quotations about civilization
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
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Kushiel's Dart
Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge. There has to be someone ready when it blows up.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
There is no accepted test of civilization. It is not wealth, or the degree of comfort, or the average duration of life, or the increase of knowledge. All such tests would be disputed. In default of any other measure, may it not be suggested that as good a measure as any is the degree to which justice is carried out, the degree to which men are sensitive as to wrong-doing and desirous to right it?
JOHN MACDONELL
Historical Trials
Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.
TIMOTHY LEARY
attributed, Still Casting Shadows
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
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
Civilization is fragile and highly ambiguous. To hope in ourselves would be a big gamble.
CHRISTIAAN MOSTERT
Hope: Challenging the Culture of Despair
What man calls civilization always results in deserts.
DON MARQUIS
what the ants are saying in archy does his part
A lost civilization can't be reborn.
SACRIFICE
"Salvation", Apocalypse Inside
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
Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
Wild Seed
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
Faults of civilization
Burning the private paradise of dreams
Minus hands of the electric clock
Clock
Clock
Clock
BAUHAUS
"Silent Hedges"
Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.
JANE ADDAMS
speech in Honolulu, 1933
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
A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Civilization is the world with its leg asleep.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Devil Finds Work
That which we call civilization is merely the accumulated debris of a chilling number of bad nights.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Fran Lebowitz Reader
Civilization is not fooling around, not blowing your top, not having a temper tantrum, not touching, not following your drift, not ease, not acting like those who are "lower" than you, not farting, not belching, not napping, not breathing, not crying, not resting.... It is a litany of "nots". It has no substance, therefore it must overcome all it is not in order to prove to itself it exists.
JOHN LANDAU
"Civilization and the Primitive", Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections