Quotes About Civilizations

Fulla is the Arab world's answer to Barbie. Now, according to proponents of the clash of civilizations, Barbie and Fulla occupy these completely separate spheres. They have different interests. They have divergent values. And should they ever come in contact... well, I've got to tell you, it's just not going to be pretty.

I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand 'clash of civilisations' theory or 'the West versus the rest' binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception.

Fingerprints of the Gods

They used to teach us that evolution of intelligent beings wasn't possible, she said. Societies protect their weaker members. Civilizations tend to make wheel chairs and spectacles and hearing aids as soon as they have the tools for them. When a society makes war, the men generally have to pass a fitness test before they're allowed, to risk their lives. I suppose it helps win the war. She smiled. But it leaves precious little room for the survival of the fittest.

Lest we forget—that we are not the measure of all things. That reality has a force which we cannot legislate or legislate away. Lest we forget—that we are all carried out into the deep. I dream of escape, of swimming or floating or rafting away. And I dream of staying, of building monuments and religions and civilisations. But in the end we can't stay and we can't escape. So here I sit silent and restless.

Personally, my interests are ancient history and ancient civilizations. In my own life, I'd like to go to places like Easter Island.

Isolationists believed that the ancient civilizations all developed independent of one another. Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, Egypt—all crossed a threshold into civilization about the same time: around the third or fourth century before the birth of Christ.

They also explain many common points in the archaeological finds of these civilizations as due to man's genetic commonality. Thus

believed that those civilizations rose at approximately the same time on the cosmic scale—and exhibited all those similarities, including the high runes—because those civilizations had all been started by people from a single earlier civilization.

La historia prueba que las grandes civilizaciones se acaban cuando la distancia entre 'tener' y 'no tener' es demasiado grande.

The combination of our mortality with our groundlessness imparts to human life its pressing and enigmatic character. We struggle to in our brief time in the midst of an impenetrable darkness. A small area is lighted up: our civilizations, our sciences, our loves. We prove unable to define the place of the lighted area within a larger space devoid of light, and must go to our deaths unenlightened.

In God's scheme what is a few billion years here and there. Perhaps there have come and gone a dozen human civilizations in the past billion years that we know nothing about. And after this civilization we are living in destroys itself, it will all start up again in a million years when the planet has all its messes cleaned up. Then, finally, one of these civilizations, say five billion years from now, will last because people treat each other the way they ought to.

The pre-Greek civilizations, never discovering the field of epistemology, had no explicit idea of a cognitive process which is systematic, secular, observation-based, logic-ruled; the medievals for centuries had no access to most of this knowledge. The dominant, mystical ideas of such cultures represent a nonrational approach to the world, not an antirational approach.

We could do as you suggest. We could coerce civilizations. Actively mold them. But our creator doesn't believe this is our place. Our creator believes in the principal of self-determination. Of choice—free will.

Ten years before Stalin's Great Terror and six years before Hitler came to power, Benda already feared that the writers, journalists, and essayists who had morphed into political entrepreneurs and propagandists would goad whole civilizations into acts of violence. And so it came to pass.

morphed into political entrepreneurs and propagandists would goad whole civilizations into acts of violence.

Ten years before Stalin's Great Terror and six years before Hitler came to power, Benda already feared that the writers, journalists, and essayists who had morphed into political entrepreneurs and propagandists would goad whole civilizations into acts of violence. And so it came to pass. If

The map showed human places I'd never heard of - places that had once been great civilizations, until humans forgot the world wasn't theirs to claim.

It seems that civilizations exist only to produce art and literature; words are what speak for them and remain. How do we know that these extra-human figures aren't truly real? It tortures my mind to think this might be the case…

There are a few much older states in existence, particularly ancient empires and their successor states such as China or Iran.

I know only that civilizations seem to be like people. They are born, they grow to maturity, then they age and lose their vitality and they die, only to be born again in later years.

Gradually, the nations living in this cradle of mankind, having created great, monumental civilizations, as if exhausted by the superhuman effort, or perhaps even crushed by the immensity of what they had brought forth and no longer capable of further developing it, handed over the reins to younger peoples, bursting with energy and eager to live. Europe will come on the scene and, later, America.

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

Feelings are the mental expressions of homeostasis, while homeostasis, acting under the cover of feeling, is the functional thread that links early life-forms to the extraordinary partnership of bodies and nervous systems. That partnership is responsible for the emergence of conscious, feeling minds that are, in turn, responsible for what is most distinctive about humanity: cultures and civilizations. Feelings are at the center of the book, but they draw their powers from homeostasis.