"Civilisation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... economic truths was at least as indispensable for the life of the Roman Empire as the acceptance of a Messiah; and it was only in the hands of a great statesman like Gregory VII. that Christianity became at last an instrument powerful enough to save civilisation. What the moral renovation of Rousseau did for France we all know. Now Rousseau's was far more profoundly social than the doctrine of Mr. Carlyle, which, while in name a renunciation of self, has all its foundations in the purest individualism. Rousseau, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... against fact has thus lamed the Celt even in spiritual work, how much more must it have lamed him in the world of business and politics! The skilful and resolute appliance of means to ends which is needed both to make progress in material civilisation, and also to form powerful states, is just what the Celt has least turn for. He is sensual, as I have said, or at least sensuous; loves bright colours, company, and pleasure; and here he is like the Greek and ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... was also abandoned, so that that part of the country was very little inhabited. Some small houses on the side of the road leading to Corbeil, an inn, called the "Auberge du Donjon," which offered passing hospitality to waggoners; these were about all to represent civilisation in this out-of-the-way part of the country, but a few leagues ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... the advantage of seeing human nature in its primitive surroundings, far from the squalid and chilly influences of the tail-end of the Glacial epoch. I admit at once that cold has done much, exceeding much, for human development—has been the mother of civilisation in somewhat the same sense that necessity has been the mother of invention. To it, no doubt, we owe to a great extent, in varying stages, clothing, the house, fire, the steam-engine. Yet none the less is it true that the first levels of society must needs have been passed ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... To the Convener and Superintendent, in their hours of discouragement, this little building brought cheer and hope. For, while it stood there it kept touch between that new country and what was best and most characteristic in Canadian civilisation, and it was for this that they wrought and prayed. But, though to people and minister, Convener and Superintendent, the little manse meant so much, the bareness, the unloveliness, and, more than all, the utter loneliness of it smote Shock with a sense of depression. ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... which the ancestors of the civilised races may be supposed to have passed through at more or less remote periods of their history. Thus when we arrange all the known peoples of the world according to the degree of their savagery or civilisation in a graduated scale of culture, we obtain not merely a comparative view of their relative positions in the scale, but also in some measure an historical record of the genetic development of culture from a very early time down ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... 1918, just at the time when the American Expeditionary Forces were approaching the desired degree of military effectiveness, the fate of civilisation was suddenly imperilled by the materialisation of ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... mainly because English statesmen could only regard it from the shopkeeping point of view. When a new world began to arise at the Antipodes, our rulers saw an opportunity not for planting new offshoots of European civilisation, but for ridding themselves of the social rubbish no longer accepted in America. With purblind energy, and eyes doggedly fixed upon the ground at their feet, the race had somehow pressed forwards to illustrate the old doctrine that a man never goes so far as when he does not know whither ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... looked at him earnestly, but took him for a savage—he was dressed in a rug of kangaroo skin, and was armed with spears. This man still survives: he contributed to the friendly reception of his countrymen; but during his long sojourn, he had imparted no ideas of civilisation. ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... inspector-general of the Confederate army, inspected the camp, and reported upon its administration in no halting terms. 'It is a place,' he said, 'the horrors of which it is difficult to describe—it is a disgrace to civilisation.'" ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... as to primitive races, I cannot help it. I profess accurately to describe native Africa—Africa in those places where it has not received the slightest impulse, whether for good or evil, from European civilisation. If the picture be a dark one, we should, when contemplating these sons of Noah, try and carry our mind back to that time when our poor elder brother Ham was cursed by his father, and condemned to be the slave of both Shem and Japheth; for as they ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... under German command, and the German, whenever he is confident that he is on the winning side, exhibited all the brutality and cruelty of his Hunnish ancestors. Attila was a scourge; his modern descendants are simply imitators who, having the thin veneer of civilisation, combine science with bestial brutality in their methods ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... the inauguration during my visit to India this winter. It promises to rally as seldom before in active support of the British connection those classes that British rule brought within the orbit of Western civilisation by the introduction of English education, just about a century ago. It has not disarmed all the reactionary elements which, even when disguised in a modern garb, draw their inspiration from an ancient civilisation, remote indeed from, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... from the seas by five hundred miles of mountain, swamp, or desert. The great river is their only means of growth, their only channel of progress. It is by the Nile alone that their commerce can reach the outer markets, or European civilisation can penetrate the inner darkness. The Soudan is joined to Egypt by the Nile, as a diver is connected with the surface by his air-pipe. Without it there is only suffocation. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... Caucasian range forms the north-west margin of the great tableland of Western Asia, and as it was the home of those races who afterwards peopled Europe and Western Asia and so became the fathers of civilisation and culture, the "Supreme Caucasian mind" is a historically correct but certainly recondite expression for the intellectual flower of the human race, for ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... 