Fran Lebowitz Quotes

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

The history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.

Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.

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

Decay is quiet but ghastly, explosion is dramatic and dreadful. There's not much to choose between the two of them in reality, and most of our lives have sufficient of both.

Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.

History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe.

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

God made nightButMan made darkness.

Civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal.

Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.

What does civilization mean to you, and what would its ending bring to the world?

I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which lead to a dark gulf.

Injustice alone can shake down the pillars of the skies, and restore the reign of Chaos and Night.

Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors.

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

The world is on fire! And you are laughing? You are deep in the dark. Will you not ask for a light?

I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.

Night is torment. That is why people go to sleep. To avoid clear sight and torment.

War is a specific product of civilization.

O comfort-killing night, image of hell, Dim register and notary of shame, Black stage for tragedies and murders fell, Vast sin-concealing chaos, nurse of blame!

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

A shout that tore hell's concave, and beyond / Frightened the reign of Chaos and old Night.