Nelson A. Miles Quotes

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

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 civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.

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.

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.

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.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.

By peace our condition has been improved in the pursuit of civilized life.

It is a mistake to assume that government must necessarily last forever. The institution marks a certain stage of civilization-is natural to a particular phase of human development. It is not essential, but incidental. As amongst the Bushmen we find a state antecedent to government, so may there be one in which it shall have become extinct.

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.

Men are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.

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

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.

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.

The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

And when native man left off this form of development, his humanization was retarded in growth.

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

We all know from a study of history the progress of the working people from the stage of barbarism to that of slavery, serfdom and later individual freedom... .

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 ...

Where Schools are not vigorously and Honourable Encouraged, whole Colonies will sink apace; into a Degenerate and Contemptible Condition, and at last become horribly Barbarous

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