Top 100 Quotes About Civilizations
#1. Civilizations rose and fell; what caused them to be remembered was not their contribution to knowledge or culture, not even the size of their empires, but rather how much force they extorted upon the landscape.
Max Barry
#2. Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.
Arnold Toynbee
#3. Education is a tender garden, whereas ignorance is weeds. History - the old history - was full of examples proving that, when civilizations fell, learning was the first thing to disappear.
Anonymous
#4. Of all the world's civilizations, America was the one that most needed losers.
Stephane Audeguy
#5. Alcohol was the reason we formed complex civilizations, and having to deal with the complexities of civilization is the reason most of us need alcohol.
David Wong
#6. Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.
Will Durant
#7. Not the kind of love that was fueled by need and that destroyed cities and entire civilizations, but the kind that rebuilt them, that much I knew.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#8. Whatever name civilizations give to the arrangement where a man lives with a woman, it is always better to call it a marriage.
Girdhar Joshi
#9. There are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If just one out of a million of those had planets, and just one in a million of those had life, and just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.
Jodie Foster
#10. From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively, civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives, there can really be no civilization at all.
Louis Kronenberger
#11. It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations
past and present
are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.
Eric Hoffer
#12. And I cried ... for all of the women who stretched their bodies for civilizations, only to find ruins.
Sonia Sanchez
#14. We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.
Anthony Marra
#15. Empires collapse,
Civilizations disappear,
Health deteriorates
And bodies turn to ash,
But life will always go on
Mouloud Benzadi
#16. The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth - Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek, and Hindu.
Joseph McCabe
#17. When civilizations collide, it usually isn't the more primitive one that prevails.
Rick Yancey
#18. Thousands of years ago, civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with those of other continents. In those centuries, Africans were politically free and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their cultures truly indigenous.
Haile Selassie
#19. The principles governing the speed at which the human organism can biologically adapt offer us the single greatest insight into why civilizations succeed and fail as well as the most reliable preview of our own destiny.
Rebecca D. Costa
#20. Civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them that they fail to meet.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#21. What makes human power erupt like a volcano? What destroy's it? The civilizations of Rome, Greece, Egypt, China were all eruptions from a human core.
Charles Lindbergh
#22. There are planets so far away from ours that no scientist will ever guess that they exits, let alone know the stories of their civilizations, their beginnings and ends. They're not being kept secret from us, but they're secret all the same.
John Darnielle
#23. In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature . They can't help it.
Carl Sagan
#24. If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.
Abdelaziz Bouteflika
#25. There is no greater motor for architecture than religious fervor. Ancient examples include the Inca, Aztec Egyptian civilizations. In more recent times, Christianity gave rise to the Gothic and Romanesque architecture of the European middle ages and Islam produced the wonders of the Ottoman Empire.
Helen Grant Ross
#26. Long time ago, many pre-human civilizations had developed so advanced
into a level where most people today assume them simply as works of nature.
Toba Beta
#27. I'm not a chauvinist. I'm a universalist. I think that God imploded, like a spiritual big bang, to launch the eight civilizations that make up recorded history and the religions in those civilizations.
Huston Smith
#28. The difference between human cultures and the civilizations of Highly Evolved Beings is that HEBs actually apply the law of reciprocity in their lives, rather than just giving it lip service.
Neale Donald Walsch
#29. Here among the constant ruins and rebuilding of civilizations lies the coexistence of diversity and intolerance.
David K. Shipler
#30. On this showing, the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.
Arnold J. Toynbee
#31. Civilizations in decline are notable when certain of their members escape justice, and do so with impunity.
Steven Erikson
#32. We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on.
Steven Erikson
#33. Thousands of years and many civilizations have defined a marriage as the union between one man and one woman. With few exceptions, those civilizations that did not follow that perished.
Randy Neugebauer
#34. I am the son of two civilizations that at a certain age in history have formed a happy marriage. The first of these, seven thousand years old, is the Pharaonic civilization; the second, one thousand four hundred years old, is the Islamic civilization.
Naguib Mahfouz
#35. Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.
Emil Cioran
#36. Our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them.
