People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the p...eople of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I suppose the fact is that no friendship can stand the breakfast test.... Civilisation has done away with curl-papers, yet at that... hour the soul of the Hausfrau is as tightly screwed up in them as was ever her grandmother's hair, and though my body comes down mechanically, having been trained that way by punctual parents, my soul never thinks of beginning to wake up for other people till lunch-time, and never does so completely till it has been taken out of doors and aired in the sunshine. Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning? It is the hour of savage instincts and natural tendencies; it is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am convinced that the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but in bed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole history of civilisation is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilisation; like the gentle air of a genial climate,... it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man's labour is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never more. To utilise it, to prevent its wasteful ...squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the most urgent tasks before civilisation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are th...e sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilisation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It used to be said that you had to know what was happening in America because it gave us a glimpse of our future. Today, the rest ...of America, and after that Europe, had better heed what happens in California, for it already reveals the type of civilisation that is in store for all of us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civili...sation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is held to be no surer test of civilisation than the increase per head of the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Yet alcoho...l and tobacco are recognisable poisons, so that their consumption has only to be carried far enough to destroy civilisation altogether.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »