Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

When people come to play music as they do to play bridge, civilization will have taken the longest stride forward since the beginning of time.

The best test of the quality of a civilization is the quality of its leisure.

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

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

The major challenge facing us is to elevate our national life to the highest level of civilization and prosperity.

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.

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

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?

It's too bad our society isn't further along.

Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces.

Civilization is only savagery silver-gilt.

With highly civilized nations, continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes. Nevertheless the more intelligent members within the same community will succeed better in the long run than the inferior, and leave a more numerous progeny, and this is a form of natural selection.

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

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.

For one true measure of a nation is its success in fulfilling the promise of a better life for each of its members. Let this be the measure of our nation.

Today's children will become tomorrow's civilization.

Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

The most civilized people are as near to barbarism as the most polished steel is to rust. Nations, like metals, have only a superficial brilliancy.

A country in which the people are not healthy physically and psychologically, are poorly educated and illiterate, will never rise to the peaks of world civilization.

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

Fight to preserve these traits of civilization, that made us go forward.

The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.