I sometimes feel that the world is a very uncivilised place where it is meant to be at its most civilised. Where it's meant to be intellectual or artistic or compassionate, it isn't, and that makes me very angry.
Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.
The permissive society has been allowed to become a dirty phrase. A better phrase is the civilised society.
Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilised folk to despise war.
London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.
You get the feeling that many of my guests feel that the French language gives them entry into a more cultivated, more intelligent world, more highly civilised too, with rules.
Suicide is possible, but not probable; hanging, I trust, is even more unlikely; for I hope that, by the time I die, my countrymen will have become civilised enough to abolish capital punishment.
I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.
We would all love to walk up to someone and shoot them in the head, there's no doubt about that. We're too civilised to admit it, but we're happy to read about it.
I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.