George Carlin Quotes

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

This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that--a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice--or if we notice, belittle--equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

War is the business of barbarians.

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

If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

When the horrors of anarchy force us to set up laws that forbid us to fight and torture one another for sport, we still snatch at every excuse for declaring individuals outside the protection of law and torturing them to our hearts content.

War,--the trade of barbarians!

War is a foolish, childish, animalistic, unthinking, unintelligent way of trying to accomplish a purpose.

War is a specific product of civilization.

War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.

Civilization is only savagery silver-gilt.

The age in which we live can only be characterized as one of barbarism. Our civilization is in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized.

At the root of the Noble Savage myth is this basic truth: the savage is good, but he's also violent. This is why Rousseau propounded the need for contracts between the savage and society. The savage also shows that in order to understand the need for civilization and culture, mankind needs to see barbarism. One could not exist without the other.

War is at its best barbarism.

Violence is a tool of the ignorant.

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

... bloody and barbarous heathens.

There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.

If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism.

The Mohammadan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

I know I am among civilized men because they are fighting so savagely.

Truth and trust are the means by which civilization holds off barbarism.

Civilization creates discontents; barbarism creates quick endings.

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