Top 100 Be Civil Quotes
#2. You can choose to be civil or not be civil. What is the point of going through the day and think it's cool to wear your honesty on your sleeve at the expense of everyone around you?
Jennifer Garner
#3. The great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don't even have to love your neighbor to be civil. You just have to treat your neighbor the same way you would like your neighbor to treat your grandmother, or your child.
Barbara Brown Taylor
#4. If you can't be civil to my girlfriend you can fucking walk away.
R.K. Lilley
#5. Disobedience, to be civil, implies discipline, thought, care, attention.
Mahatma Gandhi
#6. Despite her mother, Raven had always been a nice girl. Yes, she would grow up to poison and rampage and try to destroy all happiness, but that was no reason not to be civil.
Shannon Hale
#7. Always be civil, but with a plan to neutralise everyone in the room.
Conor McGregor
#8. Disobedience to be civil has to be open and nonviolent.
Mahatma Gandhi
#9. In a time of social fragmentation, vulgarity becomes a way of life. To be shocking becomes more important - and often more profitable - than to be civil or creative or truly original.
Al Gore
#10. Z - ds! damn the lock! 'fore Gad, you must be civil! Plague on't!'t is past a jest - nay prithee, pox! Give her the hair" - he spoke, and rapp'd his box.
Alexander Pope
#11. But, like some other undiplomatic ambassadors, in her desire to be civil, she ran at once to the extremity of the permitted concessions.
Anthony Trollope
#12. And, to say truly, the greatest benefit that learning bringeth unto men is this: that it teacheth men that be rough and rude of nature, by compass and rule of reason, to be civil and courteous, and to like better the mean state than the higher.
Plutarch
#13. You've got to be kidding me. You're propositioning me in a church?"
"Now where else are you going to be civil to me?
Jae T. Jaggart
#14. And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be 'Civil War' - not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all.
Michael Haneke
#15. Always be civil to the girls, you never know who they may marry' is a aphorism which has saved many an English spinster from being treated like an Indian widow.
Nancy Mitford
#16. Let me tell you a secret, Caitlin. We're still in the cave. It's just bigger, and we wear nicer clothes. We make alliances and try to be civil, we save the weak instead of leaving them out in the cold to die ...
Greg Iles
#17. The parts of humanity that use to be civil are dead and gone. The only thing left is a technological, emotionless, colorless, dead version of reality we live in every day.
James Wheeler
#18. They tend to be civil servants, often diplomats drawn from the Foreign Office, who may be very pleasant, intelligent people, but once they get inside the Palace they're riveted to the status quo and they lose track of public opinion in the real world.
Anthony Holden
#19. Though mathematics may teach a man how to build a bridge, it is what the Scotch Universities call the humanities, that teach him to be civil and sweet-tempered.
Amelia Barr
#20. If the security forces continue to be dominated as they are now by political groups or sects, then the people won't trust in them - and the result will be civil war or fragmentation of the country.
Adnan Pachachi
#21. All this time Lock and I had managed to be civil to one another. No drama, all efficiency. But look him in the eyes? No, I couldn't do that. That would cut me wide open, and there would be blood. Lots of blood. I'd crumble into a heap on the floor then beg him to collect the pieces.
Cat Porter
#22. The choke?" I exclaim, perplexed.
Next to me, Cal tries his best to be civil. His best isn't very good.
"Idiocy," he snaps. "The Choke has more Silvers than you know, each one instructed to arrest or kill you on sight. If you're lucky, they'll take you back to prison.
Victoria Aveyard
#23. We can be civil. We can still be friends, and be Democrats and Republicans, and have different views.
Joel Osteen
#24. Really, Weasley? Are we going to do this friend shit? We agreed to be civil, not friends. Because if you're going to do this friend bollocks every time I see you, I'll just fling myself off a cliff right now."
"You promise? Can I watch?
Bex-chan
#25. His eyes were polite yet maleficent, as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife.
Arundhati Roy
#26. I appreciate people who are civil, whether they mean it or not. I think: Be civil. Do not cherish your opinion over my feelings. There's a vanity to candor that isn't really worth it. Be kind.
Richard Greenberg
#27. Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.
Benjamin Franklin
#28. Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court Justice or White House incumbent. That amendment had built a wall, with the ecclesiastical estate on one side and the civil estate on the other.
Edwin Gaustad
#29. Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
Michael N. Castle
#30. Some of the greatest spiritual revivals in the past occurred just when the situation seemed to be the darkest. In the history of our own nation, for example, countless thousands turned to Christ during the darkest days of the Civil War, setting the stage for national reconciliation later on.
Billy Graham
#31. I would define liberty to be a power to do as we would be done by. The definition of liberty to be the power of doing whatever the law permits, meaning the civil laws, does not seem satisfactory.
John Adams
#32. Inflicting emotional distress has typically been treated as a civil action. How 'substantial' does the distress have to be for it to turn criminal?
Nancy Gibbs
#33. Before this war is over, I intend to be a Major General or a corpse.
Isaac R. Trimble
#34. I don't have to come back politically, but I would like to do something that will help the people of Thailand. There must be a process under which I can come back. I want to come back to clear the chaos in Thailand, the civil war in Thailand.
Thaksin Shinawatra
#35. Any court which undertakes by its legal processes to enforce civil liberties needs the support of an enlightened and vigorous public opinion which will be intelligent and discriminating as to what cases really are civil liberties cases and what questions really are involved in those cases.
Robert H. Jackson
#36. Rebel Number Four" is waiting patiently by the door. I named him "Rebel Number Four," for he is the fourth of his kind I have given the name "Rebel." To many he may be just a hound dog, but to me he is a champion and a friend to the end.
Nancy B. Brewer
#38. We do not want an official state church. If ninety-nine percent of the population were Catholics, I would still be opposed to it. I do not want civil power combined with religious power. I want to make it clear that I am committed as a matter of deep personal conviction to separation.
John F. Kennedy
#39. [On John Brown:] The poor wretch is hanged, but from his grave a root of bitterness will spring, the fruit of which at no distant day may be disunion and civil war.
Fanny Kemble
#40. Aggressive civil disobedience should be confined to a vindication of the right of free speech and free association.
Mahatma Gandhi
#41. Our religion was the religion of a Book. Man must be educated on Earth for Heaven. John Quincy Adams
Paul C. Nagel
#42. For this is the most civil sort of lie That can be given to a man's face. I now Say what I think.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#43. Gay marriage will be universally accepted in time. But if I may be so bold as to say to gays and lesbians, don't wait for that time to arrive. Just as my father and his generation did not 'wait' for their civil rights, nor should you. The toothpaste ain't going back in the tube. The tide has turned.
John Ridley
#44. Our union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war.
James Buchanan
#45. Martial sex is kinda like ordering a Civil War chess set through the mail. You get one piece every four to six weeks, you don't know what kind of shape that piece is gonna be in when you get it, but you still gotta pay the handling charges.
Bill Engvall
#46. You can't be halfhearted in a revolution. Values that serve well in a civil society don't work in a state of nature.
Glenn Reynolds
#47. The time has come, or is about to come, when only large-scale civil disobedience, which should be nonviolent, can save the populations from the universal death which their governments are preparing for them.
Bertrand Russell
#48. If Barack Obama now, or some black person in the future, should become president, neither Jesse Jackson nor Al Sharpton would be out of a job. A black president can't end black misery; a black president can't be a civil rights leader or primarily a crusader for racial justice.
Michael Eric Dyson
#49. The reasoning for our civil-military plan is that lasting success will be when the Afghan government, security forces and people can resist the insurgents and terrorists themselves.
Bob Ainsworth
#50. The civil rights situation is like a pregnancy. It will get worse, I believe, before it gets better. What the usual pregnancy comes to is a decent baby. That is what we all hope will be the end product of this stress. It is customary, at the end of a pregnancy, to have for your pains a decent baby.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#51. For me, jazz will always be the soundtrack of the civil rights movement.
Henry Rollins
#52. You don't need to leverage natural disasters. You don't need to capitalize on civil unrest. You need to be human. It's not always about business.
Scott Stratten
#53. Poets should be law-givers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the civil code, and the day's work.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#54. I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and justice.
Anne Lamott
#55. Louisa went about her duties at the hospital, trying not to dwell on the fact that this might be her last day alive.
David Healey
#56. The only solution to the violence problem in America is a return to traditional parental involvement. This should be encouraged by every elected official. Also, the abandonment and neglect of children by their parents should have civil consequences.
Bill O'Reilly
#57. [S]tatism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power
to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed ... Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.
Ayn Rand
#58. One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system - in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole - yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis)
Michelle Alexander
#59. The necessary and wise subordination of the military to civil power must be sustained.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#60. Lee's army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.
Ulysses S. Grant
#61. When I was 19, I thought I wanted to be an English civil servant. It was the most exotic thing at the time - can you imagine, in the middle of the IRA bombing campaigns? I saw an ad inviting Irish applicants for an induction course, so I signed up.
Colm Toibin
#62. Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.
Jehane Noujaim
#63. no person of foreign birth, not a citizen of the Confederate States, shall be allowed to vote for any officer, civil or political, State or Federal.
Confederate States Of America
#64. Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.
Samuel Adams
#65. God wants us to be significant; he wants the world to know us that is why He encourages us to have an active civil position in our nations
Sunday Adelaja
#66. Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don't bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they don't rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can?
Rabih Alameddine
#67. Some Christians worried about a faith that was so embracing as to be meaningless, that exalted not the Almighty so much as the American way of life. When civil religion bleached the challenge from faith and left behind a watery patriotism, there was room for concern.
Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy
#68. Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied.
Charles De Secondat
#69. I was in school studying civil engineering. A guy approached me on the street and said that I had a interesting look-very exotic. He told me I should try to be in the industry.
Thuy Trang
#70. All the forms of civil polity have been tried by mankind, except one, and that seems to have been reserved in Providence to be realized in America.
Ezra Stiles
#71. I was against the Iraq war I was against the Afghan war I was against bombing Libya and Syria but to be quite honest and with a heavy heart because more innocent people are gonna be killed....We have to step in and help wipeout ISIS!
