James Henry Breasted Quotes

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled law.

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

Think about it for a brief moment. Suspend disbelief. Wind the clock forward 100 years. Do you think, as a species, we will still be struggling with the things that vex us today? Will we still be arguing about the same stuff? We will still be eating Cocoa Puffs? We are at the end of the beginning.

We are not learning to view ourselves as an advanced, evolving civilization. That is what we really must learn to do, in due course, if we were to survive. All of that will take place, in due course, and we will be able to explore solar system. We will be able to go beyond it, provided we get our act together and learn to live as a civilization.

To-day it appears as though it may well be altogether abolished in the future as it has to some extent been mitigated in the past by the unceasing, and as it now appears, unlimited ascent of man to knowledge, and through knowledge to physical power and dominion over Nature.

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering - that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

We're the first technology-creating species. We use technology to extend our reach. We didn't stay in the caves, and we haven't stayed on the planet. To play jazz with our genomes and the universe might ultimately be what we're all about.

Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

The space shuttle was designed, at least in part, to broaden our knowledge of the universe. To scientists, the vehicle was a tool; to engineers, it was their creation.

Whatever people thought the first time they held a portable phone the size of a shoe in their hands, it was nothing like where we are now, accustomed to having all knowledge at our fingertips.

It seems obvious that if a species has the brainpower for speech, along with the sort of appendages that can manipulate a pair of pliers, it will eventually blunder into science, technology, and radio.

Clearly the human story is one of acceleration. There has been a Moore curve in terms of the number of people alive on the planet, our technological ability, and our ability to understand ourselves. We have had this extraordinary, explosive growth in our ingenuity.

O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.

For the first time in history, a private company is organizing a mission to the moon. This mission will inspire countries of the world, citizens, our youth.

We could raise prodigious cities and create nations, and explore the universe.

We imagine that human nature doesn't change. We like to say that but I don't think it's true because we have, in the course of the centuries, altered ourselves.

Civilization consists in the multiplication and refinement of human wants.

Every day sees humanity more victorious in the struggle with space and time.

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols