A People's History of Civilization Quotes

“Male violence toward women originated with agriculture, which transmuted women into beasts of burden and breeders of children.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“Agriculture creates and elevates possessions; consider the longing root of belongings, as if they ever make up for the loss.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“But as we have seen, recurring transitions and crises are proof that civilization never enjoys a long, untroubled sleep.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“Edward Carpenter looked at civilization as a kind of disease we have to pass through.48 This Decadence can be overcome. Confronting the nature of the whole is the inescapable challenge.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“Humanitas is its Latin reference, opposed to immanis, or savage.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“As Pierre Manent described it, the city is anything but a family or community. “In reality, it subordinates the family and the group.… It takes young men from their families living, and brings them back dead.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities,” wrote Jared Diamond. Malaria, probably the single greatest killer of humanity, and nearly all other infectious diseases are the heritage of agriculture.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“To the Greeks, work was a curse and nothing else. Their name for it—ponos—has the same root as the Latin poena, sorrow”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“Work, as a distinct category of life, likewise did not exist until agriculture.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“earlier spirituality was participatory with nature, not imposing cultural values or traits upon it.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“The amount of work per capita increases with the evolution of culture and the amount of leisure per capita decreases.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“Symbols are more than the basic units of culture; they are screening devices to distance us from our experiences. They classify and reduce, “to do away with,” in Leakey and Lewin’s remarkable phrase, “the otherwise almost intolerable burden of relating one experience to another.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“With agriculture, art lost its variety and became standardized into geometric designs that tended to degenerate into dull, repetitive patterns, a perfect reflection of standardized, confined, rule-patterned life.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“Artificiality and work have steadily increased since its inception and are known as culture: in domesticating animals and plants man necessarily domesticated himself.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“A defining feature of the present world is built-in disaster, now announcing itself on a daily basis. But the crisis facing the biosphere is arguably less noticeable and compelling, in the First World at least, than everyday alienation, despair, and entrapment in a routinized, meaningless control grid.

Influence over even the smallest event or circumstance drains steadily away, as global systems of production and exchange destroy local particularity, distinctiveness, and custom. Gone is an earlier pre-eminence of place, increasingly replaced by "airport culture"—rootless, urban, homogenized, identical.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“All civilizations are the institutionalized appropriation by a small ruling elite of most of what is produced by the submerged classes. Their political/legal structures frequently claim to serve their subjects, but of course, then as now they exist to protect the privileged position of a few. Punishments enacted by early states, though often cruel by modern standards, do not reflect the strength of law enforcement. They are better understood as testimony to the weakness of coercive authority, it's need for drastic measures.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“Sentences will be confined to museums if the emptiness of writing persists,” predicted Georges Bataille.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“René Girard proposes that rituals of sacrifice are a necessary counter to endemic aggression and violence in society.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“DeVries is correct in his judgment that duration of life dropped sharply upon contact with civilization.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization

“No group on earth has more leisure time than hunters and gatherers, who spend it primarily on games, conversation and relaxing.”
― John Zerzan, A People's History of Civilization