Civilisation Quotes - Page 6

• 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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• If we ever talk to aliens, their civilisation will be far more advanced than ours (because of distances involved). They won't be religious!

  Richard Dawkins

  Religious, Distance, Aliens

  Richard Dawkins‏ @RichardDawkins, twitter.com. February 17, 2014.

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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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• I really feel like civilisation's already over. It's not ending but it's already done. We're all addicted to the concept that humanity equals civilisation and that's not the case. We need a global conversation to be able to decipher how we can live from this point forward. We have to redefine our relationship with our environment.

  Serj Tankian

  Humanity, Needs, Done

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

  Swami Vivekananda

  Paris, Fountain, Fountain Head

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.2469, Manonmani Publishers

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

  Paul Keating

  Passion, Belief, Process

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• India has millions of internally displaced people. And now, they are putting their bodies on the line and fighting back. They are being killed and imprisoned in their thousands. Theirs is a battle of the imagination, a battle for the redefinition of the meaning of civilisation, of the meaning of happiness, of the meaning of fulfilment.

  Arundhati Roy

  Fighting, People, Imagination

  "Arundhati Roy: 'The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution'". Interview with Arun Gupta, www.theguardian.com. November 30, 2011.

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• 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.

  Matthew Arnold

  Two, Interesting, Elements

  Matthew Arnold (2007). “Civilization in the United States”, p.190, Applewood Books

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• 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.

  Sufjan Stevens

  Thinking, Creating, World

  "State trouper". Interview with Lynsey Hanley, www.theguardian.com. November 20, 2005.

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• 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.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Men, Cities, Perfect

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• Civilisation has, indeed, become a slaughtering-car crowned by a grinning effigy of Comfort, before which man blindly and voluntarily hurls himself in his own ignorance.

  Eugen Sandow

  Ignorance, Men, Car

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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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• 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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• The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. They can persuade and can be persuaded by the disclosure of alternatives, the better and the worse. Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however, unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilization there is always an element of unrest.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Mean, Adventure, Men

  "Adventures of Ideas".

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