Top 100 Civilized Man Quotes
#2. Wine has been with civilized man from the beginning.
Robert Mondavi
#3. Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise - because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment, with an excellent toilet, and a well-furnished dogma.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#4. A blow that would kill a civilized man soon heals on a savage. The higher we go in the scale of life, the greater is the capacity for suffering.
Dale Carnegie
#5. The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.
Theophile Gautier
#6. Civilized man longs for the illusion of barbarism. Either his culture fulfills this need by adopting its outer trappings, or he will be seduced by his first contact with a culture that does.
C.S. Friedman
#7. Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.
Joseph Conrad
#8. Property is desirable as the ground work of moral independence, as a means of improving the faculties, and of doing good to others, and as the agent in all that distinguishes the civilized man from the savage.
James F. Cooper
#9. Difference between savage and civilized man: one is painted, the other gilded.
Mark Twain
#10. From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.
Henry David Thoreau
#11. 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
#12. As a result, the highly civilized man can endure incomparably more than the savage, whether of moral or physical strain. Being better able to control himself under all circumstances, he has a great advantage over the savage.
Lafcadio Hearn
#13. Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
H.L. Mencken
#14. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#16. The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.
Margaret Fuller
#17. Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other
outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#18. Fontenelle was the most civilized man of his time, and indeed of most times.
Isaiah Berlin
#19. The "civilized" man of today ridicules the idolatry of bygone ages, but he does not realize that he is a far worse idolater than the idolaters of the past. In former times, men set up images of various animals and adored them; today they slaughter those animals and worship their putrefied carcasses.
Arshavir Ter Hovannessian
#20. 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
#21. Do not ask questions! The only real defense civilized man has against
anybody who bothers him is to lie. There would be no lies if there were no questions.
B. Traven
#22. The civilized man is technologically ahead of - intellectually behind - his time.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#23. Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?
Sinclair Lewis
#24. The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
Felix Frankfurter
#25. 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
#26. There are two things civilized Man should never see being made: Sausages and Laws.
Otto Von Bismarck
#27. 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
#28. By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.
Charles Baudelaire
#29. The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood
George Bernard Shaw
#30. It was as if his apostasy from the faith of his fathers, filling him with the fiery zeal of the convert, and particularly of the convert to heresy, had blinded him to every other element in the gigantic self-delusion of civilized man.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#31. 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
#33. 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
#34. Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.
Oscar Wilde
#37. To doubt one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. Don't defend past actions; what is right today may be wrong tomorrow. Don't be consistent; consistency is the refuge of fools.
Hyman Rickover
#38. 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
#39. I am not what is called a civilized man, professor. I have done with society for reasons that seem good to me. Therefore I do not obey its laws.
Earl Felton
#40. I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man: It is we.
Konrad Lorenz
#41. The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts.
Bergen Evans
#42. In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad
Pamela Geller
#43. The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.
Gore Vidal
#44. 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
#45. Ihave precious little sympathy for theselfish proprietyof civilized man, and if awarof racesshould occurbetween the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathise with the bears.
John Muir
#46. The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.
Tom Robbins
#47. The Indian ... stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison.
Henry David Thoreau
#49. For works of the mind really great there is no old age, no decrepitude. It is inconceivable that a time should come when Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, should not ring in the ears of civilized man.
William E. Gladstone
#50. Like the whale who swallowed Jonah, we have engulfed all national dishes known to civilized man and made them in delight, if not in name our own.
Louis Pullig De Gouy
#51. Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.
Leonard Woolf
#52. I believe that present day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive.
Konrad Lorenz
#53. The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
H.L. Mencken
#54. It is in refinement and elegance that the civilized man differs from the savage.
Samuel Johnson
#55. It seems to me impossible for a civilized man to love or worship, or respect the God of the Old Testament. A really civilized man, a really civilized woman, must hold such a God in abhorrence and contempt.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#56. On the outside, the man of today is carefully groomed, perhaps unnecessarily and over carefully clean; while inside he is dirtier than the dirtiest animal - whose anus is as clean as its mouth, provided said animal has not been "domesticated" by "civilized" man.
Arnold Ehret
#57. Dilemma of civilized man; body mobilized, but danger obscure.
Philip K. Dick
#58. I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.
George Meredith
#59. 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
#60. Either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the world is not yet anywhere near to being fully civilized.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#61. 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
#62. In civilized society external advantages make us more respected. A man with a good coat upon his back meets with a better reception than he who has a bad one. You may analyze this and say, What is there in it? But that will avail you nothing, for it is a part of a general system.
Samuel Johnson
#63. For a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.
Primo Levi
#64. As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!
Mark Twain
#65. There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.
