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Quotes about Civilization

Primitive man explored the pharmaceutical avenues of escape from the world with a truly astonishing thoroughness. Our ancestors left almost no natural stimulant, or hallucinant, or stupefacient, undiscovered. Necessity is the mother of invention; primitive man, like his civilized descendant, felt so urgent a need to escape occasionally from reality, that the invention of drugs was fairly forced upon him.
- Aldous Huxley
What I glory in is the civilized, middle way between stink and asepsis. Give me a little musk, a little intoxicating feminine exhalation, the bouquet of old wine and strawberries, a lavender bag under every pillow and potpourri in the corners of the drawing-room. Readable books, amusing conversation, civilized women, graceful art and dry vintage, music, with a quiet life and reasonable comfort?—that's all I ask for.
- Aldous Huxley
Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. "I ate civilization." "What?" "It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added, in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.
- Aldous Huxley
We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.
- Carl Sagan
Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.
- Oscar Wilde
It was wearisome to contemplate that animate protoplasm, reasonable by courtesy only, shut up in a car by an incomprehensible civilization, taken somewhere, to do a vague something without aim or significance or consequence.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
I feel sure we are the great coming nation—yet—and she sighed—I feel my life should have drowsed away close to an older, mellower civilization, a land of greens and autumnal browns—
- F Scott Fitzgerald
A delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of civilization. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on a city street—and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art—and he was a virtual moron, performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of threescore years.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language.
- Joseph Brodsky
The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.
- Nikki Giovanni
Our manners, our civilization, and all the good things connected with manners and civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles: I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.
- Edmund Burke