Civilization

"There’s a certain step-by-step logic, inherent in human nature and the peculiarities of human psychology, which ensures that Man will always organize into the largest possible group. Civilization is inevitable, if you want a pat phrase."

"Russian Ambassador: Civilization is an illusion; a game of pretend. What is real is the fact that we are still animals driven by primal instincts. Civilization crumbles whenever we need it most. In the right situation, we are all capable of the most terrible crimes. Imagine a world where this was no so; imagine a world where every crisis did not result in new atrocities, where every newspaper is not full of war and violence. This is to imagine a world where human beings cease to be human."

"The noun civilization is only to be met with in the economists of the years which immediately preceded the French Revolution. [...] Littré, who had ransacked all French literature, could not trace it any further back. Thus the word civilization has no more than a century and a half of existence. It was only in 1835, less than a hundred years ago, that it finally found its way into the dictionary of the Academy. ... The ancients, from whom we still consciously trace our descent, were equally without a term for what we mean by civilization. If this word were given to be translated in Latin prose, the schoolboy would indeed find himself in difficulties."

"History cannot be written as if it belonged to one group [of people] alone. Civilization has been gradually built up, now out of the contributions of one [group], now of another. When all civilization is ascribed to the [Europeans], the claim is the same one which any anthropologist can hear any day from primitive tribes - only they tell the story of themselves. They too believe that all that is important in the world begins and ends with them... We smile when such claims are made [by primitive tribes], but ridicule might just as well be turned against ourselves Provincialism may rewrite history and play up only the achievements of the historians own group, but it remains provincialism."

"Civilization is by its nature bourgeois in the deepest spiritual sense of the word. Bourgeois is synonymous precisely with the civilized kingdom of this world and the civilized will to organized power and enjoyment of life. The spirit of civilization is that of the middle classes; it is attached and clings to corrupt and transitory things; and it fears eternity. To be a bourgeois is therefore to be a slave of matter and an enemy of eternity. The perfected European and American civilizations gave rise to the industrial-capitalist system, which represents not only a mighty economic development but the spiritual phenomenon of the annihilation of spirituality."

"Western civilization is material, frankly material. It measures progress by the progress of matter — railways, conquest of disease, conquest of the air. These are triumphs of civilization according to Western measure. No one says, ‘Now the people are more truthful or more humble.’ I judge it by my own test and I use the word ‘Satanic’ in describing it. You set such store by the temporal, external things. The essential of Eastern civilization is that it is spiritual, immaterial. The fruits of Western civilization the East may approach with avidity but with a sense of guilt."

"Civilization is at the cross-roads. The issues are now so obvious that no argument is necessary. Forces of tyranny are arrayed against those who are minded for liberty and peace. Humanity is dividing into two camps. Men are spending most of their substance on material for mutual slaughter. In such a way are the first two thousand years of the Christian era drawing to a close. The world presents a panorama in which progress and barbarism, organization and chaos, brilliance and stupidity seem inextricably mixed. What has gone wrong? Is there true cause for hope or for despair? Is it possible to read the riddle of human evolution, to discover the clue to future progress, and to find the means by which humanity can be set free from the present apparent deadlock? For civilization has reached an impasse involving other things than war, an impasse involving economics, health, morality, and self-knowledge. Is there any way of piercing the fog of surface happenings, and of understanding the true trend and significance of events? Introduction"

"If civilisation has got the better of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself, it is too much to profess to be afraid lest barbarism, after having been fairly got under, should revive and conquer civilisation. A civilisation that can thus succumb to its vanquished enemy, must first have become so degenerate, that neither its appointed priests and teachers, nor anybody else, has the capacity, or will take the trouble, to stand up for it. If this be so, the sooner such a civilisation receives notice to quit the better. It can only go on from bad to worse, until destroyed and regenerated (like the Western Empire) by energetic barbarians."

"We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most critical elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."

"Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization."

"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"

"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."