#civilisation

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. ↗

— Muhammad Yunus

#civilization #crisis #debt #enormous #environmental

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. ↗

— Richard O'Brien

#australia #both #britain #civilisation #coming

As he grew older, which was mostly in my absence, my firstborn son, Alexander, became ever more humorous and courageous. There came a time, as the confrontation with the enemies of our civilization became more acute, when he sent off various applications to enlist in the armed forces. I didn't want to be involved in this decision either way, especially since I was being regularly taunted for not having 'sent' any of my children to fight in the wars of resistance that I supported. (As if I could 'send' anybody, let alone a grown-up and tough and smart young man: what moral imbeciles the 'anti-war' people have become.) ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#civilisation #courage #enemies #fathers #humour

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. ↗

— Benjamin Disraeli

#comfort #materialism #progress #science #science

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. ↗

— Al Gore

#churchill #civilisation #everything #except #fashion

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

— Lennart Meri

#between #bit #bond #civilisation #lost

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. ↗

— Rupert Murdoch

#children #civilisation #considered #crazy #family

This is indeed a clash of civilisations, not between Islam and Christendom but between reason and superstition. ↗

— Polly Toynbee

#christendom #civilisations #clash #indeed #islam

Girls say to me, very reasonably, 'why isn't it a bunch of girls? Why did you write this about a bunch of boys?' Well, my reply is I was once a little boy - I have been a brother, a father, I am going to be a grandfather. I have never been a sister, or a mother, or a grandmother. That's one answer. Another answer is of course to say that if you - as it were - scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more ike a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be. Don't ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say because I'm going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality - this is nothing to do with equality at all. I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been. But one thing you can't do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilisation, of society. The other thing is - why aren't they little boys AND little girls? Well, if they'd been little boys and little girls, we being who we are, sex would have raised its lovely head, and I didn't want this to be about sex. Sex is too trivial a thing to get in with a story like this, which was about the problem of evil and the problem of how people are to live together in a society, not just as lovers or man and wife. ↗

— William Golding

#civilisation #equality #life-experience #lord-of-the-flies #men

In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane. ↗

— Yukichi Fukuzawa

#civilization #culture #humanity #inspirational #inspirational