On ne comprends rien à la civilisation moderne, si l'on n'admet pas d'abord qu'elle est une conspiration universelle contre toute espèce de vie intérieure. - Georges Bernanos
Une civilisation sans la Science, ce serait aussi absurde qu'un poisson sans bicyclette. - Pierre Desproges
Modern civilisation is complicated and artificial. Simple folk live in a world of love and peace. Let no one hate another or harm another. - Sivananda Saraswati
You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature. - Mahatma Gandhi
Nous sommes la première civilisation qui dispose d'un passé devenu immense. En 1940personne ne connaissait les grottes de Lascaux et de Chauvet. En juillet dernier des chercheursont découvert un crâne vieux de sept cents millions d'années. La profondeur du temps aremplacé les dieux. - Pascal Quignard
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
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself."(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958) - Bernard Malamud
Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. - Samuel P. Huntington
A call to embrace democracy is the worst insult to a society that is still alien to civilisation. It is like being asked to dance to the tune of mob justice. - Newton Gatambia
We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we, too, would become Taliban. - Umberto Eco
Civilisation and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life. - Ernst Haeckel
I have the not altogether unsatisfying impression that civilisation is collapsing around me.Is it my age, I wonder, or the age we live in? I am not sure. Civilisations do collapse, after all, but on the other hand people grow old with rather greater frequency. - Theodore Dalrymple
Il ne peut y avoir une civilisation mondiale puisque la civilisation implique la coexistence de cultures offrant entre elles le maximum de diversité. - Claude Lévi-Strauss
Madame Gherardi maintained that love, like most other blessings of civilisation, was a chimaera which we desire the more, the further removed we are from Nature. - W.G. Sebald