"Civilization" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the nineteenth century, in one of the principal towns of Spain, the seat of a celebrated university, and the native country of numerous citizens distinguished by their knowledge, their courage, and their virtues. Let not the friends of humanity and of civilization disunite; let them form, on the contrary, an indissoluble union, for superstition is always on the watch, and waits for the moment again to ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... 'safe and snug in four fathoms in a magnificent sand-harbour, with no one to bother us and the whole of it to ourselves. No dues, no stinks, no traffic, no worries of any sort. It's better than a Baltic cove even, less beastly civilization about. We're seven miles from the nearest coast, and five even from Neuerk—look, they're lighting up.' There was a tiny spark in ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... highways, in the paying of our taxes, and the education of our children; to plant shade trees, repair our yard fences, and in general, as far as possible, bring our home life up to the highest standards of civilization. ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... have at least one other 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. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... stream of Coptic civilization to its inexplicable source in the date-groves of Meroe, the girl's thoughts were borne away to the Golden Fountain of the Sun, where Ammon's black doves fluttered and cooed over the shining altars and amid the mystic ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... the Sermon on the Mount. But as it is very nearly alike in the foremost states of Christendom, and as it is nationally set forth by those states, it indirectly becomes an index to the true condition of the present civilization of ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... are differently related by the several historians, but the fact is asserted by all.[1] These Tyrrhenians brought with them the knowledge of letters and the arts, and the united people attained a high degree of power and civilization, long before the name of Rome was known beyond the precincts of Latium. They possessed a strong naval force, which was chiefly employed in piratical expeditions, and they claimed the sovereignty of the western seas. The first sea-fight recorded in history was fought ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... any and every subject, which is the blessed compensation of youth and inexperience. Among the books and essays, on all sorts of topics from metaphysics to heraldry, which I read at this time, two left indelible impressions on my mind. One was Guizot's "History of Civilization," the other was Sir William Hamilton's essay "On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned," which I came upon, by chance, in an odd volume of the "Edinburgh Review." The latter was certainly strange reading for a boy, and I could not possibly ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... various directions for the benefit of young readers, has been peculiarly successful in this series, which has had a very large sale in Europe, and deserves a like popularity here. It covers not only the entire period of German civilization down to the present time, but it gives an account of ancient Germany and its inhabitants in times which might almost be called pre-historic. The first chapters are explanatory of the German mythology, and of the ancient methods of worship. The Nibelungen Lied is described ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... gathering strength at Carthage; but if so, it is hard to see why he should have chosen as his model the atheistic story of Lucian. In a similar manner the story of Cupid and Psyche has been made a type of the progress of the soul. Apuleius was one of those minds not uncommon in a decaying civilization, in which extreme quasi-religious exaltation alternates with impure hilarity. He is a licentious mystic; a would-be magician; [55] a hierophant of pretentious sanctity, something between a Cagliostro and a Swedenborg; a type altogether ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... opened the box, however, he took a quick, impatient turn or two up and down his miserable little room. Not once, since he had set forth to return to his own country, and to the civilization from which, for more than twenty years, he had been an outcast, had he felt (to use his favorite expression) that he was "his own man again," until now. A thrill of the old, breathless, fierce suspense of his days of deadly peril ran through him, as he thought on the forbidden secret into ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... their own eyes. The very degradation and misery in which he lives, and of which he is not unable to perceive some of the causes, prepare him to welcome the instruction which promises better things. Evils which are covered up under the smoothness of civilization, stand out in all their horrible deformity in the abandon of savage life; the Indian cannot get even one gleam of light, without instantly perceiving the darkness around him. Here, then, is encouragement to paint him as ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... would the amazing story provide newspaper readers all over the world with a thrilling, unexpected piece of news, but the fact that there had been a woman involved in the disaster would be perpetuated, as long as our civilization endures, in every account of ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... scholastic civilization which Ireland only could furnish; nothing, indeed, could be more perfectly ludicrous than such a chase; and such scenes were by no means uncommon in hedge-schools, for, wherever severe punishment was dreaded—and, in truth, most of the hedge masters were unfeeling tyrants—the boy, if ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... Mohi. But where are the tails of the tadpoles, after their gradual metamorphosis into frogs? Have frogs any tails, old man? Our tails, Mohi, were worn off by the process of civilization; especially at the period when our fathers began to adopt the sitting posture: the fundamental evidence of all civilization, for neither apes, nor savages, can be said to sit; invariably, they squat ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... France, try to remain hidden if you can; try to weave the least little romance about your lives in the midst of a civilization which posts in the public streets the hours when the coaches arrive and depart; which counts all letters and stamps them twice over, first with the hour when they are thrown into the boxes, and next with that of their delivery; ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... six years old, had advanced far enough towards 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 ...
— The Great K. & A. Robbery • Paul Liechester Ford
... said Mrs. Havel, breaking in upon this "give and take" conversation, "that your parents will not blame me if you all appear—both girls and boys—to have lost your good manners here in the woods. Do simmer down. Remember, you return to civilization to-day." ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... two learned sister Societies, distinguished for their labours in Philosophy and Antiquity. Methought I saw the spirits of NEWTON and of DUGDALE, looking down with complacency upon them, and congratulating each other upon the general progress of civilization since they had ceased to mingle among men. "These institutions," observed my Guide, "form the basis of rational knowledge, and are the source of innumerable comforts: for the many are benefitted by the researches and experiments of the few. It is easy to laugh at such societies, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... dispersed. The flames soon completed their work, and this handsome structure, the fruit of old Adam Miller's industry, the monument of his son's philanthropy, a promise of good things for the future of the city, lay smouldering in ruins, a melancholy witness to the fact that our boasted civilization is but a thin veneer, which cracks and scales off at the first ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... much more picturesque; and we might be excused for presenting the picture on the simple ground that it treats of certain hours of of the twenty-four, of which most of us know nothing, and in which (such are the exigencies of modern civilization) most of ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... builders of the West had more strength than gentleness, more shrewdness than wisdom, more courage than culture. They were the rough front which American civilization presented to the wilderness and the savage,—brave, hard-handed, themselves somewhat affected with the barbarism they came to displace, yet in all essentials of character true representatives of their masterful race. They were mainly ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown
... came to read others, and lofty, ambitious thoughts took possession of his soul. His mind, uncontaminated or dwarfed by the sins of civilization, early began to reach out for high ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... the honor of France and the peace of the world. Unfortunately the coup of the Prussian military clique was only postponed. Our generation was destined to sustain the unprecedented horrors of a base attempt to destroy France, that very glorious asset of all civilization. ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... Hannah Smith. Standing on the same level does not imply a likeness, but simply a natural equality,—equality, for instance, in matters of conscience, judgment, and opinion. It is often said, that, as a barbarous race progresses toward civilization, its women are brought nearer and nearer to an equality with its men. Thus in the barbaric stage woman is an appendage to man, existing solely for his pleasure and convenience. She is then at her lowest. As civilization progresses, she rises gradually nearer ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... with the prophecy of imminent change. Versailles itself did not escape the contagion. Courtiers and aristocrats, in worshiping the beautiful ideals set up by the new school, which were as far removed as possible from their own effete civilization, did not realize that they were playing with the fire which was to burn out the whole social edifice of France with such a terrible conflagration; for, back and beneath all this, there was a people groaning under long centuries ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... know all that," interrupted the man in the chair. "The road and the region need civilizing—need it badly. That is one of the reasons why I am trying to persuade you to take hold. You are long on civilization, Howard." ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... to a repetition of '93, and almost welcomed it as a deliverance from the respectable uniformity of their own time; they trusted to the working men—masons, house-painters, carpenters, navvies—to regenerate an effete civilization and to save society as the barbarians had saved it in earlier centuries. Whatever the value of these views, they can scarcely have found favour among those who rallied to the Second Empire and who imagined that the Goncourts were a pair of firebrands: whereas, in fact, they were petulant, impulsive ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... plough have we brought with us out of our civilized past. In the furrow was civilization cradled, and there, if anywhere, shall ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... Edestone, "it was extremely bad taste for me to criticize a civilization so much older than my own, but you will," he smiled, "forgive the cowboy I am sure when he tells you he is sorry." Then seeing by the expression of the officer's face that he had won the day: "Come now, Count von Hemelstein, let's be friends. I would not have liked you had you not resented ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... process of extermination begins, let our deaths be as swift and painless as you can conveniently make them. FREDERIC: I will! By the love I have for you, I swear it! Would that you could render this extermination unnecessary by accompanying me back to civilization! KING: No, Frederic, it cannot be. I don't think much of our profession, but, contrasted with respectability, it is comparatively honest. No, Frederic, I shall live ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... the writer of this prefatory page, the book he thus introduces is an exceptionally sane, practical and valuable treatment of the problem of problems suggested by our present American Civilization, namely: The Training of the On-coming Generation—the new Americans—who are to realize the dreams of our ancestors concerning personal freedom and development in the social, political, commercial and religious life ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... his short mustache. He was not quite equal to a direct answer on the spur of the moment. He had a faith in his star. Something would turn up. Something always had turned up in the old days, and doubtless, with the march of civilization, opportunities had multiplied. Somewhere behind those tall buildings the Goddess of Luck awaited him, her hands full of gifts, but precisely what those gifts would be he was not in ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... Nagoya, brought that eminent investigator out personally to see us. He was the very finest type of Oriental savant, a member of the intellectual nobility of the strange Eastern land only recently made receptive to the civilization of the West. When he and Kennedy chatted together in low tones for a few moments it was hard for me to grasp that each belonged to a basic race strain fundamentally different from the other. East and West had met, upon the plane ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... in the development of society. Civilization will subordinate the flesh to the soul. In the savage state, you find the life of the animal. Civilization is teaching a man, on the principle of this world, to subordinate his appetites; to rule himself; and there comes a refinement, and a gentleness, and a ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... all that soft delicacy of appearance that reminds the sterner sex how frail and dependent is woman, while she bore in her face that sweet and winning expression of intellect, that, in other climes more favored by civilization, and where cultivation adds so much to the charms of her sex, would alone have marked her as beautiful. Her eyes, which were surpassing in their dreamy loveliness, were enhanced in beauty by a languid plaintiveness ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... in the history of Spanish adventure in the New World are undoubtedly afforded by the conquests of Mexico and Peru—the two states which combined with the largest extent of empire a refined social polity, and considerable progress in the arts of civilization. Indeed, so prominently do they stand out on the great canvas of history, that the name of the one, notwithstanding the contrast they exhibit in their respective institutions, most naturally suggests that of the other; and when I sent to Spain to collect materials for an account ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... Jewett murder, which occurred on the south side, within a few doors of Hudson. Garbage left unremoved by Hackley festers alike on pavement, sidewalk and gutter; and a mass of black and white humanity (the former predominating) left unremoved by the civilization of New York in the last half of the nineteenth century, festers within the crazy and tumble-down tenements. Colored cotton handkerchiefs wrapping woolly heads, and shoes slouched at the heel furnishing doubtful covering to feet redolent of filth and crippled by disease—alternate ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... our isolation upon those Yorkshire moors from the trammels of conventionality (one might almost say, civilization!), that I think we should have come to begrudge the ordinary interchange of the neighbourly courtesies of life, but for occasional lectures from Mrs. Arkwright, and for going out ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... monuments which can neither be destroyed nor obscured by any art of the adversary. If Christian Europe subdued barbarous peoples, and transferred them from a savage to a civilized state, from superstition to the truth; if she victoriously repelled the invasions of the Mohammedans; if civilization retained the chief power, and accustomed herself to afford others a leader and mistress in everything that adorns humanity; if she has granted to the peoples true and manifold liberty; if she has most wisely established many institutions for the solace ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... prove the great antiquity of the worship of Khnemu, but it would have been quite easy to select the name of some king of the Ist Dynasty, and had they done this, they would have made the authority of Khnemu over the Nile coaeval with Dynastic civilization. It is impossible to assume that no great famine took place in Egypt between the reign of Tcheser and the period when the inscription was made, and when we consider this fact the choice by the editor of the legend of a famine which took place under the IIIrd ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... dissented, saying, that though all was not done that was projected, or even boasted of, yet that much good resulted; and that wherever Christianity was taught, it brought with it the additional good of civilization in its train, and men became better ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... hazardous business of making potheen, and they were generally speaking, a lawless, reckless set of people—paying, some little, and others no rent, and living without the common blessings or restraints of civilization: no road, or sign of a road, came within some miles of them; Drumshambo, the nearest village, was seven or eight miles distant from them; and although they knew that neither the barrenness of their locality, nor the want of means of approach would altogether secure ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... "the glorious Constitution" which had survived unharmed the anarchy, poverty, and depopulation it had produced. An interpretation of the Constitution which thus makes it the shield of treason and the destroyer of civilization must be false both to fact and sense. The framers of that instrument were not idiots; yet idiots they would certainly have been, if they had put into it a clause declaring "that no State, or combination of States, which may at any time ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... Potomac, and extended for many miles along the former river. Here and there partial "clearings" had been made by squatters and hardy pioneers, and their rude husbandry had produced abundant crops of grain, hemp, and tobacco; civilization, however, had hardly yet entered the valley, if we may judge from the note of a night's lodging at the house of one of the settlers—Captain Hite, near the site of the present town of Winchester. Here, after supper, most of the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... will was pronounced and feared as destiny, whose donatives were crowns, whose antechamber was thronged by submissive princes, who broke down the awful barrier of the Alps and made them a highway, and whose fame was spread beyond the boundaries of civilization to the steppes of the Cossack, and the deserts of the Arab; a man who has left this record of himself in history, has taken out of our hands the question whether he shall be called great. All must concede to him a sublime power of action, an ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... much. Queens and great heiresses are privileged To intimate their matrimonial choice,— Simply because superiority In power or riches gives an apt excuse: Let a plurality of women have The wealth and power, and you might see reversed What now you call an instinct. When a higher Civilization shall make woman less Dependent for protection and support On man's caprice or pleasure, there may be A higher sort of woman; one who shall Feel that her lot is more in her own hands, And she, like man, a free controlling force, Not a mere pensioner on paternal ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... proper or continuous Hellas, as Grote presented it, he set the word-map of Italy that Gibbon draws—Italy changing its face under the Roman civilization: "Before the Roman conquest, the country which is now called Lombardy was not considered as a part of Italy. It had been occupied by a powerful colony of Gauls, who, settling themselves along the banks of the Po, from Piedmont to Romagna, carried their ...
— The Atlas of Ancient and Classical Geography • Samuel Butler
... friend thought it was wonderful. They had travelled across the desert for a month in order to reach that little collection of buildings, and during that time they had not seen a fence or a roof of any kind, and the only sign of civilization had been an artesian bore two days out from Oodnadatta. Though the iron sheds and strong bough-shelters which comprised the homestead were very rough, there was a workmanlike air about the place which seemed to say that white ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... treasury of language. He attacked the shrug, as he thought, very temperately; but in controlling his native vehemence he grew, perforce of repression, and of incompetency to deliver himself copiously in French, sarcastic. In fine, his contrast of the pretence of their noble country to head civilization, and its encouragement of a custom so barbarous, offended M. d'Orbec ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... domestic calamity human nature betrays its inherent weakness. At such times the artificial outer covering of civilization falls away, and the soul stands forth, stark, primitive, forlorn, and cries aloud. The strain of the tremendous tragedy which had entered his house, swift-footed and silent, was too much for Sir Philip. He sank on his knees by ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... as a very average looking pilot such as could be found at the bar of any spaceport; i.e. if space pilots can ever be classified as average. Spacemen are the last true adventurers in an age where the debilitating culture of a highly mechanized civilization has pushed to the very borders of the galaxy. While most men are fearful and indecisive outside their narrow specialties the spacemen must at all times be ready to deal with the unexpected and the unusual. The expression—"Steady as a spaceman's ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... certainly to a high degree of civilization in the seventh and eighth centuries, and if the Danes had not come, Ireland might have anticipated Italy. The poems I have in mind are the first written in Europe since classical times, and though Italy and France be searched, none will be ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... channels and seek the shallow waters in the every-day concerns of life. He felt vaguely that she was narrow and provincial; for had she not always lived on the flats, a region bounded by the Square on the north and by Stoke's furniture factory on the south? On the west the flats extended as far as civilization itself extended in that direction, that is, to the gas house and the creek bank, while on the east they were roughly defined by Mitchell's tannery and the brick slaughter-house, beyond which vacant lots ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... advance and progress, and driven to its remote isles and further corners, then as one nobler thought, one spiritual idea after another has perished from it, the words also that expressed these have perished too. As one habit of civilization has been let go after another, the words which those habits demanded have dropped as well, first out of use, and then out of memory and thus after a ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk. Summer dusk, especially, is the frolic moment for children, baffle them how you may. They may have been in a pottering mood all day, intent upon all ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... 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
... to the minister to be almost disgraceful, and yet he himself had never read a word of Mr. Mill's writings. "He is a far-seeing man," continued the minister. "He is one of the few Europeans who can look forward, and see how the rivers of civilization are running on. He has understood that women must at last be put upon an equality ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble. If the civilization of Bengal remains unbroken, if that common mind which—as one divines—runs through all, is not, as with us, broken into a dozen minds that know nothing of each other, something even of what is most subtle in these verses will have come, in a few generations, to the beggar on the roads. ...
— Gitanjali • Rabindranath Tagore
... no ground for believing them to have been very different in these respects from the other German peoples who were soon to overwhelm the Roman world. Though their border nowhere touched the border of the Empire they were far from being utterly strange to its civilization. Roman commerce indeed reached the shores of the Baltic, and we have abundant evidence that the arts and refinement of Rome were brought into contact with these earlier Englishmen. Brooches, sword-belts, and shield-bosses which have been found in Sleswick, and which can be dated not ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... persons who were going direct from London to Manchester, and to whom the Five Towns was nothing but a delay. I envied them. I wanted to return to the shelter of the train. When it left, I fancied that my last link with civilization was broken. Then another train puffed in, and it was simply taken by assault in a fraction of time, to an incomprehensible bawling of friendly sociable porters. Season-ticket holders at Finsbury Park think they know how to possess ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... one voice ascribed to my superior knowledge and untiring industry; and the esteem which had been long cherished for me, now passed over to a reverent and divine worship. This period of general peace and exultation, I thought a fitting time to advance the civilization and refinement of the Quamites, and as a practical commencement to this great work I ordered the royal Tanaquitic library to be ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... as on intimate terms with leaders in the criminal world—I put a few questions to him impertinently pertinent to himself. He was surprisingly frank in his answers. I was quite prepared for a more or less indignant refusal when I asked him to account for his intimacy with these dregs of civilization. ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... to the American people to have it said that in the United States of America, in the year 1888, our missionaries were imprisoned for reading the Bible to a heathen tribe of Indians who lived remote from civilization, the crime of it being that it was read in the only language ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. XLII. April, 1888. No. 4. • Various
... been accustomed 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
... paper at any rate! Meanwhile my tailor has refused to bank upon my prospects. My horse is living on credit; as to my tiger, the little wretch who wears such fine clothes, I do now know how he lives, or where he feeds. I dare not peer into the mystery. Now, as we are not so advanced in civilization as the Jews, who canceled all debts every half-century, a man must pay by the sacrifice of personal liberty. Horrible things will be said about me. Here is a young man of high esteem in the world of fashion, pretty lucky at cards, of a passable figure, ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac
... flushed, then he joined in the laugh. The Chicago man was too valuable a would-be subscriber to quarrel with. And, then, how impossible to expect a person brought up as Mason had been to understand the ordinary refinements of civilization. ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... war, love, mysteries, and the miraculous performances of lower animals and inanimate objects. The ultimate source of all stories lies in a thorough democracy, unhampered by the restrictions of a higher civilization. Many tales spring from a loathsome filth that is extremely obnoxious to our present day tastes. The remarkable and gratifying truth is, however, that the short-story, beginning in the crude and brutal stages of man's development, ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... Luxembourg, or the Boboli, or the Villa Reale, or fifty more grounds and gardens, of a similar nature, that might be mentioned; but, seen in the spring and early summer, they adorn the building they surround, and lend to the whole neighborhood a character of high civilization, that no other place in America can show, in precisely the same form, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... must be done, they immediately set to work to face the situation and discover How Not To Do It. Since Dickens's day the exposures effected by the Socialists have so shattered the self-satisfaction of modern commercial civilization that it is no longer difficult to convince our governments that something must be done, even to the extent of attempts at a reconstruction of civilization on a thoroughly uncommercial basis. Consequently, ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... Finding that on the surface an Imperial Decree enjoyed the majesty of an Ukaze of the Czar, Europeans were ready enough to interpret as best suited their enterprises something which they entirely failed to construe in terms expressive of the negative nature of Chinese civilization; and so it happened that though the government of China had become no government at all from the moment that extraterritoriality destroyed the theory of Imperial inviolability and infallibility, the miracle of turning state negativism into an active ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... Had he left Grand Bend, or had Paddy Dougan's stuff been too much for him? I was rather surprised to find in my heart a keen anxiety for the old soldier. As I hurried on I saw that Grand Bend had heard the sound of approaching civilization and was waking up. Two or three saloons, a blacksmith's shop, some tents and a new general store proclaimed a boom. As I approached the store I saw a sign in big letters across the front, "Jacob Wragge, General Store," ...
