Civilized People Quotes & Sayings

Hamas is ISIS, and ISIS is Hamas. They're branches of the same tree. People who wantonly rocket our cities and want to conduct mass killings. And when they can, they murder children, teenagers, shoot them in the head. Throw people from the sixth floor, their own people ... They're the enemies of peace, they're the enemies of Israel, they're the enemies of all civilized countries. And I believe they're the enemies of the Palestinians themselves. — Benjamin Netanyahu

The Italians are the most civilized people. And they're very warm. Basically, they're Jews with great architecture. — Fran Lebowitz

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

Very good training to just be a person is growing up in Canada. People say a lot of things about Canada, like that it's boring, but if you look around the world, you can praise boring. It's a very civilized place to grow up. I'm very proud of it. — Mike Myers

We create institutions and policies on the basis of the way we make assumptions about us and others. We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us. So we have had poor people around us. If we had believed that poverty is unacceptable to us, and that it should not belong to a civilized society, we would have created appropriate institutions and policies to create a poverty-free world. — Muhammad Yunus

Son, quite aside from my own conditioned reflex against munching a roast haunch of - well, you, for example - quite aside from that trained-in emotional prejudice, for coldly practical reasons I regard our taboo against cannibalism as an excellent idea . . . because we are not civilized." "Huh?" "Obvious. If we didn't have a tribal taboo about the matter so strong that you honestly believed it was an instinct, I can think of a long list of people I wouldn't trust with my back turned, not with the price of beef what it is today. Eh? — Robert A. Heinlein

It would seem, from this, that the people of Omanorion had mastered the ultra-civilized art of minding their own business. — Clark Ashton Smith

Thanks to modern medical advances such as antibiotics, nasal spray, and Diet Coke, it has become routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of 40, sometimes more than once. — Dave Barry

Though tax records are generally looked upon as a nuisance, the day may come when historians will realize that tax records tell the real story behind civilized life. How people were taxed, who was taxed, and what was taxed tell more about a society than anything else. Tax habits could be to civilization what sex habits are to personality. They are basic clues to the way a society behaves. — Charles Adams

I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance. I want nothing to do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not teach people that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized on this earth, capable of becoming master of his fate and captain of his soul. — Jawaharlal Nehru

I know the evil of my ancestors because I am those people. The balance is delicate in the extreme. I know that few of you who read my words have ever thought about your ancestors this way. It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?
-The Stolen Journals — Frank Herbert

As we become civilized we are governed less by persons and more by principles ... The best of all leaders is the man who teaches people to lead themselves. — Robert Green Ingersoll

No, we aren't civilized, even in our business suits and high heels. People are as mean as ever, and as predictable. Underneath it all, we are not so different from what lurks in the wild, perhaps we're worse. — Donna Lynn Hope

For the first time in six or seven thousand years, many people of goodwill find themselves confused about art. They want to enjoy it because enjoying art is something they expect of themselves as civilized persons, but they're unsure how to do so. They aren't even sure which of the visible objects are art and which are furniture, clothes, hors d'oeuvres, or construction rubble, and whether a pile of dead and decomposing rats is deliberate art or just another pile of decomposing rats. — Barbara Holland

The education of the common people requires, perhaps, in a civilized and commercial society, the attention of the public more than that of people of some rank and fortune. — Adam Smith

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical. — Thomas B. Macaulay

Being civilized meant knowing about the right things. However much people pretend that doesn't matter, it's true. Disclaiming that is as foolish as thinking that beauty doesn't matter. And to get among the right things, you have to be among the people who possess them. Since one also likes to be thorough, knowing the difference between a hereditary and an honorary marquess always comes in handy. — L.S. Hilton

