Ask, ‘How are we different from the great apes?’ We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human.
Climate change remains the biggest threat to our civilisation, economy and security – even bigger than Brexit.
At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.
I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation – television and videos and all this.
Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle.
The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles.
I love fashion, beauty, glamour. It’s the mark of civilisation.
I think one of the most important changes of our time has been our attitude to fear. Every civilisation defends itself by keeping fears out and saying ‘we protect you from fear’. But it also produces new fears and throughout history people have changed the kind of fears which have worried them.
Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.
Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.
It’s interesting that the treatment of historical events by art precedes the civilisation of people through democracy.
If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.
I profess accurately to describe native Africa – Africa in those places where it has not received the slightest impulse, whether for good or evil, from European civilisation.
I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
Despite all the achievements of civilisation, the human being is still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth.
Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.
Entire civilisation stands on submission and obedience of mother.
The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation.
Wherever possible, I try to see things from the other side of the dividing line and to read civilisation ‘against the grain.’
Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilisation.
I can understand better than most the contradiction between the idealistic civilisation and religious morals of Europe and what they did with the slaves, because the root of the evil is only two generations away from me. Maybe this has fed my need to fight against the abuses of modern civilisation.
We were a Western civilisation, an English speaking civilisation, both NZ and Australia, and we had all these influences coming from both Great Britain and America to us; sending us their culture in the shape and form of movies and television.
Borne out of this, starting around the 17th Century was the Baroque era. It is my view that it is one of the architectural peak periods in western civilisation.
In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world.
History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there’s been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
Men are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.
There are people who just love to destroy other people. It saddens me to admit that, I think, at whatever state of human civilisation we arrive at, the will to destroy other people is something that is innate in some people.
One person’s barbarity is another person’s civilisation.
I always thought of Djibouti as a place where human history hasn’t really begun yet – or perhaps it’s already over. There’s something in the landscape that’s stronger than human civilisation. There’s no agriculture, for example, and there are live volcanoes.
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