Wallace Stegner Quotes

No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.

Alfred Nobel believed that social changes are brought about slowly, and sometimes by indirect means.

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.

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

Things change in different countries as people grow, and as generations change.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

The history of the world shows that peoples and societies do not have to pass through a fixed series of stages in the course of development.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

Civilization develops man, and if he is, according to his whole character and destiny, made for development, civilization is his truly natural state …

Always history is being made; opinions attitudes and institutions change, and there is evolution in the nature of capitalism

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back.

Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades.

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

I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible to civilization. I suspect it is in their kitchens and not in their churches that the reformation must be worked.

We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.

The people of Iran have been battling against consecutive conflicts between tradition and modernity for over 100 years... some have tried and are trying to see the world through the eyes of their predecessors and to deal with the problems and difficulties of the existing world by virtue of the values of the ancients... many others...seek to go forth in step with world developments and not lag behind the caravan of civilization, development and progress.

The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.

It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

What's the difference between a communist or socialist and a progressive? Revolution or evolution? One requires a gun and the other eats away slowly.

There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.

You have to take the long view. First, when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai, man has already progressed to the point where a commandment against cannibalism was no longer necessary. And, second, it's like pissing on a boulder. For the first few thousand years, you don't see any effect. But after that, you start to see a definite impact.