William Golding Quotes

Without the restraints of religion and social worship, men become savages much sooner than savages become civilized by means of religion and civil government.

For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.

Barbarism is the natural state of mankind.

Each time I wander into blogdom, I'm reminded of the savage children stranded on an island in William Golding's "Lord of the Flies." Without adult supervision, they organize themselves into rival tribes, learn to hunt and kill, and eventually become murderous barbarians in the absence of a civilizing structure.

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.

Break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

To deal with the true causes of war one must begin by recognizing as of prime relevancy to the solution of the problem the familiar fact that civilization is a partial, incomplete, and, to a great extent, superficial modification of barbarism.

I have this feeling that as time goes on, we're not getting any more civilized, and we should be. We're still running around like the days of Genghis Khan. There are so many important, better things to do and we need to encourage people to reach into the brighter side of humanity and not encourage people to continue to glorify the darker side.

We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch.

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.

No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the atom bomb.

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.

It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.

Barbarism is not the inheritance of our pre-history. It is the companion that dogs our every step.

We're not savages. We're English.

Ants and savages put strangers to death.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

When man is not properly trained, he is the most savage animal on the face of the globe.

Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind.

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

If we do not exert the right of eating our neighbor, it is because we have other means of making good cheer