Top 100 Quotes About Civilised
#2. Conscience is just a polite word for cowardice. No civilised man regrets a pleasure.
Lord Henry Wotton
#3. The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.
Richard Dawkins
#4. Detective, have you ever considered the fact that violence is the recourse of the uncivilised man?" Skulduggery looked back. "I'm sophisticated, charming, suave and debonair, Professor. But I have never claimed to be civilised.
Derek Landy
#5. If modern civilised man had to keep the animals he eats, the number of vegetarians would rise astronomically.
Christian Morgenstern
#6. I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.
Richard Dawkins
#7. If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#8. The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.
Bertrand Russell
#9. You get the feeling that many of my guests feel that the French language gives them entry into a more cultivated, more intelligent world, more highly civilised too, with rules.
Bernard Pivot
#10. The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.
H.P. Lovecraft
#11. When most objects are truly functional, this technological age, which is just beginning, will be truly civilised. When all objects in this country are truly functional, Australia will be as beautiful in its own way as classical Greece.
Robin Boyd
#12. The problem with a lot of people is that what they think is a virtue is actually a vice in disguise. It's much easier to convince yourself that you're reasonable and civilised, than soft and weak, isn't it?
Kevin Dutton
#13. And he had been very badly treated by a girl too. He had thought her a really civilised and adult personality, and then she had unexpectedly revealed that she was a mass of bourgeois prejudices and monogamic instincts.
C.S. Lewis
#14. We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#15. The more you stand aloof from the sword, from the arrow, from the lance and from the fist, the more you become civilised!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#16. The situation was primordial. The Man beneath prevailed for a moment over the civilised superstructure, the Draper. He pushed at the pedals with archaic violence. So Palaeolithic man may have ridden his simple bicycle of chipped flint in pursuit of his exogamous affinity.
H.G.Wells
#17. The deserts of Arabia are innocent of our civilised desolation-the ruins of Palestine are incapable of our modern gloom!
Wilkie Collins
#18. I didn't cry. Real things don't make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I'm like most civilised humans.
Glen Duncan
#19. In civilised society law is the chimney through which all that smoke discharges itself that used to circulate through the whole house,
Walter Scott
#20. Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.
Christopher Hitchens
#21. There are other, civilised ways of dealing with the matter," Dllenahkh insisted.
Darithiven looked at him with pity. "Then, by your definition, this cannot be civilisation.
Karen Lord
#22. Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 - From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)
Virginia Woolf
#23. Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
Adam Gopnik
#24. That civilised life cannot be lived without taboos - that some of them may indeed be justified, and that therefore taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished - is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism.
Theodore Dalrymple
#25. I think the police are a major part of the glue that holds civilised life together. They're not highly paid.
Peter James
#26. Who made the 999 call?"
"Dunno," said Purdy. "Mobile, probably."
It's officers like Purdy that give the Metropolitan Police its sterling reputation for customer service that makes us the envy of the civilised world.
Ben Aaronovitch
#27. Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.
J.G. Ballard
#28. England is the only civilised country in the world where it is etiquette to fall on the food like a wolf the moment it is served. Elsewhere it is comme il faut to wait until everybody has helped himself to everything and until everything on everybody's plate is stone cold.
Virginia Graham
#29. Who is that witch, asked the old man with the black eyepatch, these are things we say when we do not know how to take a good look at ourselves, had he lived as she had lived, we should like to see how long his civilised ways would last.
Jose Saramago
#30. On this waterlogged landscape ... are scattered palaces and hovels ... It is here that the human spirit becomes perfect, and at the same time brutalised, that civilisation produces its marvels and that civilised man returns to the savage.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#31. If I'm alone in the car and I fart, I still laugh at it. It's the little things that keep us civilised ...
Dana Gould
#32. Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilised folk to despise war.
Allan Massie
#33. The possession and the enjoyment of property are the pledges which bind a civilised people to an improved country.
Edward Gibbon
#34. It is a mark of civilised man that he seeks to understand his traditions, and to criticise them, not to swallow them whole.
Moses Finley
#35. We both wanted money. Immense necessity! Universal want! Is there a civilised human being who does not feel for us? How insensible must that man be! Or how rich!
Wilkie Collins
#36. I would like you to teach [the orcs] civilised behaviour," said Ladyship coldly.
He appeared to consider this. "Yes of course, I think that would be quite possible," he said. "And who would you send to teach the humans?
Terry Pratchett
#37. When my last relationship broke up, I bought a house one door along from my ex so that our daughter could continue to see as much of both of us as possible. This seems to me eminently sane and civilised.
John Niven
#38. Most men, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war.
Vera Brittain
#39. If there was anything any Radchaai considered essential for civilised life, it was tea.
Ann Leckie
#40. That monstrous tuberosity of civilised life, the capital of England.
Thomas Carlyle
#41. They were savages, yet they were ghosts. The two most terrible and dreaded foes of civilised experience seemed combined at once in them.
Grant Allen
#42. I am much more passionate about cities than I am about nations. The competition between cities is more civilised than between nations. There is an understanding there.
Richard Rogers
#43. We are all adventurers here, I suppose, and wild doings in wild countries appeal to us as nothing else could do. It is good to know that there remain wild corners of this dreadfully civilised world.
Robert Falcon Scott
#44. This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down.24
Karl Marx
#45. In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature.
James Payn
#46. To realise the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.
Isaiah Berlin
#48. If you want to be a civilised man, first you have to be a non-violent man! If you want to be a civilised country, first you have to be a non-violent country! Violence is the means of the sick minds; peacefulness is the means of the healthy minds!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#49. The nineteenth century will ever be known as the one in which the influences of science were first fully realised in civilised communities; the scientific progress was so gigantic that it seems rash to predict that any of its successors can be more important in the life of any nation.
