Quotes About Civilized

Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of luxury. But the civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era. It reminds him that civilization does but dress men. It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. It makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor. We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans.

Have you ever heard one civilized person whose opinion you respect, at any time, anywhere, in any civilized country anywhere, say the good new days?

Religion has not civilized man, man has civilized religion.

Crackers, toasted or hard bread may be added a short time before the soup is wanted; but do not put in those libels on civilized cookery, called DUMPLINGS! One might about as well eat, with the hope of digesting, a brick from the ruins of Babylon, as one of the hard, heavy masses of boiled dough which usually pass under this name.

We will not make inroads into the gun-violence problem until we acknowledge the underlying causes of youth behavior today, compared to yesterday. ... we must come to the realization that laws and regulations alone cannot produce a civilized society. It's morality that is society's first line of defense against uncivilized behavior.

Good heredity and environment are necessary. You cannot compare the child of a savage with the child of a civilized person.

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

The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

Clearly, in every civilized culture since recorded history, marriage is always between a man and a woman. And the fact that we're trying to change it is very serious, because the family is the foundational institution in our culture.

The prison was very important - as everywhere on earth. Everywhere the building of a prison is the first step in the organization of a civilized state.

Baltimore is permissiveness. The pleasures of the flesh, the table, the bottle, and the purse are tolerated with a civilized understanding.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.

The loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity.

Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us spiritually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping us alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.

History leaves no doubt that among of the most regrettable crimes committed by human beings have been committed by those human beings who thought of themselves as civilized. What, we must ask, does our civilization possess that is worth defending? One thing worth defending, I suggest, is the imperative to imagine the lives of beings who are not ourselves and are not like ourselves: animals, plants, gods, spirits, people of other countries, other races, people of the other sex, places and enemies.

I feel we all have the obligation, myself. I want to live in a more humane, civilized society, and I feel like the only way we're going to achieve that is if we all take it upon ourselves. I just wish we could be a more caring society. I feel like we're social Darwinists who believe that everyone has to make it on their own. But the reality is that we all don't start out on the same footing.

Until we start attacking the root of the historical problems of discrimination against Indians, and those Indians begin in these stereotypes, that Indians are less civilized than us, they're less able to exercise self-governing functions. Until we get to the roots of those problems, we're not going to change legislation. We're not going to change the hearts and minds of the Supreme Court.

Abortion is the only event that modern liberals think too violent and obscene to portray on TV. This is not because they are squeamish or prudish. It is because if people knew what Abortion really looked like, it would destroy their pretence that it is a civilized answer to the problem of what to do about unwanted babies.

Democrats can have a different version of the line, or they can just say, no, we are the party of international peace and activism, and we're the party that's going to have a civilized capitalism.

Every civilized society must disarm its citizens against each other.

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.

We can build an economy that does not destroy its natural support systems, a global community where the basic needs of all the Earth's people are satisfied, and a world that will allow us to think of ourselves as civilized. This is entirely doable.

We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

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 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.

War is not civilized.

Without the restraints of religion and social worship, men become savages much sooner than savages become civilized by means of religion and civil government.

Poverty does not belong in civilized human society. Its proper place is in a museum. That's where it will be.

The more civilized a nation, the more conformed its population, until that civilization's last age arrives, when multiplicity wages war with conformity. The former grows ever wilder, ever more dysfunctional in its extremities; whilst the latter seeks to increase its measure of control, until such efforts acquire diabolical tyranny.' - Traveller

To inflict cruelties on defenceless creatures, or condone such acts, is to abuse one of the cardinal tenets of a civilized society - reverence for life.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.

The sight of a child…will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons — longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona.

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

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

Protecting the weak is the first step to enlightenment and being truly civilized.

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.

Terrorism threat is serious, and not just to American interests. The assaults in Russia against two airliners, bringing them out of the sky, and against a subway station, and then that horrible scene at the school in Beslan. This kind of terrorist activity no one is immune from it. And so it suggests that we have to do even more together to make sure the civilized worlds join together in the war against terrorism.

Constructive destruction is one of the most delightful employments in the world, and in civilized life the opportunities for it are only too rare.

The rule of law bakes no bread, it is unable to distribute loaves or fishes (it has none), and it cannot protect itself against external assault, but it remains the most civilized and least burdensome conception of a state yet to be devised.

A lot of my writing is not terribly civilized. Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that. That's why I write the way I do.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes. Man's ultimate responsibility is to God alone.

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.

I'm a civilized person who obeys the law and is pretty easy to get along with, but I'm more complicated than that. I use my work as a way to get all that other stuff out and experiment with feelings and ideas, and the forbidden. That's just part of my process, I think, to identify something forbidden. That's what lures me into wanting to do the work, write the story down.

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.

I like night fishing, even though there is a molecule of terror in it. Maybe it is that tiny bit of terror that I relish, that going mano a mano with another predator in the dark. I know it is not entirely civilized, but there is nothing to compare with the sizzle of fear except, perhaps, the rush of being feared. Either condition confirms you are alive.

The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do.