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The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion. (Aldiss Brian)
People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilization. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilization; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater. (Aldiss Brian)
The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven. (Aldiss Brian)
The test of civilization is its estimate of women. (Aldiss Brian)
Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man. (Aldiss Brian)
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river. (Aldiss Brian)
I think there are only three things America will be known for 2, 000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music and baseball. (Aldiss Brian)
Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air? (Aldiss Brian)
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution. (Aldiss Brian)
As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men. (Aldiss Brian)
Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence. (Aldiss Brian)
Civilization depends on morality. (Aldiss Brian)
Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. (Aldiss Brian)
Civilization...is a matter of imponderables, of delight in the thins of the mind, of love of beauty, of honor, grace, courtesy, delicate feeling. Where imponderables, are things of first importance, there is the height of civilization, and, if at the same time, the power of art exists unimpaired, human life has reached a level seldom attained and very seldom surpassed. (Aldiss Brian)
The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism. (Aldiss Brian)
Civilization today reminds me of an ape with a blowtorch playing in a room full of dynamite. It looks like the monkeys are about to operate the zoo, and the inmates are taking over the asylum. (Aldiss Brian)
The path of civilization is paved with tin cans. (Aldiss Brian)
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. (Aldiss Brian)
Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the dragon, in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage. (Aldiss Brian)
Civilization is just a slow process of learning to be kind. (Aldiss Brian)
Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc. (Aldiss Brian)
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