civilize

The idea that the Spanish arrived “to civilize is not one we should share.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 18, 2026

“We have to civilize a market that has gotten out of control,” said Ms. Colau, a former housing activist who rose to power with an organization that fought against foreclosures.

From New York Times ● Nov. 21, 2021

By the fifth century BCE, some of the larger villages of Macedon grew big enough to be considered cities, and elite Macedonians made efforts to civilize their country in the style of the southern Greeks.

From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2020

You can civilize pungent shoes, too, with products that employ apple cider vinegar, cedar or charcoal to absorb rather than mask the acrid smell.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 31, 2018

Somewhere above, the rockets burned down to civilize a beautifully dead planet.

From "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury

We sense early on, from Mortensen’s delicate handling of their courtship, that this isn’t some musty rehash of the trope where she civilizes him and he domesticates her.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 31, 2024

But there she is, one of the immortal characters of literature, and how can you not fall in love with somebody who civilizes savage people by telling them stories?

From New York Times ● Sep. 4, 2015

Far from revealing our barbarism, fighting civilizes us, Gottschall writes.

From Washington Post ● Apr. 15, 2015

It opened up a discussion about anonymity, pseudonymity and whether using real names civilizes the Internet.

From Forbes ● Oct. 15, 2012

Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys, Unfriendly to society's chief joys: Thy worst effect is banishing for hours The sex whose presence civilizes ours.

From Familiar Quotations A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature by John Bartlett

They demonstrate that, together, freedom-loving nations are capable of defending a civilized international order.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 23, 2026

We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

From Slate ● Aug. 3, 2026

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said External link “taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” suggesting we get what we pay for.

From Barron's ● Apr. 14, 2026

The second is performed less persuasively, in part because the world is now a coarse place, much less receptive to his civilized ideas.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 10, 2026

Too civilized, they said, and downright unnatural, too, since no town the size of Blythe had any business existing out in the Mojave Desert.

From "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls

Heaney was born with a subject he often resisted, and “Digging” turns away from violence to the civilizing necessity of work.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 21, 2025

“Never darken my door again!” he thunders old-fashionedly, as though he’s subconsciously aware that the writers Kirsi Vikman and Jimmy Karlsson are drawing on centuries of love stories about savage men and civilizing women.

From New York Times ● Sep. 21, 2023

One might guess that the civilizing influence of Boomtown would form the arc of the season.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 10, 2023

What did “the civilizing mission” of industrialized nations entail?

From Textbooks ● Dec. 14, 2022

“I placed this young man with you,” she says to me in a terrible quiet voice, “in the hopes that you might provide a civilizing influence. It appears that I was gravely mistaken.”

From "Orphan Train" by Christina Baker Kline