— Michael McGrath, Postmaster • Ralph Connor
... of Helen. The Athenian Asty declares that should King Agamemnon employ the opened floodgates of popular enthusiasm as a stepping-stone to lop off another limb from the decaying trunk of the (so-called) Trojan Empire, he will have achieved a permanent blessing to civilization. ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... Carboniferous Age, which possessed at least one solid ledge of metallic "X," the rarest of all earthly metals. As the automatic controls held the cruiser upon her course, the six wanderers sat long in discussion as to what should be done, what could be done, to avert the threatened destruction of all the civilization of the Galaxy except the monstrous and unspeakable culture of the Fenachrone. Nearing their destination, ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... into civilization; it resuscitates the traditions of antique science and seeks to unite them to the truths of Christianity. The art of the middle ages, as a vessel of too limited capacity, is broken by the new flood poured into it. These different ideas are stirred up and in conflict in the sixteenth century; ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... rate the life of the world flowed freely into this hospitable house, and there was always so much talk there of the news of the day, of the new books and of authors, of Boston radicalism and New York civilization, and the virtue of Congress, that small gossip stood a ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... Figure in the Court of Abundance. Leo Lentelli, Sculptor Atlantic and Pacific and the Gateway of all Nations. William de Leftwich Dodge, Painter Commerce, Inspiration, Truth and Religion. Edward Simmons, Painter The Victorious Spirit. Arthur F. Mathews, Painter The Westward March of Civilization. Frank V. Du Mond, Painter The Pursuit of Pleasure. Charles Holloway, Painter Primitive Fire. Frank Brangwyn, Painter Night Effect - Colonnade of the Palace of Fine Arts. Bernard R. Maybeck, Architect Official Poster. Perham W. Nahl Ground ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... transplant my ancestral creed; renewing the ashes of the dead Theban rule; continuing in yet grander shores the dynasty of my crowned fathers, and waking in the noble heart of Ione the grateful consciousness that she shares the lot of one who, far from the aged rottenness of this slavish civilization, restores the primal elements of greatness, and unites in one mighty soul the attributes of the prophet and the king.' From this exultant soliloquy, Arbaces was awakened to attend the trial ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... the times of the Maya civilization, these bats haunted the temples by day as they do now, and thus became readily endowed with a ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... cities sufficiently attest the former amount of population and the comparative civilization which existed at that remote era among the progenitors of the present degraded race of barbarians. The ruins of "Anaradupoora," which cover two hundred and fifty-six square miles of ground, are all that remain ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... too, have delighted through the centuries. They are told in simple, graphic style and each one is illustrated with a beautiful color plate. The work has considerable educational value, since an understanding of the many stories here set forth is necessary to our own literature and civilization. 24 full-page color ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... a difficult form of art, but Lord Lytton's is easily the most successful. He does not overload his narrative with antiquarian details, and the story moves rapidly to its great climax. It is a brilliant and imaginative picture of the later Roman civilization. ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... and walking with the same people, the difficulty of discriminating has been greatly increased. This individual, who has too many aliases for one to know which to particularise him by, is one of that numerous order of beings whom a high state of civilization is always engendering and throwing up on the surface of society; he is a man of low birth and mean connexions, but gifted with most taking manners and an unexceptionable address and appearance; these advantages, and the possession of apparently independent means, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... thing about most news articles is that they tell of destruction, failure, and tragedy instead of construction, success, and happiness. If one were to judge from the papers, one would be forced to conclude that the world is rapidly advancing from civilization to barbarism. To test the truth of this assertion, you have only to examine almost any current newspaper. A man may labor honorably and usefully for a generation without being mentioned; but if he does or says a foolish thing, the reporters flock to him as do cats ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... duel, a fair fight, strictly regular according to the code of "honorable men" for ages past—and he sought to argue that it was doubtless but the morbid sense of the wild fastnesses without, the illimitable vastness of the black night, the unutterable indurability of nature to the influences of civilization, which made it taste like murder. He had brought away even from the scene of action, to which he had gone with decorous deliberation—his worldly affairs arranged for the possibility of death, his will made, his volition surrendered, and his sacred honor in the hands of his seconds—a humiliating ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... eloquence of his counsel was hardly likely to save him. I felt an immeasurable contempt for him.... Then it occurred to me that the criminal standard was a low one. It was the wastrels, the failures, the general riff-raff of civilization who drifted into crime.... Strange that men of brains had never realized its extraordinary opportunities.... I played with the idea.... What a magnificent field—what unlimited possibilities! It ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... day. Indeed, a great part of the most valuable literature of former ages, was preserved alone by the efforts of the French monarch for the revival of science; and the link of connexion between ancient and modern civilization, owes its existence, as much to the endeavours of Charlemagne, as even to the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... 1812. There was a hole to this day in the white pine panelling above the fireplace in the dining room, which, tradition held, had been made by a British bullet discharged after a discussion of the family port. She had found something depressing in the rococo civilization of Southern California. There was an insufficient appreciation of Mr. Square's Eternal Fitness of Things. The spirit of Los Angeles, for example, was the same as that of the picnic party which, lunching on Ruskin's glacier, leaves its ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... to be a dead world, like the moon, except that it once supported a civilization nearly as advanced as our own. They tell of a giant human, a veritable colossus, who was ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... trouble also in the shape of wild beasts, and savages, terrible droughts, winds, and floods. In order to fight against these enemies, strength was necessary, and when primitive men discovered that two were worth twice as much as one they began to join forces. This was the beginning of civilization and of politeness. It rose out of the oldest instinct in ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... light, and what he did no one can any more undo" (Harnack). But it remains for every individual to accept and reaffirm that religious faith as his own guiding principle according to which he proposes to live. We shall be at one with the spirit of Christianity and of modern civilization if we approach all men with the expectation of finding beneath commonplace, sordid, or even repulsive externals some qualities of love, loyalty, heroism, aspiration, or repentance, which prove the divine in man. Kant expressed that reverence for personality in his doctrine that we ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... a very hideous side to it, certainly," said Trent, "when you get it in connection with crime. Or with vice. Or even mere luxury. But I have a sort of sneaking respect for the determination to make life interesting and lively in spite of civilization. To return to the matter in hand, however: has it struck you as a possibility that Manderson's mind was affected to some extent by this menace that Bunner believes in? For instance, it was rather an extraordinary thing to send you posting off like that ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... due chiefly to a substitution of an ethnic type whose temperament is alien to the earlier standpoint. The cultural stage which lies immediately back of the present in the life history of Western civilization is what has here been called the quasi-peaceable stage. At this quasi-peaceable stage the law of status is the dominant feature in the scheme of life. There is no need of pointing out how prone the men of ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... civilization. It is a somewhat poorer diversion than spending the season at Paris, but a few Hungarian magnates have taken it into their heads to live henceforth at Pest, and for their sake others, and for these others' sake others still have pitched their tents in this ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... is plain that even the most conservative begin to feel this, and effort constantly takes more practical form; but this is but the beginning of what must be,—the inauguration of a social revolution in ideas, and one to which all civilization ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... of this new science was felt, it was natural that new demands and new problems should continue to originate within its own limits. There must be applied psychology wherever the investigation of mental life can be made serviceable to the tasks of civilization. Criminal law, education, medicine, certainly do not constitute the totality of civilized life. It is therefore the duty of the practical psychologist systematically to examine how far other purposes of modern society can be advanced by the new methods of experimental ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... painted or chanted, because there is no cunning of art or speech able to reflect it. Nature realizes your most hopeless ideals of beauty, even as one gives toys to a child. And the sight of this supreme terrestrial expression of creative magic numbs thought. In the great centres of civilization we admire and study only the results of mind,—the products of human endeavor: here one views only the work of Nature,—but Nature in all her primeval power, as in the legendary frostless morning of creation. Man here ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... would have in every Presidency a constant rivalry for good. The Governor of Madras, when his term of office expired, would be delighted to show that the people of that Presidency were contented, that the whole Presidency was advancing in civilization, that roads and all manner of useful public works were extending, that industry was becoming more and more a habit of the people, and that the exports and imports were constantly increasing. The Governors of Bombay and the rest of the Presidencies would be animated by the same spirit, ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... man did not properly belong, through development in later times these impressions are felt as those of a world into which man is growing, of which he more and more forms a part. Let no one suppose that a repetition of the Egypto-Chaldean civilization can take place in such a way that the soul would merely regain what then existed, and which has been handed on from that time. The Christ-impulse, rightly understood, impels the human soul which has experienced it, to feel and conduct itself as a member of a spiritual world, now recognizing ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... is in effect some vital piece of world regulation is devised in the smoking room of some Brussels hotel. The world State has not so much as an office or an address, The United States should give it one. Out of its vast resources it should endow civilization with a Central Bureau of Organization—a Clearing House of its international activities as it were, with the funds needed for ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... are bad he knows they have been worse. Never before have the faith and culture which make us human, which make us strong and wise, been the possession of so large a portion of the race. Religion and civilization have diffused themselves, from little centres—from Athens and Jerusalem and Rome—until people after people, whole continents, have been brought under their influence. And in our day this diffusion is so rapid that it spreads farther in a decade than ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... their behalf. The Franks had made up their minds to settle and not to destroy. They were not burning and slaying indiscriminately, but while despising the Romans, as they called the Gauls, for their cowardice, they were in awe of their superior civilization and knowledge of arts. The country people had free access to the city, and Genevive in her homely gown and veil passed by Hilperik's guards without being suspected of being more than any ordinary Gaulish village-maid; and thus she fearlessly ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... "Brothers" was attacked at Kennedy Bay in 1815. Bishop Williams sets up the theory that Rutherford was a deserter from a vessel which visited New Zealand, that he induced the Maoris to tattoo him in order that he might escape detection after he had returned to civilization, and that he concocted the story of the capture of the "Agnes" to account for his reappearance amongst Europeans. The weakness of this theory is that he evidently did not object to publicity, and that the tattooing would make him ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... more than two years I was away from civilization; for six months I was a prisoner among the Turks; and when at length, after the taking of Baghdad I was released, I was too ill to do anything, Besides, I thought Jack Carbis would have set your minds at rest. But there, I shall have a great ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... term of servitude these subjects were given limited 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 ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... is as gross a thing as can well be done; and one wonders how any man, or set of men, can persist in so offensive a practice for a whole day together; one should expect that the first effort towards civilization would remove ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... the suggestion, but it was true, just the same. That servant was Old Tom. And the only defense he makes is just one line or so in—in this." Caleb dropped a hand upon the half legible pages. "He says that he wasn't going to let civilization make of the boy's life the wreck which he, poor, queer, honest soul, thought it had made of his father's. And do you know, Sarah, do you know, I can't help but believe that this over-zealous thing which the law would have prosecuted was the best thing he could ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be troubled, or at least careful. It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... situated upon a plane surface, they will attract each other with a force which may be determined with exactitude; and the greater the masses the greater the force. We will now apply this to polemical science. The agricultural settlement is the first stage in the civilization and formation of a State. How did this arise? First, a single family immigrated to some uncultivated parts of the country, perhaps accompanied by others, who formed a little colony. Other settlements were made in other parts of the land; and thus the country became overspread with these ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... credit of having given, in his passionate cry "Back to Nature!" the classic expression to the consciousness that all the refinements of civilization do not constitute life in its truest sense. The sentiment itself is thousands of years old. It had inspired the idyls of Theocritus in the midst of the magnificence and luxury of the courts of Alexandria and Syracuse. It reechoed through ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... the greatest living statesmen, Senator; you have a wealth of knowledge and ability that can never be replaced; knowledge and ability that will help us to design a culture and a civilization that will be as far above this one as this one is above the wolf pack. We want you to come in with us, help us; we want you ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Hannibal. We class the Carthaginians among the European nations of antiquity; for, in respect to their origin, their civilization, and all their commercial and political relations, they belonged to the European race, though it is true that their capital was on the African side of the Mediterranean Sea. Hannibal was the great Carthaginian hero. He earned his fame by the energy and implacableness ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... in other words, it was written (or more probably dictated) at the end of the Hellenic period, after an interval of twenty or thirty years, during which St John had lived at Ephesus, a great centre of Greek civilization. Our author appears to be astonished that Luthardt should describe the 'errors' in the Apocalypse as not arising out of ignorance, but as 'intentional emancipations from the rules of grammar.' Yet it stands to reason, I think, that ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... American Indians, now extinct, who formerly occupied northern Argentina. Stone and other remains prove them to have reached a high degree of civilization. They offered a vigorous resistance to the first Spanish colonists ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... million five hundred thousand, and South America seven million. Here is a foreign mission field of twelve and a half million souls. How can it be otherwise than that, when once the Indians of our land shall come to have and appreciate the blessings of a Christian civilization, their hearts shall be stirred by the needs of their brethren according to the flesh, and that they will go to them with ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 9, September, 1889 • Various
... points as this. On the contrary, each kept on the even tenour of its way without much regard to the other. From the titles of the chapters one was led to expect some comprehensive theory of European civilization continuously expounded. But the text merely showed a great quantity of superficial and second-hand information, serving to illustrate the mental idiosyncrasies of the author. Among these idiosyncrasies might be noted a very ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... that she had never lost a grandchild and had no intention of adopting a stranger in the place of one, it should be first understood that in many respects she was a civilized person. The quality of savagery, barbarism, or civilization in a tribe may be tested by the relations it characteristically maintains with domestic animals; and tribes that eat dogs are often inferior to those inclined to ceremonial cannibalism. Likewise, the civilization, barbarism, or savagery of an individual may be estimated by ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... Democracy in the Kitchen. The Masses and the Classes. The Maternal in Domestic and Political Life. Political Militancy: Its Cause and Cure. War. The New Civilization. The Philosophy of Happiness. ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... accomplished about a thousand years before the discovery by Columbus; and the incalculable progress which would have been the consequence would have carried mankind beyond the boldest imagination of to-day, and placed us a thousand years nearer civilization. ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... cork-oak," said the colonel, solemnly. "Its rough exterior has led tourists and artists, and even naturalists, to treat it with neglect, while it is daily contributing to the comfort, delight, and civilization of ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... 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
... small landing party as they assembled near the main airlock thirty-five minutes later, "we have an obligation to our civilization which I hope all of you understand. While here on this unknown world we must do nothing to bring discredit to the name of Earth and the galactic culture which ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... the various kinds of interest which belong to the near and to the distant, to the present and to the past, were collected on one spot, and in one hour. All the talents and all the accomplishments which are developed by liberty and civilization were now displayed, with every advantage that could be derived both from cooperation and from contrast. Every step in the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many troubled centuries, to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... proportions of history. Did not this branch, descended from warlike stock, seem like a fragment taken from the European annals? Was it not a symbolical image of the progress of civilization, of regular legislation struggling against barbaric customs? Thanks to these respectable counsellors and judges, one might reverse the motto: 'Non solum toga', in favor of their race. But it did not seem as if these bearded ancestors looked with much gratitude upon this ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... she had no desire to go back, and believed we have the elements of a deeper civilization; yet, the Christian was in its infancy; the Greek in its maturity; nor could she look on the expression of a great nation's intellect, as insignificant. These fables of the Gods were the result of ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... generations could they count on a permanent cessation from the hostilities with which the mountaineers, driven back, yet unsubdued, continued to harass them. The results were precisely such as occurred in Normandy and England, and every where else, where tribes advanced to a similar pitch of civilization, won settlements by the sword. Arpad, the son of Almus, was chosen to succeed his father; and the foundations were laid both of an hereditary monarchy, and of a power able and willing to place limits ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... were hung with such pictures as give cheap lodgings half their horror; it was encumbered with countless frail chairs and "kiggly" tables, and upon every flat surface had settled a swarm of albums, framed photographs, china dogs, wax flowers, penholder-stands, and all the choicest by-products of civilization struggling towards culture. As we were not to be frozen by exposure or immediately attacked by Bolshies, we might reasonably have expected to be asphyxiated by the Russian stove; but even this consolation was denied ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... to Samuel, that a man might starve in the midst of civilization. He could hardly believe it, and grew half-delirious as he thought about it. What would happen at the end? Would they let him lie down and die in the street? Or was there some place where starving ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... all that I had seen and heard, so curious to know the history of this French priest, who talked of the court of Louis XV., who had created a country and a people, and contrived, in a region so remote from civilization, to surround himself with so many luxuries, that I elected without hesitation for the ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... 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 young ears heard ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... strenuous week in Copah's history, had passed, and still the president's party delayed its return to what Miss Priscilla Van Bruce constantly referred to as "civilization"; though the Farthest West has always been slow to admit the derogatory comparison which the ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... resemblance, the conclusion is irresistible, that the mounds of the West were but the germs of the more symmetrical pyramids of Mexico and Central America, and that the people who constructed them were, in intelligence and civilization, far in advance of the roving tribes of North American Indians who inhabited the country at the time of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... But that 'not knowing' is not so dull as your 'knowing.' I am going up a ladder which is called progress, civilization, culture; I go on and up without knowing definitely where I am going, but really it is worth living for the sake of that delightful ladder; while you know what you are living for, you live for the sake of some people's not ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 43), was founded by the joint labours of St. Peter and St. Paul, but the circumstances of its foundation were very different from those of the Churches of our own islands. [Sidenote: Difficulties encountered by the Church in Italy from high civilization] Christianity in Italy had to make its way amongst a highly civilized people, a nation of deep thinkers and philosophers, whose opposition to the truths of the Gospel was a far more subtle thing than the rude ignorance of barbarians. ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... that Horicon should ever be like Como. Pretty hills and forests and temporary summer structures cannot have the poetic or the substantial interest of the ancient villages and towns clinging to the hills, the old stone houses, the vines, the ruins, the atmosphere of a long civilization. They do the lovely Horicon no ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... be perforating your noses and ears and wearing ornaments of bone and shell. I know. The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization. When we increase and feel the lack of room, we will proceed to kill one another. And then I suppose you will wear human scalp-locks at your waist, as well—as you, Edwin, who are the gentlest of my grandsons, have already begun with that vile pigtail. Throw it away, ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... testify that in the continental countries which they have examined—more especially in Germany, France, Holland, Belgium and Switzerland—they have found a state of society which does fulfill in a very eminent degree all the conditions of a most advanced civilization. They have found in those countries education, wealth, comfort, and self-respect; and they have found that the whole body of the people in those countries participate in the enjoyment of these great blessings to an extent which very far exceeds the participation ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... pay exorbitant prices for showy trash, for crude vulgar luxury. They corrupt taste. They make everyone round them or near them sycophants and cheats. They substitute money for intelligence and discrimination. They degrade every fine thing in life. Civilization is built up by brains and hard work, and along come the rich and rot and ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... secondhand reports of wholly irrelevant atrocities committed by either one side or the other, and often by neither one side nor the other, but by irresponsible scoundrels who, in the natural turmoil of the greatest convulsion in the history of our civilization, escape temporarily here and there from any ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... libeller could not have accused him of an uncle lower in rank than a governor of the state. Sonorous names, senator and gladiator, brimful of the ferocity and dignity of old Rome! near as they had been in the days of Caesar, one would have thought the march of civilization might have widened the interval. Here was a rogue's march indeed! Judy gave the ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... days' journey,' that was 'laid waste, and there was none to bemoan her,' whose greatness sank when that of Rome had just begun to rise, now stands forth again to testify to her own splendor, and to the civilization, and power, and magnificence of the Assyrian Empire. This may be said, thus far, to be the crowning historical discovery of the nineteenth century. But the century as ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... philological point of view to different races, but constituting in their historical aspect one whole. This historic whole has been usually, but not very appropriately, entitled the history of the ancient world. It is in reality the history of civilization among the Mediterranean nations; and, as it passes before us in its successive stages, it presents four great phases of development—the history of the Coptic or Egyptian stock dwelling on the southern shore, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... to get a space ship a safe enough distance from Earth was to make a Space Platform as a starting point. Then a ship could shoot away from Earth with effectively zero gravity and full fuel tanks. The Platform should be built so civilization could surge ahead to ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... were the phrases, so rounded the periods. Yes, there were other inns; one at the top of the town—the Vetere—in a very good position; and they doubtless excelled my own in modern comfort. As a matter of fact, it might be avowed that the Lionetti, from the point of view of the great centres of civilization, left something to be desired—something to be desired; but it was a good old inn, a reputable old inn, and probably ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... philosophers tell us man's necessity for food lies at the root of civilization, and that the desire for a sufficiency and variety of aliment alone keeps up our energies! I cannot think so; I believe it is the stone about our necks that drags us down, and is intended to do so, and which keeps us truly from being "but a ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... of straightforward good sense divested of sentiment which could not appeal to any one on a higher plane of civilization ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... which one could justly say indicates a doubtful and disputatious nature, wishes to discredit it because he has not heard of such a thing before. Now, I ask you, gentlemen, intelligent and fair-minded as I know you are, where would we be, where would civilization be if we assumed the attitude of our friend here. If a thing is ever seen at all somebody sees it first, else it would never be seen. Quod erat demonstrandum. You remember your schooldays, of course. I thank you for your applause, gentlemen, but I'm not through yet. We have passed the question ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... I mean to say, except that you put it too modestly. It is a case of the phoenix, not only of modern culture, but of natural endowment and of every happy accident of the highest civilization, throwing herself away on a man specially incapacitated by his tastes and pursuits from comprehending her or entering the ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... birthday was celebrated as a feast in Germany; and the first child vaccinated in Russia was named "Vaccinov" and educated at public expense. In six years the discovery had penetrated to the most remote corners of civilization; it had even reached some savage nations. And in a few years small-pox had fallen from the position of the most dreaded of all diseases to that of being practically the only disease for which a sure and easy ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... impertinent—thrusting itself where it has no business, and hinders other people's business—that makes a weed of it. The most accursed of all vegetables, the one that has destroyed for the present even the possibility of European civilization, is only called a weed in the slang of its votaries;[32] but in the finest and truest English we call so the plant which {109} has come to us by chance from the same country, the type of mere senseless prolific activity, the American water-plant, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... of that stretch of woods, anyhow," he declared. "And it 'tain't rainin' so hard, nuther. Cal'late we can get to civilization if that breechin' holds and the pesky wheel don't come off. How are you, in aft there; ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of Richelieu, there has been no such picturesque figure in the history of civilization as that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... The Pageant of Experiments with Civilization 1. Experiments in Egypt and Eurasia 2. Rome's Outstanding Experiment 3. The Origins of Western Civilization 4. The Life Cycle of Western Civilization 5. ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing |
