Civilized World Quotes & Sayings

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

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

The child's true constructive energy, a dynamic power, has remained unnoticed for thousands of years. Just as men have trodden the earth, and later tilled its surface, without thought for the immense wealth hidden in its depths, so the men of our day make progress after progress in civilized life, without noticing the treasures that lie hidden in the psychic world of infancy. — Maria Montessori

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

The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mexico, but at bottom it is the same pitiless feeling which here, as everywhere else, animates the European race. This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die. Besides I do not want to get mixed up in it. I will not do anything against them: I will limit myself to providing everything that will hasten their ruin. In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death.
Satisfied with his reasoning, the American goes to church where he hears the minister of the gospel repeat every day that all men are brothers, and that the Eternal Being who has made them all in like image, has given them all the duty to help one another. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Is it the part of the police department to harass me when this city is a flagrant vice capital of the civilized world?" Ignatius bellowed over the crowd in front of the store. "This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians, all of whom are only too well protected by graft. If you have a moment, I shall endeavor to discuss the crime problems with you, but don't make the mistake of bothering me. — John Kennedy Toole

There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

The history of American higher education over the twentieth century is an extraordinary one, the story of the creation of a powerhouse set of institutions that are the envy of the civilized world. Once they were the province, both among the student and faculty bodies, of children of privilege, generally WASPs. — Rick Perlstein

The main trouble with this civilized world isn't that we adventure too much, but that we fail to adventure enough. — Cornelia Parker

There are worse things than eating the dead, my dear fellow. Far worse things. There is, for instance, making a huge profit out of their funeral, which is the normal custom in the civilized world. — Leonard Wibberley

There is something about men more capable of shaking despotic power than lightening, whirlwind, or earthquake, that is, the threatened indignation of the whole civilized world. — Daniel Webster

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

Today's milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation — Julia Kristeva

What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will. — Paulette Jiles

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

Dutch prisons are probably the most civilized you're going to find anywhere in the world. — Paul Watson

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

The world order which we seek is the co-operation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Coffee - the favorite drink of the civilized world. — Thomas Jefferson

France is the most civilized country in the world and doesn't care who knows it. — John Gunther

The founders of the United Nations sought to replace a world at war with a world of civilized order. They hoped that a world of relentless conflict would give way to a new era, one where freedom from violence prevailed ... But the awful truth is that the use of violence for political gain has become more, not less, widespread in the last decade. — Ronald Reagan

They're not their rules. They're our rules, the rules of the Western countries, the civilized side of the world. And every terrorist knows how to manipulate them in their own favor. — Marcus Luttrell

Titus, operating under the terms of the more modest package that he had negotiated with Gwen, which included room, board, and at the end of his own Candy Land path, the ambiguous pink-frosting-roofed gingerbread house of a family to love him and fuck him up, instantly got out of the car, observed the agreed-upon conventions of civilized intercourse among strangers, and got back into the car. The boy was still visiting their planet from his own faraway home world, but Archy figured that with time, he would adjust to the local gravity and microbes. Keeping close to the baby most of the time, as if Clark were the object he had crossed the stellar void to study. — Michael Chabon

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

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 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

The wild-often dismissed as savage and chaotic by "civilized" thinkers, is actually impartially, relentlessly, and beautifully formal and free. Its expression-the richness of plant and animal life on the globe including us, the rainstorms, windstorms, and calm spring mornings-is the real world, to which we belong. — Gary Snyder

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 nations were awakened from the sleep of death, as the words of eternal life flowed from the Apostles' lips, - the temples of superstition were shut or destroyed, and churches were planted in every part of the civilized world. — John Strachan

Like other mammals, they are capable of strong emotions. They have certainly committed no crimes. I do not claim to have the answer, but I think it is
certainly worthwhile to raise the question: Why, exactly, all over the civilized world, in virtually every major city, are apes in prison? — Carl Sagan

Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.
Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war. — Nikola Tesla

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.
You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.
I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. — Iain Pears

What is natural, needs to be looked upon, scrutinized and reshaped by each generation of the world, to make it compatible with the path of progress of a civilized society. — Abhijit Naskar

Wherever we direct our view, we discover the melancholy proofs of our depravity; whether we look to ancient or modern times, to barbarous or civilized nations, to the conduct of the world around us, or to the monitor within the breast; whether we read, or hear, or act, or think, or feel, the same humiliating lesson is forced upon us. — William Wilberforce

Jabotinsky insisted that all energies be expended to force the Congress to join the boycott movement. Nothing less than a 'merciless fight' would be acceptable, cried Jabotinsky. 'The present Congress is duty bound to put the Jewish problem in Germany before the entire world ... (We [Jews] must) destroy, destroy, destroy them, not only with the boycott, but politically, supporting all existing forces against them to isolate Germany from the civilized world ... our enemy [Germany] must be destroyed. — Ze'ev Jabotinsky

Peace may be denied for a season. ... But God our Eternal Father will watch over this nation and all of the civilized world who look to Him. ... Our safety lies in repentance. Our strength comes from obedience to the commandments of God.
Are these perilous times? They are. But there is no need to fear. We can have peace in our hearts and peace in our homes. We can be an influence for good in this world, every one of us — Gordon B. Hinckley

