This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is little hope for us until we become toughminded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance. The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of softmindedness. A nation or civilization that continues to produce softminded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.
Civilization | Death | Enough | Hope | Little | Luxury | Men | World |
Although most people never overcome the habit of berating the world for their difficulties, those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity. These people willingly embrace or force themselves to accept the rule of the stronger as the eternal norm. Their whole life is a continuous effort to suppress and abase nature, inwardly or outwardly, and to identify themselves with its more powerful surrogates—the race, fatherland, leader, cliques, and tradition. For them, all these words mean the same thing—the irresistible reality that must be honored and obeyed. However, their own natural impulses, those antagonistic to the various demands of civilization, lead a devious undercover life within them.
Choice | Civilization | Cynicism | Effort | Eternal | Force | Habit | Life | Life | People | Reality | Reason | Rule | Words | World |
Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner
Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.
Civilization | Discovery | Discovery |
Those blinded by civilization have contact with their own tabbood mimetic traits only through certain gestures and forms of behavior they encounter in others, isolated, shameful residues in their rationalized environment. What repels them as alien is all too familiar. It lurks in the contagious gestures of an immediacy suppressed by civilization: gestures of touching, nestling, soothing, coaxing. What makes such impulses repellent today is their outmodedness. In seeking to win over the buyer with flattery, the debtor with threats, the creditor with supplication, they appear to translate long-reified human relationships back into those of personal power. Any emotion is finally embarrassing; mere excitement is preferable. All unmanipulated expression appears like the grimace which the manipulated expression…always has.
Behavior | Civilization | Excitement |
Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson
A civilization is always judged in its decline.
Mikhail Gorbachev, fully Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism. If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.
Civilization | Contradiction | Dawn | Invention | People |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves. The Gujarati equivalent for civilization means “good conduct”.
Civilization | Conduct | Duty | Man | Means | Mind | Morality |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
There is no limit to the measure of sacrifice that one may make in order to realize oneness with all life, but certainly that ideal will set a limit to your wants. That is the antithesis of the position of modern civilization which says, "Increase your wants."
Antithesis | Civilization | Oneness | Order | Position | Sacrifice | Will |
To win the big stakes in this changed world, you must catch the spirit of the great pioneers of the past, whose dreams have given to civilization all that it has of value, the spirit that serves as the life-blood of our own country – your opportunity and mine, to develop and market our talents.
Civilization | Dreams | Opportunity | Spirit |
Booth Tarkington, born Newton Booth Tarkington
I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles... With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls.
Beauty | Civilization | Life | Life | Will | Wrong | Beauty |
Man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct . The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.
Civilization | Guidance | Instinct | Marriage | Method | Opinion | Pity | Race | Sense | Will | Guidance | Parent |
Pat Buchanan, fully Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan
When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That is the progression. And as the faith that gave birth to the West is dying in the West, peoples of European descent from the steppes of Russia to the coast of California have begun to die out, as the Third World treks north to claim the estate. The last decade provided corroborating if not conclusive proof that we are in the Indian summer of our civilization.
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
When Western civilization invaded the Near and Far East and what is now called the Third World it imposed its own ideas of a proper environment and a rewarding life. Doing this, it disrupted the delicate patterns of adaptation and created problems that had not existed before.
Civilization | Ideas | Problems | World |
Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
Under the continual contact with the pebbles my feet have become hardened and used to the ground. My body, almost constantly nude, no longer suffers from the sun. Civilization is falling from me little by little. I am beginning to think simply, to feel only very little hatred for my neighbor - rather, to love him.
Beginning | Civilization | Little | Love | Think |
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner. Criticism is not entirely absent. Society, for example, and its institutions, are criticized most severely and often most unfairly... But science is excepted from the criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgment of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. The move towards "demythologization," for example, is largely motivated by the wish to avoid any clash between Christianity and scientific ideas. If such a clash occurs, then science is certainly right and Christianity wrong. Pursue this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer.
Age | Civilization | Criticism | Judgment | Nothing | Reverence | Right | Science | Society | Will | Society |
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
The members of the Japanese enlightenment of the early 1870's, Fukuzawa among them, now reasoned as follows: Japan can keep its independence only if it becomes stronger. It can become stronger only with the help of science. It will use science effectively only if it does not just practice science but also believes in the underlying ideology. To many traditional Japanese this ideology-the scientific worldview- was barbaric. But, so the followers of Fukuzawa argued, it was necessary to adopt barbaric ways, to regard them as advanced, to introduce the whole of Western civilization in order to survive. Having been thus prepared, Japanese scientists soon branched out as their Western colleagues had done before and falsified the uniform ideology that had started the development. The lesson I draw from this sequence of events is that a uniform 'scientific view of the world' may be useful for people doing science... However, it is a disaster for outsiders (philosophers, fly-by-night mystics, prophets of a new age, the (“educated public"), who, being undisturbed by the complexities of research, are liable to fall for the most simpleminded and most vapid tale.
Civilization | Enlightenment | Events | Lesson | Order | People | Practice | Regard | Science | Will |
Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
What is more important than the meal? Doesn’t the least observant man-about-town look upon the implementation and ritual progress of a meal as a liturgical prescription? Isn’t all of civilization apparent in these careful preparations, which consecrate the spirit’s triumph over a raging appetite?
Civilization | Important | Progress |
Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu
The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members.
I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
Art | Civilization | Future | Little | Society | Vision | Society | Art |
Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu
Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.
Civilization | Fear | People | Right | Society | Society | Old |