And this is the ultimate lesson that our knowledge of the mode of transmission of typhus has taught us: Man carries on his skin a parasite, the louse. Civilization rids him of it. Should man regress, should he allow himself to resemble a primitive beast, the louse begins to multiply again and treats man as...

By valuing its Christian roots, Europe will be able to give a secure direction to the choices of its citizens and peoples, it will strengthen their awareness of belonging to a common civilization and it will nourish the commitment of all to address the challenges of the present for the sake of a better future.

Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it...

We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.

Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story...

Civilization is in fact the longest story of all. Civilization can persist through a series of economies.

Civilization: the human zoo

I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me

In the early twelfth century century the Virgin had been the supreme protectress of civilisation. She had taught a race of tough and ruthless barbarians the virtues of tenderness and compassion. The great cathedrals of the Middle Ages were her dwelling places upon earth. In the Renaissance, while remaining the Queen of Heaven, she became...

There’s no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

I can’t help remembering that good old wild Thoreau wound up a tame surveyor of Concord house lots. […] How would I know what it means? I don’t know what anything means. What it suggests to me is that the civilization he was contemptuous of-that civilization of men who lived lives of quiet desperation-was stronger...

Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy.

What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.

Science is a trigger of changes of civilization. Religion is the failsafe of science performance.

Civilization is hideously fragile and there’s not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.

Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.

Com a mania francesa e burguesa de reduzir todas as regiões e todas as raças ao mesmo tipo de civilização, o mundo ia tornar-se numa monotonia abominável. Dentro em breve um touriste faria enormes sacrifícios, despesas sem fim, para ir a Tumbuctu – para quê? Para encontrar lá pretos de chapéu alto, a ler o...

Good sex is the basis of any truly civilized society.

…the/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines…

This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world’s divinely appointed ruler: ‘I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.

The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles...

Our place is in European civilization.

while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.

A gold tooth is to some blacks, what braces are to all whites.

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. … At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle...

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked...

I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.

superior values of European civilization.

It would be both foolish and cumbersome to continue our everyday existences in bliss without first denying to ourselves, for the sake of excusing our own repugnance, the inherent cruelty from which modern civilization was conceived…And there can be no other path by which a fiercely competitive, yet social species, as humanity, can afford its...

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.

Manlius … took care in his invitations, actively sought to exclude from his circle crude and vulgar men like Caius Valerius. But they were all around; it was Manlius who lived in a dream world, and his bubble of civility was becoming smaller and smaller. Caius Valerius, powerful member of a powerful family, had never...

Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician’s hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to...

We are in a mutually dependent society, called civilization, and government is the oil that keeps it running and the lifeblood that carries oxygen to the various parts of the civic body.

‎Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against “society,” that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship.

Telegraph RoadA long time ago came a man on a trackWalking thirty miles with a pack on his backAnd he put down his load where he thought it was the bestMade a home in the wildernessHe built a cabin and a winter storeAnd he ploughed up the ground by the cold lake shoreAnd the other...

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...

So what this is is a ‘road novel.’ Eventually entire civilization (in the South) had been uprooted and people found security only in movement, … That interested me enormously … A friend from New Orleans, he said when he read the book, ‘This is like Hurricane Katrina.’

A call to embrace democracy is the worst insult to a society that is still alien to civilisation. It is like being asked to dance to the tune of mob justice.

Super-eruption of mount Toba, 76,000 years ago had wiped out a previous great civilization on earth.

America’s civilization perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing.

Even today, some opt for the comforts of mystification, preferring to believe that the wonders of the ancient world were built by Atlanteans, gods, or space travelers, instead of by thousands toiling in the sun. Such thinking robs our forerunners of their due, and us of their experience. Because then one can believe whatever one...

We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.

We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

Occasionally I glanced at the big blue cradle of civilization hanging in the sky, remembered for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that none of this had any right to be happening, and reminded myself for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that the only sane response was to continue carrying...

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don’t care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the...

Advanced technology does not always promise a more intelligent civilization. On the contrary, the more the common people rely on technology to do their thinking and solving for them, the less practice there is left for their own brains.

The “norm” for humanity is love.Brutality is an aberration.We are not sinners by nature.We learn to be bad.We are taught to stray from our good paths.We are made to be crazy by other people who are also crazy and who draw for us a map of the world which is ugly, negative, fearful, and crazy.

The premise of the Taker story is ‘the world belongs to man’. … The premise of the Leaver story is ‘man belongs to the world’.