Top 136 Civilised Quotes & Sayings

Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.

We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.

Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilised into time and tune.

Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.

A civilised man is someone who has discovered something more satisfying than combat.

If you want to be a civilised man, first you have to be a non-violent man! If you want to be a civilised country, first you have to be a non-violent country! Violence is the means of the sick minds; peacefulness is the means of the healthy minds!

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

In no civilised country is the head of the government immune from corruption investigation.

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.

I've always said when age or infirmity gets the better of me, I'm off to whichever civilised country lets the elderly die with dignity.

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

Tapas is one of the world's most civilised drinking and eating traditions.

Now that their long war was over, they could get on with the proper concern of all civilised nations, which is to prepare for the next one.

Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world

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.

There is nothing more foreign to a civilised and democratic system than preventive detention.

There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane.

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.

Society needs both justice and compassion, a head and a heart, if it is to be civilised.

The civilised cultures are the most cruel. It's the same with education - often it breeds sadistic forms of cruelty.

With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.

That monstrous tuberosity of civilised life, the capital of England.

Civilised my syphilised yarbles.

Civilised adults do not take apple juice with dinner.

One of its most powerful weapons has always been 'barbarity': 'we' know that 'we' are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be un-civilised, with those who do not - or cannot be trusted to - share our values.

I think the police are a major part of the glue that holds civilised life together. They're not highly paid.

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

We can only truly be civilised people when we have regular and meaningful contact with the wild world

We would all love to walk up to someone and shoot them in the head, there's no doubt about that. We're too civilised to admit it, but we're happy to read about it.

I think you will agree the sign of a civilised society is a regular dining schedule.

In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature.

Pretending is the basis of civilised society, and it is sometimes necessary for all of us. Without it we are nothing more than a pack of snarling dogs.

This extraordinary metal, the soul of every manufacture, and the mainspring perhaps of civilised society. Of iron.

The possession and the enjoyment of property are the pledges which bind a civilised people to an improved country.

I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.

A civilised society ought to make ample provision for everyone, no matter their background, to enjoy the arts and culture.

We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation.

Any outlaw regime that has ties to terrorist groups or seeks to possess weapons of mass destruction is a grave danger to the civilised world and will be confronted.

The sign of a civilised society is how we treat the most vulnerable and our social care system is not up to scratch.

When we get civilised, I believe children will go by number until they get old enough to choose their own names.

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.

On this waterlogged landscape....are scattered palaces and hovels....It is here that the human spirit becomes perfect, and at the same time brutalised, that civilisation produces its marvels and that civilised man returns to the savage.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

To be Radchaai is to be civilised.

No man who is in a hurry is quite civilised.

I have a flat in Paris and go there a lot, but the Eurostar's much more civilised than flying.

I've always thought that the level of homelessness in society is likely to be a truer measure of how civilised we are then almost any other factor.

Violence is the tool of the barbarian; aggression is the method of the primitive; bloodshed is the way of the savage; cruelty is the manner of the brutish! To be called as a 'civilised,' man must be peaceable!

All civilised countries should unite in the fight against international terrorism.

Around it are those countries which, according to History, constitute the civilised world ie, a world that can support historians

It is the decisive people who have become civilised; it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians.

To me, education is not a commodity. It is a public good, essential to any society with a claim to being civilised.

London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.

It is a mark of civilised man that he seeks to understand his traditions, and to criticise them, not to swallow them whole.

The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science.

If there was anything any Radchaai considered essential for civilised life, it was tea.

It is the duty of the followers of Islam to spread through the civilised world, a knowledge of what Islam means - its spirit and message.

If I'm alone in the car and I fart, I still laugh at it. It's the little things that keep us civilised.

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