A Quote by Rajiv Gandhi

Civilizations are built by the ceaseless toil of a succession of generations. With softness and sloth, civilizations succumb. Let us beware of decadence.

Rajiv Gandhi

Quote Topics

Beware Built Civilizations Decadence Generations Let Us Sloth Softness Succession Succumb Toil Us

Quote Author

Rajiv Gandhi
Indian - Statesman
August 20, 1944 - May 21, 1991

Ancient and oriental civilizations were more sensitive than we are to the cycles of things; to the succession of generations, both divine and human; and to change within stasis. Western man is virtually alone in wanting to make his God into a fortress and personal immortality into a bulwark against time.

Marguerite Yourcenar

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

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

I think you try to extrapolate from the early civilizations and cultures of the continent, kind of looking for unique ways they set themselves apart from Western civilizations, and then pursue those avenues technologically and see where that takes you.

Joe Robert Cole

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

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

But I just don't think it's an abyss of nothingness [after death] and that we fall off and that our journey stops. I think it's circular and we go and we go and we go. I know that there are civilizations that I think are way more sophisticated than we are and I think more sophisticated civilizations lived before us.

Halle Berry

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

Most societies wipe themselves out and it's interesting to read about the last days of past civilizations. You'll note that the last days of past civilizations were filled with idiotic, irrational ideas and behaviors that couldn't be explained by reason.

Rush Limbaugh

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new [post-Cold-War] world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

Samuel P. Huntington

If we're thinking about old civilizations, those that formed a long time ago and there were stars and planets around long before Earth even existed, then these are going to be towards the center of the galaxy. That is the place to look if you think there are ancient civilizations that have made beacons or some other way of attracting our attention.

Paul Davies

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

Modern life... changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before-populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and-we're dawdling along. My idea is that we've got to go very much faster.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.