Texas is not a civilized place. Texans shoot one another a lot. They also knife, razor, and stomp one another to death with some frequency. And they fight in bars all the time.
Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.
The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.
Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.
The truly civilized man has no enemies.
The point is. . . to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.
A lot of my writing is not terribly civilized.
Civilized life exacts its toll.
That the will of the people can be established by voting for democrats is, of course, a delusion. Yet when considering a non-threatening system for deciding between diverse interests, then voting, of course, can be regarded as a humane and civilized process.
The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.
I look much more civilized than I actually am.
Shakespeare had no tutors but nature and genius. He caught his faults from the bad taste of his contemporaries. In an age still less civilized Shakespeare might have been wilder, but would not have been vulgar.
During all the first part of the Middle Ages, no other people made as important a contribution to human progress as did the Arabs, if we take this term to mean all those whose mother-tongue was Arabic, and not merely those living in the Arabian peninsula. For centuries, Arabic was the language of learning, culture and intellectual progress for the whole of the civilized world with the exception of the Far East. From the IXth to the XIIth century there were more philosophical, medical, historical, religiuos, astronomical and geographical works written in Arabic than in any other human tongue.
deferring gratification is a good definition of being civilized.
For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus the killing of a god may sometimes come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal.
By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.
Like the whale who swallowed Jonah, we have engulfed all national dishes known to civilized man and made them in delight, if not in name our own.
To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems. . . which he has to solve. . . And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of-such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity. . . . Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant.
A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the fine qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.
The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.