Anatole France Quotes

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.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.

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

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

A cultural shift is not always an ideological one - or at least not always the one you imagine. Our norms are always evolving.

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

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.

I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not.

Cultural standards evolve. The meaning of the public interest also, of course, evolves.

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.

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

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

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

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilized society.

The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

History has been conceived--and with high justification in the records--as the human struggle for civilization against barbarism in different ages and places, from the beginning of human societies.

It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.

The conception of what is normal varies not only with the culture but also within the same culture, in the course of time.

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