Samuel P. Huntington Quotes

The measure of progress of civilization is the progress of the people.

The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

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

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

The stream of civilisation flows on like a river: it is rapid in mid- current, slow at the sides, and has its backwaters. At best, civilisation advances by spirals.

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

History is the record of human society or world civilization, of the changes that take place in the nature of that society … of all the transformations that society undergoes by its very nature.

Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.

Civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them that they fail to meet.

It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part of it and lack perspective, and because it presents considerable variation from our pattern of historical change.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent

The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.

I feel like I have been able to notice throughout the incremental march of history during the course of my own lifetime patterns emerging, and there's a sort of a rubber band effect that happens where social growth and change is concerned.

Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.

We owe the origin and development of human society and, consequently, of culture and civilization, to the fact that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than when performed in isolation.

You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books.

Nation-building is never a 'done deal' confined to history already established.

There are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that faculty which is paramount in any period and exerts itself through the strongest nation, determines the civility of that age: and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.

Revolution is the larva of civilization.

Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.