Quotes About Great Civilizations

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this.

Toni Morrison

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

Allan Bloom

#9. All great civilizations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.

Kenneth Clark

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. America is a place of many great events. Here is where Adam dwelt, where the Garden of Eden was located. America was the place of former civilizations, including Adam's, the Jaredites', and Nephites'.

Ezra Taft Benson

#15. We create beautiful and lasting things, build vast civilizations." "Gorgeous evasions," he said. "Great escapes.

Don DeLillo

#16. If one is searching for the cause of brutality in mankind, it would do well to remember that civilization is a great and vast machine.

Christopher Dutton