1,222 Quotes About Civilization

Sex does not need to be primordial in order to be legitimate. Civilization doesn't just repress our original sexuality; it makes new kinds of sexuality. And new sexualities, including learned ones, might have as as much validity as ancient ones, if not more.

Civilization, as we know it today, is defined in large measure by science.

No civilization can prosper, or even exist,after having lost this pride and the connection with its own past.

You may believe that civilization deafens us with tens of thousands of voices, but listen well to that clamour, for with each renewed burst so disparate and myriad, an ancient force awakens, drawing each noise ever closer, until the chorus forms but two sides, each battling the other. The bloody lines are drawn, fought in the turning away of faces, in the stoppering of ears, the cold denial, and all discourse, at the last, is revealed as futile and worthless.

Is it the lot of average human being, however, he asked himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilization?

Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days, it'd die of remorse on the third—

She would follow him there. And she would die there -- and die soon. Of misery and of strangeness and of all the vicious, petty, alien, and unbridled thoughts that would pour into her like the poison from the Goldner tins poured into Fitzjames -- unseen, vile, deadly.

Every book in a bookstore is a fresh beginning. Every book is the next iteration of a very old story. Every bookstore, therefore, is like a safe-deposit box for civilization.

Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong forever . . . This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping, and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that out house is the future as well as the past.