Curiosity is the engine of civilisation

Roving dogs do not indicate the civilisation or compassion of the society. They betray on the country the ignorance and lethargy of its members.

We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation.

Climate change remains the biggest threat to our civilisation, economy and security – even bigger than Brexit.

The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.

I’m sick. I’ve eaten civilisation and I’m sick.

From its first faint glimmerings, History shews Man’s constant progress as a beast of prey. As such he conquers every land, subdues the fruit-fed races, founds mighty realms by subjugating other subjugators, forms states and sets up civilisations, to enjoy his prey at rest.

People with really weak characters cause an immense amount of suffering in the world. They destroy whole civilisations.

If there is one country and its people that have contributed most to western civilisation’s man-made world continuously for the last 2000 years, it must surely be Italy.

The city of the future development will be shifted from the pursuit of material civilisation to the pursuit of nature. This is what happens after human beings experience industrial civilisation at the expense of the natural environment.

Entire civilisation stands on submission and obedience of mother.

People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.

We are producing urban places which are disjointed and disconnected and not worthy of our civilisation

The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas.

A good civilisation spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilisation stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella-artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.

My theory is that hip-hop is the most advanced version of civilisation on earth, and we are here to usher the rest of humanity into the Age of Aquarius.

Despite all the achievements of civilisation, the human being is still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth.

And … and what is civilisation if it isn’t people talking to each other over a goddamned beer?

Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

Up until 1400BC, citadel settlements are stable. Goddesses – notably in charge of fertility and learning – have a crucial role to play. But as civilisation gets greedy and society more militaristic, these wise women are edged to the sidelines in favour of a thundering, male warrior god.

Golf is an indispensable adjunct to high civilisation.

I came in contact with every known Indian anarchist in London. Their bravery impressed me, but I felt that their zeal was misguided. I felt that violence was no remedy for India’s ills, and that her civilisation required the use of a different and higher weapon for self-protection. – Hind Swaraj

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It’s where it all began and ended.

We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational.

I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation – television and videos and all this.

The great changes in civilisation and society have been wrought by deeply held beliefs and passion rather than by a process of rational deduction.

Advice for a human 86. To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilisation advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.

Civilisation cannot survive if it rests on a propertyless proletariat.

On this waterlogged landscape….are scattered palaces and hovels….It is here that the human spirit becomes perfect, and at the same time brutalised, that civilisation produces its marvels and that civilised man returns to the savage.

Indian civilisation does not distinguish in terms of religion. We are an impossible achievement in the world and I’m very proud to be an Indian.

We have written the evidence of our existence onto the surface of our planet. Our civilisation has become a beacon, that identifies our planet as home to life.

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.

The realization of justice is, in the actual state of things, a matter of life or death for society and for civilisation itself.

We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.

I believe that there have been civilisations in the past that were familiar with atomic energy, and that by misusing it they were totally destroyed.

We don’t know the spiritual advancements long-term veganism – over generations – would have for human life. It would be certainly a different civilisation, and the first one in the whole of our history that would truly deserve the title of being a civilisation.

Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.

I am distinctly opposed to visibly arrogant and arbitrary extremes of government–but this is simply because I wish the safety of an artistic and intellectual civilisation to be secure, not because I have any sympathy with the coarse-grained herd who would menace the civilisation if not placated by sops.

As much as football can cause war, it can also cause peace. Football is a kind of Geiger counter of civilisation, or a catalyst for good as well as bad.

Whatever is fine and permanent in human achievement has been realised through individuals courageously facing the circumstances of their being; and a society is civilised to the extent to which it makes this possible. Terrorism, which aims at putting out thespiritual light, is the antithesis of civilisation.

It used to be said that you had to know what was happening in America because it gave us a glimpse of our future. Today, the rest of America, and after that Europe, had better heed what happens in California, for it already reveals the type of civilisation that is in store for all of us.

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.

The First World War not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century.

The basis of drama is… the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable.

The World’s Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the US. I think there’s a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn’t meant to last.

There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived.

Modern mass culture, aimed at the “consumer“, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There’s always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.

Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle.

What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.

COв‚‚ emissions anywhere threaten civilisation everywhere.

Our civilisation has lost this bond between times, and tends to measure time with a yardstick, bit by bit, from one point to another.

Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees…to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. – Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929

The idea that war should be conducted within a moral framework may seem like a quaint medieval practice, but as speech separates humans from the apes, so morality separates civilisation from the barbarians.

During the civilisation and development process of more than 5,000 years, the Chinese nation has made an indelible contribution to the civilisation and advancement of mankind.

Civilisation has ever accompanied emigration and conquest – the conflict of opinion, of religion, or of race

I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely democratic government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilisation would perish; or order and property would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish.

Our presence on this planet does not seem to be sustainable. Our technical civilization makes up particularly vulnerable. There is talk all over the scientific community about climate change. Many of them [scientists] agree, the end of human life on earth is assured.

The penetration of society by the Internet and the penetration of the Internet by society is the best thing that has ever happened to global human civilisation.

When one is the agent of order and civilisation in the universe, one doesn’t stoop to negotiate. Especially with nonhumans.

It’s interesting that the treatment of historical events by art precedes the civilisation of people through democracy.

Like other systems in decay, the Roman Empire continued to function for several generations after its vitality was sapped. For nearly a hundred years our Island was one of the scenes of conflict between a dying civilisation and lusty, famishing barbarism.

The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.

Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.

Chemistry… is like the maid occupied with daily civilisation; she is busy with fertilisers, medicines, glass, insecticides … for she dispenses the recipes.

Civilisation is a conspiracy.

Newspaper : A device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.

A stable climate is the most fundamental resource of all. No one has yet built a civilisation in an unstable climate

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.

Many people in Europe and the U.S. dispute the thesis that we are living through a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west. But a radical minority of Muslims firmly believes that Islam is under siege, and is committed to winning the holy war it has declared against the West.

No civilisation can claim to have a monopoly on universal values and no one can claim to be always faithful to his own values.

I can say that we are very clear in our mind about the responsibility of the national soldiers for the break with civilisation that was the Shoah. We are firmly convinced that this is something that will have to be handed over to generations to come… so we don’t see any reason to change our view of history.

What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old … an advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque

Scientific civilisation has destroyed the soul of the world.

Civilisation needs more than the law to hold it together. You see, all mankind are not equally willing to accept as divine justice what is called human law.

Science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.

In some ways, I lament the introduction of civilisation on such a huge scale, because it has given us a lot of room to abuse each other, which we continue to do.

Modern civilisation is complicated and artificial. Simple folk live in a world of love and peace. Let no one hate another or harm another.

In 1957, I was studying the Pleiades star cluster at Harvard University‘s radio observatory. On one occasion, we saw an added feature in the data. It turned out to be an amateur radio enthusiast near the observatory, but at the time, I thought we had detected clear evidence of another civilisation.

Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and christianise Christendom?

Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees…to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation.

There can be little doubt that in many ways the story of bridge building is the story of civilisation. By it we can readily measure an important part of a people’s progress.

The sword of Mahomet, and the Coran, are the most stubborn enemies of Civilisation, Liberty, and Truth, which the world has yet known.

I must say I have a personal love affair with India, with its civilisation, its culture.

The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation.

Civilisation has ever accompanied emigration and conquest – the conflict of opinion, of religion, or of race.

I like looking at the countryside as well as anyone… a little countryside goes a long way, but it’s almost like the DNA of a civilisation is in its cities.

Galactic plankton is undoubtedly out there, but it’s statistically highly likely there’s also another intelligent civilisation out there somewhere. Unfortunately, the distances and time differences are so great, communication might remain impossible.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.

As civilisation advances, the deities lessen in number, the divine powers become concentrated more and more in one Being, and God rules over the whole earth, maketh the clouds his chariot, and reigns above the waterfloods as a king.

I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation.

Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilisation and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.

It is impossible to remain indifferent to Japanese culture. It is a different civilisation where all you have learnt must be forgotten. It is a great intellectual challenge and a gorgeous sensual experience.

There are messages about civilisations and we are trying to be true to history as much as possible. We wanted all this to gel with some good theory about why these civilisations went down, why they weakened and crumbled. Because they did, they vanished.

Education is the transformation of civilisation

What, after all, was the point of civilisation if not the well-being of citizens?

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

We must delve deep into history the better to engage a true dialogue of civilisations. Fear of the present can impose upon the past its own biased vision.

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.

The enduring lesson is war is a disaster. Whoever wins, tremendous loss of life, property – a set back for civilisation.

What we are witnessing now is a clash of civilisations, not just between states but within them.

Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.

You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.

We can see quite plainly that our present civilization is built on the exploitation of animals, just as past civilisations were built on the exploitation of slaves.

What is the difference between a 2В°C world and a 4В°C world? Human civilisation!

It is so stupid of modern civilisation to have given up believing in the devil when he is the only explanation of it.

The stream of civilisation flows on like a river: it is rapid in mid- current, slow at the sides, and has its backwaters. At best, civilisation advances by spirals.

Take seriously the traditions, the Christian roots, and all the values that are the basis of the civilisation of Europe.

