Top 100 Quotes About Civilizations
#1. We live in a world of crisis, of challenge, and ... it's in our galleries that we can unpack the civilizations that we're seeing the current manifestations of.
Thomas P. Campbell
#2. We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
Bill Bryson
#3. Civilizations proceed from the heart rather than from the head.
Mark Twain
#4. All creatures tread across the rubble of ruined civilizations. The trick is to keep moving. No animal ever goes about dispensing shallow compassion.
Rita Mae Brown
#5. That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and the cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin.
C.S. Lewis
#6. Statistically it's a certainty there are hugely advanced civilizations, intelligences, life forms out there. I believe they're so advanced they're even doing interstellar travel. I believe it's possible they even came here.
Story Musgrave
#7. Historically, if you look at great civilizations, why do they crumble? Is it because of what's outside or because of something internal? It's always internal. It is.
Phylicia Rashad
#8. Black holes are the last vestige of civilizations obsessed with tinkering.
Kane Freeman
#9. It is fair to say that Africa has become a major force in moving the world towards multi-polarity, an important emerging market that helps promote global economic recovery and integration, and an outstanding representative of diverse civilizations in the world.
Li Keqiang
#10. Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam? Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.
Pat Buchanan
#11. Militarism has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations. The single art of war makes progress at the expense of all the arts of peace.
Arnold Joseph Toynbee
#12. Each of us in our own way can try to spread compassion into people's hearts. Western civilizations these days place great importance on filling the human brain with knowledge, but no one seems to care about filling the human heart with compassion. This is what the real role of religion is.
Dalai Lama
#13. To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect.
Aldous Huxley
#14. This breakdown in the bicameral mind in what is called the Intermediate Period is reminiscent at least of those periodic breakdowns of Mayan civilizations when all authority suddenly collapsed, and the population melted back into tribal living in the jungles.
Julian Jaynes
#15. Civilizations do fail. We have never seen one that hasn't. The difference is that the torch of progress has, in the past, always passed to another region of the world. But we now for the first time have a single, global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together.
John Brockman
#16. His eyes flew back at me and I could see whole civilizations, cities that he'd built and cherished and planned for, like the model of an entire world, all crumbling.
Lyndsay Faye
#17. Personally, my interests are ancient history and ancient civilizations. In my own life, I'd like to go to places like Easter Island.
Nicolas Cage
#18. The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.
Honore De Balzac
#19. The highest civilizations
the longest to last and I believe the most successful in human terms
are those which have come the closest to achieving real understanding and mutual appreciation between men and women.
Pearl S. Buck
#20. China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust.
Rose George
#21. I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.
Tim Blake Nelson
#22. In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.
Jonas Mekas
#23. Xenophobia manifests itself especially against civilizations and cultures that are weak because they lack economic resources, means of subsistence or land. So nomadic people are the first targets of this kind of aggression.
Antonio Tabucchi
#24. It is the mass dream of inverted self, populous with fears overt and secret, that forms the continuous but gossamer thread upon which are strung as phantom beads all civilizations from the remotest past of record to that of the present day and hour.
Louis Sullivan
#25. Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.
Haruki Murakami
#26. Al Jazeera is the opinion of other opinion, independent. Al Jazeera is diverse, reflection of the collective mind of the nations and cultures and civilizations that we report from and we report to, bridge of dialogue. This is what Al Jazeera is all about. Al Jazeera is a mission.
Wadah Khanfar
#27. In all civilizations we've studied, all cultures that we know of across the Earth and across time have invested some kind of attempt to understanding where where, where they come from, and where they are going.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#28. Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
Stanislaw Lem
#29. Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
Freeman Dyson
#30. On Mars, the crumbling remains of ancient civilizations may be found, mutely testifying to the one-time glory of a dying world.
P. E. Cleator
#31. There's a sick joke that the reason we have not been contacted by an alien civilization is that civilizations tend to destroy themselves when they reach our stage. But I have sufficient faith in the good sense of public to believe that we might prove this wrong.
Stephen Hawking
#32. All the art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time. Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life.
Alberto Giacometti
#33. Technological civilizations don't last long. You're all right until you get a printing press. Then a race starts between technology and common sense. And maybe technology always wins.
