Niall Ferguson Quotes

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

I've begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes. Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of.

I don't think we're crumbling as a civilization, but this is not our finest hour, and it's good to be mindful that we're all susceptible to fall and to look at what are the earmarks of a civilization on the wane. What are they - destruction of the environment? Conspicuous consumption? Heard of those?

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

The acceptance of homosexuality is the last step in the decline of Gentile civilization.

My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes! How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges.

For we know when a nation goes down and never comes back, when a society or a civilization perishes, one condition may always be found. They forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what brought them along.

I think human arrogance will be the demise of civilization.

In a state of nature, the weakest go to the wall; in a state of over-refinement, both the weak and the strong go to the gutter.

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.

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

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.

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

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.

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

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

Because Roman civilization perished through barbarian invasions, we are perhaps too much inclined to think that that is the only way a civilization can die. If the lights that guide us ever go out, they will fade little by little, as if of their own accord.... We therefore should not console ourselves by thinking that the barbarians are still a long way off. Some peoples may let the torch be snatched from their hands, but others stamp it out themselves.

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.