Civilisation Quotes - Page 5

• 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?

  Daniel Barenboim

  Pregnancy, Eye, Listening

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• In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Teacher, Art, Book

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• There's a fundamental difference, if you sort of look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars...compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.

  Elon Musk

  Stars, Differences, Space

  "The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity". TED Talk, www.ted.com. February 2013.

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• Western civilisation came to this country in 1788 and I'm proud of that...

  Tony Abbott

  Country, Proud, Western

  "The Authentic Mr Abbott". "Four Corners" with Liz Jackson, www.abc.net.au. March 15, 2010.

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• Europe is standing on the brink of the greatest tragedy in the history of the human race: a new world war, that may involve the doom of our entire civilisation.

  Vidkun Quisling

  War, Europe, Race

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• 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.

  Samuel P. Huntington

  Islamic, People, Culture

  "American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear". Book by Khaled A. Beydoun, April 3, 2018.

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• A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.

  Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

  Culture, Mythology

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• Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

  David Deutsch

  Stars, Optimism, People

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• 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.

  Edward Glaeser

  Real, Cities, Collaboration

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• The first and most important impact of climate change on human civilisation will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply. Eating regularly is a non-negotiable activity and countries that cannot feed their people are unlikely to be reasonable about it.

  Gwynne Dyer

  Country, Impact, People

  Gwynne Dyer (2010). “Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats”, p.8, Oneworld Publications

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• Knowledge has always been important, of course. The ancient Egyptians did not raise the stones for the pyramids relying on the incantations of their gods. The waters in the irrigation canals of the great Indus Civilisation did not flow according to the laws of ignorance. Knowledge has always been power and wealth.

  Mahathir Mohamad

  Ignorance, Knowledge, Law

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• 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.

  Harry Seidler

  Country, Men, Years

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• 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.

  Alan Moore

  Reality, Ideas, Mind

  "What Is Reality?". Proposed text for "Holy Smoke" by Alan Moore, 1999.

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• Scientific civilisation has destroyed the soul of the world.

  Alexis Carrel

  Animal, Soul, World

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• 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.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Light, Achievement, Society

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• Man cannot pretend to be higher in ethics, spirituality, advancement, or civilization than other creatures and at the same time live by lower standards than the vulture or hyena.

  H. Jay Dinshah

  Equality, Men, Hyenas

  "Compassion, the Ultimate Ethic: An Exploration of Veganism" by Victoria Moran, (p. 32), 1985.

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

  Winston Churchill

  Beautiful, Cutting, Tree

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

  C. G. Weeramantry

  Nuclear, Weapons, Creation

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

  Swami Vivekananda

  Mean, Race, Progress

  Swami Vivekananda (2014). “Raja Yoga”, p.11, Lulu Press, Inc

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

  Moshe Safdie

  Urban, Architecture, Worthy

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• 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.

  Anandi Gopal Joshi

  Gratitude, Grateful, Men

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• Civilisation is never so charming as when it is an island in the middle of simplicity, or of a civilisation of an alien kind.

  William Hurrell Mallock

  Islands, Simplicity, Aliens

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• 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.

  Ritwik Ghatak

  Rivers, Bed, Dry

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• Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and delimited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules and games which we call civilisation. They're often absurd and farcical, and sometimes they're tragic, yet we acknowledge that they are necessary.

  Peter Greenaway

  Games, Sometimes, Absurd

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• Turns out we've been eating the wrong things...since the dawn of civilisation

  Lewis Black

  Dawn, Eating, Turns

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