Jack McDevitt
#34. Civilizations fall because the people inside the Sanctuary throw open the gates.
Bill Whittle
#35. Abstract academic discussions have a way of leaving their mark on entire civilizations, as the events of this century have proved all too well.
Michael D. O'Brien
#36. Civilizations are not remembered by their business people, their bankers or lawyers. They're remembered by the arts.
Eli Broad
#37. I know a lot of Americans in Paris who have married Frenchmen. They keep bringing up their experience, the clash of civilizations, the clash of personalities.
Leslie Caron
#38. The International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC) ... to establish a superior library reflecting the religious and intellectual traditions both of the Islamic and Western civilizations.
Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas
#39. It has always been a mark of decaying civilizations to become obsessed with sex. When people lose their way, their purpose, their will, and their goals, as well as their faith ... they go "a whoring." It is a form of diversion that requires no thought, no character, and no restraint.
Billy Graham
#40. Promises controversy on a scale not seen since Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations sought to reframe a new world order.
Stefan Halper
#41. Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.
Stanislaw Lem
#42. Throughout its history, Islam has borrowed and adapted from other civilizations, both ancient and modern.
Shereen El Feki
#43. Most people would deny such a world (ancient highly advanced civilizations in the remote past) ever existed because it would be so at odds with their daily experience. We would have the same we-can't-do-it-so-it-can't-be-done mentality ...
David Icke
#44. Throughout the Arab and Islamic world the feeling is that we are now in top gear for a war of civilizations, a clash of civilizations. Support for the United States is very low and there are no voices within the Muslim world, except for a very few.
Husain Haqqani
#45. Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case ... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#46. Who would have predicted a century ago that the richest civilizations in history would be made up of polluted tracts of suburban development dominated by the private automobile, shopping malls, and a throwaway economy? Surely, this is not the ultimate fulfillment of our destiny.
Alan Thein Durning
#47. How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain's festering,
blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conicts of today.
Arundhati Roy
#48. Moths lay their eggs where civilizations have been destroyed.
Marty Rubin
#49. The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it aloneits ideologies and inventionswhich eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
Susan Sontag
#50. America's civilization perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing.
Walter A. McDougall
#51. Nature is relic of pre-human civilizations.
Toba Beta
#52. A nation that fails to plan intelligently for the development and protection of its precious waters will be condemned to wither because of its shortsightedness. The hard lessons of history are clear, written on the deserted sands and ruins of once proud civilizations.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#53. 'Avatar' imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent.
Annalee Newitz
#54. Where is everybody? Humans could theoretically colonize the galaxy in a million years or so, and if they could, astronauts from older civilizations could do the same. So why haven't they come to Earth?
Enrico Fermi
#55. That's what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last; they are repeated over and over by each generation.
Philip Reeve
#56. THE EVENTS IN THIS BOOK ARE REAL.
NAMES ANS PLACES HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT THE LORIEN, WHO REMAIN IN HIDING.
OTHER CIVILIZATIONS DO EXIST.
SOME OF THEM SEEK TO DESTROY YOU.
Pittacus Lore
#59. Civilizations evolve over time, and most scholars of civilization, including people like Carol Quigley, argue that they go through periods of warring states, and eventually evolve into a universal state.
Samuel P. Huntington
#60. Civilizations have been founded and maintained on theories which refused to obey facts.
Joe Orton
#61. Symbolic forms have always been the supports of civilizations, their laws, and their morality. Since symbolic forms are illusions, and illusions sustain civilization, those who rule must maintain illusion.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#62. People usually feel funny, smile and laugh when I tell them
about my strong belief in the very existence of prehistoric
advanced technology and great civilizations of wilier races.
I just can't wait to see their faces at time the truth is revealed.
Toba Beta
#63. In all earlier civilizations, it should be remembered, commerce was treated as a narrow activity and by no means the senior sector in society.
John Ralston Saul
#65. Indeed we generally remember ancient civilizations best by those buildings which most exploited the labor of ordinary people and most glorified the vanity of a single autocrat.
Chris Brazier
#66. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers created the 'Fertile Crescent' where some of the first civilizations emerged. Today they are immensely important resources, politically as well as geographically.
