Civil

Famous quotes containing the word civil:

    The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water,—so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    What I fear is being in the presence of evil and doing nothing. I fear that more than death.
    Otilia De Koster, Panamanian civil rights monitor. As quoted in Newsweek magazine, p. 15 (December 19, 1988)

    Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.
    Edmund Burke (1729–1797)