It did not take Bunch very long, amid the politicking and the revelry, to discover the darker side of life in Charleston's homes. "The frightful atrocities of slaveholding must be seen to be described," he wrote in a private letter that wound up prominently positioned in the official slave-trade correspondence of the Foreign Office. "My next-door neighbor, a lawyer of the first distinction and a member of the Southern Aristocracy, told me himself that he flogged all his own people - men and women - when they misbehaved. I hear also that he makes them strip, and after telling them that they were to consider it as a great condescension on his part to touch them, gives them a certain number of lashes with a cow-hide. The frightful evil of the system is that it debases the whole tone of society - for the people talk calmly of horrors which would not be mentioned in civilized society. It is literally no more to kill a slave than to shoot a dog. — Christopher Dickey

In savage countries they eat one another, in civilized they deceive one another; and that is what people call the way of the world! — Arthur Schopenhauer

... their eager, childlike attention was refreshing to see as compared with the decent, deathlike apathy of weary civilized people, in whom natural curiosity has been quenched in toil and care and poor, shallow comfort. — John Muir

If I told you that God speaks to us through our urges so long as these are safe and proper and totally civilized and don't hurt anyone, what would I be saying? If I told you longing is okay as long as it is within the bounds of what our world considers normal, I would be going counter to my whole tradition. My people discovered divine urges, for goodness' sake. Not namby-pamby urges either. It was loincloth-tearing, harlot-marrying, sacrificing, succumbing, and surrendering kinds of urges. Not without bickering and haggling, I'll grant you, but ultimately urges of the worst kind, the kind that demanded everything. — Francisco X Stork

Claiming "the budget can't allow it" reminds me of when you walk into a restaurant at a civilized hour like ten o'clock and they say "the kitchen is closed." For years I would hear this, and think, "damn, just a little too late, oh well, thank you, I guess it's Denny's again."
And then one day it hit me: kitchens don't close. Just as at home, at a certain point in the night, I stop using the kitchen
but at three in the morning, if I want to, I still have the ability to go downstairs and "re-open" the kitchen by turning on the stove and opening the refrigerator! Restaurants are not banks; at the stroke of ten an enormous airlock doesn't seal off the kitchen and render the preparation of food an utter impossibility./ No, kitchens can open and budgets are what certain people say they are. — Bill Maher

If this policeman began to suspect me, he could call the immigration people. Then one of them would click a button on their computer and mark a check box on my file and I would be deported. I would be dead, but no one would have fired any bullets. I realized, this is why the police do not carry guns. In a civilized country, they kill you with a click. The killing is done far away, at the heart of the kingdom in a building full of computers and coffee cups. — Chris Cleave

Over-sentimentality, over-softness, in fact washiness and mushiness are the great dangers of this age and of this people. Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail. — Theodore Roosevelt

Thirdly. It forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations; or if a civilized people has ever given admission to any of them, that people will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors, who transmitted them with that inviolable sanction and authority, which always attend received opinions. — David Hume

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

An important advance in the life of a people is the transformation of the religion of fear into the moral religion. But one must avoid the prejudice that regards the religions of primitive peoples as pure fear religions and those of the civilized races as pure moral religions. All are mixed forms, though the moral element predominates in the higher levels of social life. Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of the idea of God. — Albert Einstein

We can build an economy that does not destroy its natural support systems, a global community where the basic needs of all the Earth's people are satisfied, and a world that will allow us to think of ourselves as civilized. This is entirely doable. — Lester R. Brown

A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is 'real' life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only 'real' work, that the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit', he is grim, 'dour', plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy - that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate for the first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing among savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a barbarian out for loot. — George Orwell

There's a hollowness to civilized life. It doesn't appeal to people, and some people react with extreme violence. — John Zerzan

In civilized places idleness, once the prerequisite for abstract thought, poetry, religion, philosophy, and falling in love, has become a character flaw. In America we've managed to stamp it out almost completely, and few people under forty can remember a single moment of it, even in earliest childhood. The phrase 'spare time' has vanished from the land. — Barbara Holland

He was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens. People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be excluded from future games. — Albert Speer

What's the good of being civilized, that's what I'd like to know? It just means other people can break the rules and you can't. — Diana Wynne Jones

