#civilization

"No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species."

"What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline."

"I am beginning to understand,"said the little prince. "There is a flower... I think that she has tamed me..."

"The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'."

"This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war."

"Civilization is vastly overrated."

"I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind."

"Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost."

"The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization."

"[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world."

"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation."

"Among peoples who possess a highly developed pugnacious instinct we find the greatest progress in the arts, sciences, social and political organization, commerce and industry. The instinct takes the milder form of rivalry which is the motive force of the great portion of the serious labors of mankind."

"This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood."

"Societies in decline have no use for visionaries."

"Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."

"The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do."

"You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world."

"No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much."

"[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it."

"Love as a concrete foundation for an authentically functional civilization requires the around-the-clock labors of forgiveness. Without it, Love fails, Friendship fails, Intelligence fails, Humanity: fails."