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Civilization   Listen
noun
Civilization  n.  
1.
The act of civilizing, or the state of being civilized; national culture; refinement. "Our manners, our civilization, and all the good things connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles... the spirit of a gentleman, and spirit of religion."
2.
(Law) Rendering a criminal process civil. (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Civilization" Quotes from Famous Books



... United States to recognize and protect their independence, to establish commercial relations with their people, and to assist them in their steps toward regulated and responsible government. The inhabitants of these islands, having made considerable progress in Christian civilization and the development of trade, are doubtful of their ability to maintain peace and independence without the aid of some stronger power. The subject is deemed worthy of respectful attention, and the claims upon our assistance by this distant community ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson

... in its quality—childlike, simple, and savage. It has not entirely passed; for both Elizabethan folk and Elizabethan customs are yet to be found in the United States. While the half-savage civilization of the farther West was roaring on its way across the continent—while the day of the keelboatman and the plainsman, of the Indian-fighter and the miner, even the day of the cowboy, was dawning and setting—there still was a frontier left far behind in the East, near the top of the mountain ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough

... misrepresented by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a narrow street, in a den of vice, you do not expect civilization, you do not expect order. But the horror of this was the fact that there was civilization, that there was order, but that civilisation only showed its morbidity, and order only its monotony. No one would say, in going ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton

... four walls we half insensibly lose something of our naturalness and comport ourselves as creatures of the civilization we belong to. But we never really feel at home there, though childhood may have wreathed round with tender memories old rooms and the quaint garden-places of happy unthinking hours. There is a house, a temple not built with hands; perhaps we thought it a mere ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell

... raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men? They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defence, awaiting their transformation. Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester

... flowers grew in their well-cultivated valleys until the country blossomed like the Garden of the Lord; and in the midst of all this industry and agricultural prosperity the native converts obeyed their Christian masters peacefully and happily, and came as near to a state of civilization as Indians ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard

... generations. The Paris peace lost an opportunity as unique as the great war itself. In destroying the moral idealism born of the sacrifices of the war it did almost as much as the war itself in shattering the structure of Western civilization. ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan

... subject to themselves. Like a whirlwind of 126 nations they swept across the great swamp and at once fell upon the Alpidzuri, Alcildzuri, Itimari, Tuncarsi and Boisci, who bordered on that part of Scythia. The Alani also, who were their equals in battle, but unlike them in civilization, manners and appearance, they exhausted by their incessant attacks and subdued. For by the terror 127 of their features they inspired great fear in those whom perhaps they did not really surpass in war. They made their foes flee in horror ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes

... two straggling barns and cottages indicated their approach to the outskirts of a country town or settlement. Here the team halted, as if the belligerent-looking teamster had felt his appearance was inconsistent with an effeminate civilization, and the oxen were turned into an open waste opposite a nondescript wooden tenement, half farmhouse and half cabin, evidently of the rudest Western origin. He may have recognized the fact that these "shanties" were not, as the ordinary traveler might infer, the first rude shelter of the original ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... call himself a lady's man, was nevertheless human enough to appreciate the fact that the young lady's face was piquant and her smile delightful. She was dressed with quiet but elegant simplicity. The perfume of the violets at her waistband seemed to remind him of his return to civilization. ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... be? His studies had taught him that in this little-explored portion of Barsoom the fierce tribe of Torquasian green men ruled supreme, and that as yet no red man had succeeded in piercing to the heart of their domain to return again to the world of civilization. ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... subject to interest the ears and tongues of the public. But no wonder universal attention is engrossed by the present portentous scene! It seems to draw to a question, whether Europe or France is to be depopulated; whether civilization can be recovered, or the republic of Chaos can be supported by assassination. We have heard of the golden, silver, and iron ages; the brazen one existed while the French were only predominantly insolent. What the present age will be denominated, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... he repeated. "It is going to take money from those who don't know how to keep or to spend it and give it to those who do know how. The money will go for building up civilization, instead of for beer and for bargain-trough finery to make working men's wives and daughters look ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips

... the hips, and of a fine brown coloring. He carried with easy grace a strong, well-massed head, to which the close adherence of the ears, and the shortness of the dark-brown shiny hair, gave an effect of high civilization and finish. Brown, level eyes, neither hard nor soft, but of a twinkling habit, a nose straight, thick, finely chiselled, an emphatic chin, and a large mouth of extraordinary sweetness, were not lost ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris

... conditions akin to those which have in various forms prevailed ever since the institutions of ancient times and which alone render the present social structure viable. If this forecast should prove correct, the only alternative to a break disastrous in the continuity of civilization is the frank recognition of the principle that certain inferior races are destined to serve the cause of mankind in those capacities for which alone they are qualified and to readjust social institutions to ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... sins against oaths of allegiance; it sins against public and beneficent peace; and it sins, worse than all, against the cornerstone of American progress and history and hope,—the worth of the laborer, the rights of man. It strikes for barbarism against civilization." ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds

... Kaiser, was the author of the phrase, "the treaty is a scrap of paper." What was once in the gristle in the ancestor is now bred in the bone of the Kaiser and Crown Prince. That phrase, "a scrap of paper," holds the germ of a thousand wars. It spells the ruin of civilization. Not to resent it by war, is for the Allies ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis

... incitements to the study of nature, afforded in descriptive poetry, landscape painting, and the cultivation of exotic plants; while the second and larger part enters into the consideration of the different epochs in the progress of discovery and of the corresponding stages of advance in human civilization. The 'third' volume, the publication of which, as M. Humboldt himself informs me in a letter addressed to my learned friend and publisher, Mr. H. G. Bohn, "has been somewhat delayed, owing to the present state of public ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... usually conscious only of the former. This is the visible, palpable world of motion and change that rushes and roars around us in the winds, the storms, the floods, the moving and falling bodies, and the whole panorama of our material civilization; the latter is the world of silent, invisible, unsleeping, and all-potent chemical reactions that take place all about us and is confined to the atoms and molecules of matter, as the former is confined to its ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... an Andrew Jackson type of man as its first President, our country would soon have been the laughing stock of nations, and could never have gained that prestige which neither wealth nor power can bring, but which is obtained only through evidences of genuine civilization and culture. As Wharton says in her Martha Washington: "An executive mansion presided over by a man and woman who combined with the most ardent patriotism a dignity, elegance, and moderation that would have graced the court of any Old World ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... and shame arising from the mixture of the races; and, secondly, the separation of husband and wife from each other, and from their infant families, by sale. I do firmly believe that the recurrence of the former evil becomes rarer every day, for advance of civilization only seems to strengthen the natural repugnance—with which moral sentiment has nothing to do—existing between the Anglo-Saxon ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... career. Ah, he succeeded greatly. Why, when I was at Harrow we used to cross from Waterloo to Euston through some of the worst slums in the world. You boys can't realize what they looked like. And Shaftesbury's work and example wiped them out of our civilization."[27] ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell

... "Civilization thwarts the ends of nature. In our cities, according to our customs, the virgin destined by nature for the open air, made to bask in the sunlight, to admire the nude wrestlers, as in Lacedemonia, to choose, and to love, is shut up in close confinement ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... strange scenes confronting him, for during the hundred years a great change had taken place in the Enchanted Island. Great cities had been built and great kingdoms established. Civilization had won the people, and they no longer robbed or fought or indulged in magical arts, but were busily employed and ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum

... constitutes himself the head of a sort of brute polity. He becomes a king and father of the beasts, and by the economical arrangements which this pretension involves, advances a first step, though a low one, in civilization, which the hunter or the fisher ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... being an enterprising young man, though destitute of cash, and utterly ignorant of South African life, determined to push on with all his might and main into the Barolong country, and to rush for the front among the first in the field in these rumoured new diggings on the extreme north frontier of civilization. ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... of the civilization of a people—at least, as sure as any— afforded by mechanical art is to be found in their architecture, which presents so noble a field for the display of the grand and the beautiful, and which, at the same time, is so intimately connected with the essential comforts ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved. This language, in spite of the complex influences which went to the making of the nationality of France, was of a simple origin. With a very few exceptions, every word in the French ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... of the Duel between France and Germany, with its Lesson to Civilization. In calling the terrible war now waging a Duel, I might content myself with classical authority, Duellum being a well-known Latin word for War. The historian Livy makes a Roman declare that affairs are to be settled "by a pure and pious ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner

... whose celebrity is of much greater antiquity than that of the Rhine. The Nile and the Ganges are intimately associated with the early history of civilization and the mysterious beginnings of wisdom; the Tiber is eloquent of that vanished Empire which was the first to carry the torch of advancement into the dark places of barbarian Europe; the name of the Jordan is sacred to thousands as that first heard in infancy ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... try and accommodate yourself to our manners," said Jones, when Murdoch had left the room. "They may seem unnecessary, or even absurd, but they are sanctioned by custom, and, you know, civilization is built on custom. The poet speaks of a freedom which 'slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent.' Precedent is custom. Never defy custom, or you will find her your master. Humor her, and she will be your slave. Now I think I shall leave, while ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead

... Christ! Here, in this family, where slavery is found in its mildest form, she had been kept in ignorance of God's will and word, and learned to know that the mildest form of American slavery, at this day of Christian civilization and Democratic liberty, was worse than death itself! She had learned by an experience of many years, that it was so bad she had rather take the life of her own dearest child, without the hope of Heaven for herself, than that it should experience its unutterable agonies, ...
— The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 18 • American Anti-Slavery Society

... team was speeding swiftly away, the strident voice of the lone passenger was uplifted in excited hail to the coachman to stop. And here the Filipino demonstrated to the uttermost that the amenities of civilization were yet undreamed of in his darkened intellect—as between the orders of the man and the demands of the woman he obeyed the former. Deaf, even to that awful voice, he drove furiously on until brought ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King

