quotations about civilization
Civilization, is a fine and beautiful structure. It is as picturesque as a Gothic cathedral, but it is built upon the bones and cemented with the blood of those whose part in all its pomp is that and nothing more. It cannot be reared in the ungenerous tropics, for there the people will not contribute their blood and bones.
AMBROSE BIERCE
A Cynic Looks at Life
The effect of civilization is to impose human law upon environment until it becomes machine-like in its regularity. The objectionable is eliminated, the inevitable is foreseen. One is not even made wet by the rain nor cold by the frost; while death, instead of stalking about gruesome and accidental, becomes a prearranged pageant, moving along a well-oiled groove to the family vault, where the hinges are kept from rusting and the dust from the air is swept continually away.
JACK LONDON
"The Unexpected", Love of Life and Other Stories
What man calls civilization always results in deserts.
DON MARQUIS
what the ants are saying in archy does his part
Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
Wild Seed
Because they didn't know better, they called it "civilization," when it was part of their slavery.
TACITUS
Agricola
People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.
KENNETH CLARK
"The Skin of Our Teeth", Civilisation
We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.
CARL SAGAN
interview with Anne Kalosh, 1995
We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"At the Root"
There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.
ROGER ZELAZNY
The Great Book of Amber
The essence of civilization is that men should come to be led more by hope and ambition and example and less by fear.
WILLIAM BEVERIDGE
Full Employment in a Free Society
Civilization is fragile and highly ambiguous. To hope in ourselves would be a big gamble.
CHRISTIAAN MOSTERT
Hope: Challenging the Culture of Despair
Fear of change is a part of the state of fear man has ever lived in but out of which he has begun to escape. Civilization might be defined indeed as the steps in his escape.
ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS
Fear and Conventionality
It is a fine line, in all of us, between civilization and savagery. To any who think they would never cross it, I can only say, if you have never known what it is to be utterly betrayed, you cannot know how close it is.
JACQUELINE CAREY
Kushiel's Dart
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Typee
In general, too, the conquerors would be better than the conquered (most merits in early society are more or less military merits), but they would not be very much better, for the lowest steps in the ladder of civilization are very steep, and the effort to mount them is slow and tedious.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
That which we call civilization is merely the accumulated debris of a chilling number of bad nights.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Fran Lebowitz Reader
The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Devil Finds Work
Civilization was a defense against nature's raw power.
GREGORY BENFORD
Foundation's Fear
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