Top 100 Quotes About Civilized
#1. A lot of my writing is not terribly civilized.
Suzanne Vega
#3. 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
#4. You all cool?"
"I'm cool," confirmed Becks.
"I haven't been 'cool' since arriving in this godforsaken hellhole you persist in claiming is a civilized nation. I am, however, ready to go violate a few more laws.
Mira Grant
#6. 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
#7. ...Each of you will begin to be truly human when, in spite of your natural dislike of one another, you still respect one another. That is what it means to be civilized.
William, Saroyan
#8. 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
#9. Dutch prisons are probably the most civilized you're going to find anywhere in the world.
Paul Watson
#10. It was the only field, so far, in which the Pearl of Fortune had shown any precocity, other than the feat of keeping her head, her reason and her sense of the ridiculous amid conditions of civilized lunacy.
Dorothy Dunnett
#11. It is a curious thing ... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
Evelyn Waugh
#12. As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
George Orwell
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. There's a set of unspoken rules we live by when it comes to fighting. We can't help it. It comes from living in a civilized world. Even when you're fighting your hardest, somewhere deep down, you know how far you can go. But today the rules are gone. Today I fight not to win, but to destroy.
Neal Shusterman
#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. Don't make me kill you at this hour in the morning Jimmy. It's not civilized.
Kylie Scott
#19. It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.
Henry David Thoreau
#20. Keynes declared capitalism the best system ever devised to achieve a civilized economic society. But he recognized in it two major faults - its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.
Robert B. Reich
#21. Wine glasses, like fine wines, have always been a symbol of civilized living.
Alexis Lichine
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. ...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
#25. The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.
Thomas Lynch
#26. It is our responsibility to explain to the public how an often unpredictable system of justice is one that serves a productive, civilized, but always evolving, society.
Sonia Sotomayor
#27. How dangerous it is rashly to adopt the Mosaical institutions [Old Testament teachings of eye for an eye]. Laws might have been proper for a tribe of ardent barbarians wandering through the sands of Arabia which are wholly unfit for an enlightened people of civilized and gentle manners.
Gerald Heaney
#28. Cold love's the loveliest love of all. So clear, so crisp, so empty. In short, so civilized.
Mervyn Peake
#29. That the will of the people can be established by voting for democrats is, of course, a delusion. Yet when considering a non-threatening system for deciding between diverse interests, then voting, of course, can be regarded as a humane and civilized process.
Robert Musil
#30. There are only two ways, as you know, of becoming civilized. One is by being cultured, the other is by being corrupt.
Oscar Wilde
#31. I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man: It is we.
Konrad Lorenz
#32. One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions - sorrow and anger - adequately.
Anita Brookner
#33. PANTALOONS, n. A nether habiliment of the adult civilized male. The garment is tubular and unprovided with hinges at the points of flexion. Supposed to have been invented by a humorist. Called trousers by the enlightened and pants by the unworthy.
Ambrose Bierce
#34. It is how decent, civilized people behave, Captain Ransom. Though I suppose that to someone of your level of moral fortitude, it must seem remarkable.
Jim Butcher
#35. The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
Alfred North Whitehead
#36. Where will you find any code of laws among civilized men in which the commands and prohibitions are not founded on Christian principles? I need not specify the prohibition of murder, robbery, theft, trespass.
Noah Webster
#37. He felt the evidence showed that some metaphysical force had directed evolution at three different points: the beginning of life, the beginning of consciousness, and the beginning of civilized culture.
Julian Jaynes
#38. Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.
Carl Jung
#39. Fleetingly, unnervingly, I understand what he's saying but cannot accept a world that is so brutally black and white. Murder, rape and torture are the apparatus of terrorists, not of civilized societies. If we become like them, what hope do we have?
Michael Robotham
#40. You can have a coke since you never did learn to be civilized and drink coffee.
Nora Roberts
#41. 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
#42. The most refined shedders of blood have been almost always the most highly civilized gentlemen.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#43. 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
#44. The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society.
Mark Skousen
#45. 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
#46. The music masters familiarize children's minds with rhythms and melodies, thus making them more civilized, more balanced, better adjusted in themselves, and more capable in whatever they say or do, for rhythm and harmony are essential to the whole of life.
Plato
#47. Ah," Bridget said, flushing slightly. As the glib-tongued lout in question, she was currently on the receiving end of this facet of the habble's law. "I'm not sure everyone would agree with you. We're a civilized society, are we not?" Esterbrook blinked. "Since when, miss? We're a democracy.
Jim Butcher
#48. The rule of law bakes no bread, it is unable to distribute loaves or fishes (it has none), and it cannot protect itself against external assault, but it remains the most civilized and least burdensome conception of a state yet to be devised.
Michael Oakeshott
#49. Feeling the inevitable claim of the this desert, he experienced a desire to throw off his civilized costume, hurl himself upon Josephina, either succumb, or return to Guadalajara, where men could only complain of having too many buttons to button or unbutton...
Warren Eyster
#50. Then that accounts for it. In the civilized countries I believe there are no witches left, nor wizards, nor sorceresses, nor magicians. But, you see, the Land of Oz has never been civilized, for we are cut off from all the rest of the world. Therefore we still have witches and wizards amongst us.
L. Frank Baum
#51. The true nature of a human being is not compatible with the so-called civilized world.
Bryant McGill
#53. When she found his eyes, hers were fuller and sharper, lit with something that had entered the world centuries before civilized things. "I get off at midnight," she said.
Dennis Lehane
#54. 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
#55. For the individual, education is the path to achievement and fulfillment; for the nation, it is a path to a society that is not only free but civilized; and for the world, it is the path to peace - for it is education that places reason over force.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#56. 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
William Goldman
#57. That little boys and girls should be tormented is what no one at all acquainted with human nature in a civilized state can deny.
