That Is Civilization Quotes
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.
My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?
A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of green paper.
The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.
We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.
The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life.
a real partnership in which all parties help all others to be more fully themselves
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....
It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.
It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love.
For Aristotle, it's not enough simply to act in accordance with the reason once in a while. We must cultivate habits of virtue that develop into a firmly established moral character over a lifetime.
Growing up loving the Bible made me apt to love other books. I don't love them in the same way I love the Bible, but a lesser love came easily. The splendor of sunlight does not take away
Eating connects us to our histories as much as it connects our souls to our bodies, our bodies to the earth.
Aggression, rage and violence are archetypal foundations of manhood.
The more fundamentalist a person, the more immoral and inhuman he is.
After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism
while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.
God bestows great gifts on human beings with perfect justice, but not All gifts we are given come from God. Some gifts come from society or culture, and it is here that problems develop.
There is no truth that does not ultimately rest upon what is evident to us in our own experience.
Try to get inside the world of Homer and see what it would be like to think with his view of reality. Only then can you begin to judge it, because only then do you really understand it.
We are therefore blessed with powerful minds yet at the same time cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must.
The nature of consciousness is to point beyond itself. It is a tending toward or pointing to... Since consciousness points beyond itself, it is in its very being a self-transcendence.
The bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier-explorer.
The least successful athletes, those who have never won any victories, suddenly call themselves trainers.
Rights are a protection from society. But only by fulfilling their obligations to society can the individual give meaning to that protection.(V - From Ideology Towards Equilibrium)
Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.
There are three types of student: The golden student pays and loans, the silver student pays but does not learn, the bronze student learns but does not pay.
But the pirates never showed, and the slaves found themselves trapped on a narrow peninsula. (Lesson: never trust pirates.)
Diversity, not uniformity, is what works.
What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.
Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization.
We spend so much time creating a façade of what we want to project to the world, we almost forget what we ourselves are truly about in the process.
A panic attack is pathological exaggeration of the body’s normal response to fear, stress or excitement.
The aristocrats had to force them to do their jobs. After all, human beings are not badgers. We aren't molded to stoop.
Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous.
Truth and untruth weave the seamless web of human nature.
Here (in Thomas Aquinas) is the mind that prepared the way for the scientific and industrial revolutions. Here is the mind that was Catholic enough to embrace any good idea, from wherever it came.
Modernity gone wrong has isolated humanity and made human reason autonomous of (and dismissive toward) revelation.
Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence....
Chaucer, like Homer, writes about a journey, but as a Christian he has a different goal. Homer wanted to go home, but Chaucer's pilgrims want a place of man's true home: paradise
I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.
The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril
By reading older books we get a taste of the conversation of Heaven.