The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'.
We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.
Woman's success in lifting men out of their way of life nearly resembling that of the beasts who merely hunted and fished for food, who found shelter where they could in jungles, in trees, and caves was a civilizing triumph.
The law has no claim to human respect. It has no civilizing mission; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.
The major civilizing force in the world is not religion, it is sex.
Wine is a civilizing agent.
In the development of mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as the civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to altruism.
I'm for prayer in the schools because ritual and ceremony are calming and civilizing, and the little fartlings should be tamped down whenever possible.
The socialism of our day has done good service in setting men to thinking how certain civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by theopulent, can be enjoyed by all.
The civilizing process has increased the distance between behavior and the impulse life of the animal body.
All black people who are even minimally conscious, black people who have ever experienced Europe's technological power crusading in the vanguard of a civilizing mission, have profound feelings of inferiority and bitterly regret the fact that the Industrial Revolution did not agreeably commence in Dahomey or Dakar. Nothing is achieved by concealing this fact.
Since civilizing children takes the better part of two decades--some twenty years of nonstop thinking, nurturing, teaching, coaxing, rewarding, forgiving, warning, punishing, sympathizing, apologizing, reminding, and repeating, not to mention deciding what to do when--I now understand that one wrong move is invariably followed by hundreds of opportunities to be wrong again.