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

I believe that if the silent majority were to protest against those who believe in irrational blind faith - who want to go backwards instead of forward, who are for tradition not innovation, who oppose individualism and plurality of thought - then the world would become a truly civilized world in which to live. — Taslima Nasrin

Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax. — Lauren Willig

The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale. — Gore Vidal

Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. — Joseph Heller

One would think that potential motherhood should make women as a class as sacred as the priesthood. In common parlance we have much fine-spun theorizing on the exalted office of the mother, her immense influence in moulding the character of her sons; "the hand that rocks the cradle moves the world," etc., but in creeds and codes, in constitutions and Scriptures, in prose and verse, we do not see these lofty paeans recorded or verified in living facts. As a class, women were treated among the Jews as an inferior order of beings, just as they are to-day in all civilized nations. And now, as then, men claim to be guided by the will of God. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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 treatment of women in Muslim communities throughout the world is unconscionable. All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the Earth. — Sam Harris

Wine is the most civilized thing in the world. — Ernest Hemingway,

One of the greatest challenges facing humanity is that of being able to live with one another in a peaceful and civilized way. We all have our individual uniqueness and perceptions of how we believe the world ought to function. This creates conflict unless there is a deeper realization in the collective consciousness and an understanding that most human desires desecrate the beauty of the nowness of life. — Christopher Dines

As the United States lagged behind the civilized world in outlawing human slavery, so the United States now lags behind in softening the unrestrained brutalities of animal slavery. — Peter Singer

It's so much more interesting to study a ... damaged world. I find it difficult to learn anything in a place that's too civilized. — Brian Herbert

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

We might live in a civilized world, but rules "We might live in a civilized world, but rules and laws didn't apply to me. I was a rule-breaker, curse-maker, life-stealer."and laws didn't apply to me. I was a rule-breaker, curse-maker, life-stealer. — Pepper Winters

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at. — David Sedaris

Mao would hardly be deterred by the universal condemnation of the civilized world. He saw Stalin as his model. In the agrarian reforms, Stalin had killed seven million; Mao himself killed an estimated forty million Chinese in his reforms.49 — William J. Bennett

Deep thinkers who look everywhere for the mysterious causes of poverty, ignorance, crime and war need look no further than their own mirrors. We are all born into this world poor and ignorant, and with thoroughly selfish and barbaric impulses. Those of us who turn out any other way do so largely through the efforts of others, who civilized us before we got big enough to do too much damage to the world or ourselves. — Thomas Sowell

Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world. — Marisha Pessl

It is a land of Wonders!
It is a land of Mystery.
It is a land that Time Forgot (or chose specifically not to remember).
Cut off from the civilized world for untold years, this land is called:
Delaware. — M T Anderson

Monogamy, in brief, kills passion
and passion is the most dangerous of all the surviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. The civilized man
the ideal civilized man
is simply one who never sacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reaches perfection when he even ceases to love passionately
when he reduces the most profound of all his instinctive experiences from the level of an ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing the armies and workshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the infant death-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making it possible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at any hour of the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it. — H.L. Mencken

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

Enough, a person might say, if that person lived in the civilized world, the world of movies and television and fair play and decent restraint. But Reacher didn't live there. He lived in a world where you don't start fights but you sure as hell finish them, and you don't lose them either, and he was the inheritor of generations of hard-won wisdom that said the best way to lose them was to assume they were over when they weren't yet. — Lee Child

Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history - a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world - from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. — Ayn Rand

Epochs later, the curtains grew dusty and brittle, the deep, vicious colour of a bruise. The floorboards creaked and we were civilized. We were no longer the wild, ravening voices of the world, howling our shame and indignation at the sky. — Brenna Yovanoff

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

Anyway, I learned an important lesson from all of this: While gun ownership is
morally reprehensible in the civilized world, firepower is more or less
de rigeur in a zombie apocalypse. — John Green

Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder. Not content with having all Europe under his heel, or else terrorized into various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and of Asia. The terrible military machine, which we and the rest of the civilized world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing, cannot stand idle lest it rust or fall to pieces. It must be in continual motion, grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and the rights of hundreds of millions of men. Moreover it must be fed, not only with flesh but with oil. — Winston S. Churchill

Let me be very clear. For me geography does not exist! I strongly object to the whole concept of "foreign literature"...and speaking of national identity: that is how dictatorships get started! In literature there is no periphery and no center; there are only writers. The problem is not geographic but rather numeric. In the 19th century there were at least thirty literary geniuses in Russia, Germany, France, England and the United States. Today we are lucky if there are five writers of that caliber in the whole world...Where does one find good literature today? Mostly in third world countries, because adversity, isolation, combat provide good working conditions. It is harder to be a good writer in a so-called "civilized" country, in the so-called "democracies. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

