"Civilisation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his own table, and his excuse for his licentious language, viz. 'that every body understood that, but few could talk rationally upon less common topics.' The refinement of latter days,—which is perhaps the consequence of vice, which wishes to mask and soften itself, as much as of virtuous civilisation,—had not yet made sufficient progress. Even Johnson, in his 'London,' has two or three passages which cannot be read aloud, and Addison's 'Drummer' ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... "moved with compassion on them." No Protestant missionary had ever yet gone forth into the wilderness after these lost sheep; and in addition to their natural heathenism, with its degrading superstitions and revolting cruelties, a new danger was approaching the Indians in the shape of the "civilisation" of white traders and miners, with its fire-water and its reckless immorality. Capt. Prevost earnestly inquired of Mr. Ridgeway what prospect there was of the Church Missionary Society undertaking a Mission on ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... farther side into the rude shelter of the forest. So, at a bound, she left the discretion and the cheerful lamps of palace evenings; ceased utterly to be a sovereign lady; and, falling from the whole height of civilisation, ran forth into the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thick damask faded to a strange pale green. All in that double-stalled partition, once belonging to the great earl's war-horses, was scrupulously clean, for the Christian Moor had retained some of the peculiar virtues born of Mohammedanism and of high civilisation. The apprentice lads tramped in much as if they had been entering a wizard's cave, though Stephen had taken care to assure Edmund of his application of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... succession the course of geographical advance in Christendom down to the death of Prince Henry (1460). Setting aside the Ptolemy, which represents the knowledge of the world at its height in the pre-Christian civilisation, and the Edrisi which represents the Arabic followers of Ptolemy, whose influence upon early Christian geography was very marked, all the maps reproduced belong to the science of the Christian ages and countries. The two Mappe-mondes above referred to are ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... Pilumnus (connected with the stake, pilum), and Deverra (connected with the act of sweeping). Its object was, as Varro explains it, to avert the entrance of the half-wild Silvanus by giving three unmistakeable signs of human civilisation; we shall probably not be wrong in seeing in it rather an actual hacking, beating, and sweeping away of evil spirits. On the ninth day after birth, in the case of a boy, on the eighth in the case of a girl, occurred ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey
... At times the horror of it all seemed to freeze the understanding, and it was difficult to realise that one was part and parcel of this world of ours. Literally, horror was piled upon horror. And this was the twentieth century of which men boasted; this was civilisation! Built by men's hands, the result of centuries of work. Now look at them; those beautiful architectural monuments, destroyed, in a few months, by the vilest spawn that ever contaminated the earth. A breed that should and would ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... he's not in any known Army list, because it's what he called himself. Likewise a Champion of the Dispossessed. He has an intense sympathy with the indigenous populations, and thinks the British system of conquering and corrupting native races simply a disgrace to civilisation. With all of which sentiments I entirely agree. Luke has taken to him immensely, chiefly, I fancy, because he was once private secretary to some Administrating Rajah in an Eastern-Archipelago or Indian Island, and as Luke is hankering after a colonial governorship, he wants to scrape ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... and massacre made the Bhil a cruel and half-crazy thief and cattle-stealer, and when the English came he seemed to be almost as open to civilisation as the tigers of his own jungles. But John Chinn the First, father of Lionel, grandfather of our John, went into his country, lived with him, learned his language, shot the deer that stole his poor crops, and won his confidence, so that some Bhils learned to plough ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... decorate his belongings has always been one of the earliest signs of civilisation. Art had its beginning in the lines indented in clay, perhaps, or hollowed in the wood of family utensils; after that ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... of the plan of distributing economic advantages by eleemosynary state action. This policy was based on the conviction that personal liberty and freedom of private enterprise were the adequate, constructive influences of a progressive civilisation. Too much importance has perhaps been attached to the relatively unimportant question of the freedom of international trade, for this was only part of a general policy of emancipation which had a much more far-reaching scope. Rightly ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... represent all that remains to the planet of that odd old word authority. She is responsible only to the Aerial Board of Control the A. B. C. of which Tim speaks so flippantly. But that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score of persons of both sexes, controls this planet. "Transportation is Civilisation," our motto runs. Theoretically, we do what we please so long as we do not interfere with the traffic AND ALL IT IMPLIES. Practically, the A. B. C. confirms or annuls all international arrangements and, to judge from its last ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... sabre of Sadowa and Sedan. That doubt is the doubt whether Russia, as compared with Prussia, is sufficiently decent and democratic to be the ally of liberal and civilised powers. I take first, therefore, this matter of civilisation. ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... while some of them, still in apparent possession of all their faculties, voluntarily exposed themselves to sufferings which on ordinary occasions would have been sufficient to deprive them of life. The scenes that occurred were a scandal to civilisation and to religion—a strange mixture of obscenity, absurdity, and superstition. While some were praying on bended knees at the shrine of St. Paris, others were shrieking and making the most hideous noises. The women especially exerted ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... lost in the mountains?