c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They're rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.
— Robert E. Howard
One of the problems with all of this is that not all narratives are equal. Imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. You've been told these stories since you were a child. You believe them. You eat dog shit hotdogs, dog shit ice cream, General Tso's dog shit. Sooner or later, if you are exposed to some other foods, you might figure out that dog shit really doesn't taste good. Or if you cling too tightly to these stories (or if your enculturation is so strong that dog shit actually does taste good to you), the diet might make you sick or kill you. To make this example a little less silly, substitute the word pesticides for dog shit. Or, for that matter, substitute Big Mac, Whopper, or Coca Cola.
— Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization
Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.
— Jo Walton, Among Others
But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.
— Eric Berne
No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent. Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.
— Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
It's funny how people think that they have "a right to life". Now isn't that the biggest load you ever heard? You don't have a right to shit your pants on Sunday. Let's take it back to the jungle. Where the fuck are your rights there? No layers in the jungle. Civilization has allowed the weak to survive. You can sit back and be an overweight, apathetic piece of shit, smoke your dope and still survive because you have a right to life.
— Henry Rollins, Black Coffee Blues
Without the library, you have no civilization.
— Ray Bradbury
People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.
— Yasunari Kawabata
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....
— Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.
— Voltaire
[Referring to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde] ... Will civilization never reach humane ideals? Will men always punish most severely the sins they do not understand and which hold forth for them no temptation? Did Jesus suffer in vain?
— Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde
Once, headed uptown on the 9 train, I noticed a sign posted by the Metropolitan Transit Authority advising subway riders who might become ill in the train. The sign asked that the suddenly infirm inform another passenger or get out at the next stop and approach the stationmaster. Do not, repeat, do not pull the emergency brake, the sign said, as this will only delay aid. Which was all very logical, but for the following proclamation at the bottom of the sign, something along the lines of, “If you are sick, you will not be left alone.” This strikes me as not only kind, not only comforting, but the very epitome of civilization, good government, i.e., the the crux of the societal impulse. Banding together, pooling our taxes, not just making trains, not just making trains that move underground, not just making trains that move underground with surprising efficiency at a fair price—but posting on said trains a notification of such surprising compassion and thoughtfulness. I found myself scanning the faces of my fellow passengers, hoping for fainting, obvious fevers, at the very least a sneeze so that I might offer a tissue.
— Sarah Vowell
The more I see of what you call civilization, the more highly I think of what you call savagery!
— Robert E. Howard, King Kull
The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.
— Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you find absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.
— Octave Mirbeau
Let the war turn off the families. Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.
— Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization
The flaw in being civilized is that it permit’s the uncivilized among us to perpetrate horrific crimes against us in the name of freedom and equality.Foreword 'RHG
— M.J. Croan, Right Hand Up to God: No More Will Die
Poets write beautiful words to describe savagery-wrapped civilization nowadays.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
A chair is the first thing you need when you don’t really need anything, and is therefore a peculiarly compelling symbol of civilization. For it is civilization, not survival, that requires design.
— Ralph Caplan
If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man — and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages — it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Civilization depends on continually making the effort, of never giving in. It needs to be cared for by men of goodwill, protected from the dark.
— Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.
— George Orwell, Smothered Under Journalism: 1946
I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.
— Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward
The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations - and absolutely nothing more.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend.And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.Let the fool gape and shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink.But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff--with his own inborn strength.Principles? Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go ashore for a howl and a dance?Well, no--I didn't. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky steam-pipes--I tell you.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle, and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased, and I turned away with disgust and loathing.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.
— Lorrie Moore
(Catholic) monks taught metallurgy, introduced new crops, copied ancient texts, preserved literacy, pioneered in technology, invented champagne, improved the European landscape, provided for wanderers of every stripe, and looked after the lost and shipwrecked.
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Gullibility is a knife at the throat of civilization.
— David Wong
The university system, a gift of Western civilization to the world, was developed by the Catholic Church.
— Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization.
— Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization
This civilization is the impact of the world's consumption behavior.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
Barbarians are all alike... sit up half the night to discuss anything a Roman says.
— Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook's Hill
What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.
— Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
On why 300 years separates the first use of glass lenses in spectacles and their use in a telescope: “In many cases there are times when an invention is technologically possible – and in which it may indeed appear necessary, as the telescope may have – but without a market the idea will not sell, and in the absence of the technical and social infrastructure to support it, the invention will not survive.
— James  Burke, Connections
There is no a revolution, without a man!
— Hesham Nebr
Thinking the simplest rights of Civilization to The Humanitarian !
— Hesham Nebr
Self as such was not normal ..will be like the Justice, which lost its wings !! Both are rivals for the same man ..
— Hesham Nebr
The fact that Man is Nature’s perverse instantiation can only lead to the appalling conclusion that Man, too, is some kind of an artificial intelligence
— Stephan Attia
You are so civilized. So polite. So brave coming here alone when you know no one here would dare to touch you. So easy to be all those things, when all the power is on your side
— Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword
The equality prescribed by the Revolution is simply the weak man's revenge upon the strong; it's just what we saw in the past, but in reverse; that everyone should have his turn is only meet. And it shall be turnabout again tomorrow, for nothing in Nature is stable and the governments men direct are bound to prove as changeable and ephemeral as they.
— Marquis de Sade, Juliette
What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good?
— Stanisław Lem, The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy
You didn't find any trace of her?" asked d'Arnot. // Tarzan shook his head. "None. In the jungle, I could have found her; but here –-here, in civilization, a man cannot even find himself.
— Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Forbidden City
The more civilization progresses, the hollower it becomes and the easier to destroy it.
— Empress Eugenie of France
... man by nature is not a wild or unsocial creature, neither was he born so, but makes himself what he naturally is not, by vicious habit; and that again on the other side, he is civilized and grows gentle by a change of place, occupation, and manner of life, as beasts themselves that are wild by nature, become tame and tractable by housing and gentler usage...
— Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives, Vol 2
there was no television in the Netherlands during the afternoons!
— Robert Ludlum, The Aquitaine Progression
Since the days of cave civilization to the modern day microprocessor civilization, the relation between man and woman remained the same. Then it was at a carnal level. And, today it is still at carnal level.
— Girdhar Joshi, Some Mistakes Have No Pardon
Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies fromindifference toward the unique values which created it.
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implicito: Obra completa
Advanced weaponry, victories in battle and space travel do not an advanced species or civilization make.
— Christina Engela, Bugspray
It was not exasperation.... It was anger for the relentless force of evolution that insisted on endowing man with increased powers without removing the vestigial vices that prevented him from using them.
— Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
Nothing distresses the civilized person like unfettered nature. The Grand Canyon seen from behind the railing is indeed a splendid sight, but as soon as the desert reclaims your golf course that is another matter altogether.
— Anthony Marais
We, ironically known as the civilizados - in practically everything that matters they're a damned sight more civilized than we are - bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilization, which harms them even more, and desease, which kills them.
— Alistair MacLean, River of Death
The oldest profession [prostitution] is the most honest, for it exposes the bare bones of what civilization is all about. It's the root of all professions.
— Daniel Suelo, The Man Who Quit Money
A Greek invention, democracy is highly overrated. For starters, it never worked in Greece. The first philosophers were fascists and, even today, 2,500 years later, the "cradle of Western civilization" remains an incompetent state. Roman emperors and a vengeful, authoritarian God are the true European success stories.
— Thorsten J. Pattberg
By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death. In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust. In truth, the whole progress of civilization is based upon this power.
— Julian Huxley, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom
After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization.
— Arthur C. Clarke, A Fall of Moondust
Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.
— Joe Haldeman, Forever Free
And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his 'Every Change Is for the Worse' should he ever find time to write it: Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.
— Joseph Heller
The engineered built environments or domesticated landscapes of certain Amazonian peoples were as impressive as any Egyptian pyramid, Mesopotamian city, or Chinese terrace-irrigiation system. In the Amazon, the transformation was driven by social demands: social group formation, domestic routines, territoriality, local environmental knowledge, gifting, and competitive feasting.
— Clark L. Erickson
Pattaya is what the end of civilization will look like.
— John Cameron Smith
What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will.
— Paulette Jiles, Enemy Women
Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If our civilization goes on like this, only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.
— G.K. Chesterton
But, for myself, the Earth’s records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization.
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Colloquy of Monos and Una
But the bars that held you, the bars that kept you in were the luxury and soft living. It is hard to walk out on a thing like that
— Clifford D. Simak, Time Is the Simplest Thing
Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The necessity, then, of those “lesser breeds without the law”—those wogs, barbarians, niggers—is this: one must not become more free, not become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their abandonment allows one to use them: therefore, they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may simply “spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again,” leaving the civilizer with no satisfaction on which to rest.
— James     Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
civilization is the very root cause of the woes of civilization
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Our Freedoms come from those that keep our beliefs, our ideology, and lifestyle safe. You may never know who they are but salute their presence. Their only glory is knowing we recognize their efforts even if they are but ghosts.
— Hunter Blacke, TROIKA: Operation Siberia: Operatives Spies and Assassins
An urbanite does not become a civilized person just because he has had an education. What one assimilates in the city is book-learning and knowledge derived through emulating educated men. But that alone will not make him a civilized person. A man of simple tastes becomes complex through education because he desires to become complex. That is why a lot of educated men enjoy vulgar and obscene things. The cinema has become a vulgar philistine art form. The enormous motor car with its bloated body is a vulgar vehicle. It is difficult to create a complex thing without some vulgarity and grossness. Amongst the things valued by the educated, it is difficult to find things untainted by vulgarity. People who cannot distinguish between grossness and refinement are not uncommon among the urban educated because for many, the measure of civilization is its complexity.
— මාර්ටින් වික්‍රමසිංහ, Yuganthaya
I cannot think who my residents hurt but how I can give them tools to remain on the right side of civilization.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Juvenile Justice: A Reference Handbook, 2nd Edition: A Reference Handbook
Surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions.
— Lily King, Euphoria
Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach — see what happens, limit damages, and learn from experience — is unworkable. Rather, we must take a proactive approach. This requires foresight to anticipate new types of threats and a willingness to take decisive preventive action and to bear the costs (moral and economic) of such actions.
— Nick Bostrom
Somewhere on the Earth tonight, my Tylla, there is a Man with a Lever, which, when he pulls it, Will Save The World. The man is now unemployed. His switch gathers dust. He himself plays pinochle.
— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
We cannot rely on trial-and-error approaches to deal with existential risks… We need to vastly increase our investment in developing specific defensive technologies… We are at the critical stage today for biotechnology, and we will reach the stage where we need to directly implement defensive technologies for nanotechnology during the late teen years of this century… A self-replicating pathogen, whether biological or nanotechnology based, could destroy our civilization in a matter of days or weeks.
— Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,(...) I am tame. I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls. I drink too much of the same kind of whisky at the same time every night. I even drink about the same amount too much. I go to the same number of public-houses. I meet the same damned women with mauve faces. I hear the same number of dirty stories— generally the same dirty stories. You may assure my friends, Inglewood, that you see before you a person whom civilization has thoroughly tamed.
— G.K. Chesterton, Manalive
This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
— Jimmy Carter
You've made a beast of yourself,- to the beasts you may go.
— H.G. Wells
The larger the pile of rubble you leave behind, the larger your place in the historical record!
— James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
Encouragement of sedentarism is perhaps the oldest "state project," a project related to the second-oldest state project of taxation.
— James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
That frontier operated as a rough and ready homeostatic device; the more a state pressed its subjects, the fewer subjects it had. The frontier underwrote popular freedom.
— James C. Scott
Civilization has made life a humanized jungle, a sugar coated jungle, but still a jungle
— Bangambiki Habyarimana
[What do you want to be when you grow up?] "A wrecker of civilizaton
— Sasha Grey
The civilizations barter in coldness; they peddles it, reinforces it, market it, entices with it, reward it, and then flees from it when it's unchecked force is too much to marvel at. Soon absolute zero will be on sale, and people will warm up to that notion as well.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk.
— Will Durant
No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library ... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.
— Lawrence Clark Powell
Bell defined civilization in the language of a Bloomsbury connoisseur: ‘A taste for truth and beauty, tolerance, intellectual honesty, fastidiousness, a sense of humour, good manners, curiosity, a dislike of vulgarity, brutality, and over-emphasis, freedom from superstition and prudery, a fearless acceptance of the good things of life, a desire for complete self-expression and for a liberal education, a contempt for utilitarianism and philistinism, in two words – sweetness and light.’ Bell argued that ‘as a means to good and as a means to civility a leisured class is essential’. The Bloomsbury group was necessary because ‘It is only when there come together enough civilized individuals to form a nucleus from which light can radiate, and sweetness ooze, that a civilization becomes possible. The disseminators of civilization are therefore highly civilized men and women forming groups sufficiently influential to affect larger groups, and ultimately whole communities.
— Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes
Of course I realized that the Protestants denominations of the world have grown and matured over the years, but maybe we should not throw away the gains of the old Protestants that brought us to our modern day civilization.
