Quotes about civilization

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“Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.”

“… what makes you older is when your bones, muscles and blood wear out, when the heart sinks into oblivion and all the houses you ever lived in are gone and people are not really certain that your civilization ever existed.”

“Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.”

“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”

“While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them”

“It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.”

“Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.”

“It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.”

“Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.”

“In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.”

“The quantity of civilization is measured by the quality of imagination.”

“You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.”

“specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”

“And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.”

“Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.”

“It knew that the earth goddess intended on razing all human civilization, and this city, which had stood ffor thousands of years, was saying back to her: You wanna dissolve this city, Dirt Face? Give it a shot.”

“There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.”

“Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.”

“In Western Civilization, our elders are books.”

“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”

“Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.”

“Civilization is vastly overrated.”

“A hermit is simply a person to whom civilization has failed to adjust itself.”

“How much modern civilization has lost, I think, when they lost the awareness of the billions of stars overhead.”

“The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them.”

“I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.”

“Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. "I ate civilization.”

“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding out what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”

“Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.”

“It's love this and love that but of couse it's so easy to love someone you don't know, whether it's George Clooney or Monkey. Staying civil to someone with whom you've ever shared Christmas turkey- now there's a miracle.”

“It's called civilization. Women invented it, and every time you men blow it all to bits, we just invent it again.”

“Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.”

“If there are no books. There is no civilization.”

“Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”

“What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!”

“Some people don’t respond to civility.”

“When kids look up to great scientists the way they do to great musicians and actors, civilization will jump to the next level”

“It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.”

“The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!”

“Truth and trust are the means by which civilization holds off barbarism.”

“[A]nother important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.”

“When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.”

“Books are the carriers of civilization… They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”

“I’ll take your bet,” he said grimly. “I’m going to win it. And in three months, I’m going to put this back on your finger, and take you to bed, and do things to you that are outlawed in the civilized world.”

“If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.”

“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”

“There is nothing I detest so much as the contortions of these great time-and-lip servers, these affable dispensers of meaningless embraces, these obliging utterers of empty words, who view every one in civilities”

“There are only three things that America will be remembered for 2000 years from now when they study this civilization: The Constitution, Jazz music, and Baseball. These are the 3 most beautiful things this culture's ever created.”

“A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.”

“Sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.”

“I have no argument with those who see in organized religion a template or an imperative to live life according to a prescribed set of beliefs. Just give others the room, within the laws of civil society, to believe or not believe whatever they like.”

“The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”

“I think in our desire to create a better America, we have to have civilized debate in this country and not just yelling.”

“Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”

“Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve
got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up
the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money
gives out.”

“Civility and etiquette, gentlemen, are all important.”

“This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.”

“He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.”

“Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized… That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.”

“There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.”

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

“It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.”

“The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.”

“And now I wish I hadn’t been civil, because he says he shall not despair! He is as stupid as Endymion!”
“No, no!” said Alverstoke soothingly. “Nobody could be as stupid as Endymion!”

“Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?”

“Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.”

“I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.”

“Politics is not about justice. It's about the settling of personal vendettas under a thin veneer of civilization. All politics is personal.”

“I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.”

“The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.”

“Dilemma of a civilized man; body mobilized but danger obscure.”

“Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.”

“Maybe they didn't want you to realize that every civilization has its weakness. There's always one thing we depend on. And if someone takes it away all that's left is some story in a history class.”

“The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.”

“There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war; there is only just and unjust war.”

“There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding”

“The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.”

“To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.”

“Unusual financial activity: none, unless you count the fact that someone in the family is way too into Civil War biographies. (Can this be a possible indication of Confederate insurgents still living and working in Virginia? Must research further.)”

“The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.”

“In a time of social fragmentation, vulgarity becomes a way of life. To be shocking becomes more important - and often more profitable - than to be civil or creative or truly original.”

“The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.”

“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.”

“Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.”

“The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.”

“They parted at last with mutual civility, and possibly a mutual desire of never meeting again.”

“… the first sign of civilization is always trash.”

“I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.”

“She is probably by this time as tired of me, as I am of her; but as she is too Polite and I am too civil to say so, our letters are still as frequent and affectionate as ever, and our Attachment as firm and sincere as when it first commenced.”

“Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”

“The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.”

“The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.”

“A civilization has the ethics it can afford”

“You can't say civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.”

“But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.”

“What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.”

“Isn’t that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?”

“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.”

“Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.”