#civilization

I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God. ↗

— G. Willow Wilson

#religion #spirituality #experience

Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification. ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#adventure #america #civilization #desertion #emigration

The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable. ↗

— Talal Asad

#eurabia #europe #european #islam #modernity-tags-civilization

If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force. ↗

— Auberon Herbert

#cannot #certainly #civilization #effort #example

Justice has nothing to do with victor nations and vanquished nations, but must be a moral standard that all the world's peoples can agree to. To seek this and to achieve it - that is true civilization. ↗

— Hideki Tojo

#agree #civilization #justice #moral #must

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization. ↗

— Arnold J. Toynbee

#able #civilization #fill #intelligently #last

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills. ↗

— Arnold J. Toynbee

#believe #civilization #civilizations #die #i

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor. ↗

— Arnold J. Toynbee

#civilization #condition #harbor #movement #voyage

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization. ↗