Quotes about civilisation
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“It is not until a community or an individual has advanced a fair distance along the path of civilisation and shows by its laws its elimination of many of its most mischievous dispositions — notably sadism — that it can bear to admit the equality of women.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

"Woman as Artist and Thinker" (1931)

Women, Law, Communication

“We may add that the Poland of the fifteenth century was one of the most civilised states of Europe.”

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800–1891) German Field Marshal

'Poland. A historical sketch'

“People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 1: The Skin of Our Teeth

People

“The more I thought it over, Kemp, the more I realised what a helpless absurdity an Invisible Man was—in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded civilised city. Before I made this mad experiment I had dreamt of a thousand advantages. That afternoon it seemed all disappointment. I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got. Ambition—what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there? What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah? I have no taste for politics, for the blackguardisms of fame, for philanthropy, for sport. What was I to do? And for this I had become a wrapped-up mystery, a swathed and bandaged caricature of a man!”

H. G. Wells book The Invisible Man

Source: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 23: In Drury Lane

Love, Disappointment, Sport, Appearance

“T'riss sat down opposite the Warden, her expression thoughtful. 'Is civilisation nothing but an illusion, then?'
'Crowd control.'
'Excuse me?'
'That's all civilisation is, T'riss. A means by which we manage the proliferation of our kind. It increases in complexity the more of us there are. Laws keeps us muzzled and punishment delivers the necessary message when those laws are broken. Civilizations in decline are notable when certain of their members escape justice, and do so with impunity.”

Steven Erikson book Forge of Darkness

Forge of Darkness (2013)

Justice, Law

“Did Libya invade Italy or was it Italy that invaded Libya? You attack us now as you did then. In other ways, with other systems, by supporting Israel, opposing Arab unity and our revolutions, frowning on Islam and calling us fanatics. We’ve been too patient with you. We’ve put up with your provocation for too long. If we hadn’t been so wise, we would have gone to war with you a thousand times. We didn’t because we think the use of force is a last resort for survival and because we have always been on the side of civilisation. After all, during the Middle Ages we civilised you. You were poor barbarians, primitive, savage creatures.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Interview with Oriana Fallaci (2 December 1979), Corriere della Sera
Interviews

War, Age, Way, Support

“It was, however, from Spain, and not from Arabia, that a knowledge of eastern mathematics first came into western Europe. The Moors had established their rules in Spain in 747, and by the tenth or eleven century had attained a high degree of civilisation.”

W. W. Rouse Ball (1850–1925) English mathematician

W. W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics (1888), Courier Dover, 1960, p. 164

Mathematics, Knowledge

“And for us in this country to think of having, for example, a dictatorship—a popular form of government in many countries to-day—would, on our part, be an act of consummate cowardice, an act of surrender, of throwing in our hands, a confession that we were unable to govern ourselves…In this country we do not want what I call the "get-rich-quick" mind. Speed and efficiency are very good things, and they are, perhaps, the idols of this generation. But they do not necessarily go together. Acceleration, as I have often said, is not a synonym for civilisation. It is quite true the State coach of this country may be going through heavy ground, the wheels may be creaking; but are you quite sure that the wheels of the State coach are not creaking to-day in Moscow, in Berlin, in Vienna? Are you quite certain that they are not creaking even in the United States of America?”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast from London (6 March 1934); published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 21.
1934

Thinking, Parting, Speed, Country

“If Amsterdam or Leningrad vie for the title of Venice of the North, then Venice - what compliment is high enough? Venice, with all her civilisation and ancient beauty, Venice with her addiction to curious aquatic means of transport, yes, my friends, Venice is the Henley of the South.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

"Paying through the Doge for Europe", Daily Telegraph, 11 March 2004, p. 22.
2000s, 2004

Beauty

“[T]he direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilisation. Not of this or that civilisation but — from what we can judge to-day — of any civilisation. …[T]he type of man dominant to-day is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Chap.IX: The Primitive and the Technical
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)

World

“I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilisation, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history to know then. I now know it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan, - that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Lie, History, Knowledge, Reality

“During the Middle Ages, and indeed, throughout later years…Our boundary was the sea; it was a fixed boundary, and a boundary which none could cross when once there was a united nation able to guard that sea frontier; and it is owing to that, primarily and principally, that we were able to develop in this country our own peculiar civilisation and our own freedom in a security which was alien, at that time, to almost every other nation of the world.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast from London (25 September 1933), quoted in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 11.
1933

Age, World, Freedom, Time

“Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren't.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

In an interview in Artforum, Nov. 83
Interviews

Life, History

“Has the artist ever considered the history of the "chop" which is brought so elegantly to his studio? … He has first employed a slaughterman … to convert a beautiful living creature into a hideous carcase, to be displayed with other carcases in that ugliest product of civilisation, a butcher's shop, and then he has employed a cook to conceal, as far as may be, the work of the slaughterman. This is what the Spectator calls being "humanised" by schools of cookery; I should call it being de-humanised.”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

The Humanities of Diet

School, Beauty, History, Cooking

“History is one long record of like illustrations. Must our modern civilisation with all its teeming wonders come to a like end? We are reproducing in faithful detail every cause which led to the downfall of the civilisations of other days—Imperialism, taking tribute from conquered races, the accumulation of great fortunes, the development of a population which owns no property, and is always in poverty. Land has gone out of cultivation and physical deterioration is an alarming fact. An so we Socialists say the system which is producing these results must not be allowed to continue. A system which has robbed religion of its saviour, destroyed handicraft, which awards the palm of success to the unscrupulous, corrupts the press, turns pure women on the streetsm and upright men into mean-spirited time-servers, cannot continue. In the end it is bound to work its own overthrow. Socialism with its promise of freedom, its larger hope for humanity, its triumph of peace over war, its binding of the races of the earth into one all-embracing brotherhood, must prevail. Capitalism is the creed of the dying present; socialism throbs with the life of the days that are to be. It has claimed its martyrs in the past, is claiming them now, will claim them still; but what then? Better to "rebel and die in the twenty worlds sooner than bear the yoke of thwarted life."”

Keir Hardie (1856–1915) Scottish socialist and labour leader

Source: From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), p. 103–104

Life, Women, Men, War

“There is … a clever maxim which bears upon what I was saying to you some little while ago, and that is, that unless wicked ideas take root in a naturally depraved mind, human nature, in a right] and wholesome state, revolts at [[crime. Still, from an artificial civilisation have originated wants, vices, and false tastes, which occasionally become so powerful as to stifle within us all good feelings, and ultimately to lead us into guilt and wickedness…”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Chapter 17 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo/Chapter_17 The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–1846)

Feeling, Idea, Nature, Falseness

“We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_commons_indiagovt_1833.html#13
Attributed

Freedom

“…The subjects we study at school can be divided roughly into two groups—the sciences and the arts. The sciences include mathematics, geography, chemistry, physics, and so on. Among the arts are drawing, painting, modelling, needlework, drama, music, literature. The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life, Education, School, Art

“You have destroyed the small monopolies so that the one great basic monopoly, property, may function the more freely and unrestrictedly. You have civilised the ends of the earth to win new terrain for the deployment of your vile avarice. You have brought about the fraternisation of the peoples – but the fraternity is the fraternity of thieves.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Ihr habt die kleinen Monopole vernichtet, um das EINE große Grundmonopol, das Eigentum, desto freier und schrankenloser wirken zu lassen; ihr habt die Enden der Erde zivilisiert, um neues Terrain für die Entfaltung eurer niedrigen Habsucht zu gewinnen, ihr habt die Völker verbrüdert, aber zu einer Brüderschaft von Dieben.
Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844)

People

“…the splitting up of mankind into a multitude of infinitesimal governments, in accordance with their actual differences of dialect or their presumed differences of race, would be to undo the work of civilisation and renounce all the benefits which the slow and painful process of consolidation has procured for mankind…It is the agglomeration and not the comminution of states to which civilisation is constantly tending; it is the fusion and not the isolation of races by which the physical and moral excellence of the species is advanced. There are races, as there are trees, which cannot stand erect by themselves, and which, if their growth is not hindered by artificial constraints, are all the healthier for twining round some robuster stem.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Source: 'English Politics and Parties', Bentley's Quarterly Review, 1, (1859), p. 22

Pain, Tree

“Now I am prepared to maintain," said Chaffery, proceeding with his proposition, "that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilisation made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry … Were I not of a profoundly indolent, restless, adventurous nature, and horribly averse to writing, I would make a great book of this and live honored by every profound duffer in the world.”

H. G. Wells book Love and Mr Lewisham

Love and Mr Lewisham (1899), Ch. 23

Lie, Books, World, Communication

“Modern civilisation has created modern vices, modern crimes, modern virtues, austerities, and generosities. The crimes of to-day were not dreamed of a hundred years ago, any more than the sublimity of the good deeds done in our time to remedy our time’s mistakes. And between the angel and the beast of this ending century lie great multitudes of ever-shifting, ever-changing lives, neither very bad nor very good, but in all cases very different from what lives used to be in the good old days when time meant time and not money.”

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) Novelist, short story writer, essayist (1854-1909)

The Novel: What It Is (1893)

Money, Lie, Dreams, Angels

“We will cleanse every area of public discourse that has been westernised and where Indian culture and civilisation need to be restored - be it the history we read or our cultural heritage or our institutes that have been polluted over years.”

Mahesh Sharma (1959) Indian politician

On westernisation, as quoted in " Centre targets 'cultural pollution' http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150908/jsp/frontpage/story_41407.jsp" Calcutta Telegraph (7 September 2015)

History, Reading

“Civilisational triumph is thus not a zero-sum enterprise that favours one geo-cultural domain over another.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.213

“The proper limits of Government interference are relative to the nature of each particular state and the stage of its civilisation. It is a matter of great importance at the present day for us to discover what these limits are in our own case, for administration bids fair to claim a large share of our attention in the future.”

Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian

Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 31

Nature, Future

“Bright-minded young people think poorly of existing institutions and want to abolish them. Well, one doesn't need to be young to dislike institutions. But the dreary fact remains that, even in the darkest ages, it was institutions that made society work, and if civilisation is to survive society must somehow be made to work.At this point I reveal myself in my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 13: Heroic Materialism

Men, People, Age, History

“As man is truly “humanised”, not by schools of cookery but by schools of thought, he will abandon the barbarous habit of his flesh-eating ancestors, and will make gradual progress towards a purer, simpler, more humane, and therefore more civilised diet-system.”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

The Humanities of Diet

School

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.”

Winston S. Churchill book The River War

The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (1899), Volume II pp. 248–250 This passage does not appear in the 1902 one-volume abridgment, the version posted by Project Gutenberg. Downloadable etext version(s) of this book can be found online http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=4943 at Project Gutenberg Early career years (1898–1929)

Life, Men, World, Fear

“I have tried to show how religion, the backbone of civilisation, hardens into a Church that is unacceptable to Outsiders, and the Outsiders — the men who strive to become visionaries — become the Rebels. In our case, the scientific progress that has brought us closer than ever before to conquering the problems of civilisation, has also robbed us of spiritual drive; and the Outsider is doubly a rebel: a rebel against the Established Church, a rebel against the unestablished church of materialism. Yet for all this, he is the real spiritual heir of the prophets, of Jesus and St. Peter, of St. Augustine and Peter Waldo. The purest religion of any age lies in the hands of its spiritual rebels. The twentieth century is no exception.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Religion and the Rebel (1957), p. 320

Men, Age, Religion, Problem

“The progressive Islamisation of our country and the increase in political-religious demands are calling into question the survival of our civilisation.”

Marine Le Pen (1968) French lawyer and politician

Source: Interview with The Daily Telegraph (26 December 2010) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8225697/National-Fronts-Marine-Le-Pen-to-prove-formidable-rival-to-Nicolas-Sarkozy.html

Question, Country

“The conflict between liberty under divine authority and the absolutism of human authorities ended disastrously. …In the very year 586 [BCE], in which the flood of Asiatic despotism closed over the city which had been, and was destined again to be, the sanctuary of freedom in the East, a new home was prepared for it in the West, where, guarded by the sea and the mountains, and by valiant hearts, that stately plant was reared under whose shade we dwell, and which is extending its invincible arms so slowly and yet so surely over the civilised world.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

World, Home, Mountain, Freedom

“Who wants to fish, if you're halfway civilised? Dangling some dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people do is fish.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

People, Fish, Dead

“Beyond all question the future is with the vegetarian. It seems certain that in the future — and I hope it may be in the near future — we shall be looking back upon this time with disgust and with horror. In spite of all its wonderful discoveries, in spite of its marvellous machinery, in spite of the enormous fortunes that have been made in it, I am certain that our descendants will look back upon this age as one of only partial civilisation, and in fact but little removed from savagery.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Vegetarianism and Occultism (1913), p. 28

Age, Hope, Question, Time

“Moral improvement (or perfecting) require an evolution leading to a higher consciousness, which is the true torch of life; it is what we have failed too much to appreciate, and that which would be fatal to fail to appreciate any longer ("pluslongtemps", Fr.); For if we do not take it upon ourselves to remedy in time to the moral colapse (or bankruptcy) that already threaten, the whole civilisation will risks to disappear.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 60.

Life, Time, Perfection

“Civilisation as a term suggests human agency. Things don't come together organically.”

Richard Miles (historian) (1969) British historian and archaeologist

My bright idea: Civilisation is still worth striving for

“It is a sure criterion of the civilisation of ancient Egypt that the soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private citizens did not carry them at all.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter I, "War", p. 13.

“Just as Mycenaean civilisation is a development of the Minoan, so too the Philistines who came to Palestine from Caphtor were an offshoot of the same general Aegean civilisation. …until David's victories around 1000 B. C., the Philistines dominated the Hebrews, so that, militarily at least, the Davidic monarchy was the Hebrew response to the Philistine stimulus. …the Achaeans, Trojans, Philistines and Hebrews during the closing centuries of the second millennium belonged to the same international complex of peoples, sharing many conventions and institutions, specifically in military matters.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Introduction
The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962])

People, Victory

“There is a right and legitimate Pan-Islamism to which every sincere and believing Mahomedan belongs--that is, the theory of the spiritual brotherhood and unity of the children of the Prophet. It is a deep, perennial element in that Perso-Arabian culture, that great family of civilisation to which we gave the name Islamic in the first chapter. It connotes charity and goodwill towards fellow-believers everywhere…It means an abiding interest in the literature of Islam, in her beautiful arts, in her lovely architecture, in her entrancing poetry. It also means a true reformation -- a return to the early and pure simplicity of the faith, to its preaching by persuasion and argument, to the manifestation of a spiritual power in individual lives, to beneficent activity for mankind. This natural and worthy spiritual movement makes not only the Master and His teaching but also His children of all climes an object of affection to the Turk or the Afghan, to the Indian or the Egyptian. A famine or a desolating fire in the Moslem quarters of Kashgar or Sarajevo would immediately draw the sympathy and material assistance of the Mahomedan of Delhi or Cairo. The real spiritual and cultural unity of Islam must ever grow, for to the follower of the Prophet it is the foundation of the life of the soul.”

Aga Khan III (1877–1957) 48th Imam of the Nizari Ismaili community

p. 156; a variant of this begins "This is a right and legitimate Pan-Islamism…", but is otherwise identical.
/ India in Transition (1918)

Love, Life, Children, Family

“As scientific men we have all, no doubt, felt that our fellow men have become more and more satisfying as fish have taken up their work which has been put often to base uses, which must lead to disaster. But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance. On our plane knowledge and ignorance are the immemorial adversaries.
Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilisation. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime.”

Frederick Soddy (1877–1956) chemist and physicist from England

Frederick Soddy's speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm (10 December 1922) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1921/soddy-speech.html

Men, People, Knowledge, Fish

“It is erroneous to consider the multiplication (or increase) of needs as a sign of progress, to think that it is necessary to arouse in the people still unpolished (or rough), new needs to bring them to a more civilised life. Similarly ("de même", Fr.) it is erroneous to expect (or want, or wish, - "vouloir," Fr.) to measure (or assess) the degree of culture of a man to the degree of refinement he make (or deploy, or unfold) in his methods ("modes", Fr.) of pleasure”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

"jouissance", Fr.
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 48 - Gandhi wrote something that is almost word for word the same, in All men are brothers.

Life, People, Pleasure, Thinking

“In 1932… I received a communication from the Tibetan which was published in the fall in a pamphlet entitled, The New Group of World Servers… The position taken by the spiritual Hierarchy on our planet was that a group was in process of formation that had in it the nucleus of the coming world civilisation and was characterised by the qualities that would distinguish that civilisation during the next 2,500 years. These qualities are primarily a spirit of inclusiveness, a potent desire selflessly to serve one's fellowmen plus a definite sense of spiritual guidance, emanating from the inner side of life.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter 6

Life, World, Communication, Sense

“If I am asked what we are fighting for I reply in two sentences: In the first place, to fulfil a solemn international obligation, an obligation which, if it had been entered into between private persons in the ordinary concerns of life, would have been regarded as an obligation not only of law but of honour, which no self-respecting man could possibly have repudiated. I say, secondly, we are fighting to vindicate the principle which, in these days when force, material force, sometimes seems to be the dominant influence and factor in the development of mankind, we are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed, in defiance of international good faith, by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power. I do not believe any nation ever entered into a great controversy – and this is one of the greatest history will ever know – with a clearer conscience and a stronger conviction that it is fighting, not for aggression, not for the maintenance even of its own selfish interest, but that it is fighting in defence of principles the maintenance of which is vital to the civilisation of the world.”

H. H. Asquith (1852–1928) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Address to the House of Commons on the declaration of war with Germany; see [Asquith, 6 August 1914, http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/asquithspeechtoparliament.htm, British Prime Minister's Address to Parliament]

Life, World, Faith, Law

“I feel it, but I cannot express it,… I cannot analyse the Celtic genius to my own satisfaction. In the Middle Ages art came from groups, not from individuals. It was anonymous; the sculptors of cathedrals no more put their names to their works than our workmen put theirs on the pavement that they lay. Ah! what an admirable scorn of notoriety! The signature is what destroys us. We do portraits, but what we do is not so great. Thèse kings and queens, on the cathedrals, were not portraits. The fellow-workers stood for one another, and they interpreted; they did not copy. They made clothed figures; the nude and portraiture only date from the Renascence. And then those fellows cut with the tool's end into the block, that is why they were called sculptors. As for us, we are modellers. And what a disgraceful thing that casting from life is, which so many well-known sculptors do not blush to use! It is a mere swindling in art. Art was a vital function to the image-makers of the thirteenth century; they would hâve laughed at the idea of signing what they did, and never dreamed of honours and titles. When once their work was finished, they said no more about it, or else they talked among themselves. How curious it would hâve been to hear them, to be present at their gatherings, where they must hâve discussed in amusing phrases, and with simple, deep ideas!… Whenever the cathedrals disappear civilisation will go down one step. And even now we no longer understand them, we no longer know how to read their silent language. We need to make excavations not in the earth, but towards heaven…”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 63-64; About the genius of the Gothic sculptors.

Life, Age, Dreams, Art

“An evil fate befall German efforts to defend the ideal of liberty in general and in the field of economics in particular, with the result that today I am almost the only survivor of a generation that set out in the wake of the First World War to devote all its energies to the preservation of a civilised society, a generation that set itself the task to build a better society in a systematic fashion and to learn to understand, an to some extent defend, a tradition that had civilised the world.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

"The Rediscovery of Freedom: Personal Recollections" (1983), published in The Fortunes of Liberalism (1992)
1980s and later

Fate, War, World, Fashion

“…one day there came a great strike in the coalfields. It was one of the earlier strikes, and it became a national strike. We tried to carry on as long as we could, but of course it became more and more difficult to carry on, and gradually furnace after furnace was damped down; the chimneys erased to smoke, and about 1,000 men who had no interest in the dispute that was going on were thrown out of work through no fault of their own, at a time when there was no unemployment benefit. I confess that that event set me thinking very hard. It seemed to me at that time a monstrous injustice to these men, because I looked upon them as my own family, and it hit me very hard—I would not have mentioned this only it got into the Press two or three years ago—and I made an allowance to them, not a large one, but something, for six weeks to carry them along, because I felt that they were being so unfairly treated. But there was more in it really than that. There was no conscious unfair treatment, of these men by the miners. It simply was that we were gradually passing into a new state of industry, when the small firms and the small industries were being squeezed out. Business was all tending towards great amalgamations on the one side of employers and on the other side of the men…We have to see what wise statesmanship can do to steer the country through this time of evolution, until we can get to the next stage of our industrial civilisation.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1925/mar/06/industrial-peace in the House of Commons (6 March 1925). 1925

Men, Family, Business, Thinking

“Have you ever wondered, perhaps, why opinions which the majority of people quite naturally hold are, if anyone dares express them publicly, denounced as 'controversial, 'extremist', 'explosive', 'disgraceful', and overwhelmed with a violence and venom quite unknown to debate on mere political issues? It is because the whole power of the aggressor depends upon preventing people from seeing what is happening and from saying what they see.

The most perfect, and the most dangerous, example of this process is the subject miscalled, and deliberately miscalled, 'race'. The people of this country are told that they must feel neither alarm nor objection to a West Indian, African and Asian population which will rise to several millions being introduced into this country. If they do, they are 'prejudiced', 'racialist'... A current situation, and a future prospect, which only a few years ago would have appeared to everyone not merely intolerable but frankly incredible, has to be represented as if welcomed by all rational and right-thinking people. The public are literally made to say that black is white. Newspapers like the Sunday Times denounce it as 'spouting the fantasies of racial purity' to say that a child born of English parents in Peking is not Chinese but English, or that a child born of Indian parents in Birmingham is not English but Indian. It is even heresy to assert the plain fact that the English are a white nation. Whether those who take part know it or not, this process of brainwashing by repetition of manifest absurdities is a sinister and deadly weapon. In the end, it renders the majority, who are marked down to be the victims of violence or revolution or tyranny, incapable of self-defence by depriving them of their wits and convincing them that what they thought was right is wrong. The process has already gone perilously far, when political parties at a general election dare not discuss a subject which results from and depends on political action and which for millions of electors transcends all others in importance; or when party leaders can be mesmerised into accepting from the enemy the slogans of 'racialist' and 'unChristian' and applying them to lifelong political colleagues...

In the universities, we are told that education and the discipline ought to be determined by the students, and that the representatives of the students ought effectively to manage the institutions. This is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense which it is already obligatory for academics and journalists, politicians and parties, to accept and mouth upon pain of verbal denunciation and physical duress.

We are told that the economic achievement of the Western countries has been at the expense of the rest of the world and has impoverished them, so that what are called the 'developed' countries owe a duty to hand over tax-produced 'aid' to the governments of the undeveloped countries. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense with which the people of the Western countries, clergy and laity, but clergy especially—have been so deluged and saturated that in the end they feel ashamed of what the brains and energy of Western mankind have done, and sink on their knees to apologise for being civilised and ask to be insulted and humiliated.

Then there is the 'civil rights' nonsense. In Ulster we are told that the deliberate destruction by fire and riot of areas of ordinary property is due to the dissatisfaction over allocation of council houses and opportunities for employment. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that has not prevented the Parliament and government of the United Kingdom from undermining the morale of civil government in Northern Ireland by imputing to it the blame for anarchy and violence.