The fields of clinical psychology and psychiatry exist specifically to help the emotionally unstable become more stable and lead happier, healthier lives. Unlike in the eras of Vincent Van Gogh and Abraham Lincoln, there is now professional help available for those who suffer from emotional illness. Treatment may require therapy or even medication, but hope is now available every single day in practically every city in the civilized world. — David J. Lieberman

The human mind is a lucky little local, passing accident which was totally unforeseen, and condemned to disappear with this earth and to recommence perhaps here or elsewhere the same or different with fresh combinations of eternally new beginnings. We owe it to this little lapse of intelligence on His part that we are very uncomfortable in this world which was not made for us, which had not been prepared to receive us, to lodge and feed us or to satisfy reflecting beings, and we owe it to Him also that we have to struggle without ceasing against what are still called the designs of Providence, when we are really refined and civilized beings. — Guy De Maupassant

If left together for too long, the two of them might actually take over the civilized world, through sheer application of snide remarks. — Gail Carriger

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

I studied at the Academy during the years of economic sanctions. Life was almost dead because the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the civilized world were so strict. — Hassan Blasim

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. — Karl Marx

Today the earth speaks with resonance and clearness and every ear in every civilized country of the world is attuned to its wonderful message of the creative evolution of man, except the ear of William Jennings Bryan; he alone remains stone-deaf, he alone by his own resounding voice drowns the eternal speech of nature. — Henry Fairfield Osborn

I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world. — Charles Darwin

Surrounded by military airplanes and warships from the world's most civilized and developed nations, we have been denied permission by friendly governments, for reasons of security, to land anywhere, but in the tiny, and still neutral, Republic of Djibouti. — Thor Heyerdahl

Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinigar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favourite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilized than what had gone. — Salman Rushdie

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

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

When in August 1793 a British delegation showed their hosts a terrestrial globe, it turned into a diplomatic incident, for the Chinese were furious to see that their empire covered so little of it. For centuries the Chinese had thought of themselves as 'The Middle Kingdom', that is the centre of the civilized world. To see otherwise was a shock. — Margaret Thatcher

Let us suppose that such a person began by observing those Christian activities which are, in a sense, directed towards this present world. He would find that this religion had, as a mere matter of historical fact, been the agent which preserved such secular civilization as survived the fall of the Roman Empire; that to it Europe owes the salvation, in those perilous ages, of civilized agriculture, architecture, laws, and literacy itself. He would find that this same religion has always been healing the sick and caring for the poor; that it has, more than any other, blessed marriage; and that arts and philosophy tend to flourish in its neighborhood. In a word, it is always either doing, or at least repenting with shame for not having done, all the things which secular humanitarianism enjoins. If our enquirer stopped at this point he would have no difficulty in classifying Christianity - giving it its place on a map of the 'great religions. — C.S. Lewis

each civilized person in the world should admit that he has two home countries: the one he was born in, and Syria . — Andrea Parrot

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

I suppose there is hardly any one in the civilized world - particularly of those who do just a little more every day than they really have strength to perform - who has not at some time regarded bed as a refuge. — J. E. Buckrose

Modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with the lives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and not of it. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world is almost a palpable movement. To enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are diregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars. — Thomas Hardy

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity. — Sigmund Freud

The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking. — H.L. Mencken

The world of 1906 ... was a stable and a civilized world in which the greatness and authority of Britain and her Empire seemed unassailable and invulnerably secure. In spite of our reverses in the Boer War it was assumed unquestioningly that we should always emerge "victorious, happy and glorious" from any conflict. There were no doubts about the permanence of our "dominion over palm and pine", or of our title to it. Powerful, prosperous, peace-loving, with the seas all round us and the Royal Navy on the seas, the social, economic, international order seemed to our unseeing eyes as firmly fixed on earth as the signs of the Zodiac in the sky. — Violet Bonham Carter

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

This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse
appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. — Michael Oakeshott

Whatever happens in the country, whatever warfare harasses our land, we will never relinquish our hold on Western learning. As long as this school of ours stands, Japan remains a civilized nation of the world. — Fukuzawa Yukichi

General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general ... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property. — Rutherford B. Hayes

Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing. — Ernest Hemingway,

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

THE NEXT DAY Reef, Cyprian, and Ratty were out on the Anarchists' golf course, during a round of Anarchists' Golf, a craze currently sweeping the civilized world, in which there was no fixed sequence - in fact, no fixed number - of holes, with distances flexible as well, some holes being only putter-distance apart, others uncounted hundreds of yards and requiring a map and compass to locate. Many players had been known to come there at night and dig new ones. Parties were likely to ask, "Do you mind if we don't play through?" then just go and whack balls at any time and in any direction they liked. Folks were constantly being beaned by approach shots barreling in from unexpected quarters. "This is kind of fun," Reef said, as an ancient brambled guttie went whizzing by, centimeters from his ear. — Thomas Pynchon

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. — George Meredith

How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight; and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilized nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blessed and happy! — Charles Dickens

The little that he had said, thus far, had been sufficient to convince me that I was speaking to a gentleman. He had what I may venture to describe as the unsought self-possession, which is a sure sign of good breeding, not in England only, but everywhere else in the civilized world. — Wilkie Collins