Francis Lieber Quotes

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.

The history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards

A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is found,—a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape, a cannibal, an eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,—a certain degree of progress from this extreme is called Civilization.

Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.

Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

History is the zoology of the human race.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

I do not conceive of any manifestation of culture, of science, of art, as purposes in themselves. I think the purpose of science and culture is man.

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops,—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

But we are more than genteel or civilized/ we are an idea in the process of being realized.

Man is born barbarous--he is ransomed from the condition of beasts only by being cultivated.

Civilization is not a burden. It is an opportunity.

There is as yet no civilized society, but only a society in the process of becoming civilized. There is as yet no civilized nation, but only nations in the process of becoming civilized. From this standpoint, we can now speak of a collective task of humankind. The task of humanity is to build a genuine civilization.

He is a man, who is to be a man, the fruit is always present in the seed.

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.

Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature.

Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

It is because nations tend towards stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.