Civilization Civilized Quotes

#1. The great lie is that it is civilization. It's not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That's the great lie, is that it represents civilization.

John Trudell

#2. Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.

Lauren Willig

#3. Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.

Victor Davis Hanson

#4. I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not.

Flora Lewis

#5. The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.

Rachel Carson

#6. Art is neither a muscle nor a cure for ugliness. Ugliness has its own reasons and convictions to stay here. Art has a patience of a civilized, patience to withhold the gentleness of the civilization.

Ashutosh Gupta

#7. Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.

Mark Rowlands

#8. I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Henry David Thoreau

#9. Men have always wanted to have sex with as many fertile young women as possible. It's part of a man's basic programming. That hasn't changed. Civilization is nothing more than an artificial and very thin veneer hiding our deep-seated primitive urges.

Oliver Markus

#10. Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.

James A. Michener

#11. As long as there are prisons, police, armies, navies; we are not civilized. When the Earth joins together and uses the Earth intelligently, that will be the beginning of civilization.

Jacque Fresco

#12. A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the fine qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.

Alfred North Whitehead

#13. Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrified in the turbulence of change.

Will Durant

#14. Protecting the weak is the whole fucking basis for civilization. If you're not protecting the weak, you're not civilized. You're fucking animals.

Robert Kirkman

#15. Modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with the lives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and not of it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#16. In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.

Alfred North Whitehead

#17. We may like to think of ourselves as civilized, but that civilization is in large part bestowed by material wealth. Without this stuff, we would quickly be confronted by the same basic struggle for survival that animals are faced with.

Mark Miodownik

#18. Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whithersoever it has gone; and, as if to show that the latter does not depend on physical causes, some of the countries the most civilized in the day's of Augustus are now in a state of hopeless barbarism.

Augustus William Hare

#19. Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized ... That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.

Jonathan Maberry

#20. Primary purposes of a mirror: (1) To help civilized men realize their imperfections, and, (2) To help the imperfect hide their imperfections.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#21. Difference between savage and civilized man: one is painted, the other gilded.

Mark Twain

#22. The only very marked difference between the average civilized man and the average savage is that the one is gilded and the other is painted.

Mark Twain

#23. Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

George Bernard Shaw

#24. For our part, if we were forced to make a choice between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized men of barbarism, we should choose the barbarians.

Victor Hugo

#25. The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.

Pearl S. Buck

#26. If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.

Clive James

#27. The mark of the truly civilized is their (truly baffling to the likes of you and me) patience with what truly baffles.

Samuel R. Delany

#28. All civilized wo/men are prostitutes: Some sell what's between their legs; the rest sell what's between their ears.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#29. The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.

Margaret Fuller

#30. All definitions of civilization along to a conjugation which goes: I am civilized, you belong to a culture, he is a barbarian.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#31. Those who haven't been exposed to the hypocrisies of a civilized education react to things 'naturally', as they happen. It is in the here and now that they are either happy or unhappy, joyful or sad, interested or indifferent.

Henri Charriere

#32. Nothing distresses the civilized person like unfettered nature. The Grand Canyon seen from behind the railing is indeed a splendid sight, but as soon as the desert reclaims your golf course that is another matter altogether.

Anthony Marais

#33. If you really want to define civilization it should be a culture that doesn't destroy its environment. If you burn down the kitchen one day and expect to eat the next, it is not even intelligent, let alone civilized.

Sting

#34. I trust the time is nigh when, with the universal assent of civilized people, all international differences shall be determined without resort to arms by the benignant processes of civilization.

Chester A. Arthur

#35. For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized

Rod Serling

#36. I don't actually believe in a clash of civilizations. I believe in a clash of the civilized and the noncivilized.

Madeleine Albright

#37. Civilization rests on two things," said Hitzig; "the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both?

Robertson Davies

#38. It is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

Freya Stark

#39. What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less.

Thomas Sowell

#40. Human is human," said Issib. "But civilized - that's the gift of the Oversoul. Civilization without self-destruction.

Orson Scott Card

#41. One comes across white men occasionally who suffer under the delusion that China is not a civilized country. Such men have forgotten what constitutes civilization.

Bertrand Russell

#42. A very civilized thing, glass - almost an index of civilization. When civilization retreats, it leaves behind broken glass.

John Derbyshire

#43. Is not the history of real civilization the slow and gradual emancipation of the intellect, of the judgment, from the mastery of passion? Is not that man civilized whose reason sits the crowned monarch of his brain - whose passions are his servants?

Robert Green Ingersoll

#44. I think in our desire to create a better America,we have to have civilized debate in this country and not just yelling.

Craig Ferguson

#45. The civilized man is technologically ahead of - intellectually behind - his time.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#46. Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#47. Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

Thomas Sowell

#48. We are the civilized world, you and I. A few dozen people, with our learning. As long as we continue to stroll through my garden arm in arm, civilization will continue.

