The old school of thought would have you believe that you’d be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn’t...

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

When people stargazing, they stare at stars,and many other things which they’ve already presumed commonly and universally as stars.

si tu examines mon empire tu t’en iras voir les forgerons et les trouveras forgeant des clous et se passionnant pour les clous et te chantant les cantiques de la clouterie. Puis tu t’en iras...

No.”Perhaps, Adelia thought drearily, it was only a very old woman who could look hopefully on a single brick laid in a wasteland.

Na Natureza nunca eu descobriria um contorno feio ou repetido! Nunca duas folhas de hera, que, na verdura ou recorte, se assemelhassem! Na Cidade, pelo contrário, cada casa repete servilmente a outra casa; todas as...

There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.

Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.

If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.

Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

Civilization did not come with fire. It came with the discovery of how to use fire to heat water.

These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil...

The employed are punished by having to do what they do not love. The self-employed are punished by the opposite.

My ‘morals’ were sound, even a bit puritanic, but when a hidebound old deacon inveighed against dancing I rebelled. By the time of graduation I was still a ‘believer’ in orthodox religion, but had strong...

Civilization… wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

There is a reasonable hypothesis that there could have been an ancient civilization on Mars, … At no point has NASA chosen to address this scientifically.

Anti-terrorism is a fight between justice and evil, civilization and savagery.