Norman Lockyer
#50. It is the decisive people who have become civilised; it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#51. Adventures, I reflected, are all very fine but a certain amount of civilised comfort forms the true kernel of our desires.
K.W. Jeter
#52. I sometimes feel that the world is a very uncivilised place where it is meant to be at its most civilised. Where it's meant to be intellectual or artistic or compassionate, it isn't, and that makes me very angry.
Rachel Cusk
#53. There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilised and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons.
Anthony Trollope
#54. I think you will agree the sign of a civilised society is a regular dining schedule.
Philippa Ballantine
#55. Hollywood is probably the most active centre of film-making in the world, but it's also a very difficult place in which to find your voice ... It was also a far more civilised industry in Ireland.
Lenny Abrahamson
#56. War was a hellish, horrible hideous thing - too horrible and hideous to happen in the twentieth century between civilised nations.
L.M. Montgomery
#57. Civilised adults do not take apple juice with dinner.
Fran Lebowitz
#58. When we get civilised, I believe children will go by number until they get old enough to choose their own names.
Myrtle Reed
#59. I've been on jobs like that before, everyone stuck on the money not the work, watching their backs every minute. Bad for your health and your business. We'll do this civilised, or not at all. What do you say?
"I say civilised," said Shenkt. "For pity's sake, let's kill like honest men.
Joe Abercrombie
#60. Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.
George Orwell
#61. I did not know it, but that was the last civilised dinner I was to eat for very many strange and terrible days.
H.G.Wells
#62. A civilised man is someone who has discovered something more satisfying than combat.
John Keegan
#63. Swedes are such a civilised, perfect society - at least on the surface. There's a great safety net, a huge middle class, free education, free health care. People are very polite, they wait their turn. They're not too loud, they're not too quiet, but sometimes it's a little too perfect.
Alexander Skarsgard
#64. The war on terror is the most insane and immoral war of all time. The Americans are doing what they did in Vietnam, bombing villages. But how can a civilised nation do this? How can you can eliminate suspects, their wives, their children, their families, their neighbours? How can you justify this?
Imran Khan
#66. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.
C.S. Lewis
#67. Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
Herbert Spencer
#68. Asia is not going to be civilised after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.
Rudyard Kipling
#69. There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.
James Robertson
#70. It is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.
Samuel Johnson
#71. If the last few weeks had taught Han anything, it was that he didn't belong in the civilised part of her world. His place was in the bowels of the Falcon, or the pilot's seat.
James S.A. Corey
#72. A city with no way of telling the time can by no stretch of the imagination be called civilised. It's just a mob with walls.
K.J. Parker
#73. A wasteland is a confrontation to a man of stature: an empty place, a gauntlet thrown down in challenge and defiance. A place like that cries out to be conquered and civilised.
John C. Wright
#74. As a civilised society, we have a duty to support those among us who are vulnerable and in need. When times are hard, that duty should be felt more than ever, not disappear or diminish.
Justin Welby
#75. To me you cannot be fully human, fully civilised, unless you recognise humanity in everyone.
Hillary Clinton
#76. Brotherhood" to the more civilised is connected with training and identity of interest.' Man
Idries Shah
#77. We would all love to walk up to someone and shoot them in the head, there's no doubt about that. We're too civilised to admit it, but we're happy to read about it.
Lee Child
#78. We can only truly be civilised people when we have regular and meaningful contact with the wild world
Simon Barnes
#79. The ancient Roman code belongs to a class of which almost every civilised nation in the world can show a sample, and which, so far as the Roman and Hellenic worlds were concerned, were largely diffused over them at epochs not widely distant from one another.
Henry James Sumner Maine
#80. When men learnt to talk in the beginning of the civilised word they used language not as a means of communication alone but as a means of excluding others
using it as a way of setting themselves apart and shutting out strangers.
Charlotte Lamb
#81. No man who is in a hurry is quite civilised.
Ariel Durant
#82. London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.
Renzo Piano
#83. Now that their long war was over, they could get on with the proper concern of all civilised nations, which is to prepare for the next one.
Terry Pratchett
#84. In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
Thorstein Veblen
#85. Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#86. You have to protect your food, otherwise someone else takes it! There is no divinity in here! But there is divinity there: In a civilised order where no being has to defend for its food!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#87. Violence is the tool of the barbarian; aggression is the method of the primitive; bloodshed is the way of the savage; cruelty is the manner of the brutish! To be called as a 'civilised,' man must be peaceable!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#88. With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.
Charles Darwin
#89. No civilised man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilised man ever knows what a pleasure is.
Oscar Wilde
#90. The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man, and is always talking about what he may do.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#91. We now lay in towns, where nobody troubled us with questions; we had floated into civilised life, where people pass without salutation.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#92. A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.
Primo Levi
#93. Society needs both justice and compassion, a head and a heart, if it is to be civilised.
Julian Baggini
#94. The civilised cultures are the most cruel. It's the same with education - often it breeds sadistic forms of cruelty.
Nellie McKay
#95. Man does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much the same thing, because he is exhausted
G.K. Chesterton
#96. There is nothing more foreign to a civilised and democratic system than preventive detention.
Robert Bourassa
#97. This extraordinary metal, the soul of every manufacture, and the mainspring perhaps of civilised society. Of iron.
Samuel Smiles
#98. I am not what you call a civilised man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons which I alone have the right of appreciating. I do not, therefore, obey its laws, and I desire you never to allude to them before me again!
Jules Verne
#99. We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.
Oscar Wilde
#100. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.
Karl Marx
