Top 133 Civilized Quotes

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

We do not consider patriotism desirable if it contradicts civilized behavior.

Better to die in the pursuit of civilized values, we believed, than in a flight underground. We were offering a value system couched in the language of science.

The Koran and the laws of all civilized nations legislate against the vilification of religions.

To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.

Instead of isolating our school and our many subjects from the every day world, we intend to plant it not merely in the French capital, but in what for next summer at least will be the focal point, the capital of the entire civilized world.

It is our responsibility to explain to the public how an often unpredictable system of justice is one that serves a productive, civilized, but always evolving, society.

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior, but if we’re civilized people, we publicly criticize that, and don’t belong to those groups or don’t associate with those people.

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.

Nobody will ever agree with everything everyone says, especially once an issue or speaker becomes politically charged. But as tolerant and civilized Americans, we should at least have the decency to hear them out.

It is a curious thing… that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.

One of the rudest things you can do, food-wise, is to stare at someone in the act of eating. It draws attention to the unseemly fact that eating is a bodily function – like animals, we are trapped by our hungers, but we do our best to disguise them with such civilized props as menus and forks.

The bulk of life on Earth lives in a peaceful place where the temperature is stable. There’s hunting going on, but it’s very civilized, like a slow ballet.

The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.

I think for any society to develop and become a civilized society, they need an independent judiciary.

A civilized nation can have no enemies, and one cannot draw a line across a map, a line that doesn’t even exist in nature and say that the ugly enemy lives on the one side, and good friends live on the other.

The highest hallmark of a civilized society is not the rapidity by which it exacts vengeance, but its ability to hold victim and victimizer in its compassionate heart.

France is the only nation in which astoundingly small numbers of civilized patrons reside.

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

To be able to serve and to eat a whole fish, especially a trout, is part of civilized dining. This applies particularly to the young, who should take to it as soon as they can handle knife and fork; this is a fine way for them to begin taking pride in themselves and their abilities.

I assure Romanians that once I return… I will try and generate a sentiment of reconciliation in society. Divisions in society must be stopped, they must be annihilated, because Romania needs all its energy to… integrate into the civilized world.

By the time Congress is even authorized to act after the President has launched nuclear weapons, there may no longer be a civilized world in which to do so.

I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not.

Standing up to bullies is the hallmark of a civilized society.

Dutch prisons are probably the most civilized you’re going to find anywhere in the world.

The limitation upon this mode of promoting peace lies in the fact that it consists in an appeal to the civilized side of man, while war is the product of forces proceeding from man’s original savage nature.

In all of my books, I’ve emphasized that the fundamental difference between civilized and indigenous ways of being is that, for even the most open-minded of the civilized, listening to the natural world is a metaphor.

No matter how civilized we are and how much society has curbed violent behavior. Human beings still have the same genes they had 10,000 years ago. Our bodies are designed to have a certain amount of physical stress and violence in them. We’re designed to run from jaguars and fight to defend our territory.

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.

Nothing is more useless in developing a nation’s economy than a gun, and nothing blocks the road to social development more than the financial burden of war. War is the arch enemy of national progress and the modern scourge of civilized men.

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

The whites, who are educated and civilized, swindle me, and I am not hard to swindle because I do not know how to read and write.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

No nation, savage or civilized, save only the United States of America, has confessed its inability to protect its women save by hanging, shooting, and burning alleged offenders.

The discovery of agriculture was the first big step toward a civilized life.

They have some pretty tough gun laws in Japan, as they do in any other civilized country in the world, and they’re not killing each other off with firearms. You have very violent films in Europe, yet it’s not causing the mayhem we see in our streets routinely here.

If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.

At least in Russia, you cannot just go and tap into someone’s phone conversation without a warrant issued by court. That’s more or less the way a civilized society should go about fighting terrorism.

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.

I believe that present day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive.

Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.

A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.

We are civilized human beings, but we’re all animals deep down, and that creates a certain friction in all of us.

From the day of the Declaration, the people of the North American union, and of its constituent states, were associated bodies of civilized men and Christians, in a state of nature, but not of anarchy.

In the late ’70s, the conditions that bands had to endure were, shall we say, not as civilized as they are today. People were a lot more aggressive back then. So there was definitely a lot of suffering for your art. But I would argue that was a good thing. Generally, people make better music when they suffer.

I am for a system of universal health care where every American has health care as a fundamental right because I think that’s where we should be as a civilized society.

I dreamed my way into Lincoln and the details that moved me – his lack of education or ‘civilized’ manners and his deep connection to all humankind.

There is a requirement to ensure the withdrawal takes place in a civilized manner. We will be able to show the world we deserve independence and freedom.

A disaffected America can be drawn into a civilized – but disruptive – dialogue about political change and reformation.

Mr. Speaker, on September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked, and Britain stood with us. This was not only an attack against America, but against the civilized world; and Britain understood this.

I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women.

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

Britons are good, though often brutal, colonists where they come into relations with entirely uncivilized tribes whose past is so remote as to be forgotten. But they trample with their heavy boots over the sensitive, delicate susceptibilities of an ancient, highly civilized and cultured nation, such as India.

Redemption is possible, and it is the measure of a civilized society.

Democratic socialism means, that in a democratic, civilized society, the wealthiest people and the largest corporations must pay their fair share of taxes.

Liberals allow right-wingers on their platforms to have a ‘civilized discussion,’ but there’s no reasoning with racists. I don’t want them to have a platform that humanizes them. I want to talk down to them and meet them exactly where they are, with absolutely no respect.

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.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

No country could claim to be civilized if its legal system weren’t available to everyone in it.

