Octavia E. Butler Quotes

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.

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

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

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

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

The rise of man from the animal to the human level was prolonged by the necessity of rising from a state of barbarism and violence to one of order and peace.

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

A good sort of man is this Darwin, and well meaning, but with very little intellect.

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

Criticism is the spur of reform; and Burke's admonition that a healthy society must reform in order to conserve has not lost its force.

No community ever did or ever can emerge unassisted by external helps from a state of utter barbarism into anything that can be called civilization

With highly civilized nations, continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes. Nevertheless the more intelligent members within the same community will succeed better in the long run than the inferior, and leave a more numerous progeny, and this is a form of natural selection.

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.

The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.

The longer a region is in contact with modern civilization, the higher the degree to which the society in the region is civilized.

There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure.

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