Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our l...
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigat...
A prayerless age will have but scant models of divine power. The age may be a better age than the past, but there is an infinite distance between the betterment of an age by the force of an advancing civilization and its betterment by the increase of...
Kita umat Islam di Indonesia terikat pada adat-kebiasaan dan kebudayaan kita, dan ini mempunyai pengaruh pula pada Islam yang kita amalkan di tanah air kita ini.
Tuhan ingin menyampaikan risalah kepada manusia. Untuk itu Tuhan mengirim Rasul-rasul dan Nabi Muhammad adalah salah satu dari Rasul-rasul itu. Risalah yang ingin disampaikan Tuhan ialah norma-norma akhlak dan syariat.
Al-Quran dalam pendapatnya mempunyai sifat supernatural. Kemukjizatannya terletak bukan hanya pada isi dan kebenaran psikologis dan mistisnya, tetapi juga pada cepatnya Islam meluas ke daerah-daerah di luar semenanjung Arabia.
The earth is an orbiting speck in incomprehensible vastness. The histories of our civilizations, our accomplishments and secrets, great good and evil—these are no more significant than the single twinkle of a star. Perhaps, this is why we try to ou...
Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak ...
The least successful athletes, those who have never won any victories, suddenly call themselves trainers.
The human rights community has focused very narrowly on political and civil rights for many decades, and with reason, but now we have to ask how can we broaden the view.
Obama's not down for the civil rights struggle, and he certainly wasn't down for the apartheid struggle, but he's clearly gonna take advantage of it and insert himself in such a way as to make it look like he is single-handedly responsible for aparth...
We have barely emerged from centuries of barbarism. It's not a surprise that there are shocking inequities in this world. It is hard work to climb down out of the trees and walk upright,and build a viable global civilization when you start with techn...
Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to imagine possibilities and then turn those possibilities into realities. Evident in the gifts of civilization—in our arts, languages, sciences, technologies, businesses, governments, and so on—it is c...
I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and - and clear. You relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other ...
[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A v...
Everyone lies... It may not be about the same thing, but everyone does it. People do it to fit in, people do it to feel civilized, and there are many more reasons. You can be an honest person, and still be a liar. Everyone lies, including your God. I...
When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from ...
They have some pretty tough gun laws in Japan, as they do in any other civilized country in the world, and they're not killing each other off with firearms. You have very violent films in Europe, yet it's not causing the mayhem we see in our streets ...
In my mid-adolescence, my friend Terry Martin and I became obsessed with William F. Buckley. This makes more sense when you realize that we were living in Bible Belt farming country miles from civilization. Buckley seemed impossibly exotic.
Civility is not a specific code of behavior as much as it is a call to unrelenting preemptive thought, and steady effort to care about influence on others.
Words have meaning beyond the obvious. Words have consequences beyond intentions. Civil words align risk and reward of such unknowns.