Aiden Wilson Tozer Quotes

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

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.

History shows us that other highly developed forms of civilization have collapsed. Who knows whether the same fate does not await our own?

If our civilization is destroyed it will not be by ... barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above.

The general idea of history seems to be that it is the biography of a society…. History is to the common life of many what biography is to an individual.

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.

Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions

Human history began as an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.

If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have . . . a recipe for the fall of civilization.

We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it.

Civilization has always been a bust.

Most societies wipe themselves out and it's interesting to read about the last days of past civilizations. You'll note that the last days of past civilizations were filled with idiotic, irrational ideas and behaviors that couldn't be explained by reason.

Yet the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed, that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.

Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.

Civilization is coming to an end, you understand.

When work goes out of style we may expect to see civilization totter and fall.

The civilization you sit in ... is now obvious in crisis, perhaps death pangs, twisting grotesquely like a dying animal, swirling down the garbage drain-this civilization was founded on God's road map.

The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world.

Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.

The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its lifespan and brings about its corruption.

It is clear that every civilization undergoes a process of historical change. We can see that a civilization comes into existence, passes through a long experience, and eventually goes out of existence.

Barbarism recommences by the excess of civilization.