"Only among those who were engaged in a particular activity did their language remain unchanged; so, for instance, there was one for all the architects, one for all the carriers of stones, one for all the stone-breakers, and so on for all the different operations. As many as were the types of work involved in the enterprise, so many were the languages by which the human race was fragmented; and the more skill required for the type of work, the more rudimentary and barbaric the language they now spoke. But the holy tongue remained to those who had neither joined in the project nor praised it, but instead, thoroughly disdaining it, had made fun of the builders' stupidity."

"They have things like the atom bomb! So, I'll think I'll stay where I am. Civilization? I'll stay right here!"

"The triumph of the industrial arts will advance the cause of civilization more rapidly than its warmest advocates could have hoped, and contribute to the permanent prosperity and strength of the country far more than the most splendid victories of successful war."

"It is essential that all thinking people should give time and thought to the consideration of the major world problems with which we are now faced. Some of them can be solved with relative rapidity—given common sense and a correctly appreciated self-interest; others will require foresighted planning and a long patience as, one by one, the necessary steps are taken, leading to the readjustment of human values and the inauguration of new attitudes of mind regarding right human relations. In the recognition of the growth in human consciousness and in a realization of the distinction obviously existing between primitive men and our modern intelligent humanity lie the grounds for an unshaken optimism as to human destiny. Events in the immediate foreground do not blot out the long history of human development and obliterate recognition of the long range changes which have taken place within the human consciousness"

"It must be recognized that the cause of all world unrest, of the world wars which have wrecked humanity, and the widespread misery upon our planet, can largely be attributed to a selfish group with materialistic purposes, who have for centuries exploited the masses and used the labour of mankind for their selfish ends... This group of capitalists has cornered and exploited the world's resources and the staples required for civilised living; they have been able to do this because they have owned and controlled the world's wealth through their interlocking directorates, and have retained it in their hands. They have made possible the vast differences existing between the very rich and the very poor; they love money and the power which money gives; they have stood behind governments and politicians; they have controlled the electorate; they have made possible the narrow nationalistic aims of selfish politics; they have financed the world businesses and controlled oil, coal, power, light and transportation; they control publicly or sub rosa the world's banking accounts. The responsibility for the widespread misery to be found today in every country in the world, lies predominantly at the door of certain major interrelated groups of businessmen, bankers, executives of international cartels, monopolies, trusts and organisations, and directors of huge corporations, who work for corporate or personal gain. p. 70/1"

"If we mark civilisation to be the state in which men have the steam-engine, or printing, or guns, or any of the higher tokens of our civilisation, we make ourselves to have been too lately wholly uncivilised, and yet our fore-fathers were cives without those things of civitas."

"The bureaucratic culture which prompts us to view society as an object of administration, as a collection of so many 'problems' to be solved, as 'nature' to be 'controlled', 'mastered' and 'improved' or 'remade', as a legitimate target for 'social engineering', and in general a garden to be designed and kept in the planned shape by force (the gardening posture divides vegetation into 'cultured plants' to be taken care of, and weeds to be exterminated), was the very atmosphere in which the idea of the Holocaust could be conceived, slowly yet consistently developed, and brought to its conclusion."

"History cannot be written as if it belonged to one group [of people] alone. Civilization has been gradually built up, now out of the contributions of one [group], now of another. When all civilization is ascribed to the [Europeans], the claim is the same one which any anthropologist can hear any day from primitive tribes - only they tell the story of themselves. They too believe that all that is important in the world begins and ends with them... We smile when such claims are made [by primitive tribes], but ridicule might just as well be turned against ourselves Provincialism may rewrite history and play up only the achievements of the historian's own group, but it remains provincialism."

"There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."

"Civilization is by its nature bourgeois in the deepest spiritual sense of the word. 'Bourgeois' is synonymous precisely with the civilized kingdom of this world and the civilized will to organized power and enjoyment of life. The spirit of civilization is that of the middle classes; it is attached and clings to corrupt and transitory things; and it fears eternity. To be a bourgeois is therefore to be a slave of matter and an enemy of eternity. The perfected European and American civilizations gave rise to the industrial-capitalist system, which represents not only a mighty economic development but the spiritual phenomenon of the annihilation of spirituality."

