Quotations about Civilization
CIVILIZATION. A concerted effort to remedy the blunders and check the practical joking of God. ~H. L. Mencken
The fact is that the ability to read, write, talk and understand has in our time become a survival tool, just as the flint ax was a survival tool for our ancestors. That ability is not only a sign of intelligence. It also develops the intelligence. Without it we're only second-class citizens, half slaves, surely not free men and women. We don't have to become highbrows or intellectuals to remain free. But we do have to be able to communicate with each other, learn from each other, judge our leaders and our laws. Democracy and literacy go together. ~Clifton Fadiman, Preface to How to Use the Power of the Printed Word, edited by Billings S. Fuess, Jr., 1985
But let us not fool ourselves:
This civilization is mostly varnish very thinly laid on...
~James Oppenheim, "Civilization," Songs for the New Age, 1914
We go on fooling ourselves... Especially if we live in a nice pretty cushioned world. Civilisation is hideously fragile... There's not much between us and the horrors underneath. Just about a coat of varnish, wouldn't you say?... And the same applies to you and me. And the rest of us. There's not much between us and our beastly selves. ~C. P. Snow, A Coat of Varnish, 1979
The two latest acquisitions of civilization have been habits of industry and the infectious diseases. And one is tempted sometimes to wonder which is the more deadly. ~Woods Hutchinson, A.M., M.D. (1862–1930), Civilization and Health, "Chapter XIV: The Vacation Habit," 1914
The Native Races have the advantage of moving about and sleeping in the open air; and Civilized Races have the advantages over the poor Indians, of comfortable houses and beds, and
God... fixed up the planet
As best as He could
Then in come the people
And gum it up good...
~Alan Jay Lerner, "The First Thing You Know," Paint Your Wagon, 1969 ♫
The body itself is clean, but the caged mind
is a sewer inside, it pollutes, O it pollutes
the guts and the stones and the womb, rots them down, leaves a rind
of maquillage and pose and malice to shame the brutes.
~D. H. Lawrence, "Obscenity," Pansies, 1929
Human vanity can best be served by a reminder that, whatever his accomplishments, his sophistication, his artistic pretension, man owes his very existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil — and the fact that it rains. ~Anonymous, in The Cockle Bur
What all of us know put together don't mean anything. Nothing don't mean anything. We are here for a spell and pass on. Anyone who thinks that civilization has advanced is an egotist. ~Will Rogers (1879–1935)
Under every roof, a storm. ~James Oppenheim, "A Picture of Civilization," War and Laughter, 1916
Leash: n, a means by which animals, formerly running wild, are prevented from running tame, also. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. ~Aldous Huxley
...for they are very civil — but civility itself, in that uniform, wearies and bodders one to death... ~Laurence Sterne, letter to
Civilization begins with soap. ~Author unknown, from Dallas-Galveston News,
Since the Middle Ages progress in hygiene has been characterized by the conquest of stink. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
The sanitary and mechanical age we are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of smell by the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing. As usual, what we call "Progress" is the exchange of one Nuisance for another Nuisance. ~Havelock Ellis, 1912
There was no such thing as civilization until individuals ceased carrying arms, and agreed to refer their differences to the courts. ~Elbert Hubbard
A living civilization creates; a dying, builds museums. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. ~Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 1927
There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he less savage than the other savages. ~Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897
She will escape from the rut of small domestic household cares, which I have heard you so often say eat the soul out of a woman.... She will be out in the open and free from the crushing yoke of conventionalities which hem the most of us in like prison walls. ~Robert Grant, "The Fall of the House of Padelford," 1892
But, as an English writer has wittily remarked, the man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilization. ~Sigmund Freud, c.1893, translated from German by James Strachey [quoteinvestigator.com]
I don't agree with you in saying that in all human minds there is poetry. Man as he came from the hand of his Maker was poetic in both mind and body, but the gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual. ~John Muir, letter to John B. McChesney, 1871 September 19th, from Yosemite (University of the Pacific Library Holt-Atherton Special Collections, © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust)
One is tempted to advance the notion that civilization came out of human terror at having to face dread as a daily condition.... Small wonder if man did everything he could to remove himself from such intimacy with nature. He even escalated the costs of tribal war in order to found large nations—anything to avoid a daily existence filled with dread. Carnage ensued and philosophy developed. ~Norman Mailer, "Primitive Man, Art and Science, Evil and Judgment," The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing, 2003
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. ~H. G. Wells,
PROGRESS. The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God. ~H. L. Mencken
The first thing you know
They civilize what's pretty
By puttin' up a city
Where nothin' that's
Pretty can grow...
