"Civilization" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cruel act of man and the very forces of nature, to a manhood and intelligent citizenship that converts the cautious, impartial, and conservative spirit of history into eulogy! They have overcome the obstacles in the path of the physical civilization of North America; they have earned billions of dollars for a profligate people; they have made good laborers, efficient sailors, and peerless soldiers. In three wars they won the crown of heroes by steady, intrepid valor; and in peace have shown themselves the friends of stable government. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... various forms prevailed ever since the institutions of ancient times and which alone render the present social structure viable. If this forecast should prove correct, the only alternative to a break disastrous in the continuity of civilization is the frank recognition of the principle that certain inferior races are destined to serve the cause of mankind in those capacities for which alone they are qualified and to readjust social institutions to ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Governors of Louisiana, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Utah, and South Carolina, was unanimously adopted. This Magna Charta of the conservation movement declared "that the great natural resources supply the material basis upon which our civilization must continue to depend and upon which the perpetuity of the nation itself rests," that "this material basis is threatened with exhaustion," and that "this conservation of our natural resources is a subject of transcendent importance, which should engage unremittingly ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... was the use of setting up to be a queen, anyway, if she could not do that? And, moreover, you've got to do your duty in the wild. There's no profit in monkeying with Nature, as is possible with civilization, for the penalty ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... already traversed by a system of railways, and its population is entering more and more into the footsteps of western civilization. This movement, a consequence of the revolution of 1868, is extending to the public works of every kind, for while the first railway lines were being continued, there was in the course of excavation (among other canals) a navigable canal designed to connect Lake Biwa and the Bay of Osaka, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... of all," he said, "will be to preserve in our victory the virtues that won it for us. Germany and Russia will do their best to corrupt us. A dishonoured nation always tries to bury its shame under the ruins of the victor's civilization. It's the device of Samson; it's as old as history itself. Rome, surrounded by vanquished and humbled nations, witnessed the lightning speed of Judaic preaching, which was so much like the Bolshevism of our day. The Russian ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... exclaimed Edestone, "it was extremely bad taste for me to criticize a civilization so much older than my own, but you will," he smiled, "forgive the cowboy I am sure when he tells you he is sorry." Then seeing by the expression of the officer's face that he had won the day: "Come now, Count von Hemelstein, let's be friends. I would not have liked you had you ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... of Fort Moultrie, the blazing of the Kentucky wilderness, the expedition of Clark and his handful of followers in Illinois, the beginning of civilization along the Ohio and Mississippi, and ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... how large a proportion of the new converts lay amongst Roman officers, or (to speak more adequately) amongst Romans of high rank, both men and women. And for that there was high reason. In the advance of civilization, and in the corresponding decay of idolatrous religions, there was fast arising a new growth of cravings amongst men. Mythological and desperately immoral religions, that spoke only to the blind sense of power, had been giving way through the three ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... your heart you were back on the creek with the grass for a bed and a rock for a table. Canoeing is like ice cream—when you once taste it you are always wanting more. It reminds me of what I read about a famous African explorer. He was always glad to get back to civilization for a little while, and then he was more anxious than ever to return to his wild life. It seemed as though he couldn't breathe right anywhere ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... surprise, she regarded the Republican ideal of government as the highest that had yet been evolved from finite minds, still far from their last and highest stages of development. She believed that the only hope of the present civilization was to avert at any cost the successful rise of the proletariat to power until the governing and employing classes had learned sufficient wisdom to conciliate it and treat it with the same impartial justice they now reserved for themselves. ("And to educate themselves along the lines ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... perpetually growing. It is only such cities that become capitals. They are funnels, into which all the geographical, political, moral, and intellectual water-sheds of a country, all the natural slopes of a people, pour; wells of civilization, so to speak, and also sewers, where commerce, industry, intelligence, population,—all that is sap, all that is life, all that is the soul of a nation, filters and amasses unceasingly, drop by drop, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Indian was not confined to our own country, in the earlier periods of our history. In Great Britain, sovereigns, ecclesiastics, and philosophers recognized the obligations providentially imposed upon them, to aid in giving a Christian civilization to their swarthy brethren, who were sitting in the thickest darkness of heathenism in the primeval forests of the New World. Societies, as well as individuals, manifested a deep and practical interest ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... It was one of her theories that "society should punish what the law cannot attack." She maintained that good manners are based upon noble and delicate sentiments, that mutual consideration, deference, politeness, gentleness, and respect to age are essential to civilization. The disloyal, the ungrateful bad sons, bad brothers, bad husbands, and bad wives, whose offenses were serious enough to be made public, she banished from that circle which called itself la bonne compagnie. It must be admitted, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... the older settlements, the bulk of the hard work was done by a lusty army of men not reproduced again in America until the picturesque figure of the cow-puncher appeared above the western horizon. This breed of men was nurtured on the outer confines of civilization, along the headwaters of the Susquehanna, the Potomac, the James, and the Broad—the country of the "Cowpens." Rough as the wilderness they occupied, made strong by their diet of meat and curds, these Tatars of the highlands played a part in the commercial history of America that has ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... walls of prehistoric man to the sublimities of the Sistine Chapel, there is no break in the continuity of effort and aspiration. Potentially every man is an artist. Between the artist, so-called, and the ordinary man there is no gulf fixed which cannot be passed. Such are the terms of our mechanical civilization to-day that art has become specialized and the practice of it is limited to a few; in consequence artists have become a kind of class. But essentially the possibilities of art lie within the scope of any man, given the right conditions. ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... thickets and are reared in the most barbaric infidelity. Others are called Zimarrones, and have apostatized from the Catholic faith, after having fled from the nearby Christian villages. There is also an incredible number of blacks who, without God, without king, without law, without civilization, without settlement, live as though they had no rational soul. All of those Indians, notwithstanding that they wage most bloody wars among themselves, generally unite to oppose the Spanish arms, when the Spaniards have attempted their conquest, and stake their ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... their pedigrees. But when the art of writing was introduced towards the close of the fourth century, or at the beginning of the fifth, and it was seen that in China, then the centre of learning and civilization, the art had been applied to the compilation of a national history as well as of other volumes possessing great ethical value, the Japanese conceived the ambition of similarly utilizing their new attainment. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the world is due to mining and to the perfectness of man's ability to work the minerals which the mines supply. The fields of the world give men food; with food furnished, a few souls turn to the contemplation of higher things; but no grand civilization ever came to an agricultural people until their intellects were quickened by something ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... man's necessity for food lies at the root of civilization, and that the desire for a sufficiency and variety of aliment alone keeps up our energies! I cannot think so; I believe it is the stone about our necks that drags us down, and is intended to do so, and which keeps us truly from being "but a little ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... with pride these indisputable proofs that our refinement and culture had an ancestry, and that our present civilization did not spring, as ribald scoffers have alleged, mushroom-like from the sties and ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... yet to learn that there is a period of life when it is a joy to slip out of as much civilization as possible," said Lance, putting his sentence in involved form so as to be the less ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... our art, our science, and our philosophy exalts us far above them, is that a proof that there was nothing admirable, nothing that can call forth our love on that infant state, or in the annals of our civilization ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... judges; no generation has six thousand great men at her command, much less can she find them in the legal profession. Popinot, in the midst of the civilization of Paris, was just a very clever cadi, who, by the character of his mind, and by dint of rubbing the letter of the law into the essence of facts, had learned to see the error of spontaneous and violent decisions. By the help of his judicial second-sight ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... side of forty the more remote West has passed from rollicking boyhood to its responsible majority. The frontier has gone to join the good Indian. In place of the ranger who patrolled the border for "bad men" has come the forest ranger, type of the forward lapping tide of civilization. The place where I write this— Tucson, Arizona— is now essentially more civilized than New York. Only at the moving picture shows can the old West, melodramatically overpainted, be shown to the manicured sons and daughters of those, ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... little historical or cultural background, the material for this volume has been gathered from a section that was one of the first to be colonized. Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... To-day, savage children, when the day of toil is ended with the setting sun, gather in groups to listen to the never-dying charm of the tale; and the most learned of men, meeting in the great centers of civilization to work out weighty problems, find relief and pleasure when wit and culture tell ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... the code of the frontier no man could let himself be driven from town by the knowledge that another man was looking for him with a gun. There are in the Southwest now many thousands who do not live by the old standard, who are anchored to law and civilization as a protection against primitive passions. But Fendrick was not one of these. He had deliberately gone outside of the law in his feud with the cattleman. Now he would not repudiate the course he had chosen and hedge because of the danger it involved. He was an aspirant to leadership ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... of a dreamy, tranquil July day, a day made impressive beyond the possible comprehension of a dweller in civilization by its sun having risen for us over the unbroken wilderness of the Adirondack, a mountain-land in each of whose deep valleys lies a blue lake, we, a party of hunters and recreation-seekers, six beside our guides, lay on the fir-bough-cushioned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... the world Christian missionaries have been the first to get on friendly terms with the natives, and thus to pave the way for developing the resources of a savage country and leading its inhabitants in the paths of progress and civilization. Pre-eminently has this been the case in South-eastern New Guinea. White men had landed before them, it is true; but for the most part only to benefit themselves, and not unfrequently to murder the natives or to entrap them into slavery. Christianity ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... these things, them lofty towers riz up like gigantick skeleton fingers outstretched mockin'ly. They seemed to be sayin' to me and Josiah and the world at large, "You may boast of your inventions, your marvels of this age, your civilization, your glory, your pryin' into dark continents and unexplored regions of land and science. But what do you know anyway? Of what consequence are you? How soon your life and your memory will be utterly wiped out and forgotten. How soon the careless sun will forget the shadow you cast on the earth's ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... of bards and the legends of monkish chroniclers. These fables they arranged in order, adorned with the embellishments of fancy, amplified from their own invention, and stamped with immortality. It may safely be asserted that as long as civilization shall endure these productions will retain their place among the most ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... views, the attempt shall be made to report truthfully upon the freedmen at Port Royal. A word, however, as to the name. Civilization, in its career, may often be traced in the nomenclatures of successive periods. These people were first called contrabands at Fortress Monroe; but at Port Royal, where they were next introduced to us in any considerable number, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... She saw the humor of this, but was aware that without a knowledge of Ben Fordyce Joe could not understand her problem, therefore she abandoned her search for light and leading. "Well, anyhow, right here I quit what you fellows call civilization. I hate to lose you and Julia and the rest of the folks, but it's me to the high hills. You'll never know how much you've ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... stupidly at the magnificence all round her—the daughter of the London streets! the pet creation of the laws of political economy! the savage and terrible product of a worn-out system of government and of a civilization rotten to its core! Cleaned for the first time in her life, fed sufficiently for the first time in her life, dressed in clothes instead of rags for the first time in her life, Mercy's sister in adversity ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... as an orchid. It was long, narrow, and pale with three accents to redeem it from what that ordinarily implies—lips of a brilliant carmine, eyes of a deep sea-green, and eyebrows high, arched, clean cut, narrow as though drawn by a camel's-hair brush. Indeed, in civilization no one would have believed them to have been otherwise produced. In spite of the awkward sun helmet she ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... attention to the good of their subjects. It was not the rage of conquests, if we may believe the accounts of their countrymen, that prompted the Incas to extend their dominion, but the desire of diffusing the blessings of civilization, and the knowledge of the arts which they possessed, among the barbarous people whom they reduced. During a succession of twelve monarchs, it is said that not one deviated ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... work with which we are acquainted. Trusting, then, that the Khan's patriotic aspirations for the welfare of his country may be realized by the speedy introduction of all those Feringhi appendages to high civilization, the want of which he so feelingly deplores, and that he may live a thousand years in the full fruition of all the advantages therefrom resulting, we now take ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... shall find that they are most gratuitous; and, consequently, that the regret of the president at the probable fate of the Indian, should he remain east of the Mississippi, is grossly hypocritical. He says, "surrounded by the whites, with their arts of civilization, which, by destroying the resources of the savage, doom him to weakness and decay:[17] the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware, is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... rivers whose