Quotes About Civilized

There is as yet no civilized society, but only a society in the process of becoming civilized. There is as yet no civilized nation, but only nations in the process of becoming civilized. From this standpoint, we can now speak of a collective task of humankind. The task of humanity is to build a genuine civilization.

I 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?

Nobody minded what you did in bed or what you said about God, a very civilized attitude in 1948.

No civilized society can long exist, with an active power in its bosom that is stronger than the law.

No doubt it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. That work is already advanced and is making progress every day. But man must be civilized also in relation to nature.

Social intercourse -- a very limited thing in a half civilized country, becomes in our centers of civilization a great power. . .

Children are sent to school to be civilized, to learn to be part of the social enterprise.

I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man; it is we.

Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world.

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.

No civilized person ever goes to bed the same day he gets up.

Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and over-civilized?

I studied at the Academy during the years of economic sanctions. Life was almost dead because the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the civilized world were so strict.

Shame and guilt are noble emotions essential in the maintenance of civilized society, and vital for the development of some of the most refined and elegant qualities of human potential.

There is nothing in either savage or civilized history that is more utterly complete, more remorselessly sweeping than the Father of Mercy´s campaign among the Midianites. The official report deals only in masses, all the virgins, all the men, all the babies. all ´creatures that breathe,´ all houses. all cities. It gives you just one vast picture ...as far as the eye can reach, of charred ruins and storm-swept desolation... Would you expect this same conscienceless God, this moral bankrupt, to become a teacher of morals, of gentleness, of meekness, of righteousness, of purity?

It's true we have our disagreements on border issues, we have disagreements on trade and related issues, but you don't go invading a country whenever you have a dispute on trade issues, ... We have more civilized mechanisms on resolving such problems.

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.

The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.

How many thousands of [lives] are there every year that comes cast away, (in all civilized countries at least)--and consider'd asnothing but common air, in competition of an hypothesis.

During all the first part of the Middle Ages, no other people made as important a contribution to human progress as did the Arabs, if we take this term to mean all those whose mother-tongue was Arabic, and not merely those living in the Arabian peninsula. For centuries, Arabic was the language of learning, culture and intellectual progress for the whole of the civilized world with the exception of the Far East. From the IXth to the XIIth century there were more philosophical, medical, historical, religiuos, astronomical and geographical works written in Arabic than in any other human tongue.

The right most valued by all civilized men is the right to be left alone.

I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.

The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood.

Glory is a scandal. Let me state once & for all: I do not wish to be civilized.

I suppose there is hardly any one in the civilized world - particularly of those who do just a little more every day than they really have strength to perform - who has not at some time regarded bed as a refuge.

The education of the common people requires, perhaps, in a civilized and commercial society, the attention of the public more than that of people of some rank and fortune.

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world - no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.

The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.

. . . As a so-called "civilized" people, and as members of a society in search of lasting peace in the world, we cannot remain callous to our responsibility toward nature and insensitive to the inherent rights of the animals.

The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man's soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life.

We 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.

I assure Romanians that once I return... I will try and generate a sentiment of reconciliation in society. Divisions in society must be stopped, they must be annihilated, because Romania needs all its energy to... integrate into the civilized world.

In 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.

A nation to be great ought to be compressed in its increment by nations more civilized than itself.

In an ideal society, mothers and fathers would produce potty- trained, civilized, responsible new citizens while government and corporate leaders would provide a safe, healthy, economically just community.

Today I see more clearly than yesterday that the back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellow men.

Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise - because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment with an excellent toilet and a well-furnished dogma.

Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood

The recognition, the diagnosis, and the preservation of psychopathic individuals account for the apparent increase of neurotics in civilized communities.

ISIS is a threat to all civilized nations. America's intention is that the foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return home to North Africa, to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa. We're not going to allow them to do so. We're going to stop them there and take apart the caliphate.

The laws of Nature take precedence of all human laws. The purpose of all human laws is one - to defeat the laws of Nature. This is the case among all the nations, both civilized and savage. It is a grotesquerie, but when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity.

You do know how to play pinochle?" Mr. D eyed me suspiciously. "I'm afraid not," I said. "I'm afraid not, sir," he said. "Well," he told me, "it is, along with gladiator fighting and Pac-Man, one of the greatest games ever invented by humans. I would expect all civilized young men to know the rules.

Iraq is not only fighting to defend itself, but also to defend all countries of the world, especially as these foreign fighters that are fighting for Daesh, they come from more than 100 countries. So, very humbly, we say that we are defending ourselves and all countries of the civilized world, and we are defending democracy.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wild man in her, became extinct.

It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. . . . The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.

The praise of a civilized world is justly due to Christianity;—war, by the influence of the humane principles of that religion, has been stripped of half its horrors. The French renounce Christianity, and they relapse into barbarism;—war resumes the same hideous and savage form which it wore in the ages of Gothic and Roman violence.