Carlisle Floyd
#37. ASEM should build a new Silk Road to actively boost exchanges between these two civilizations in the new century so that countries in Asia and Europe will build on their respective civilizations and respect, learn from, complement and benefit each other.
Jiang Zemin
#38. Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.
Russell Kirk
#39. Nations and civilizations rise, flourish for a time, and then decay. Eventually each comes to an end. This, because of sin, is the decree of history and the way of life on this planet.
Billy Graham
#40. It was the transmutation of the classical liberal intellectual foundation by Christianity that gave modern Europe its impetus and that pushed European accomplishment so far ahead of all other cultures and civilizations around the world.
Charles A. Murray
#41. He'd watched the world change around him, civilizations rise and fall, and although he could have anything, anyone, he wanted her.
Lisa Kessler
#42. By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.
Lewis Mumford
#43. By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death
Octavio Paz
#44. Nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would rather die than change.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#45. The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.
Joseph Campbell
#46. The flying serpent figure is ancient civilizations' way of creeping onto the throne of the Upper Heavens to claim its authority.
Ibrahim Ibrahim
#47. I have been digging through graves looking for proof that civilizations, people and stories don't really ever die, but what I've learned, over and over, is that they always do.
Zoe Klein
#48. Who are we to say what's right for civilizations that were already thousands of years old when our own nation came into being?
Unita Blackwell
#49. There haven't been civilizations without cities. But what about cities without civilizations? An inhuman thing, if possible, to have so many people together who beget nothing on one another. No, but it is not possible, and the dreary begets its own fire, and so this never happens.
Saul Bellow
#50. On the day of the universe's Last Judgment, two humans and a robot belonging to the Earth and Trisolaran civilizations embraced each other in ecstasy.
Liu Cixin
#51. I am urging that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
#52. There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness.
John Fante
#53. The clash of civilizations or the clash between Islam and the West may be cliches. But there is an even bigger cliche around: that this clash actually goes on within Islam, between reformists and fanatics.
Pankaj Mishra
#54. have our civilizations become so destitute that we can only live in our fear of want? Can we only enjoy our possessions or our senses when we are certain that we shall always be able to enjoy them?
Muriel Barbery
#55. We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.
Paul Valery
#56. I believe that the capital of the Republic of Albania is a suitable venue for discussing the dialogue among religions and civilizations, notably in the countries of South East Europe, because we are well familiar with this country's track record of religious tolerance.
Georgi Parvanov
#57. Lemon Tree is well worth seeing as a first-class artistic achievement bridging two civilizations.
Andrew Sarris
#58. In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.
Carl Sagan
#59. If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstances. All forms of dogmatic religion should go. The world did without them in the past and can do so again. I cite the great civilizations of China and India.
Theodore Dreiser
#60. Throughout history, civilizations have built a common cause through coming-of-age rituals. But we don't do that anymore. Maybe we should think about that.
Joe Klein
#61. A dialogue among civilizations can be seen as a dialogue between the individual and the universal.
Abdelaziz Bouteflika
#62. The first light of human consciousness and the world's first civilizations were in Africa.
John Henrik Clarke
#63. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates
Michel Foucault
#64. It should not surprise us that there must be other civilizations in our galaxy and throughout the entire universe.
Robert K. G. Temple
#65. Words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself," he said. "Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe." From a Life Magazine interview in 1988.
Julian Jaynes
#66. Civilizations ... cannot flourish if they are beset with troublesome infections of mistaken beliefs.
Harry G. Frankfurt
#67. Paleoclimatic records show clearly that the past 10,000 years, the Holocene, is a remarkably stable period in which we went from being a few hunters and gatherers to become more sedentary agriculture-based civilizations, which then moved us to the current populated modern era.
Johan Rockstrom
#68. Enormous cemeteries existed among sedentary civilizations, where the weight of the past grew larger than any present time.
Vernor Vinge
#69. No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent.
Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.
Anne Rice
#70. People quite often think of the question 'Are we alone in the universe?' in terms of other civilizations out there: life forms that have reached at least our level of technological development.
