quotations about civilization
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
There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.
ROGER ZELAZNY
The Great Book of Amber
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
Because they didn't know better, they called it "civilization," when it was part of their slavery.
TACITUS
Agricola
Civilization is like a 747, the filtered air, the muzak oozing over the earphones, the phony sense of security, the chemical food, the plastic trays ... an idiot savant in the cockpit manipulating computerized controls built by sullen wage workers and dependent for his directions on sleepy technicians high on amphetamines with their minds wandering to sports and sex.
T. FULANO
"Civilization Is Like a Jetliner", Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections
Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
A lost civilization can't be reborn.
SACRIFICE
"Salvation", Apocalypse Inside
We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.
CARL SAGAN
interview with Anne Kalosh, 1995
Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
Wild Seed
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
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
Kushiel's Dart
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
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
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 is fragile and highly ambiguous. To hope in ourselves would be a big gamble.
CHRISTIAAN MOSTERT
Hope: Challenging the Culture of Despair
Civilization was a defense against nature's raw power.
GREGORY BENFORD
Foundation's Fear
In general, too, the conquerors would be better than the conquered (most merits in early society are more or less military merits), but they would not be very much better, for the lowest steps in the ladder of civilization are very steep, and the effort to mount them is slow and tedious.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
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
Faults of civilization
Burning the private paradise of dreams
Minus hands of the electric clock
Clock
Clock
Clock
BAUHAUS
"Silent Hedges"