— Sunday Adelaja
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born
—  in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Those who haven't been exposed to the hypocrisies of a civilized education react to things 'naturally', as they happen. It is in the here and now that they are either happy or unhappy, joyful or sad, interested or indifferent.
— Henri Charrière, Papillon
Why wasn't I already kissing this woman? Why wasn't I naked, eating violets, and playing music underneath the open sky?Looking around the room again, everything seemed terribly ridiculous. These people sitting on their benches wearing layers on layers of clothing, eating with knives and forks. It all struck me as so pointless and contrived. It was incredibly funny. It was like they were playing a game and didn't even realize it. It was like a joke I'd never understood before.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central human system of thought.
— Robert Graves
They believe civilization weakens natural selection. They do nature’s work so that we do not become a soft race.
— Pierce Brown, Red Rising
Civilization is a scheme to hide nakedness.
— Marty Rubin
Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men
—  it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art
What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace an egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of peace in this world of men.
— Jack Vance
The fleeting systems lapse like foam,'" he mumbled what was evidently a quotation. "That's it—foam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation. And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again, sweeping his handiwork away—the weeds and the forest inundated his fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are wolves on the Cliff House beach." He was appalled by the thought. "Where four million people disported themselves, the wild wolves roam to-day, and the savage progeny of our loins, with prehistoric weapons, defend themselves against the fanged despoilers. Think of it! And all because of the Scarlet Death—
— Jack London, The Scarlet Plague
And what were the rules at St. Cloud's? What were Larch's rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace--and with what confidence?
— John Irving, The Cider House Rules
You're mad, you missionaries,' ejaculated Tai Haruru angrily. 'What good do you think you do, crawling out to the extremities of all the different world's ends and dying there like lizards spiked on sticks?'Brother Balaam jabbed his thumb over his shoulder at the church behind him. 'Ye'll get no civilization worth havin' in a new country unless ye lay down a few martyrs' bones for a foundation,' he said. 'They generate. Slow but sure.
— Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street
They say the level of civilization is proportionate to the degree of cleanliness of the skin. Assuming that man has a soul, it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin.
— Kōbō Abe
There is nothing more savage than modern civilization.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
— Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest
We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages.
— William Golding, Lord of the Flies
In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated.Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman empire or Egypt with the last pharaoh abdicating in 1912. For China, the last century has been a period of transition - dramatic change and perpetual revolution.
— Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History
Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization.
— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
There has never been but one question in all civilization-how to keep a few men from saying to many men: You work and earn bread and we will eat it.
— Abraham Lincoln
The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.
— Julian Barnes, The Lemon Table
Handwriting enables civilization.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
The hardest part about being back in the human world was relearning emotion. Everything a wolf does has a practical, simple reason. There is no cold shoulder, no saying one thing when you mean something else, no innuendo. Wolves fight for two reasons: family and territory. Humans are driven by ego; wolves have no room for it and will literally nip it out of you. For a wolf, the world is about understanding, knowledge, respect – attributes that many humans have cast off, along with an appreciation of the natural world.
— Jodi Picoult, Lone Wolf
Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. - Pg. 195
— Robert   Harris, Pompeii
Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
We only refer to sapient creatures as civilized when their society is willingly self-correcting. That means that any problem or imbalance that arises is fixed, and I mean really fixed - not ignored, not hidden, and not passed off to a future generation.
— J.Z. Colby, Star Station
Anyone who has ever watched children amuse themselves will recognize that the scientific and technological face of civilization is precisely the result of play in its purest form. Just as children are constantly exploring, experimenting, testing and trying things out, for no conscious purpose except the sheer enjoyment of the game itself, so pure science and applied technology play with ideas and toy with the principles and substance of the world; all the time wondering ‘just suppose…’ and asking ‘what happens if…?
— Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia And The Birth Of Civilization
Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.
— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora at a time. Wine displaced beer to become the most civilized and sophisticated of drinks—a status it has maintained ever since, thanks to its association with the intellectual achievements of Ancient Greece.
— Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Scientists are the true driving force of civilization.
— James  Burke
We know we are a species obsessed with itself and its own past and origins. We know we are capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and gently placing them in museums. Great museums in great cities—the hallmarks of civilisation.
— Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines
It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.
— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
PharaohsIt took Khufu twenty-three years to build his Great Pyramid at Giza, where some eleven hundred stone blocks, each weighing about two and a half tons, had to be quarried, moved, and set in place every day during the annual building season, roughly four months long. Few commentators on these facts can resist noting that this achievement is an amazing testimonial to the pharaoh’s iron control over the workers of Egypt. I submit, on the contrary, that pharaoh Khufu needed to exercise no more control over his workers at Giza than pharaoh Bill Gates exercises over his workers at Microsoft. I submit that Egyptian workers, relatively speaking, got as much out of building Khufu’s pyramid as Microsoft workers will get out of building Bill Gates’s pyramid (which will surely dwarf Khufu’s a hundred times over, though it will not, of course, be built of stone).No special control is needed to make people into pyramid builders—if they see themselves as having no choice but to build pyramids. They’ll build whatever they’re told to build, whether it’s pyramids, parking garages, or computer programs.Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building pyramids is something we just can’t stop doing, we love it so much.
— Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure
POUND		We spend twelve hundred generations developing 	 so-called civilization to the point where it  produces an expert who can offer us salvation  from our superstitions, and all we end up with  is another superstition! If it takes someone  like Freud to save us from our neuroses, what’s 		it gonna take to save us from Freud?
— Billy Marshall Stoneking, Sixteen Words For Water
What is word for good together living? Nobody shits in the well?"I laughed. "Civilization?"He nodded, splaying his fingers: amusement. "Yes," he said. "Speaking with hands is civilization.""But smiling is natural," I protested. "Everyone smiles.""Natural is not civilization," Tempi said. "Cooking meat is civilization. Washing off stink is civilization.""So in Ademre you always smile with hands?" I wished I knew the gesture for dismay."No. Smiling with face good with family. Good with some friend.""Why only family?"Tempi repeated his thumb-on-collarbone gesture again. "When you make this." He pressed his palm to the side of his face and blew air into it, making a great flatulent noise. "That is natural, but you do not make it near others. Rude. With family..." He shrugged. Amusement. "...civilization not important. More natural with family.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
... civilization—a word that simply means "living in cities..."Excerpt From: Standage, Tom. “A History of the World In 6 Glasses.
— Tom Standage
Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames and smolders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view.
— Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina
There’s just as much money to be made in the wreck of a civilization as in the upbuilding of one.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
What 'primitive' men called gossip, 'civilized' men call news.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
...the/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines...
— Jack Kerouac, Book of Sketches
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 or civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. And in fact it is not difficult to indicate those defects. While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again, many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all. One would think that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that, undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be a golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realized. It seems rather that every civilization must be built upon coercion and renunciation of instinct; it does not even seem certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings would be prepared to undertake to perform the work necessary for acquiring new wealth. One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behavior in human society.
— Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didin't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we didn't have any delinquents. Without a prison, there can't be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white man arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.
— John (Fire) Lame Deer
There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of the nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose - and is a test to the quality of a nation's civilization.
— John F. Kennedy
And it came to me as I stood on the desert sand, looking at the Great Pyramid, that what any civilization says about God tells us more about that civilization than it does about God.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Glimpses of Grace: Daily Thoughts and Reflections
Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook
The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops.
— Alfred Nobel
the veneer of civilization is exceedingly thin
— Karin Tansek
, civilization is an ever-changing tacit agreement, culturally inherited, not chosen at birth. Civilization is the invention of man, my big friend. It is a means of ensuring order and structure; it is man’s attempt to expunge all and every act of randomness from daily life. The ultimate goal of civilization is determinism, the complete absence of freewill. If everyone adhered to every rule, every demand, every decree of civilization, there would be no accidents, no arguments, no crime! Man would move through his life smoothly, like a well-oiled cog in a grandfather clock.
— Peter Jelen
A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as 'the outpost of Western Christian civilisation': France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as przedmurze (bastion), even tsarist Russia. Each of these nation-state myths identified "barbarism" as the condition or ethic of their immediate eastward neighbour: for the French, the Germans were barbarous, for the Germans it was the Slavs, for the Poles the Russians, for the Russians the Mongol and Turkic peoples of Central Asia and eventually the Chinese.
— Neal Ascherson, Black Sea
It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.
— M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans
Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father’s generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don’t recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!”How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
The market system is the basis of our civilization. Its only alternative is the Führer principle.
— Ludwig von Mises
He realized that the ritualized world he had dismissed as feminine was in fact civilization.
— Wilson Rawls
‎I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walking
Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.
— Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern
Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times, or by omission, or by silence, shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.
— C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
Old Rekohu’s claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life.Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!” (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, “I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?
— Émile Zola, L'Argent
A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs.
— Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind