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 U.S. I think there's a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn't mean...
...if anyone who speaks up to criticise something obviously evil is punished merely for speaking, civilisation will be in a bad way.
Adventures, I reflected, are all very fine but a certain amount of civilised comfort forms the true kernel of our desires.
Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?
There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.
The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world b...
I am very excited to be supporting one of the world's most visionary efforts to seek basic answers to some of the fundamental question about our universe and what other civilisations may exist elsewhere.
The conquistadors and their followers were very rough people, and they were fixated on gold and silver. They were oblivious to the astonishing achievements of the Inca civilisation.
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.
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.
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.
Suicide is possible, but not probable; hanging, I trust, is even more unlikely; for I hope that, by the time I die, my countrymen will have become civilised enough to abolish capital punishment.
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 ...
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.
Environmental activism against the resource industry is widespread all over the world, but at the same time we have to realise that these are basic materials on which civilisation depends. We need to tap natural resources in a sustainable manner.
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.
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 slow rhythm of the body, the insistent rhythm of the wit, were they becoming irreconcilable in modern civilisation? The sedentary life, frustration and irritability; work with the body, fatigue - and peace of mind.
I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.
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 world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation.
