Woman's success in lifting men out of their way of life nearly resembling that of the beasts--who merely hunted and fished for foo...d, who found shelter where they could in jungles, in trees, and caves--was a civilizing triumph.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a proces...s of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You've spent too much time with the stars. You don't know anything about living, the law of the jungle, the human jungle. I do, I'...ve spent my life at it. You don't know what your civilized people will do to cling to life. I do, because I know I'd cling if I had to kill to do it. And so will you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »
Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a P...resent nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »