Arthur Keith 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 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.

The progress made in refinement of manners and morals seems to have gone on simultaneously with the improvement in arts, manufactures and commerce. It moved slowly at first, but has been constantly increasing in velocity…. we are a much better people than we were then, better instructed, more sincere and kind-hearted, less gross and brutal, and have fewer of the concomitant vices of a less civilized state.

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.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled law.

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.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

… the biography of mankind

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

Men in masses do not forget the main gains of their civilization, and that, in spite of deteriorations, their tendency is upward.

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigor of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.

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

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

History is not merely a procession of people in fancy dress fighting wars. It is crucially the story of man's evolution from grunting cave dweller to serious thinker, from cruelly retributive law to merciful law, from casual barbarism to care and compassion.

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.

Beneficience removes evils, introduces the practice of virtue, and adds to general welfare and civilization.

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

We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.

A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture and civilization.

The pure and benign light of revelation has had a meliorating influence on mankind.

History has been conceived--and with high justification in the records--as the human struggle for civilization against barbarism in different ages and places, from the beginning of human societies.

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