Popular quotes about Civilized! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
I could tell Hugo was convinced that he would get to walk back up these stairs: after all, he was a civilized person. These were all civilized people. Hugo really couldn't imagine that anything irreparable could happen to him, because he was a middle-class white American with a college education, as were all the people on the stairs with us. I had no such conviction. I was not a wholly civilized person.
Charlaine HarrisIt would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another; and whether the form in which slavery exists in the South is not but one modification of this universal condition... Let those who are interested remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.
John C. Calhoun...men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.
George OrwellWe are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.
Tennessee WilliamsIn any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad
Pamela GellerCivilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo.... In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at sight of which great grownup babies are expected to hide their eyes.
Clive BellThe triumph of the Confederacy... would be a victory for the powers of evil which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the sprits of its friends all over the civilized world... [The American Civil War] is destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs.
John Stuart MillThe downfall of civilized states tends to come not from the direct assaults of foes, but from internal decay combined with the consequences of exhaustion in war.
B. H. Liddell HartToday the two hundred million men in our country are entering into a civilized new world...but we, the two hundred million women, are still kept down in the dungeon.
Qiu JinAs we become civilized we are governed less by persons and more by principles. . . . The best of all leaders is the man who teaches people to lead themselves.
Robert Green IngersollMarriage...one of the most civilized institutions in the world...But...swimming is one of the most wonderful of sports, and yet there are always some people who cannot swim who insist on going into the water and getting drowned. Many people spoil marriage in a like manner. One should be sure she knows how to be married before rushing into it.
Edna St. Vincent MillayIt is a quite remarkable fact that the great religions of the most civilized peoples are more deeply fraught with sadness than the simpler beliefs of earlier societies. This certainly does not mean that the current of pessimism is eventually to submerge the other, but it proves that it does not lose ground and that it does not seem destined to disappear.
Emile DurkheimIt is our responsibility to explain to the public how an often unpredictable system of justice is one that serves a productive, civilized, but always evolving, society.
Sonia SotomayorWe're fundamentally opposed to the expansion of nuclear-weapons arsenals. This is why we have proposed the formation of an unbiased organization and the disarmament of the nuclear powers. We don't need any weapons. We're a civilized, cultured people, and our history shows that we have never attacked another country.
Mahmoud AhmadinejadAsia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.
Rudyard KiplingMy dear girl, you must cultivate a taste for the finer things. Civilized pleasures give meaning to life.
Barbara Taylor BradfordThere are crimes which no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done 'for the common good.'...one might point to the way in which racial hatreds and even persecution are admitted by people who consider themselves, and perhaps in some sense are, kind, tolerant, civilized and even humane.
Thomas MertonThe loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity.
Charles Eliot NortonLove has an immense ability to help heal the devastating wounds that life sometimes deals us. Love also enhances our sense of connection to the larger world. Loving responsiveness is the foundation of a truly compassionate, civilized society.
Sue JohnsonDogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.
George Bernard ShawBut still there are moments when a brother and sister can lay down their instruments of torture for a moment and speak as civilized human beings and Bruno decided to make this one of those moments.
John BoyneBecause we had to convince the scientific members of Transylvania that with the procedure I was using on the creature, Dr. Frankenstein could be taught to be a civilized human being, what I called a man about town. Instead of a monster who's going to kill their children, it was someone who could sing and dance.
Gene WilderFrom my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.
Henry David ThoreauThe mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country.
P. D. JamesThis will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.
Elbert HubbardThe practice of inhibiting impulses, which is to a great extent necessary to civilized life, makes mistakes easier, by preventing experience of the actions to which a desire would otherwise lead, and by often causing the inhibited impulses themselves to be unnoticed or quickly forgotten.
Bertrand RussellWe create institutions and policies on the basis of the way we make assumptions about us and others. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us. So we have had poor people around us. If we had believed that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have created appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.
Muhammad YunusWithout the restraints of religion and social worship, men become savages much sooner than savages become civilized by means of religion and civil government.
Benjamin RushDo you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilized folk to despise war.
Allan MassieNo civilized society can thrive upon victims, whose humanity has been permanently mutilated.
Rabindranath TagoreHow many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight; and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilized nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blessed and happy!
Charles DickensA great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive.
James Weldon JohnsonIn Western Europe, Turkey is regarded as uncivilized, so they can't come in into the European Union until they're civilized. I think it's the other way around. If you could achieve the level of civilization of, say, Turkish intelectuals, it would be quite an achievement.
Noam ChomskyAnd if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaininggross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?
Henry David ThoreauLoneliness is a hard thing to handle. I feel it, sometimes. When I do, I want it to end. Sometimes, when you're near someone, when you touch them on some level that is deeper than the uselessly structured formality of casual civilized interaction, there's a sense of satisfaction in it. Or at least, there is for me. It doesn't have to be someone particularly nice. You don't have to like them. You don't even have to want to work with them. You might even want to punch them in the nose. Sometimes just making that connection is its own experience, its own reward.
Jim ButcherTaxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure.
Mark SkousenI seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.
Emile M. CioranThe point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.
Thomas Nagel