Civilization Development Quotes

My final aim is to bring Iran, within twenty years, to the same level of civilization and progress as will be enjoyed by the most highly developed countries. During the last ten years the degree of our backwardness has been halved, but it is this remaining backwardness which will be the most difficult to combat.

If a drought strikes them, animals perish--man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish--man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish--man writes the Constitution of the United States.

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

History is the record of human society or world civilization, of the changes that take place in the nature of that society … of all the transformations that society undergoes by its very nature.

All great civilizations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.

The accident of the predominance of white men in modern times should not give us supercilious ideas about color or persuade us to listen to superficial theories about the innate superiority of the white-skinned man. Four thousand years ago, when civilization was already one or two thousand years old, white men were just a bunch of semi-savages on the outskirts of the civilized world. If there had been anthropologists in Crete, Egypt, and Babylonia, they would have pronounced the white race obviously inferior, and might have discoursed learnedly on the superior germ-plasm or glands of colored folk.

The aim of eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens; that done, to leave them to work out their common civilization in their own way.

But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

It would seem to me that by the time a race has achieved deep space capability it would have matured to a point where it would have no thought of dominating another intelligent species.

We must plant the sea and herd its animals ... using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about -- farming replacing hunting.

That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to State of Nature, the State of Art of an organized polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy civilization

The capacity for friendship usually goes with highly developed civilizations. The ability to cultivate people differs by culture and class; but on the whole, educated people have more ways to make friends... . In England, for instance, you find everyone in your class has read the same books. Here, people grope for something in common-like a newly engaged girl who came to me and said, "It's absolutely wonderful! His uncle and my cousin were on the same football team.

The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great.

The whole of mankind's progress has had to be achieved against the resistance and opposition of the state and its power of coercion.

We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their roots in Greece. But for Greece… we might still have been savages and idolators.

God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was quite the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world, void of national bias, race, hate, and religious prejudice. There should be no indulgence in undue eulogy of the Negro. The case of the Negro is well taken care of when it is shown how he has far influenced the development of civilization.

As long as you have war, police, prisons, crime, you are in the early stages of civilization.

Civilization did not come with fire. It came with the discovery of how to use fire to heat water.

After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.

A great European federative system alone can be favourable to the development of civilisation.

If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled law.

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?