Civilized Quotes - Page 21

• The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.

  E. O. Wilson

  Mind, Ordinary, Details

  "Biophilia". Book by E. O. Wilson, 1984.

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• The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Culture, Fields

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.416, Knopf

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• The triumph of the Confederacy... would be a victory for the powers of evil which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the sprits of its friends all over the civilized world... [The American Civil War] is destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs.

  John Stuart Mill

  War, Enemy Of Progress, History

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• There are crimes which no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done 'for the common good.'...one might point to the way in which racial hatreds and even persecution are admitted by people who consider themselves, and perhaps in some sense are, kind, tolerant, civilized and even humane.

  Thomas Merton

  Names, People, Evil

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• Nonviolent nationalism is a necessary condition of corporate or civilized life.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Corporate, Nations, Conditions

  Mahatma Gandhi (1967). “Collected Works”

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• The one enemy in the world that America has is England. But then, England is the great land of Christian civilization, and it may not be a thing to be much wondered at that our Americans whom we send to represent us in London become in a short time somewhat civilized, and learn to love those who hate them, bless those that curse them, and do good to those that persecute and calumniate them.

  Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa

  Christian, Hate, Land

  Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa (1898). “Rossa's Recollections, 1838 to 1898: Childhood, Boyhood, Manhood. Customs, Habits and Manners of the Irish People. Erinach and Sassenach-Catholic and Protestant-Englishman and Irishman-English Religion-Irish Plunder. Social Life and Prison Life. The Fenian Movement. Travels in Ireland, England, Scotland and America”

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• A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science. With modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search.

  Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

  Powerful, Past, Ethos

  "My Dearest Daughter: A letter from the Death Cell". Book by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, p. 15, 2007.

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• The world order which we seek is the co-operation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Country, Order, History

  The Four Freedoms, delivered 6 January, 1941 (photo of FDR in 1936)

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• Very good training to just be a person is growing up in Canada. People say a lot of things about Canada, like that it's boring, but if you look around the world, you can praise boring. It's a very civilized place to grow up. I'm very proud of it.

  Mike Myers

  Growing Up, People, Training

  Source: collider.com

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• It seems to me impossible for a civilized man to love or worship, or respect the God of the Old Testament. A really civilized man, a really civilized woman, must hold such a God in abhorrence and contempt.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  God, Religious, Men

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.902, Library of Alexandria

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• In the midst of all these innumerable forms of a common protest and universal ill-ease there has grown up one definite body of doctrine whose adherents are called Communists and who desired the total subversion of what had been, hitherto unquestioned among civilized European men, the general doctrines of property and individual freedom.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Doctrine

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• Start a conversation with someone with whom you have "nothing in common" and no possibility of scoring with, networking with, or even seeing again. In other words, a conversation just for the civilized hell of it.

  Perry Brass

  Networking, Common, Hell

  Perry Brass (1998). “The Lover of My Soul: A Search for Ecstasy and Wisdom”, p.26, Perry Brass

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• Being civilized means that one keeps one's words unrelated to one's thoughts, when necessary.

  Ursula Parrott

  Mean, Speech, Etiquette

  Ursula Parrott (1989). “Ex-wife”, Plume

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

  David Hume

  Revenge, Praise, Cruelty

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• Speak out, educate, do not be intimidated by the apologists, and do not let extreme racism be mainstreamed. Hopefully there will come a time when we don't need to tell our kids that Halloween is no excuse for hate, and that blackface has no place in a civilized society.

  Christine Pelosi

  Leadership, Halloween, Hate

  "Halloween Is No Excuse for Hate: Blackface Has No Place" by Christine Pelosi, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 27, 2013.

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• In every civilized society there is found a race of men who retain the instincts of the aboriginal cannibal and live upon their fellow-men as a natural food.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Men, Race, Fellow Man

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• 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.

  Mary Blakely

  Mother, Father, Government

  Mary Kay Blakely (1995). “American Mom: Motherhood, Politics, and Humble Pie”, p.15, Simon and Schuster

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• Architecture is, to a certain extent, a sensual gratification. It addresses itself to the eye, and affords the best scope for the parade of barbaric pomp and splendour. It is the form in which the revenues of a semi-civilized people are most likely to be lavished. The most gaudy and ostentatious specimens of it, and sometimes the most stupendous, have been reared by such hands. It is one of the first steps in the great march of civilization.

  William H. Prescott

  Eye, Hands, Civilization

  William H. PRESCOTT (1873). “History of the Conquest of México”, p.173

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• Becoming more flexible, open-minded, having a capacity to deal with change is a good thing. But it is far from the whole story. Grandparents, in the absence of the social institutions that once demanded civilized behavior, have their work cut out for them. Our grandchildren are hungry for our love and approval, but also for standards being set.

  Eda LeShan

  Cutting, Grandchildren, Grandparent

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• The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.

  Iris Murdoch

  Men, Cycling, Riding A Bicycle

  IRIS MURDOCH (1965). “THE RED AND THE GREEN”

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• 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.

  J. E. Buckrose

  Bed, World, Littles

  Annie Edith Foster Jameson, J. E. Buckrose (1923). “What I Have Gathered”

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• When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.

  Ayn Rand

  Fighting, Men, Support

  Ayn Rand's Ford Hall Forum lecture, 1974.

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• To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized - perhaps too much for our own good - in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as
  having reached morality - for that, much is lacking.

  Immanuel Kant

  Art, Grace, Degrees

  Immanuel Kant (1986). “Philosophical Writings”, Continuum

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• It's frightening enough with a male actor and not a stunt person. If you accidently punch him with the wrong hand, then you've cost them a week's work and they've got a black eye or a lot of money goes on CG to get rid of it. That was nerve wracking, but it was very civilized. Women tend to immediately take responsibility if somebody messes up with both of us saying it's our fault. Men are quite happy for it to be your fault it seems like.

  Kate Beckinsale

  Eye, Responsibility, Men

  Interview with Tiffany Rose, screenrant.com. August 7, 2012.

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• There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers.

  William Damon

  Education, Kids, Self

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