Daily Inspiration Quote by Cyril Connolly

Civilization, Connolly implies, isn’t a broad social achievement so much as a brittle arrangement of weak links. The line hits with the cool cruelty of arithmetic: “a very few people,” “a small number of places.” It’s not poetry; it’s logistics. That choice is the point. By shrinking “civilization” to something like a handful of libraries, editors, teachers, courts, and sane administrators concentrated in real, targetable locations, he punctures the comforting democratic myth that culture is evenly distributed and self-sustaining.

The second half turns the knife. “Some bombs and a few prisons” frames destruction as almost banal: not apocalyptic firestorms, just sufficient violence and a bit of bureaucracy. Connolly is writing in the shadow of the 20th century’s signature inventions: industrialized war and the modern security state. You can read the “bombs” as aerial warfare and total war, and the “prisons” as the quieter counterpart - censorship, show trials, preventive detention, the institutional removal of the people who keep standards alive. The pairing matters: civilization can be flattened from above, or hollowed out from within.

Connolly’s intent isn’t merely pessimism; it’s a warning about concentration. When cultural and civic capacity is clustered - geographically, class-wise, institutionally - it becomes easy to erase. The subtext is accusatory: if only “a few” maintain the whole, then the rest are free-riding until panic arrives. He’s daring the reader to ask whether their society is resilient, or just lucky.