Civilized Quotes

• Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

  Leonard Woolf

  Character, Men, Effort

  Leonard Woolf (1939). “Barbarians Within and Without”

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• Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Taken, Gains

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Self-Reliance and Other Essays”, p.36, Courier Corporation

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• 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

  Live Life, Men, Civilization

  Robert E. Howard (2007). “The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 2: Grim Lands”, p.31, Del Rey

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• Perhaps only when people can enjoy their differences as a resource of cultural enrichment do they become truly civilized.

  Herb Kawainui Kane

  Differences, People, Citizenship

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• The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Vigor, Aim, Civilized Society

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• 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

  Children, Men, Heritage

  Will Durant (2002). “The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time”, p.6, Simon and Schuster

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• The best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation; after that, mass indoctrination; after that, intercultural exchange.

  Joseph Campbell

  Misunderstood, Second Best, Conversation

  Joseph Campbell (1991). “The Masks of God: Creative Mythology”, Penguin Group USA

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• A semi-civilized state of society, equally removed from the extremes of barbarity and of refinement, seems to be that particular meridian under which all the reciprocities and gratuities of hospitality do most readily flourish and abound. For it so happens that the ease, the luxury, and the abundance of the highest state of civilization, are as productive of selfishness, as the difficulties, the privations, and the sterilities of he lowest.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Civilization, Luxury, Selfishness

  Charles Caleb Colton (1821). “Lacon: or, Many things in few words”, p.227

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• The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Men, Community

  "Heretics". Chapter XIV: "On Certain Modern Writers and the Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Institution of the Family", 1905.

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• In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Creativity, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.144

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• The vast majority of the race whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind at heart and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.

  Mark Twain

  Pain, Heart, Race

  Mark Twain (1992). “The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories”, p.110, Courier Corporation

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• The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts.

  Bergen Evans

  Trust, Wisdom, Men

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• Emotions are the fuel and the mind is the pilot which together propel the ship of civilized progress.

  Jim Rohn

  Mind, Together, Progress

  Jim Rohn (2013). “7 Strategies for Wealth & Happiness: Power Ideas from America's Foremost Business Philosopher”, p.150, Harmony

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• Civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Knowledge, Men, Civilization

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek. Part I: "The Value of Freedom". Chapter 2: "The Creative Power of a Free Civilization", 1960.

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• The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion, the being, and attributes, and providence of one Almighty God: the responsibility to him for all our actions, founded upon moral freedom and accountability; a future state of rewards and punishments; the cultivation of all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues-these these never can be a matter of indifference in any well-ordered community. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how any civilized society can exist without them.

  Joseph Story

  Responsibility, Punishment, Community

  Joseph Story (1833). “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States: With a Preliminary Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and States, Before the Adoption of the Constitution”, p.699

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• The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.

  Rachel Carson

  War, Civilization, Losing

  Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.99, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The snake kills by squeezing very slowly. This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be.

  James Cameron

  Snakes, World, Forests

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• One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting.

  George Orwell

  Safe, Emotion, Life Is

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• In civilized communities, property as well as personal rights is an essential object of the laws, which encourage industry by securing the enjoyment of its fruits; that industry from which property results, and that enjoyment which consists not merely in its immediate use, but in its posthumous destination to objects of choice, and of kindred affection. In a just and free government, therefore, the rights both of property and of persons ought to be effectually guarded.

  James Madison

  Freedom, Law, Rights

  "Selections from the Private Correspondence of James Madison, from 1813 to 1836".

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• The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Experience, Savages

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “Walden; Or, Life in the Woods”, p.26, Courier Corporation

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• Have you ever heard one civilized person whose opinion you respect, at any time, anywhere, in any civilized country anywhere, say the good new days?

  Cleveland Amory

  Country, Past, New Day

  Cleveland Amory (1980). “The trouble with nowadays: a curmudgeon strikes back”, G K Hall & Co

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• Bigotry toward any faith community cannot have any place in civilized society anywhere in the world.

  Feisal Abdul Rauf

  Community, World, Civilized Society

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• There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened civilized people.

  Mark Twain

  Party, Civilization, Differences

  Mark Twain (1869). “The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrims' Progress”, p.275

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• He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

  Don DeLillo

  Pain, Self, World

  Don DeLillo (2011). “White Noise”, p.24, Pan Macmillan

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• The moral authority in the Western world is gone. And it is gone forever. It is gone, not because of the criminal record--everybody's record is criminal. It is gone because you cannot do one thing and pretend you're doing another! None of us, who are sitting around in some of the true limbo out-of-space, which we call "now," waiting to be saved, civilized, or discovered, have the moral authority to say anything.

  James A. Baldwin

  Space, Waiting, Forever

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