#civilization

"The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do."

"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation."

"[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world."

"I am beginning to understand,"said the little prince. "There is a flower... I think that she has tamed me..."

"We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."

"In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity."

"Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."

"[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it."

"What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline."

"No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species."

"The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'."

"The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization."

"Civilization is vastly overrated."

"I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind."

"You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world."

"If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably right—it would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed."

"Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually."

"Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost."

"This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood."