quotations about civilization
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
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
What man calls civilization always results in deserts.
DON MARQUIS
what the ants are saying in archy does his part
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
There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.
ROGER ZELAZNY
The Great Book of Amber
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
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"
Because they didn't know better, they called it "civilization," when it was part of their slavery.
TACITUS
Agricola
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
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
The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Devil Finds Work
Civilization is fragile and highly ambiguous. To hope in ourselves would be a big gamble.
CHRISTIAAN MOSTERT
Hope: Challenging the Culture of Despair
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 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
Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling
Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
Wild Seed
Civilization sails prettily like a child's rubber balloon until it hits a sharp object; then it is likely to collapse like the balloon.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
Civilization was a defense against nature's raw power.
GREGORY BENFORD
Foundation's Fear
Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.
JANE ADDAMS
speech in Honolulu, 1933