quotations about civilization
That which we call civilization is merely the accumulated debris of a chilling number of bad nights.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Fran Lebowitz Reader
Civilization is the world with its leg asleep.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The first request of civilization ... is that of justice.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.
JANE ADDAMS
speech in Honolulu, 1933
Civilization sails prettily like a child's rubber balloon until it hits a sharp object; then it is likely to collapse like the balloon.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
All times, we assume, are different; we therefore have nothing to learn from our elders, nothing to teach our children. Civilization is thus reduced to a sequence of last-minute improvisations, desperately building today out of the wreckage of yesterday.
WENDELL BERRY
A Continuous Harmony
You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.
JOHN BUCHAN
"Tells of a Midsummer Night", The Power-House
Civilization helps the disabled and disables those who can help themselves.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Long exile from Christendom and civilisation inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e., what is called savagery.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
Civilization does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she has not even her full share of them. They flourish in greater abundance and attain greater strength among many barbarous people.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Typee
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
WILL DURANT
Caesar and Christ
A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
Civilization is a natural and inevitable consequence -- whether good or evil I am not prepared to state.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
letter to H. P. Lovecraft, Aug. 1930
What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque.
CARL SAGAN
Cosmos
We must regard the raw material, as I have called it, of civilization as being now, in all probability, at its best, and henceforth for the amelioration of mankind we must look to the perfection of manufacture.
ARTHUR BALFOUR
Essays and Addresses
There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first and deadly afterwards.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
Our civilization depends largely on paper.
PLINY THE ELDER
Natural History