It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours…

Fanaticism is just one step away from barbarism.

— Denis Diderot

The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the…

— Nikki Giovanni

“William Faulkner is supposed to have said, "Civilization begins with distillation," but I'd push even further -- beyond just distilled spirits to wine, beer,…

— Adam Rogers

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not…

— Hunter S. Thompson

“A city like Ankh-Morpork was only two meals away from chaos at the best of times.”

— Terry Pratchett

A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.

— Alastair Reynolds

You're constantly working and missing meals. You're away from your family, and you're doing it for, like, eight months.

— Boyd Holbrook

No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide.

— Eric Sevareid

“Every society is three meals away from chaos”

— Vladimir Lenin

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.

— Neil Gaiman

Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion…

— Neil Gaiman

Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whithersoever it has gone; and, as if to show that the latter does not depend on physical…

— Augustus William Hare

“Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have…

— Iain Pears

Liberty is the condition of progress. Without Liberty, there remains only barbarism. Without Liberty, there can be no civilization.

— Robert Green Ingersoll

That country [Carthage] was rapidly sinking into the state of barbarism from whence it had been raised by the Phoenician colonies and Roman laws;…

— Edward Gibbon