Top 51 Quotes About Being Civilized
#1. It is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.
Freya Stark
#2. 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
#3. With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.
Oscar Wilde
#4. 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
#5. Being civilized means that one keeps one's words unrelated to one's thoughts, when necessary.
Ursula Parrott
#6. I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.
Peter Schjeldahl
#7. What's the good of being civilized, that's what I'd like to know? It just means other people can break the rules and you can't.
Diana Wynne Jones
#9. The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilized being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.
Oscar Wilde
#10. 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
#12. The true nature of a human being is not compatible with the so-called civilized world.
Bryant McGill
#13. 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
#14. In any civilized society the most important task is achieving a proper balance between freedom and order. In wartime, reason and history both suggest that this balance shifts in favor ... of the government's ability to deal with conditions that threaten the national well-being.
William Rehnquist
#15. Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.
Carl Jung
#16. There are only two ways, as you know, of becoming civilized. One is by being cultured, the other is by being corrupt.
Oscar Wilde
#17. A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive.
James Weldon Johnson
#18. He'd always prided himself on being more civilized than his brothers, but so much for that; he was becoming aroused in a damned sewer.
Larissa Ione
#19. 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
#20. We were bothered by sex because it is a fundamentally disruptive, overwhelming and demented force, strongly at odds with the majority of our ambitions and all but incapable of being discreetly integrated within civilized society.
Alain De Botton
#21. The Internet does not have a reputation as being a particularly civilized place.
Anita Borg
#22. Just now one of the significant historical roles of the primal people of the world is not simply to sustain their own traditions, but call the entire civilized world back to a more authentic mode of being.
Thomas Berry
#23. In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.
Steven Pinker
#24. Art is a necessity - an essential part of our enlightenment process. We cannot, as a civilized society, regard ourselves as being enlightened without the arts.
Ken Danby
#25. It seems to me that the civilized human being is a skeptic someone who believes nothing at face value.
Robert McKee
#26. I'm also alternative because of Canada - there's something romantic about being Canadian. We're a relatively unpopulated, somewhat civilized, and clean and resourceful country. I always push the fact that I'm Canadian.
K.d. Lang
#27. 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
#28. It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.
Henry Louis Gates
#29. But we are more than genteel or civilized/ we are an idea in the process of being realized.
Shane Koyczan
#30. To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#31. The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame
Terry Pratchett
#32. 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
#33. With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an agent of the angel of death.
Elie Wiesel
#34. There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.
Walter Lippmann
#35. 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
#36. A rational human being of the civilized world would be like the swan that can draw the milk from a mixture of milk and water, leaving aside the water.
Abhijit Naskar
#37. 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
#38. How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?
Edith Wharton
#39. This great question of predestination and free will, of free moral agency and accountability, and being saved by the grace of God, and damned for the glory of God, have occupied the mind of what we call the civilized world for many centuries.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#40. I never said I hated the Marine Corps! I only said it was no place for a sensitive, civilized, self-respecting human being.
William Styron
#41. The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.
Nelson A. Miles
#42. Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.
C. G. Jung
#43. soldier's first duty, his reason for being, is not to fight. Fighting is the final recourse for any civilized people. His duty is not even to preserve the peace; that is a police officer's job,
Evan Currie
#44. It's easy for me to go back to being a kid. You know how kids can be like savages before they get civilized? There's that sadist quality. Y'know, like boys who like to pick apart an insect for the sake of it.
Helena Bonham Carter
#45. War is part of our history, but it is not in at all the same sense part of our prehistory. It is one of the innovations that occurred between nine and eleven thousand years ago when the first civilized societies were coming into being. What has been invented can be changed; war is not in our genes.
Gwynne Dyer
#46. Today an educated, civilized society is turning its face while thousands of unborn babies are being killed. God Himself, if not history, will judge this greater holocaust.
Billy Graham
#47. In all of my books, I've emphasized that the fundamental difference between civilized and indigenous ways of being is that, for even the most open-minded of the civilized, listening to the natural world is a metaphor.
Derrick Jensen
#48. The barbarian loves his own pride, and hates, or disbelieves in, the pride of others. I will be a civilized being, I will love the pride of my adversaries, of my servants, and my lover; and my house shall be, in all humility, in the wilderness a civilized place.
Karen Blixen
#49. But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.
Susan Sontag
#50. There are two things civilized Man should never see being made: Sausages and Laws.
Otto Von Bismarck
#51. You want us all to be snake-charmers and scorpion-eaters," he raged, at one point in their conversation ...
"Naturally," Eunice replied in her most provoking manner. "It would be far preferable to being a nation of tenth-rate pseudo-civilized rug-sellers.
Paul Bowles