—not the peaceful, cultivated child hills of the Catskills, but in real mountains, where the first outpost of civilisation, a lonely ranch house, is two weeks' travel away, and where that stream on your left is bound for the Pacific Ocean, and that stream on your right over there will, after four thousand miles, find its way into the Atlantic ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... not outlived! Had he not seen the natives, for whose benefit his blameless and strenuous life had been ungrudgingly spent, sinking lower and lower, exchanging the virtues of barbarism for the vices of civilisation? Had he not seen the chosen lambs of his flock sink back into the savagery that surrounded them, lured by those tribal rites which bear a fundamental resemblance to the ritual of the worship of the Cyprian Venus? Had he not seen the land covered with plague-spots ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... the reason will not co-operate with the physical desire, the result is a sterile intellectualism, a life of starved and timid experience. It was here, of course, that Walt Whitman's view gave offence; he thought of civilisation as a conventional system, cultivating a false shame and an ignoble reserve about bodily processes. But the vital truth of his doctrine lies in the fact that many of our saddest, because most remediable, disasters are ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of ancient genius rescued from obscurity and decay—the Eternal City offered the just and glorious tribute of her gratitude. Amidst the ruined monuments of ancient and the infant erections of modern art, he who had restored the broken link between the two ages of human civilisation was crowned with the wreath which he had deserved from the moderns who owed to him their refinement—from the ancients who owed to him their fame. Never was a coronation so august witnessed by Westminster ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... she did not believe me. Madame de Clericy was not very learned, and it is probable that her history was all forgotten. Paris had always seemed to her the centre of civilisation and safely withdrawn from the perils of war or ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... the heads of the many brilliant little groups of diners to rest apparently upon an empty space in the white-and-gold walls. He had been a great traveller, but always his first evening, when he came once more into touch with a civilisation more meretricious but more poignant than his own, resulted in this disturbing cloud of sensations. His companion's voice sounded ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that many of my readers, who have perhaps never been very far away from civilisation, will be inclined to think that some of the incidents are exaggerated. I can only assure them that I have toned down the facts rather than otherwise, and have endeavoured to write a perfectly plain and straightforward account of things as ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... the country after all," he observed. "When I have made my pile, I shall pitch my tent or build myself a hut far from the madding crowd, and bid good-bye to Lincoln's Inn, and Piccadilly, and club-land, and all the delights of modern civilisation." ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... dim and damp It lurks, and Civilisation's tramp Disturbs its sanctuary. Hard on the snake? Perchance, perchance! But Civilisation, to advance, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... darker hue, and full as far removed from civilisation, black Caesar, once more fled from honest labour to the woods, there to subsist by robbing the settlers. It was however reported, that he had done one meritorious action, killing Pe-mul-wy, who had just before wounded Collins (the native) so ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... Britanny;" if he could have beheld that one country as it now abides in its strength and its wealth, the most powerful of European states; if he could have realized free Italy with Rome, the Popes without temporal power, and modern civilisation more than a match for Papal intrigues; if he could have known that the gospel for which he lived had regenerated the social life of Great Britain, that it was tha confessed basis of our political action and ...
— The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment - of Women • John Knox
... Peter. "If it's a boy, as I rather think it is, maybe I'll be able to find it a place in one of the offices—after I've taught it a little civilisation." ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... Johannesburg and Pretoria, in Kimberley and Cape Town—and we have prospected together in the wild places. We have trekked the veldt and been lost to the world for many months at a time. We have seen the real wonders of Africa together, as well as her tawdry civilisation." ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the hill, the trail led them through clearings where the trees had been cut for fuel. Piles of brush were on all sides, and in places cords of wood lined the way which here widened into a rough road. They were coming into the limits of civilisation now, and the view of the Fort was much more distinct. The great guns gave no further voice, but as they neared the crest of the hill which slopes down to the harbour, a new and peculiar sound fell upon their ears. They paused and ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... of the glass he had just used. Even the Italian peasant, who had been a goatherd in Calabria, and could hardly write his name, showed more delicacy, according to his lights, which were certainly not dazzling. A faint ray of Roman civilisation had reached him through generations of slaves and serfs and shepherds. But no such traditions of forgotten delicacy disturbed the manners of Schreiermeyer. The glass from which he had drunk was good enough for any primadonna in his company, and it was silly for any of them to give themselves ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... something deeper than physics in the operations of so-called natural laws, and all the moral influences those laws have brought to bear on man's higher development. There is the significant fact that as the resources of civilisation have increased, the pressure of the utilitarian relation ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... will either shut their ears prudishly to his painful facts, or reject them as incredible, unaccustomed as they are to find similar horrors and abominations among people of their own rank, of whom they are naturally inclined to judge by their own standard of civilisation. Thus if any one, in justification of the Reformation and the British hatred of Popery during the sixteenth century, should dare to detail the undoubted facts of the Inquisition, and to comment on them dramatically enough ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... collective title of a series in which the history of a family is made to illustrate successive stages of German Civilisation. The English translation does not extend beyond the first two stories, dealing with the years 357 and 724 respectively; the remaining four stories (published by Hirzel of Leipsic, 1874-80) depict German life in 1226, ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield
... Thus it was not an unmixed evil that in the Middle Ages, as a rule, the ballads were neglected; for this neglect, while it rendered the discovery of their sources almost impossible, gave the ballads for a time into the safe-keeping of their natural possessors, the common people. Civilisation, advancing more swiftly in some countries than in others, has left rich stores here, and little there. Our close kinsmen of Denmark, and the rest of Scandinavia, possess a ballad-literature of which they do well ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... Deffand was perhaps the most typical representative of that phase of civilisation which came into existence in Western Europe during the early years of the eighteenth century, and reached its most concentrated and characteristic form about the year 1750 in the drawing-rooms of Paris. She was supremely a woman ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... great state built up in those valleys?' he asked. 