Pierre Schaeffer Quotes

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

All great nations inevitably end up committing suicide.

Renaissance always comes out of depression.

Every generation needs regeneration

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

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.

I speak of the old Japan, because out of the ashes of the old Japan there has risen a new Japan.

What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.

It is true that we aspire to our ancient land. But what we want in that ancient land is a new blossoming of the Jewish spirit.

It seems to me we are now, since 1789, going through the same sort of process of regeneration the Roman world went through between 300 and 500. It is only to be hoped all civilization will not again be destroyed by the anarchists.

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free.

Blending hard-bitten realism with long-view optimism, Obama said that every 20 or 30 years brings a new cycle of pessimism in America.

Everything here in Europe turns into rottenness--- religion, laws, arts, sciences--- and everything hastens to renew itself in America.

The precedent is that civilizations collapse, and everything's stacked up for this one to go, and it's a mess when it happens.

In Hinduism, Shiva is a deity who represents transformation. Through destruction and restoration, Shiva reminds us that endings are beginnings, and that our world is constantly undergoing a cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

The 500 years following the fall of the Western Roman Empire were dubbed by the poet Petrarch 'dark.' Although the 14th-century Italian was referring to a literary decline, the term caught on to denote the seemingly backward turn the Western world took with regard to religious and technological developments.

I really wanted to give people that tool, that thing, that answer, 'Well, what are you going to do after Katrina? How does New Orleans come back?' And I'm thinking to myself, New Orleans is back. We're the definition of 'back.' We're the definition of 'rebirth,' of 'renaissance.'

Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.

Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.

All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always' of course, a century, two centuries... and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.

The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

As soon as an opinion becomes common it is sufficient reason for men to abandon it and to uphold the opposite opinion until that in its turn grows old, and they require to distinguish themselves by other things. Thus if they attain their goal in some art or science, we must expect them soon to cast it aside to acquire some fresh fame, and this is partly the reason why the most splendid ages degenerate so quickly, and, scarcely emerged from barbarism, plunge into it again.

In western civilization, the period ruled by mysticism is known as the 'Dark Ages' and the 'Middle Ages'. I will assume that you know the nature of that period and the state of human existence in those ages. The Renaissance broke the rules of the mystics. "Renaissance" means the "rebirth". Few people today will care to remind you that it was a rebirth of reason - of man's mind.

Nothing old is ever reborn, but neither does it totally disappear. And that which has once been [born], will always reappear in a new form.