#civil

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#civilization #conventions #distinction #equality #individualism

When asked what gave her the strength and commitment to refuse segregation, (Rosa) Parks credited her mother and grandfather "for giving me the spirit of freedom... that I should not feel because of my race or color, inferior to any person. That I should do my very best to be a respectable person, to respect myself, to expect respect from others. ↗

— Jeanne Theoharis

#equal-rights #equality #inspirational #rosa-parks #equality

The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable. ↗

— Talal Asad

#eurabia #europe #european #islam #modernity-tags-civilization

I never thought I'd see the day that I would see white folks as frightened, or more so, than black folks was during the civil rights movement when we was in Mississippi. ↗

— Dick Gregory

#civil #civil rights #civil rights movement #day #during

Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society. ↗

— Walter Gropius

#civilized #civilized society #design #everyone #guiding

When and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law? ↗

— Benjamin Harrison

#been #black #civil #civil rights #conditions

Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that. ↗

— Suzanne Vega

#certain #civil #experience #follow #formalities

If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force. ↗

— Auberon Herbert

#cannot #certainly #civilization #effort #example

These men were religious when the spirit of religion was buried in forms and ceremonies, and when the priesthood had armed itself with the civil powers to put down all opposition, and suppress all freedom, intellectual, civil, and religious. ↗

— Ethan A. Hitchcock

#buried #ceremonies #civil #down #forms

People truly reaching across boundaries - be they religious or race, political or geographic. A state that is sincerely civil and respectful of each individual's pathway toward life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be our goal. ↗

— Jon Huntsman, Jr.

#boundaries #civil #each #geographic #goal