Denis Diderot
#66. The privilege against self-incrimination is one of the great landmarks in man's struggle to make himself civilized ... The Fifth is a lone sure rock in time of storm ... a symbol of the ultimate moral sense of the community, upholding the best in us.
Erwin Griswold
#67. The most pressing question on the problem of faith is whether a man as a civilized being can believe in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, for therein rests the whole of our faith.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#68. [The Bible] has survived attack of every kind. Neither barbaric vandalism nor civilized scholarship has touched it. Neither the burning of fire nor the laughter of skepticism has accomplished its annihilation. Through the many dark ages of man, its glorious promises have survived unchanged.
Billy Graham
#69. It is man's vision of a world fit for rational, civilized humanity which leads him to dare and to suffer to build societies free from want and fear. Concepts such as truth, justice and compassion cannot be dismissed as trite when these are often the only bulwarks which stand against ruthless power.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#70. She is still less civilized than man, largely because she has not been educated.
W. L. George
#71. In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.
Jeremy Collier
#72. He had no bag, which was strange. But overall it was vaguely reassuring to have such a man on board, especially after he had proved himself civilized and not in any way threatening. Threatening behavior from a man that size would have been unseemly. Good manners from a man that size were charming.
Lee Child
#73. Accepting a man's hospitality is a token of good will, a declaration that you and your host stand on terms of a civilized relationship.
Ayn Rand
#74. As man develops, he places a greater value upon his own rights. Liberty becomes a grander and diviner thing. As he values his own rights, he begins to value the rights of others. And when all men give to all others all the rights they claim for themselves, this world will be civilized.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#75. Fawcett, quoting a companion, wrote that cannibalism at least provides a reasonable motive for killing a man, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare.
David Grann
#76. In every civilized society there is found a race of men who retain the instincts of the aboriginal cannibal and live upon their fellow-men as a natural food.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#77. Man ... is a tame or civilized animal; never the less, he requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized; but if he be insufficiently or ill- educated he is the most savage of earthly creatures.
Plato
#78. The more I consider the condition of the white men, the more fixed becomes my opinion that, instead of gaining, they have lost much by subjecting themselves to what they call the laws and regulations of civilized socieities.
Tomochichi
#79. 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
#80. I do not oppose the insane asylum - but I abhor and condemn the cutthroat system that robs man of his reason, drives him to insanity and makes the lunatic asylum an indispensable adjunct to every civilized community.
Eugene V. Debs
#81. The American press is a shame and a reproach to a civilized people. When a man is too lazy to work and too cowardly to steal, he becomes an editor and manufactures public opinion.
William T. Sherman
#82. Man and other civilized animals are the only creatures that ever become dirty.
John Muir
#83. Indigenous people believe that Man belongs to the World; civilized people believe that the World belongs to Man.
Daniel Quinn
#84. Morals are nothing but a civilized society's attempt to tame some beast called man.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#85. If you want a war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men are ever subject, because doctrines get inside a man's reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines.
William Graham Sumner
#86. No man, however civilized, can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality.
Aldous Huxley
#87. Then, yes. It's civilized. What a man eats, he should be willing to kill. It's not absolutely necessary that he do so, but he should at least be willing to face the reality of it. To eat a chicken only if it comes from the market is the height of cowardice and denial. Someone still had to kill it.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#88. 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
#89. Miss Rogers waved a hand. "But Mr. Hearst just wants a dramatic story. If the rebels destroy us, he'll get no story at all!"
"Aye, but has anyone explained that to the barking rebels?"
"These are civilized rebels, young man. They have movie deals!"
"That's no guarantee of sanity!
Scott Westerfeld
#90. Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.
Daniel Webster
#91. Since the invention of the flush toilet and the vacuum carpet cleaner, the modern man seems to judge a man's moral standards by his cleanliness, and thinks a dog the more highly civilized for having a weekly bath and a winter wrapper round his belly.
Lin Yutang
#92. When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.
Ayn Rand
#93. Civilized society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible,
Ernest Becker
#94. Even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development.
Henry David Thoreau
#95. Be a dog, be a jerk, be a devil, be a worst imaginable creature, but never be a good man, for being civilized in chaos is itself a chaos.
Abdul Mueed
#96. If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children.
Will Durant
#97. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.
Charles Darwin
#98. Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.
Carl Jung
#99. Now what happens?" asked the man in black.
"We face each other as God intended," Fezzik said. "No tricks, no weapons, skill against skill alone."
"You mean you'll put down your rock and I'll put down my sword and we'll try to kill each other like civilized people, is that it?
William Goldman
#100. In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes. Man's ultimate responsibility is to God alone.
Geoffrey Fisher
