There’s a certain step-by-step logic, inherent in human nature and the — Civilization

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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."