Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes

No community ever did or ever can emerge unassisted by external helps from a state of utter barbarism into anything that can be called civilization

The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

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.

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.

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

The rise of man from the animal to the human level was prolonged by the necessity of rising from a state of barbarism and violence to one of order and peace.

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

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

In a country which two hundred years ago was peopled only by savages and whose government has ... been no other than republican, it is really wonderful that there should be any polite authors at all in any line ...

Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.

As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere taboos.

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?

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

Civilization is only savagery silver-gilt.

I have thought it a sufficient definition of civilization to say, it is the influence of good women.

Before language, cavemen simply grunted, and then they used the club. Communication changed that. It's the mechanism that created civilization and prevents its own destruction.

We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.

Arts are a luxury, proof that a civilization has risen above 'politics and war.'

The longer a region is in contact with modern civilization, the higher the degree to which the society in the region is civilized.

It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.