top of page
"The story of the herd of seals. Hundreds of them on a beach; among them the hunter killing one after the other with a club. Together they could easily have crushed him- but they lay there, watching him come to murder, and did not move; he was only killing a neighbor- one neighbor after the other. The story of the European seals. The sunset of civilization. Tired shapeless Götterdämmerung. The empty banners of human rights. The sell-out of a continent. The onrushing deluge. The haggling for the last prices. The old dance of despair on the volcano. Peoples again slowly being driven into a slaughterhouse. The fleas would save themselves when the sheep were being sacrificed. As always."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Civilization quotes

"Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables."

"There is nothing more savage than modern civilization."

"It ain't technology that enhances the civilization..but the way mankind perceives nature from all standpoints."

"Old people have wisdom but not energy; young people have energy but not wisdom; energy and wisdom must be in the same body to create a much better civilisation! To do this, we will either give energy to the old or we will give wisdom to the young and for now the latter seems a more plausible action!"

"Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization."

"Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down."

"We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others."

"Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization."

"Education is not the amount of information that is pushed into the brain and causes havoc there, undigested all through a lifetime. Education must be a symposium of life-building, character- making and assimilation of ideas in the pursuit of building a more harmonious, peaceful and truly civilized world."

"Knowledge is the key driver of the progress of civilization."
Explore more quotes by Erich Maria Remarque

"The crowd, still shouting, gives way before us. We plough our way through. Women hold their aprons over their faces and go stumbling away. A roar of fury goes up. A wounded man is being carried off."

"What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing."

"How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is."

"No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck."

"We were never very demonstrative in our family; poor folk who toil and are full of cares are not so. It is not their way to protest what they already know. When my mother says to me 'dear boy,' it means much more than when another uses it."

"Anyway, there were thousands of Kantoreks, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best, in a way that was the most comfortable for themselves.But as far as we are concerned, that is the very root of their moral bankruptcy."

"A man has to have something he can put faith in. Can't you see that? What I want is someone that will love me, she would have me and I her. Otherwise a man may just go hang himself."

"And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death."
bottom of page