Quotes About Civilizations

He lay on the bed and he felt he might never rise from it. He lay in an enormous torpor. The world was too heavy to bear and it was settling itself onto his chest. He felt old, old. Civilizations had risen and fallen in the brief time that he had lived. He felt that when the old man's head exploded across the snow he should have turned the gun on himself.

Scientists in 2020 are not (as readers of mid-twentieth-century science fiction might have hoped) encountering alien civilizations in distant star systems; but they are encountering radically different forms of society under their own feet, some forgotten and newly rediscovered, others more familiar, but now understood in entirely new ways.

Most people would deny such a world (ancient highly advanced civilizations in the remote past) ever existed because it would be so at odds with their daily experience. We would have the same we-can't-do-it-so-it-can't-be-done mentality...

Too much light inhibits the activity of the brain", Carrel said. "Surely you've noticed that the world's great civilizations have formed far above the equator, where there is much less direct sunlight than in tropical regions".

The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.

Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.

The history of America is the history of a genocide that didn't end yet, the genocide of American civilizations.

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

Xenophobia manifests itself especially against civilizations and cultures that are weak because they lack economic resources, means of subsistence or land. So nomadic people are the first targets of this kind of aggression.

The first light of human consciousness and the world's first civilizations were in Africa.

Indeed, our concept of "East versus West"—or, as it has been called, "the clash of civilizations"—arises from Greek opposition to Persia.

What made the show work, in addition to the relationships between the members of the crew, were the stories we told each week. Star Trek wasa tribute to the great tradition of science fiction, in which future civilizations were used to tell contemporary morality tales, tales about subjects that couldn't be addressed for various reasons at the time.

Over the millennia, man has developed three ways of thinking about time: chaotic, cyclical, and linear. The first was the dominant view of primitive man, the second of ancient and traditional civilizations, and the third of the modern West, especially America.

The Empire is falling. The barbarians are at the gate. Even the mightiest civilizations can vanish. When its empire fell, Rome turned into a pathetic backwater, full of ruins, with sheep wandering through it, munching on the overgrown grass. All the glory was gone. Will the same fate befall Los Angeles and Manhattan? Will they be overrun by wild dogs, munching on the bones of dead Influencers and bankers? One can hope!

Because the rituals of the larger culture play a formative role in fashioning our affections, it must be recognized that idolatry is not merely an individual sin but is embedded in the very patterns of civilizations where they take on a systemic character.

Civilizations, from the perspective of history, are shown to be the outcome of mixtures and borrowings, often of quite arbitrary things, but always on a prodigious scale.

We are all failing, masterfully, because we desire it. Want to see civilizations ruined, want to see our species' death, our psychic embroidery unraveled. We want to find out who's left, the impossible perceiver of our demise.

In Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote that Egypt is the "cradle of mathematics—that is, the country of origin for Greek mathematics." Some historians believe that when European societies eventually began enslaving Africans, they also started downplaying the major contributions of both the ancient Nile River Valley civilizations and the kemetic culture, as well as concealing its African lineage.

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.

If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse.

An alliance of civilisations can be our most powerful weapon in the fight against terror.

The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers created the 'Fertile Crescent' where some of the first civilizations emerged. Today they are immensely important resources, politically as well as geographically.

Civilizations often prosper in opposition to others. Just as Christendom achieved form and substance in opposition to Islam after the latter's conquest of North Africa and the Levant in the seventh and eighth centuries, the West forged a definitive geopolitical paradigm in opposition to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

Les religions commencent divines, elles finissent humaines. De manière générale, les institutions, comme les civilisations, foncent vers leur disparition, car le temps les vide. En vieillissant, la forme prend plus d'importance que le fond, le contenant compte davantage que le contenu. Ce qu'on appelle la décadence.