Civilisation Quotes - Page 8

• 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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• A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.

  Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

  Culture, Mythology

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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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• 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.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Art, Past, Trying

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• All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a facade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language—they are the foundation of civility and civilisation.

  Leon Krier

  Law, Cities, Space

  Leon Krier (2009). “The Architecture of Community”, p.439, Island Press

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

  Alan Furst

  Heart, Paris, You Like It

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• 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.

  Germaine Greer

  Mistake, Women, Agitation

  germaine greer (1971). “the female eunuch”

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• The natural tendency of representative government, as of modern civilisation, is towards collective mediocrity: and this tendency is increased by all reductions and extensions of the franchise, their effect being to place the principal power in the hands of classes more and more below the highest level of instruction in the community.

  John Stuart Mill

  Government, Hands, Class

  John Stuart Mill (2016). “Considerations on Representative Government”, p.196, John Stuart Mill

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• 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.

  Viktor Schauberger

  Men, Unity, Ignorant

  Viktor Schauberger, Callum Coats (1999). “The Water Wizard – The Extraordinary Properties of Natural Water: Volume 1 of Renowned Environmentalist Viktor Schauberger’s Eco-Technology Series”, p.9, Gill & Macmillan Ltd

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• The Unconscious Civilisation There is a certain terrifying dignity to the big ideologies. With the stroke of an intellectual argument the planet is put in its place. Only the bravest or the most foolish of individuals would not become passive before such awe inspiring destinies.

  John Ralston Saul

  Destiny, Political, Intellectual

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• 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.

  John Hughlings Jackson

  Men, Abuse, Brain

  John Hughlings Jackson, James Taylor, Sir Gordon Holmes (1958). “Selected Writings of John Hughlings Jackson: Evaluation and dissolution of the nervous system. Speech. Various papers, addresses and lectures”

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• 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.

  Sigmund Freud

  Deceit, Culture, Conflict

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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.

  Donald Watson

  Animal, Past, Civilization

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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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• If it were felt that the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being; that it is not only a coordinate element with all that is designated by the terms civilisation, instruction, education, culture, but is itself a necessary part and condition of all those things; there would be no danger that liberty should be undervalued.

  John Stuart Mill

  Individuality, Liberty, Essentials

  John Stuart Mill (1989). “J. S. Mill: 'On Liberty' and Other Writings”, p.57, Cambridge University Press

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