Cal Sarwar
#72. By 1950, he had come to view the pedestrian as a threshold or indicator species capable of foretelling things to come - if the rights of the pedestrian were threatened, it would be an early indicator that broader freedoms of thought and action were also at risk.
Jonathan Eller
#73. I don't think it's a great leap to go from civil unions to gay marriage - I may be in the minority in believing that.
Harold Ford Jr.
#74. The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there's a reason for that - the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent - No Child Left Behind.
P. J. O'Rourke
#75. The opinions of men should not be the object of any government. Our civil rights are no more dependent on our religious beliefs than they are dependent upon our thoughts about geometry or physics!
Thomas Jefferson
#76. There never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War.
Gertrude Stein
#77. If a man, notoriously and designedly, insults and affronts you, knock him down; but if he only injures you, your best revenge is to be extremely civil to him in your outward behaviour, though at the same time you counterwork him, and return him the compliment, perhaps with interest.
Lord Chesterfield
#78. We did an album one time called White Mansions, about the civil war, but it was written by a guy from England. His looking at it from over there and it not being a part of his history made it so he could be objective.
Waylon Jennings
#79. The Cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even one hundred defeats.
Abraham Lincoln
#80. I have for some time urged that a nuclear abolition summit to mark the effective end of the nuclear era be convened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 70th anniversary of the bombings of those cities, with the participation of national leaders and representatives of global civil society.
Daisaku Ikeda
#81. Causes of Civil War are also, that the Wealth of the Nation is in too few mens hands, and that no certain means are provided to keep all men from a necessity either to beg, or steal, or be Souldiers.
William Petty
#82. Using a broad brushstroke, I think Libertarian - most of America are socially accepting and fiscally responsible. I'm in that category. I think, broadly speaking, that's a Libertarian. A Libertarian is going to be somebody who's really strong on civil liberties.
Gary Johnson
#83. War! It is purification, liberation, an enormous hope ... The victory of Germany will be a paradox, nay, a wonder: a victory of the soul over numbers ... The German soul is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization, for is not peace the element, of civil corruption?
Thomas Mann
#84. Disease, and most specially opprobrious, suppressed, secret disease, creates a certain critical opposition to the world, to mediocre life, disposes a man to be obstinate and ironical toward civil order, so that he seeks refuge in free thought, in books, in study.
Thomas Mann
#85. For a long time I thought I should be a civil engineer. That seemed to be the only thing worth doing, and I chose the wrong subjects at A-level. I read all the sciences to start with, and then had to admit, 'This isn't what I want to do' and changed course.
Ian Hislop
#86. [M]y mother fought hard for civil rights so that instead of a mop, I could hold this microphone. And while she may be proud of me tonight, I've got to tell you, Mom, I'm even more proud of you. Thank you, Mom.
Julian Castro
#87. I kept my hands firmly on the iron rail before me. Grabbing the weight bar and walloping the Beast Lord upside the head wouldn't be the best diplomatic move.
"I'm sorry, Your Majesty." There. I was civil. It almost killed me.
"Apology accepted."
"Will there be anything else?"Your Arrogance.
Ilona Andrews
#88. The Bill of Rights should contain the general principles of natural and civil liberty. It should be to a community what the eternal laws and obligations of morality are to the conscience. It should be unalterable by any human power ...
Thomas Paine
#89. I would only go to Syria to destroy ISIS. I would not use U.S. troops to depose Assad. But I would support the rebels there. It's okay to support those people who share your view. But for the United States to be embroiled in a civil war in Syria against [Bashr] Assad I think is a big mistake.
John Kasich
#90. We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off.
John Trudell
#91. The failures of the past must not be an excuse for the inaction of the present and the future.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#92. Each state, so that it does not abridge the great fundamental rights belonging, under the Constitution, to all citizens, may grant or withhold such civil rights as it pleases; all that is required is that, in this respect, its laws shall be impartial.
Lyman Trumbull
#93. Pastors can lead the way in motivating the faithful to wise stewardship of their citizenship responsibilities. Without a healthy culture and civil society, limited government and ordered liberty will be impossible.
Edwin Meese
#94. You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
Doris Lessing
#95. But there are a couple of places where it is clear to me that there should be no ambiguity of corporate responsibility - the environment and civil rights, .. As a corporation, you cannot let the desire for unanimity override your obligation for fairness.
Leo Hindery
#96. In the defense of civil liberties there can be no exceptions, or there will soon be many.
A.J. Muste
#97. You can't put down anybody. You can just try and understand. The emphasis shouldn't be on revolution, it should be on communication. Because it's just going to get more uptight. The more the revolution goes on, and there will be a civil war sooner or later.
David Bowie
#98. Once we destroyed the Saddam regime, we knew there was going to be a civil war.
William Odom
#99. To be ambitious of true honor and of the real glory and perfection of our nature is the very principle and incentive of virtue; but to be ambitious of titles, place, ceremonial respects, and civil pageantry, is as vain and little as the things are which we court
Philip Sidney
#100. I don't like calling myself a "feminist" only because I don't think I've done anything active enough to call myself one. It'd be like calling myself a civil rights activist just because I'm not racist.
Bo Burnham
