Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard H. Davis

A compliment that lands like a backhand: Davis crowns Morocco “a very fine place” and then blames “civilization” for ruining it, as if modern life were an invasive species. The line works because it smuggles in a whole colonial-era fantasy of the “unspoiled” elsewhere, a place whose value is measured by how little it resembles the speaker’s world. “Morocco as it is” performs innocence; it suggests a pristine essence that can be observed, catalogued, and loved at a distance. Then “spoiled” snaps the mood from travelogue to moral judgment, turning roads, schools, bureaucracy, commerce, even local agency into contamination.

Davis was a late-19th/early-20th-century American writer and war correspondent, part of an Anglophone cohort that treated North Africa as a stage set for adventure, exotic color, and personal reinvention. In that context, “civilization” doesn’t mean Moroccan society (which is, of course, complex and ancient); it means the arrival of Western infrastructure, tourists, consuls, rail lines, and the administrative tidying that makes a place legible to outsiders. His irritation reads less like anti-imperial critique than disappointment that the spectacle is losing its rough edges.

The subtext is the most revealing: Morocco is “fine” when it can be consumed aesthetically, but less appealing when it modernizes on its own terms. Civilization, here, isn’t progress; it’s the end of the romantic postcard. That’s the dirty magic of the sentence: it exposes how easily admiration turns into ownership, and how quickly “authenticity” becomes a demand that other people stay still.