Quotes About Civilization

Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.

We would never allow child sacrifice, which is one of the sure manifestations of a totally reprobate civilization. Really?

The light of reason and civilization was virtually snuffed out by the Barbarian hordes who swarmed across Europe, annihilating everything the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the Renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art. It's a familiar story, but it's codswallop.

What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.

No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men, in the epitome of discontinuity.

Die zivilisatorische Gesamttendenz der Konstellation von rationalen Mitteln und irrationalen Zwecken

No history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.

Restraints upon our natural inclinations, which left to themselves do not automatically lead us to do what is good for us and often indeed lead us to evil, are not only necessary; they are the indispensable condition of civilized existence.

I have the not altogether unsatisfying impression that civilisation is collapsing around me. Is it my age, I wonder, or the age we live in? I am not sure. Civilisations do collapse, after all, but on the other hand people grow old with rather greater frequency.

The first requirement of civilisation is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than mere beasts.

That civilised life cannot be lived without taboos—that some of them may indeed be justified, and that therefore taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished—is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism.

To paraphrase Burke, all that is necessary for barbarism to triumph is for civilised men to do nothing: but in fact for the past few decades, civilised men have done worse than nothing—they have actively thrown in their lot with the barbarians.

It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it—in other words, by becoming civilised—that men become fully human.

My mother, with her wrench by day and helmet by night, did more for civilisation (a word that Mrs. Woolf enclosed in quotation marks in Three Guineas, as if did not really exist) than Mrs. Woolf had ever done, with her jewelled prose disguising her narcissistic rage.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

The curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety, even sometimes an almost modern sentimentality, weakened the fibre of each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder people that had kept that virile fighting power the lack of which makes all other virtues useless and sometimes even harmful.

Father is strength at home, strength in government and strength overseas. Mother represents upbringing, education, the spread of civilization. Children are the lower classes, the lower races, to be brought to maturity and then set free

Every lynching represents by just so much a loosening of the bands of civilisation; that the spirit of lynching inevitably throws into prominence in the community all the foul and evil creatures who dwell therein. No man can take part in the torture of a human being without having his own moral nature permanently lowered

No one could fail to be impressed with the immense advance these men represented as compared with the native negro; and indeed to an American, who must necessarily think much of the race problem at home, it is pleasant to be made to realize in vivid fashion the progress the American negro has made, by comparing him with the negro who dwells in Africa untouched, or but lightly touched, by white influence.

One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge. When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is always a danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness of fiber. The

Each civilization, each nation, each family, each profession, each sex and each class has its own history. Humans have so far been interested mainly in their own private roots, and have therefore never claimed the whole of the inheritance into which they were born, the legacy of everybody's past experience. Each generation searches only for what it thinks it lacks, and recognizes only what it knows already.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.