quotations about civilization
Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
EMILE ZOLA
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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
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
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"
We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.
ERIC BERNE
attributed, Warning: Nonsense is Destroying America
Our civilization depends largely on paper.
PLINY THE ELDER
Natural History
Civilization is like a musical composition, the individual who lives it, is like an artist, like a performer. He has not created his civilization, it is given to him, but his art enables him to reproduce it and to transform it in an individual and peculiar way.
A.A. GOLDENWEISER
"Civilization as an Art", The Freeman, September 15, 1920
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
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
Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.
TED CHIANG
Stories of Your Life and Others
We build our civilization up
And we shoot it down
BILLY BRAGG
"Christ for President"
Vestiges of obliterated civilizations cover the earth; no savage but has camped upon the sites of proud and populous cities; no desert but has heard the statesman's boast of national stability. Our nation, our laws, our history--all shall go down to everlasting oblivion with the others, and by the same road. But I submit that we are traveling it with needless haste.
AMBROSE BIERCE
A Cynic Looks at Life
Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilization, what there is particularly immortal about yours?
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.
NEIL GAIMAN
Good Omens
But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness--each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked--each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.
HERBERT BUTTERFIELD
Christianity, Diplomacy and War
Civilization is a network and a maze of precedences and custom.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
Kull: Exile of Atlantis