A Quote by Paul Theroux

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

Paul Theroux

Quote Topics

Behavior Civilized Civilized Behavior Compassion Measure

Quote Author

Paul Theroux
American - Novelist
Born: April 10, 1941

As a society, we come up lacking in many of the marks of compassion and wisdom by which we measure ourselves as civilized.

Greg Boyle

Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become.

D. Todd Christofferson

Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it.

Rush Limbaugh

Live with compassion. Work with compassion. Die with compassion. Meditate with compassion. Enjoy with compassion. When problems come, experience them with compassion.

Thubten Zopa Rinpoche

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.

Ayn Rand

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

Greg Boyle

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

Friedrich Durrenmatt

We will not make inroads into the gun-violence problem until we acknowledge the underlying causes of youth behavior today, compared to yesterday. ... we must come to the realization that laws and regulations alone cannot produce a civilized society. It's morality that is society's first line of defense against uncivilized behavior.

Walter E. Williams

Civilized people have exchanged some part of their chances of happiness for a measure of security.

Sigmund Freud

The measure of a society is its compassion.

Kristin Hannah

In civilized communities men's idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behavior. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.

W. Somerset Maugham

What do we measure when we measure time? The gloomy answer from Hawking, one of our most implacably cheerful scientists, is that we measure entropy. We measure changes and those changes are all for the worse. We measure increasing disorder. Life is hard, says science, and constancy is the greatest of miracles.

David Quammen

Racism itself is difficult to measure. We can measure hate crimes - which are absolutely an indicator. We can measure reports of discrimination. We can measure the number of times hateful words are being used across the Internet. Those things all help us measure racism, but it can sometimes be nebulous.

Shaun King

There is as yet no civilized society, but only a society in the process of becoming civilized. There is as yet no civilized nation, but only nations in the process of becoming civilized. From this standpoint, we can now speak of a collective task of humankind. The task of humanity is to build a genuine civilization.