Most cynically of all, we are told, and told by bishops forsooth, that communist countries are the upholders of human rights and guardians of individual liberty, but that large numbers of people in this country would be outraged by the spectacle of cricket matches being played here against South Africans. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that did not prevent a British Prime Minister and a British Home Secretary from adopting it as acknowledged fact.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

The "enemy within" speech during the 1970 general election campaign; speech to the Turves Green Girls School, Northfield, Birmingham (13 June 1970), from Still to Decide (Eliot Right Way Books, 1972), pp. 36-37.
1970s

Pain, People, World, Education

“The rescue of India from ages of barbarism, tyranny, and internecine war and its slow but ceaseless forward march to civilisation constitute upon the whole the finest achievement of our history.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Article for the Daily Mail (16 November 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 356
Early career years (1898–1929)

War, Age, History

“We are on the eve of great changes…We have set an example to the world in all ages; we have given them the representative system. The very rules and regulations of this House have been taken as the model for every representative assembly throughout the whole civilised world; and having besides given them the example of a free press and civil and religious freedom, and every institution that belongs to freedom and civilisation, we are now about giving a still greater example; we are going to set the example of making industry free—to set the example of giving the whole world every advantage of clime, and latitude, and situation, relying ourselves on the freedom of our industry. Yes, we are going to teach the world that other lesson. Don't think there is anything selfish in this, or anything at all discordant with Christian principles. I can prove that we advocate nothing but what is agreeable to the highest behests of Christianity. To buy in the cheapest market, and sell in the dearest. What is the meaning of the maxim? It means that you take the article which you have in the greatest abundance, and with it obtain from others that of which they have the most to spare; so giving to mankind the means of enjoying the fullest abundance of earth's goods, and in doing so, carrying out to the fullest extent the Christian doctrine of 'Doing to all men as ye would they should do unto you.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (27 February 1846), quoted in John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (eds.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, M.P. Volume I (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), p. 198.
1840s

Men, Age, World, Thinking

“The likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced beyond all recognition – into colonies in outer space, for instance. In either case, evolutionary extrapolations from present conditions are likely to be highly misleading.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

Time

“Britain has joined its brethren in the 'civilised West' to legitimise civil partnerships, which to us simply means same-sex marriages. They are also putting a ban on preaching because it offends Muslim minorities. Britain has, of course, made Sunday a working day.”

Peter Akinola (1944) Anglican Primate of the Church of Nigeria

Marriage, Sex, Partnership

“England is the country of the English… England is the stage on which the drama of English history was played and the setting within which the English became conscious of themselves as a people … when politicians and preachers attempt to frighten and cajole the English into pretending away the distinction between themselves and people of other nations and other origins, they are engaged in undermining the foundation upon which democratic government by consent and peaceable civilised society in this country are supported … those who at the end of the twentieth century wish to keep alive that consciousness of being English, which seemed so effortless and uncontroversial to our forefathers, will discover that they are called upon, if they take their purpose seriously, to confront the most arrogant and imposing prejudices of their time.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Source: Speech to The Royal Society of St George (23 April 1988), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), p. 918-19

People, History, Support, Time

“It is remarkable that India became a democracy in modern times, because the long-lasting Hindu civilisation at first sight was innately hostile to the ideas that all adults should have an equal vote, irrespective of their caste, and that all adults should be able to share in the social mobility which was part of the democratic spirit. But to graft exotic new trees onto old, when there seemed little hope of success, and to watch them grow vigorously, is not a rare experience in human institutions.”

Geoffrey Blainey book A Short History of the World

A Short History of the World (2000)

Hostility, Hope, Democracy, Idea

“The great gift of the southern lands to our civilisation is the simple right to sit at an outside cafe table and look at things.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

“If the present civilisation does not acquire some stable moral fondations ("bases morales stables", Fr.), its existence will hardly be more assured than that of the civilisations that have preceeded it, and which have fallen”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

or collapse, or failed
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 41.

“Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race. Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever…? Whether there is a race so inferior I do not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle’s plea for slavery, that there are “natural slaves,” lies in the fact that there are no “natural” masters… The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to exterminate it. Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to “race suicide,” as the British administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race… If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive—they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving “black-fellows” are there. Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity…Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the great synthesis of the future.”

H. G. Wells book A Modern Utopia

Source: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 10, sect. 3

Death, Women, World, Education

“I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what he meant. He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an 'empty homogeneous medium.' 'Never mind at present what the ultimate constituents of that medium are. We take it as a finished product, and we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all. That is the view of civilised man. You will find all the philosophers taking it for granted. Yes, but every living thing does not take that view.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Space (1912)

Understanding, Thinking, Time

“Civilisation may perish as the result of war: it would certainly perish as the result of Nazi-ism triumphant beyond the borders of the country of its birth… And now we know that should the challenge come, we shall be there. In Luther's words “we can no other.” We were there when the Spanish galleons made for Plymouth: we were on those bloody fields in the Netherlands when Louis XIV aimed at the domination of Europe: we were on duty when Napoleon bestrode the world like a demi-god, and we answered the roll call, as you did, in August, 1914. We can no other. So help us, God.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the University of Toronto (April 1939), quoted in An Interpreter of England. The Falconer Lectures (1939), pp. 117-118.
1939

God, War, World, Birth

“The so-called highly civilised culture of the West won't let them get married at that age. They prohibit them from marrying or inhibit them or make it as difficult for them as possible to get married at the age of 14 or 15, because they want to keep, them at home without having to be bothered with babies.
They just want their own little baby & keep it a babyas long as they can in the house, until it becomes an absolute monster that they can't control, they don't know what to do with,& breaks their heart & takes drugs & runs off & has a child anyhow, & then they have an abortion! They kill the baby because the parents don't want to help take care of it or teach their children how! How horrible! It's the absolute selfishness of the so-called highly civilised Western culture! Cruelly killing babies!”

David Berg (1919–1994) Children of God founder

Child Brides!