Look at these ISIS people. These people are ruthless. They don’t operate by any sort of normal civilized code. That’s the world. There’s a shadow world that exists out there.

U.K. citizens fleeing the Middle East and Japan have been allowed to take their animal companions with them on evacuation flights. The U.S. is not so civilized, and that’s a blot on our national copybook.

It’s easy for me to go back to being a kid. You know how kids can be like savages before they get civilized? There’s that sadist quality. Y’know, like boys who like to pick apart an insect for the sake of it.

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

The verb is relatively of much greater importance in an Indian tongue than in a civilized language.

For the sake of our children, let’s behave like civilized, law-abiding adults.

Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them.

I am a passionate devotee of the Howard Hawks’ screwball comedies of the 1930s and the 1940s, where I think that the relations between men and women were at their civilized height in terms of banter and exchange of wit and equality.

But while human liberty has engaged the attention of the enlightened, and enlisted the feelings of the generous of all civilized nations, may we not enquire if this liberty has been rightly understood?

The 5th Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. one of the great landmarks in men’s struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized.

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.

In boxing, it just seemed to me from the time I was a very small child, we have a peculiarly civilized form in that boxers don’t screech and holler. They don’t use weapons. When the bell rings, they fight; when the bell rings again, they stop.

Every other civilized nation in the world has been compelled to care for its forests, and so must we if waste and destruction are not to go on to the bitter end, leaving America as barren as Palestine or Spain.

We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones – and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.

The rich become richer and the poor become poorer is a cry heard throughout the whole civilized world.

Children are sent to school to be civilized, to learn to be part of the social enterprise.

And I think to be in NATO for the countries of our region, it means more guarantees for us, it means more responsibility for our common security, but it means fulfillment of all standards of civilized world, like protection of human rights and democratic mechanisms.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.

We’ve been civilized from the beginning. In the desert, it’s a baroque city like Paris or Rome.

What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country, vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization?

America’s revolutionary deists saw themselves as – and they were – participants in an international movement that drew on most of the same literary sources across the civilized world.

I’m not that worried about war. Insecurity is the word I would use – insecurity and tension and conflict. I thought civilized people had abandoned wars. Sometimes people don’t make rational decisions.

I am a New Yorker, and 7:00 A.M. is a civilized hour to finish the day, not to start it.

Laws fixed, certain, and uniform, are said to be the distinguishing traits of civilized from savage communities. In these last, seldom are any laws, unless it be the arbitrary and uncertain will of the strongest.

Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns.

This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

The longer a region is in contact with modern civilization, the higher the degree to which the society in the region is civilized.

Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.

The Queen Mary was the most civilized and luxurious way one could travel to America in the late 1930s.

It frustrates me that Britain can’t make something like ‘CSI’ or ‘The Sopranos’. Instead, British TV puts soap in primetime while every other civilized nation leaves it in daytime. Viewers should be more demanding.

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

We are fascinated with our own history, and we are fascinated with the Romans because they were millennia ago, and yet they still capture our imagination because they were actually so similar to us. They were very civilized. They had a very similar political system.

I’ve done pretty well as a professional fed-up. The tools of my trade so far have been irony, tongue-in-cheek mockery, and supercilious contempt, but these are highly civilized weapons designed for 18th-century French salons.

The more we study the Indian’s character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.

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.

Torture, including practices like waterboarding, violates the legal and moral standards of all civilized nations.

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.

Since dogs could hear and smell better than men, we could concentrate on sight. Since courage is commonplace in dogs, men’s adrenal glands could shrink. Dogs, by making us more efficient predators, gave us time to think. In short, dogs civilized us.

The prison system in Norway is fairly civilized, by world standards, and so are the prisoners and the guards.

Civilized discourse demands critical thinking, self-reflexiveness, sober-headed analysis.

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.

Everyone town of 100,000 in the United States should have a Classical Theater supported by the town, or the state of the county, or the Federal Government, as they have in every civilized country.

Sharing food has always had a central place in civilized societies; it’s no accident that so many of our cultural, religious and patriotic rituals are involved with eating.

I expect Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.

When it comes to raising civilized kids there are no hard rules, but there are two things on which most parents agree: Boys are generally wilder than girls, and adolescents are wilder than kids of any other age. If you’ve got an adolescent boy, you’re in the sweet spot for trouble.

She is still less civilized than man, largely because she has not been educated.

The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.

The civilized world has a common stake in defeating the terrorists.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes. Man’s ultimate responsibility is to God alone.

We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.

In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.

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

Remember that a civilized nation cannot just have one party; if there were only one party, this would merely be a dictatorship. Politics could not advance.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

As a result, the highly civilized man can endure incomparably more than the savage, whether of moral or physical strain. Being better able to control himself under all circumstances, he has a great advantage over the savage.

Libel actions, when we look at them in perspective, are an ornament of a civilized society. They have replaced, after all, at least in most cases, a resort to weapons in defense of a reputation.

The people are not defending political interests. They are defending the idea of living in a civilized country.

There are two worldviews in thriller writing: the paranoid view, like Chuck Logan’s, that everything is inside a large clockwork. I like those books; they’re intricate and thought out, but my view is that everything is chaotic and stupid. Chaos reigns, and civilized people do what they can to hold it back.

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

It is time for all civilized nations to stop the horrors that are taking place in Syria and demand a political solution.

Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must – must – redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent healthcare is by definition re-distributional.

Business is always looking to avoid the toughest norms. But some do it in a civilized way, while others push it using uncivilized, brazen methods.

We cannot be a civilized society if these terrorists are going to have their ways.

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.

Listening is a crucial aspect of democracy. Listening creates understanding, and understanding permits one of the most important things about every democracy, which is civilized disagreement.