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man. — Aung San Suu Kyi

We are all the children of Rome, without knowing it. Our months are called after Roman emperors or gods, our summer is July and August, named after Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar. When you people scream fascist at us, you are referring to the rods of authority called fasces by the Romans. The idea of law written down and to be observed equally comes to us from the Romans, and our alphabet comes to us exactly from the Roman. From plumbing to the idea that surrounding someone in battle gives victory, Rome gave them to us. Rome is our common, civilized roots, so deep that many of us in the West do not even realize it unless we are educated to it. Rome is our intellectual father, and we have been living off its remnants for two thousand years. — Richard Sapir

Fundamentalist Christianity appeals to pre-civilized, prudish tribal people who are not ready for urban feudal pleasures. — Timothy Leary

You know what?' said Vimes aloud. 'This is going to be the world's first democratically killed dragon. One man, one stab.'
Then you've got to stop them. You can't let them kill it!' said Lady Ramkin.
Vimes blinked at her.
Pardon?' he said.
It's wounded!'
Lady, that was the intention, wasn't it? Anyway, it's only stunned,' said Vimes.
I mean you can't let them kill it like this,' said Lady Ramkin insistently. 'Poor thing!'
What do you want to do, then?' demanded Vimes, his temper unravelling. 'Give it a strengthening dose of tar oil and a nice comfy basket in front of the stove?'
It's butchery!'
Suits me fine!'
But it's a dragon! It's just doing what a dragon does! It never would have come here if people had left it alone!'
Vimes thought: it was about to eat her, and she can still think like this. He hesitated. Perhaps that did give you the right to an opinion ... — Terry Pratchett

The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth. — Alan W. Watts

The civilized people of today look back with horror at their medieval ancestors who wantonly destroyed great works of art or sat slothfully by while they destroyed. We have passed this stage ... Here in the U.S. we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy our forests and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals - not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at best it looks as if our people were awakening. — Theodore Roosevelt

No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it. — Karen Blixen

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

The most civilized people are as near to barbarism as the most polished steel is to rust. Nations, like metals, have only a superficial brilliancy. — Antoine Rivarol

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

Perhaps the habit which distinguishes civilized people from others is that of discussion, exchange of opinion and ideas, the ability to differ without quarrelling, to say what you have to say civilly and then to listen civilly to another speaker. — Katherine Anne Porter

I thought you were from a civilized country," he said. "How have you come to look more like Carthya's whipping boy than its king?"
"I have a habit of irritating some of our less civilized people," I answered. "But you seem like a civilized ... pirate. I'd much prefer it if you didn't have me whipped."
"And why shouldn't I?"
With some effort, I forced a smile to my face. "Because it will hurt. — Jennifer A. Nielsen

We don't really want to know what soldiers go through in combat. We do not really want to know how many children are being molested and abused in our own society or how many couples - almost a third, as it turns out - engage in violence at some point during their relationship. We want to think of families as safe havens in a heartless world and of our own country as populated by enlightened, civilized people. We prefer to believe that cruelty occurs only in faraway places like Darfur or the Congo. It is hard enough for observers to bear witness to pain. Is it any wonder, then, that the traumatized individuals themselves cannot tolerate remembering it and that they often resort to using drugs, alcohol, or self-mutilation to block out their unbearable knowledge? — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

The United States has more people living in poverty than at almost any time in the modern history of our country. I believe that in a democratic, civilized society none of our people should be hungry or living in desperation. We need to expand Social Security, not cut it. We need to increase funding for nutrition programs, not cut them. — Bernie Sanders

Now do you suppose unselfishness is unreal and nowhere extant? On the contrary, nothing is more ordinary! One may even call it an article of fashion in the civilized world, which is considered so indispensable that, if it cost too much in solid material, people adorn themselves with its counterfeit tinsel and feign it. — Max Stirner

Architecture is, to a certain extent, a sensual gratification. It addresses itself to the eye, and affords the best scope for the parade of barbaric pomp and splendour. It is the form in which the revenues of a semi-civilized people are most likely to be lavished. The most gaudy and ostentatious specimens of it, and sometimes the most stupendous, have been reared by such hands. It is one of the first steps in the great march of civilization. — William H. Prescott

Many criminologists believe that the source of the state's pacifying effect isn't just its brute coercive power but the trust it commands among the populace. After all, no state can post an informant in every pub and farmhouse to monitor breaches of the law, and those that try are totalitarian dictatorships that rule by fear, not civilized societies where people coexist through self-control and empathy. A Leviathan can civilize a society only when the citizens feel that its laws, law enforcement, and other social arrangements are legitimate, so that they don't fall back on their worst impulses as soon as Leviathan's back is turned. — Steven Pinker

As life in general constituted much pain in the form of struggles against poverty, disease, ignorance, and emotional anguish, what more civilized way for people to alleviate the same than by giving themselves to one another as brothers and sisters in deed as well as in word? A society of people hoping to become politically superior needed first to become spiritually valid. — Aberjhani

soldier's first duty, his reason for being, is not to fight. Fighting is the final recourse for any civilized people. His duty is not even to preserve the peace; that is a police officer's job, — Evan Currie

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

Alas, the twentieth century alone, in which more than 50 million people were murdered by "civilized" government decrees - during Nazi Germany, the Armenian genocide, the Soviet regime, and so on - has proved how easy it is for good people to turn mass murderers.
... This reality - the human capacity, our capacity, for evil - should not distance us from those who commit atrocities. Quite the contrary, it should remind us of a fine line: if not for some grace, there go we. — Baz Dreisinger

A soldier's first duty, his reason for being, is not to fight. Fighting is the final recourse for any civilized people. His duty is not even to preserve the peace; that is a police officer's job," Comdr. Stephen Michaels of the NAC military said by rote, remembering the many long nights of arguments and discussions that had brought this to his mind. "A soldier's first duty is simply to stand between his nation and any who might wish it harm. — Evan Currie

The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning. — George F. Kennan

I like to cook for 2, or for 4 or 6 at the most 8 people. Beyond that you get into quantity cooking and that is just not my field at all. The last time we had 12 for a sit-down dinner and I did all the cooking, and Paul and I did all the setting up, serving, and washing up afterwards, I said never again. I'll do a buffet, but I don't consider that civilized dining; it is feeding, and I like to sit down at a well-set table. — Julia Child

I could tell Hugo was convinced that he would get to walk back up these stairs: after all, he was a civilized person. These were all civilized people.
Hugo really couldn't imagine that anything irreparable could happen to him, because he was a middle-class white American with a college education, as were all the people on the stairs with us.
I had no such conviction. I was not a wholly civilized person. — Charlaine Harris

Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and over-civilized? — Louis Kronenberger

He had had many conversations during his long life. Some were fascinating and stayed with him more than a century later. Others were less so. As a younger man he had tolerated those as part of the cost of doing business - a sort of tax that all people must pay in order to take part in civilized society. When he had turned one hundred, he had decided to stop paying that tax. Henceforth he would engage only in conversations that really interested him - which, with a few exceptions for close friends and family members, meant conversations with a purpose. — Neal Stephenson

To some degree, all civilized people are out of touch with reality because we fail to distinguish between the way things are and the way they are described. For politicians this dichotomy has reached extreme proportions, but it affects everyone. We confuse money, which is an abstraction, with real wealth; we confuse the idea of who we are with the actual experience of our organic existence. During — Alan W. Watts

As a society we've progressed to a point where it is unacceptable behavior to knock someone down who is acting a fool. I teach my children to use their words when faced with a conflict. That's what civilized people do. All that is fine and good except for one small thing; we've enabled the fools ...
... What if people could expect a measure of instant justice when they were out of order? The acts of thoughtlessness would decline exponentially. If you give people license to be fools then you are left to deal with fools. However, if you put fools on notice then they'll be forced to snap to attention and act right or suffer the consequences. Think of it as an adult spanking. — Aaron Blaylock

Civilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo ... In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at sight of which great grownup babies are expected to hide their eyes. — Clive Bell

Even today, the politics of religion does not allow the subcontinent to become civilized and its people to become truly educated. — Taslima Nasrin

The Jews are cowering along the wall, eyes wide, palms up, fingers splayed -- a collective posture of submission. Even now, with everything that has happened, with the city in ruins and the dead as thick upon the streets as busted glass, they don't want to believe we are actually going to kill them. We are Germans, after all; the most civilized people in Europe. And we are soldiers, not murderers. Except for today. Today we are both. — Miles Watson

Civilized people don't feel. — Mervyn Peake

Use convention to govern a state, use surprise in waging war, use disinterest to take the world. How do I know this is so? When there are many taboos in the world, the people grow poorer and poorer. When the people have many weapons, the nation grows more benighted. When the people are very crafty, weird things arise more and more. The greater the articulation of rules of law, the more brigands and outlaws there are. Therefore a wise rulers says, If I contrive nothing, the people will naturally be civilized. If I am fond of tranquility, the people will naturally be upright. If I am disinterested, the people will naturally become rich. If I want not to want, the people will naturally be innocent. — Lao-Tzu

The first time he had taken the massa to one of these "high-falutin' to-dos," as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion - but most of all a deep loneliness and melancholy from which it took him almost a week to recover. He couldn't believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn't live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it's possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother's milk made possible the life of privilege they led. — Alex Haley

If the Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest during the last three centuries, I have not the slightest doubt that we should have been at this moment a poorer people and less civilized. — Thomas B. Macaulay

There are innumerable civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest, and who yet do not hesitate to gratify their avarice, their aggressiveness and their sexual lusts, and who have no compunction in hurting others by lying, fraud and calumny, so long as they remain unpunished for it; and no doubt this has been so for many cultural epochs. If — Sigmund Freud

One of the things that first attracted me to chess is that it brings you into contact with intelligent, civilized people - men of the stature of Garry Kasparov, the former world champion, who was my part-time coach. — Magnus Carlsen

Just now one of the significant historical roles of the primal people of the world is not simply to sustain their own traditions, but call the entire civilized world back to a more authentic mode of being. — Thomas Berry

This drove home to me how barbaric our own medicine and our own customs are in the "civilized" world, where we put ill or demented people away and try to forget them. — Oliver Sacks

Our government is based on the belief that a people can be both strong and free, that civilized men need no restraint but that imposed by themselves against abuse of freedom. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

If you can't experience the humanity of people who don't look like you, you're not civilized enough to be an officer of the peace. — Ann Medlock

Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of humankind as civilized. — Albert Einstein

I was stricken by news and television pictures coming from the United States this morning. It is impossible to fully comprehend the evil that would have conjured up such a cowardly and depraved assault upon thousands of innocent people. There can be no cause or grievance that could ever justify such unspeakable violence. Indeed, such an attack is an assault not only on the targets but an offense against the freedom and rights of all civilized nations. — Jean Chretien

I have this feeling that as time goes on, we're not getting any more civilized, and we should be. We're still running around like the days of Genghis Khan. There are so many important, better things to do and we need to encourage people to reach into the brighter side of humanity and not encourage people to continue to glorify the darker side. — Ben Carson

Primitive people alienate themselves in their mana, their totem; civilized people in their individual souls, their egos, their names, their possessions, and their work: here is the first temptation of inauthenticity. — Simone De Beauvoir

As a so-called "civilized" people, and as members of a society in search of lasting peace in the world, we cannot remain callous to our responsibility toward nature and insensitive to the inherent rights of the animals. — Nathaniel Altman

The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth. — Herman Melville

There is a danger, when thinking of the earliest civilized people, of putting too much emphasis on technology. One tends to assume that if you don't have, at least, a lavatory and perhaps something that will take you a lot faster than your own feet, or a certain number of gadgets in the house, then you must be in some way, a bit backward and defective ... the important thing to remember is that technology is not necessarily the same thing as civilization. — Jacquetta Hawkes