'You get nothing but a few wild conquerors rushing east and west, and then some squalid khanates. And yet all the materials were there—the stuff for a strong race, a rich land, the traditions of an old civilisation, and natural barriers against ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... first campaign (though you be but a mere peaceful campaigner) is a glorious time in your life. It is so sweet to find one’s self free from the stale civilisation of Europe! Oh my dear ally, when first you spread your carpet in the midst of these Eastern scenes, do think for a moment of those your fellow-creatures, that dwell in squares, and streets, and even (for such is the fate of many!) in actual country houses; think of the people that are ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... and a hunger cure as though what suits their flaccid German systems will agree with a Russian stomach! Such devices are no good at all." Sobakevitch shook his head wrathfully. "Fellows like those are for ever talking of civilisation. As if THAT sort of thing was civilisation! Phew!" (Perhaps the speaker's concluding exclamation would have been even stronger had he not been seated at table.) "For myself, I will have none of it. When I eat pork at a meal, give me the WHOLE pig; when mutton, the WHOLE sheep; when goose, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... a body of men should be dispatched to bring in the carcasses of the slaughtered buffalo, which had been done, and he now made the offer that, if I pleased, he would have the skins carefully dressed, and the skulls and horns preserved, so that I might take the whole back with me to civilisation, as trophies, upon my return. Of course I thanked him for his exceedingly generous offer, which I gladly accepted so far as the three buffalo killed by myself were concerned; and therewith we parted upon the very best of terms, the king according me full ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... she had only brushed the cobwebs off her keel. On entering the creek, we startled large flocks of wild geese and ducks; and here and there a pair of pelicans, after gazing at us for a few seconds, would slowly wing their way to some more sequestered stream, unprofaned by noisy, smoky civilisation. ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... influence, happily or unhappily, declines. In an era of overwrought activity, of superficial, however free, education, when we run the risk of being associated into nothingness and criticised to death, it remains a question whether, in the interests of the highest civilisation (which means opportunity for every capable citizen to lead the highest life), the subordination of the one to the many ought to be accelerated or retarded. It is said that the triumph of Democracy is a mere "matter of time." But time is in this case of the essence ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... barbaric sea. This varied sheltered land of aged vineyards and great wealth has, for the French Renaissance, the one special quality of beginnings and Edens, namely, that it preserves on to a later time the outward evidences of an original perfection. This place, the nest or seed-plot of the new civilisation, still shows its castles—Blois, Amboise, Chambord. Here Leonardo died, Rabelais, Ronsard himself was born. Here the kings of the Change built in their fantastic pride, and founded a France that still endures. It is as truly the soil of the modern thing as are the provinces north of it (the Isle ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... austerity of the saints, and this reaction was much intensified after the cessation of the panic which had risen at the close of the tenth century about the approaching end of the world. It was in part produced by the softer and more epicurean civilisation which grew up in the country bordering on the Pyrenees. It was especially represented in the romances and poems of the Troubadours, and the new tendency even received some assistance from the Church when the Council of Clermont, which originated the Crusades, imposed on the knight ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... fiercely. "You have but one idea—to strike—the narrow idea of men that breeds warfare. I tell you that if ever universal peace comes, if ever the nations are taught the horror of this lust for blood, this criminal outrage against civilisation, it is the women who will become the teachers, because amongst your instincts the brutish ones of force are the first to leap to the surface at the slightest provocation. We women see further, we know more. I swear to you, Richard, that if you interfere I will never forgive ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... told one's living in a suburb when one is conscious of spreading the benefits of civilisation all over the world! Philanthropy—I suppose you will say that is a comfortable delusion; and yet even you must admit that whenever want or misery or starvation is known to exist, however distant or difficult of access, we instantly organise relief on the most generous scale, and distribute ...
— Reginald • Saki
... a manner this ancient race, which has lived so long, done so much, and suffered so much, bore its martyrdom. By such an exercise of self-discipline it defied the Powers of Civilisation to do their worst. In spite of the licence given to brute force, in spite of the removal of the machinery of civil control, in spite of the internment of the army and its arms, in spite of the ostentatiously paraded support to the Rebel, in spite of actual famine and the threat of imminent ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... opprobrium to people than to make yourself acquainted with their history and position. He was a specimen, and a fair specimen, of a most remarkable body of men, who during two centuries have fought a good fight in Ireland in the cause of civilisation and religious truth; they were sent as colonists, few in number, into a barbarous and unhappy country, where ever since, though surrounded with difficulties of every kind, they have maintained their ground; theirs has been no easy life, nor have their lines ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... few and seen there but seldom, led mysterious lives, had preserved an undefaced energy with the temper of buccaneers and the eyes of dreamers. They appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilisation, in the dark places of the sea; and their death was the only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of achievement. The majority were men who, like himself, thrown there by some accident, had remained as officers of country ships. They had now a horror ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... even unintentional, deviation from truth, does that much towards weakening the trustworthiness of human assertion, which is not only the principal support of all present social well-being, but the insufficiency of which does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back civilisation, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the largest scale depends; we feel that the violation, for a present advantage, of a rule of such transcendent expediency, is not expedient, and that he who, for the sake of a convenience to himself or to some other individual, does ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... Society permeated in every direction by brotherly associations established for the purpose of mutual help and sympathising counsel, it is not an impossible thing to believe that we shall be able to do something to restore the missing element in modern civilisation. ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... part, je vous felicite bien cordialement de la victoire que vous venez de remporter, car je sais qu'avec des hommes tels que vous on peut etre assure que c'est une victoire feconde en resultats pour la civilisation ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... of Darius must be left untouched. The one is a ghastly example of retributive judgment, in which, as sometimes is the case even now, men fall into the pit they have digged for others, and it shows the barbarous cruelty of that gorgeous civilisation. The other is an example of how far a man may go in perceiving and acknowledging the truth without its influencing his heart. The decree enforces recognition of Daniel's God, in language which even prophets do not surpass; but it is all lip-reverence, as evanescent as superficial. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... mankind, and the narrow strip of territory they inhabited which formed the battle-ground of the ancient empires of the world. Israel was few in numbers, and the Canaan it conquered was limited in extent; but they became as it were the centre round which the forces of civilisation revolved, and towards which they all pointed. Palestine, in fact, was for the eastern world what Athens was for the western world; Athens and Attica were alike insignificant in area and the Athenians were but a handful of men, but we derive ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... softer type of character, and may hope that it will make civilisation more humane and compassionate. . . . Unfortunately, experience shows that none is so cruel as the disillusioned sentimentalist. He thinks that he can break or ignore nature's laws with impunity; and then, when he finds that ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... working in the evil as in the good. In her own thought she often compared these forces to the Day and Night, and believed both of them to be necessary to the human world. For her, savagery had virtues as well as civilisation, although it is true of the latter she knew ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... sketched the vices generally accompanying a low degree of civilisation; and in the first scene of the second act Shakespeare has, as in many other places, shown the tendency in bad men to indulge in scorn and contemptuous expressions as a mode of getting rid of their ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... interests of civilisation," he answered, "and in that case it is our duty. Now look here, Ewart, this will have to be a secret. It is essential that we should not get ourselves laughed at because, for one thing, the scoffers may get into serious trouble if they start investigating our assertions in a ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... interjections and nouns; then came verbs; at length the whole sentence appeared, and rhythm and metre followed. Each stage in the progress of language was accompanied by some corresponding stage in the mind and civilisation of man. In time, when the family became a nation, the wild growth of dialects passed into a language. Then arose poetry and literature. We can hardly realize to ourselves how much with each improvement of language the powers of the human mind were enlarged; ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... because of it. And this will wither the WORK as well. They will think the work itself is ugly: the machines, the very act of labour. Whereas the machinery and the acts of labour are extremely, maddeningly beautiful. But this will be the end of our civilisation, when people will not work because work has become so intolerable to their senses, it nauseates them too much, they would rather starve. THEN we shall see the hammer used only for smashing, then we shall see it. Yet here we are—we have the opportunity to make ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... of ground, and, at one time, everybody used to turn out and watch the matches; but now, owing to the barbarous reasons I have given you, cricket has fallen into disrepute. Of course, to see an eleven taking the field in a state of nature makes dead against civilisation and human progress." ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Undertaker Who Was a Member of a Trust, "this is a most hateful and injurious scheme. If people cannot be assured of graves, I fear they will no longer die, and the best interests of civilisation will wither ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... African would express the same problem in a number of cows, and as the comparatively modern Roman used such pictorial phrases as "to condemn a person of his head." From this era, centuries before the Celt traversed our shores, "the progress of civilisation" has gone on in one unbroken continuity from the Second Stone Age man to the ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... it should be but occasionally difficult to them shows an affinity with the type. Do you perchance, O continental observers of the race, call it hypocritical? It is their nature disciplined to the regimental step of civilisation. Socially these island men and women of a certain middle rank are veterans of an army, and some of the latest enrolled are the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that the personal impression produced by the man so strangely thrown on the hands of Mrs. Nightingale and her daughter was a pleasant one. For had the reverse been the case, the resources of civilisation for disposing of him elsewhere had not been exhausted when the decision was come to that he should remain where he was; till next morning, at any rate. The lady of the house—of course the principal factor in the solution of the problem—appeared, as we have seen, to have made up her mind ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... suggested picture of Sheriff Elvsted, his family and his avocations are all distinctively Norwegian. The truth seems to be very simple—the environment and the subsidiary personages are all thoroughly national, but Hedda herself is an "international" type, a product of civilisation by no means ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... cried. "This 'Olgate offers to put us on shore safe, and you refuse—refuse to give him up the money. You must not. You must bargain with him. Our lives depend on it. And you will arrange that he leaves us sufficient to get to civilisation again." ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... may have survived only in one; or possibly may have perished in all. Larger it may very well, but poorer it cannot, have been. [Footnote: Ozanam (Les Germains avant le Christianisme, p. 155): Dans le vocabulaire d'une langue on a tout le spectacle d'une civilisation. On y voit ce qu'un peuple sait des choses invisibles, si les notions de Dieu, de l'ame, du devoir, sont assez pures chez lui pour ne souffrir que des termes exacts. On mesure la puissance de ses institutions ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... peasants, trained since boyhood in victorious armies, and accustomed to move among subject and trembling populations, could ill brook their change of circumstance. There was one man of the name of Goguelat, a brute of the first water, who had enjoyed no touch of civilisation beyond the military discipline, and had risen by an extreme heroism of bravery to a grade for which he was otherwise unfitted—that of marechal des logis in the 22nd of the line. In so far as a brute can be a good soldier, he was a good soldier; the Cross was on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a somewhat regretful look at that steam marvel of civilisation, which had brought us thus far on our journey, and to which we now bade farewell for a month, at least, for a much ruder and more primitive mode ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... satisfied by the experiment that a journal devoted to Ireland, guided by truth, and sustained with earnest ability, would supersede the whole jaundiced literature of the metropolis, and create a new era in the progress of the country's civilisation and ambition. They immediately busied themselves to establish such an organ. Charles Gavan Duffy, late editor of the Belfast Vindicator, entered into the spirit of the enterprise, and after an evening's ramble in the Park, during which the terms and the ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... long journeys, cheerfully supplied my place at Madrid, and exerted himself to the utmost in forwarding the views of the Bible Society, influenced by no other motive than a hope that its efforts would eventually contribute to the peace, happiness, and civilisation of his native land. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... plainly as words: "Touch me who dares!" yet her armament was not boisterously aggressive, considering that her presumptive owner had set out from England with no very settled programme, but the possibility that ere he returned he might be moved to visit spots where, despite the rapid spread of civilisation, might is still right. ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... 