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 ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... eloquent Professor of History at the University is that which is most deserving of particular mention—viz., the [Greek: Epilogos tes historias tou hellenikou ethnous], which has been published in French under the title of "Histoire de la Civilisation hellenique." It is a summary of his large work in five volumes on the history of the Hellenic nation from the most distant period down to our own time. The writer has had for his object to establish the idea of Hellenic civilization and history, so often called in question in the West. We may boldly ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... fatigue, we took 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 ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... Misivria) in 812 and Adrianople in 813, Krum appeared before the capital, where he nearly lost his life in an ambush while negotiating for peace. During preparations for a final assault on Constantinople he died suddenly in 815. Though Krum cannot be said to have introduced civilisation into Bulgaria, he at any rate increased its power and gave it some of the more essential organs of government. He framed a code of laws remarkable for their rigour, which was undoubtedly necessary in such a community and beneficial in its effect. He repressed civil strife, and ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... that if it seeks anything better it will probably be disappointed. The natural man, the savage, is as indifferent to others as the exclusive, and those who accuse the coldness of the Bostonians, and their reluctant or repellant behaviour toward unknown people, accuse not only civilisation, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the years of my life I have handled the raw material, the virgin ore, not the finished ornament that is smelted out of it—if, indeed, it is finished yet, which I greatly doubt. I dare say that a time may come when the perfected generations—if Civilisation, as we understand it, really has a future and any such should be allowed to enjoy their hour on the World—will look back to us as crude, half-developed creatures whose only merit was that we handed on ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... where the persons lived whose bones have thus been uncovered to the gaze of a late generation of sight-seers, but it is supposed that their habitations must have been near this site. They were, of course, in a higher state of civilisation than mere cave-dwellers, but their huts may have been of perishable wattle, or they may have come from some of the hut-circles of the Bodmin Moors. The remains, like those around St. Piran's, bespeak a somewhat dense population. ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... in all parts of Russia, with the exception of the government of St. Petersburg, from which they have been banished. In most of the provincial towns they are to be found in a state of half-civilisation, supporting themselves by trafficking in horses, or by curing the disorders incidental to those animals; but the vast majority reject this manner of life, and traverse the country in bands, like the ancient Hamaxobioi; the immense grassy plains of Russia affording pasturage for their herds of ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... the aforesaid ugly surroundings, and will be moved to discontent of what is careless and brutal now, and will, I hope, at last be so much discontented with what is bad, that you will determine to bear no longer that short-sighted, reckless brutality of squalor that so disgraces our intricate civilisation. ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... unmitigated grizzly. It was an understood thing, that whoever took upon himself to be a bear must eventually die, sooner or later, even if he were the eldest born; else, life would have been all strife and carnage, and the Age of Acorns have displaced our hard-won civilisation. This little affair concluded with satisfaction to all parties concerned, we rambled along the road, picking up the defaulting Harold by the way, muffinless now and in his ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... But the progress of civilisation and thought has impressed this amazing idea on the general mind. It is no matter-of-course conception. The difficulties attending it were long insuperable to the deepest thought as well as to popular belief; and the triumph of the modern ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... their movements and their correspondence as were their fathers, they must seek the remoter and more savage quarters of Europe, the less travelled portions of America or of half-explored Australia; they must plunge into Asian or African wilds, untouched by civilisation, where as yet there runs not the iron horse, worker of greater marvels than the wizard steeds of fairy fable, that could, transport a single favoured rider over wide distances in little time. The subjugated, serviceable nature-power Steam, with its fellow-servant ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... somewhat modified. In the despatch to the Secretary of State in which he announces the new appointment, Sir Garnet says that Mr. Osborn is to be the "councillor, guide, and friend" of the native chiefs, and that to his "moral influence" "we should look I think for the spread of civilisation and the propagation of the Gospel." What a conglomeration of duties,—at once "prophet, priest, ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... reasons, they ought not to be encouraged to take holy orders; and, on the whole, it is very doubtful if it would be a wise step to introduce them into the army, much less into the navy. Seeing this, therefore, the question naturally arises, Are women to be the mere drudges—the Helots of our civilisation? Are we only to employ them in such humble callings as exclude all ideas of future distinction? A very serious question this, and one over which I pondered for more than half an hour last night, as I lay ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... the one country to the other, it is for all the world like the shutting of a door between oneself and the world. For some reason or other the impression of a civilisation active to the point of distress follows one all up the pass from the French railway to the summit of the range; but when that summit is passed the new and brilliant sun upon the enormous glaciers before one, ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... delightful to himself, and he made it delightful to others. He is regarded as the founder of historical pathology. He studied disease in relation to the history of man, made his study yield to men outside his own profession an important chapter in the history of civilisation, and even took into account physical phenomena upon the surface of the globe as often affecting the ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... legends is probable. Kanishka as a barbarian but docile conqueror was likely to adopt Buddhism if he wished to keep abreast of the thought and civilisation of his subjects, for at that time it undoubtedly inspired the intellect and art of north-western India. Both as a statesman and as an enquirer after truth he would wish to promote harmony and stop sectarian squabbles. His action resembles that of Constantine who after his conversion ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... with the expulsion of man from the garden. Seduced by the serpent, man stretches out his hand after the food which is forbidden him, in order to become like God, and eats of the tree of knowledge. The first consequence of this is the beginning of dress, the first step in civilisation; other and sadder consequences soon follow. In the evening the man and his wife hear Jehovah walking in the garden; they hide before Him, and by doing so betray themselves. It is useless to think of denying what has taken place, and as ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... her?—to that extent that it made no difference whether or not he introduced them. The strangest thing of all for Milly was perhaps the uplifted assurance and indifference with which she could simply give back the particular bland stare that appeared in such cases to mark civilisation at its highest. It was so little her fault, this oddity of what had "gone round" about her, that to accept it without question might be as good a way as another of feeling life. It was inevitable ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... Histoire des Enfants abandonnes et delaisses. Etudes sur la protection de l'enfance aux diverses epoques de la civilisation. Paris, 1885. vii, ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... in a speech in 1841, 'that the onward movements of society have generally had their origin. It is among them that new discoveries in political and moral science have invariably found the readiest acceptance; and the cause of Peace, Civilisation, and sound National Morality has been more indebted to their humble but enterprising labours, than to the measures of the most sagacious statesman, or the teachings of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... Arts The Art of the People The Beauty of Life Making the Best of It The Prospects of Architecture in Civilisation ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... they were hospitably received by the then governing people, who, for the most part, were Christians—probably Gallas and Abyssinians—who, judging from the few archaeological remains they subsequently left behind them, must have lived in a far more advanced state of civilisation than the present Somali enjoy. Those Christian people were governed by one man, Sultan Kin, who had a deputy called Wurrah, renowned alike for his ferocity of character ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... the caravan of the Parisians went on its way, winding farther into the desert. In leaving Sidi-Okba they left behind them the last traces of civilisation—the French man and woman who keep the auberge in the orange garden there. To-day, as they journeyed, a sense of deep mystery flowed upon the heart of mademoiselle. She felt that she was a little cockle-shell ...
— The Figure In The Mirage - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... good-looking chap—this Cannable who lived in the civilised city of New Orleans. It is quite true that he came from an island in the sea, but as that island is known to geographers, great and small, as England, it is scarcely worth while to mention his migration as an achievement of civilisation. Moreover, it was known that he had eaten of human flesh, but it was not with the gusto of those ancient Fijis who banqueted on salubrious sailors and munchable ministers whenever they had the ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... entire domain contained about 827,000 square miles, inhabited by about three million people, very unequally distributed. Population was most dense near the coast and gradually shaded off toward the interior. The front wave of civilisation may be located by an irregular line passing through central New Hampshire, skirting Lake Champlain, narrowing down to the Mohawk valley, and across north-western New Jersey, whence it turned due west across the mountains in a long arm reaching to Pittsburg. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... Mediterranean civilisation teaches us a useful lesson in this respect. Two languages dominated the Mediterranean basin. The East spoke Greek, not because Plato and AEschylus spoke Greek, but because Greek was the tongue of the great commercial ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... sure I am happy, thought Magdalena, suddenly. Yes, I am sure. But I wish I might never see anyone again. California is faultless; it is civilisation that has spoilt her. ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... back to slavery," he continued, "I shall bear it more philosophically. It was making me a brute, but I think there'll be no more danger of that. The memory of civilisation will abide with me. I shall remind myself that I was once a free man, and that will ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... Sir George said, 'to reflect that in the latitudes, for which we were bound, human beings were everywhere eating one another. There was a patch of settled civilisation at the Cape, a lighthouse beaming into those seas, and that was about all, The full glow had to arrive from the north, seeing that south of a line, drawn from the Cape to Australia and New Zealand, there was ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... that both the theory and the practice of morality have advanced with the general advance in the intelligence and civilisation of the human race. But, if this be so, morality must be a matter capable of being reasoned about, a subject of investigation and of teaching, in which the less intelligent members of a community have always something to learn from the more intelligent, and the more intelligent, in ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... 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 ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... these, 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 to make his readers feel about them what men who witnessed them felt, he would ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... he laughs, or at what, seeing that he does not always know, and that, if he does, he is not a responsible agent. Laughter is an involuntary action of certain muscles, developed in the human species by the progress of civilisation. The ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... beginning. After that I never had a secure moment unless I was away on an exploring expedition. The moment I reappeared in civilisation my brother would seek me out. He was cunning enough to press me only to the verge of endurance. He could judge exactly how much I would stand. At last, however, I resolved not to yield another penny to his extortions. I cut loose from all ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... ideas have perhaps been suggested to him by a locomotive crossing the plains, as for elegance of design he has grasped it while admiring the Venus of Milo or the work of Murillo, and finally, if his book exercises any influence over us, it does so, thanks to all the circumstances of our civilisation. ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin
... 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 ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... evil practices against the Cathari were perhaps no truer than similar accusations against the Waldenses, and their missionary zeal was proof against even death at the stake. Nevertheless there is no doubt that the cause of progress and civilisation lay with Catholicism rather than with its opponents. The asceticism of the Cathari would have resulted, if not in the extinction of the race, at least in the destruction of the family: their identification of matter with the work of Satan would have been ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... from a humanitarian and not from a political aspect, and it was only upon the former ground that he felt called and impelled to attempt the redress of the wrongs which were a scandal to the name of civilisation in Europe. And it was not long before England and the Continent were aroused by his denunciations of the Neapolitan system of government. Mr. Gladstone first carefully ascertained the truth of the statements made to him in order to attest their accuracy, and then published two ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... the cable that bound me to civilisation, and having seen the buff pony and the dazed yokel disappear in a cloud of dust, I looked about me with what Stevenson calls a "fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy," the joy of a successful rebel or a liberated serf. Plenty of money in my purse—that was unromantic, of course, but it simplified matters—and ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... imperceptible slope of national tendency, yet forever recruited from sources nearer heaven, from summits where the gathered purity of ages lies encamped, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and civilisation through what seem the eternal barriers of both. It is a loyalty to great ends, an anchored cling to solid principles, which knows how to swing with the tide, but not to be carried away by it, that we demand in public men,—and not persistence in prejudice, sameness of policy, or stolid antagonism ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... as old as life, property and the pocket invented theft, late-born among the arts. It was not until avarice had devised many a cunning trick for the protection of wealth, until civilisation had multiplied the forms of portable property, that thieving became a liberal and an elegant profession. True, in pastoral society, the lawless man was eager to lift cattle, to break down the barrier between robbery and warfare. But the contrast is as sharp between the savagery of ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... brief consideration of these and many similar topics, and suggest lines of action and thought that may perhaps stimulate a fuller study of the subject. Attention is also given to the relation of birds to mankind and the effect of civilisation on the bird-life of the country. The book is not intended so much for the advanced student in ornithology, as for the beginner. Its purpose is to answer many of the questions that students in this charming field of outdoor study are constantly asking of those ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... capable of being abused. Alcohol not one of these; alcohol always pernicious. Fiction, on the other hand, a good thing. Antiquity of fiction. In early days couched in verse. Civilisation prefers prose. Fiction, from the earlier ages, intended to convey Moral Instruction. Opinion of Aristotle defended against that of Plato. Morality in mediaeval Romance. Criticism of Mr. Frederic Harrison. Opinion of Moliere. Yet French novels usually immoral, and why. Remarks ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... of cereal grain. They spoke a language whose existence and nature we infer from the remnants of it which survive in the tongues of their descendants, and from these remnants we are able to judge, in some measure, of their civilisation and their modes of thought. The indications thus preserved for us show the Aryans to have been a simple and fierce community of early warriors, farmers, and shepherds, still in a partially nomad condition, ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... port of refuge, not too far distant, into which could run now and again to assure myself that good clothes and cleanliness still existed. Also in such port I could receive my mail, work up my notes, and sally forth occasionally in changed garb to civilisation. ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... that respect to the Boers or British. The marauders were also mentally superior to the black races within the colony, and altogether more interesting savages, braver in battle, and capable of a higher civilisation. One of these tribes, numbering about ten thousand, was in alliance with the British, but the whole population of the Cape able to bear arms, and the troops, taken together, did not reach twenty thousand men. The nature of the country favoured the action of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of course, except the Moors and Arabs, who will never, I believe, adopt European civilisation; they seem to recoil from before it, like the wild beasts ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... and the Muses. Thou sidest with them who have broken our statues, unroofed our temples, desecrated our altars, and banished us from among mankind. Thou rejectest the glory of standing alone in a barbarous age as the last witness to culture and civilisation. Thou despisest the gifts of the Gods and the Muses, of which I am even now the bearer. Thou preferrest the mitre to the laurel chaplet, and the hymns of Gregory to the epics ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... comparable to the human hand. The tail of an opossum is a prehensile thing, but it is too far from his eyes; the elephant's trunk is better, and it is probably to their trunks that the elephants owe their sagacity. It is here that the bee, in spite of her wings, has failed. She has a high civilisation, but it is one whose equilibrium appears to have been already attained; the appearance is a false one, for the bee changes, though more slowly than man can watch her; but the reason of the very gradual nature ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... or at best with the wind abeam. The wind was, at the moment, blowing briskly from the southward, which was a fair wind for the Caroline group, in one of which—if we could only manage to hit the right one—we might hope to meet with hospitality at least, if not the actual means to return to civilisation. After some discussion, therefore, we determined, as the wind seemed inclined to moderate a little, to risk a start without further delay, since, if our boat was to be of any real service to us, she ought to be able to live in such a sea as was ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... difficulty. To those who had an understanding of the work, it had a compelling appeal, not only as an opportunity for service but also as the greatest conservation project of all time—the conservation of one of the finest races of our civilisation. ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... of Dr. Turner's, which I was allowed to consult at Malua, I came on one damning evidence: on the island of Onoatoa the punishment for theft was to be killed and eaten. How shall we account for the universality of the practice over so vast an area, among people of such varying civilisation, and, with whatever intermixture, of such different blood? What circumstance is common to them all, but that they lived on islands destitute, or very nearly so, of animal food? I can never find it in my appetite ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a singular lack of political imagination that they should still fail to appreciate the reality, the significance, and the abiding force of a sentiment which has so far successfully resisted the influence of those governing qualities which have played a foremost part in the civilisation of the modern world. The Spectator some time ago came out bluntly with a truth which an Irishman may, I presume, quote without offence from so high an English authority:—"The one blunder of ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... private individuals in districts occupied by an enemy the indispensable protection of law. There may be members of the Institut who do not give up the hope that some day, thanks to the progress of civilisation, humanity will succeed in substituting an organised international justice for the wars which now-a-days take place between sovereign States. But the body of the Institut, as a whole, well knows that that hope has no chance ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... 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 beautiful ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... but who know that the love of money is so distinctive a characteristic of humanity that such sermons are mere platitudes called for by customary but unintelligent piety. All material progress has come from man's desire to do the best he can for himself and those about him, and civilisation and Christianity itself have been made possible by such progress. Though we do not all of us argue this matter out within our breasts, we do all feel it; and we know that the more a man earns the more useful he is to his fellow-men. The most useful lawyers, as a rule, have been those ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... stealing his master's property, but just softly and silently vanished away. And if hunted up the treasure will be found in his or her particular village— clothes-less, comfortable, utterly unconcerned, and unaware that he or she has lost anything by leaving Clarence and Civilisation. It is this conduct that gains for the Bubi the reputation of being a bigger idiot ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... other signs of civilisation there besides costume, for, in addition to the neat huts and gardens and whitewashed church, there was a sound issuing from the pointed spire which was anything but suggestive of the South sea savage. It was the church bell—a small one, to be sure, but sweetly toned—which was being rung ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... evident that the problem of the relation of the child to the parent is still incompletely solved even in what we consider our highest civilisation. There is here needed an art in which those who have to exercise it can scarcely possess all the necessary skill and experience. Among trees and birds and beasts the art is surer because it is exercised unconsciously, on the foundation of a large tradition in which failure meant death. In the common ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... Evidences of modernity, buildings that might have been anywhere else, were not lacking; but these huge piles of iron and stone served only to bring into sharper contrast the remnants of an earlier civilisation. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... Hunter River, whence he ascended the main range without any difficulty beyond having to unload some of the pack-horses during the steepest part of the ascent. He had with him six men, eleven horses, and provisions for fourteen weeks. He left civilisation, or the outskirts of it, on the 2nd of May, and on the 11th he crossed the parallel on which Oxley had crossed the Peel River in 1818, and once beyond that point he was traversing unexplored country. The land was suffering under a prolonged drought in that district, ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... 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 ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... 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 Ocean, and where ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... something which could not be beaten for its excellence of quality; but it was always simple, always out of the line of shoddy and bespanglement. But Quakerism is neither immaculate nor invincible; time is changing its simplicity, its quaint old fashioned solidity of dress; "civilisation" is quietly eating away its rigidity; and the day is coming when Quakerism will don the same suit as the rest of the world. For the first ten minutes we were in the chapel silence was not to us so much of a singularity; but when ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... curious results of what is called wild life, is a blessed release from many of the timidities that assail the easy liver in the centres of civilisation. Potts was the only one in the white camp who had doubts about the wisdom of having to do ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... at that time curiously eager for some adequate philosophy of life, and his social satire seemed very small beer indeed. I was really young. I hungered after great truths: "Middle-march," "Adam Bede," "The Rise and Fall of Rationalism," "The History of Civilisation," were momentous events in my life. But I loved life better than books, and I cultivated with care the acquaintance of a neighbour who had taken the Globe Theatre for the purpose of producing Offenbach's operas. Bouquets, stalls, rings, delighted me. I was not dissipated, but I loved the abnormal. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... their civilisation? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehovah. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... England, though infinitely finer than our own, is more remarkable for its verdure, and for a general appearance of civilisation, than for its natural beauties. The chalky cliffs may seem bold and noble to the American, though compared to the granite piles that buttress the Mediterranean they are but mole-hills; and the travelled eye seeks beauties instead, in the retiring vales, the ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... that mirrored world, with very little effort of imagination, might become peopled by different generations. As the figures receded in space so they receded in time. Groups of human beings, with all the subtle ease of a decadent civilisation, ceded their place to groups of men and women who moved with more slowness and dignity in the middle distance of those endless reflections. And looking down those avenues of gilded foliage into that fancied past, the old cry might well rise to the ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... 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 ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... is not the work of a blind destiny. While civilisation in the East succumbed and died out before the advance of races incapable of culture, it was welcomed in the West by races possessing the requisite capacity, which by their inborn force gave it new forms and indestructible bases for its outward existence. Nor have the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... stand. The best brains and intellects of Europe, the brightest and most promising youths, all the manhood everywhere in Europe to be shrivelled and consumed in a holocaust like this—it is such a reign of the Devil and Antichrist on earth that it must be banished in perpetuity if civilisation and progress are to endure. ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... pencil the kind of art that would answer to Meredith's description of the comic muse. Throughout The Egoist, by George Meredith, a comedy in which Clara Middleton's life comes near to being tragic, the air would clear at any moment if Sir Willoughby and Clara had not both lost through over-civilisation the power of saying precisely what they mean. The book is the story of how Clara tries to find words, and of how, when she finds them, the conversational genius of Willoughby seemingly deflects them from the meaning she intends them to bear. It was in the mid-region between two ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... Exodus of the Israelites, revised by the Author. Dr. Lepsius, it may be mentioned, was at the head of the scientific expedition appointed by the King of Prussia to investigate the remains of ancient Egyptian and Ethiopian civilisation, still in preservation in the Nile valley and the adjacent countries; and in this cheap volume we have that accomplished traveller's own account of what that expedition was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... Their houses are very simply builded with pebble stone, without any chimneys, the fire being made in the midst thereof. The good man, wife, children, and other of their family, eat and sleep on the one side of the house, and their cattle on the other, very beastly and rudely in respect of civilisation. They are destitute of wood, their fire is turf and cow shardes. They have corn, bigge, and oats, with which they pay their king's rent to the maintenance of his house. They take great quantity of fish, which they dry in the wind and ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... a contemporary, has completed his plans for the overthrow of civilisation. It seems that all our efforts to conceal from him its presence in our midst are doomed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... realised—and we repeat, that among many contingencies it appears to us to be the least improbable—it affords to Europe the best hope of undisturbed peace and progressive civilisation and prosperity. An alliance with England was one of the favourite dreams of the first Napoleon. He believed, and with reason, that England and France united could dictate to all Europe. But in this respect, as indeed in all ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... the trunks of trees, the early immigrants would have brought to our virgin land, first the bean, then the pea, and finally the cereal, that best of safeguards against famine. They taught us the care of herds, and the use of bronze, the material of the first metal implement. Thus the dawn of civilisation arose over France. With the bean did those ancient teachers also involuntarily bring us the insect which to-day disputes it with us? It is doubtful; the Bruchidae seem to be indigenous. At all events, I find them levying tribute from various indigenous ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... appears to be the origin, or one of the origins, of food prohibitions, on the one hand, and of totemism on the other. When it is remembered that the old Israelites sprang from ancestors who are said to have resided near, or in, one of the great seats of ancient Babylonian civilisation, the city of Ur; that they had been, it is said for centuries, in close contact with the Egyptians; and that, in the theology of both the Babylonians and the Egyptians, there is abundant evidence, notwithstanding their advanced social organisation, of the belief in spirits, ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... events, he should go out somewhere, and beat the big British drum, one way or another. I believe it's our only hope. We're rotting at home—some of us sunk in barbarism, some coddling themselves in over-refinement. What's the use of preaching peace and civilisation, when we know that England's just beginning her big fight—the fight that will put all history into the shade! We have to lead the world; it's our destiny; and we must do it by breaking heads. That's the nature of the human animal, and will be for ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... having the same meaning, side by side. But, unfortunately for the scholar who undertakes to prove the question, the Romans were in this island four hundred years, colonised it partly, and partly gave it their own form of civilisation. As before mentioned, the inhabitants adopted with avidity the Roman dress, language, and literature. That language must therefore be supposed to have entered deeply into the composition of the present Cumrian tongue. The sceptical examiner may therefore reasonably object, that any similarity ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... which I have done, I have done with a good purpose. First, politically, or according to practical wisdom—in order that you, not I, might carry the basket. Next, philosophically, or according to the intuitions of the pure reason—in order that you might, by beholding the magnificence of that great civilisation which your fellows wish to destroy, learn that you are an ass, and a tortoise, and a nonentity, and so beholding yourself to be nothing, may be ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... by earnest students of occultism attached to the Theosophical Society, the significance of the statement embodied in the following pages would be misapprehended without some preliminary explanation. Historical research has depended for western civilisation hitherto, on written records of one kind or another. When literary memoranda have fallen short, stone monuments have sometimes been available, and fossil remains have given us a few unequivocal, though inarticulate assurances concerning the antiquity of the human race; but modern ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... These were of two kinds. Some, very 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 ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... cohesion of men in societies, in political obedience, in the sanctity of contract; in all that fabric of law and charter and obligation, whether written or unwritten, which is the sheltering bulwark between civilisation and barbarism. When reason and history had contributed all that they could to the explanation, it seemed to him as if the vital force, the secret of organisation, the binding framework, must still come from the impenetrable regions beyond reasoning and beyond history. There was another ...
— Burke • John Morley
... situated on an advantageous site in the centre of a great plain, the north and south ends of which are open. The surrounding hills and valleys are so disposed that a large number of rivers radiate towards the centre of the plain. Civilisation—if we must rank the ultra-fierce Norsemen, for instance, among its exponents—proceeded westwards from the coast, and wave after wave of the invading peoples crossed with ease the eastern and north-eastern hills, which are far less formidable than those on the west. ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... small army, still smaller navy, and miniature government. Labuan has not possessed a Governor since Sir Charles Lees (then Mr. Lees) left, but it boasts capital public offices, a first-rate Government House, Secretary's residence, church, parsonage, and other amenities of advanced civilisation. Only there is nobody to govern, and hardly anything for the officials to do. At present the colony of Labuan seems a farce, and ought either to be done away with or placed on an entirely different footing. The best plan would ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... race, the great dominating race whom I hate and defy. Tell them that I have battened on their blood for twenty years, that I have slain them until even I became tired of what had once been a joy, that I did this unnoticed and unsuspected in the face of every precaution which their civilisation could suggest. There is no satisfaction in revenge when your enemy does not know who has struck him. I am not sorry, therefore, to have you as a messenger. There is no need why I should tell you how this great hate became born in me. See this," and he held up his mutilated hand; ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a mighty bow; what some of his enemies would have called a long bow. But though he sometimes overshot the mark of truth, he never shot away from it, like Froude. His account of that sixteenth century in which the mediaeval civilisation ended, is not more and not less picturesque than Froude's: the difference is in the dull detail of truth. That crisis was not the foundling of a strong Tudor monarchy, for the monarchy almost immediately perished; ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... us into commercial and political difficulties. Yet I give to them—a little—it is a matter of conscience with me to identify myself with all the enterprises of the Church; it is the mainstay of social order and a prosperous civilisation. But the best forms of benevolence are the well-established, organised ones here at home, where people can see them and ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... at by small brown men in more than one forest, to say nothing of the little encounters he had had in most un-Occidental towns and cities. He had seen women in Morocco and Egypt and Persia and—But it is a waste of time to enumerate. Strange to say, he was now drifting back toward the civilisation which we are pleased to call our own, with a sense of genuine disappointment in his heart. He had found ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... have all got beautiful homes, plenty of horses, motors, even electric light on some of the stations. In fact, I know of one old squatter who can produce a butler and footmen in breeches. You can have joy rides on motors, picnics miles from civilisation, and dances with the jolliest band of girls and boys I've seen. Everything is natural, all is delightful. I love Australia. I'm awfully proud of it. And I'm proud of those boys over there and all the others who have come to help ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... good national qualities attain their apotheosis. This hero combines strength of character with justice and bravery. With great severity he examines his own conscience before proceeding to any action, however small. War he makes with all possible humanity, and only for the furtherance of civilisation. Nothing is more hated by Shakspere than a government of weak hands. From such an unfortunate cause came the Wars of the Two Roses. It seems that, in order to bring this fact home to the understanding of the people, Shakspere put the ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... the road where Hamil sat his horse was an old pump—the last indication of civilisation. He dismounted and tried it, filling his cup with clear sparkling water, neither hot nor cold, and walking through the sand offered it ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... Middle Ages; and from henceforward we must speak mainly, if not wholly (for some 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 ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... that he was altogether too indifferent to theories. On large matters he went right by the very largeness of his mind; but in small matters he suffered from the lack of any logical test and ready reckoner. Hence his comment upon the details of civilisation or reform are sometimes apt to be jerky and jarring, and even grossly inconsistent. So long as a thing was heroic enough to admire, Dickens admired it; whenever it was absurd enough to laugh at he laughed at it: so ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... had read, he could not remember the name, had covered the passage in eighty days—he would gain a clear day; and by steadily continuing to do it for thirty years, would gain one hundred and eighty days, or nearly the half of a year. It would not be much, but in course of time, as civilisation advanced, and the Euphrates Valley Railway was opened, he could improve ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... little sweetheart?" Aristarchi chuckled with delight as he stroked her hair. "I am sorry," he continued. "The fact is, I am not a Georgian like you. I have been brought up among people of civilisation, and I have scruples about killing any one. Besides, sweet dove, if we were to kill the son of one of the Council of Ten, the Council would pursue us wherever we went, for Venice is very powerful. But the Ten will not lift a hand to revenge a good-for-nothing young gamester whose slave ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... removed, inasmuch as some obscurity must be admitted to remain as to the manner in which the structure of the larva is aborted; this obscurity is likely to remain till we know more of the early history of civilisation among bees than I can find that we know at present; but I believe the difficulty was reduced to such proportions as to make it little likely to be felt in comparison with that of attributing instinct ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... that age have passed away, and with them the drunken laird and the widely tolerant wife. The advancing civilisation which has nearly extinguished this class of frailties among those who have the amplest means of indulgence in them, is, no doubt, doing for other frailties, and will come at last to the one in hand, leaving it an object of admiring and compassionate retrospect ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... to buy little articles at the rancho where we stayed. It was supposed that General Rosas had about six hundred Indian allies. The men were a tall, fine race, yet it was afterwards easy to see in the Fuegian savage the same countenance rendered hideous by cold, want of food, and less civilisation. ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... true criticism, to the history of poetry and the fine arts. This, like the so-called universal history, we generally limit (even though beyond this range there may be much that is both remarkable and worth knowing) to whatever has had a nearer or more remote influence on the present civilisation of Europe: consequently, to the works of the Greeks and Romans, and of those of the modern European nations, who first and chiefly distinguished themselves in art and literature. It is well known that, three centuries and a-half ago, the study of ancient literature received ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... evening over his evil pipe, down there in his dank chamber, that London had lived long enough, had abused its opportunities, had gone too far, in fine, with its civilisation. And so he decided to ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... have had a great effect on our literature," he said, deep in a favourite topic. "They have stripped bare the soul of man with a realism that shrivels up our civilisation and proves—Two ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... the hall. Still further, our company was to be increased, and our festive board to be graced, by the presence of Waboose and her mother. Little had we imagined, when all this was planned, that we were to have the addition of our old friend Macnab, and that glorious beam from the sun of civilisation, his sister Jessie! ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... that 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 stoutest defenders of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... issued forth to rob and murder, and his own dwelling with the hovels where the peasants and the hogs of the Shannon wallowed in filth together. He was a member of a society far inferior, indeed, in wealth and civilisation, to the society in which we live, but still one of the wealthiest and most highly civilised societies that the world had then seen: the Irish were almost as rude as the savages of Labrador. He was a freeman: the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... affairs continued until they arrived in ten degrees of north latitude and twenty degrees of east longitude, when they found themselves fairly beyond the limits of even the most rudimentary civilisation, and in a country of alternating wooded hill and grassy, well-watered plain, which had all the appearance of a very promising hunting district. The country was very thinly populated, the native villages being in some cases as much as fifty ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... miles without seeing the slightest vestige of any human inhabitants or civilisation: all appeared wild and magnificent as if just fresh from the hands of nature; and it failed not to lead the mind up to the contemplation of the Creator. It seemed utterly impossible to reconcile the idea that such ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... which men had entered her tent with the object of murdering her, Jane Hubbard had shot without making inquiries. What strange feminine weakness it was that had caused her to utter a challenge on this occasion, she could not have said. Probably it was due to the enervating effects of civilisation. She was glad now that she had done so, for, being awake and in full possession of her faculties, she perceived that the intruder, whoever he was, had ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... 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 any ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... themselves of the hats of civilisation, and tied round their heads the red handkerchiefs proper to their profession; then he gave her the wheel, and going to the cabin, came back with a black flag neatly embroidered in white with a skull and crossbones, Dorothy's work, ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... every instant they would appear close to us, and attempt to stop our progress. Had we possessed firearms, and the means of preserving them fit for service, we might easily have kept the savages at bay, or have driven them back; but now, notwithstanding all our boasted civilisation, we were completely on a level with them, and were utterly unable to defend ourselves should they choose to attack us. Uncle Paul possibly thought just as I did; but not wishing to increase our fear by showing any himself, he continued ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... A genuine civilisation following Christianity had come to many of these once degraded tribes, and now comfortable homes and large and happy family circles are to be found where not a generation ago all was dark and degraded, and the sweet ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... distinctions, which was felt to be lowering to man in his quality as a reasonable being, and to return to Nature, to simple and unsophisticated habits of life, or rather to find a way through Nature to a better civilisation, which would restore the natural values of life to their rightful place and would be compatible with truth and virtue, sincerity ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Yokohama was sufficiently Europeanised in its shops to suit the worst and wickedest taste. To-day it is still worse if you keep to the town limits. Ten steps beyond into the fields all the civilisation stops exactly as it does in another land a few thousand miles further West. The globe-trotting, millionaires anxious to spend money, with a hose on whatever caught their libertine fancies, had explained to us aboard-ship ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... demise of Constantine the Great, Greece, Rome, and Palestine had ceased to exist. Civilisation had passed Eastward, for Constantinople was the metropolis of Europe; and from the East, Rome, Spain, Gaul, and Germany were governed by satraps with various titles. It seemed as though the vitality of Europe ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... proceed with the execution of his great plan for the establishment of a dockyard ashore, and the construction of a craft sufficiently substantial and seaworthy to convey him and his companion back to the world of civilisation. ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... subject defined—A reconstruction of rural life in English-speaking communities essential to the progress of Western civilisation—A movement for a new rural civilisation to be proposed—The author's point of view derived from thirty years of Irish and American experience—The physical contrast and moral resemblances in the Irish ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... Ignatius had taken the intellectual and moral control of Catholic communities out of the failing hands of the Popes and the secular clergy. Their own hour had now struck. The rationalistic historian has seldom done justice to the services which this great Order rendered to European civilisation. The immorality of many of their maxims, their too frequent connivance at political wrong for the sake of power, their inflexible malice against opponents, and the cupidity and obstructiveness of the years ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... hear. By-and-by, when the whirligig of time has brought on another revenge, the museum itself becomes a dust-heap, and remains so till after long ages it is re-discovered, and valued as belonging to a neo-rubbish age—containing, perhaps, traces of a still older paleo-rubbish civilisation. So when people are old, indigent, and in all respects incapable, we hold them in greater and greater contempt as their poverty and impotence increase, till they reach the pitch when they are actually at the point to die, whereon they become sublime. ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... yet, how small a man is when measured by the length of his coffin! Events in Europe marshalled themselves into a formula of new problems at the beginning of 1878. The complete defeat of Turkey by the Russians left England and the United States—allies in the great causes of civilisation and Christianity—aghast. It was the most intense political movement in Europe of my lifetime. I was glad the Turkish Empire had perished, but I had no admiration then for Russia, once one of the ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... springs to the lips, is no more a threat to civilisation than French or Russian militarism. It was born, not of wars of aggression, but of wars of defence and unification. Since it was welded by blood and iron into the great human organism of the last forty years ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... anaesthetics for hospital surgical work, being compelled to use what were termed "Bulgarian Operations," that is, operations without anaesthetics. Professor Stieglitz claims that the lack of drugs and anaesthetics threw back American surgery some fifty to seventy years in civilisation. ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden |
