Top 70 Being Civil Quotes
#1. If being tolerant of differing opinions, if believing that America has to make it as a pluralistic nation, if being civil, if that makes you a liberal, I plead guilty.
Bill Moyers
#2. The people who are good at being civil often lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions often lack civility.
Martin E. Marty
#3. It's hard to keep on being civil when they ask you such annoying questions.
Olivia De Havilland
#4. In a sane, civil, intelligent and moral society, you don't blame poor people for being poor.
Andrew Young
#5. My life is about being a civil rights activist. That's my life. Whoever you are, everyone, we either have civil rights or we don't. It's for everyone.
Pauley Perrette
#7. My view of Christianity is that the hallmark of being a Christian is to reach out to people who have been left behind. So I think there was a religious aspect to my decision to support civil unions.
Howard Dean
#8. America's humanitarian concern for foreign victims of natural disasters or civil strife is being abused by President Bush when he extends legal status to foreigners in the US when there is no reason that they could not go home safely.
Dan J. Stein
#9. At the center, on the lawn of the courthouse, sat a log manger with a life-size nativity scene cut out of plywood. If an civil libertarian had complained about the nativity being on public property, he would have been hunted down like Santa's reindeer during bow season.
Deborah Smith
#10. Mrs. Parks was a shy, soft spoken woman who was uncomfortable being revered as a symbol of the civil rights movement. She only hoped to inspire young people to achieve great things.
Jim Costa
#11. The American civil space program is growing to maturity. It has passed through the joys and crises of precocious childhood and now is being called upon to do grown-up things, like earn a living and establish permanent roots in space.
John Noble Wilford
#12. 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
#13. Where I come from, if you see your family and friends' civil rights being taken away, you speak up and do everything you can to keep that from happening!
Cyndi Lauper
#14. I'd like to continue being involved with issues that animated my time as attorney general - criminal-justice reform and civil rights especially. I don't just want to give speeches; I'd like to involve myself in this work in a systematic way.
Eric Holder
#15. Are you kidding me? It's insane that civil rights are being denied people in this day and age. It's embarrassing, and it's heartbreaking. It goes without saying that I'm completely in support of gay marriage. In 10 years we'll be ashamed that this was an issue.
Chris Evans
#16. Africans are on the front lines of humanitarian efforts, distributing life-saving aid in dangerous environments. Africans comprise the vast majority of peacekeepers in civil conflict on that continent. Africans for the most part lead peace negotiations for the wars being fought in Africa.
John Prendergast
#17. We grew up as kids watching those movies and we were exposed to themes of civil rights, unfairness, bigotry and fathers struggling against the kind of mob of the town, so you remember how you felt as a kid being taken seriously, that you are part of the human drama.
Rachel Griffiths
#18. We didn't have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.
Rosa Parks
#19. Seattle is not an overly friendly city. It is a civil city, but not altogether friendly. People from outside mistake the civility for friendliness. Seattle is full of people who have their own lives to live. They won't waste their time being friendly. But they are civil.
Jonathan Raban
#20. The European powers had been anxious to see the United States become embroiled in a civil war and eventually break into two smaller and weaker nations. That would pave the way for their further colonization of Latin American without fear of the Americans being able to enforce the Monroe Doctrine.
G. Edward Griffin
#21. A lot of things happened in a lot of places. And to see how well it was handled in Atlanta. There are a lot of reasons for Atlanta being a special town in the Civil Rights era.
Ivan Allen
#22. I think that the firepower of the Civil War, the numbers of bodies that were left to rot, the numbers of amputations in the Civil War, all of this created threats to the understanding of the human being as an integral soul, as a body and soul that could be united.
Drew Gilpin Faust
#23. If I was an exceptional human being in Detroit, then I saw no reason why I couldn't be an exceptional human being in Mississippi. In Hattiesburg.
Victoria Gray Adams
#24. My father was a civil servant, so having a regular job, being respectable is a big deal for me. Respectable in the sense that I support my family. That's what I mean by respectability.
Hanif Kureishi
#25. If I were an Arab-American, I would insist on being profiled. This is not the time for civil rights. There are larger issues for Americans.
Jack Nicholson
#26. A boy is content to be made into a civil man by caning, or any one of a number of other stratagems, but a girl, being disqualified by Nature, as it were, from such physical brutality, must remain forever something of a terra incognita. Don't you think?
Alan Bradley
#27. Civil government being the sole object of forming societies, its administration must be conducted by common consent.
Thomas Jefferson
#28. the United States decided it was not going to intervene in Syria - at least for the time being. The Syrian opposition felt betrayed and abandoned. Worse, Syrians were now completely without hope, which is the most dangerous human condition. A man or woman with no hope is capable of anything.
Richard Engel
#29. For the mob, habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, being excluded by poverty from the sweets of civil honors, produces a reign of mere violence.
Polybius
#30. Peaceful civil disobedience to unjust laws, which I support with every fiber of my being, can sometimes be necessary at any level of government. It falls upon the people, in the last resort, to stand against injustice no matter where it occurs.
Ron Paul
#31. Being a feminist means that you believe in civil rights and social justice.
Janeane Garofalo
#32. Piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well being of that state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice.