celebrity is of much greater antiquity than that of the Rhine. The Nile and the Ganges are intimately associated with the early history of civilization and the mysterious beginnings of wisdom; the Tiber is eloquent of that vanished Empire which was the first to carry the torch of advancement into the dark places of barbarian Europe; the name of the Jordan ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... engaged a shrewd, active lad as groom, valet, and he seems to think, companion, at about two pounds per month. A very light carriage, sometimes driven by my servant and sometimes by myself, will transport the moderate wardrobe which I shall deem it necessary to take with me to the outermost verge of civilization and good roads, where leaving carriage and wardrobe, or at least all of the latter which may not be borne by a led-horse, I shall penetrate still further into the old forests of this New World. I long to be alone with "Nature's ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... Altogether Tuam is a depressing kind of place, and but for the enterprise of a few Protestants, the place would be a phantasmagoria of pigs, priests, peasants, poverty, and "peelers." Perhaps Galway would have more civilization, if less piety. You cannot move about an Irish country town after nightfall without barking your shins on a Roman Catholic Cathedral. This in time ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... thumped into the little box car to listen, like children, to the rattling of the telegraph key,—as though they never had heard one before. So soon does civilization feel the need of its inventions, once they are taken away; so soon does the mind become primitive, once the rest of the world has been shut away from it. Eagerly they clustered there, staring with anxious eyes toward the ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... of our nervous disorders are undoubtedly due to the age in which we live. Our modern civilization, with all its facilities for human advancement and enjoyment, throws an extra strain upon the nervous system. Educational and social standards are higher than ever before and life in all its phases is more complex. Since we can hardly change the conditions under which we live, and ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... been so much astonished in his life. He stared dumbly at the strange boat's crew. From the first he was positive that these men were not sailors. They wore the white drill-suit of tropical civilization; but their apparition in a boat Heyst could not connect with anything plausible. The civilization of the tropics could have had nothing to do with it. It was more like those myths, current in Polynesia, of amazing strangers, ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... of its name, a true Garden of Africa. The crossing was now a memory of heavy grades, of verdant country, of ripened fruits. There had been the week's delay at Pietermaritzburg where they had tasted a bit of civilization in the intervals of completing their outfits; there had been the brief stop at Ladysmith, already recovered from her hardships of the year before, then the crossing the border into the Transvaal where the verdure slowly vanished ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... Catholic Church things are tending, with far greater rapidity than in that old time from the circumstance of the age, to atheism in one shape or other. What a scene, what a prospect, does the whole of Europe present at this day! and not only Europe, but every government and every civilization through the world, which is under the influence of the European mind! Especially, for it most concerns us, how sorrowful, in the view of religion, even taken in its most elementary, most attenuated form, is the spectacle presented to us by the educated intellect ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... Jaguar alone. The other flesh-eating animals also heeded it. And the wild tribes that inhabited the wilderness knew from bitter experience that it was best to conserve their food supply and that to waste today was to want tomorrow. It was only when men who professed some degree of civilization appeared on the scene that the wild things found existence impossible; and the more advanced the men the greater the slaughter. They showed an insatiable lust for killing—under one pretext or another; but always ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... fair to subject our laborer to a competitor who can measure his wants by an expenditure of six cents a day, and who can live on an income not exceeding five dollars a month? What will become of the boasted civilization of our country if our toilers are compelled to compete with this class of labor, with more competitors available than twice the entire population of France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... founded by the joint labours of St. Peter and St. Paul, but the circumstances of its foundation were very different from those of the Churches of our own islands. [Sidenote: Difficulties encountered by the Church in Italy from high civilization] Christianity in Italy had to make its way amongst a highly civilized people, a nation of deep thinkers and philosophers, whose opposition to the truths of the Gospel was a far more subtle thing than the rude ignorance ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... success must be sought according to local possibilities. Development always depends upon the environment, and we should expect, therefore, unequal progress for the Negroes. Even the highest fruits of civilization fail if the bases of life are suddenly changed. The Congregational Church has not flourished among the Negroes as have some other denominations, in spite of its great activity in educational work. The American mode of government is being greatly modified to make it fit ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... stand in the light of offspring or relatives, or whose transactions and fates have rendered the history of the world what it is, almost superlatively important to every intelligent mind. If time shall witness the triumph of civilization over the savages of the southern hemisphere, then, it is highly probable, a similar enthusiasm will prevail among their literary descendants; and objects regarded by us as mere dust in the high road of nature, will be ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... shun the atmosphere of the student's closet; their sphere is in the free and open wilderness. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that to our veteran borderer the field of literature should remain a "terra incognita." It is our army that unites the chasm between the culture of civilization in the aspect of science, art, and social refinement, and the powerful simplicity of nature. On leaving the Military Academy, a majority of our officers are attached to the line of the army, and forthwith ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... the Western world stood till the year A.D. 305, when the Emperor Diocletian abdicated; and there it was that Adams broke down on the steps of Ara Coeli, his path blocked by the scandalous failure of civilization at the moment it had achieved complete success. In the year 305 the empire had solved the problems of Europe more completely than they have ever been solved since. The Pax Romana, the Civil Law, and Free Trade should, in four hundred years, have put Europe far in advance of the point ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... of them marked him. But he paid no attention to individuals. His mind was full of the whole picture. Mile after mile of narrow streets between blocks of stone and brick and wood. Thousands of people tramping the miles like so many animals driven from the jungle by fire or flood. This men called civilization—this City of Stone Blocks! How far was it from the jungle? Hunger, thirst, lust, jealousy, anger, courage, and cowardice—these were the passions of both fastnesses. How far was Man from his ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... furnish the most of the content of the lessons. But the Committee urge that enough other matter, of an introductory character, be included to teach boys and girls of from twelve to fourteen years of age that our civilization had its beginnings far back in the history of the Old World. Such introductory study will enable them to think of our country in its true historical setting. The Committee recommend that about two-thirds of one year's work be devoted to this preliminary matter, and that the remainder of the year ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... piquant it is the greater is the satisfaction. Craving for excitement and a stimulus that will restore their depleted energies, they flock into the dance-halls and the saloons, where they find the temporary satisfaction that they wanted, but where they are tempted to lose the control that civilization has put upon the primitive passions and to let the primitive instincts ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... enthusiasm, his glance of undisguised admiration on her face. "I certainly recall some such earlier conception," he admitted. "Those just arriving from the environment of an older civilization perceive merely the picturesque elements; but my later experiences have ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... the great bull buffalo through the barrier of the steel-wire fence, were fitted, before all others, to give him a name. Between him and them there was surely a tragic bond, as they stood there islanded among the swelling tides of civilization which had already engulfed their kindreds. "Last Bull" they had called him, as he answered their gaze with little, sullen, melancholy eyes from under his ponderous and shaggy front. "Last Bull"—and the passing of his race was in ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... that were sufficient we might all walk our thirty miles a day. But some of us must earn wages for other people, or the world will make no progress. Civilization, as I take it, consists in efforts made not for oneself but ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... Eugene called "his beloved pupil;" Ostermann, of whom the dying Czar Peter said he had never caught him in a fault; that he was the only honest statesman in Russia—Munnich and Ostermann, those two great statesmen to whom Russia was chiefly indebted for what civilization and cultivation she had acquired, were now accused of high-treason, and sent for trial before a commission commanded to find them guilty and to punish them. They were to be put out of the way because they were feared, and to be feared was held ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... "and you young people, who have had so many advantages of education and leisure, are very right to give the subject some attention, for the sake of the community in which you live. Manners in their best meaning, as a part of civilization, are closely connected at many different points, with the character and morals of a nation. Hitherto in this country, the subject has been too much left to itself; but in many respects there is a good foundation to work upon—some of our ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... those for whom this book is intended, a woman is a rare variety of the human race, and her principal characteristics are due to the special care men have bestowed upon its cultivation,—thanks to the power of money and the moral fervor of civilization! She is generally recognized by the whiteness, the fineness and softness of her skin. Her taste inclines to the most spotless cleanliness. Her fingers shrink from encountering anything but objects which are soft, yielding and scented. Like the ermine she sometimes dies for ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... twenty miles, when we went into camp. We proceeded each day about this same rate, following along the valley of the Madison River until we reached the park. When we were there the park was truly a wilderness, with no evidences of civilization. Game was very abundant. Elk, deer, antelope and bear were plentiful, and we had no difficulty in getting all the fresh meat ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... in every case that I have met with, half-witted, silly, or incapable of taking care of himself. His intellect and his health have been undermined by the forcing of education."[2210] Petrie's doctrine is that each generation of men of low civilization can be advanced beyond the preceding one only by a very small percentage. He does not lay stress on the stimulation of vanity and false pride. If he is right, his doctrine explains the complaints ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... himself hardly less upon. He had seen Faneuil Hall, the old State House, Bunker Hill, the Public Library, and the Old South Church, and he had not been sandbagged or buncoed or led astray from the paths of propriety. In the comfortable sense of escape, he was disposed, to moralize upon the civilization of great cities, which he now witnessed at first hand for the first time; and throughout the evening, between the acts of the "Old Homestead," which he found a play of some merit, but of not so much novelty in its characters as he had somehow led himself to expect, he recurred to the difficulties ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... don't see you, and, damn you, don't you dare see me!" But Feuerstein advanced boldly. Twelve years of active membership in that band of "beats" which patrols every highway and byway and private way of civilization had thickened and toughened his skin into a hide. "Good evening, Albers," he said cordially, with a wave of the soft, light hat. "I see you have a vacant place in your little circle. Thank you!" He assumed that Albers had invited him, took ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... Bessie and the little Thad had returned to their attractive home after an absence of two months in a section of the Adirondacks whither the march of civilization had not carried such comforts as gas, good beds, and other luxuries, to which the little family had become so accustomed that real camp-life, with its beds of balsam, lights of tallow, and "fried coffee," possessed ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... emptying in the Mexican Gulf, separated by a distance of more than two thousand miles, washing in its course the shores of nine States, all embraced by this, the most fertile and important valley known to mankind. As an aid to civilization and to commerce, its value can never be ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... hunters the power of looking into the future, their camp-fire that night on the frozen Ombabika might have been one of their last, and a few days later would have seen them back on the edges of civilization. Possibly, could they have foreseen the happy culmination of the adventures that lay before them, they would still have gone on, for the love of excitement is strong in the heart of robust youth. But this power of discernment was denied ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... gratifying, not only to those who consider the commercial interests of nations, but also to all who favor the progress of knowledge and the diffusion of religion, to see a community emerge from a savage state and attain such a degree of civilization in those distant seas. It is much to be deplored that the internal tranquillity of the Mexican Republic should again be seriously disturbed, for since the peace between that Republic and the United States it had enjoyed such comparative repose that the most favorable ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... when she called on her friends to come at twelve, and especially begged them to believe that she meant it, she would be able to see them comfortably seated in their tents at two. Vain woman—or rather ignorant woman—ignorant of the advances of that civilization which the world had witnessed while she was growing old. At twelve she found herself alone, dressed in all the glory of the newest of her many suits of raiment; with strong shoes however, and a serviceable bonnet on her head, and a warm rich shawl ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... in the fact that this industrialism has gathered together multitudes of eager young creatures from all quarters of the earth as a labor supply for the countless factories and workshops, upon which the present industrial city is based. Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon city streets and to work under alien roofs; for the first time they are being ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... growth of the Criminal is one of the most ominous clouds on every national horizon. In spite of advances in criminology the rate of increase is so alarming that the "Unfit" threatens to be to the new Civilization what the Hun and Vandal were to the old. How to deal with this dangerous class is perhaps the most serious question that faces Sociologists at this hour. And something must be done speedily, else our civilization is in imminent peril of being swamped by the increasingly ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... excitement in the community about us; but as they see by our improvement, (a great improvement, indeed, within forty years,) that the period is hastening on, 'when there will be no other alternative but we must rank among them in civilization, science and politics, they have got up this colonization scheme to persuade us to leave our slave brethren, and flee to the pestilential shores of Africa, where we shall be in danger of being forced to hang our harps upon the willows, and our song of liberty and civilization will be hushed ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... a couple of sub-lieutenants, one of whom has looked at the other in a way the latter does not like. A duel to the death is the result. But two great nations ought not to act like a couple of musketeers. Besides, in a duel to the death between two nations like England and France, it is civilization that would ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... before the day's out," was the answer. "I tell you, you simply must fight. I'll give you a fair chance to kill me, but I'll kill you before the day's out. This isn't civilization. It's the Solomon Islands, and a pretty primitive proposition for all that. King Edward and law and order are represented by the Commissioner at Tulagi and an occasional visiting gunboat. And two men and one woman is an equally primitive proposition. We'll settle ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... "I hope you will forgive my manners, but I've lived and worked here alone in the desert so long that I had forgotten the niceties of civilization." ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... that all this and much more took place between a delegation of wild Indians and six mute girls attending the Institution in our city, it certainly will be considered remarkable, and probably never before in the history of civilization has such a meeting occurred. As a means of communication with the wild tribes roaming over our western plains, the capacity of the sign-language of mutes can hardly be over estimated, and a few well-trained mute missionaries could, without doubt, be made ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... into a dim, unspoken background. The wholesomeness of the existence that he now leads has taught him to delight in the most simple and natural of things. This throwing aside of the perversions and fripperies of an over-civilization has forced him to regard them with a disgust that can never allow him to be tempted again by their inducements of delight and dissipation. The natural, healthy desires which a man is sometimes inclined to indulge in are no longer veiled under a mask of hypocrisy. They ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... from churches, laid villages under contribution, and cut throats by thousands, to divide the spoils of a galleon or a military chest, has gained gold on the highway of glory! Europe has reached an exceeding pass of civilization, it may not be denied; but before society inflicts so severe censure on the acts of individuals, notwithstanding the triteness of the opinion, I must say it is bound to look more closely to the example it sets, in its ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... here and there disturb the monotony of desolation. The early Jesuits have left their traces in their churches, college squares now empty, and houses gone to wreck, while their labors in the cause of religion and civilization are recalled in the names of saints borne by the villages. At Carapegua, which owes what importance it possesses to its proximity to Paraguari and the railroad, our traveler once more finds himself ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... Jewish maker of learning, the privilege of building a schoolhouse at Jamnia as a substitute for the hall of the judiciary in the temple at Jerusalem, that this sanctuary of the Jewish law and what it represents would by far eclipse all the power and greatness of the Roman civilization. Yet this was symbolized by the Menorah. Whether originally intended or not, it was the emblem of Israel's mission of light. It indicated the task of the Jew, when scattered over the wide globe, to be a light to the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... playing at war. Many of us thought it would be so always. We believed we had discovered a method of settling all the world's difficulties without blows. The peace people had their jubilee. They talked about the advance of intelligence, and the softening power of civilization. They placed war among the forgotten horrors of a dead barbarism. They proved that commerce had rendered war impossible, because it had made it against self-interest. They talked about reason and persuasion, and moral influences. They asked, 'Why not settle all troubles ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the fact that there are times, under the spell of the West, when I simply do not care whether there are such things as gold beads and crape; when the whole business of city life, the music, arts, drama, the pleasant friends, equally with the platitudes of things and people you care not about—civilization, in a word—when all these fade away from my thoughts as far as geographically they are, and in their place comes the joy of being at least a healthy, if not an intelligent, animal. It is a pleasure to eat when the time comes around, a good old-fashioned pleasure, and you need no dainty ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... the very middle of a field. If the guard had shouted out the name of any American city, built overnight, on a Western prairie, we should have felt entirely at home in this meadow; we should have known any clearing, with grass and daisies, was a very finished evidence of civilization ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... Thank God, who has given you these priests! Thank the Mother Country, who spreads civilization in these fertile isles and protects them with the covering of her glorious mantle. Thank God, again, who has enlightened you by his ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... elbowroom wherever they gather together. Society, however, not being tolerable where the smoothness of intercourse is disturbed by a perpetual punching of sides, the merits of the free citizen in them become their demerits when a fraternal circle is established, and they who have shown an example of civilization too notable in one sphere to call for eulogy, are often to be seen elbowing on the ragged edge of barbarism in the other. They must therefore be reduced to accept laws not of their own making, and of an ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the native Irish, and have usually, like them, a flat third: the same has been observed of the music of Bengal, and probably it will be found that the minor key obtains a preference amongst all people at a certain stage of civilization. ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... avocation. The Roman conqueror of the world knew better than to put in his heavily-armed legions the flying Parthian, the light-armed horseman of Numidia, or the slinger of the Balearic Isles. The American of the past had at his disposal a race capable of being the skirmish line of his march of civilization to wrest a continent from the wilderness. As trappers, hunters, and guides; as fishermen and slayers of whale and seal; as the light horseman, quick, brave, self-sustaining, and self-reliant, the Indian was capable of valuable services to a people who offered him but two alternatives—extinction, ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... we had the chance, we might then conceivably have wrecked a ship. For there, on the narrow strip of shingle between the wash of the waves and the unstable cliff, we were primitive men, ready without ruth to wreck for ourselves the contrivances of civilization. ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... own King to ascend the ancient throne of Norway will open up an era of tranquil conditions of industry for Norway, of good and cordial relations to the Swedish people, and of peace and concord and loyal co-operation in the north for the protection of the civilization of the people and of their ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... answer to the latter possibility. While providing man with everything to which he has aspired for milleniums, we instill in him, through the media of entertainment, knowledge of all the survival practices known to the backtimers who painfully nurtured civilization from an embryonic idea to its present pinnacle. We can ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage
... the time in wandering about aimlessly, or sitting down and watching the labors of his companions, while he enlivened them by pathetic lamentations over his unfortunate position, so far away from Boston and the refining influences of civilization. ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... official respect for a French prince possessing such claims upon the respect of Frenchmen as well as of Americans, the diplomatic representative of the United States was assailed with coarse and vulgar violence in the columns of journals assuming to represent the civilization ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... tomb of Sidi Abd-el-Kader El Jalili at Bagdad—events which stimulated his natural tendency to religious enthusiasm. While in Egypt in 1827, Abd-el-Kader is stated to have been impressed, by the reforms then being carried out by Mehemet Ali with the value of European civilization, and the knowledge he then gained affected his career. Mahi-ed-Din and his son returned to Mascara shortly before the French occupation of Algiers (July 1830) destroyed the government of the Dey. Coming forward as the champion of Islam against the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the best historical works dealing with each nation, and arranged under the following subdivisions: (a) The general history of the nation; (b) special periods in its career; (c) the descriptions of the people, their civilization and institutions. On each work thus mentioned there is a critical comment with suggestions to readers. This bibliography is designed chiefly for those who desire to pursue more extended courses of reading, and it offers them the experience and guidance of those who have ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... in Melbourne had not been such as to make up for his want of youth. I do not mean to imply by this that he indulged in irregular or dissipated habits. He possessed a happy gift of delineating natural objects with the pencil, but died before passing the boundaries of civilization, from causes unconnected with want or fatigue. Dr. Herman Beckler, who has since returned to his native country, was neither a man of courage, energy, nor of medical experience. He resigned when Mr. Landells did, and, as will be seen, for a very poor reason. His place should have been immediately ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... had to suffer and endure like a saint. Away with this rabble! What a reproach to our civilization that we need what we despise and must ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... will come to know it if they are spared to see many years) that civilization alone will never improve the heart. Let history speak, and it will tell you that deeds of darkest hue have been perpetrated in so-called civilized though pagan lands. Civilization is like the polish that beautifies inferior furniture, which water will wash off if it be but hot enough. Christianity resembles dye, which permeates every fibre of the fabric, and which ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... always wrote in German. The disputed nationality of Copernicus strongly suggests that he came of a mixed racial lineage, and we are reminded again of the influences of those ethnical minglings to which we have previously more than once referred. The acknowledged centres of civilization towards the close of the fifteenth century were Italy and Spain. Therefore, the birthplace of Copernicus lay almost at the confines of civilization, reminding us of that earlier period when Greece was the centre of culture, but when the great Greek thinkers were born in Asia ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Bob earnestly, anxiously, "is the work of the conservative and thoughtful majority, and to custom and tradition every civilization must look for a solid foundation. Ignore them and we wouldn't ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... sons of the same mother. Some are born into opulence, others into the most dreadful want. Why am I not a prince and a great lord, instead of a poor pilgrim on the earth, ungrateful and rebellious? Why was I born in Europe and at Paris, whereby civilization and art life is rendered supportable and easy, instead of seeing the light under the burning skies of the tropics, where, dressed out in a beastly muzzle, a skin black and oily, and locks of wool, I should have been exposed to the double torments of a deadly climate and a barbarous society? Why ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... third-rate ones, for Protestantism. On one side stood Spain, then at the head of Europe,—rich in arts, in military glory, in the genius and chivalry of its people, in the resources of its soil, and mistress, besides, of splendid colonies. By her side stood France,—the equal of Spain in art, in civilization, in military genius, and inferior only to her proud neighbour in the single article of colonies. Austria came next, and then Italy. Such were the illustrious names ranged on the one side. All of them were powerful, opulent, highly civilized; and some of them cherished the recollections of imperishable ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... expenditure than (b) by expenditure in articles unproductively consumed is a question difficult for many to comprehend, and needs all the elucidation possible. To start with, no one ever knew of a community all of whose wants were satisfied: in fact, civilization is constantly leading us into new fields of enjoyment, and results in a constant differentiation of new desires. To satisfy these wants is the spring to nearly all production and industry. There can, therefore, be no stop to production ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... tramp back from the settlement, on the edge of a water-meadow beside the lonely Quah-Davic, stood the old woodsman's cabin. Beside it he had built a snug log-barn, stored with hay from the wild meadow. The hay he had made that August, being smitten with a desire for some touch of the civilization to which as a whole he could not reconcile himself. Then, with a still enthusiasm, he had built his barn, chinking its crevices scrupulously with moss and mud. He had resolved to have a cow. The dream that gave new zest to all his waking hours was the fashioning of a little farm in this sunny, sheltered ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... place, its effects upon Africa have been most disastrous. All along the coast, intercourse with Europeans has deprived the inhabitants of their primitive simplicity, without substituting in its place the order, refinement, and correctness of principle, attendant upon true civilization. The soil of Africa is rich in native productions, and honorable commerce might have been a blessing to her, to Europe, and to America; but instead of that, a trade has been substituted, which operates like a withering curse, ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... do not hear James Smith called the "relict" of Hannah Smith. Standing on the same level does not imply a likeness, but simply a natural equality,—equality, for instance, in matters of conscience, judgment, and opinion. It is often said, that, as a barbarous race progresses toward civilization, its women are brought nearer and nearer to an equality with its men. Thus in the barbaric stage woman is an appendage to man, existing solely for his pleasure and convenience. She is then at her lowest. As civilization progresses, she rises ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... country, and you've wrecked almost all of the rest of civilization. You've brought my world down around ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... society limits a peaceful generation. The atmosphere of the camp and the smoke of the battle-field are morally invigorating; the hardy virtues flourish in them, the nonsense dies like a wilted weed. The enervating effects of centuries of civilization vanish at once, and leave these young men to enjoy a life of hardship, and the exhilarating sense of danger,—to kill men blamelessly, or to be killed gloriously,—and to be happy in following out their native instincts of destruction, precisely in the spirit of Homer's ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... vitiating influence of war upon life about one. He was certainly disposed, I think, to exaggerate his own coarsening, as a not very reputable campaign proceeded. He harped somewhat morbidly on one particular strain in his letters. How much better, he surmised, it would be for Christianity and civilization if he and others like him should never return to resume their places in Christian society! Some verses that he sent me when he was under orders to join a rather hazardous expedition, have, I believe, a certain sincerity in their ruggedness. They are ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... the greatest metropolis of the world sets out to have such a collection at all.—My idea was, that here every living thing was provided for, in the way best suited to its nature and habits, and that the refinement of civilization had here restored a garden of Eden, where all the animal kingdom had regained a happy home. This is not quite the case; though, I believe, the creatures are as comfortable as could he expected, and there are certainly a good many strange beasts here. The hippopotamus is the chief treasure ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that the best plants and animals have had their start in some center of old civilization. China, Manchuria, Japan, Indo-China, India, Persia, Asia Minor, Central America, Oceania—these places, the nurseries of all existing races of men are today the bonanza spots for these explorers. Such a coincidence could hardly have been due to chance. It must surely occur ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... it was an indignation worthy to be imitated by every rational being. The conduct of this young man, upon the present occasion, strongly points out the difference which had taken place, in the progress of civilization, between the inhabitants of the Society islands and those of New Zealand. It was our commander's firm opinion, that the only human flesh which was eaten by these people was that of their enemies, who had been ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... challenged. I took the first watch, while the others turned in to sleep after we had all breakfasted off cold meats, for here we dared not light a fire. As the sun grew high, dispelling the mists, I saw that we were entering upon a thickly-populated country which was no stranger to civilization of a sort. Below us, not more than fifteen or sixteen miles away, and clearly visible through my field-glasses, lay the great town of Harmac, which, during my previous visit to this land, I had never seen, as I passed it ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Achilles and Xanthus—Herminius and Black Auster—down to Scott and Brown Adam—or Dandie Dinmont and Dumple. That pastoral one is, of all, the most enduring. I hear the proudest tribe of Arabia Felix is now reduced by poverty and civilization to sell its last well-bred horse; and that we send out our cavalry regiments to repetitions of the charge at Balaclava, without horses at all; those that they can pick up wherever they land being good enough for such military operations. But the cart-horse will remain, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... N. improvement; amelioration, melioration; betterment; mend, amendment, emendation; mending &c v.; advancement; advance &c (progress) 282; ascent &c 305; promotion, preferment; elevation &c 307; increase &c 35; cultivation, civilization; culture, march of intellect; menticulture^; race-culture, eugenics. reform, reformation; revision, radical reform; second thoughts, correction, limoe labor [Lat.], refinement, elaboration; purification &c 652; oxidation; repair &c (restoration) 660; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... more able or industrious. An international extension of her own principle would have destroyed the pretensions of France to all the countries of the West. She had called them hers for three fourths of a century, and they were still a howling waste, yielding nothing to civilization but beaver-skins, with here and there a fort, trading-post, or mission, and three or four puny hamlets by the Mississippi and the Detroit. We have seen how she might have made for herself an indisputable title, and peopled the solitudes with a host to maintain it. She would not; others were ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... the rocky tors that so strangely crest the low flat hill-tops of the great Devonian moor. She felt a marvelous exhilaration stir her blood —the old Cornish freedom making itself felt through all the restrictions of our modern civilization. She was to the manner born, and she ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... the Persian wars the Athenians, under Pericles, began rebuilding their city and perfecting themselves in all the arts of civilization, and their progress in the next half century will always be a subject for wonder. It is especially wonderful that works of art of the character produced at this time should have been the outcome of political maneuvering: for if Plutarch is to be credited the scheming of Pericles to obtain and hold ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 08, August 1895 - Fragments of Greek Detail • Various
... Civilization dulls this power of the glance. A part of the education the world gives us consists in teaching our eyes to deceive, in making them expressionless, in extinguishing their flames; but simple and straightforward natures ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... brought her work and sat in her mother's chair near him. It was not very dainty work, winding a mass of dyed carpet rags into a huge, madder-colored ball, but there were delicate points in its execution which a restless civilization has hurried into oblivion along with the other lost arts, and Marg'et Ann surveyed her ball critically now and then, to be sure that it was not developing any slovenly one-sidedness under her deft hands. The minister's crutches leaned against the arm of his painted wooden chair with an ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... perhaps been rather more troubled over certain outbreaks of lawlessness than you need have been. They are to be expected, I suppose, in all new countries, and they gradually disappear before the advance of civilization, as Mr. Alston says. All that is in the natural order of human events. However, since you have been so much disturbed, I am truly pleased that you are so soon to be relieved of all uneasiness from this source. May I ask, sir, if you can tell me ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... really begins with the earliest dawn of civilization. As soon as men developed a language, even of the simplest sort, they felt the necessity of a means of communication with those who were not present. This would be needed for the identification of property, the ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... quiet; but we need not suppose for that reason that there were none. Our Ice Folk, who dropped their stone axes in the river banks, may have passed away with the Ice Age, or they may have remained in Ohio, and begun slowly to take on some faint likeness of civilization. There is nothing to prove that they went, and there is nothing to prove that they staid; but Ohio must always have been a pleasant place to live in after the great thaw, and it seems reasonable to ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... our active, aggressive, material, Occidental civilization to sneer and scoff at the quiet, passive, and less material civilization of the Orient. We despise—that is, the unthinking majority do—the studious, contemplative Oriental. We believe in being "up and doing." ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... pure charm. Sometimes he has allowed himself to go in for pure fantasy, so that satire (which should hold on to the mane of the real) slides off the other side of the runaway horse. But he remains, on the whole, pencil in hand, a wonderfully copious and veracious historian of his age and his civilization. ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... growing in his heart the stubbornness of the man of property, the landholding man, the man who even unconsciously plans a home, resolved to cling to that which he has taken of the earth's surface for his own. Heredity, civilization, that which we call common sense, won the victory. Though he saw his own face in the primeval mirror here held up to him, Franklin turned away. It was sure to him that he must set his influence against this unorganized ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... imagines how the requirements of the law jar upon a heartfelt sorrow. The thought of it is enough to make one turn from civilization and choose rather the customs of the savage. At nine o'clock that morning Mme. Sauvage half-carried Schmucke downstairs, and from the cab he was obliged to beg Remonencq to come with him to the registrar as a second witness. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... to the minister to be almost disgraceful, and yet he himself had never read a word of Mr. Mill's writings. "He is a far-seeing man," continued the minister. "He is one of the few Europeans who can look forward, and see how the rivers of civilization are running on. He has understood that women must at last be put upon an ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... and raised a crucifix at the doors of the Palazzo Pubblico to commemorate the victory of freedom. Had they known it, they were in reality celebrating the loss of national independence, the beginning of a long reign of slavery and foreign rule. Seldom has the cause of freedom and civilization suffered a worse blow than this betrayal of the Moro at Novara, which left the Milanese a prey to French invaders, and planted the yoke of the stranger firmly on the ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... instinct for being on the spot when anything was happening, was present in them to the most remarkable extent. The town was supporting them in modest winter quarters somewhat nearer than Killick to the center of civilization, and the first alarm brought them promptly to the scene, Mrs. Crambry remarking at intervals: "If I'd known there'd be so many out I'd ought to have worn my bunnit; but I ain't got no bunnit, an' if I had they say I ain't got no head to ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... fraud. Mr. Wilberforce showed that the trade thus carried on had a natural tendency to cause frequent and cruel wars; to produce unjust convictions and aggravated punishments for pretended crimes; to encourage fraud and oppression; and to obstruct the natural course of civilization and improvement. He also showed that an extensive commerce in articles peculiar to Africa and important to our manufactures, might be substituted for this inhuman traffic; a commerce which would at once equal the profits of the slave-trade, and would probably ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... hampered in their choice of mates by the unrestrained right of the fighting male. Indeed, the great constructive work of chivalry in the middle ages was to lay, unconsciously, the corner-stone of modern civilization by resigning to the woman the power of choosing from ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... in the ranks of the German army had received that reward for lesser acts than that of the under-officer this evening; there are heroes in the armies of the All-Highest Kaiser who have been decorated with that Iron Cross for valour, and others who wear the emblem for deeds which make the rest of civilization shudder. Yes, indeed, the under-officer might well earn such reward, for he had shown acuteness, promptitude, and dispatch in carrying ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... entitled to assume that the invention of the drama was made once for all in the world, to be afterwards borrowed by one people from another. The English circumnavigators tell us, that among the islanders of the South Seas, who in every mental qualification and acquirement are at the lowest grade of civilization, they yet observed a rude drama in which a common incident in life was imitated for the sake of diversion. And to pass to the other extremity of the world, among the Indians, whose social institutions and mental cultivation descend unquestionably from a ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... stayed whenever military success was checked. The Faith was meant for Arabia and not for the world, hence it is constitutionally incapable of change or development. The degradation of woman hinders the growth of freedom and civilization under it. ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... years old. There is no good reason for believing that, during all these years the developing dominant species would not increase as rapidly as the Jews, or the human race in historic times, especially since the restraints of civilization and marriage did not exist. But let us generously suppose that these remote ancestors, beginning with one pair, doubled their numbers in 1612.51 years, one-tenth as rapidly as the Jews, or 1240 times in 2,000,000 years. If we raise 2 to the 1240th power, the result ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... your host. La Hontan was glad he was directly leaving Acadia. He was fond of Saint-Castin. Few people could approach that young man without feeling the charm which made the Indians adore him. But any one who establishes himself in the woods loses touch with the light manners of civilization; his very vices take on an ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... aggressiveness. Father Ribaut finds the Indians of the Sierras a century behind those of the coast. They are devoid of spiritual ideas. Contact with traders, and association with wild sea rovers, have given the Indians of the shore much of the groundwork of practical civilization. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... people about him Monsieur du Bousquier is a man of means,—a respectable man, steady in his principles, upright, and obliging. Alencon owes to him its connection with the industrial movement by which Brittany may possibly some day be joined to what is popularly called modern civilization. Alencon, which up to 1816 could boast of only two private carriages, saw, without amazement, in the course of ten years, coupes, landaus, tilburies, and cabriolets rolling through her streets. The burghers and the land-owners, alarmed at first ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... don't mean the sky," he answered. "What you really mean is the desert. There's space, there's color, glorious, infinite, with an air purer than earthly. Such a life, Mildred! The utter freedom of it! None of this weary, dreary slavery you call civilization. That would be ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... infinitely worse than mere reverses of fortune: the disorders they generate shake the very foundations of morals; and while shattering the industry, they undermine the economy and frugality and rend the integrity of mankind. We doubt whether any of the great forms of evil incident to our imperfect civilization—the slave-trade, debauchery, pauperism—cause more individual anguish or more public detriment than these incessant revolutions in the value and tenure of property. Those afflict limited classes alone, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... supplemented by the researches of Rawlinson, George Smith, Oppert, Sayce, Sarzec, Pinches, and others, and thus it was revealed more clearly than ever before that as far back as the time assigned in Genesis to the creation a great civilization was flourishing in Mesopotamia; that long ages, probably two thousand years, before the scriptural date assigned to the migration of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, this Chaldean civilization had bloomed ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... That is what bothers me. I was going to lead this expedition to London, Paris, and New York, admiral. That is where the money is, and to get it you've got to go ashore, to headquarters. You cannot nowadays find it on the high seas. Modern civilization," said Kidd, "has ruined the pirate's business. The latest news from the other world has really opened my eyes to certain facts that I never dreamed of. The conditions of the day of which I speak are ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... patrician, with inherited feudal privileges, but has welcomed the thrifty Pilgrim, the Puritan, the Scotch Covenanter, the French Huguenot, the Ironsides soldiers of the great Cromwell. The men and women of this fusion have shaped our civilization. New England gave its distinctive character to the American colonies, and finally to the nation. New England influences still breathe from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the great lakes to Mexico; and Boston, still the focus of the New England ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... will see us there. I don't want to go. If we were at peace, and were to spend a few months of the warmest season out there, none would be more eager and delighted than I: but to leave our comfortable home, and all it contains, for a rough pine cottage seventeen miles away even from this scanty civilization, is sad. It must be! We are hourly expecting two regiments of Yankees to occupy the Garrison, and some fifteen hundred of our men are awaiting them a little way off, so the fight seems inevitable. And we must go, leaving what little has already been spared us to the tender mercies ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... then entirely an American product. As to Englishmen here doing this kind of work, it would be of advantage to know whether they were merely travelers or sojourners, or had been here long enough to be considered an integral part of our civilization. However useful this information would be, it is, in a majority of cases, unobtainable. Most of the translations appeared without any indication as to authorship. One thing that may partly account for this ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... Island, the total area of American coal fields has been reckoned at not less than two hundred thousand square miles. We can hardly estimate the value of these great stores of fossil fuel to an industrial civilization. The forests of the coal swamps accumulated in their woody tissues the energy which they received from the sun in light and heat, and it is this solar energy long stored in coal seams which now forms the world's chief source of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... long for the centres of civilization; to touch elbows with their activities; to feel the flow of the current of humanity in great streets. Not that I wanted to give up Little Rivers, but I wanted to go forth to fill the mind with argosies which I could enjoy here at my leisure. And Mary ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer |
