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