Edith Hamilton Quotes

All men are democrats when they are happy.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.

History has been conceived--and with high justification in the records--as the human struggle for civilization against barbarism in different ages and places, from the beginning of human societies.

For what can power give more than food and drink, To live at ease, and not be bound to think?

That country [Carthage] was rapidly sinking into the state of barbarism from whence it had been raised by the Phoenician colonies and Roman laws; and every step of intestine discord was marked by some deplorable victory of savage man over civilized society.

By peace our condition has been improved in the pursuit of civilized life.

I believe in courtesy. It is the way we avoid hurting people's feelings. She thought that maybe, just maybe, western civilization was in decline because people did not take time to take tea at four o'clock.

I'm happy. I don't ever have to pay anything, and I don't ever have to wash the dishes, and I don't ever have to behave nicely.

I pray we are still a young and courageous nation, that we have not grown so old and so fat and so prosperous that all we can think about is to sit back with our arms around our money bags. If we choose to do that I have no doubt that the smoldering fires will burst into flame and consume us - dollars and all.

Taking it easy is often the prelude to backsliding. Comfort precedes collapse.

As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom, I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to, or actually in favor of, the limits being placed on that freedom.

Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the most compassionate of all.

I am much afraid that we shall have very greatly hastened the decline and ruin of the New World by our contagion, and that we willhave sold it our opinions and our arts very dear.

We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

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.

One feels the insignificance of the individual, and it makes one happy.

When I was young I used to read about the decline of Western civilization, and I decided it was something I would like to make a contribution to.

If freedom were not so economically efficient it certainly wouldn't stand a chance.

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.

If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy . . . to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous . . . let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb

Not so long ago people believed in ideologies, systems, and institutions to save all societies. Today, they have given up such hopes and have returned to relying on the individual, on individual freedom, individual initiative, individual creativity.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

Prosperity engenders sloth.