Leonard Woolf Quotes

At the root of the Noble Savage myth is this basic truth: the savage is good, but he's also violent. This is why Rousseau propounded the need for contracts between the savage and society. The savage also shows that in order to understand the need for civilization and culture, mankind needs to see barbarism. One could not exist without the other.

Civilization is hideously fragile … there's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.

The progress made in refinement of manners and morals seems to have gone on simultaneously with the improvement in arts, manufactures and commerce. It moved slowly at first, but has been constantly increasing in velocity…. we are a much better people than we were then, better instructed, more sincere and kind-hearted, less gross and brutal, and have fewer of the concomitant vices of a less civilized state.

It's a curious thing, this thing we call civilization...we think it is an affair of epochs, and nations. It's really an affair of individuals. One brother will be civilized and the other a barbarian...All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.

What is marriage but the renunciation of unchastity? The savage does not marry. Man marries because he renounces.

There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.

I know I am among civilized men because they are fighting so savagely.

Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.

The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.

Are we savages or what?

We're not savages. We're English.

Barbarism is the natural state of mankind.

Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.

Man perfected by society is the best of all animals; he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law and without justice. If he finds himself an individual who cannot live in society, or who pretends he has need of only his own resources do not consider him as a member of humanity; he is a savage beast or a god.

What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women.

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.

SAUCE, n. The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted a vice is renounced and forgiven.

Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.

Our manners, our civilization, and all the good things connected with manners and civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles: I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.

Teachers are more than any other group the guardians of civilization.

letters are not the first, but the last step in the progression from barbarism to civilisation.

In a state of nature, the weakest go to the wall; in a state of over-refinement, both the weak and the strong go to the gutter.

Civilization begins with distillation

Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.

Modesty died when clothes were born.