Civilization and barbarism - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

''Are you surprised, professor, at setting foot on land, any land, and finding savages there? Where aren't there savages? Are they any worse than men elsewhere, the local natives you call savages?'' ''But captain - '' ''All I can say, professor, is that I have encountered savages everywhere.''

- Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), translated byWalter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter (1993)

''Transportation is Civilization,'' our motto runs.

- Rudyard Kipling, ''With the Night Mail'' (1905)

This was life! ah, how he loved it! Civilization held nothing like this in its narrow and circumscribed sphere, hemmed in by restrictions and convenionalities. Even clothes were a hinderance and a nuisance. At last he was free. He had not realized what a prisoner he had been.

- Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1914)

Ten minutes later they were crossing the frontier that separated civilization from savagery. Uphill and down, across the deserts of salt or sand, through forests, into the violet depth of canyons, over crag and peak and tabletopped mesa, the fence marched on and on, irresistibly the straight line, the geometrical symbol of triumphant human purpose.

- Aldous Huxley, Brave NewWorld (1932)

''Cleanliness is next to fordliness,'' she insisted. ''Yes, and civilization is sterilization.''

- Aldous Huxley, Brave NewWorld (1932)

You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.

- Aldous Huxley, Brave NewWorld (1932)

Tumithak had to learn that in no matter what nation or age one finds oneself, he will find gentleness if he looks, as well as savagery.

- Charles R. Tanner, ''Tumithak of the Corridors'' (1932)

He moved with the dangerous ease of a panther; he was too fiercely supple to be a product of civilization, even of that fringe of civilization which composed the outer frontiers.

- Robert E. Howard, ''Beyond the Black River'' (1935)

''Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,'' the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. ''Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.''

- Robert E. Howard, ''Beyond the Black River'' (1935)

The very basis of human civilization was leisure . . . spare time in which to indulge curiosity and experiment.

- Edmond Hamilton, ''The Ephemerae'' (1938)

The tides of civilization rolled in century-long waves across the continents, and each particular wave, though conscious of its participation in the tide, nevertheless was more preoccupied with dinner.

- Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, ''The Piper's Son'' (1945)

One of the shortcomings of modern civilization - ancient civilization too, for that matter - is that the average man never gets all he wants of the most desirable products, never makes his life fit his dreams.

- Jack Vance, ''I'll Build Your Dream Castle'' (1947)

It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1954)

All languages carry in them a portrait of their users and the idioms of every language say over and over again, ''He is a stranger and therefore a barbarian.''

- Robert A. Heinlein, The Star Beast (1954)

I wonder how harmless such people are? To what extent civilization is retarded by the laughing jackasses, the empty-minded belittlers?

- Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit - Will Travel (1958)

Is civilization always a woman's choice first, and only later a man's?

- Cordwainer Smith, ''On the Gem Planet'' (1963)

What was that epigram that he had trotted forth too often, about civilization being the distance man placed between himself and his excreta? But it was nearer the truth to say that civilization was the distance man had placed between himself and everything else.

- BrianW. Aldiss, The Dark Light Years (1964)

The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

An army, and sometimes a civilization, must proceed at the pace of its weakest marcher.

- Edgar Pangborn, ''The Children's Crusade'' (1974)

''From spaceman to caveman in three days,'' she meditated aloud. ''How we imagine our civilization is in ourselves, when it's really in our things.''

- Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor (1986)

She felt as she had felt in Havnor as a girl: a barbarian, uncouth among their smoothnesses. But because she was not a girl now, she was not awed, but only wondered at how men ordered their world into this dance of masks, and how easily a woman might learn to dance it.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990)

Some of these island farms were very ancient places of civilisation, drawing for their comfort and provision on inexhaustible sun, wind, and tide, settled in a way of life as immemorial as that of their plowlands and pastures, as full and secure. Not the show-wealth of the city, but the deep richness of the land, was in the steaming pitcher she brought him, and in the woman who brought it.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''Olders'' (1995)

He soon concluded New Orleans' idea of civilized hours had nothing to do with those kept by the rest of the world, or possibly that New Orleans defined civilization as unending revelry.

- Harry Turtledove, ''Must and Shall'' (1995)