Carl Sagan Quotes

This civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed.

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

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder

That contagion idea is so relevant and shows how quickly civilization could self-destruct.

Civilization does not have to perish. The brutes are winning only by default.

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

destruction is ultimately self-destruction.

Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.

A nation never falls but by suicide.

Historically, if you look at great civilizations, why do they crumble? Is it because of what's outside or because of something internal? It's always internal. It is.

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

Mighty cultures never - are almost never conquered. They crumble from within. And frankly, I think that a lot of Americans are acting like spoiled brats because everything isn't working out perfectly every time.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

Well, this is the end of Western civilization.

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

Every government of the world has the seeds of its own destruction in itself.

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 are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.

Most societies die of suicide, not attack.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood.

in the very long run any success devours - and perhaps also corrupts.

Civilization sails prettily like a child's rubber balloon until it hits a sharp object; then it is likely to collapse like the balloon.

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!