1283, the game was placed under an interdict, which, during the next four hundred years, was secretly but sedulously disregarded within those impregnably fortified places of learning and piety, to which so much of our Western civilisation is due, the abbeys and other scholastic foundations of the Benedictine order. The book-form, in which the board still conceals itself, stands as a memorial of its secretive preservation upon the shelves of the monastic libraries. I keep my own, with a certain touch of ritualistic observance, ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... not one adapted to our present civilisation," said Lady Joan. "A baronetcy has become the distinction of the middle class; a physician, our physician for example, is a baronet; and I dare say some of our tradesmen; brewers, of people of that class. An attempt to elevate them ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... another. Yet, as the narrative proceeds—if narrative it can be called—we have the Pelasgians and the Greeks represented as essentially distinct people; and we hear of the difficulty of determining "the precise point of civilisation to which the Pelasgians had advanced, before the Greeks overtook and outstripped them." The whole treatise, notwithstanding the air of decision now and then assumed, is but an amplification of the doubt implied in the very first ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... song as a whole is lost—the more to be regretted for its sweet simplicity and melodious wail (so far as judged in the fragments), which in a modern song would be viewed as weakness or affectation. Indeed, the modes of thought and feeling that belong to what is called advanced civilisation are impatient of these things except as rude relics of yet untutored minds; and the pleasure with which they are accepted has in it perhaps a grain of pity for those that didn't know better than produce them. Yet, as regards mere poetical ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... Zaouia, and not once had she seen from her roof a European, except a French government-official or two, and a few—a very few—French officers. Never had any European women come. Tourists were usually satisfied with Touggourt, three or four days nearer civilisation. Women did not care to undertake an immense and fatiguing journey among the most formidable dunes of the desert, where there was nothing but ascending and descending, day after day; where camels sometimes broke their ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... small wonder that Vanamee had loved her, and less wonder, still, that his love had been so intense, so passionate, so part of himself. Angele had loved him with a love no less than his own. It was one of those legendary passions that sometimes occur, idyllic, untouched by civilisation, spontaneous as the growth of trees, natural as dew-fall, strong as ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... morning, having already got up my oxen, I told Scowl to inspan them—an order which he received with joy, for he and the other boys wished to be off to civilisation and its delights. Just as the operation was beginning, however, a message came to me from old Umbezi, who begged me to delay my departure till after noon, as a friend of his, a big chief, had come to visit him who wished much to have the honour of making ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... said Leonard, "and give me some brandy." He was in no mood to discuss the blessings of civilisation as they have often been put into practice in Africa. And to think that this fate ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... bulk of the population scattered over the country seem in spite of imperial edicts to have clung to their old law as to their old language, and to have retained some traditional allegiance to their native chiefs. But Roman civilisation rested mainly on city life, and in Britain as elsewhere the city was thoroughly Roman. In towns such as Lincoln or York, governed by their own municipal officers, guarded by massive walls, and linked together by a network of magnificent roads which reached from one end of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... out,' she answered, 'that her heart was yours, he pined away day by day until, at length, he started a furniture store in Grand Rapids. We heard lately that he was bitten to death by an infuriated moose near South Bend, Ind., where he had gone to try to forget scenes of civilisation.' With which, Mr. Redruth forsook the face of mankind and became a hermit, as ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... be awarded next year the question, "Has the progress of arts and sciences contributed to purify morals?" Suddenly a tumult of ideas arose in his brain and overwhelmed him; it was an ecstasy of the intellect and the passions. With Diderot's encouragement he undertook his indictment of civilisation; in 1750 the Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts was crowned. In accordance with his theory he proceeded to simplify his own life, intensifying his self-consciousness by singularities of assumed austerity, and playing the part (not wholly a fictitious one) of a moral reformer. Famous as author ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... nor respondents seem to have duly appreciated the immense importance of the step taken by introducing the use of a cipher. I would commence with observing, that we know of no people tolerably advanced in civilisation, whose system of notation had made such little progress, beyond that of the mere savage, as the Romans. The rudest savages could make upright scratches on the face of a rock, and set them in a row, to signify units; and as the circumstance of having ten fingers has led the people of every ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... a century, plainer and plainer, that the Christian natives, while defending with unfaltering courage their beloved country, are yet descending more and more to the moral level of their assailants, without the apology of their Paganism. Degenerate civilisation may be a worse element for truth to work in than original barbarism; and, therefore, as we enter on the second century of this struggle, we begin to fear for the Christian Irish, not from the arms or the valour, but from the contact and ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... inevitable logical conclusion in regard to it), may well be glad to be able to point, amongst other creditable things, to this history of service given without hesitation in acknowledgment of their debt to the civilisation of the Old World; and we also shall be no ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, March 21, 1917 • Various
... peace, later called Ki[o]to, became the "Blossom Capital" and the Sacred City for a thousand years. At Nara, where flourished the first six sects introduced from Korea, were built vast monasteries, temples and images, and thence the influence of civilisation and art radiated. From the first, forgetting its primitive democracy and purely moral claims, Buddhism lusted for power in the State. As early as A.D. 624, various grades were assigned to the priesthood by the ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... book is to prove that the Homeric Epics, as wholes, and apart from passages gravely suspected in antiquity, present a perfectly harmonious picture of the entire life and civilisation of one single age. The faint variations in the design are not greater than such as mark every moment of culture, for in all there is some movement; in all, cases are modified by circumstances. If our contention be true, it will follow ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... left his fellow-citizens very much alone I am only myself when I am drunk I should remember to forget it Liquor makes me human Nervous legs at a gallop So say your prayers, believe all you can, don't ask questions Was not civilisation a mistake Who knows! ...
— Quotations From Gilbert Parker • David Widger
... not while we are as yet involved in a question of plain logic? You think selfishness a vice. None the less you must concede that the world has invariably progressed because, upon the whole, we find civilisation to be more comfortable than barbarism; and that a wholesome apprehension of the penitentiary enables many of us to rise to deaconships. Why, deuce take it, Jill! I may endow a hospital because I want to see my name over ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... will not quit the subject without reminding you of one thing which concerns nutrition, not theirs, however, but ours. It was by the taming of the domestic ruminants—that unfailing dinner-material which now follows everywhere at the heels of his master—that human civilisation began. Before that event, man, driven to depend for his living upon the hazards of the chase, spent his whole time in seeking for food, and had none to spare for the pursuit of ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... situation has this dual aspect. First it is a mechanico-material struggle, two mechanical forces pulling asunder from the central object, the bone. All it can result in is the pulling asunder of the fabric of civilisation, and even of life, without any creative issue. It is no more than a frog under a cart-wheel. The mechanical forces, rolling on, roll over the body of ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... of foodstuffs that has become a world-wide feature of the last few years, the wheatgrower is one of the most important necessities in civilisation. He has prospered in the past, but the future holds still greater and richer prospects. And in no country in the world are those prospects brighter than in the Commonwealth of Australia. The world's surface is gradually filling up, ...
— Wheat Growing in Australia • Australia Department of External Affairs
... tendency of social development is to narrow the range of the belief, to restrict the scope of its authority, and to so attenuate it that it becomes of no value precisely where it is supposed to be of most use. The belief in God is least questioned where civilisation is lowest; it is called into the most serious question where civilisation is most advanced. To-day the belief in God is only universal in the sense that some representatives of it are to be found in all societies. The majority ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... by the territorial division of labour that a country arrives most successfully at wealth and civilisation. Our hops are grown in Kent and Essex; Glasgow annually sends forth the engines of our steam fleets; Sunderland is the focus of our shipbuilding; Edinburgh, with her legion of professors, and her busy presses, is one vast academy. In short, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... fashion to say that the progress of civilisation is favourable to liberty. The maxim, though in some sense true, must be limited by many qualifications and exceptions. Wherever a poor and rude nation, in which the form of government is a limited monarchy, receives a great ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... but our habitual range. Not only this, but we change our habitations with a growing frequency and facility; to Sir Thomas More we should seem a breed of nomads. That old fixity was of necessity and not of choice, it was a mere phase in the development of civilisation, a trick of rooting man learnt for a time from his new-found friends, the corn and the vine and the hearth; the untamed spirit of the young has turned for ever to wandering and the sea. The soul of man has never yet in any land been willingly adscript to the ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the man—the man we have described; the man of Punic faith, the fatal man, attacking the civilisation to arrive at power; seeking, elsewhere than amongst the true people, one knows not what ferocious popularity; cultivating the still uncivilized qualities of the peasant and the soldier, endeavouring to succeed by appealing to gross selfishness, to brutal passions, to newly ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... Arts State of the Common People; Agricultural Wages Wages of Manufacturers Labour of Children in Factories Wages of different Classes of Artisans Number of Paupers Benefits derived by the Common People from the Progress of Civilisation Delusion which leads Men to overrate the Happiness ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Complete Contents of the Five Volumes • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... has been known in many countries; but in Egypt it was maintained to a later pitch of civilisation than elsewhere, and the mixture of such a primitive system with more elevated beliefs seemed as strange to the Greek as it does to us. The original motive was a kinship of animals with man, much like that underlying ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... all the dignity of manhood, and introduced into a system which, despite the combativeness of certain ardent spirits from the South, every American believes and maintains to be immortal. But how does the case stand with us? No matter how great the advance of a British colony in wealth and civilisation; no matter how absolute the powers of self-government conceded to it, it is still taught to believe that it is in a condition of pupilage from which it must pass before it can attain maturity. For one I have never been able ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... accepted as a guarantee of excellence, while the products of other countries were viewed with a suspicion justified by experience of their comparative inferiority."[86] The more highly civilised nations have thus gained by this civilisation, and have widened the distance which separates them from the less civilised. England, France, Germany, Holland, and the United States are in wealth and in industrial methods far more widely removed from Spain and Russia than was the case a ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... suffice to transport yourself into the Arctic regions, and invest yourself with the average intelligence of an ordinary human being who has not been debased by the artificial evils that surround modern civilisation, or demoralised by strong drink. In this condition of happy simplicity you draw near to the end ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... performed an imitation Indian battle, fireworks were let off, and the first number of the Railway Pioneer was printed by a press brought on the train. Thus was celebrated the inauguration of this great railroad, a mighty instrument of progress and civilisation, thrown across the desert, and destined to link together cities and towns which do not yet exist. The whistle of the locomotive, more powerful than Amphion's lyre, was about to bid them rise ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... to which we had been recommended at Quartes was full, or else the landlady did not like our looks. I ought to say, that with our long, damp india-rubber bags, we presented rather a doubtful type of civilisation: like rag-and-bone men, the Cigarette imagined. 'These gentlemen are pedlars?—Ces messieurs sont des marchands?'—asked the landlady. And then, without waiting for an answer, which I suppose she thought superfluous in so plain a case, recommended us to a butcher who lived hard ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Ah! God! it was true he would hold his beloved one—never again. And often unavailing rebellion against destiny would rise up in him, and he would almost go mad and see red once more. Then he would rush away from civilisation ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... its character, that it cannot be supposed that this was their earliest intercourse with the trans-nivean races: whether they may have wandered from beyond the snows before the spread of Boodhism and its civilisation, or whether they are a cross between the Tamulian of India and the Tibetan, has not been decided. Their language, though radically identical with Tibetan, differs from it in many important particulars. They, or at least some of their tribes, call themselves ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... bowl us out like a lot of skittles, and where will the theatre be then?... Where would you be, my dear? They'd make you take off your clothes and run about the stage with a lot of other young women, and call that—art.... The theatre is either a temple or it is in Western Civilisation what the slave-market is in the East. This damned fool of yours can't see anything outside