Quotes About Civilization

Wherever men have lived there is a story to be told, and it depends chiefly on the story-teller or historian whether it is interesting or not.

It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

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

Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

Bankruptcy and repudiation are the spring-boards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?

Is not the sea-brine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough to make the cup of life go down here? Yet such, to a great extent, is our boasted commerce; and there are those who style themselves statesmen and philosophers who are so blind as to think that progress and civilization depend on precisely this kind of interchange and activity- the activity of flies about a molasses- hogshead. Very well, observes one, if men were oysters. And very well, answer I, if men were mosquitoes.

Mientras que la civilización ha ido mejorando nuestro habitat, no ha hecho igual con los hombres que han de poblarlo. Ha creado palacios, pero no era tan fácil crear nobles y reyes. Y si los objetivos que persigue el hombre civilizado no tienen más valor que los del salvaje, si empeña la mayor parte de su vida en la satisfacción de necesidades no imprescindibles y de meras comodidades, ¿por qué ha de tener una morada mejor que la de aquél?

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor AEschylus, nor Virgil even—works as refined

The progress of civilization has meant the reduction of employment, not its increase. It is because we have become increasingly wealthy as a nation that we have been able virtually to eliminate child labor, to remove the necessity of work for many of the aged and to make it unnecessary for millions of women to take jobs.

The Press, my child," Bight said, "is the watchdog of civilisation, and the watchdog happens to be – it can't be helped – in a chronic state of rabies.

The strangest thing of all for Milly was perhaps the uplifted assurance and indifference with which she could simply give back the particular bland stare that appeared in such cases to mark civilisation at its highest. It

On 10 August 1914, five days after war was declared, Henry James, in a letter to a friend, expressed his revulsion at the prospect of war, and articulated the illusion that had preceded it: `Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared the wreck of our beliefs that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible.

The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world.

It is the obscene horror, the dry, fucked-out aspect of things which makes this crazy civilization look like a crater. It is this great yawning gulf of nothingness which the creative spirits and mothers of the race carry between their legs.

The real renegade is the man who has lost faith in his fellowman. Today the loss of faith is universal. Here God himself is powerless. We have put our faith in the bomb, and it is the bomb, which will answer our prayers [...] it takes time for doom to spread throughout the corpus of civilization. But when Rimbaud walked out the back door, doom had already announced itself.

Taboos, though unadmitted, are potent. What is it that people fear? What they don't understand. The civilized man is not a whit different from the savage in this respect. The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is, different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.

It's terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness.

De wiegen der beschaving zijn de verpestende riolen van de wereld, het knekelhuis waarin de stinkende baarmoeders hun bloederige pakjes vlees en been toevertrouwen.

It didn't matter to me whether I was intact or falling to pieces. I was attending a spectacle: the crumbling of our civilization.

The most ignorant and degenerate of them will be asked to shoulder a gun and fight for a civilization which has brought them nothing but misery and degradation.

Comprendo de repente lo terriblemente civilizado que soy... la necesidad que tengo de gente, conversación, libros, teatro, música, cafés, bebidas, etc. Es terrible ser civilizado, porque cuando llegas al fin del mundo no tienes nada que te ayude a soportar el terror de la soledad.