Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder

... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

I think human arrogance will be the demise of civilization.

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.

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

Because Roman civilization perished through barbarian invasions, we are perhaps too much inclined to think that that is the only way a civilization can die. If the lights that guide us ever go out, they will fade little by little, as if of their own accord.... We therefore should not console ourselves by thinking that the barbarians are still a long way off. Some peoples may let the torch be snatched from their hands, but others stamp it out themselves.

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military- industrial civilization will soon collapse.

Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes! How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges.

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

The word civilization to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture.

For we know when a nation goes down and never comes back, when a society or a civilization perishes, one condition may always be found. They forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what brought them along.

If the world suffers from mental deterioration or from moral degradation, then something goes wrong at the very root of civilization or culture. Even though that civilization may drag out for a considerable period, it grows less and less vital and ultimately tumbles down.

Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.

specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.

When I was young I used to read about the decline of Western civilization, and I decided it was something I would like to make a contribution to.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

There's been cultural rot since there's been culture.

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.