Civilized Culture Quotes & Sayings

This is said to civilized men who are to venture into countries where sacred cows are fed, while children are left to starve - where female infants are killed or abandoned by the roadside- where men go blind, medical help being forbidden by their religion - where women are mutilated, to insure their fidelity - where unspeakable tortures are ceremonially inflicted on prisoners - where cannibalism is practiced.
Are these the 'cultural riches' which a Western man is to greet with 'brotherly love'? Are these the 'valuable elements' which he is to admire and adopt? Are these the 'fields' in which he is not to regard himself as superior? And when he discovers entire populations rotting alive in such conditions, is he not to acknowledge, with a burning stab of pride - of pride and gratitude - the achievements of his nation and his culture, of the men who created them and left him a nobler heritage to carry forward? — Ayn Rand

Nothing distresses the civilized person like unfettered nature. The Grand Canyon seen from behind the railing is indeed a splendid sight, but as soon as the desert reclaims your golf course that is another matter altogether. — Anthony Marais

If you wish to know how civilized a culture is, look at how they treat it's women. — Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

Libraries are a hallmark of a civilized culture, and librarians represent that culture to all facets of society. — Janis Ian

In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces. — W. Somerset Maugham

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

Humans are by nature self-centered. It doesn't matter how civilized or primitive they are. If they want something, they'll find a way to get it or take it. The old empires used land, women, religion, pride in one's nationality, or preservation of their culture as an excuse to start war. Presently, you use technology, world policing, expanding markets, and protecting national interest, but the underlying theme has never changed. As long as there are greedy people in this world, there will always be wars. — Ednah Walters

As a journalist, I can also now understand his (Patrick O'Brian's)idea that the Q&A is not particularly civilized - let alone a sports media press scrum. The formats don't necessarily further understanding between two people. It is not always true conversation - a discussion that unearths nuggets of insight. It too often seems like interviewers are running through a pre-fab checklist, looking for a Tweetable quote, trolling for a gaffe, or ticking off pre-conceived points like those on a medical checklist at the doctor's office. It can feel invasive, like a trip to the proctologist - in front of an audience. — Knute Berger

Kafka's writings often display an insidious power to describe a wholly secular and "factical" world in which the eerie or "unheimlich" elements gang up behind or beneath the ego's awareness and immerse it in a waking dream of something Other, an alien world-order similar to ancient irrationalist cultures (in transition from primitivism to civilized mythos-culture). — Kenny Smith

[E]ncouraging the Muslim world, and particularly the Arab Muslim world, which is the heart of the global terrorist threat - to adopt democratic ways and to shine the light of liberty into its culture of medieval darkness is a pragmatic necessity for the future security of the civilized world. That is the reality behind the President's address. Only people in serious denial can be blind to this fact. Only liberals. — David Horowitz

Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. — W.E.B. Du Bois

In the General History of Africa, we come across very impressive facts about the culture of primitive African peoples. It is known, for example, that in the old African kingdoms, all foreigners-whether white or colored- enjoyed hospitality and had the same rights as the native people. At the same time, a foreigner in ancient Rome or Greece usually became a slave. Such and similar facts have probably made Leo Frobenius, a well-known German ethnologist and a great connoisseur of Africa, write : The Africans are civilized up to their bones, and the idea of their being barbarians is a European fiction. — Alija Izetbegovic

During all the first part of the Middle Ages, no other people made as important a contribution to human progress as did the Arabs, if we take this term to mean all those whose mother-tongue was Arabic, and not merely those living in the Arabian peninsula. For centuries, Arabic was the language of learning, culture and intellectual progress for the whole of the civilized world with the exception of the Far East. From the IXth to the XIIth century there were more philosophical, medical, historical, religiuos, astronomical and geographical works written in Arabic than in any other human tongue. — Philip Khuri Hitti

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

That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear. — W.E.B. Du Bois

I'm a cosmopolitan sophisticate of culture and intelligence. The culmination of technology and civilized experience. — Billy Joel

I had come to the conclusion that I must really be French, only no one had ever informed me of this fact. I loved the people, the food, the lay of the land, the civilized atmosphere, and the generous pace of life. — Julia Child

The civilized nations
Greece, Rome, England
have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones. — Henry David Thoreau

It was the Culture's fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. The — Iain M. Banks

You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be the geek they will never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them, they put you here. You should realize what society has made of you and take full revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly thoroughly weird and don't do it half way, put every ounce of your horse power into it. Have the artistic courage to realize your significance in culture. — Bruce Sterling

Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal. — C. G. Jung

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

The British are civilized. People still read and some conversations can be interesting. By contrast American are fat and stupid and so thoroughly brain-blurred and over-sold by our culture that there's a numbing, unapologetic, arrogance and desperation about us. In fact, I've just defined the perfect consumer. — Dan Fante

Wine has been with us since the beginning of civilization. It is the temperate, civilized, sacred, romantic mealtime beverage recommended in the Bible. Wine has been praised for centuries by statesmen, philosophers, poets, and scholars. Wine in moderation is an integral part of our culture, heritage and gracious way of life. — Robert Mondavi

During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began. — Tom Standage

Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. — Virginia Woolf

If you really want to define civilization it should be a culture that doesn't destroy its environment. If you burn down the kitchen one day and expect to eat the next, it is not even intelligent, let alone civilized. — Sting

We've become so civilized it is unnatural to be naked. — Jeffrey Rasley

The kitchen is tough. It's one of the last bastions in civilized culture that sets out to crush the spirit. — Yotam Ottolenghi

Civilized man longs for the illusion of barbarism. Either his culture fulfills this need by adopting its outer trappings, or he will be seduced by his first contact with a culture that does. — C.S. Friedman

White supremacist ideology is based first and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them. One of the best ways to instill fear in people is to terrorize them. Yet this fear is best sustained by convincing them that their bodies are ugly, their intellect is inherently underdeveloped, their culture is less civilized, and their future warrants less concern than that of other peoples. — Cornel West

All definitions of civilization along to a conjugation which goes: I am civilized, you belong to a culture, he is a barbarian. — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

In India we're fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it's gone. Every person that's walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes are from, how much they cost, which designer made which shoe, which shop you bought each item from. Everything is civilized and tagged and valued and numbered and put in it's place. Whereas in India, the wilderness still exists-the unindoctrinated wilderness of the mind, full of untold secrets and wild imaginings. — Arundhati Roy

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

Kindness and compassion towards all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Conversely, cruelty, whether it is directed against human beings or against animals, is not the exclusive province of any one culture or community of people. — Cesar Chavez

First New York was a sort of provincial capital, bigger and richer than Manchester or Marseilles, but not much different in its essential spirit. Then, after the war, it became one among half a dozen world cities. Today it has the appearance of standing alone, as the center of culture in the part of the world that still tries to be civilized. — Malcolm Cowley

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. 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

Supposing that what is at any rate believed to be the 'truth' really is true, and the meaning of all culture is the reduction of the beast of prey 'man' to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal, then one would undoubtedly have to regard all those instincts of reaction and ressentiment through whose aid the noble races and their ideals were finally confounded and overthrown as the actual instruments of culture; which is not to say that the bearers of these instincts themselves represent culture. Rather is the reverse not merely probable - no! today it is palpable! These bearers of the oppressive instincts that thirst for reprisal, the descendants of every kind of European and non-European slavery, and especially of the entire pre-Aryan populace - they represent the regression of mankind! These 'instruments of culture' are a disgrace to man and rather an accusation and counterargument against 'culture' in general! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Dayton had no civilized culture. — Annie Jacobsen

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

Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth. — Wallace Stegner