For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.
To live like we are supposed to, we need to listen to our blood, so to speak. Our paganism is in our blood, and to be able to create a positive and meaningful civilization in the future, on the ruins of the ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ we live in today, we need to live in accordance with our blood.
No administration could stop the tidal wave of immigration that swept over the land; no political party could restrain or control the enterprise of our people, and no reasonable man could desire to check the march of civilization.
So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.
The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.
Well, I think, you know, the arts are really what – one of the things that make this country strong. We always think it’s our economy or our military power, but in fact, I think it’s our culture, our civilization, our ideas, our creativity.
What I needed and actually need is a discipline of tradition, which is lacking in our civilization. Discipline of tradition and the ceremony of humbleness.
Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.
If Reagan and John Paul II were linked by anything, it was a grand, ambitious, and generous idea of Western political civilization, one in which a democratic Europe would be integrated by multiple economic, political, and cultural links, and held together beneath an umbrella of American hegemony.
Our own civilization has lost its way, and this makes us even more vulnerable to Islamist nihilism.
It is said that Mahatma Gandhi, when asked about Western civilization, remarked, ‘I think it would be a good idea.’ That’s how I feel about intelligent life on Earth, especially when I think about the question of what truly intelligent life might look like elsewhere in the universe.
Partners from the Islamic world are of particular importance. Indeed, they have huge incentives to be involved, as the ongoing struggles are generally not clashes between civilizations. Rather, what we are seeing is more accurately a clash within a civilization: that of the Islamic world.
All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.
Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.
I believe, 50 years from now, when you write history, one technology that would have changed human civilization is going to be the mobile Internet.
Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.
What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete.
I have been obsequious toward Western civilization, exaggerating its merits and, at the same time, exaggerating my own merits.
I’m more into human nature than politics. But they’re intertwined. Obviously, I live in civilization, so politics are part of my life.
The slum is the measure of civilization.
Without winners, there wouldn’t even be any civilization.
Education is the transmission of civilization.
The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.
The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.
We need to make sure that the Voyager probes carrying a record of human civilization speeding beyond our solar system remain an introduction to the world that sent them and not an epitaph for a civilization that caused its own ruin.
For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.
Tolerance is held to be a condition of mind which is encouraged by, and is necessary for, civilization.
We’ve gotta become the Martians. I’m a Martian – I tell you to become Martians. And we’ve gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.
I just think we’re on this rock orbiting a sun that’s going to go out, and I don’t know that human society is necessarily a wonderful thing for the planet. I think people can be kind to one another and share things, but I don’t know that this particular iteration of civilization is to be preferred to any other.
United States and our allied partners need to wake up. ISIS is at war with us and civilization.
Shakespeare is, essentially, the emanation of the Renaissance. The overflow of his fame on the Continent in later years was but the sequel of the flood of the Renaissance in Western Europe. He was the child of that great movement, and marks its height as it penetrated the North with civilization.
China, with her five thousand years of history, her vast territory and her enormous population stands like a mountain peak among the nations of the world. Her contribution to the civilization of mankind is imperishable. She has been a keen lover of peace; she has had a deep respect for international justice.
Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.
I’ve begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes. Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvellous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.
I think that we, as a civilization, need to sit down and figure out how to solve political problems over a table, not over a battlefield.
Civilization in our time is driven by materialism and troubled by pollution, over-population, corruption, and violence. National parks can hardly be uncoupled from the society around them, but that only makes it more important to protect them and keep them whole and pure.
From stoplights to skyscrapers, turn anywhere in civilization and you will see imagination at work. It’s in our inventions, advances and remedies and how a single parent masterminds each day. Imagination is boundless, surrounds us and resides in us all.
I count myself a a rationalist and a skeptic with a very conscious awareness of my indebtedness to Western Christian civilization, and I am a fairly passionate defender of it.
I’m particularly drawn to actors in their own little drama. I find it’s that area I’m very alive to. And I don’t encounter it that often. You have to be far from civilization, you have to be far from New York or London to find people who do that.
This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Civilization needs a new operating system.
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.
The only people who steal are thieves, and that’s a very small percentage of civilization. Most people want to have some way to make the economic transaction valid. They want to return the favor, if you will… return the benefit and reciprocate.
Right now we’re working on finishing up Pirates! for the Xbox, we’re developing Civilization IV and we’ve got a couple other games in development that we’ll tell you about soon.
The family is the nucleus of civilization.
I’ve been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture. I’ve been wondering about this, because our civilization is completely dependent on science and high technology, yet most of us are alienated from science.
I do not believe that the values which the Western democracies consider essential to civilization can survive in a world rent by the international anarchy of nationalism and the economic anarchy of competitive enterprise.
We should be concerned about the impact of climate change on vulnerable populations, without question. There is nothing automatic about adaptation. But it’s clear that there is simply no science that supports claims that rising sea levels threaten civilization much less the apocalypse.