"Civilization depends upon the control of our instincts--aggression foremost among them."

"The dramatic growth of human civilization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would not have been possible without the discovery and exploitation of stored sunlight power and the ancient dead remains of organisms in coal and oil deposits, which, as numerous theorists have argued, already reached peak levels decades ago, or are soon reaching them, and will rapidly decline by 2050. The exploitation of coal deposits to power the rapid growth of industrial capitalism was an unrepeatable one-and-done shot, and precipitated the current climate crisis."

"There is a flaw in civilization from the instant it has to admit fear."

"You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn."

"Yet somehow our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members."

"There’s a certain step-by-step logic, inherent in human nature and the peculiarities of human psychology, which ensures that Man will always organize into the largest possible group. Civilization is inevitable, if you want a pat phrase."

"But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness—each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked—each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity."

"Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?"

"People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater."

"The convention by which the great events in biblical or secular history could be enacted only by magnificent physical specimens, handsome and well-groomed, went on for a long time — till the middle of the nineteenth century. Only a very few artists — perhaps only Rembrandt and Caravaggio in the first rank — were independent enough to stand against it. And I think that this convention, which was an element in the so-called grand manner, became a deadening influence on the European mind. It deadened our sense of truth, even our sense of moral responsibility."

"We are so much accustomed to the humanitarian outlook that we forget how little it counted in earlier ages of civilisation. Ask any decent person in England or America what he thinks matters most in human conduct: five to one his answer will be "kindness." It's not a word that would have crossed the lips of any of the earlier heroes of this series. If you had asked St. Francis what mattered in life, he would, we know, have answered "chastity, obedience and poverty"; if you had asked Dante or Michelangelo, they might have answered "disdain of baseness and injustice"; if you had asked Goethe, he would have said "to live in the whole and the beautiful." But kindness, never. Our ancestors didn't use the word, and they did not greatly value the quality — except perhaps insofar as they valued compassion."

"It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs."

"Since the idea of order and subordination succumbed to barbarian brawn and brutality in the fifth century, the civilized world has been like a child brought up by his father. It has needed the great mother heart to teach it to be pitiful, to love mercy, to succor the weak and ca, re for the lowly."

"We civilized men do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick .... There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands... Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

"Whatever the virtues of a civilization may be, it immediately belies them if it buys them by means of injustice and tyranny."

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars."

"Culture suggests agriculture, but civilization suggests the city. In one aspect civilization is the habit of civility; and civility is the refinement which townsmen, who made the word, thought possible only in the civitas or city."

"Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again."

"All of our exalted technological progress, civilization for that matter, is comparable to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal."

"The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it. ... The church and civilization are antipodal; one means authority, the other freedom; one means conservatism, the other progress; one means the rights of God as interpreted by the priesthood, the other the rights of humanity as interpreted by humanity. Civilization advances by free thought, free speech, free men."

"One of the effects of civilisation is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands."

"There is a steady check in an old civilisation upon the fertility of the abler classes: the improvident and unambitious are those who chiefly keep up the breed. So the race gradually deteriorates, becoming in each successive generation less fit for a high civilisation."

"Western civilization is material, frankly material. It measures progress by the progress of matter — railways, conquest of disease, conquest of the air. These are triumphs of civilization according to Western measure. No one says, ‘Now the people are more truthful or more humble.’ I judge it by my own test and I use the word ‘Satanic’ in describing it. You set such store by the temporal, external things. The essential of Eastern civilization is that it is spiritual, immaterial. The fruits of Western civilization the East may approach with avidity but with a sense of guilt."

"From the beginning, human civilization has been characterized by acute contradictions. All human advancements derive from the original sin of civilization, namely expropriation and exploitation. Without an exploited people toiling on expropriated land, there is no surplus to allow for material, intellectual, and technological progress. Thus far, civilization has proceeded on the basis of numerous social hierarchies legitimized by various myths. These legitimizing myths facilitate denial of various forms of expropriation and exploitation. In America, these have included "whiteness" vis-a-vis Indians and black slaves, , , , , , American exceptionalism, and "humanitarian" interventionism."