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.

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .

If the truth be told, we are a society that is dripping in racism. This is not in the least surprising. For the best part of two centuries, we British ruled the waves, controlled two-fifths of the planet, and believed it was our responsibility to bring civilisation to those who allegedly lacked it.

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.

Civilisation was built around wheat, around people settling down and not being nomadic. Baking is one of the oldest professions.

The progress and civilisation of the human race simply mean controlling this nature.

When we say Tamil, we are not talking of a language but an entire civilisation.

The French have made conversation their claim to civilisation.

Myths are part of our DNA. We’re a civilisation with a continuous culture. The effort to modernize it keeps it alive. Readers connect with it.

The future of civilization depends on our overcoming the meaninglessness and hopelessness which characterize the thoughts and convictions of men today, and reaching a state of fresh hope and fresh determination.

Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion.

Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren’t.

We must realise that man’s nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles.

It has been said that he who was the first to abuse his fellow-man instead of knocking out his brains without a word, laid thereby the basis of civilisation.

Words make a world of difference. Over time, they become charged with inference and allusion and, deployed effectively, they have the power to change the very fabric of our civilisation.

The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.

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.

letters are not the first, but the last step in the progression from barbarism to civilisation.

Be grateful for challenges because… Had there been no difficulties and no thorns in the way, then [each woman and] man would have been in his primitive state and no progress made in civilisation and mental culture.

As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can’t take off.

We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we too would become Taliban.

To discover a system for the avoidance of war is a vital need of our civilisation.

I knew that Britain and the United States were beacons of freedom and democracy at a time when my life – and Western civilisation itself – was at grave risk.

Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

The Hindu civilisation is a diabolical contrivance to enslave humanity. Its proper name would be infamy.

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.

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.

Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn’t take an awful lot to unleash it.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the “massacre of innocent people” or, if you like, “a clash of civilisations” and “collateral damage“. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice.

Our shouting is louder than our actions, Our swords are taller than us, This is our tragedy. In short We wear the cape of civilisation But our souls live in the stone age

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.

But the ear, let us not forget, starts operating on the forty-fifth day of the pregnancy of a woman. Seven and a half months advance over the eye…(but) what do we do in our society, in our civilisation, to continue this process?

We stand then for freedom, because we claim the right to develop our own individuality and evolve our own destiny along our own lines, unembarrassed by what Western civilisation has to teach us and unhampered by the institutions which the West has imposed.

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.

Paris is the fountain-head of European civilisation, as Gomukhi is of the Ganga.

This civilisation is the work of man, who high-handedly and ignorant of the true workings of Nature, has created a world without meaning or foundation, which now threatens to destroy him, for through his behaviour and his activities, he, who should be her master, has disturbed Natureäs inherent unity.

With every throb of the climatic pulse which we have felt in Central Asia,, the centre of civilisation has moved this way and that. Each throb has sent pain and decay to the lands whose day was done, life and vigour to those whose day was yet to be.

What do we value more: an economic system which privileges profit above all other considerations, or the continued existence of human civilisation as we recognise it? A reckoning is coming.

The strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilisation’s success and the primary reason why cities existwe must free ourselves from our tendency to see cities as their buildings, and remember that the real city is made of flesh, not concrete.

Finally, we might decide that civilisation itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population – weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example…

Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

Civilisation never dies, it may change, but it is eternal. Where the paddy field is born on the dry river bed of Titash, there begins another civilisation.

Climate change is an existential threat to our economy, and ultimately to civilisation as we know it.

I’m considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family – father, mother, children – is fundamental to our civilisation.

The creation of a nuclear weapons convention is not only achievable, it is imperative if civilisation is to survive.

A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.

The crossing of space … may do much to turn men’s minds outwards and away from their present tribal squabbles. In this sense, the rocket, far from being one of the destroyers of civilisation, may provide the safety-value that is needed to preserve it.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

The central industry of modern civilisation, tending, because of its control over materials, to spread into and ultimately incorporate older industries such as mining, smelting, oil- refining, textiles, rubber, building, and even agriculture in respect to fertilizers and food processing.

Jesus is absolutely at the centre of Western civilisation and part of my fascination with him is, why? What is it about this particular man and his story?

I think it’s important to understand that in the big historical context of things, there has been land degradation from civilisation since the beginning of history. I mean, the Rajputana desert in India is a manmade desert caused by overgrazing.

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.

It crosses my mind that our generation may leave problems that are simply too hard for human society in the generations that follow. The structures that separate civilisation from disorder are thin and fragile. (But) I am not gloomy by nature so don’t presume that the global community will fail the young people.