quotations about civilization
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
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
Because they didn't know better, they called it "civilization," when it was part of their slavery.
TACITUS
Agricola
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
The essence of civilization is that men should come to be led more by hope and ambition and example and less by fear.
WILLIAM BEVERIDGE
Full Employment in a Free Society
Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?
ÉMILE ZOLA
L'Argent
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
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 the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
Wild Seed
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
There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.
ROGER ZELAZNY
The Great Book of Amber
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
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
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
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
Civilization was a defense against nature's raw power.
GREGORY BENFORD
Foundation's Fear
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"