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

In a civilized and cultivated country wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen. the excellent people who protest against all hunting, and consider sportsmen as enemies of wild life, are ignorant of the fact that in reality the genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination. — Theodore Roosevelt

You have spent most of the past sixteen or more years learning to read and write. People who can do those things well, as you can, are miracles and, in my opinion, entitle us to suspect that we may be civilized after all. — Kurt Vonnegut

There was just such a man when I was young - an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos. But the thing which this fellow had overlooked, my friend, was that he had a predecessor in the reformation business, called Jesus Christ. Perhaps we may assume that Jesus knew as much as the Austrian did about saving people. But the odd thing is that Jesus did not turn the disciples into strom troopers, burn down the Temple at Jerusalem, and fix the blame on Pontius Pilate. On the contrary, he made it clear that the business of the philosopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people. — T.H. White

None but a people advanced to a high state of moral and intellectual excellence are capable in a civilized condition of forming and maintaining free governments, and among those who are so far advanced, very few indeed have had the good fortune to form constitutions capable of endurance. — John C. Calhoun

Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers,-and that the aspiration for a civilized life - that "universal eligibility to be noble," as Saul Bellow's Augie March so imperishably phrases it - is proper and common to all. — Christopher Hitchens

Here lies Morris, a good man and friend. He enjoyed the finer points of civilized life but never shied away from a hearty adventure or hard work. He died a free man, which is more than most people can say, if we are going to be honest about it. Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven't the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood - weak blood, diluted - and their memories aren't worth a goddamned thing, you will see what I mean. — Patrick DeWitt

It's absurd that the same word is used to describe someone raping, torturing, mutilating, and killing a child; and someone stopping that perpetrator by shooting him in the head. The same word used to describe a mountain lion killing a deer by one quick bite to the spinal column is used to describe a civilized human playing smackyface with a suspect's child, or vaporizing a family with a daisy cutter. The same word often used to describe breaking a window is used to describe killing a CEO and used to describe that CEO producing toxins that give people cancer the world over. Check that: the latter isn't called violence, it's called production. — Derrick Jensen

The essence of interior design will always be about people and how they live. It is about the realities of what makes for an attractive, civilized, meaningful environment, not about fashion or what's in or what's out. This is not an easy job. — Albert Hadley

Why do people so love to wander? I think the civilized parts of the World will suffice for me in the future. — Mary Cassatt

Most of us, in our civilized society, rely too heavily on reasoning capacity to make things happen. We've been raised to believe that logic will prevail. Logic, in and of itself, will rarely influence people. Most often logic doesn't work. — Herb Cohen

Iraq is a very important part of securing the homeland, and its a very important part of helping change the Middle East into a part of the world that will not serve as a threat to the civilized world, to people like
or to the developed world, to people like
in the United States. — George W. Bush

It's civilized to let a society overbreed and destroy the ecology, raise interpersonal tensions to the point that violence is endemic, and stretch resources to the point that all too many children are ill-fed, uneducated, diseased, and without any hope of ever reaching their potential? Or would you prefer millions of abortions? That happened, you know, before the chaos. But it's barbaric to require people to limit their offspring? — L.E. Modesitt Jr.

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world. — James A. Baldwin

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

The American people expect the United States to keep terrorists where they belong, apart from civilized society and outside of America's borders — Eric Cantor

For most of history, war has been a more or less functional institution, providing benefits for those societies that were good at it, although the cost in money, in lives, and in suffering was always significant. Only in the past century have large numbers of people begun to question the basic assumption of civilized societies that war is inevitable and often useful. — Gwynne Dyer

The one thing I've learned, getting out to all those foreign and domestic locales, is that people in every country of the 'civilized' world wish - either secretly or openly - that they had the expressiveness, the flair, the I'm-so-glad-to-be-me spirit that black folks have made a part of American life. — Wolfman Jack