Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far - the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

Things change in different countries as people grow, and as generations change.

If people are all the same underneath, how has society changed so fast and so radically? Life now is completely different to how it was 32,000 years ago. It's changed like that of no other species has. What's made that difference?

We think we can play a small part in the evolution of culture.

Historyis nothing other than a collection of the lives of people, some of them great, some of them ordinarynothing other than a collection of what people have done in challenging circumstances and how they have risen to those circumstances.

I'm a human who is aware of the history of humanity and the ways in which the movies touch on those things.

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.

The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.

The improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence: as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

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.

All that is great in man comes through work; and civilization is its product.

American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

All culture developed as some wild, raw creature strived to live better and longer.

Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies.

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.

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

Were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

Truly life is wasted on the living.

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.

History is neither more nor less than biography on a large scale.

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

There's this Indian fellow who worked out a cycle like the idea of stone-age, bronze-age, only he did it on an Indian one. The cycle goes from nothing until now and 20th century and then on and right around the cycle until the people are really grooving and then just sinks back into ignorance until it gets back into the beginning again. So the 20th century is a fraction of that cycle, and how many of those cycles has it done yet? It's done as many as you think and all these times it's been through exactly the same things, and it'll be this again.

The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.