Civilized Quotes - Page 17

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

  Richard Harding Davis

  Bed, Get Up, Persons

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• How can I be expected to believe that this same racial discrimination which has been the cause of so much injustice and suffering right through the years, should now operate here to give me a fair and open trial?....consider myself neither morally nor legally obliged to obey laws made by a Parliament in which I am not represented. That the will of the people is the basis of the authority of government, is a principle universally acknowledged as sacred throughout the civilized world.

  Nelson Mandela

  Believe, Government, Years

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• No nation, no society, no community can hold its head high and claim to be part of the civilized world if it condones the practice of discriminating against one half of humanity represented by women.

  Manmohan Singh

  Practice, Community, Humanity

  Manmohan Singh, Smita Vats Sharma, India. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Publications Division (2005). “Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: June 2007 to May 2008”

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• Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Memories, Believe, Autumn

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• If you want a war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men are ever subject, because doctrines get inside a man's reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines.

  William Graham Sumner

  Betrayal, War, Fighting

  William Graham Sumner (1963). “Social Darwinism: selected essays”, Prentice Hall

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• I believe that if the silent majority were to protest against those who believe in irrational blind faith - who want to go backwards instead of forward, who are for tradition not innovation, who oppose individualism and plurality of thought - then the world would become a truly civilized world in which to live.

  Taslima Nasrin

  Believe, Innovation, Majority

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• 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.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Civilization, Two, Savages

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• I like things that are civilized.

  Martha Plimpton

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• As with most things in life, Lady Maccon preferred the civilized exterior to the dark underbelly (with the exception of pork products, of course.)

  Gail Carriger

  Dark, Things In Life, Pork

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• The American people expect the United States to keep terrorists where they belong, apart from civilized society and outside of America's borders

  Eric Cantor

  America, People, United States

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• 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.

  James A. Baldwin

  Children, Rain, Taken

  "The Devil Finds Work". Book by James A. Baldwin, 1976, reprinted in James A. Baldwin "The Price of the Ticket", 1985.

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• That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

  Oscar Wilde

  Philosophy, Real, Soul

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.365, University of Chicago Press

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• By peace our condition has been improved in the pursuit of civilized life.

  John Ross

  Native American, Pursuit, Has Beens

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• Every civilized society must disarm its citizens against each other.

  Garry Wills

  Gun, Citizens, Civilized Society

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• Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.

  Aldo Leopold

  Science, Average, Civilization

  Aldo Leopold (1937). “Game Management 118”

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

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Men, Liberty, Libertarian

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• I think there will come a time when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it; the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say 'meat-eaters' in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism.

  Dennis Weaver

  Running, Animal, Thinking

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• An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Artist, Self

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.466, Vintage

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• Nothing is more useless in developing a nation's economy than a gun, and nothing blocks the road to social development more than the financial burden of war. War is the arch enemy of national progress and the modern scourge of civilized man.

  King Hussein I

  Block, War, Gun

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• Kindness and compassion towards all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Conversely, cruelty, whether it is directed against human beings or against animals, is not the exclusive province of any one culture or community of people.

  Cesar Chavez

  Kindness, Animal, Compassion

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• Now what happens?" asked the man in black. "We face each other as God intended," Fezzik said. "No tricks, no weapons, skill against skill alone." "You mean you'll put down your rock and I'll put down my sword and we'll try to kill each other like civilized people, is that it?

  William Goldman

  Mean, Men, Rocks

  William Goldman (2013). “The Princess Bride”, p.109, A&C Black

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

  Muhammad Yunus

  Museums, Doe, Poverty

  Twitter post from Jan 30, 2012

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

  Tom Robbins

  Men, Doe, Bags

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”, p.117, Bantam

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• The abolition of the death penalty is making us a civilized society. It shows we actually do mean business when we say we have reverence for life.

  Desmond Tutu

  Mean, Reverence For Life, Death Penalty

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• With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an agent of the angel of death.

  Elie Wiesel

  Memories, Believe, Angel

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