Dimitar Sasselov
#71. We should not judge Islam by terrorists. All civilizations and cultures produce terrorists. Every time there is a flag-burning, killing, or provocative films, I'm worried, not because something radical will happen, and this time, some people are killed. We're very sorry for that.
Orhan Pamuk
#72. Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to another in order for stars to shine, planets to rotate, plants to grow, and civilizations to evolve.
Vaclav Smil
#73. One of the things that I'm fascinated about generally is the rise and fall of everything, from civilizations to families to companies.
Satya Nadella
#74. The civilization of the twentieth century cannot be universal except by being a dynamic synthesis of all the cultural values of all civilizations. It will be monstrous unless it is seasoned with the salt of negri-tude, for it will be without the savor of humanity.
Leopold Sedar Senghor
#75. The position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.
Rose Macaulay
#76. Our civilizations do not cause us to clash. No, our clashing allows us to pretend we belong to civilizations.
Mohsin Hamid
#77. If there were other civilizations out there, why would they ever want to make contact with humanity? If this was how we treated each other, how much kindness could we possibly show to some race of bug-eyed beings from beyond?
Ernest Cline
#78. Civilizations rose and fell and in the end everything was dust and sand. Nothing beside remained. Hotels, maybe.
Kate Atkinson
#79. I am studying ancient civilizations, trying to find what happened to them, finding out why they went into a decline, why they died.
L. Ron Hubbard
#80. Democracy is just a false idol - a mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries and dying civilizations.
H.P. Lovecraft
#81. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.
Julian Jaynes
#82. On the top of my desk there are initials, carved into the wood, and dates ... This carving, done with a pencil dug many times into the warn varnish of the desk, has the pathos of all vanished civilizations. It's like a handprint on stone. Whoever made this was once alive.
Margaret Atwood
#83. For thousands of years it has been understood that, just as civilizations have to come to an end, there can even be times of global extinctions. But always there are people who know how to gather the essence of life and hold it safely, protect it and nurture it until the next seeding.
Peter Kingsley
#84. political and economic development among civilizations are clearly rooted in their different cultures. East Asian economic success has its source in East Asian culture, as do the difficulties East Asian societies have had in achieving stable democratic political systems. Islamic
Samuel P. Huntington
#85. The phone is one hundred, one hundred and ten years old. There was a middle period where the government had a broad ability to surveil, but if you look at human history in total, people evolved and civilizations evolved with private conversations and private speech.
Brian Acton
#86. Is that the end ... of all the races and civilizations, and the dreams of the world, to be able to leave a few stones buried beneath the sands, to tell the Dark that we were here?
C.J. Cherryh
#87. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
Toni Morrison
#88. Civilizations may clash, but they surely fall if robbed of light from above. It could come from the 1 percent or the 99%, but a guiding light is needed to keep the United States from becoming the rubble of past great civilizations.
James A. Forbes
#89. There are many, many communities, many ethnic minorities, many civilizations that have been brutalised by others and you have to move on. You cannot perpetually stay in that place of blame, otherwise it's just a downward spiral.
David Oyelowo
#90. AIDS is a global problem and there should be a global solution found by the entire international community. It is really scary to see and imagine our world fall into pieces because we refuse to share and put in the common vestiges of our civilizations.
Sarah Polley
#91. Essentially all civilizations that rose to the level of possessing an urban culture had need for two forms of science-related technology, namely, mathematics for land measurements and commerce and astronomy for time-keeping in agriculture and aspects of religious rituals.
Frederick Seitz
#93. [H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.
Will Durant
#94. Legends and folklores are the memories of ancient civilizations.
Ninotaziz
#95. Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.
Joseph Wood Krutch
#96. 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.
David Sedaris
#97. If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.
Loren Eiseley
#98. Everything we know and believe about deity and divinity nowadays, is a direct origin of old civilizations. Everybody, Greeks, Saxons, Assyrians and Soumerians, all imitate the ancient ways of the first tribes of central Africa (Mason father to his son in The Omniconstant
Christos Rodoulla Tsiailis
#99. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.
Marilynne Robinson
#100. Civilizations have come and gone and, in spite of our vaunted progress, I am tempted to ask again and again, 'To what purpose?'
Mahatma Gandhi
