Civilizing Quotes

#1. The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.

Kenneth Clark

#2. Books were despised by the Viking Tribes, as they were seen as a horrible civilizing influence and a threat to the barbarian culture.

Cressida Cowell

#3. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.

Katherine Dunn

#4. The civilizing process has increased the distance between behavior and the impulse life of the animal body.

Shoshana Zuboff

#5. I'm for prayer in the schools because ritual and ceremony are calming and civilizing, and the little fartlings should be tamped down whenever possible.

Florence King

#6. Horror and panic themselves are forms of violence, and diminishing them, restricting their dimensions, is itself a civilizing act.

Walter Kirn

#7. The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.

John Adams

#8. In many ways, the crumbling of the institution of marriage is the real 'war on women.' Marriage is the civilizing influence for men and for families.

Tim Huelskamp

#9. Egypt restored to prosperity, regenerated by wise and enlightened administration ... would shed its civilizing rays upon all its Oriental neighbors.

Edward W. Said

#10. Justice is the foremost virtue of the civilizing races. It subdues the barbarous nations, while injustice arouses the weakest.

Jose Rizal

#11. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life
the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure
had gone steadily on to a climax ... And the harvest was what I saw.

H.G.Wells

#12. Old gold has a civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting.

James Russell Lowell

#13. There's no handbook for parenting. So you walk a very fine line as a parent because you are civilizing these raw things. They will tip the coffee over and finger-paint on the table. At some point, you have to say, 'We're gonna have to clean that up because you don't paint with coffee on a table.'

Gary Oldman

#14. Such Africans soon encounter the many contradictions inherent in colonialism as a civilizing institution and agent of European culture on the one hand, and colonialism as an oppressive, exploitative, and violent political and economic system and agent of white supremacy on the other.

John Mukum Mbaku

#15. Gingrich - Primary mission, Advocate of civilization, Definer of civilization, Teacher of the rules of civilization, Leader of the civilizing forces.

Newt Gingrich

#16. It was only as part of the civilizing process that storytelling developed within the aristocratic and bourgeois homes, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through governesses and nannies, and later in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries through mothers, who told bedtime stories.

Jack D. Zipes

#17. Wine is a civilizing agent.

Clifton Fadiman

#18. Art moves. Hence its civilizing power.

Victor Hugo

#19. The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'.

James C. Scott

#20. Education and study, and the favours of the muses, confer no greater benefit on those that seek them than these humanizing and civilizing lessons, which teach our natural qualities to submit to the limitations prescribed by reason, and to avoid the wildness of extremes.

Plutarch

#21. The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.

Eric Hoffer

#22. Enthusiasts for empire argued that Rome had a civilizing mission; that because her values and institutions were self-evidently superior to those of barbarians, she had a duty to propagate them; that only once the whole globe had been subjected to her rule could there be a universal peace.

Tom Holland

#23. Every civilizing step in history has been ridiculed as 'sentimental', 'impractical', or 'womanish', etc., by those whose fun, profit or convenience was at stake

Joan Gilbert

#24. The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.

Peter Kropotkin

#25. The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that, when it is born, is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.

Roald Dahl

#26. I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head. No Jacob's ladder this, no, but rather Civilization's Ladder, if you will.

David Mitchell

#27. The power which the Hellenes and even the Italians possessed, of civilizing and assimilating to themselves the nations susceptible of culture with whom they came into contact, was wholly wanting in the Phoenicians.

Theodor Mommsen

#28. The major civilizing force in the world is not religion, it is sex.

Hugh Hefner

#29. Christianity is the greatest civilizing, moulding, uplifting power on this globe.

Mark Hopkins

#30. Woman's success in lifting men out of their way of life nearly resembling that of the beasts who merely hunted and fished for food, who found shelter where they could in jungles, in trees, and caves was a civilizing triumph.

Mary Ritter Beard

#31. The socialism of our day has done good service in setting men to thinking how certain civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by theopulent, can be enjoyed by all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#32. Law is the great civilizing machinery. It liberates the desire to build and subdues the desire to destroy.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#33. The literary fairy tale became an acceptable social symbolic form through which conventionalized motifs, characters, and plots were selected, composed, arranged, and rearranged to comment on the civilizing process and to keep alive the possibility of miraculous change and a sense of wonderment.

Jack D. Zipes

#34. Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it. It is civilizing because it puts truth ahead of all else, including personal interests.

John Polanyi

#35. In the development of mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as the civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to altruism.

Sigmund Freud

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

Freya Stark

#37. We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.

Eric Berne