... was like one compelled to walk through life with a bandage over his eyes. On all sides of him, in the towns and on the farms, an undercurrent of life went on that did not touch him. In even the smallest of the towns, inhabited only by farm laborers, a quaint interesting civilization was being developed. Men worked hard but were much in the open air and had time to think. Their minds reached out toward the solution of the mystery of existence. The schoolmaster and the country lawyer read Tom Paine's "Age of Reason" and Bellamy's "Looking Backward." They discussed ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson

... she had considered her friends in the East. What would they say if they knew of her friendship with the Two Diamond stray-man? The standards of Eastern civilization were not elastic enough to include the man whom she had come to know so well, who had strode as boldly into her life as he had strode into her story, with his steady, serene eyes, his picturesque rigging, and ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer

... moonlight; and when near the summit the Hermit commenced his evening hymn a few rods from me. Listening to this strain on the lone mountain, with the full moon just rounded from the horizon, the pomp of your cities and the pride of your civilization ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... the walls in Oriental style, were of rich crimson satin embroidered with gold. In the middle stood a table covered with ornaments and rich trinkets lately arrived from Paris—for France already began to exercise the influence of its superior civilization and refinement over the south ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... point which has baffled us for several years now," the major returned. "Only it is not how they are going to find it, but where. Because somewhere in the past of this world they have contacted a civilization able to produce weapons and ideas so advanced as to baffle our experts. We have to find that source and either mine it ourselves or close it off. As yet we're ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton

... have only a small supply of food, my lad, an' it's hard to git up here. We must hit th' trail fer civilization as ...
— Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice • Victor Appleton

... and surrounded by two broad verandas, one at each story, beneath a great hip roof gracefully upheld on Doric columns. It bore that air of uncostly refinement which is one of the most pleasing outward features of the aloof civilization to which it, though ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... conquerors the Sicilians built as they were directed. Their arts and their civilization were superior to those of their masters, and the Normans were apparently willing to make use of this superiority, and merely adapted the forms of decoration and methods of construction which they found here in ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 03, March 1895 - The Cloister at Monreale, Near Palermo, Sicily • Various

... regarded as worthy of contempt and abuse, and the progress being made in the emancipation and elevation of woman, is one of the noblest and best proofs of the real progress of Lebanon in the paths of morality and civilization." ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup

... rent and children. Generation after generation have grown up in ignorance and misery, while those who lived upon the product of their labours have laughed and rioted through life as though they had not known that from them alone could light and civilization descend upon these poor wretches. I had often heard, as every one has, of the evils of absenteeism, but till I came and saw its effects I had no notion how great a crime it is.... They [the absentee landowners] thought only of themselves and their own enjoyments, ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... wave. The desert has replaced the sea, the sebkhas, the salt lakes, the Triton lakes, the sandy Syrtes are the desolate vestiges of the free sea water over which, in former days, the fleets swept with a fair wind towards the conquest of Attica. Sand swallows up civilization better than water. To-day there remains nothing of the beautiful isle that the sea and winds kept gay and verdant but this chalky mass. Nothing has endured in this rocky basin, cut off forever from the living world, but the marvelous oasis ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit

... that had vanished through the floor; and to the pickling rooms, and the salting rooms, the canning rooms, and the packing rooms, where choice meat was prepared for shipping in refrigerator cars, destined to be eaten in all the four corners of civilization. Afterward they went outside, wandering about among the mazes of buildings in which was done the work auxiliary to this great industry. There was scarcely a thing needed in the business that Durham and Company ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... the hill of the little church of St. Martin, and look on the view which is there spread before his eyes. Immediately below are the towers of the great abbey of St. Augustine, where Christian learning and civilization first struck root in the Anglo-Saxon race; and within which now, after a lapse of many centuries, a new institution has arisen, intended to carry far and wide, to countries of which Gregory and Augustine never heard, the blessings which they gave to ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin

... been shipwrecked as a child, and cast upon this island. It was sad to think that one so beautiful should be condemned to live among savages, but I reflected that my own case was no better, for it seemed unlikely I would return to civilization. Melannie appeared to place full confidence in me from ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes

... will they left a happy, prosperous country to come over here. They knew war was here. They knew that the forces battling for honor, for justice, and for civilization were still being checked by the forces serving the powers of frightfulness, brute force, and barbarity. They knew that fighting was still necessary. Not forgetting historical memories, they wished to give us ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood

... came to a stop at last at the siding of the station. Benito was a typical desert settlement, the very last link with civilization. For beyond the three squat adobe shacks, lay the sandy, cactus-dotted land that stretched far out in every direction to the rising foothills that skirted the ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm

... a tale of the primitive and lonely West and North, but the primitiveness and loneliness is not like that to be found in 'Pierre and His People'. Pierre's wanderings took place in a period when civilization had made but scant marks upon the broad bosom of the prairie land, and towns and villages were few and far scattered. The Lebanon and Manitou of this story had no existence in the time of Pierre, except that where Manitou stands there was a Hudson's Bay Company's post at ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... shoppers and the profound difference between the shoppers and the shopkeepers. All ladies were agreeable, all babies in perambulators were darlings. The homes thus represented by ladies and babies were clearly polite homes, where reigned suavity, tranquillity, affection, and plenty. Civilization was justified in Wedgwood Street and the market-place—and also, to some extent, in St. Luke's Square.... And Rachel was one of these ladies. Her gloved hand closed over a purse exactly in the style of the others. And her purse, regard being had to the inheritance of her husband, was supposed to ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... occupy a unique place in our history as the archetype of the hunter and wilderness wanderer. He was a true pioneer, and stood at the head of that class of Indian-fighters, game-hunters, forest-fellers, and backwoods farmers who, generation after generation, pushed westward the border of civilization from the Alleghanies to the Pacific. As he himself said, he was "an instrument ordained of God to settle the wilderness." Born in Pennsylvania, he drifted south into western North Carolina, and settled on what was then the extreme frontier. There he married, built a log cabin, ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt

... compared to Beta, but the Brotherhood had opened Kardon less than five hundred years ago, and in such a short time one couldn't expect all the comforts of civilization. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone

... the excitation that they loved; and, having their good faith and sympathy, heart and soul, with him, he met, in these lawless leopards of African France, with loyalty, courage, generosity, and self-abnegation far surpassing those which he had ever met with in the polished civilization ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... settlement was called, because it was the fourth in a range of townships recently marked out along the Connecticut, but, with one or two exceptions, wholly unoccupied as yet—was a rude little outpost of civilization, buried in forests that spread unbroken to the banks of the St. Lawrence, while its nearest English neighbor was nearly thirty miles away. As may be supposed, it grew slowly, and in 1744 it had but nine or ten families. In the preceding year, when ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman

... . something worse. Every advanced thinker, and the majority of theorists, could count on finding a sympathetic listener in him: and not infrequently they found in him an advocate also; such an arrant anti-optimist was the pestilent fellow. As if Civilization, after thousands of years of travail, had produced nothing better than a clumsy abortion with the claws of an animal and the tastes of Jack-an-ape! Why, the man must be mad, to have such irregular fancies! It was a pity laws against opinions ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce

... to do with it. They just fling it away, in a drunken frenzy. And down below are the poor, who slave to make civilization possible. Such lives as they have to live—I can't ever get the thought out of my mind, not in any happiest moment! I feel as if I were a man who had escaped from a beleaguered city, and it all depended upon me to carry the tidings and bring relief. I'm their one hope, and if I fail them I'm ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... fulfil? Wilt thou never cease to waste thy force and energies in intestine struggles? No; such cannot be thy destiny: the day will soon come, when, to govern thee, it will be necessary to understand that thy part is to place in all treaties thy sword of Brennus on the side of civilization." ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... in bearing testimony to the part taken by American missionaries in promoting the progress of the Chinese people. They have borne the light of Western civilization into every nook and corner of the empire. They have rendered inestimable service to China by the laborious task of translating into the Chinese language religious and scientific works of the West. They help us to bring happiness and comfort to the poor and the suffering, by the establishment ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland

... jack-boots. In the reporter of the 'Territorial Enterprise' I became introduced to a Californian celebrity, rich in eccentricities of thought, lively in fancy, quaint in remark, whose residence upon the fringe of civilization had allowed his humour to develop without restraint, and his ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... intellectual Beauty,—a line which, while it is as wise and subtle as the serpent, is as harmless and loving as the sacred dove of Venus. I have endeavored to prove how this line, the gesture of Attic eloquence, expresses the civilization of Pericles and Plato, of Euripides and Apelles. It is now proposed briefly to relate how this line was lost, when the politeness and philosophy, the literature and the Art of Greece were chained to the triumphal cars of Roman conquerors,—and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... generation was strongly Darwinian in the sense that it accepted, almost as a tenet of religious faith, the theory that human civilization is a progressive evolution, moving on the whole steadily toward perfection, from a lower to a higher intellectual plane, and, as a necessary part of its progress, developing a higher degree of mental vigor. I need hardly observe that all belief in democracy as a final ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams

... have met in China, all smiles and bustling politeness and condescension; a trifle too much of the latter, perhaps, were we at all on an equality; but quite excusable under the conditions of Celestial refinement and civilization on one side, and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... society—of civilization to-day, most marriages are merely a matter of chance. Even judgment cannot foresee the development of character brought about by circumstances, by environment. And in many marriages I have known about intimately both ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... aspects. On the one hand there is the established or accepted culture of those who dominate and control,—the culture of the leisure or ruling class. This culture is respected, admired, applauded, and sometimes even worshipped by those who benefit from it most directly. Civilization—even life itself seems bound up with its continuance. When the advocates of the established culture cry "Long live the King!" they are really shouting approval of royalty, aristocracy, landlordism, vassalage, exploitation and of ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin

... to entertain that same idea myself," he said, "but, after all, what is it to be a gentleman? All men can be gentle when they get what they want. That's no test of gentility. It takes circumstances outside the normal to prove man's civilization. When his desires meet with opposition the brute ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous

... citizenship, but were never allowed to be upon equality with those who once owned them. These indentured slaves and their descendants were always considered with contempt by the upper classes. The advance of American civilization, the tide of progress has arisen and swept over this indolent creature who remains the same stupid, ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton

... which belongs to the very noblest stage of civilization. All generous companies of artists, authors, philanthropists, men of science, are, or ought to be, Societies of Mutual Admiration. A man of genius, or any kind of superiority, is not debarred from admiring ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... domestic life of the Mormons. No portrait of them, however, will prove a likeness which does not clearly depict their twofold features; namely, their thrift and their iniquity. Contact with a truer condition of civilization, and the enforcement of United States laws, are slowly, but it is believed surely, reducing the numbers of the self-entitled "saints." Mormon missionaries, however, still seek to make proselytes in France, Norway, Sweden, and Great Britain, addressing themselves always to the ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou

... issue with our objectors and stand by this declaratory law. It embodies the general opinion and practice of the people; it is plainly conformable to the physical laws of nature and the requirements of civilization. Lands are held subject to laws thus grounded, and these considerations will not tolerate laws or decisions the ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... hands of the Republican party an awful responsibility was placed last Tuesday. . . It knows that reforms—great, far-sweeping reforms—are necessary, and it has the power to make them. God help our civilization if it does not! . . . It must repress the trusts or stand before the world responsible for our system of government being changed into a social republic. The arbitrary cutting down of wages must cease, or socialism ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... this was Tuesday! As Cousin George was taken westward from Red Lion Square in a cab, three or four different lines of conduct suggested themselves to him. In the first place, it would be a very good thing to murder Captain Stubber. In the present effeminate state of civilization and with the existing scruples as to the value of human life, he did not see his way clearly in this direction, but entertained the project rather as a beautiful castle in the air. The two next suggestions were to pay him the money demanded, or to pay him half of it. The ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope

... in the life of the nation has seemed to me more significant than that dark civilization which the colored man has built up in the midst of a white society organized against it. The Negro has been driven under all the burdens of oppression, both material and spiritual, to the brink of desperation, but he has always been saved by his philosophy of life. He has advanced against ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... furnaces are the squalid huts and ramshackle cottages of the operatives; there too, a little removed from the river are the caves in which the Huns and Scandinavians dwell, even as their prehistoric ancestors dwelt before the light of civilization dawned. ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams

... a tract of land twenty four miles long and twelve miles wide was withdrawn from civilization and given as a reservation to two thousand Winnebago Indians who took possession in June of that year against the vigorous protest of the people. Everyone in the town was down to see them come in. The river was full of their canoes for two or three ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various

... field in central Michigan evidently formed in an inclosed basin (Fig. 260), and one in Rhode Island, the total area of American coal fields has been reckoned at not less than two hundred thousand square miles. We can hardly estimate the value of these great stores of fossil fuel to an industrial civilization. The forests of the coal swamps accumulated in their woody tissues the energy which they received from the sun in light and heat, and it is this solar energy long stored in coal seams which now forms the world's chief source of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... of the men who are now wandering homeless through the streets. That is the way in which the nomads of civilization are constantly being recruited ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... Christ new elements were introduced into the civilization of the world; elements of kindliness, of compassion, of sympathy of man toward his fellow-man, that up to this time had not been known. There was a new revelation of the brotherhood of all men in the fatherhood of God: "We are all one in ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft

... at that time were not public, and that refinement of civilization which enables the first comer to ruin himself at all hours, as soon as the wish enters his mind, had not ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various

... by the Anglo-Saxons, begun in 449, seemed at first to promise only retrogression and the ruin of an existing civilization. These fierce barbarians found among the Celts of Britain a Roman culture, and the Christian religion exerting its influence for order and humanity. Their mission seemed to be to destroy both. In their original homes in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... can have been evolved from such germs as we find among the supposedly 'primitive' peoples, such as e.g. the Australian tribes. Are they really primitive? Or are we dealing, not with the primary elements of religion, but with the disjecta membra of a vanished civilization? Certain it is that so far as historical evidence goes our earliest records point to the recognition of a spiritual, not of a material, origin of the human race; the Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms were not composed by men who believed ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... he queried, half amused, half thoughtful. When he got back to civilization he always had to adjust his thoughts ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey

... is only necessary that you give me the sign, and you will become the master of circumstances. You will be the man to lead the people to the plane of high civilization that their government makes it possible ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams

... horseback, for at that time public lines of travel were fewer than at present, came suddenly upon a neat, one-story cottage in the edge of the forest. It stood alone, but it was evidently the home of one who aimed to add something of the graces of civilization to ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... to get the treasure to the surface, it would need a small army of men and burros to carry it over the mountains to civilization, and another small army to defend it while on the journey. It would be almost equally impossible, probably, for them ever again to reach this cave. If they were successful in getting out of this country alive now that the Priest was roused and the natives incensed ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... was as insatiable in ATTICUS and PEIRESC as in our CRACHERODE and TOWNLEY.[A] We trace the feelings of our literary contemporaries in all ages, and among every people who have ranked with nations far advanced in civilization; for among these may be equally observed both the great artificers of knowledge and those who preserve unbroken the vast chain of human acquisitions. The one have stamped the images of their minds on ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... thing should be at all necessary, and does not speak well for human nature. Why should it not be possible for men to vote openly? Because some who have done so have had to suffer loss. Is not this a blot upon our civilization, to say nothing ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness

... of the masses. It viewed every change with distrust, it met every innovation with opposition. While it reigned supreme, Europe lay in chains, and even into the new world it carried the fetters of the old. Only as Christianity has grown feebler has civilization strengthened, and progress has been made more and more rapidly as a failing creed has lost the power to oppose. And now, day by day, that progress becomes swifter; now, day by day, the opposition becomes ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... killed or wounded since the war began, but that avalanche of men and guns still poured out of the heart of Germany. He felt more deeply than ever that the world could not afford a German victory, and the sanguinary spectacle of a Kaiser riding roughshod over civilization. The fact that so many German people were likable and that Germany had achieved so much made ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler

... which success must be sought according to local possibilities. Development always depends upon the environment, and we should expect, therefore, unequal progress for the Negroes. Even the highest fruits of civilization fail if the bases of life are suddenly changed. The Congregational Church has not flourished among the Negroes as have some other denominations, in spite of its great activity in educational work. The American mode of government is being greatly modified to make it fit ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey

... of friendship for, and sympathies with, those who, like themselves, have founded their institutions on the principle of the equal rights of men; and such nations being more prominently neighbors of the United States, the latter are co-operating with them in establishing civilization and culture on the American continent. Such being the general principles which govern the United States in their foreign relations, you may be assured, sir, that in all things this government will deal justly, frankly, and, if it be possible, even liberally with Peru, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... art and literature. Far in advance of the other European nations, the Italians regarded the rest of the world as barbarous, priding themselves the while, in spite of mutual jealousies and hatreds, on their Italic civilization. They were enormously wealthy. The resources of the papal treasury, the private fortunes of the Florentine bankers, the riches of the Venetian merchants might have purchased all that France or Germany possessed of value. The single duchy of Milan yielded to its masters seven hundred thousand ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... has been waged. The English are not a cruel people,—quite the reverse,—but it is a fact that their military history abounds more in devilish acts than that of any other people of corresponding civilization. The reason of this is, that they look upon all men who resist them in some such spirit as the Romans regarded their foes, and as being in some sense rebels. It is only with those who rebel against other Governments that those who live under ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various

... Gilmore's bedside table. The girl McKnight expected to see in Richmond the next day, Sunday! She was on her way back to meet him! Well, what difference did it make, anyhow? We had been thrown together by the merest chance. In an hour or two at the most we would be back in civilization and she would recall me, if she remembered me at all, as an unshaven creature in a red cravat and tan shoes, with a soiled Pullman sheet tied around my neck. I drew ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... their jaws. France must be so completely crushed that she will never again cross our path. You must remember that we have not come to make war on the French people, but to bring them the higher Civilization. The French have shown themselves decadent and without respect for the Divine law. Against England we fight for booty. Our real enemy is England. We have to ... crush absolutely perfidious Albion ... subdue her to such an extent that her ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell

... any regard for public interest, will do his part in obeying them to the letter. However, if he occupies private property where he may use his own judgment, or if he travels in the wilderness far from civilization, where there are no regulations, it will be useful for him to know something about the fuel value of all kinds of wood, green as well as dead, and for such people the ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... been trying to catch up with. Jane is that, and then the day after, too, and what she has done to Glendale in these two weeks has stunned the old town into a trance of delight and amazement. She has recreated us, breathed the breath of modernity into us, and started the machine up the grade of civilization at a pace that makes me hold my breath for fear ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess

... without assailing or denouncing them. He is a friend of religious toleration, and that not only because his philosophy has taught him to look on all forms of faith with an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness and effeminacy of feeling which is attendant on civilization. ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser

... powers of imitation and invention, make them the leaders of the Orient. Steamships of twenty-two thousand tons, and equal to any Atlantic Cunarders, yet built in their own dockyards by shipwrights who twenty years ago knew nothing of their trade, are a proof of extraordinary plasticity and ability. Civilization and Christianity may find new expression, if the Japanese are subdued ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong

... like neighbors. I do like civilization. The trouble is, neighbors are not always civilized. PUNCHINELLO will be impressed with the fact before becoming a single weekling. The first floor may be ever so nice, quiet, well-dressed, proper folks—but those dreadful musical people in the attic! ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various

