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Quotes About Civilizations

That's what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last; they are repeated over and over by each generation.
~ Philip Reeve
Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.
~ Joseph Campbell
The Jebusites ... belonged to one or other of these two great races; perhaps, indeed, to both (i.e., Amorites and Hittites).
~ A. H. SAYCE.
No one will ever comprehend the arrested civilizations unless he sees the strict dilemma of early society. Either men had no law at all, and lived in confused tribes, hardly hanging together, or they had to obtain a fixed law by processes of incredible difficulty. Those who surmounted that difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in their way who did not.
~ Walter Bagehot
The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
~ Will and Ariel Durant
THOSE WHO STUDY the rise and fall of civilizations learn that no shortcoming has been as surely fatal to republics as a dearth of public virtue, the unwillingness of those who govern to place the value of their society above personal interest.
~ James B. Stockdale
What has been written down only goes back some six thousand years, tracking only the briefest steps of humans on this planet. And even that record is full of gaps turning history into a frayed and moth-eaten tapestry. Most remarkable of all, down those ragged holes many of history's greatest mysteries have been lost, waiting to be rediscovered—including events that mark pivotal shifts in history, those rare moments that change civilizations.
~ James Rollins
A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a millionfold the age of the earth. But these same divines, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when it comes to the age of civilisations; they can't even begin to concede that civilisations might have very old histories.
~ Doris Lessing
Acontecimientos importantes de la Historia de la Galaxia, II: Desde los orígenes de esta Galaxia, grandes civilizaciones han surgido y desaparecido y muerto tan a menudo que resulta profundamente tentador pensar que la vida en ella debe ser a) algo así como un mareo, un vértigo en el espacio, en el tiempo, en la historia o cosa parecida, y b) estúpida.
~ Douglas Adams
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate
~ Douglas Adams
A história de todas as grandes civilizações galácticas tende a passar por três fases distintas e identificáveis: a da Sobrevivência, a da Interrogação e a da Sofisticação, também conhecidas pelas fases Como, Porquê e Onde. Por exemplo, a primeira fase é caracterizada pela pergunta Como vamos comer?, a segunda pela pergunta Por que comemos? e a terceira pela pergunta Onde vamos almoçar?.
~ Douglas Adams
La historia de todas las civilizaciones importantes de la Galaxia tiende a pasar por tres etapas diferentes y reconocibles, las de Supervivencia, Indagación y Refinamiento, también conocidas por las fases del Cómo, del Por qué y del Dónde. »Por ejemplo, la primera fase se caracteriza por la pregunta: ¿Cómo podemos comer?; la segunda, por la pregunta: ¿Por qué comemos? y la tercera, por la pregunta: ¿Dónde vamos a almorzar?»
~ Douglas Adams
There are only a few really high-profile archaeological cultures in the world: Egypt and the Maya.
~ Douglas Preston
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
This battle, this war, between us . . . this 'clash of civilizations,' as your people like to call it. It's a long-term fight. It's not about who's got the biggest gun. It's not about landing one big killer punch. It's about attrition. It's about killing the body slowly, with lots of well-placed jabs. It's about relentlessly chipping away at the soul of your enemy with every opportunity you get.
~ Raymond Khoury
But it is a law of life and development in history where two national civilizations meet they fight for ascendancy.
~ Bernhard von Bulow
This is indeed a clash of civilisations, not between Islam and Christendom but between reason and superstition.
~ Polly Toynbee
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
Henceforth women were marginalized and became second-class citizens in the new civilizations of the Oikumene. Their position was particularly poor in Greece, for example—a fact that Western people should remember when they decry the patriarchal attitudes of the Orient.
~ Karen Armstrong
Civilizations rose and fell and in the end everything was dust and sand. Nothing beside remained. Hotels, maybe.
~ Kate Atkinson
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
Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
~ Freeman Dyson
Nature is relic of pre-human civilizations.
~ Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
It is impossible to understand history, international politics, the world economy, religions, philosophy, or 'patterns of culture' without taking geography into account.
~ Kenneth C. Davis