Civilized Quotes - Page 3

• 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.

  Lester R. Brown

  Inspiring, Thinking, Support Systems

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• Forts, arsenals, garrisons, armies, navies, are means of security and defence, which were invented in half-civilized times and in feudal or despotic countries; but schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications, and if they are dismantled and dilapidated, ignorance and vice will pour in their legions through every breach.

  Horace Mann

  Country, Ignorance, Mean

  Horace Mann, William Bentley Fowle (1841). “Common School Journal”, p.271

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• One of the greatest myths of all time is that so-called civilized man is no longer an animal, and for that reason can strive to disarm himself and grow fat with false concepts.

  William Powell

  Animal, Men, Reason

  "The Anarchist Cookbook". Book by William Powell, Chapter Three: "Natural, Nonlethal, and Lethal Weapons", p. 93, 1971.

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• The act of nutrition is not a purely physiological event... The family meal is a formality that cultivates in us... a capacity for sharing, generosity, thoughtfulness, a talent for civilized conversation.

  Francine du Plessix Gray

  Generosity, Events, Meals

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• To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  Men, Barbarians, Realizing

  "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy". Book by Joseph Schumpeter, Part IV, Chapter XX, Section III, 1942.

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• It seems to me that the civilized human being is a skeptic someone who believes nothing at face value.

  Robert McKee

  Believe, Faces, Skeptic

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• Left to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement; but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Sight, Forests

  Henry David Thoreau (2011). “The Natural History Essays”, p.39, Gibbs Smith

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• Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.

  George Meredith

  Struggle, Men, Reflection

  George Meredith (1922). “The Complete Works of George Meredith”, p.4327, Library of Alexandria

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• Science and technology contribute to the fast-expanding vocabularies of all living civilized tongues at a faster rate than all other fields of human endeavor put together.

  Mario Pei

  Technology, Vocabulary, Together

  Mario Pei (1965). “The Story of Language”

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• The artist must operate on the assumption that the public consists in the highest order of individual; that he is civilized, cultured, and highly sensitive both to emotional and intellectual contexts. And while the whole public most certainly does not consist in that sort of individual, still the tendency of art is to create such a public - to lift the level of perceptivity, to increase and enrich the average individual's store of values... I believe that it is in a certain devotion to concepts of truth that we discover values.

  Ben Shahn

  Art, Believe, Emotional

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• How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight; and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilized nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blessed and happy!

  Charles Dickens

  Religious, Struggle, Blessed

  Charles Dickens (2016). “The Pickwick Papers: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”, p.310, Pan Macmillan

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• We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, in all its forms, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Single Life, Sun, Life Is

  "The Dispossessed". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974.

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• I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance. I want nothing to do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not teach people that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized on this earth, capable of becoming master of his fate and captain of his soul.

  Jawaharlal Nehru

  Religious, Ignorance, Fate

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• I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if aware of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathise with the bears.

  John Muir

  Men, Would Be, Littles

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• It's so much more interesting to study a ... damaged world. I find it difficult to learn anything in a place that's too civilized.

  Brian Herbert

  Interesting, World, Study

  Brian Herbert, Kevin Anderson (2003). “Dune: House Atreides”, p.30, Spectra

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• The reason the lawyers lead the line to the guillotine or the firing squad is that, while law is supposed to be a device to serve society, a civilized way of helping the wheels go round without too much friction, it is pretty hard to find a group less concerned with serving society and more concerned with serving themselves than the lawyers.

  Fred Rodell

  Law, Squad, Lines

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• During practically all of my public life, I have been a sincere advocate of an agreement between the leading nations of the world to set up all the necessary international machinery that would bring about a practical abolition of war between civilized nations.

  George W. Norris

  War, Agreement, Civilized Nations

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• The legislator commands the future; to be feeble will avail him nothing: it is for him to will what is good and to perpetuate it; to make man what he desires to be: for the laws, working upon the social body, which is inert in itself, can produce either virtue or crime, civilized customs or savagery.

  Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

  Men, Law, Desire

  "Discours sur la Constitution à donner à la France". Speech to the National Convention, April 24, 1793.

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• We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life.

  Rachel Carson

  Men, Rivers, Important

  Paul Brooks, Rachel Carson (1972). “The house of life: Rachel Carson at work”

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• The gentle art of gastronomy is a friendly one. It hurdles the language
  barrier, makes friends among civilized people, and warms the heart.

  Samuel Chamberlain

  Art, Food, People

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• The education of the common people requires, perhaps, in a civilized and commercial society, the attention of the public more than that of people of some rank and fortune.

  Adam Smith

  People, Attention, Common

  Adam Smith (1827). “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”, p.328

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• Under the ominous shadow which the second World War and its attendant circumstances have cast on the world, peace has become as essential to civilized existence as the air we breathe is to life itself.

  Cordell Hull

  War, Air, Shadow

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• The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  People, Disease, Pessimism

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• It seems important that the social value factor be more generally recognized as a powerful causal agent in its own right and something to be dealt with directly as such. No more critical task can be projected for the 1970s than that of seeking for civilized society a new, elevated set of value guidelines more suited to man's expanded numbers and new powers over nature, a frame of reference for value priorities that will act to secure and conserve our world instead of destroying it.

  Roger Wolcott Sperry

  Powerful, Men, Numbers

  "Science and the Problem of Values". Book by Roger Wolcott Sperry, p. 119, 1972.

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• In all ages, through all the varied experience of individuals and nations, knowledge has been the power which has civilized, elevated and dignified humanity. In those countries where progress has been most rapid, the thirst for knowledge has been most intense.

  Sarah Moore Grimke

  Country, Knowledge, Humanity

  Gerda Lerner, Sarah Moore Grimké (1998). “The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké”, p.77, Oxford University Press, USA

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