Iain Pears

#49. In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#50. We are living in an increasingly feminized society. Some people view that as an increasingly civilized society, but it has left our boys with deep desires for honor but few outlets for displaying it appropriately.

Cindy Rollins

#51. 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

#52. Morals are nothing but a civilized society's attempt to tame some beast called man.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#53. And if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaininggross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?

Henry David Thoreau

#54. The flaw in being civilized is that it permit's the uncivilized among us to perpetrate horrific crimes against us in the name of freedom and equality.
Foreword 'RHG

M.J. Croan

#55. The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops.

Alfred Nobel

#56. Whether ... civilization has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested," he wrote in 1795. "[Both] the most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized." When

Sebastian Junger

#57. We are not a civilized country if we can read in a newspaper what a lady tells her boyfriend or husband.

Silvio Berlusconi

#58. A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.

Ezra Pound

#59. We only refer to sapient creatures as civilized when their society is willingly self-correcting. That means that any problem or imbalance that arises is fixed, and I mean really fixed - not ignored, not hidden, and not passed off to a future generation.

J.Z. Colby

#60. During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began.

Tom Standage

#61. What 'primitive' men called gossip, 'civilized' men call news.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#62. What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will.

Paulette Jiles

#63. From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a savage.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#64. ...unless our standards of civilization are comfort and contraptions, Athens from (say) 480 to 380 was clearly the most civilized society that has yet existed.

H.D.F. Kitto

#65. The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.

Thomas Lynch

#66. The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society.

Mark Skousen

#67. Her father had been a sailor. Her mother had been a siren. That particular relationship had worked out better than normal, with the sailor not being drowned then eaten, and Sharon had been the result, brought back to human civilization and raised to be a civilized young lady.

Larry Correia

#68. People here always said to me, 'Why would you leave civilization to go to a place like Fiji?' Fiji is a far more civilized place than California or New York City.

Raymond Burr

#69. Man was not intended by nature to live in communities and be civilized.

Epicurus

#70. The more civilized people are, the more honorable working hard is to them. As a result, the more civilized we get, the less we live.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#71. It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.

Alan Bennett

#72. Thievery is for the civilized. It is what laws protect us from. I am a wild beast of no laws and no society. I want no laws. I want no more civilized things.

J.M. McDermott

#73. He despised violence. He believed he was smarter than that, better than that. A civilized man. After seeing Martin Pink in the flesh again - he knew just how thin the veneer of civilization was.

Josh Lanyon

#74. The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.

Tom Robbins

#75. The city is all right. To live in one
Is to be civilized, stay up and read
Or sing and dance all night and see sunrise
By waiting up instead of getting up.

Robert Frost

#76. The point of civilization is to be civilized; the purpose of action is to perpetuate society, for only in society can philosophy truly take place.

Iain Pears

#77. All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.

David Baldacci

#78. In civilized societies, if you are offended by a cartoon, you do not burn flags, take up guns and raid buildings, chant death to your opponents, or threaten suicide bombings. You write a letter to the editor.

Michelle Malkin

#79. We've become so civilized it is unnatural to be naked.

Jeffrey Rasley

#80. I believe that Western civilization, after some disgusting glitches, has become almost civilized. I believe it is our first duty to protect that civilization. I believe it is our second duty to improve it. I believe it is our third duty to extend it if we can.

P. J. O'Rourke

#81. We, ironically known as the civilizados - in practically everything that matters they're a damned sight more civilized than we are - bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilization, which harms them even more, and desease, which kills them.

Alistair MacLean

#82. There is a certain freedom of enjoyment that defines true civilization. And the Spanish are among the few peoples in Europe who are civilized.

Albert Camus

#83. The bookshelf, like the book, has become an integral part of civilization as we know it, its presence in a home practically defining what it means to be civilized, educated, and refined.

Henry Petroski

#84. I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.

Kurt Vonnegut

#85. We must open our eyes and see that modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with thelives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and out of it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#86. It is yet another Civilized Power, with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife in the other. Is there no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level?.

Mark Twain

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

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

#88. I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and - and clear. You relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other way to survive.

Toni Morrison

#89. In the most civilized and progressive countries freedom of discussion is recognized as a fundamental principle.

C.E.M. Joad

#90. Good sex is the basis of any truly civilized society.

Gil A. Waters

#91. What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country, vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization?

William Wilberforce

#92. Civilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain ... those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men.

Harold Laski

#93. If this is called civilization, then I am afraid humanity is no more civilized than the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Abhijit Naskar

#94. If we are to preserve civilization, we must first remain civilized.

Louis St. Laurent

#95. Social intercourse
a very limited thing in a half civilized country, becomes in our centers of civilization a great power ...

Emily Blackwell

#96. Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.

Mark Skousen

#97. There is a demon in technology. It was put there by man and man will have to exorcise it before technological civilization can achieve the eighteenth-century ideal of humane civilized life.

Rene Dubos

#98. When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

Jeanette Winterson

#99. In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it's about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty.

Orhan Pamuk