Top 331 Civilizations Quotes & Sayings

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

Institutions are what allow us to have continuity in civilizations.

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.

Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them.

Human rights is the fruit of various civilizations.

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.

Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor. Civilizations are ghouls.

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.

In the end, what brings civilizations down is when the elites lose confidence in the rightness of their cause.

Civilizations fall because the people inside the Sanctuary throw open the gates.

And I cried… for all of the women who stretched their bodies for civilizations, only to find ruins.

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.

Fundamentalist tendencies and movements existed, so far as I know, in all societies and civilizations.

One of the things that I'm fascinated about generally is the rise and fall of everything, from civilizations to families to companies.

The precedent is that civilizations collapse, and everything's stacked up for this one to go, and it's a mess when it happens.

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.

If the European Union wants to be an address where civilizations meet, it must take Turkey in.

Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future.

I hate the tribal hatred thesis - in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and places like that they kill each other because that's just what people do there. I think it's profoundly ignorant. I was astonished when Samuel Huntington wrote his famous clash of civilizations essay in response to the Yugoslavian war. I was on the streets in Sarajevo and every other person I met came from a mixed marriage. And here is Professor Huntington from Harvard writing this is a clash of civilizations. That was absurd.

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.

What we need is a dialogue amongst civilizations.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

The key strengths of civilizations are also their central weaknesses. You can see that from the fact that the golden ages of civilizations are very often right before the collapse. The Renaissance in Italy was very much like the Classic Maya. The apogee was the collapse. The Golden Age of Greece was the same thing. We see this pattern repeated continuously, and it is one that should make us nervous. I just heard Bill Gates say that we are living in the greatest time in history. Now you can understand why Bill Gates would think that, but even if he is right, that is an ominous thing to say.

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

Here among the constant ruins and rebuilding of civilizations lies the coexistence of diversity and intolerance.

Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.

All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.

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.

India and Vietnam are old civilizations. We have ancient cultural and spiritual connections.

Getting access to diverse civilizations should be easy, and languages are the gateway to that.

In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature. They can't help it.

It was their intention to start twelve new civilizations similar to Atlantis in these locations.

Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring this about?

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.

It should not surprise us that there must be other civilizations in our galaxy and throughout the entire universe.

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.

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.

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.

Civilizations proceed from the heart rather than from the head.

Civilizations have been founded and maintained on theories which refused to obey facts.

Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.

Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations have recognized only one. Where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilization in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.

Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

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

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

But it is a law of life and development in history where two national civilizations meet they fight for ascendancy.

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

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.

Throughout its history, Islam has borrowed and adapted from other civilizations, both ancient and modern.

When civilizations collide, it usually isn't the more primitive one that prevails.

The role of religions in the domination and destruction of African civilizations was ruthless... Islam was as guilty as all the rest.