They civilize left
They civilize right
'Til nothing is left
'Til nothing is right...
~Alan Jay Lerner, "The First Thing You Know," Paint Your Wagon, 1969 ♫
The reputations of the nineteenth century will one day be quoted to prove its barbarism. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not savages? and what else are we, I ask you? We are worse savages than the Australian bushmen, since possessing the knowledge of our savagery, we persist in it. ~Octave Mirbeau, "The Mission," The Torture Garden, 1899, translated from the French by Alvah C. Bessie, 1931
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries. ~Mark Twain, as quoted in More Maxims of Mark compiled by Merle Johnson, 1927
We are creatures trapped in culture. ~Terri Guillemets
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct. ~Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930
Wild things in captivity
while they keep their own wild purity
won't breed, they mope, they die.
All men are in captivity,
active with captive activity,
and the best won't breed, though they don't know why.
The great cage of our domesticity
kills sex in a man, the simplicity
of desire is distorted and twisted awry...
~D. H. Lawrence, "Wild Things in Captivity," Pansies, 1929
Now it would be very wrong to suppose that Hardy was in the least tainted with socialism, anarchism, or any such pestilent heresies, or that he had read "Emile" and "Walden." He had never heard of either of these works, and had no desire whatever for the restoration of society on a primitive basis of animalism, modified by light literature, clothing, and the moral law. For all modern theories he had a withering contempt, his own simple creed being that in the beginning God made man a Tory squire. His quarrel with the social order was a purely private and particular one. In our modern mythology, Custom, Circumstance, and Heredity are the three Fates that weave the web of human life. Hardy did not wholly sympathise with this belief. He had too profound a respect for his own pedigree to lay his sins at his great-grandfather's door. As the nephew of a Tory squire, he was but two degrees removed from original righteousness. In spite of this consideration, he was wont to describe himself with engaging candour as a "bad hat." In doing so he recognised that he was a dependent part of a vast and complicated system. If he, Vincent Hardy, was a bad hat, who was to blame for it? Obviously, civilisation for providing him with temptation, and society for supplying encouragement. As a consequence he owed both civilisation and society a grudge.
"Therefore I say that a return to barbarism will be our salvation. You and I mayn't live to see the day,
Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years in order to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization. ~Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt, 1855, translated from French
Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long... ~Ogden Nash, "Come, Come, Kerouac! My Generation is Beater Than Yours," in The New Yorker, 1959 [quoteinvestigator.com]
Flowers don't open to the clock
but to the sunshine spontaneous;
for modern humans that manner
of instinct is now extraneous.
~Terri Guillemets, "If I Cry Will I Rust"
I think a civilization is created out of some kind of sublimation of violence. When the violence gets too sublimated, you get a sick civilization. ~Norman Mailer, 1967
In almost every act, and even thought, of our lives we are so clothed in rationalization and dissemblance that we can recognize but dimly the deep primal impulses that motivate us. ~James Ramsey Ullman, River of the Sun, 1951
The parson thinks our modern civilization has a trace of paganism in it — but I'm inclined to believe it's our modern paganism which has a trace of civilization in it. ~J. W. Cunningham (1881–1971), Corn on the Cob, 1952 [This line may have been first published as early as the 1930s, in a Toledo, Ohio newspaper.
Civilization gradually creeps up on us! ~J. W. Cunningham (1881–1971), Corn on the Cob, 1952 [This line may have been first published as early as the 1930s, in a Toledo, Ohio newspaper.
Civilizations do not last forever; they always seem to reach a point from which decline is inevitable. ~Dr. Idel Dreimer, lumpenbangenpiano.com