CIVILIZATION QUOTES IV

quotations about civilization

Faults of civilization
Burning the private paradise of dreams
Minus hands of the electric clock
Clock
Clock
Clock

BAUHAUS

"Silent Hedges"


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


A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

WILL DURANT

Caesar and Christ


Civilization is a method of living, an attitude of equal respect for all men.

JANE ADDAMS

speech in Honolulu, 1933


You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.

JOHN BUCHAN

"Tells of a Midsummer Night", The Power-House


The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first and deadly afterwards.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics


Civilization is the world with its leg asleep.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


Civilization is like a musical composition, the individual who lives it, is like an artist, like a performer. He has not created his civilization, it is given to him, but his art enables him to reproduce it and to transform it in an individual and peculiar way.

A.A. GOLDENWEISER

"Civilization as an Art", The Freeman, September 15, 1920


What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque.

CARL SAGAN

Cosmos


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 consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.

FERNANDO PESSOA

The Book of Disquiet


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

EMIL CIORAN

A Short History of Decay


Civilization does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she has not even her full share of them. They flourish in greater abundance and attain greater strength among many barbarous people.

HERMAN MELVILLE

Typee


The first request of civilization ... is that of justice.

SIGMUND FREUD

Civilization and Its Discontents


All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality.

ALFRED L. KROEBER

The Superorganic


We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.

ERIC BERNE

attributed, Warning: Nonsense is Destroying America


For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.

WILLA CATHER

"On the Divide,", The Troll Garden


Civilization is sterilization.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

Brave New World


Civilization helps the disabled and disables those who can help themselves.

ABRAHAM MILLER

Unmoral Maxims


Civilization is another word for respect for life.

ELIZABETH GOUDGE

At the Sign of the Dolphin