... Back at the willows they would have killed him. The hands at his throat had sought his life. Wolves and not men were about them on the plain; wolves headed by two monsters of the human pack, Graham and Rossland. Murder and lust and mad passion were hidden in the darkness; law and order and civilization were hundreds of miles away. If Graham won, only the unmapped tundras would remember this night, as the deep, dark kloof remembered in its gloom the other tragedy of more than half a century ago. And the girl at his side, already disheveled and ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood

... weeks afterward in rapid visits to various industrial centres and model factory villages. During his previous European pilgrimages his interest had by no means been restricted to sociological questions: the appeal of an old civilization, reaching him through its innumerable forms of tradition and beauty, had roused that side of his imagination which his work at home left untouched. But upon his present state of deep moral commotion the spells of art and history were powerless to work. The foundations ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... the Great—Munnich, whom Prince Eugene called "his beloved pupil;" Ostermann, of whom the dying Czar Peter said he had never caught him in a fault; that he was the only honest statesman in Russia—Munnich and Ostermann, those two great statesmen to whom Russia was chiefly indebted for what civilization and cultivation she had acquired, were now accused of high-treason, and sent for trial before a commission commanded to find them guilty and to punish them. They were to be put out of the way because they were feared, and to be feared was held ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... this particular fraternity, the absurdity of the whole system of religion remains the same. Religion's day is done; the very sense of worship is a mere coward instinct—a relic of barbarism which is being gradually eradicated from our natures by the progress of civilization. The world knows by this time that creation is an empty jest; we are all beginning to understand its bathos! And if we must grant that there is some mischievous supreme Farceur who, safely shrouded in invisibility, continues to perpetrate ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... beach, and the entire spectacle of the solitude, blended as it was with the associations of Africa, time, and the changes of history, united to produce sensations of a pleasing melancholy. The spectacle of the ship, bringing with it the images of European civilization, as it lay helpless and deserted on the sands, too, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... illustrious literary school of Seville," says Correa, "and developed amidst Gothic Cathedrals, lacy Moorish and stained-glass windows, was at ease only in the field of tradition. He felt at home in a complete civilization, like that of the Middle Ages, and his artisticopolitical ideas and his fear of the ignorant crowd made him regard with marked predilection all that was aristocratic and historic, without however refusing, in his quick intelligence, to recognize ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... respectable looking street. She told me that she had grown up in Riverville and had walked up and down that street nearly every day of her life, and that she never knew till last year that those respectable fronts of houses opened on to interiors and into back yards that were a disgrace to any civilization. The other property owners on that block were perfectly horrified when she published a description of it, with photographs of the worst spots. It stirred up a great deal of talk and indignation, but nobody did anything to make it better, and soon the ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston

... forgetting; by the world forgot! I should enjoy the life of a Canadian settler—so free, so rational, so manly. How happy we might be—she with her children, her garden, her books; I with my dogs, my gun, my lands! What a curse it is, this spider's web of civilization, that hems and cramps us in on every side, and from which not all the armor of common-sense is sufficient to ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

... is very much otherwise. For long ages past, man has paid very little attention to it—so little, that he has practically lost the use of his senses. It is true, that in every civilization the star arises, and man confesses, with more or less of folly and confusion, that he knows himself to be. But most often he denies it, and in being a materialist becomes that strange thing, a being which cannot see its own ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins

... personal and official respect for a French prince possessing such claims upon the respect of Frenchmen as well as of Americans, the diplomatic representative of the United States was assailed with coarse and vulgar violence in the columns of journals assuming to represent the civilization ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... reason to complain of some of them in the late war, it will have, in the future, far stronger reason to be grateful; not to them, indeed, for the citizen owes his life to his country, but to their religion, which has been and is the grand protectress of modern society and civilization. ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson

... the question of the ethics of slavery, — on the other hand they defended it on biblical grounds, — but they did enjoin upon masters the duty of kindness to slaves. Many of them were not cultivated men, but they laid the foundation for a better civilization in a stern and righteous social life which flowered in the next generation. "The only burning issues were sprinkling versus immersion, freewill versus predestination," and over these questions the churches fought with energy. Divided ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... of government be extended to now distant and uninhabited regions. In view of the vast wilderness yet to be reclaimed, we may well invite the lover of freedom of every land to take up his abode among us and assist us in the great work of advancing the standard of civilization and giving a wider spread to the arts and refinements of cultivated life. Our prayers should evermore be offered up to the Father of the Universe for His wisdom to direct us in the path of our duty so as to enable us to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... in which this craving exhibits itself seem to depend upon climate and civilization. Climate prescribes what is absolutely necessary; civilization, what is decent and becoming. In some countries it is necessary to protect the body, and especially the head, from the power of the sun; ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge

... the eighteenth century, Cooperstown was one of the outposts of civilization. Few clearings had been made in the vast mysterious forests, which appealed so deeply to the boy's imagination, and which still sheltered deer, bear, and Indians. The most vivid local story which his ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... up the newly-fallen snow in its mad embrace, and drove it with amazing force against the little telegraph office which sheltered me from its deathly embrace, as though enraged against this earnest of approaching civilization. So fierce, at times, was the onslaught that the tense telegraph wires could be heard humming even above the ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith

... in an almost kindly tone: "What would you do with a wild man like Red Pierre? Run along; git out of here; grab your horse, and beat it back to civilization; there ain't no place for you up here ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand

... melody. Barbarous refers to the worst side of barbarian life, and to revolting acts, especially of cruelty, such as a civilized man would not be expected to do; as, a barbarous deed. We may, however, say barbarous nations, barbarous tribes, without implying anything more than want of civilization and culture. Savage is more distinctly bloodthirsty than barbarous. In this sense we speak of a savage beast and ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... and that portion of such another avenue are merely myths—unknown lands away in the wilds. But a stranger finds himself in the position of being sent across the country knee deep into the mud, wading through snipe grounds, looking for civilization ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

... of this remarkable reservoir is full of human and natural interest. It is located in a land whose civilization was old when Rome was founded, a land of lost races, perpetual sunshine, forbidding deserts, and picturesque wonders. Strange vegetation and scenes that are novel are reflected in soft, changing tints from plain and mountain. From dawn to dark they ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... that night were the criminal feelings that underlie all civilization. I had only one desire—to destroy—to be avenged. My uncle, Andrew Henderson, was an Arch-Mystic of your sect; and on the night he died, your sacred Scitsym ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... the same reason that Earthmen bury time capsules with records of their civilization," Major Briarton said. "I'd guess that the records here will tell, when they have been studied and deciphered. Perhaps there was already some sign of intelligent life developing elsewhere in the Solar System. Perhaps they hoped that some of their ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse

... the missionaries, to give to the Indians the Bible in their own language, so that the opposing forces of Christianity and shamanism alike profited by the genius of Sikw[^a]ya. The pressure of the new civilization was too strong to be withstood, however, and though the prophets of the old religion still have much influence with the people, they are daily losing ground and will soon be without ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney

... fruit, nuts, and vegetables. He was a convinced rebel against any fire for food, making known to any one who would listen that man had erred sadly, thousands of years ago, in bringing fire into his cave for cooking, and that the only cure for civilization's evils was in abolishing the kitchen. He would live in the Marquesas as he said the aborigines do. Alas! I did not tell him they ate ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... capital town could alone reproduce the miracle worked in Brie during the last two centuries. Here, however, not only is a town lacking, but also the great residences which sometimes give life to these hopeless deserts, where civilization languishes, where the agriculturist sees only barrenness, and the traveller finds not a single inn, nor that which, perchance, he is ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... missionary tell that the pariah caste sit on the ground, the peasant caste lift themselves by the thickness of a leaf, and the next rank by the thickness of a stalk, it seems to me that the heathen has reached a high state of civilization—precisely that which Victoria has reached when she permits a Herschel ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell

... leisurely into Atchison on a Sunday evening. Lights gleam in the windows of milk-white churches, and they tell us, far better than anything else could, that we are back to civilization again. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne

... laborers digging where Wilfrid thought the rest of the building ought to be. In his travels he had seen other Roman houses better preserved than this, and by inquiring of learned men had gained some idea of Roman civilization. He had been told that Roman officials in England often built villas in places rather like this terrace, and since the building already unearthed was the end of the walls in one direction, the rest of the villa might be found under the cottage of old Bartram and ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey

... It echoed in his ear all the way home: "Take care of yourself." What boast is there for the civilization that refines away the unconscious heroism of ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... six years old, had advanced far enough toward civilization to have a small jail, and into that we were shoved. Night was come by the time we were lodged there, and, being in pretty good appetite, I struck ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced, and possibly may be upheld. Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles, and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion. The ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... rights and world-old laws, and allowed the monarch to meddle and make with the freemen's allodial holdings. As we look at it now, and from another point of view, we see that what to them was unbearable tyranny was really a step in the great march of civilization and progress, and that the centralization and consolidation of the royal authority, according to Charlemagne's system, was in time to be a blessing to the kingdoms of the north. But to the freeman ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous

... of learning in Turkey, the London Literary Gazette mentions, that when the department of the Ministry of Public Instruction was created four or five years ago in Constantinople, it became apparent that there existed a desideratum of Moslem civilization necessary to be supplied as soon as possible—a Turkish Vocabulary and a Turkish Grammar, compiled according to the development of modern philology. The Grammar has now been published, compiled by Fuad Effendi, mustesher of the Grand Vizier, assisted ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... period, which we are apt to overlook. The political questions, the debates, the eloquence of that day, give us no idea of the city in which the history was made, or of the life led by the men who figured in that history. Their speeches might have been delivered in any great centre of civilization, and in the midst of a brilliant and luxurious society. But the Washington of 1841, when Mr. Webster took the post which is officially the first in the society of the capital and of the country, was a very odd sort of place, and widely ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge



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