Quotes About Civilization

Primitive peoples did not inspire Rudge, who saw in them the worst aspects of human nature, reminding him that superstition, ignorance, violence, and cruelty were inherent human traits, first impulses, and that civilization was a cheap coat of paint over a rotten edifice.

There's a fundamental difference, if you look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars … compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.

Quality education is the key to civilization and socialization. Yes! sound education is bound to make you civilized and socialized eventually. Thus, endeavour to be educated. Moreover, never mind your age in your quest for education. For, it does not matter. -Emeasoba George

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

The "west"-what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these businessmen, these shopkeepers, these racketeers with their blank stares and atrophied smiles... is it with such vermin as this that a civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end?

At best, we conceive happiness; never felicity, prerogative of civilizations based on the idea of salvation, on the refusal to savor one's sufferings, to revel in them; but, sybarites of suffering, scions of a masochistic tradition, which of us would hesitate between the Benares sermon and Baudelaire's Heautontimoroumenos? I am both wound and knife"—that is our absolute, our eternity.

Wisdom is the last word of a dying civilization, the halo of historical sunsets, fatigue turned into a worldview, the final tolerance before the rise of fresher gods—and barbarism.

The West: a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse.

When modes of expression are worn out, art tends toward non-sense, toward a private and incomprehensible universe. An intelligible shudder, whether in painting, in music, or in poetry, strikes us, and rightly, as vulgar or out-of-date. The public will soon disappear; art will follow shortly. A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to end with the hermeticism of schizophrenia.

A civilization develops from agriculture to the paradox. Between these two extremities occurs the struggle between barbarism and neurosis: resulting in the unstable equilibrium of creative epochs. This struggle is reaching its end: All horizons are opening without any being able to excite a curiosity at once weary and awakened. It is then up to the disabused individual to flourish in the void, up to the intellectual vampire to lap up the tainted blood of civilizations.

A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to end with the hermeticism of schizophrenia.

Les ravages de la "civilisation" sont si évidents qu'on a honte de les signaler encore.

It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

L'Occident : une pourriture qui sent bon, un cadavre parfumé.

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

Strong as the propensity to imitation is among civilized men, we must conceive it as an impulse of which their minds have been partially denuded. Like the far-seeing sight, the infallible hearing, the magical scent of the savage, it is a half-lost power. It was strongest in ancient times, and IS strongest in uncivilized regions.

The essence of a civilised age is, that administration requires the continued aid of legislation.

But then the mist of battles passes away, and the sound of the daily conflict no longer hurtles in the air, and a generation arises skilled with the skill of peace, and refined with the refinement of civilization, yet still remembering the old world, still appreciating the old life, still wondering at the old men, and ready to receive, at the hand of the poet, a new telling of the old tale.

At any rate, the pre-historic times were spent in making men capable of writing a history, and having something to put in it when it is written, and we can see how it was done.

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.

In the East, in a word, we are attempting to put new wine into old bottles-to pour what we can of a civilization whose spirit is progress into the form of a civilization whose spirit is fixity, and whether we shall succeed or not is perhaps the most interesting question in an age abounding almost beyond example in questions of political interest.

Probably if we had historic records of the ante-historic ages—if some superhuman power had set down the thoughts and actions of men ages before they could set them down for themselves—we should know that this first step in civilization was the hardest step. But when we come to history as it is, we are more struck with the difficulty of the next step.

Our habitual instructors, our ordinary conversation, our inevitable and ineradicable prejudices tend to make us think that "Progress" is the normal fact in human society, the fact which we should expect to see, the fact which we should be surprised if we did not see. But history refutes this. The ancients had no conception of progress; they did not so much as reject the idea; they did not even entertain the idea.