"Civilization" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the little man. "And what do you call this? Let one of these uniformed gentleman on this side of the border hear you say that and you won't ever get any place except under the sod. This, take the Austrian word for it, is the last word in civilization. Therefore, what you mean is that you want to get ...
— The Boy Allies in Great Peril • Clair W. Hayes
... Matilda's temple of cleanliness with a horrible sense of awe. And Walter Johnson, her son by a former marriage, had—poor, weak-willed fellow!—been driven into bad company and bad habits by the wretchedness of extreme civilization. And yet he showed the hereditary trait, for all the genius which Mrs. White consecrated to the glorious work of making her house too neat to be habitable, her son Walter gave to tying exquisite knots in his colored cravats and combing his oiled locks so as to ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... plans or engraved prints, however accurately done. These temples afforded an insight into the old pagan religion better far than volumes of description. These streets, and shops, and public squares, and wall, and gates, and tombs, all gave him an insight into the departed Roman civilization that was far fresher, and more vivid, and more profound, than any that he had ever gained before. It seemed to him that one day was too small for such a place. He must come again and again, he thought. He was ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... conditions of the march, and, at the spots thus made sacred, memory never fails to halt, as in later life it makes its rounds up and down the years. Not fewer in number than the stars, which hang above them at night, are the altars of remembrance, which will forever mark the line of immigration and civilization from east to west ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... presence of 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 side of his unconscious ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... the gathering of spoil, were brave and faithful, but they were little more than savages, and woe betide the land that lay beneath their sword; while the troops on the other side represented the forces of order and civilization, and though they might be routed that evening, they held the promise of final victory. Was it worth the doing, and something of which afterwards a man could be proud, to restore King James to Whitehall, and place Scotland again in the hands of the gang of cowards and evil ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... minority, is recruited from that refuse of humanity infesting all capitals, amongst the epileptic and scrofulous rabble which, heirs of vitiated blood and, further degrading this by its misconduct, introduces into civilization the degeneracy, imbecility, and infatuations of shattered temperaments, retrograde instincts, and deformed brains.[34171] What it did with the powers of the State is narrated by three or four contemporary ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... it! 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 ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... commerce, which, at the beginning of the war, covered every sea. This is an achievement of which you may well be proud; and a grateful country will not be unmindful of it. The name of your ship has become a household word wherever civilization extends. Shall that name be tarnished by defeat? The thing is impossible! Remember that you are in the English Channel, the theatre of so much of the naval glory of our race, and that the eyes of all Europe are at this moment upon you. The flag that floats over you is that of ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... of the terrible events passing there. Was ever an arrival more providential? I greatly doubt it; for had she not appeared in this miraculous fashion, who knows what would have come to the handful of white men left in that last outpost of civilization? ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... face in my pillow and sob; but then I look up and pray for faith. I say we are only at the beginning of civilization, we can see but the first gleams of a social conscience; but it will come—it must come! Am I to believe that mankind will always submit to toil and pant to make lace at a thousand dollars a meter to cover the pride-swollen carcase of ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... sensibility; while a highly educated perfection is requisite for the actor who, in a brilliant and polished representation of the follies of society, produces by fine and delicate and powerful delineations the picture of the vices and ridicules of a highly artificial civilization. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... no doubt. It appears strange to find the outcasts of the States elected to that sort of notice over here—as though the old world, tired of civilization and culture, turned for distraction ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... dignity, of prudent discretion and poverty of spirit, which last, in the European mode of viewing things, approached to cowardice, formed the leading traits of the character of Alexius Comnenus, at a period when the fate of Greece, and all that was left in that country of art and civilization, was trembling in the balance, and likely to be saved or lost, according to the abilities of the Emperor for playing the very difficult game which ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... unpaid representative Commission to investigate animal vivisection, protecting it from abuses, and allowing it to be properly pursued within safeguards of necessity and mercy.... The regulation of vivisection is not the abolition of it, but the civilization of it. Such of the medical profession as are a Trade Union on a large scale, as afraid of one another as they are deaf to the voices of humanity and to public opinion, should be forced by the State to courses that should long ago have been volunteered by themselves. The beginning ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... Russia, where the ancient epic songs of the Elder Heroes and the Kieff Cycle originated, the memory of them has died out, owing to the devastation of southern Russia by the Tatars in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the decay of its civilization under Lithuanian sway in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the sixteenth century the population of southern Russia reorganized itself in the forms of kazak communes, and fabricated for itself a fresh ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... which flourish in unregarded luxuriance in the rich meadows of peace, receive unwonted admiration when we discern them in war, like violets shedding their perfume on the perilous edges of the precipice, beyond the smiling borders of civilization. God be praised for all the examples of magnanimous virtue which he has vouchsafed to mankind! God be praised that the Roman emperor, about to start on a distant expedition of war, encompassed by squadrons of cavalry and by golden eagles which moved in the ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... down a step here, and remind you of a yet graver peril that threatens. There is serious danger of a heathenized Christianity dominating our boasted Christian civilization and Christian lands. And in time that would be a serious menace ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... Joiner's Shop, the Printing Office, the Banana and Yam House, the Cook House, etc.; all very humble indeed, but all standing sturdily up there among the orange-trees, and preaching the Gospel of a higher civilization and of a better life for Aniwa. The little road leading to each door was laid with the white coral broken small. The fence around all shone fresh and clean with new paint. Order and taste were seen to be laws in the white man's New Life; and ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... view, and in the view of those for whom this book is intended, a woman is a rare variety of the human race, and her principal characteristics are due to the special care men have bestowed upon its cultivation,—thanks to the power of money and the moral fervor of civilization! She is generally recognized by the whiteness, the fineness and softness of her skin. Her taste inclines to the most spotless cleanliness. Her fingers shrink from encountering anything but objects which are soft, yielding and scented. Like the ermine she sometimes dies for ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... here, where I have spent many happy months in solitude, wrapped up in my studies of the people of the cliffs, who spent their lives in this very place, and who have left many traces of their customs behind. My work is almost finished, and in another week I expected leaving here for civilization, with a masterly book on the subject that has mystified ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson
... painfully, I know him." (It seemed to Napoleon that the chief import of what was taking place lay in the personal struggle between himself and Alexander.) "From the height of the Kremlin—yes, there is the Kremlin, yes—I will give them just laws; I will teach them the meaning of true civilization, I will make generations of boyars remember their conqueror with love. I will tell the deputation that I did not, and do not, desire war, that I have waged war only against the false policy of their court; that I love and respect Alexander and that in Moscow I will accept terms ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... had joined in the merry dance with the Otaheitian, had eaten fruits with the Hottentots, shared the coarse morsel of the Greenlander, been twice chased by the Patagonians—but what shall we say?—he was imprisoned, for the olive tints of his color, in a land where not only civilization rules in its brightest conquests, but chivalry and honor sound its fame within the lanes, streets, and court-yards. Echo asks, Where—where? We will tell the reader. That flag which had waved over him so long and in so many of his wayfarings—that ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... landing place, there would be genuine trouble. Let them move aggressively and there would be panic and disorder and pure catastrophe, with self-exiled city dwellers desperate from hunger because they were away from market centers. It looked as if a dozen or two monsters could wreck a civilization without the need to kill one single ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... has important bearing upon the productiveness of the observer is the degree of isolation from civilization and from other scientific work. No scientist can long work effectively, even in a reasonably healthy and stimulating climate, if entirely cut off from similar interests and activities. It is therefore desirable, if at all possible, to discover a location in the midst of civilization and with ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... is so. For nearly two centuries we stood still, because there were no means of locomotion—which is another word for progress and civilization. But in less than fifty years after the first railroad was built we had become a ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... praised if what he says be true! He would have individuality released; which is precisely what we do not want. Americans are not individuals, and they are not free; but they think they are. Therefore is America, in these troublous times, an island in chaos, where civilization, like Custer, will make ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... state of the insane in his county as "one of the most horrifying documents he had ever seen."[233] It was "a state of things which they could not before have believed to prevail in any civilized country, much less in this country, which laid peculiar claims to civilization, and boasted of its religious and humane principles."[234] "Distressing as were the cases which he had mentioned, there were others ten times worse remaining behind—so horrible, indeed, that he durst not venture ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... 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 ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... of the constitutional scheme to deal with changing conditions. For example, when the Constitution was adopted, railroads, the most powerful economic force in our present civilization, were unknown. Nevertheless, the Constitution contains adequate provision for dealing with the railroads. They are instruments of interstate commerce and may be controlled by the Federal Government under the express grant of power to regulate ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson
... concessions would set all other dissenters in motion—an issue which has never fairly been met by the friends to concession; and deeming the Church Establishment not only a fundamental part of our constitution, but one of the greatest upholders and propagators of civilization in our own country, and, lastly, the most effectual and main support of religious Toleration, I cannot but look with jealousy upon measures which must reduce her relative influence, unless they be accompanied with arrangements more adequate than any yet ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... came readily to him. They were the most wholesome children he had ever known. Hare wondered about it, and decided it was not so much Mormon teaching as isolation from the world. These children had never been out of their cliff-walled home, and civilization was for them as if it were not. He told them stories, and after school hours they would race to him and climb on his bed, ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... to barbarism, may start from where the best of their day left off. We do for manners and the arts in general what the Moors did for learning when the wild hordes came down. There were capital chaps among the barbarians,' he smiled, 'I haven't a doubt! But it was the men who held fast to civilization's clue, they were the people who mattered. We matter. We hold the clue.' He was recovering his spirits. 'Your friends want to open the gates still wider to the Huns. You ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... nursing than three or four children would cost them might not be very large if the advance in social organization and conscience indicated by such payments involved also the opening up of other means of livelihood to women. And it must be remembered that urban civilization itself, insofar as it is a method of evolution (and when it is not this, it is simply a nuisance), is a sterilizing process as far as numbers go. It is harder to keep up the supply of elephants than of sparrows and rabbits; and for the same reason ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... necessarily furnish the most of the content of the lessons. But the Committee urge that enough other matter, of an introductory character, be included to teach boys and girls of from twelve to fourteen years of age that our civilization had its beginnings far back in the history of the Old World. Such introductory study will enable them to think of our country in its true historical setting. The Committee recommend that about two-thirds of one year's work be devoted ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... their goods, including women and other live stock. Then it was found more profitable to spare the conquered warrior's life and set him to do the victor's disagreeable work; more profitable, and incidentally more merciful. Civilization advanced; wars became less general; but in the established social order that grew up there was a definite place for a great class of slaves. It was part of Nature's early law, the strong raising themselves upon the weak. Morality and religion by degrees established certain ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... China stood as a leading civilization, outpacing the rest of the world in the arts and sciences, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the country was beset by civil unrest, major famines, military defeats, and foreign occupation. After World War II, the Communists ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... perhaps from disgust. And well it is that they stand aside, but maybe they will cease one day to do so and will form a firm wall confronting the hurrying apparition and will check the frenzied rush of our lawlessness, for the sake of their own safety, enlightenment and civilization. Already we have heard voices of alarm from Europe, they already begin to sound. Do not tempt them! Do not heap up their growing hatred by a sentence justifying the murder of a father ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... inculcate a friendly and forbearing spirit towards them, and to protect them from fraud and injustice. [Footnote: The American government has been indefatigable in its exertions to ameliorate the situation of the Indians, and to introduce among them the arts of civilization and civil and religious knowledge. To protect them from the frauds of the white traders, no purchase of land from them by individuals is permitted; nor is any person allowed to receive lands from them as a present, without the express sanction of government. These precautions ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... criticism naturally changes with local conditions in different parts of a country extended like our own, so that it is one of the most convenient gauges of the partial movements in the direction of civilization. It is satisfactory to add, that the views assailed have also been unflinchingly defended by unsought champions, among the ablest of whom it is pleasant to mention, at this moment of political alienation, the Editor of the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... it may be a power for good is evident to all. It enables men to benefit their fellow-creatures; it gives a man independence; it procures him comforts he could not otherwise have obtained. It is, as it has well been termed, "the lever by which the race has been lifted from barbarism to civilization. So long as the race could do nothing but barely live, man was little more than an animal who hunted and fought for his prey. When the race began to think and plan and save for tomorrow, it specially began to be human. There is not ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... as he was and had been for centuries when we found him eleven short years ago, will have become extinct. It has appeared to me that no better means could be chosen of preserving a record of a curious and fast disappearing civilization than the translation of some of the most interesting national legends and histories, together with other specimens of literature bearing upon the same subject. Thus the Japanese may tell their own tale, their translator only adding ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... 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
... morality. When conditions render possible the fulfilment of every human desire, the race exhausts its vitality in a surfeitment of caprice. The animal instincts predominate, and the potential vigor of the people is exhausted in contributing to its own amusement. Each succeeding civilization has reached this epochal period, and has fallen, victim of the rapacity of stronger and younger invading antagonists, themselves to succumb to the same ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... for the instruction and edification of the whole world, as He had never done in any individual, since the great Apostle of the Gentiles. At the word of St. Francis a revival of primitive Christianity sprang into existence at a time when all civilization seemed unhinged on account of the almost universal decay in morals. He taught men afresh that the commands of Jesus Christ could be literally obeyed and that the Sermon on the Mount was as applicable to the men of the middle and ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... brook between them, both sides are free to hate cordially, without offending against the social conventions that require two brothers to wear a mask if the older will succeed to the entail, and the other to the fortune of a younger son. The whole civilization of Europe turns upon the principle of hereditary succession as upon a pivot; it would be madness to subvert the principle; but could we not, in an age that prides itself upon its mechanical inventions, perfect this essential ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... cherry trees, flanked by peach and pear. Fruit trees, although so common and so lavish of their blessings in this climate, are often gathered about American country-houses, instead of being confined to gardens devoted to the purpose, as in Europe; a habit which pleasantly reminds us that civilization has made a recent conquest over the wilderness in this new world, and that our forefathers, only a few generations back, preferred the trees of the orchard to those of the forest, even for ornament. Fruit trees are indeed beautiful objects when gay with the blossoms of ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... of the effect of alcohol on the human body would not be complete without calling attention to the extraordinary fact that those peoples to whom we owe our modern civilization have from time immemorial, most of all others, consumed the greatest amount of alcohol. Explain it as we may, the fact remains that the greatest achievements of the world were brought about by a society in which a very large proportion of its members were in the habit of more or less constantly ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... of the chief differences between wolves, wild dogs, and domestic dogs. The ears of the wild animals are always pricked, the lop or drooping ear being essentially a mark of civilization; with very rare exceptions, their tails hang more or less and are bushy, the honest cock of the tail so characteristic of a respectable dog, being wanting. This is certainly the rule; but, curious enough, the Zoological Gardens contain at the present moment, a Portuguese female wolf which ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... came back on time and sober; thus avouching that the precepts of the Prophet concerning rum were obeyed in Johanna. Exemplary in this, it would be difficult to say, otherwise, on what precise rung of the ladder stretching from barbarism to civilization these people stood. In manner towards us they were pleasant and smiling; not averse to the arts of diplomacy, but perhaps a little transparent in their approaches to a desired object. I went on shore one Friday, their Sunday, which was inadvertent on my part, for their religious duties interfered ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... we," Arthur corrected with a grim smile. "I don't know. Way back before the discovery of America, though. You can see in everything in the village that there isn't a trace of European civilization. I suspect that we are several thousand years back. I can't tell, of course, but this pottery makes me ...
— The Runaway Skyscraper • Murray Leinster
... of civilization the use of iron has reached a very wide extension, and in a great number of cases iron is used where wood or stone was formerly used. It is certainly an important question how this metal can be protected under all circumstances against ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... became a master of the newly conquered element. Mac's mind was not limited by science, his soul was not dwarfed by religious prejudice, he held no political position, and he had no personal military ambition. He fought to defeat a threat to the civilization he believed in, to preserve a form of government that his ancestors had bled and died for, and to secure a future for his tiny son free from the hell of war. Mac, like every other man who had the courage ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... an intensely practical age; in many respects, it is utilitarian. "The survival of the fittest," is the almost universal creed of the age. The American civilization is distinctly Anglo-Saxon. Whatever does not attain to that standard is out of harmony with real conditions. The Negro is here to stay. Two radically different civilizations cannot thrive in one country at the same time. One advances, the other ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... the Charleston light, "the pale, star-like beacon, set by the guardian civilization on the edges of the great deep." Lying on the shore he watched "the swarthy beauty, Night, enveloped in dark mantle, passing with all her train of starry servitors; even as some queenly mourner, followed by legions of gay and brilliant courtiers, glides slowly and mournfully in sad state ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... between men and women relieves the brain through the body; the mind and memory have scant reason, physical or mental, to dwell fondly upon visions amatory and venereal, to live in a "rustle of (imaginary) copulation." On the other hand the utterly artificial life of civilization, which debauches even the monkeys in "the Zoo," and which expands the period proper for the reproductory process from the vernal season into the whole twelvemonth, leaves to the many, whose lot is celibacy, no bodily want save one and that in a host of cases either unattainable or procurable ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... as it stands. In the first place, you cannot but admit that Mr. Baker and the men associated with him have done great things for this country. When they came into it, it was an undeveloped wilderness, supplying nothing of value to civilization, and supporting only a scattered and pastoral people. The valley towns went about their business on horse cars; they either paid practically a prohibitive price for electricity and gas, or used oil and candles; they drank well water and ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... by mouth was a subject of repeated forebodings and warnings. Perhaps these pages may in some way explain a phenomenon almost unexampled in history,—that twenty millions of people, brave, highly intelligent, and mastering all the wealth of modern civilization, were, if not virtually overpowered, at least so long kept at bay by about five millions ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... both on the Royalist and the Parliamentary sides. It was to grow into that high type of cultivated English nature, in the present and the last century, common both to its monarchical and its democratic embodiments, than which, with all its faults and defects, our western civilization has ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... violet-crowned city of Athens is succeeded by the island of Corfu, the cradle of the literary renaissance of Modern Hellenism, which again fades before the vision of Egypt, whence the earliest lights of civilization shone upon the land of the Greeks. Christianity in its extreme form of asceticism is brought forth from one of its strong citadels, Mt. Athos, the holy mountain of Greece, and a contrast is made between the "gleaming beauties of the world" and the utter absorption of ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... scarcely necessary to remark that everything which civilization most cherishes has been the direct result of that spirit of inquiry and of those inductive processes of reasoning which Mrs. Eddy despises. If the morality of the civilized world is higher to-day than it ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... fields and places where the forests have been interrupted by civilization and other causes are blackberry, huckleberry, raspberry, sumac, and their usual neighbors, with the azalia, laurel, and rhododendron on the slopes and in the shade ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... evils of disunion or by long and exhausting war springing from the only great element of national discord among us. While it can not be foreseen exactly how much one huge example of secession, breeding lesser ones indefinitely, would retard population, civilization, and prosperity, no one can doubt that the extent of it would be ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... the barons—is more interesting than all the modern songs which nicely depict soldiers' moods. Language itself was fighting for recognition, as well as industrial and social rights. The verses mark successive steps of a people into consciousness and civilization. Some of this battle-poetry is worth preserving; a few camp-rhymes, also, were famous enough in their day to justify translating. Here are some relics, of pattern more or less antique, picked up from that field of Europe where so many centuries ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... need this advice you know, but I think that the old philosopher never made a wiser observation. I am convinced that civilization itself depends largely on the respect that men feel ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... over my Guizot for instance, that I had marked the passages which contained matters not creditable to the clergy, and passed unnoticed those portions of the work which set forth the services which the Church and Christianity had rendered to civilization. I also remembered how eagerly I had swallowed the unfair representations and fallacious reasonings of Buckle with regard to Christianity and skepticism, and how impatiently I had hurried over what reviewers friendly to Christianity ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... the manufacture of pottery or earthenware utensils may be classed as a conspicuous feature of their peculiar civilization at the present time, are situated geographically as follows: San Juan, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Cochiti, Santo Domingo, San Felipe, Sandia, and Isleta, located on the Rio Grande; Pojake, Tesuke, Nambe, Jamez, Zia or Silla, Santa ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... seas and oceans, whose 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 ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... Sicilians built as they were directed. Their arts and their civilization were superior to those of their masters, and the Normans were apparently willing to make use of this superiority, and merely adapted the forms of decoration and methods of construction which they found here in use to their own needs and purposes. The polychromatic ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 03, March 1895 - The Cloister at Monreale, Near Palermo, Sicily • Various
... was the advancement of the few and the slavery of the many—in Greece 30,000 freemen and 300,000 slaves—and it passed away. True civilization must be measured by the progress, not of a class or nation, but of all men. God admits none to advance alone. Individuals in advance become martyrs—nations in advance the prey of the barbarian. Only as one family of man can we progress. But man must exist as an animal before he can exist ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... was really caused by the continual tension of his mind; he went over the history of Cephalic Oils and the Paste of Sultans, lucifer matches and portable gas, jointed sockets for hydrostatic lamps,—in short, all the infinitely little inventions of material civilization which pay so well. He bore Bixiou's jests as a busy man bears the buzzing of an insect; he was not even annoyed by them. In spite of his cleverness, Bixiou never perceived the profound contempt which Minard felt for him. Minard never dreamed ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... to American civilization was that of virgin wilderness inhabited by animals and roamed over by Indians. As remnants of that time there are found some animals, now driven into the swamps and rocks, and a ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... neither can we always master our servant, the horse, but we have put a bridle on the wildest natural agencies. The mob of elemental forces is as noisy and turbulent as ever, but the standing army of civilization keeps it well under, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... kinds of houses he built, what tools he made, and how he formed a government under which to live. So we learn of the activities of men in the past and what they have passed on to us. In this way we may become acquainted with the different stages in the process which we call civilization. ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... engaged to Harmon, and she threw him over for 'Boots' Lansing. Then I came along—Boots behaved like a thoroughbred—that is all there is to it—inexperience, romance, trouble—a quick beginning, a quick parting, and two more fools to give the lie to civilization, and justify the West Pointers in their opinions ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... rather in awe of them at first, being aware of my own magnificent limitations; but, for the most part, these charming new friends of mine, especially the wealthier members of the set I was thrown with, seemed guilelessly ignorant in respect of the interesting period of civilization in which they happened to live—almost as ignorant as I was and as most "nice people" ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... exclaimed. "I hope you will forgive my manners, but I've lived and worked here alone in the desert so long that I had forgotten the niceties of civilization." ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... action with an extraordinary, but none the less bitter, ignorance of the fact that he was employing the only practical means of carrying out the mission which, in addition to his administrative duties, had been practically imposed on him as the representative of civilization. These good but misinformed persons must have believed that the Egyptian garrison in the Soudan was efficient, that communications were easy, and the climate not unpleasant, and that Gordon, supported by zealous lieutenants, had only to hold up his hand or pass a resolution, ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... middle age, with close-cropped gray beard, clad in soft flannels, the trousers bottoms turned up in New York fashion for negligee business suits for that spring. To the simple interior of a western ranch house he brought the atmosphere of complex civilization as a thing ineradicably bred into his being. It was evident, too, that he had been used to having his arrival in any room a moment of importance which summoned the rapt attention of everybody, whether nurses, fellow physicians, or the members of the patient's family. But this ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... at once suggest itself, and that of Herbert Spencer; the former, in his great work on the "Early History of Mankind and of Civilization," and other writings, the latter, in the first volume of his "Sociology," and in his earlier works, have respectively established the doctrine of the universal origin of myths on the basis of ethnography, on the psychological examination of the primary facts of the intelligence, and on ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... northward, guided through the maze of abandoned roads by the frozen ruts of Moncrossen's tote wagons, and it was long after dark when he camped in the northernmost of the old shacks with civilization, as represented by Hilarity's deserted buildings and the jug-tilting, barrel-head conclave of Hod Burrage's store, forty miles ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... the body, in heaven, in the spirit. The soul had power to reunite itself to the body at will. We find in the texts mention of Egyptian political institutions at the remotest period, the existence of a high type of civilization. Agriculture was highly developed. All the domestic animals, with the exception of the horse and camel, are introduced, the arts of cooking, of dressing and of personal adornment, all ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... be thought, because I am constrained to describe the overthrow of civilization, that I desire it. The prophet is not responsible for the event he foretells. He may contemplate it with profoundest sorrow. Christ wept over ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... them as many of those who are already wise in 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 he is, that the hearts of the good may be moved at his destitute ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... left you," answered Nickols, as we all ascended the steps and stood in a group before the door. "I got my books full of sketches of bits of treasures that the war might destroy, and beat it back to civilization. Did the Madonna of the Red Cross you had in tow come across as sentimentally as was threatened?" Nickols' voice was as cordial as the Reverend Goodloe's, but something in me made me resent the question and ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... heard the tinkle of the bells of the flocks and herds grazing among the trees. We have seen the moon rise and the stars twinkle upon this forest scene; and the remembrance has more than once marred the pleasure of journeyings in the midst of civilization and the refinements ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... opposite on the fore-shore of the river is the Egyptian obelisk, one of the trio of which another is in the Place de la Concord at Paris, and the other in Central Park, New York. Here it was transferred to a new environment, and since the seventies this pictured monolith of a former civilization has stood amid its uncontemporary surroundings, battered more sorely by thirty years of London's wind and weather than by its ages of ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... beneficial to the people, so long as they conform to the rules of the military administration, order and justice. This is not a war of devastation and dissolution, but one to give all within the control of the military and naval forces the advantages and blessings of enlightened civilization." ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... the perfidies, the injustices, and the oppressions of all sorts, and "incalculable disorders" which arise in the social body. In this way only shall we discover and acquire the means of obtaining the enjoyment of the advantages which we have a right to expect from our state of civilization. The author endeavors to state what science can and should render to society. He dwells on the sources from which man has drawn the knowledge which he possesses, and from which he can obtain many others—sources the totality of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... what it all means? I am a fugitive, a hunted man; never again can I venture within French civilization. I must live among savages. No, no, Adele, the sacrifice is too great. I ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... brave, self-reliant men and women who sought the broad acres of the west, and builded their homes upon the "edge of civilization." From that time began the work of progress and cultivation. Towns, villages and cities sprang up as if under the wand of the magician. Fifty years ago, a small trading post, with its general store, its hand grist-mill, rude blacksmith-shop and the fort. To-day, a busy active ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... are said to treat their slaves kindly, and this also may be said of native masters; the reason is, master and slave partake of the general indolence, but the lot of the slave does not improve with the general progress in civilization. While no great disparity of rank exists, his energies are little tasked, but when society advances, wants multiply; and to supply these the slave's lot grows harder. The distance between master and man increases ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... spring, had settled himself in the old home at Newport, adding to his old furniture only his books, which he had been all winter collecting, and the primitive inconveniences of his own room, which his rough Western life had rendered indispensable to him. His study presented a singular mixture of civilization and barbarism, and its very peculiarities made it a delight to Alice and me. There were a few rare engravings on the walls, hung between enormous antlers which supported rough-looking rifles and uncouth hunting-shirts,—cases of elegantly bound and valuable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... damned far from the center of things," the young man replied, defensively assuming the burden of all civilization, "we wouldn't abandon it. After all, we hate leaving the world on which we originated. But it's a long haul to Alpha Centauri—you know that—and a tremendously expensive one. Keeping up this place solely out of sentiment would be sheer waste—the people would never ...
— The Most Sentimental Man • Evelyn E. Smith
... "Water-Throat." Silver-works. Volcano of Jorullo. Cascade of Regla. "Eyes of Water." Fires. The Hill of Knives. Obsidian implements. Obsidian mines. The Stone-age. The loadstone-mountain of Mexico. Unequal Civilization of the Aztecs. Silver and commerce of Mexico. Effect of Protection-duties. Silver mines. ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... revolutionists. He would see no abuses in the past, now that it had fallen, or anything but the ruin of society in the future. He preached a crusade against men whom he regarded as the foes of religion and civilization, and called on the armies of Europe to put down a Revolution whose principles threatened every state ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... may be briefly told. He took for bride the princess Tatara, the daughter of one of his chiefs, and the most beautiful woman in all the land. The rest of his life was spent in strengthening his rule and extending the arts of civilization throughout his realm. Finally he died, one hundred and thirty-seven years old, as the Kojiki states, leaving three children, one of whom he had chosen as the heir ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... support of half the people of the town. The dance-house and the gambling-saloon, flaunting their gaudy attractions, own him for the hour their king. His Midas touch is all-powerful. I must confess, with all my admiration for his character, that his tastes are low. I know that the civilization of the East would bore him immeasurably, and that he considers Colt, with his revolvers, a broader philanthropist than Raikes with his Sunday schools. But he is frank and open, generous and confiding, honorable and honest, scorning anything mean and cowardly. Mention to him, in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... no man could tell; he was a fresh-faced young Frenchman with much knowledge of medicine and many theories, and a reticence un-French. From the Indians he learned to use strange herbs that healed almost magically the ills of man; from the rough out-croppings of civilization he learned to swallow vile whiskey in great gulps, and to ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... regarded as unlimited. We see no possible reason why Aden should not, in the course of a few years, be made the capital of a great Arabian colony. Conquest must not be the means, but purchase might not be difficult; and civilization and Christianity might be spread together through immense territories, formed in the bounty of nature, and only waiting to be filled with a free and vigorous population. It is only the centre and north of Arabia that is desert. The coast, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... is usually only the male part of the population which wears the handsome clothes, just as the Indian braves wear the gaudiest paint and the showiest feathers. It is not till we get to the higher stages of civilization that ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... the two brothers he took the sentimentalist for his hero, but made him at the same time a man of action, a man of heroic mould and a self-helper. The logic of Rousseau finds in Karl Moor a practical interpreter. What the Frenchman had preached concerning the infamies of civilization, the badness of society and politics, the reign of injustice and unreason, the petty squabbles of the learned, the necessity of a return to nature,—all this seethes in the blood of Moor, but he ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... was stayed whenever military success was checked. The Faith was meant for Arabia and not for the world, hence it is constitutionally incapable of change or development. The degradation of woman hinders the growth of freedom and civilization under it. ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... more advanced civilization, it ought to be possible for the oil and menthol to be made in this country at less price than the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... propitious for a discoverer. The opinion of D'Alembert that the steps of Civilization were to be taken in the middle of each century, was to be confirmed ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... John Temple's railroads straight through from somewhere or other in Dakota to Catskill Landing, and a funny sight he must have been in his flannel shirt and slouch hat, sprawling his lanky limbs from the platforms of observation cars, drawling out his pithy observations about the civilization which he had ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... dying early, to a Christian immortality; launching our thunders upon the bold, softening the hearts of the errant, mingling with our unbending creed the more pliable ethics of worldly graces, and, in a word, walking like Saint John on the savage border of civilization, to thrill the brutal and unlettered with the tidings of one just day to come—our itinerant lives drift on till the marble slab in the meeting-house wall writes the ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... 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 men went ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... Isaac's "International" organization as Susan's dabs of speech shaped it out. It was indeed what we all of us see everywhere about us, the work of the base energetic mind, raw and untrained, in possession of the keen instruments of civilization, the peasant mind allied and blended with the Ghetto mind, grasping and acquisitive, clever as a Norman peasant or a Jew pedlar is clever, and beyond that outrageously stupid and ugly. It was a new view and yet the old familiar view of her husband, but now she saw him not as little eager ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... bards, or gleemen, who could compose or recite in verse, ritual, laws, and heroic ballads. During the four hundred years of Roman occupation, the Celts in England became somewhat Romanized, but the Irish, and their near relatives the Scots, were less influenced by Latin civilization. It is therefore in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales that the oldest traces of Celtic literature are found, for the bards there retained their authority and acted as judges after Christianity had been introduced, and as late as the sixth century. Although St. Patrick is reported to have forbidden ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... circumstances, all callings; whether you shall go to serve your country and your family, in trade or agriculture, at home; or whether you shall go forth, as many of you will, as soldiers, colonists, or merchants, to carry English speech and English civilization to the ends of ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... I may call his underground life. And as I sat, evening after evening, facing him at dinner, a curiosity in that direction would naturally arise in my mind. I am a quiet and peaceable product of civilization, and know no passion other than the passion for collecting things which are rare, and must remain exquisite even if approaching to the monstrous. Some Chinese bronzes are monstrously precious. And here (out of my friend's collection), here I had before me a kind of rare ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... been adopted as just and necessary by practically the entire civilized world. We do not believe that the interpretation of the Court is correct. It is, in our opinion, in conflict alike with the progress of civilization, the spirit of democracy, the principles of social justice, and the analogies and tendencies of law. And we believe that this unconscious attempt to fasten upon the workingman an unjust and intolerable burden from which all other civilized nations, with ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... Civilization and Humanity, the man of smaller vision had called out to him as passwords to safety. Simplicity and Love, he now discovered, were the truer clues. His big friend in silence taught him. ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... brought by father Fray Martin de Rada, and a thing of great importance and value in those times—namely, a description of the great kingdom of China, its provinces, its boundaries, its religion, its wealth, its civilization, its amusements, and everything that human curiosity is desirous of knowing, of which until then there was no account. This was the account caused to be printed by father Fray Jeronimo Roman, of our order, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... Royal, as a recognition of his indefatigable labours in Astronomy, and of his eminent services in the advancement of practical science, whereby he has so materially benefited the cause of Commerce and Civilization. ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... in your view, Captain Passford, though probably he is of more service to the Confederate government, as your father is to our own, than a score of sailors or soldiers; but modern civilization does not hold civilians as prisoners of war. Besides, he is doing so much to provide our vessels with prizes in the matter of cotton ships, that it would be a pity to take him out of his sphere of usefulness to us," added the commodore ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... expert was slightly flushed. "There is another thing," he said. "If we go back in time and colonize the land we find there, what would happen when that—well, let's call it retroactive—when that retroactive civilization reaches the beginning of our historic period? What will result from that cultural collision? Will our history change? Is what has happened ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... some filtration of sound ideas, prevented the application of this theory in its nakedness and rigour to the American Colonies of England. In Ireland we had not even the title of founders to allege. Nay, we were, in point of indigenous civilization, the junior people. But the maritime severance, sufficient to prevent accurate and familiar knowledge, was not enough to bar the effective exercise of overmastering power. And power was exercised, at first from without, to support the Pale, to enlarge ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... the continuity of effort and aspiration. Potentially every man is an artist. Between the artist, so-called, and the ordinary man there is no gulf fixed which cannot be passed. Such are the terms of our mechanical civilization to-day that art has become specialized and the practice of it is limited to a few; in consequence artists have become a kind of class. But essentially the possibilities of art lie within the scope of any ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... known among them, and I can aver that even Lord Dalhousie scarcely could succeed in stirring up a momentary interest for the dispersed aborigines. That excellent nobleman devoted himself very warmly to the work of attempting their civilization; and told me that if a few would join him heartily and zealously in the effort, he should succeed; but that, between, lukewarmness on the one side and suspicion on the other, he found himself completely baffled. It was not to be wondered ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... far as we know) has charged that the lions, or the tigers, the bears, the orcas, the eagles or the owls have ever obliterated a species during historic times. It was the swine of civilization, transplanted by human agencies, that exterminated the dodo on the Island of Mauritius; and it was men, not birds of prey, who swept off the earth the great auk, the passenger pigeon and a dozen ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... the people of Butung or boeton, a large island off the southeastern peninsula of Celebes; their state of civilization is similar to that of the Macassar and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... at the time when she began to display her battleships, cannon, and her accomplished method of drilling her soldiers. They were mocking themselves and did not know how. They talk of culture and civilization and their criterion thereof is the development of the technique of murder. Again, Japan a modern state. She can take her place in the ranks of other civilized countries. Rejoice! and then learn that victorious Japan is on the threshold of a famine. Nearly a million people, it is laconically ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... to do with it. They just fling it away, in a drunken frenzy. And down below are the poor, who slave to make civilization possible. Such lives as they have to live—I can't ever get the thought out of my mind, not in any happiest moment! I feel as if I were a man who had escaped from a beleaguered city, and it all depended upon me to carry the tidings and bring relief. I'm their one hope, and if I fail them I'm a ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... plate-glass windows of the modern shops, the square dogmatic church towers and the pointed insinuating spires—all seemed to listen in surprise to this being who was not content to let another suffer for her. For civilization as it now stands is based solely on this one thing—vicarious suffering. From the central doctrine of its chief creed to the system of its trade; from the vivisection-table to the consumptive genius dying so that crowds of fat ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... closer relations were formed with London and New York financial interests; mushroom millionaires, country clubs, city slums, suburban subdivisions, land booms, grafting aldermen, and all the apparatus of an advanced civilization grew apace. A new self-confidence became the dominant note alike of private business ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... For civilization perfected Is fully developed Christianity. "Measure the frontier," shall it be said, "Count the ships," in national vanity? —Count the ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... in Richmond the next day, Sunday! She was on her way back to meet him! Well, what difference did it make, anyhow? We had been thrown together by the merest chance. In an hour or two at the most we would be back in civilization and she would recall me, if she remembered me at all, as an unshaven creature in a red cravat and tan shoes, with a soiled Pullman sheet tied around my neck. ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... course, is more than words. It is a body of literature, it is a method of thinking, it is a definition of emotions, it is the exponent and the symbol of a civilization. You cannot adopt English without adapting yourself in some measure to the English, or the Anglo-American tradition. You cannot adopt English political words, English literary words, English religious words, the terms of sport or ethics, without in some measure remaking ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... wilderness of God and made part of the wildness of man, hard men of tongue, of hand, of nature, hard drinkers, hard fighters. Gunmen, to the last man of them, who live with a gun always, by a gun often enough, who are dropping fast before the onrush of the civilization for which they themselves have made the way, but who will daily walk over their graves until the glimmer of steel rails runs into the last of the far places, until there be no longer wide, unfenced miles where cattle run free and rugged mountain sides into ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... iron-bearing planet upon which you can effect a landing, and it is upon that infinitesimal chance that some of us are staking a portion of our wealth. We expect no return whatever, but if you should by some miracle happen to find stores of iron somewhere in space, what then? Deep seas being made shallow, civilization extending itself over the globe, science advancing by leaps and bounds, Nevia becoming populated as she should be peopled—that, my friend, is a chance well ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... a prophetic exhibition of the pre-Adamic scenes and events by vision seems to be the one best suited for the opening chapters of a revelation vouchsafed for the accomplishment of moral, not scientific purposes, and at once destined to be contemporary with every stage of civilization, and to address itself to minds of every various calibre, and every ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... things, because the world they live in is all built up on ancient foundations of great festering lies. The lies are carefully coated over and disinfected as much as possible and quite hidden out of sight, but everybody knows they are there—everybody knows the quaking foundations they tread upon. Civilization means universal civility, I suppose, Joan; and to be civil to everybody argues a great power of telling lies. People call it tact. But I don't like polite society myself, because my nose is sensitive and I smell the stinking basis ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts |
