Thoughts, Man and Civilization

“Is civilization progress ? . . . The man who first abused his fellows with swear-words instead of bashing their brains out with a club should be counted among those who laid the foundations of civilization . . . . Civilization wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere . . . We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them . . . The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.”

The Battle Within and Without

“Our life is shaped by our mind. We become what we think.” ~ Buddha (563 - 483 BC), the Dhammapada

“The only devils in this world are those running around in our own hearts, and that is where all our battles should be fought.” ~Gandhi

“Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.” ~Aldous Huxley

“Civilization is simply a great metaphor which describes the aspirations of the individual soul in collective form - as perharps a novel or a poem might do. The struggle is always for greater consciousness.” ~ Lawrence Durrell

“Ideas go booming through the world louder than cannon. Thoughts are mightier than armies. Principles have achieved more victories than horsemen or chariots.” ~ W. M. Paxton

“Ideas are precious. An idea is the only lever which moves the world.” ~ Arthur F. Corey

“The mind has exactly the same power as the hands, not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.” ~Colin Wilson (1937 - )

“No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution . . . Revolution is but thought carried into action.” ~ Emma Goldman (1869 - 1940)

“The man who first abused his fellows with swear-words instead of bashing their brains out with a club should be counted among those who laid the foundations of civilization.” ~Sir John Denham (1615 - 1668)

“We do not yet trust the unknown powers of thought. Whence came all these tools, inventions, book laws, parties, kingdoms — Out of the invisible world, through a few brains. The arts and institutions of men are created out of thought. The powers that make the capitalist are metaphysical, the force of method and force of will makes trade, and builds towns.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death . . . Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.” ~Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

The Problems of Thoughts and Civilization

“Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to their moral state, or their state of thought?c. We surround ourselves always, according to our freedom and ability, with true images of ourselves in things, whether it be ships or books or cannons or churches. The standing army, the arsenal, the camp and the gibbet do not appertain to man. They only serve as an index to show where man is now; what a bad, ungoverned temper he has; what an ugly neighbor he is; how his affections halt; how low his hope lies . . .” ~Emerson

“Civilization . . . wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.” ~Richard Bach

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” ~H.G. Wells, The Outline of History

“Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.” ~Will Durant (1885 - 1981)

“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.” ~Richard P. Feynman

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them . . . We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.” ~Albert Einstein

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” ~Confucius

“Our civilization is characterized by the word ‘progress’. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is seldom sought.” ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951)

“The inventor tries to meet the demand of a crazy civilization.” ~Thomas Edison (1847 - 1931)

The Measure of Civilization

“K is for ‘Kenghis Khan’ He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.” ~Harlan Ellison, From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet

“Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life.” ~Elizabeth Goudge (1900 - 1984)

“Is civilization progress? . . . The challenge, I think, is clear; and, as clearly, the final answer will be given not by our amassing of knowledge, or by the discoveries of our science, or by the speed of our aircraft, but by the effect of our civilized activities as a whole have upon the quality of our planet’s life-the life of plants and animals as that of men”?h ~Charles Lindbergh (1902 - 1974)

“Spiritual awakening is the most essential thing in man’s life, and it is the the sole purpose of being. Is not civilization, in all its tragic forms, a supreme motive for spiritual awakening?” ~Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

“I do not believe the greatest threat to our future is from bombs or guided missiles. I don’t think our civilization will die that way. I think it will die when we no longer care when the spiritual forces that make us wish to be right and noble die in our hearts.” ~Lawrence Gould

“The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

“I believe with all my heart that civilization has produced nothing finer than a man or woman who thinks and practices true tolerance. Some one has said that most of us don’t think, we just occasionally rearrange our prejudices. And I suspect that even today, with all the progress we have made in liberal thought, the quality of true tolerance is as rare as the quality of mercy. That men of all creeds have fundamental common objectives is a fact one must learn by the process of education. How to work jointly toward these objectives must be learned by experience.” ~Frank Knox

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.” ~Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

The Journey of Man

“Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.” ~Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889 - 1975)

“Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world; he becomes aware of himself only within the world, and aware of the world only within himself. Every object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ within us.” ~Goethe

“Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” ~ Vincent Lombardi (1913 - 1970)

“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problem.” ~Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

“Our capacity to see and change the world co-evolves with our capacity to see and change ourselves.” ~Robert Quinn

“You must be the change you wish to see in this world.” ~Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

Keywords : mind, thoughts, man, life, civilization, planet, ecosocial crisis, change
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