The measure of progress of civilization is the progress of the people.
The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
Civilizations evolve over time, and most scholars of civilization, including people like Carol Quigley, argue that they go through periods of warring states, and eventually evolve into a universal state.
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.
The phone is one hundred, one hundred and ten years old. There was a middle period where the government had a broad ability to surveil, but if you look at human history in total, people evolved and civilizations evolved with private conversations and private speech.
Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to another in order for stars to shine, planets to rotate, plants to grow, and civilizations to evolve.
Our civilizations have evolved. The solutions we can find for the things that keep us somewhat primitive and base and ugly in our desires can improve and become more sophisticated. Sometimes there's a disconnect between that. My car can drive, but we can't get rid of violence.
The main problem is that we, as an Earth civilization, have not come to understand ourselves - see ourselves in a cosmic sense at all.
I just think we're on this rock orbiting a sun that's going to go out, and I don't know that human society is necessarily a wonderful thing for the planet. I think people can be kind to one another and share things, but I don't know that this particular iteration of civilization is to be preferred to any other.
It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.
I tend to think having an impact on the world is a lot more complicated than government.
All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.
Technological civilization has now dominated the earth to the point where there is a big question what is going to happen next.
Any society which is not improving is deteriorating, and the more so the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is habitually king of his company.
