The social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to real star patterns.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

In the dust where we have buried the silent races and their abominations we have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.

Human history, if you read it right, is the record of the efforts to tame Father. Next to striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

As civilization advances, man grows unconscious of the primitive elements of life; he is separated from them by his perfection of material techniques.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming back.

Civilization does everything for the mind and favors it entirely at the expense of the body.

You can't say civilization dont advance... for in every war they kill you a new way.

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct.

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent.