Those who regard the decay of civilisation as something quite normal and natural console themselves with the thought that it is not civilisation, but “a” civilisation, which is falling a prey to dissolution; that there will be a new age and a new race in which there will blossom a new civilisation. But that is […]
Civilization Quotes
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
Civilization is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
We veneer civilization by doing unkind things in a kind way.
My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.
But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which ‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom […]
All the ways discovered so far lead to the horrors of our existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by Ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another for scraps of food.
There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened civilized people.
The idea that we were brought up on, that Europe is the home of civilization in general – nonsense! It’s a periodical slaughter-pen, with all the vices this implies. I’d as lief live in the Chicago stockyards.
Civilization is hideously fragile and there’s not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.
