Wild Seed (Patternmaster, #1)

by Octavia E. Butler

Civilization is the way one’s own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.”

Not quite, but I get where he is going. Civilization is the surrendering of certain freedoms in exchange for certain securities. Each culture is to some extent civil and savage depending on the degree to which this exchange took place. That being said, civilized is the antithesis of barbaric, and the original definition of barbaric is “not Roman” (or so I have been told without fact checking), so maybe Octavia Butler was right after all.