his own scenery. He thinks he is more important than me; but is a bookbinder more ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... Mexicans. Primitive people are becoming scarce on the globe. On the American continents there are still some left in their original state. If they are studied before they, too, have lost their individuality or been crushed under the heels of civilisation, much light may be thrown not only upon the early people of this country but upon the first chapters of ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... her own interests, why then the case is different, and (to use Dr. Schneibel's words) not altogether unmerited, only a result of the social economy to which she does not know how to be intelligently subordinate, and which will reduce her, with the inexorable logic of the laws of civilisation, to a useless superfluity, which Society's organism rejects. Or, vulgarly speaking, she is left with shame, contempt and poverty resting upon both her and her illegitimate offspring. As a private individual, she is in a sense right; but socially, ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... history of this people, much is seen that accounts for their extraordinary love of isolation, and their ingrained and passionate aversion to control; much, too, that draws to them a world of sympathy. And when one realises the old Dopper President hemmed in once more by the hurrying tide of civilisation, from which his people have fled for generations—trying to fight both Fate and Nature, standing up to stem a tide as resistless as the eternal sea—one sees the pathos of the picture. But this is as another generation may see it. To-day we are too close, so close that the meaner details, ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... the "stations" kept for the purpose of getting at the scattered population only attract those dwelling within reasonable distances. The poor mountaineers in the neighbourhood of the Recess Valley and away over the hills seldom go far enough from home to rub shoulders with civilisation. Many of them have never seen bigger places than Letterfrack and Leenane, and those perhaps not fifty times ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... remark applies with even greater force to the Maha-bharata; it is an encyclopaedia of the life and knowledge of Ancient India. And it discloses to us an ancient and forgotten world, a proud and noble civilisation which has passed away. Northern India was then parcelled among warlike races living side by side under their warlike kings, speaking the same language, performing the same religious rites and ceremonies, ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... the fatal fascination was complete, and my trip became practically an exercise of devotion to that sheep. I carried it everywhere and ministered fondly to its wants. Not for the world would I have alluded to mutton in its presence. And when we returned to civilisation I parted from the creature with sincere regret and the consciousness that I had humoured my affections at the expense of my digestion. The sheep did not give me so much as a look of farewell, but fell to feeding on the grass beside the ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... glances abroad may be permitted), of English letters.[6] But the ever-increasing bonds of union—even of such union in disunion as war—between different European nations, and the developments of more complex civilisation, of more general education and the like—all tended and wrought in the ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... troublesomeness and implied no doubt of her capacity to bring them to a solution and to administer the very considerable fortune that Mr. Temperly had left. She used, in a superior, unprejudiced way, every convenience that the civilisation of her time offered her, and would have lived without hesitation in a lighthouse if this had contributed to her general scheme. She was now, in the interest of this scheme, preparing to use Europe, which she had not yet visited and with none of whose foreign tongues ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... received in Threadneedle Street without question or demur. Secondly, we found our present lodgings narrow, and therefore moved westward to St. James's. Further, it struck us that our clothes would have to conform to the "demands of more Occidental civilisation," as Tom put it, and also that unless we intended to be medical students for ever it was necessary to become medical men. Lastly, it began to dawn upon Tom that "Francesca: a Tragedy" was a somewhat turgid performance, and on me that a holiday ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... It was not "I will not be overridden" that her spirit felt, but "I must not be over-ridden, for if I am over-ridden, I, and in me something beyond me, more important than myself, is all undone." And though she was far from knowing this, that something was her country's civilisation, its very soul, the meaning of it all gentleness, balance. Her spirit, of that quality so little gross that it would never set up a mean or petty quarrel, make mountains out of mole-hills, distort proportion, or get images awry, had taken its stand unconsciously, no sooner ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... none of these things, however; nor suspected that the advance of civilisation is not always progressive, but that she may take hands with vulgarity and dance down-hill, as she does to-day. His one scheme of life for Sep was that he should be sent to the ancient school where field-sports are cultivated to-day and English gentlemen turned upon the world more ignorant than ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... connection with Asia and between the English and Spanish connection with America. In the latter case the exploring and conquering Europeans had to deal with savage tribes, and in many instances with an uncultivated country; in the former the Portuguese found themselves confronted with a {17} civilisation older than that of Europe, with men more highly educated and more deeply learned than their own priests and men of letters, and with religions and customs and institutions whose ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... two of these styles—namely, the architecture of the beam, and that of the round arch—are treated of in this little volume. They occupy those remote times of pagan civilisation which may be conveniently included under the broad term Ancient; and the better known work of the Greeks and Romans—the classic nations—and they extend over the time of the establishment of Christianity ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... we mean by the history of geographical discovery is the gradual bringing to the knowledge of the nations of civilisation surrounding the Mediterranean Sea the vast tracts of land extending in all directions from it. There are mainly two divisions of this history—the discovery of the Old World and that of the New, including Australia under the latter term. Though we speak of geographical discovery, ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... sense of the term, on the Flanders front, and I am afraid it is true that modern war knocks and smashes any faith he ever had out of many a man. Yet in a hospital there is much ground for believing that shining qualities which amid the refinements of civilisation are often absent—staunch, and even tender comradeship, readiness to judge kindly if judge at all, resolute endurance, and absence of self-seeking, so typical of our fighting men—have their root in a genuine ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... of a fowl. He looked like a sailor, and as such was an object of curiosity to inland folk; but he called himself a missionary, saying that he had laboured these many years in the Lord's vineyard of the South Seas, and had returned to England for a sight of white faces and a smack of civilisation. This hybrid individual was named Ben Baltic, and had the hoarse voice of a mariner accustomed to out-roar storms, but his conversation was free from nautical oaths, and remarkably entertaining by reason of his adventurous life. ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... and better and more prosperous under a Hindu raj than it had ever been or could ever be under the rule of alien "demons"; and that if the British raj had at one time served some useful purpose in introducing India to the scientific achievements of Western civilisation, it had done so at ruinous cost, both material and moral, to the Indians whose wealth it had drained and whose social and religious institutions it had undermined, and on the other hand he held out to them the prospect that, if power were once ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... remind people, by so much as the place of the word "civilisation," of Buckle. It seems a ridiculous caution, but the indolent part of the public (a large part!) on such points tumble ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... face or grace of movement. The first settlers were, as a rule, rough people who had to make their living, and little time to think of anything beyond, but we are indebted to them, for they are everywhere the necessary pioneers of civilisation—the mass whose dead bodies form a bridge for their more fortunate successors. Then the gold discoveries brought out a lower class. However, the second generation is a great improvement on the first, and, no doubt, the usual rule ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... clothed, are often very beautiful. Fantastic imagination, magnanimity, moral sentiment, tender feeling, and humour are discovered in a degree which may astonish many who have been apt to imagine that advanced civilisation has much to do with the possession of such qualities. I know of nothing that throws so much light upon Indian character as ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... War. 'It was a struggle for existence, for supremacy or destruction. It was to decide whether the Graeco-Roman civilisation of the West or the Semitic (Carthaginian) civilisation of the East was to be established in Europe, and to determine its history for ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... that an invention, which is hailed as being one of the greatest achievements ever recorded in the march of civilisation, should be devoted essentially to the maiming of humanity and the destruction of property. In no other trend of human endeavour is this factor so potently demonstrated as in connection with Man's Conquest of ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... awakened in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from their intellectual lethargy and began to move forward on the path of intellectual and material progress, Russia not only remained unmoved, but looked on the new civilisation with suspicion and fear as a thing heretical and accursed. We have here one of the chief reasons why Russia, at the present day, is in many respects less civilised than the nations ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... dreadful, but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. The common notion that peace and the virtues of civil life flourished together I found to be utterly untenable. We talk of peace and learning, of peace and plenty, of peace and civilisation; but I found that these are not the words that the Muse of History coupled together; that on her lips the words were peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and death. I found in brief that all great nations ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... times past, excited much interest and amusement. His theory was that man emerged from a wild and savage condition, much resembling that of apes; that man had then a tail like other animals, but which by progressive civilisation and the constant habit of sitting, had become obsolete. This theory produced many a joke from facetious and superficial people, who had never read any of the arguments of the able and elaborate work, by which the ingenious ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... don't think, when he comes, that he will glorify explosives. I want to hear someone talk about Peace—and not from the commercial point of view. The slaughterers shan't have it all their own way, Arnold; civilisation will be too strong for them, and if Old England doesn't lead in that direction, it will be her shame ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... he went to Spain with the colours of that Society on his hat—oh! the blood glows in his veins! oh! the marrow awakes in his old bones when he thinks of what he accomplished in Spain in the cause of religion and civilisation with the colours of that Society on his hat, and its weapon in his hand, even the sword of the word of God; how with that weapon he hewed left and right, making the priests fly before him, and run away squeaking: ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... no shore of the then known world upon which they were unseen or unfelt. A glance at English history will show the large part of it they fill, and how they took tribute from the Anglo-Saxons, who, by the way, were far nearer kin to them than is usually thought. In Ireland, where the old civilisation was falling to pieces, they founded kingdoms at Limerick and Dublin among other places; (3) the last named, of which the first king, Olaf the White, was traditionally descended of Sigurd the Volsung, (4) endured even to the English ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... they expressed it, and turned not their faces, looking steadfastly forward to the wilderness where they were to worship God in His own temple, the virgin forest. It had been a terrible shock to find the Baron de St. Castin fallen away from religion and civilisation, living in savage pomp with his savage wives, the daughters of the great chief Modocawando. There could be no such companionship as this for the Sieur d'Arthenay and his noble wife; the friendship of half a lifetime was sternly repudiated, and d'Arthenay cast in his lot with the little band of ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... that walls could be built in the form of a quadrangle. Here was the birth of architecture. And thus, from the magical dreams of this unmausoleumed barbarian was evolved the home, the best and sweetest evolution of man's civilisation. ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... in Scotland Yard—a romance that has never been written, that may never be written. It concerns the building up, in the face of incredible obstacles, of a vast, ingenious machine which has become one of the greatest instruments of civilisation the world has ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... American nationality is the most convenient in the world. The Americans do just as they like, and no one is ever surprised. The explanation is quite simple: "They are Americans." I have often noticed little faults of manners or breeding, which would shock one in a representative of an older civilisation, pass quite unnoticed, or merely ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... and exercised charity towards his enemies, attributing their conduct entirely to their ignorance and prejudice, upon this step he nevertheless felt it his duty to decide. There seemed in the opening prospects of America, in a world still new, which had borrowed from the old as it were only so much civilisation as was necessary to create and to maintain order; there seemed in the circumstances of its boundless territory, and the total absence of feudal institutions and prejudices, so fair a field for the practical introduction of those regenerating principles ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... of the time these repairs took up to go and pay my respects to the President at Washington and thence to make a rapid dash into the West, in the footsteps of our ancient pioneers, and up to the farthest limits of civilisation (as they were then, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... less like a Germanic hero than this French artist; and yet the Germans were in error when they counted on an easy victory over him and his like, when they made sure that a conscious barbarism must prevail over an unconscious civilisation. ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... I have forgotten; it is so long since I associated with ladies, or perhaps, like beauty, these are natural to her. After all, her father seems to have been a gentleman of birth, and people who live with nature may have every fault in the calendar, but they cannot be vulgar. That is the gift of civilisation." ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... without a restless wish to join in action or money-making or the pursuit of fame. To habitual residents among the Alps this absence of social duties and advantages may be barbarising, even brutalising. But to men wearied with too much civilisation, and deafened by the noise of great cities, it is beyond measure refreshing. Then, again, among the mountains history finds no place. The Alps have no past nor present nor future. The human beings who live upon their sides are at odds with nature, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds |
