Quotes About Civilized

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world.

Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.

Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.

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

Bill Clinton persuaded some people that he was really a civilized character and his Administration had the best interests of humanity at heart. These days we don't have to put up with that nonsense. It's very clear that the George W. Bush Administration is out of control. It contains some truly dangerous people.

The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

No nation, savage or civilized, save only the United States of America, has confessed its inability to protect its women save by hanging, shooting, and burning alleged offenders

Marriage is but slavery made to appear civilized.

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

Most civilized lives are measured out with coffee spoons.

Love 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.

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.

It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it — in other words, by becoming civilized — that men become fully human.

The true courage of civilized nations is readiness for sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual counts as only one amongst many. The important thing here is not personal mettle but aligning oneself with the universal.

Dogmatic 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.

The 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.

Perhaps only when people can enjoy their differences as a resource of cultural enrichment do they become truly civilized.

But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.

Dress like a gentleman, but my mouth is never civilized.

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.

[T]he most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

Mohammed praises [instances of] tretchery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, and bigotry that are utterly incompatible with civilized society.

Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.

The Queen Mary was the most civilized and luxurious way one could travel to America in the late 1930s.

Elie Wiesel has for years served as the moral compass of the civilized world. For many of us, including me, he has defined the Holocaust.

Wine has been with civilized man from the beginning.

What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country, vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization?

Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.

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.

Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure.

In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the existence, of man depends so much upon the opinion of his fellow men, he is constantly acting a studied part.

Hunger eats civilization. The West is not hungry; that's why they can say they're so civilized. Civilization is the biggest bluff!

First New York was a sort of provincial capital, bigger and richer than Manchester or Marseilles, but not much different in its essential spirit. Then, after the war, it became one among half a dozen world cities. Today it has the appearance of standing alone, as the center of culture in the part of the world that still tries to be civilized.

The savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilized society; and we may inquire, with anxious curiosity, whether Europe is still threatened with a repetition of those calamities, which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.

Only world law can assure progress towards a civilized peaceful community.

Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

Art is a necessity - an essential part of our enlightenment process. We cannot, as a civilized society, regard ourselves as being enlightened without the arts.

Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized ... That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.

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.

The main trouble with this civilized world isn't that we adventure too much, but that we fail to adventure enough.

[Educated blacks] Society refuses to consider them genuine Negroes. The Negro is a savage, whereas the student is civilized. "You're us," and if anyone thinks you are a Negro he is mistaken, because you merely look like one.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.

We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.

The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.

One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions - sorrow and anger - adequately.

I am a New Yorker, and 7:00 A.M. is a civilized hour to finish the day, not to start it.