No civil conversation can occur while you are holding an ax.

“Maybe you could casually mention to Zoe that I'm not now, nor have I
ever been, an axe murderer."
"I'll see if I can work it into our next conversation," Flynn promised.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Key of Knowledge

“Fragmentation occurs when a civilization is in decline.”

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911–1983) British lecturer, novelist, historian, poet and biographer

The Corruptions of Our Time, p. 238
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)

“Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Unser ganzer gepriesener Fortschritt der Technik, überhaupt die Civilisation, ist der Axt in der Hand des pathologischen Verbrechers vergleichbar.
Letter to Heinrich Zangger (1917), as quoted in A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit by Alan Lightman (2005), p. 110 http://books.google.com/books?id=-yo_gVxMs6MC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA110#v=onepage&q&f=false, and in Albert Einstein: A Biography by Albrecht Fölsing (1997), p. 399 http://books.google.com/books?id=Kmm0foYfvQAC&q=%22compared+to+an+axe%22#search_anchor
Sometimes paraphrased as "Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
1910s