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 gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature and poetry and all that is spiritual.
A rude nature is worse than a brute nature by so much more as man is better than a beast: and those that are of civil natures and genteel dispositions are as much nearer to celestial creatures as those that are rude and cruel are to devils.
I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.
Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.
You think that religion is a thing that is there to help you and to see you through life and then you wake up one morning and find the entire Irish situation the civil war that's based on religion.
There are 435 members of Congress. There's one 'Morning Joe' show. Hopefully we can keep hammering the argument that you can disagree with other people and have debates but remain civil.
When I wake up on a Monday morning and I realise I don't have to go and work at the civil service I really think I've won.
On the last morning of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea.
What most people don't seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.
We need to shift from an economic organizing principle for human civilization to a humanitarian organizing principle. Making money more important than your own children is a pathological way for an individual to run their affairs and it's a pathological way for a society to run its affairs.
The civility which money will purchase is rarely extended to those who have none.
This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.
Money not morality is the principle commerce of civilized nations.
Civilized countries generally adopt gold or silver or both as money.
A civilization is built on what is required of men not on that which is provided for them.
Men become civilized not in proportion to their willingness to believe but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men between brothers?
All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers.
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split as a general thing.
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist and believed blind eternal fate I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.
If any civilization is to survive it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.