Civilized Quotes - Page 27

• Yet, upon the whole, the space I traversed is unlikely to become the haunt of civilized man, or will only become so in isolated spots, as a chain of connection to a more fertile country; if such a country exist to the westward.

  Charles Sturt

  Country, Men, Space

  Charles Sturt (1834). “Two expeditions into the interior of Southern Australia: during the years 1828, 1829, 1830 and 1831 with observations on ... New South Wales”, p.48

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• To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems...which he has to solve...And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of-such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity....Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Love, Mean, Men

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• It is a quite remarkable fact that the great religions of the most civilized peoples are more deeply fraught with sadness than the simpler beliefs of earlier societies. This certainly does not mean that the current of pessimism is eventually to submerge the other, but it proves that it does not lose ground and that it does not seem destined to disappear.

  Emile Durkheim

  Sadness, Mean, Doe

  Emile Durkheim (2005). “Suicide: A Study in Sociology”, p.333, Routledge

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• We create institutions and policies on the basis of the way we make assumptions about us and others. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us. So we have had poor people around us. If we had believed that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have created appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Business, Believe, People

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• The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood.

  Sean O'Casey

  Military, Fighting, Army

  Sean O'Casey (1973). “Sunset and evening star”, Pan

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• The preservation of our free society in the years and decades to come will depend ultimately on whether we succeed or fail in directing the enormous power of human knowledge to the enrichment of our own lives and the shaping of a rational and civilized world order....It is the task of education, more than any other instrument of foreign policy to help close the dangerous gap between the economic and technological interdependence of the people of the world and their psychological, political and spiritual alienation.

  J. William Fulbright

  Spiritual, Educational, Order

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• Would you have a strong and virile nation, keep your homes pure; would you reduce delinquency and crime, lessen the number of broken homes. It is time that civilized peoples realized that prevention is more profitable than punishment, and that the home is the incubator either of children of high character or of criminals. Home building, therefore, should be the paramount purpose of parents and of the nation.

  David O. McKay

  Strong, Children, Character

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• Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Communication, Views, Achievement

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1963). “Goethe's world view: presented in his reflections and maxims”

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• It is a thorough process, this war with the wilderness - breaking nature, taming the soil. feeding it on oats. The civilized man regards the pine tree as his enemy. He will fell it and let in the light, grub it up and raise wheat or rye there. It is no better than a fungus to him.

  Henry David Thoreau

  War, Men, Light

  David R. Foster, Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Thoreau's Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape”, p.38, Harvard University Press

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• Nature is rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society.

  Hendrik Willem van Loon

  Civilization, Sacred, Portal

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• 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.

  David Hume

  Revenge, Islam, Hurtful

  David Hume (1758). “Essays and Treatises on several subjects, etc. New edition”, p.135

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• It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.

  Mark Twain

  Brother, Heart, Men

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• We believe that poverty does not belong in a civilized human society. It belongs in museums [...] A poverty-free world might not be perfect, but it would be the best approximation of the ideal.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Positive, Believe, Museums

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• The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Country, Spiritual, Men

  Thomas Carlyle (1864). “Sartor Resartus”, p.23

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• I always get back to the question, is it really necessary that men should consume so much of their bodily and mental energies in the machinery of civilized life? The world seems to me to do much of its toil for that which is not in any sense bread. Again, does not the latent feeling that much of their striving is to no purpose tend to infuse large quantities of sham into men's work?

  William Allingham

  Men, Feelings, Energy

  William Allingham (1967). “William Allingham's diary”, Centaur Press

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• Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be "civilized off the face of the earth," - our forests, not to hold the king's game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation, - not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re-creation?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Sports, Kings, Inspiration

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “The Maine Woods - The Writings of Henry David Thoreau”, p.102, Read Books Ltd

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• Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!

  Herman Melville

  Sorry, Men, Eden

  Herman Melville (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)”, p.175, Delphi Classics

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• Even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Hunting, Community

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walden and Civil Disobedience”, p.154, Xist Publishing

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• For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.

  Walter Cronkite

  Years, Savages, Calling

  Address on receiving the Norman Cousins Global Governance Award at the UN Delegates Dining Room, October 19, 1999.

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• I often pass a farm with cows grazing in the field and I think to myself how terrible it is that human beings grow other animals just to kill them and eat them. Most of us think of vegetarians as nuts and I'm not a vegetarian but I wouldn't be surprised if we came to a time in 50 or 100 years when civilized people everywhere refused to eat animals.

  Andy Rooney

  Animal, Thinking, Years

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• The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions.

  Albert Einstein

  Development, Scripture, Moral

  Albert Einstein (2016). “The Albert Einstein Collection: Essays in Humanism, The Theory of Relativity, and The World As I See It”, p.180, Open Road Media

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

  Marjane Satrapi

  Civilization, West, Hunger

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• For the individual, education is the path to achievement and fulfillment; for the nation, it is a path to a society that is not only free but civilized; and for the world, it is the path to peace - for it is education that places reason over force.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Achievement, World, Path

  Johnson, Lyndon B. (1967). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966”, p.1104, Best Books on

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• Torture, including practices like waterboarding, violates the legal and moral standards of all civilized nations.

  Jerrold Nadler

  Practice, Civilized Nations, Moral

  "No More Clever Wordplay on Torture" by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 15, 2007.

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• How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

  Edith Wharton

  Country, Patriotic, Thinking

  Edith Wharton, Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, Nancy Lewis (1988). “The letters of Edith Wharton”, Macmillan Reference USA

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