Octavia E. Butler Quotes

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

Civilization is not a burden. It is an opportunity.

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.

What does civilization mean to you, and what would its ending bring to the world?

Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we've had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is 'how to get along and mutually cope.'

I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is found,—a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape, a cannibal, an eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,—a certain degree of progress from this extreme is called Civilization.

As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere taboos.

A nation may be ever so civilized and yet lack wisdom.

Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

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?

Work is not a curse; it is the prerogative of intelligence, the only means to manhood, and the measure of civilization.

When people come to play music as they do to play bridge, civilization will have taken the longest stride forward since the beginning of time.

You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books.

Civilization has always been a bust.

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

Yet the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed, that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.