As a cultural product of both 'East' and 'West', I do not believe there is a fundamental basis for a clash of civilisations, or that the West is the cause of all problems.
Ahmed Zewail
The Japanese keenly learned from Western civilisation in a bid to modernize and preserve the nation.
Akihito
Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.
Al Gore
It is impossible to remain indifferent to Japanese culture. It is a different civilisation where all you have learnt must be forgotten. It is a great intellectual challenge and a gorgeous sensual experience.
Alain Ducasse
Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.
Alan Furst
Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle.
Aleister Crowley
Civilisation has ever accompanied emigration and conquest - the conflict of opinion, of religion, or of race.
Alfred Russel Wallace
From his roots as a slave, the American Negro - sometimes sorrowing, sometimes jubilant but always hopeful - has touched, illuminated, and influenced the most remote preserves of world civilisation. I and my dance theater celebrate this trembling beauty.
Alvin Ailey
Myths are part of our DNA. We're a civilisation with a continuous culture. The effort to modernize it keeps it alive. Readers connect with it.
Amish Tripathi
We in the so called 'Western civilisations' have so much to learn from other cultures, and they would stand to gain so much by learning from ours. We don't have all the answers - far from it... but nor do any other culture or religion.
Andrea Leadsom
I can say that we are very clear in our mind about the responsibility of the national soldiers for the break with civilisation that was the Shoah. We are firmly convinced that this is something that will have to be handed over to generations to come... so we don't see any reason to change our view of history.
Angela Merkel
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.
Anil Agarwal
Men are at every stage of evolution, from the most barbarous to the most developed; men are found of lofty intelligence, but also of the most unevolved mentality; in one place there is a highly developed and complex civilisation, in another a crude and simple polity.
Annie Besant
As civilisation advances, the deities lessen in number, the divine powers become concentrated more and more in one Being, and God rules over the whole earth, maketh the clouds his chariot, and reigns above the waterfloods as a king.
I must say I have a personal love affair with India, with its civilisation, its culture.
Antonio Guterres
Many people in Europe and the U.S. dispute the thesis that we are living through a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west. But a radical minority of Muslims firmly believes that Islam is under siege, and is committed to winning the holy war it has declared against the West.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Galactic plankton is undoubtedly out there, but it's statistically highly likely there's also another intelligent civilisation out there somewhere. Unfortunately, the distances and time differences are so great, communication might remain impossible.
Ben Miller
America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.
Bill Bryson
My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.
Christopher Hitchens
I always thought of Djibouti as a place where human history hasn't really begun yet - or perhaps it's already over. There's something in the landscape that's stronger than human civilisation. There's no agriculture, for example, and there are live volcanoes.
Claire Denis
I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation - television and videos and all this.
I love fashion, beauty, glamour. It's the mark of civilisation.
The basis of drama is... the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable.
As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off.
Civilisation is slippery, the word has multiple and contested meanings.
I don't have any personal memories of the broadcast of 'Civilisation'. I was born the year afterwards. But the many personal stories I have heard from the people it touched do resonate as I had my own television-induced epiphany.
Climate change remains the biggest threat to our civilisation, economy and security - even bigger than Brexit.
It's interesting that the treatment of historical events by art precedes the civilisation of people through democracy.
As much as football can cause war, it can also cause peace. Football is a kind of Geiger counter of civilisation, or a catalyst for good as well as bad.
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 that remains the case. But it may not.
If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.
If we're going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation.
I will defend Europe; it is our civilisation which is at stake... I will work to rebuild ties between Europe and its citizens.
Words make a world of difference. Over time, they become charged with inference and allusion and, deployed effectively, they have the power to change the very fabric of our civilisation.
An alliance of civilisations can be our most powerful weapon in the fight against terror.
There is nothing more worrisome to ISIS than cooperation between 'the West' and the Muslim world, for it defies the narrative of a clash of civilisations the group is trying to revive.
ISIL struck France because it is 'free' and 'the nation of human rights'. This is not a war of civilisation, as these assassins don't have any. This is a war against the jihadist menace that threatens not just France.
In 1957, I was studying the Pleiades star cluster at Harvard University's radio observatory. On one occasion, we saw an added feature in the data. It turned out to be an amateur radio enthusiast near the observatory, but at the time, I thought we had detected clear evidence of another civilisation.
I knew that Britain and the United States were beacons of freedom and democracy at a time when my life - and Western civilisation itself - was at grave risk.
There are many indicators of advanced civilisations, but unthinking hero worship of the military isn't one of them.
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.
Just carrying a ruler with you in your pocket should be forbidden, at least on a moral basis. The ruler is the symbol of the new illiteracy. The ruler is the symptom of the new disease, disintegration of our civilisation.
Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.
Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.
It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.
At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn't think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn't be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn't understand how that added up.
We are at a time in history where everyone with any insight of the climate crisis that threatens our civilisation - and the entire biosphere - must speak out in clear language, no matter how uncomfortable and unprofitable that may be.
We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles.
Borne out of this, starting around the 17th Century was the Baroque era. It is my view that it is one of the architectural peak periods in western civilisation.
In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world.
