Civilised Quotes - Page 2

• Why are you not smarter? It's only the rich who can't afford to be smart. They're compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can't leave. But you two. We three. We're free.

  Michael Ondaatje

  War, Smart, Years

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• 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.

  Charles Darwin

  Struggle, Fighting, Ideas

  Charles Darwin (2016). “Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: the Evolution”, p.209, VM eBooks

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• London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.

  Renzo Piano

  Design, World, London

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• Civilised my syphilised yarbles.

  Anthony Burgess

  Anthony Burgess (2013). “A Clockwork Orange: Restored Edition”, p.54, Penguin UK

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• At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

  Charles Darwin

  Men, Race, Doubt

  Charles Darwin (2008). “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex”, p.201, Princeton University Press

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• When we get civilised, I believe children will go by number until they get old enough to choose their own names.

  Myrtle Reed

  Children, Believe, Names

  Myrtle Reed (1916). “Old Rose and Silver”, p.24, Library of Alexandria

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• The great works belong to no one nation, no one cultural tradition even. They are universal.I want an Australian vision of arts policy that is expansive, is embracing, is not narrow, is not parochial. For example, that Australians can do Shakespeare just as well as Englishmen can because we, like every civilised nation, partake of the great canonical works. It's not about Australian nationalism; it's about our identity as a culturally ambitious, culturally sophisticated nation.

  George Brandis

  Art, Vision, Ambitious

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• I am a very, very strong advocate of the notion that we shouldn't equate the arts with other aspects of infrastructure. They have a unique role in any civilised society and that requires appropriate and targeted government support.

  George Brandis

  Art, Strong, Unique

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• Even today to be civilised is held to be synonymous with being westernised. Advanced countries devote large resources to formulating and spreading ideas and doctrines and they tend to impose on the developing nations their own norms and methods. The pattern of the classical acquisitive society with its deliberate multiplication of wants not only is unsuited to conditions in our countries but is positively harmful.

  Indira Gandhi

  Country, Ideas, Doctrine

  Indira Gandhi (1971). “Selected Speeches of Indira Gandhi: The years of challenge, January 1966-August 1969”

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• In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury.

  Edward Gibbon

  Christian, Powerful, Luxury

  Edward Gibbon (1998). “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.3, Wordsworth Editions

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• England is the only civilised country in the world where it is etiquette to fall on the food like a wolf the moment it is served. Elsewhere it is comme il faut to wait until everybody has helped himself to everything and until everything on everybody's plate is stone cold.

  Virginia Graham

  Country, Fall, Waiting

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• Around it are those countries which, according to History, constitute the civilised world ie, a world that can support historians

  Terry Pratchett

  Country, History, Support

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• Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together.

  Thomas Paine

  Men, Order, Community

  Thomas Paine (2015). “The Thomas Paine Collection: Common Sense, Rights of Man, Age of Reason, An Essay on Dream, Biblical Blasphemy, Examination Of The Prophecies”, p.131, Ravenio Books

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• The Government which attacks its own innocent subjects has no claim to be called a civilised government. Bear in mind, such a government does not survive long. I declare that the blows struck at me will be the last nails in the coffin of the British rule in India.

  Lala Lajpat Rai

  Blow, British Rule In India, Government

  "Under the Shadow of Gallows". Book by Gulab Singh, p. 40, 1963.

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• The direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but from what we can judge today of any civilisation. The type of man dominant today is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Taken, Men, Rising Up

  "The Revolt of the Masses". Book by José Ortega y Gasset. Chapter IX: "The Primitive and the Technical", 1929.

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• In the background lurks the scourge of international terrorism. There are people exercising power in a few countries and leading political factions in others who seem to be moved by narrow, brutal and irrational impulses. Their view of their own self-interest is so blinkered as to leave no space for purely human values, for peaceful negotiation or for economic advancement. They are bent on the destruction of the established order and of civilised ways of doing business. They must never be allowed to succeed.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Country, Exercise, Self

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• To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions, - while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Ambition, Men, Primitive Man

  "New Lamps for Old". Nine articles by Sri Aurobindo in the "Indu Prakash" (a Bombay daily newspaper), December 4, 1893.

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• All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as "revealed religion". They are theories more or less rational which uncivilised men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilised men believe that they believe.

  William Winwood Reade

  Believe, Destiny, Men

  William Winwood Reade (1874). “The Martyrdom of Man”, p.179

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• Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.

  Herbert Spencer

  Sculpture, May, Architecture

  Herbert Spencer (2012). “Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects Everyman's Library”, p.73, tredition

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• Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Men, Sound, Lasts

  Christopher Hitchens (2002). “Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere”, p.268, Verso

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• It is time to remind Sharon that the star of David belongs to all Jews, not to his repulsive Government. His actions are staining the star of David with blood. The Jewish people, whose gifts to civilised discourse include Einstein and Epstein, Mendelssohn and Mahler, Sergei Eisenstein and Billy Wilder, are now symbolised throughout the world by the blustering bully Ariel Sharon, a war criminal implicated in the murder of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila camps and now involved in killing Palestinians once again.

  Gerald Kaufman

  Stars, War, Government

  Speech to the House of Commons, April 2002.

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• To be Radchaai is to be civilised.

  Ann Leckie

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• The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.

  Edward Gibbon

  Memories, Reflection, Ideas

  Edward Gibbon (1854). “The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire”, p.354

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• If I'm alone in the car and I fart, I still laugh at it. It's the little things that keep us civilised.

  Dana Gould

  Laughing, Car, Littles

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• The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Zero, Needs, Use

  Alfred North Whitehead (1958). “An Introduction to Mathematics”, p.43, New York : Oxford University Press, 1958 [c1948]

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