Quotes About Civilization

Men do not have to cook their food; they do so for symbolic reasons to show they are men and not beasts.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

The great enemy of any attempt to change men's habits is inertia. Civilization is limited by intertia.

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

The downfall of every civilization comes, not from the moral corruption of the common man, but rather from the moral complacency of common men in high places.

Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.

Only man has law. Law must be built, do you understand me? You must build the law.

I predict the absolute fullness of man's operation on planet Earth by the year 2000 A.D.

I answer, because I live among men and not among angels.

The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.

Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state.

Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.

Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.

The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

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.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

The ball is man's most disastrous invention, not excluding the wheel.

In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

We must kill the savage to save the man.

Man is born barbarous--he is ransomed from the condition of beasts only by being cultivated.

It is the mark of the cultured man that he is aware of the fact that equality is an ethical and not a biological principle

The final story, the final chapter of Western man, I believe, lies in Los Angeles.