#civil

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph ↗

— Robert E. Howard

#civilization #nature

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#dissent #nature

To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature - the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy grades, the water, the soil, the air itself. ↗

— Dee Brown

#indians #nature #nature

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him. ↗

— Will Durant

#commanding-nature #eternal-recurrence #history #history-repeating-itself #science

The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t see heat or cold, we can’t see electricity or radio signals, we can’t see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ We can’t even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible. ↗

— David Wong

#eye #sight #nature

It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#civilization

The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify. ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#history #human-nature #psychology #men

‎'I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#nature #philosophy #love

Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#nature #nature

Na Natureza nunca eu descobriria um contorno feio ou repetido! Nunca duas folhas de hera, que, na verdura ou recorte, se assemelhassem! Na Cidade, pelo contrário, cada casa repete servilmente a outra casa; todas as faces reproduzem a mesma indiferença ou a mesma inquietação; as ideias têm todas o mesmo valor, o mesmo cunho, a mesma forma, como as libras; e até o que há mais pessoal e íntimo, a Ilusão, é em todos idêntica, e todos a respiram, e todos se perdem nela como no mesmo nevoeiro... A "mesmice" - eis o horror das Cidades! ↗

— Eça de Queirós

#civilization #nature #nature