Civilization had too many rules for me so I did my best to rewrite them.

Nobody minded what you did in bed or what you said about God a very civilized attitude in 1948.

We assume that we've come so far as compassionate citizens of the world if we do choose to read the news yet the attitude towards life can be one where we put blinders on and forget that there are civil wars going on. It's easy to forget that there are so many people starving to death every single day.

There is a single thread of attitude a single direction of flow that joins our present time to its early burgeoning in Mediterranean civilization.

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

Civilization is a method of living an attitude of equal respect for all men.

It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent subtle and sophisticated people with organized societies and great art.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on the degradation of the arts will go on and if that system is to last for ever then art is doomed and will surely die that is to say civilization will die.

After a few months in my parents' basement I took an apartment near the state university where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.

Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization it is the best part of refinement and in many ways an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.

There was an age however when the transition from savagery to civilization with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture took place for the first time.

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

The greatest advances of civilization whether in architecture or painting in science and literature in industry or agriculture have never come from centralized government.

I have for some time urged that a nuclear abolition summit to mark the effective end of the nuclear era be convened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 70th anniversary of the bombings of those cities with the participation of national leaders and representatives of global civil society.

We are losing sight of civility in government and politics. Debate and dialogue is taking a back seat to the politics of destruction and anger and control. Dogma has replaced thoughtful discussion between people of differing views.

We start 'The Butler' in June and that's incredibly exciting for me because I get to work with the amazing Forest Whitaker again. It's a phenomenal script and a great great role - I play his son. Oprah Winfrey is his wife and my mother. My character is a radical civil rights activist.

All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture) the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism idealism and fantasy.

Half a century ago the amazing courage of Rosa Parks the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.

In a civilized society all crimes are likely to be sins but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes. Man's ultimate responsibility is to God alone.

The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.