Jane Austen
#58. The familiar smells of a busy tavern at an hour closer to dawn than dinner. Sweat, scalded meat, puke, blood, smoke, and a dozen kinds of bad ale and wine: the bouquet of the civilized nightlife.
Scott Lynch
#59. Etiquette, Seward had once told Jamison, was all that mattered. Ideologies waxed and waned, religions developed and eroded, political parties rose and fell from power. Only courtesy remained one of the few things valued by all civilized men.
Connie Brockway
#60. I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me to be the most civilized music in the world.
Peter Ustinov
#61. Drawing used to be a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness.
Michael Kimmelman
#62. 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
#63. Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them.
Nicholas Meyer
#64. Nothing is more useless in developing a nation's economy than a gun, and nothing blocks the road to social development more than the financial burden of war. War is the arch enemy of national progress and the modern scourge of civilized men.
King Hussein I
#65. Every leader, and every regime, and every movement, and every organization that steps across the line to terrorism must be banished from the discourse of civilized human life.
Alan Keyes
#66. It's true we have our disagreements on border issues, we have disagreements on trade and related issues, but you don't go invading a country whenever you have a dispute on trade issues, ... We have more civilized mechanisms on resolving such problems.
Meles Zenawi
#67. Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.
Howard Zinn
#68. Said nothing, I could tell he was resigned. So here's what's going to happen. I am going to prepare a nice dinner, and then I am going to bring it up here and you and I are going to eat like two civilized
Nina G. Jones
#69. Things became more civilized all of a sudden. Coffee does that. Or maybe it is women who do that.
Elizabeth Wein
#70. The village had a mill near it, situated on the little creek, which made very good flour. The population consisted of civilized Indians, but much mixed blood.
Zebulon Pike
#71. Our freedom is under attack. Our economy is under water. The leading democrat is under investigation. And America is under the gun to lead the free world to protect our civilized way of life.
Jeb Bush
#72. The Internet does not have a reputation as being a particularly civilized place.
Anita Borg
#73. In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad
Pamela Geller
#74. CHILDREN Are Like ANGELS And On Earth, ANGELS Have No Color ... It's The Society To Blame That Teaches Racism, Turning An ANGLE To A Civilized Beast While They Are Growing Up ...
Muhammad Imran Hasan
#75. A disaffected America can be drawn into a civilized - but disruptive - dialogue about political change and reformation.
David Ignatius
#76. He wasn't just beautiful; he was ... enthralling. He was the kind of guy who made a woman want to rip his shirt open and watch the buttons scatter along with her inhibitions. I looked at him in his civilized, urbane, outrageously expensive suit and thought of raw, primal, sheet-clawing fucking.
Sylvia Day
#77. I'll take your bet," he said grimly. "I'm going to win it. And in three months, I'm going to put this back on your finger, and take you to bed, and do things to you that are outlawed in the civilized world.
Lisa Kleypas
#78. Restraints upon our natural inclinations, which left to themselves do not automatically lead us to do what is good for us and often indeed lead us to evil, are not only necessary; they are the indispensable condition of civilized existence.
Theodore Dalrymple
#79. If I had to point to one invention in my lifetime that separated howling barbarism from civilized existence, it would be coffee.
Edward W. Robertson
#80. 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
#81. And no wonder; for the new technique of "subliminal projection," as it was called, was intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings massed entertainment now plays a part comparable to that played in the Middle Ages be religion.
Aldous Huxley
#82. The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts.
Bergen Evans
#83. Terrorism must be outlawed by all civilized nations - not explained or rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children.
Elie Wiesel
#84. When your whole system, your whole civilized system goes down, this is pretty much what you get left with. We have no communications, no running water, no electricity, no real help.
Kathleen Blanco
#85. 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
#86. The first purpose of clothes ... was not warmth or decency, but ornament ... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.
Thomas Carlyle
#87. Why is our (US) government the only one in the civilized world with a stupid, short-term energy policy? Why do our elected officials consider a European or Japanese-type energy tax not only unpassable but undiscussable?
Donella Meadows
#88. I think, certainly in the more civilized societies, women's roles are growing in power all of the time.
Sally Quinn
#89. 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
#90. Design, vitalized and simplified, will make the comforts of civilized life available to an ever-increasing number of Americans.
Raymond Loewy
#91. Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
Robert E. Howard
#92. Only those who have the will and the power to shoot down their fellow men, are the real rulers in this, as in all other (so-called) civilized countries; for by no others will civilized men be robbed, or enslaved.
Lysander Spooner
#93. Entrepreneurship is not a civilized joust. It is streetfighting.
James Hong
#94. This report inflamed my mind to such a degree that I could not rest by night or day for dreaming golden dreams, and considering how to get to that rich district, unknown to civilized men.
William Henry Hudson
#95. His remit will be to monitor the use of reality-modification weapons by both sides in the conflict and to assure the civilized worlds that the New Republic does not engage in gratuitous use of time travel as a weapon of mass destruction.
Charles Stross
#96. In a desperate bid to reestablish civilized talk and decorum, Miss Hisselpenny said, quite loudly, I see they are bringing in the fish course. What a pleasant surprise. I do so love fish. Don't you Mr., uh, Dubh. It is so very, um, salty.
Gail Carriger
#97. But when they brought Sabira out, the crowd parted almost magically. A sea of hands rose faster than a swell and a bidding war commenced, amongst these civilized gentlemen who made their living off the backs of slaves.
Jay Grewal
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. The most base of men can be civilized through suffering.
St. Jerome