Joseph Story
#33. But despite the scarcity of confrontation with whites in our neighborhood, race and racism permeated every aspect of our lives. Our parents taught us that in order to succeed, we 'had to be twice as good as white folks.' We were constantly being prepared to enter a world dominated by whites.
Junius Williams
#34. Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all, Burke writes.
Yuval Levin
#35. The priest is not and must not be a civil servant of the Church. Above all the priest is a man who lives for the spirit for God. This being the case the Seminary is the place where he learns 'to be with Him.'
Pope John Paul II
#36. But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood, I leave to others to restore it to its strength, by recalling it within the pale of truth. Within that, it is a noble institution, equally the friend of science and of civil liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
#37. We live a life of privilege. That doesn't mean we can literally switch off these women, whose only fault was being born in the Congo during civil war. We need to bear witness.
Maria Semple
#39. What was the reason for invading Iraq' Was it a humanitarian crusade or an economic one' I would be inclined to say the latter. It was the same with the Civil War, because the landed gentry's money was being stolen by the king.
Dougray Scott
#40. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement.
Michael Eric Dyson
#41. We have got to protect privacy rights. We have got to protect our God-given, constitutionally protected civil liberties, and we are not doing that in the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security, as well as the TSA, is a great culprit in being a Gestapo-type organization.
Paul Broun
#42. It is distressing to me that we live in an age in which we still must fight to protect our civil rights as Americans, in which a hate crime perpetrated against someone based their sexual orientation can go unpunished, and in which discrimination is being written into our laws.
John Conyers
#43. I think the legacy of the civil rights movement is that now whites are more open to being represented by people of color or people who are women or, again, non-traditional candidates.
Carol Moseley Braun
#44. 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
#45. The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things ... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.
Shelby Foote
#46. My God, is it possible that all the people have gone mad? The civil war now being inaugurated will be as horrible as his Satanic Majesty could desire.
Sam Houston
#47. I want some help on this. I'm being very honest, i want some ideas, as somebody who was arrested 50 years ago fighting for Civil Rights trying to desegregate schools in Chicago, who spent his whole life fighting against racism, I want your ideas. What do you think we can do? What can we do?
Bernie Sanders
#48. Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.
Emmeline Pankhurst
#49. In an age where community involvement and partnerships with civil society are increasingly being recognized as indispensable, there is clearly a growing potential for cooperative development and renewal worldwide.
Kofi Annan
#50. It is probably true that I would not have had as many children or mothers in my books without being a mother with children. It is definitely true that I would not have written about the Civil War without having a little guy who was obsessed with it.
Marly Youmans
#51. When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig'd to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.
Benjamin Franklin
#52. The funnel-shaped devices are tremie tubes, which are apparently being used to avoid having the wet concrete free fall into the forms where the 4-cubic-yard buckets could not fit to pour directly.
Ray Bottenberg
#53. Jewish fundamentalism is teaching that Jews can fight with guns and with civil war, against being relocated off the West Bank, and disobey the orders of their government. That is the call to jihad, to several kinds of jihad.
Arthur Hertzberg
#54. Journalists were at the forefront. From the Civil War until the early 1900s, nothing was being done to solve the problems of the Industrial Age.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#55. You can be strong without being involved in every single civil war around the world.
Rand Paul
#56. In 'The Hunger Games,' in most people's idea, in terms of rebellion or a civil-war situation, that would meet the criteria for a necessary war. These people are oppressed, their children are being taken off and put in gladiator games. They're impoverished, they're starving, they're brutalized.
Suzanne Collins
#57. I believe that what is legislated bleeds down into everything. So if the legislation continues to uphold anything that doesn't support equal rights and civil rights, that bleeds down into Matthew Shepard being murdered.
Pauley Perrette
#58. When religious law becomes civil law, does the state not cease being secular, and become theocratic or theocentric?
Christina Engela
#59. Being an American is about having the right to be who you are. Sometimes that doesn't happen.
Herb Ritts
#60. I don't think marriage is a civil right, but I think that being able to transfer property is a civil right.
Barack Obama
#62. For me, it was definitely an education in being grateful. And appreciating the civil liberties we have today, the natural liberties we have at home.
Aldis Hodge
#63. Couldn't he have come out and greeted her like a civil human being instead of lurking from his kitchen while she shared a clearly intimate moment with his brisket?
Tracy Ewens
#64. Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti earthquake.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#65. There's a difference between hurting when you lose and being a bad loser. You don't compete at the highest level of sport to feel comfortable about losing, but you behave in a civil way when it goes wrong because that is the flip side.
Sebastian Coe
#66. I am exceedingly distressed at the proceedings of the Convention-being ... almost sure, they will ... lay the foundation of a Civil War.
Elbridge Gerry
#67. In any event, any person from 2.0 down on the Tone Scale should not have, in any thinking society, any civil rights of any kind, because by abusing those rights he brings into being arduous and strenuous laws which are oppressive to those who need no such restraints.
L. Ron Hubbard
#68. If youre a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.
Al Gore
#69. In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining ... . We demand this fraud be stopped.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#70. He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights ... it had to be some silly little Communist.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
