Werner Herzog Quotes

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

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

That which we call civilization is merely the accumulated debris of a chilling number of bad nights.

Civilization is very fragile, all it takes is a few decades of chaos for us to forget humanity and turn into animals. Our base natures can take over very fast. We can forget that we are sentient beings, with laws and codes and ethics.

Civilization itself . . . can easily be swept aside when mob passions are aroused.

If you think people are inherently good, you get rid of the police for 24 hours - see what happens.

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.

Civilization develops man, and if he is, according to his whole character and destiny, made for development, civilization is his truly natural state …

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.

I don't know what it is about these post-apocalyptic movies where it's like... people really want to see what happens and know what goes on in people's minds when they lose everything. With nothing left of what we had, do people revert back to animals or stay civilized?

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default.

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

It is inherent in human consciousness to improve. So there is nothing unique about a people searching for and creating ways to make their life better - all civilizations throughout history have done this. What is unique about us in America is the accelerated rate at which we continually search for novelty and progress.

I live my life until there's no more living to be done. Because you never know when it's going to stop. Wake up tomorrow and it could all be gone, bro. All the cars, all the motorcycles, everything. All the memories. We could go into a state of emergency, you know, and the world goes to war. The money won't count for nothing.

Chaos needs no allies, for it dwells like a poison in every one of us.

Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.

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

I don't think we really gave barbarism a fair try.

In civilized societies, we spend our lifetimes trying to become what is socially acceptable. We're dark and we're light. We all have both sides to us.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.