Children, Age, Home, Parent

“The common law, though not to be found in the written records of the realm, yet has been long well known. It is coeval with civilised society itself, and was formed from time to time by the wisdom of man. Good sense did not come with the Conquest, or at any other one time, but grew and increased from time to time with the wisdom of mankind.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Rex v. Rusby (1800), Peake's N. P. Cases, 193.

Wisdom, Law, Sense, Time

“Homeric tradition has its own way of telling us that Minoan/Mycenaean civilisation was intertwined with the culture of the Semitic Phoenicians. Iliad 14: 321-322 makes Phoenix (named after the ancestor of the Phoenicians) the maternal grandfather of Minos. …Archaeology bears out early cultural connections between the two.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VII Further Observations on Homer

Way, Maternity

“The history of human civilisation is a history of mutual borrowings.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.28

History

“The newspapers still talk about glory but the average man, thank God, has got rid of that illusion. It is a damned bore, with a stall mate as the most probable outcome, but one has to see it through, and see it through with the knowledge that whichever side wins, civilisation in Europe will be pipped for the next 30 years. Don't indulge in Romance here, Malcolm, or suppose that an era of jolly little nationalities is dawning. We shall be much too much occupied with pestilence and poverty to reconstruct.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Letter 136, to Malcolm Darling, 6 November 1914
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

God, Knowledge

“It was a dramatic moment in the history of our civilisation when, in about the year 240 B. C., Archimedes leapt out of his bath and ran naked into the street of Syracuse shouting "Eureka" - "I have found it!" He had found the theoretical answer to a practical problem, that of finding the specific gravity of solids, known ever since as "Archimedes' Principle". We know this because Archimedes had written and published many books, on mathematics and mechanics, and some of these have survived and are preserved in libraries for us to use today. He made a major contribution to the progress of humanity, and over the centuries, that progress has been continually stimulated and accelerated by the invention of new theories, new tools and machines, which explain our world, and lighten the burden of securing the basic necessities of life.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Librarians and Information Systems (1995)

Life, Books, World, History

“Civilisation is a conspiracy. What value would your police be if every criminal could find a sanctuary across the Channel, or your law courts, if no other tribunal recognised their decisions? Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences. And it will succeed till the day comes when there is another compact to strip them bare.”

John Buchan book The Power-House

Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 3 "Tells of a Midsummer Night"

Life, Law, Decision

“I am one of those who believe that there is no permanent home for even a section of the Bantu in the white area of South Africa and the destiny of South Africa depends on this essential point. If the principle of permanent residence for the black man in the area of the white is accepted then it is the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it in this country.”

P. W. Botha (1916–2006) South African prime minister

Speaking to parliament on 11 May 1964 as Minister for Coloured Affairs, as cited in The Guardian, 7 February 2006

Home, Dependency, Country

“… I hate them. Them and their false democracy, their false liberty, their imperialism conducted in the name of christian civilisation, their coups, like the coup which they started against me…”

Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) Cambodian King

On the USA, said during his exile in Peking, as quoted by Oriana Fallaci (June 1973), Intervista con la Storia (sixth edition, 2011). page 112.
Interviews

Hate, Democracy, Falseness

“What on earth has given opera its prestige in western civilisation — a prestige that has outlasted so many different fashions and ways of thought? Why are people prepared to sit silently for three hours listening to a performance of which they do not understand a word and of which they very seldom know the plot? Why do quite small towns all over Germany and Italy still devote a large portion of their budgets to this irrational entertainment? Partly, of course, because it is a display of skill, like a football match. But chiefly, I think, because it is irrational. "What is too silly to be said may be sung" — well, yes; but what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious — these things can also be sung and can only be sung.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 9: The Pursuit of Happiness; "What is too silly to be said may be sung" is a commonly used translation or paraphrase of lines from Act I, Scene ii of the play The Barber of Seville by Pierre de Beaumarchais, which was the basis of famous operas.

People, Way, Fashion, Understanding

“It is, thank heaven, difficult if not impossible for the modern European to fully appreciate the force which fanaticism exercises among an ignorant, warlike and Oriental population. Several generations have elapsed since the nations of the West have drawn the sword in religious controversy, and the evil memories of the gloomy past have soon faded in the strong, clear light of Rationalism and human sympathy. Indeed it is evident that Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men's passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccination. But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace. Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Story of the Malakand Field Force

The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), Chapter III.
Early career years (1898–1929)

Death, Men, War, People

“I say, Archbishop, all this reforming gives a deuced deal of trouble, eh? eh? I wish they'd let it all alone…I say, Archbishop, what do you think I'd have done about this slavery business, if I'd had my own way? I'd have done nothing at all! I'd have left it all alone. It's all a pack of nonsense! Always have been slaves in all the most civilised countries; the Greeks and Romans had slaves; however, they would have their fancy, and so we've abolished slavery; but it's a great folly.”

William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (1779–1848) British Whig statesman

E. Jane Whately (ed.), Life and Correspondence of Richard Whately, D.D. Late Archbishop of Dublin. Volume II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1866), pp. 451-452
Attributed

Way, Business, Thinking, Country

“Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"The Egg-Head's Egger-On" (2000).
2000s, 2000, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (2000)

“The realization of justice is, in the actual state of things, a matter of life or death for society and for civilisation itself.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 55.

