Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) British Head of State
The word “civilization” to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don’t believe in the golden ages, you see… civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture.
—Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist
Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
—Brian Aldiss (1925–2017) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer
The old Hindoo saw, in his dream, the human race led out to its various fortunes.—First, men were in chains, that went back to an iron hand—then he saw them led by threads from the brain, which went upward to an unseen hand. The first was despotism, iron, and ruling by force.—The last was civilization, ruling by ideas.
—Wendell Phillips (1811–84) American Abolitionist, Lawyer, Orator
Civilization depends on morality.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.
—Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970) American Writer, Critic, Naturalist
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81) Russian Novelist, Essayist, Writer
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
—William C. Durant (1861–1947) American Industrialist
Civilization… wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.
—Richard Bach (b.1936) American Novelist, Aviator
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
—Richard Feynman (1918–88) American Physicist
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist
Man was not intended by nature to live in communities and be civilized.
—Epicurus (c.341–270 BCE) Greek Philosopher
Civilization is the order and freedom promoting cultural activity.
—William C. Durant (1861–1947) American Industrialist
Here is the element or power of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty, and of social life and manners, and all needful to build up a complete human life.—We have instincts responding to them all, and requiring them all, and we are perfectly civilized only when all these instincts of our nature—all these elements in our civilization have been adequately recognized and satisfied.
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic
Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.
—Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist
We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
Civilization is the making of civil persons.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.
—Anatole France (1844–1924) French Novelist
A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900–44) French Novelist, Aviator
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English Humanist, Pacifist, Essayist, Short Story Writer, Satirist
It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) Scottish Novelist
Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
The central question is whether the wonderfully diverse and gifted assemblage of human beings on this earth really knows how to run a civilization.
—Adlai Stevenson (1900–65) American Diplomat, Politician, Orator
The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.
—Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American Writer, Publisher, Artist, Philosopher
A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth’s span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space—to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.
—H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American Science-fiction Writer
You can’t say civilization isn’t advancing: in every war, they kill you in a new way.
—Will Rogers (1879–1935) American Actor, Rancher, Humorist
If you would civilize a man, begin with his grandmother.
—Victor Hugo (1802–85) French Novelist
Is man’s civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish Historian, Essayist
Civilization is what makes you sick.
—Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist Painter
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