Quotes About Civilizations

In reconstructing African civilisations, the concern is to indicate that African social life had meaning and value, and that the African past is one with which the black man in the Americas can identify with pride.

The difficulty is believing what we are told, and my grandmother said that a good prayer depends on the audience. It's all in the clutter of words, this eloquence, the lives before and after transformed into fingerprints, notes of music, the accessories of forgotten civilizations.

Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

Badger nodded towards the trenches. "Woolley and the rest of 'em dig to uncover past civilizations. We dig to bury our own.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far - the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.

For well over a thousand years, from about A.D. 500 to 1700, the civilizations of western Africa flourished. Most of us know nothing about them. During the same period, Europe suffered from constant warfare and only slowly recovered its lost glory. The history of the "Dark Ages" and the Renaissance is taught in every school. Most of Africa's history, except for that of Egypt, remains unknown to general readers.

The right to a quality education is, I believe, the perfect path to bridge the gap between different cultures and to reconcile various civilizations. Without such a right, the values of liberty, justice and equality will have no meaning. Ignorance is by far the biggest danger and threat to humankind.

In the third and following centuries of our era various Celtic, Teutonic, or Asiatic tribes laid Italy waste and destroyed the classic cultures. The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.

To the Romans, the Greeks and the Jews Sumeria was unknown.

Sumeria was to Babylonia, and Babylonia to Assyria, what Crete was to Greece, and Greece to Rome:

Algunas veces se ha dicho que el acentuar el carácter cristiano de la cultura occidental nos vuelve ciegos a los valores de otras civilizaciones. Por mi parte, considero que sucede todo lo contrario. En efecto, mientras más entendamos el cristianismo, mejor entenderemos el Islam, y mientras más subestimemos el elemento religioso en nuestra propia cultura, menos apreciaremos las culturas del mundo no europeo.

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?

About the idea of a clash between cultures, between civilisations, I don't believe in it. It's something some political leaders tried to use, and that the media tried and are still trying to sell us, in order to simplify the world and their work.

The Americas span a much greater distance north–south (9,000 miles) than east–west: only 3,000 miles at the widest, narrowing to a mere 40 miles at the Isthmus of Panama. That is, the major axis of the Americas is north–south. The same is also true, though to a less extreme degree, for Africa. In contrast, the major axis of Eurasia is east–west. What effect, if any, did those differences in the orientation of the continents' axes have on human history?

That contrast between the immediate virtues of wheat and barley and the difficulties posed by teosinte may have been a significant factor in the differing developments of New World and Eurasian human societies.

Why did history unfold differently on different continents?

Hi, Emperor. How's the galactic-domination business these days?" "Hard work," he replied, rolling his eyes heavenward. "Honestly, I invade peaceful civilizations on a whim, destroy their cities and generally cause a great deal of unhappy mayhem—and then they turn against me for absolutely no reason at all.

There's people who actually have a whole science devoted to what makes a sticky meme and that idea of that question of why some ideas about how civilizations work catch on and others don't.

We in the so called 'Western civilisations' have so much to learn from other cultures, and they would stand to gain so much by learning from ours. We don't have all the answers - far from it... but nor do any other culture or religion.

The extraterrestrials explained that there are more than 80 different extraterrestrial civilizations interacting within our solar system, all of which have gone through an evolutionary process.

Our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them.

these densely settled civilizations interacted in a perverse way with European colonialism to create a "reversal of fortune," making the places that were previously relatively wealthy in the Americas relatively poor. Today it is the United States and Canada, which were then far behind the complex civilizations in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, that are much richer than the rest of the Americas.

At school, we'd studied the Romans and the Saxons, and I was fascinated by it all. So I made my dad take me to the British Museum as often as possible.