Life, Death, Justice

“In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all of them, have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill ‘Bolshevism versus Zionism; a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people’ in Illustrated Daily Herald, 8 February 1920.
Early career years (1898–1929)

Men, People, World, Faith

“If I may be allowed just three wishes, they would be these.
Firstly, I would like to see some evidence of extra-terrestrial life. I have always believed that we are not alone in the universe. But we are still waiting for ETs to call us — or give us some kind of a sign. We have no way of guessing when this might happen — I hope sooner rather than later!
Secondly, I would like to see us kick our current addiction to oil, and adopt clean energy sources. … Climate change has now added a new sense of urgency. Our civilisation depends on energy, but we can't allow oil and coal to slowly bake our planet…
The third wish is one closer to home. I’ve been living in Sri Lanka for 50 years — and half that time, I’ve been a sad witness to the bitter conflict that divides my adopted country.
I dearly wish to see lasting peace established in Sri Lanka as soon as possible.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

90th Birthday Reflections (2007)

Life, Sadness, Peace, Hope

“The art of wrestling, which in the present day is chiefly confined to the lower classes of the people, was, however, highly esteemed by the ancients, and made a very considerable figure among the Olympic games. In the ages of chivalry, to wrestle well was accounted one of the accomplishments which a hero ought to possess. Wrestling is a kind of exercise that, from its nature, is likely to have been practiced by every nation, and especially by those the least civilised. It was probably well known in this country long before the introduction of foreign manners.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 80
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Wrestling

People, Age, Art, Exercises

“Medieval Islam was a religion of remarkable tolerance for its time, allowing Jews and Christians the right to practise their inherited beliefs, and setting an example which was not, unfortunately, copied for many centuries in the West. The surprise, ladies and gentlemen, is the extent to which Islam has been a part of Europe for so long, first in Spain, then in the Balkans, and the extent to which it has contributed so much towards the civilisation which we all too often think of, wrongly, as entirely Western. Islam is part of our past and our present, in all fields of human endeavour. It has helped to create modern Europe. It is part of our own inheritance, not a thing apart.”

Charles, Prince of Wales (1948) son of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom

Speech on Islam and the West http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/speechesandarticles/a_speech_by_hrh_the_prince_of_wales_titled_islam_and_the_wes_425873846.html to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, 27 October 1993. 1990s

Religion, Thinking, Time, Past

“It was India's Karma, her fate, to be conquered, and in her turn, to conquer her conqueror. She has already done so with her Mohammedan victors: Educated Mohammedans are Sufis, scarcely to be distinguished from Hindus. Hindu thought has permeated their civilisation; they assumed the position of learners. And England will be conquered in her turn. Today she has the sword, but it is worse than useless in the world of ideas. You know what Schopenhauer said of Indian thought. He foretold that its influence would be as momentous in Europe, when it became well known, as the revival of Greek and Latin; culture after the Dark Ages.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Source: Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Vol. 5, p. 190

Fate, Age, World, Education

“Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies — in fact the very narrowness of primitive society gives their ornamental art a peculiar concentration and vitality. At some time in the ninth century one could have looked down the Seine and seen the prow of a Viking ship coming up the river. Looked at today in the British Museum, it is a powerful work of art; but to the mother of a family trying to settle down in her little hut, it would have seemed less agreeable — as menacing to her civilisation as the periscope of a nuclear submarine.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 1: The Skin of Our Teeth

Family, Art, Time

“We now know that bin Laden's terrorists had been planning their outrages for years. The propagation of their mad, bad ideology – decency forbids calling it a religion – had been taking place before our eyes. We were just too blind to see it. In short, the world had never ceased to be dangerous. But the West had ceased to be vigilant. Surely that is the most important lesson of this tragedy, and we must learn it if our civilisation is to survive.”

Margaret Thatcher book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World

Source: Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, p. xxv

World, Religion, Learning, Madness

“There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay book Critical and Historical Essays

"Essay on Ludwig von Ranke's 'History of the Popes', in "Critical and Historical Essays", iii, (London; Longman, 7th Edn. 1952), 100-1.
Attributed

Life, Hostility, Children, Lie

“Now, surely, when we want to educate ourselves for the purpose of citizenship…If you can clear the mind of cant and detect the fallacy, whatever guise it may be wearing, I think you have made a long step forward in the education that every citizen in a democracy that may hope to endure must have. I think that we all of us realise to-day that no civilised community is bound necessarily and by an inscrutable fate to progress, and there are such things in civilisation as checks, that there is such a thing as retrogression, and that the mere existence of a civilised community is no guarantee either for its continuance or for its progress— in other words, that unless we are the faithful guardians of such civilisation as we have already attained to, we run the risk of seeing the whole of the progress that has been made with such infinite labour up to our own time gradually slipping back and back and back.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the Philip Scott College (27 September 1923), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 150-151.
1923

Fate, Education, Faith, Hope

“Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder. Not content with having all Europe under his heel, or else terrorised into various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and of Asia. The terrible military machine — which we and the rest of the civilised world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing — cannot stand idle lest it rust or fall to pieces. … So now this bloodthirsty guttersnipe must launch his mechanized armies upon new fields of slaughter, pillage and devastation.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Radio broadcast on the German invasion of Russia, June 22, 1941. In The Churchill War Papers : 1941 (1993), W.W. Norton, pp. 835–836 ISBN 0393019594
The Second World War (1939–1945)

World

“The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilisation, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter V: "On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties during Primeval and Civilised Times" (second edition, 1874) page 141 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=164&itemID=F944&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

People

“The old civilisation, with all the brilliant qualities which make many moderns regret its destruction, rested on too narrow a base. The woman and the slave were left out, the woman especially by the Greeks, and the slave by the Romans.”

William Ralph Inge (1860–1954) Dean of St Pauls

[St Paul, The Quarterly Review, 220, 45–68, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015056059549;view=1up;seq=71] January 1914, p. 61

“I believe that the crazy combative patriotism that plainly threatens to destroy civilisation to-day is very largely begotten by the schoolmaster and the schoolmistress in their history lessons. They take the growing mind at a naturally barbaric phase and they inflame and fix its barbarism.”

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) English writer

The Informative Content of Education http://books.google.com/books?&id=vLs4AAAAMAAJ&q=%22I+believe+that+the+crazy+combative+patriotism+that+plainly+threatens+to+destroy+civilisation+to-day+is+very+largely+begotten+by+the+schoolmaster+and+the+schoolmistress+in+their+history+lessons+They+take+the+growing+mind+at+a+naturally+barbaric+phase+and+they+inflame+and+fix+its+barbarism%22&pg=PA242#v=onepage Speech http://archive.org/stream/reportofbritisha37adva#page/242/mode/2up given at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Nottingham, England on 2 September 1937

History, Nature

“In thinking of history in this [progressive & eschatological] way Islam shares common ground with Christianity and with the secular creeds of the modern West. It is misleading to represent Islam and ‘the West’ as forming civilisations that have nothing in common. Christianity and Islam are integral parts of western monotheism, and as such they share a view of history that marks them off from the rest of the world. Both are militant faiths that seek to convert all humankind. Other religions have been implicated in twentieth-century violence—the state cult of Shintō in Japan during the militarist period and Hindu nationalism in contemporary India, for example. But only Christianity and Islam have engendered movements that are committed to the systematic use of force to achieve universal goals.”

John Gray book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Enlightenment and Terror in the Twentieth Century: Terror and the Western Tradition
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)

World, Faith, Religion, Way

“And when we look closely, we find a system of morals which any civilised person today should surely find poisonous.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

Personality

“Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilised into time and tune.”

Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) English churchman and historian

The History of the Worthies of England (1662): Musicians.

Music, Time

“Sirs, I address this warning to you, the aristocracy of industry in this city, because, like all aristocracies, you tend to grow blind in long authority, and to be unaware that you and your class and its every action are being considered and judged day by day by those who have power to shake or overturn the whole social order, and whose restlessness in poverty today is making our industrial civilisation stir like a quaking bog. You do not seem to realise that your assumption that you are answerable to yourselves alone for your actions in the industries you control is one that becomes less and less tolerable in a world so crowded with necessitous life.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

Open letter to the Masters of Dublin (1913)

Life, World

“Diogenes, in his mud-covered sandals, tramps over the carpets of Aristippus. The cynic pullulated at every corner, and in the highest places. This cynic did nothing but saboter the civilisation of the time. He was the nihilist of Hellenism. He created nothing, he made nothing. His role was to undo — or rather to attempt to undo, for he did not succeed in his purpose. The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. What would become of the cynic among a savage people where everyone, naturally and quite seriously, fulfils what the cynic farcically considers to be his personal role?”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age

People, Nature, Time, Personality

“Civilisational triumph is important because if it is not actively sought, conflictual relations between members of geo-cultural domains may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.219

“For fifty years Private Eye has pretty much in most issues exposed a miscarriage of justice, and a lot of them have been murders. Over the years, large numbers of these cases have been found to be entirely wrong, and the men convicted -- almost always men, there was a couple of women -- have been found innocent, so we would have killed those people, and in some of those very high profile cases which involved terrorism cases, we would have made very dangerous new martyrs by executing people who turned out not to have committed the murders involved. So on a purely practical basis, whatever you think it says about the civilised nature of your society or not, I think it would be incredibly dangerous to have capital punishment back.”

Ian Hislop (1960) Satirical comedian, Editor, Television and radio presenter

On capital punishment in the United Kingdom. Question Time, BBC, 22 September 2011.

Women, Men, People, Justice

“"Thank God for the French army." When we read about Germany, when we watch with surprise and distress the tumultuous insurgence of ferocity and war spirit, the pitiless ill-treatment of minorities, the denial of the normal protections of civilised society to large numbers of individuals solely on the ground of race—when we see that occurring in one of the most gifted, learned, scientific and formidable nations in the world, one cannot help feeling glad that the fierce passions that are raging in Germany have not found, as yet, any other outlet but upon themselves. It seems to me that, at a moment like this, to ask France to halve her army while Germany doubles hers… to ask France to halve her air force while the German air force remains whatever it is… such a proposal, it seems to me, is likely to be considered by the French Government at present, at any rate, as somewhat unseasonable.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1933/mar/23/european-situation#S5CV0276P0_19330323_HOC_299 in the House of Commons (23 March 1933) shortly after Hitler became Chancellor The 1930s

God, War, World, Feeling

“Since Australia is an outgrowth of England, European civilisation is also the field of study for an intelligible history of Australia. This does not mean that every history of Australia has to begin with Charlemagne. It does mean that Australian history not set within European civilisation will convey a very poor understanding of Australian society.”

John Hirst (1942–2016) Australian historian

Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2005)

History, Intelligence, Understanding, Study

“Undue cultivation of the inward or Dynamical province leads to idle, visionary, impracticable courses, and, especially in rude eras, to Superstition and Fanaticism, with their long train of baleful and well-known evils. Undue cultivation of the outward, again, though less immediately prejudicial, and even for the time productive of many palpable benefits, must, in the long-run, by destroying Moral Force, which is the parent of all other Force, prove not less certainly, and perhaps still more hopelessly, pernicious. This, we take it, is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management of external things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Age, Soul, Nature, Parent

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter V: "On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties during Primeval and Civilised Times" (second edition, 1874) pages 133-134 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=156&itemID=F944&viewtype=image The last sentence of the first paragraph is often quoted in isolation to make Darwin seem heartless. The Descent of Man (1871)

Life, Men, Marriage, Health

“We can see quite plainly that our present civilisation is built on the exploitation of animals, just as past civilisations were built on the exploitation of slaves, and we believe the spiritual destiny of man is such that in time he will view with abhorrence the idea that men once fed on the products of animals' bodies.”

Donald Watson (1910–2005) English vegan activist

Inaugural newsletter of the Vegan Society, Vegan News no. 1 (November 1944). Quoted in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, edited by Linda Kalof (Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 30 https://books.google.it/books?id=Cdv_DQAAQBAJ&pg=PA30.

Men, Idea, Time, Past

“Unless legal and illegal immigration is halted and reversed, European First World nations across all of Europe from Spain to Russia, North America, Australia and New Zealand — will be destroyed and have their very culture and civilisation changed to that of the Third World. Immigration is now the single most important issue facing all First World nations, and will determine whether Western Civilisation continues to exist or not.”

Arthur Kemp (1962) British writer

Collective Nouns, blog post http://www.arthurkemp.com/?p=140 Quotes from other works:

World, Change