Civilizations Quotes

“The common man is in the majority, so the common man holds the most power, but unfortunately they give their power away to the few who tell them to do so. If a certain threshold of people believed in their hearts that a transition to a moneyless civilization would be best, it would manifest itself in the physical world.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear music and how to read a book. What does your civilization offer?”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“Mothers are the backbone and strength of civilizations. - Strong by Kailin Gow”
― Kailin Gow

“Art is memory made public. Time wins in the long run. Books turn to dust, negatives decay, records get worn out, civilizations burn. But as long as the art endures, a song or a view or a thought or a feeling someone once thought worth keeping is saved and stays shareable. Others can say, “I feel that too.”
― David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue

“Words are so powerful. It can win wars, create kings, and sustain civilizations. - Wordwick Games by Kailin Gow”
― Kailin Gow, Wordwick Games Trilogy (An Epic Fantasy with SAT Prep Words) Books 1 - 3

“History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up,' Voltaire reportedly said. The observation refers to the argument that fortunes of nations or civilizations or societies rise and fall based on the character of their people, and this character is heavily influenced by the material and moral condition of their society. The idea was a staple of history writing from ancient Greece until it began to decline in popularity after the middle of the twentieth century.”
― Dan Carlin, The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

“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, Etched in Bone

“He who writes well runs the civilization. Everyone else does the grunt work.”
― Prof. Kenneth W. Harl

“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, To America with Love

“If you do not know an oriental language, you are less than five thousand years old”
― Malay Roychoudhury, The Hungryalist Poems by Malay Roychoudhury

“We are used to things starting out small and simple and then progressing--evolving--to become ever more complex and sophisticated, so this is naturally what we expect to find on archaeological sites. It upsets our carefully structured ideas of how civilizations should behave, how they should mature and develop, when we are confronted by a case like Göbekli Tepe that starts out perfect at the beginning and then slowly devolves until it is just a pale shadow of its former self.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“If the teachings of the Protestants in Europe gave birth to the Protestant ethics and the modern civilization, it becomes alarming that most of our charismatic teachings today mainly concentrate on individual aggrandizement”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Nothing is more important than a great idea that influenced the
development of civilization.”
― Eraldo Banovac

“Cultele memoriei de orice natură, indiferent dacă se prezintă ȋn veșminte religioase, civilizatoare sau politice, trebuie privite... cu neȋncredere și asta fără excepție: sub pretextul unei comemorări purificatoare, eliberatoare sau fie și numai fondatoare de identitate, ele dau inevitabil apă la moară unei tendințe ascunse de repetare și repunere ȋn scenă. ... măsurile de stingere sau de domolire a flăcării mocnite cu care ard amintirile suferințelor trebuie să facă parte din regulile de ȋnțelepciune ale oricărei civilizații,”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Zorn und Zeit

“The rolling hills we traveled through were lined with rows of crisscrossed crops- apple and pear trees, vines of grapes, and maize- creating bafflingly precise geometries. In the forested areas, the branches on the trees drooped lugubriously like the long sleeves of Druid priests.
Jonathan pointed to the curved roads that cut through the hillsides and valleys. "Forged by Romans, Mina!" he said. "So many civilizations have come and gone on this land- Celts, Romans, Normans, Mongols, French. Who knows how many more?”
― Karen Essex, Dracula in Love

“When we study the past seeking evidence of a highly advanced culture, we should not expect to find objects that we associate with our own culture. Different cultures develop along different paths. This process occurs even over relatively short periods of time, especially when one society is isolated from others. For example, when the Allies went into Germany after Hitler's defeat, they found that after only twelve years of isolation German technology was being developed along lines vastly different from our own. Pauwels and Bergier wrote:
'When the War in Europe ended on May 8th, 1945, missions of investigation were immediately sent out to visit Germany after her defeat. Their reports have been published; the catalogue alone has 300 pages. Germany had only been separated from the world since 1933. In twelve years the technical evolution of the Reich developed along strangely divergent lines. Although the Germans were behindhand as regards the atomic bomb, they had perfected giant rockets unmatched by any in America or Russia. They may not have had radar, but they had perfected a system of infra-red ray detectors which were quite as effective. Though they did not invent silicones, they had developed an entirely new organic chemistry, based on the eight-ring carbon chain. [...] They had rejected the theory of relativity and tended to neglect the quantum theory. [...] They believed in the existence of eternal ice and that the planets and the stars were blocks of ice floating in space. If it has been possible for such wide divergencies to develop in the space of twelve years in our modern world, in spite of the exchange of ideas and mass communications, what view must one take of the civilizations of the past? To what extent are our archaeologists qualified to judge the state of the sciences, techniques, philosophy and knowledge that distinguished, say, the Maya or Khmer civilizations?”
― Christopher Dunn, The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt

“Gravity and time are local, and they are maintaining the balance in the bubbles. However, anomalies in the local gravity fields and times can destroy complete planetary systems and civilizations.”
― Jozef Simkovic, How to Kiss the Universe: An Inspirational Spiritual and Metaphysical Narrative about Human Origin, Essence and Destiny

“For more than half a century, [...] American archaeology was so riddled with pre-formed opinions about how the past should look, and about the orderly, linear way in which civilizations should evolve, that it repeatedly missed, sidelined, and downright ignored evidence for any human presence at all prior to Clovis--until, at any rate, the mass of that evidence became so overwhelming that it took the existing paradigm by storm.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“As I studied the e-mail from Glenn Milne, I knew just how ancient the U-shaped structure [found a few kilometers away from the Indian coast] really might be - at least 11,000 years old. That's 6000 years older than the first monumental architecture of ancient Egypt or of ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia - traditionally thought of as the oldest civilizations of antiquity. Certainly, no civilization known to history existed in southern India - or anywhere else - 11,000 years ago. Yet the U-shaped structure off the Tranquebar-Poompuhur coast invites us to consider the possibility that it was the work of a civilization that archaeologists have as yet failed to identify - one whose primary ruins could have been missed because they are submerged so deep beneath the sea.”
― Graham Hancock, Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

“Now we know that man is more than two million years old,' exlaimed Heyerdahl, 'it would be very strange if our ancestors lived like primitive food collectors for all that time until suddenly they started in the Nile valley, in Mesopotamia and even in the Indus valley, to build a civilization at peak level pretty much at the same time. And there's a question I ask that I never get an answer to. The tombs from the first kingdom of Sumer are full of beautiful ornaments and treasures made of gold, silver, platinum, and semi-precious stones -- things you don't find in Mesopotamia. All you find there is mud and water -- good for planting but not much else. How did they suddenly learn -- in that one generation just about -- where to go to find gold and all these other things? To do that they must have known the geography of wide areas, and that takes time. So there must have been something before.”
― Graham Hancock, Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

“Civilization does not have to be ugly; civilization can well be civilized! And the only way to create a civilized civilization is to create an environmentally friendly civilization!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The West is the only civilization which has substantial interests in every other civilization or region and has the ability to affect the politics, economics, and security of every other civilization or region.”
― Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

“When morals and values are absent, civilizations fall and collapse.”
― Nadine Sadaka Boulos

“The only true solutions to complex systemic problems are piecemeal, multi-pronged answers, and they will vary wildly from forest to desert, from city to city, and even between neighborhoods within a single city. Life is messy and civilization even messier. If your answer is ever any less messy, you’re fooling yourself.”
― John Bierce, The Siege of Skyhold

“Rich, modern countries have common traits that make them different from poor, traditional countries, which also share common traits. Differences in wealth can lead to conflict between societies, but the evidence suggests that this mainly occurs when rich and powerful societies try to conquer and colonize poor and traditional societies.”
― Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

“He was not afraid, but slightly bewildered, as a barbarian always is when confronted by the evidence of civilized networks and systems, the workings of which are so baffling and mysterious to him.”
― Robert E. Howard, God in the Bowl

“When a social system is destroyed, that destruction is final, there is no turning back.”
― Michel Houellebecq

“Civilizations Will Crumble

The hardest walls will crumble and
the most thriving civilisations will fall;
but Nature, with all its might—
incarnated in gentle processes, graceful resilience,
and eloquent harmony—
will effortlessly remain to reign.

The path of resistance is
the way to death;
the path of non-resistance is
the way to deathlessness.”
― Felisa Tan

“The more I contemplate the spectacle of the world and the ever-changing state of things, the more profoundly I'm convinced of the inherent fiction of everything, of the false importance exhibited by all realities. And in this contemplation (which has occurred to all thinking souls at one time or another), the colourful parade of customs and fashions, the complex path of civilizations and progress, the grandiose commotion of empires and cultures--all of this strikes me as a myth and a fiction, dreamed among shadows and ruins.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Civilizations come and go.
Why?
Because man's greed will always get in the way.”
― Anthony T. Hincks