CIVILIZATION QUOTES IV

quotations about civilization

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately.

JAMES BALDWIN

The Devil Finds Work


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


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


Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.

JANE ADDAMS

speech in Honolulu, 1933


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


A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

EMIL CIORAN

A Short History of Decay


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 helps the disabled and disables those who can help themselves.

ABRAHAM MILLER

Unmoral Maxims


Civilization is another word for respect for life.

ELIZABETH GOUDGE

At the Sign of the Dolphin


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


I know that [civilized men] do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in their chains.... But when I see [barbarous man] sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Discourse on Inequality


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"


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


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


Civilization advances by free thought, free speech, free men.

MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE

"Church, Woman and State"


For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.

WILLA CATHER

"On the Divide,", The Troll Garden


All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality.

ALFRED L. KROEBER

The Superorganic


The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

JACK LONDON

The Scarlet Plague


Civilization is sterilization.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

Brave New World


The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first and deadly afterwards.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics