quotations about civilization
The first request of civilization ... is that of justice.
SIGMUND FREUD
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Civilization and Its Discontents
Civilization is another word for respect for life.
ELIZABETH GOUDGE
At the Sign of the Dolphin
That which we call civilization is merely the accumulated debris of a chilling number of bad nights.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Fran Lebowitz Reader
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
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
Civilization was a defense against nature's raw power.
GREGORY BENFORD
Foundation's Fear
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
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
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
We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.
ERIC BERNE
attributed, Warning: Nonsense is Destroying America
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
I really like to pay taxes. It is buying civilization.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Some Table Talk of Mr. Justice Holmes
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
Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
EMILE ZOLA
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"
Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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
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