Civilised Quotes

It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability.

Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.

The vigour of civilised societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth while. Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth while. Such personal gratification arises from aim beyond personality.

Kipling sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilised folk to despise war.

Swedes are such a civilised, perfect society - at least on the surface.

There's a great safety net, a huge middle class, free education, free health care. People are very polite, they wait their turn. They're not too loud, they're not too quiet, but sometimes it's a little too perfect.

In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.

I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase.

A better phrase is the civilised society.

You get the feeling that many of my guests feel that the French language gives them entry into a more cultivated, more intelligent world, more highly civilised too, with rules.

Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality - the qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic, dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-class men.

The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.

To me you cannot be fully human, fully civilised, unless you recognise humanity in everyone.

Suicide is possible, but not probable;

hanging, I trust, is even more unlikely; for I hope that, by the time I die, my countrymen will have become civilised enough to abolish capital punishment.