Civilized Quotes - Page 25

• Since the invention of the flush toilet and the vacuum carpet cleaner, the modern man seems to judge a man's moral standards by his cleanliness, and thinks a dog the more highly civilized for having a weekly bath and a winter wrapper round his belly.

  Lin Yutang

  Dog, Winter, Men

  Yutang Lin (1939). “My country and my people”

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• Just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation.

  Hannah Arendt

  Country, Men, Law

  "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" by Hannah Arendt, (Ch. VIII), 1963.

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• For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus the killing of a god may sometimes come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal.

  James G. Frazer

  Sacrifice, Criminals, Doe

  "The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion". Book by James G. Frazer, 1890.

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• The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.

  J. G. Ballard

  Past, World, Residents

  J. G. Ballard (2014). “Running Wild”, p.62, Macmillan

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• Among civilized peoples, especially the very wealthy population of the United States of America, women have become objects of luxury who consume but do not produce.

  Vilfredo Pareto

  Luxury, America, United States

  Vilfredo Pareto (1971). “Manual of political economy”, Augustus m Kelley Pubs

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• It is man's vision of a world fit for rational, civilized humanity which leads him to dare and to suffer to build societies free from want and fear. Concepts such as truth, justice and compassion cannot be dismissed as trite when these are often the only bulwarks which stand against ruthless power.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Compassion, Men, Justice

  Aung San Suu Kyi (1991). “Freedom from fear: and other writings”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Under extremely difficult circumstances (Iraq) pursues the inherently complicated task of rebuilding the country. Yet Iraq continues, courageously, to reach for the promise of a democratic, federal and pluralistic state, where generations of oppressed Iraqis will regain their dignity, freedom and the right to join the civilized and progressive nations of the world.

  Jalal Talabani

  Country, Iraq, Promise

  "Keep U.S., British forces in Iraq, says Talabani". The Toronto Star, September 23, 2006.

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• I am unable to rouse much interest in any highly civilized race, country or epoch, including this one.

  Robert E. Howard

  Country, Race, Interest

  Letter to H. P. Lovecraft, August 9, 1932.

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• Rebellion against technology and civilization is real rebellion, a real attack on the values of the existing system. But the green anarchists, anarcho-primitivists, and so forth (The "GA Movement") have fallen under such heavy influence from the left that their rebellion against civilization has to great extent been neutralized. Instead of rebelling against the values of civilization, they have adopted many civilized values themselves and have constructed an imaginary picture of primitive societies that embodies these civilized values.

  Theodore Kaczynski

  Real, Technology, Civilization

  "The Road to Revolution" by Theodore Kaczynski, 2008.

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• This priesthood became a closed group, able to control enormous wealth and incomes, and concerned very largely with the study of the solar and astronomical periodicities on which there influence was originally based. With the surplus thus created, the priesthood was able to command human labor in huge amounts and to direct this labor from the simple tillage of the peasant peoples to the diversified and specialized activities that constitute civilized living.

  Carroll Quigley

  Simple, Able, Groups

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• 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

  War, Years, Innovation

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• The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.

  Gao Xingjian

  War, Moving, Europe

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• Every humane and patriotic heart must grieve to see a bloody and causeless rebellion, costing thousands of human lives and millions of treasure. But as it was predetermined and inevitable, it was long enough delayed. Now is the appropriate time to solve the greatest problem ever submitted to civilized man.

  Thaddeus Stevens

  Heart, Patriotic, Men

  Thaddeus Stevens (1997). “The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens: January 1814-March 1865”, University of Pittsburgh Pre

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• Still how unenlightened and ignorant are the very nations we term civilized!

  Jean-Baptiste Say

  Ignorant, Term, Stills

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• Opulent, civilized, and industrious nations, are greater consumers than poor ones, because they are infinitely greater producers.

  Jean-Baptiste Say

  Poor, Producers, Consumers

  Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, J.R. McCulloch (2013). “History of Economic Theory: The Selected Writings of Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, and J.R. McCulloch”, p.96, Coventry House Publishing

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• There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers.

  William Damon

  Education, Kids, Self

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• A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science. With modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search.

  Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

  Powerful, Past, Ethos

  "My Dearest Daughter: A letter from the Death Cell". Book by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, p. 15, 2007.

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• The one enemy in the world that America has is England. But then, England is the great land of Christian civilization, and it may not be a thing to be much wondered at that our Americans whom we send to represent us in London become in a short time somewhat civilized, and learn to love those who hate them, bless those that curse them, and do good to those that persecute and calumniate them.

  Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa

  Christian, Hate, Land

  Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa (1898). “Rossa's Recollections, 1838 to 1898: Childhood, Boyhood, Manhood. Customs, Habits and Manners of the Irish People. Erinach and Sassenach-Catholic and Protestant-Englishman and Irishman-English Religion-Irish Plunder. Social Life and Prison Life. The Fenian Movement. Travels in Ireland, England, Scotland and America”

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• There are crimes which no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done 'for the common good.'...one might point to the way in which racial hatreds and even persecution are admitted by people who consider themselves, and perhaps in some sense are, kind, tolerant, civilized and even humane.

  Thomas Merton

  Names, People, Evil

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• The triumph of the Confederacy... would be a victory for the powers of evil which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the sprits of its friends all over the civilized world... [The American Civil War] is destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs.

  John Stuart Mill

  War, Enemy Of Progress, History

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• The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Culture, Fields

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.416, Knopf

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• The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.

  E. O. Wilson

  Mind, Ordinary, Details

  "Biophilia". Book by E. O. Wilson, 1984.

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• I like night fishing, even though there is a molecule of terror in it. Maybe it is that tiny bit of terror that I relish, that going mano a mano with another predator in the dark. I know it is not entirely civilized, but there is nothing to compare with the sizzle of fear except, perhaps, the rush of being feared. Either condition confirms you are alive.

  Paul G. Quinnett

  Dark, Night, Sea

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• In the midst of all these innumerable forms of a common protest and universal ill-ease there has grown up one definite body of doctrine whose adherents are called Communists and who desired the total subversion of what had been, hitherto unquestioned among civilized European men, the general doctrines of property and individual freedom.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Wisdom, Men, Doctrine

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• Start a conversation with someone with whom you have "nothing in common" and no possibility of scoring with, networking with, or even seeing again. In other words, a conversation just for the civilized hell of it.

  Perry Brass

  Networking, Common, Hell

  Perry Brass (1998). “The Lover of My Soul: A Search for Ecstasy and Wisdom”, p.26, Perry Brass

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