Stephen Kinzer
#67. Most every old civilizations looks at others--members of the same species but not of the same tribe--as wild men. It's a common rationalization, because when you reduce someone else to a level of something like an animal, it makes them easier to kill.
Gene Doucette
#68. Monuments and archaeological pieces serve as testimonies of man's greatness and establish a dialogue between civilizations showing the extent to which human beings are linked.
Vicente Fox
#69. If we don't cut carbon's money pipeline, we will pay for their gasoline with floods, droughts, fires, super storms, drowned cities, mass extinctions, wars, and collapsing civilizations.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#70. It is time to stop the mealy-mouthed euphemisms: 'Nationalists', 'Loyalists', 'Communities', 'Ethnic Groups', 'Cultures', 'Civilizations'. Religions is the word you need. Religions is the word you are struggling hypocritially to avoid.
Richard Dawkins
#71. women enjoyed more freedom in ancient Egypt than they did in other civilizations, in many cases for thousands of years to come, they had house pets, used a form of chewing gum made from myrrh and wax and some Egyptian doctors actually specialized in different areas of medicine.
Martin R. Phillips
#72. Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?
Maurice Strong
#73. They wanted to preserve and protect the mystical knowledge gained from their meditation practices and pass it on to future civilizations they clairvoyantly saw were going to be born after the destruction of Atlantis
Frederick Lenz
#74. The Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations have perished; Hammurabi, Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar are empty names; yet Babylonian mathematics is still interesting, and the Babylonian scale of 60 is still used in Astronomy.
G.H. Hardy
#75. I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#76. The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state.
Ludwig Von Mises
#77. There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.
Rebecca West
#78. I don't actually believe in a clash of civilizations. I believe in a clash of the civilized and the noncivilized.
Madeleine Albright
#79. The history of America is the history of a genocide that didn't end yet, the genocide of American civilizations.
Luiz Bolognesi
#80. Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, believes that DNA could only have arrived from space, sent in the form of bacteria from more advanced civilizations.
Walker Percy
#81. And while a hundred civilizations have prospered (sometimes for centuries) without computers or windmills or even the wheel, none have survived even a few generations without art.
David Bayles
#82. It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper, the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations.
Huston Smith
#83. It is very natural that every one who makes anything inside themselves that is makes it entirely out of what is in them does naturally have to have two civilizations. They have to have the civilization that makes them and the civilization that has nothing to do with them.
Gertrude Stein
#84. Death was in every fibre of these creatures. It was hidden in their languages and at the root of their civilizations. You could hear it in the sounds they made and see it in the way they moved. It darkened their pleasures and lightened their despair.
Andre Alexis
#85. All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.
Carl Sagan
#86. I reject the idea that there is some sort of existential "clash of civilizations." I am an interventionist, but not a militarist. War should always be a last resort.
Bernard-Henri Levy
#87. I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited.
Patrick Stewart
#88. Even people who know nothing about Greece know something about Greece. The very name sparks visions of ancient civilizations that dominated the Mediterranean.
Polly Letofsky
#89. America didn't bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.
A.A. Gill
#90. Christianity doesn't come into it. George Bush and Tony Blair are not Christians. Religious people believe in the prophets, peace be upon them. Bush believes in the profits and how to get a piece of them. So don't ever confuse this with a war of civilizations.
George Galloway
#91. The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#92. The differences between people need not act as barriers that wound, harm and drive us apart. Rather, these very differences among cultures and civilizations should be valued as manifestations of the richness of our shared creativity.
Daisaku Ikeda
#93. I'm sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity.
Diane Ackerman
#94. The possibility of reduced-time interstellar travel either by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations at present or ourselves in the future, is not fundamentally constrained by physical principles.
Harold E. Puthoff
#95. Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.
W. H. Auden
#96. The map showed human places I'd never heard of - places that had once been great civilizations, until humans forgot the world wasn't theirs to claim.
Anne Bishop
#97. If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse.
Cory Booker
#98. Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?
Henry Louis Gates
#99. We are in the twilight of this earth. The societies and civilizations of human beings will not endure much longer because of their abuses of power.
Frederick Lenz
#100. There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.
Hans Hofmann
