The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.
Our understanding of Shakespeare already depends largely on the vitality of Renaissance elements in our education. Each man must live in his own generation, as the saying is; but the generations are bound together by the golden links of the great tradition of civilization.
A lot of people thought of me as a threat to Western civilization.
Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
You know when civilization began? With the invention of the mirror.
Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.
Civilization is hideously fragile and there’s not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.
We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.
Give me civilization. I don’t want to be pampered.
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
Civilization grew in the beginning from the minute that we had communication – particularly communication by sea that enabled people to get inspiration and ideas from each other and to exchange basic raw materials.
Several years ago, when I was about to start a novel, I thought I might get some mileage out of the idea of a civilization in which people somehow felt – that is, they shared – all the pain and all the pleasure they caused one another.
A writer is justly called ‘universal’ when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.
My two interests are spirituality and politics. I would mesh them in some way; maybe try to figure out the politics of spirituality, or the spirituality of politics. Or maybe come up with this really crazy naive solution for the end of civilization.
A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.
The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.
When I’m not writing, I do a lot of research reading on the shape of civilization. Fiction can be a lot of different things… but I feel like it’s my job to write about the way things are.
