Popular quotes about Civilized! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 2
You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.
John LoganGreat Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.
Anthony BurgessWe are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.
Tennessee WilliamsTaxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.
Mark SkousenMan...is a tame or civilized animal; never the less, he requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized; but if he be insufficiently or ill- educated he is the most savage of earthly creatures.
PlatoLike everybody else, I've got dark and light, trying to hold onto the civilized part and use it successfully. I'm sure that includes competition, but not in a way that I can recognize. Most of the games I like have more to do with the process of the game or the aesthetics. Racing's really about the aesthetics for me, not particularly the idea of coming in first - though I certainly appreciate a champion, and I like watching people do something really well.
Jon J MuthI always get back to the question, is it really necessary that men should consume so much of their bodily and mental energies in the machinery of civilized life? The world seems to me to do much of its toil for that which is not in any sense bread. Again, does not the latent feeling that much of their striving is to no purpose tend to infuse large quantities of sham into men's work?
William AllinghamBut I never want to get to the point where I write a safe song or one that represents my sense of a subject in order to appear civilized.
Suzanne VegaGood heredity and environment are necessary. You cannot compare the child of a savage with the child of a civilized person.
Jiddu KrishnamurtiSocial intercourse -- a very limited thing in a half civilized country, becomes in our centers of civilization a great power. . .
Emily BlackwellLibraries are a hallmark of a civilized culture, and librarians represent that culture to all facets of society.
Janis IanI was standing next to a famed geo-politician when the first news of the Argentine attack [on the Faulkland Islands] was received, and heard him muse incredulously: "An old-fashioned naval battle. A war between two civilized nations, perhaps with even a declaration of war, and later a peace conference. Wow." No hostages, no nukes, no ideologies, no religious fanaticism; just a fair-and-square war over national interests - hard to believe, in this day and age.
William SafireThere is very little in civilized life that demands everything you got intellectually, physically, and emotionally. Driving is living. It's aggressive instead of passive living.
Janet GuthrieIt 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 DurkheimAs the war was just in its origin and necessary and noble in its objects, we can reflect with a proud satisfaction that in carrying it on no principle of justice or honor, no usage of civilized nations, no precept of courtesy or humanity, have been infringed.
James MadisonAsia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.
Rudyard KiplingThe most civilized people are as near to barbarism as the most polished steel is to rust. Nations, like metals, have only a superficial brilliancy.
Antoine RivarolIt's kind of interesting and sick that the intellectual culture called the 1960s, "time of troubles," a dangerous period in which a lot of harm was done to the society. And the reason is because we were civilized and that's dangerous. That increased the commitment to democracy, to rights and so on, and this left people much less obedient.
Noam ChomskyThe so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with everything we know of the workings of the human mind, and with every sound idea formulated by mankind. If it prevailed in the whole modern world we'd still be in the Thirteenth Century; nay, we'd be back among the Egyptians of the pyramid age. Its only coherent contribution to Western thought has been theosophy-and theosophy is as idiotic as Christian Science. It has absolutely nothing to offer a civilized white man.
H. L. MenckenPerhaps only when people can enjoy their differences as a resource of cultural enrichment do they become truly civilized.
Herb Kawainui KanePerhaps the habit which distinguishes civilized people from others is that of discussion, exchange of opinion and ideas, the ability to differ without quarrelling, to say what you have to say civilly and then to listen civilly to another speaker.
Katherine Anne PorterWine has been with us since the beginning of civilization. It is the temperate, civilized, sacred, romantic mealtime beverage recommended in the Bible. Wine has been praised for centuries by statesmen, philosophers, poets, and scholars. Wine in moderation is an integral part of our culture, heritage and gracious way of life.
Robert MondaviIt is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls.
George Bernard ShawGlamor is just sex that got civilized. A pretty girl, tastefully posed in a scant costume, is even a sort of cultural achievement.
Dorothy LamourThe sobering anwer is yes - the white community is so entitled because ... it is the advanced race ... it is more important ... to affirm and live by civilized standards ... than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.
William F. Buckley, Jr.Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?
Sinclair LewisIt is a thorough process, this war with the wilderness - breaking nature, taming the soil. feeding it on oats. The civilized man regards the pine tree as his enemy. He will fell it and let in the light, grub it up and raise wheat or rye there. It is no better than a fungus to him.
Henry David ThoreauWhy should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be "civilized off the face of the earth," - our forests, not to hold the king's game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation, - not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re-creation?
Henry David ThoreauTo the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems...which he has to solve...And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of-such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity....Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant.
Dorothy L. SayersWe were far more civilized in our divorce than we had ever been in marriage. It seemed we'd finally found something we could do together amicably.
Robyn CarrEvery other civilized country has determined when life begins and it's something that eludes us. We've got things that have to be done! "We didn't fix that bridge because you are all down at the meeting house discussing abortion again."
Lewis BlackWe need some contact with the things we sprang from. We need nature at least as a part of the context of our lives. Without cities we cannot be civilized. Without nature, without wilderness even, we are compelled to renounce an important part of our heritage.
Joseph Wood KrutchIn respect to religion and the healing art, all nations are still in a state of barbarism. In the most civilized countries the priest is still but a Powwow, and the physician a Great Medicine.
Henry David ThoreauIf I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence; I become absent minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of time any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should we not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time Dimension; or even to turn about and travel the other way?
H. G. WellsHow much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?
Edith WhartonThere is something on earth greater than arbitrary or despotic power. The lightning has its power, and the whirlwind has its power, and the earthquake has its power; but there is something among men more capable of shaking despotic thrones than lightning, whirlwind, or earthquake, and that is, the excited and aroused indignation of the whole civilized world.
Daniel WebsterEnormous amounts of money are spent for publicity. As a result, large quantities of alimentary and pharmaceutical products, at the least useless, and often harmful, have become a necessity for civilized men.
Alexis Carrel