quotations about civilization
If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.
ORSON WELLES
attributed, Forbes, 1985
All of our exalted technological progress, civilization for that matter, is comparable to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
letter to Heinrich Zangger, December 1917
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
H.L. MENCKEN
Mencken on Mencken: A New Collection of Autobiographical Writings
The destruction that barbarians leave behind has a grim fascination, doesn't it? We're reminded how thin is the veneer of civilization.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry ... The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.
WILL DURANT
The Story of Civilization
We have forgotten that we live in the universe, and that our civilization itself is merely an elaboration of the palm-leaf hat that one of our ancestors tried on ten thousand years ago to ward off the sun, a more complicated and ample version that now not only wards off the sun but shuts out the view. We have lost ourselves within it.
WENDELL BERRY
A Continuous Harmony
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Notes from the Underground
Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Descent of Man
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead
Civilization is like a river. Walking along its banks we are drawn compulsively to the river's sparkling, ever-changing surface, with its noisy progressions, its sudden directional changes, its unexpected reversals, and its slow descent into the wild chaos of the great ocean. To begin again anew. Watching it from a safe distance we are fascinated by the abundance of life swarming in and around this vibrant surface. Its brilliant ephemeral display distracts us from the river's hidden depths. We are beguiled into believing that some superficial principle of movement is at work. Only those who wade into its depths discover that powerful, hidden undercurrents, rarely betraying their silent presence, are responsible for the constantly changing surface patterns. The ephemeral surface display has deep eternal origins. Those who wish to negotiate those waters ignore its silent forces at their peril.
GRAEME SNOOKS
The Ephemeral Civilization: Exploding the Myth of Social Evolution
You can't say civilization don't advance ... in every war they kill you in a new way.
WILL ROGERS
New York Times, Dec. 23, 1929
The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.
GAO XINGJIAN
Nobel Lecture, 2000
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
"The Towers of the Elephant"
Break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
letter to Harold Preece, Jan. 1928
We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.
ANTHONY MARRA
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
An example particularly well-fitting to represent the current status of civilization is the one of the frog in the pot. If we put a live frog into a pot full of boiling water, the frog will suddenly jump outside, saving its life. But if we put the frog into a pot full of cold water, and we light the fire under the pot, the frog will stay inside, and will slowly die. Our civilization is like that frog, and the pot we are in is getting more and more dangerous.
ADRIANO AUTINO
Three Thesis for the Space Renaissance
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
An Introduction to Mathematics
Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
WENDELL BERRY
A Continuous Harmony