Jane Jacobs Quotes

The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost?

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

It has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.

Here in Europe they had a Dark Age so extensive, radical and obliterative that everyone forgot how to speak Latin.

You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages--they haven't ended yet.

Arab civilization has collapsed. It won’t recover in my lifetime.

The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

Is it not possible that we are still living in the Dark Ages, still mocking the suggestion of 'mystical' forces that we cannot see or comprehend.

What is called Western Civilization is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us, if, indeed, it has not already begun. With the Media, especially television, governing all our lives, as they indubitably do, it is easily imaginable that this might happen without our noticing...by accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values.

I am studying ancient civilizations, trying to find what happened to them, finding out why they went into a decline, why they died.

We are committing cultural suicide. The barbarians at the gate will only need to give us a slight push, and the emancipated body of Western civilization will collapse in a heap.

History didn't begin yesterday.

The plague swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. The entire world changed.

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

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 feel really connected to antiquity for some reason.

We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture.

Humanity would have plunged into a new dark age of absolutely frightening and appalling characteristics without Churchill.

Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.

National security rests on the credible threat of a form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages, the wholesale slaughter of noncombatants.

Are we all just Dark Age doctors, swearing by our leeches? We crave a greater science. We want to be proven wrong.

We have had people for so many generations dumbed down, literally dumbed down, who are now in positions of awesome and extreme power with influence over others, that we're paralyzed. And, if we're not paralyzed, we are backtracking and moving backwards. We are actually regressing, I should say, from magnificent progress that we as a nation and a culture and society have taken over hundreds of years.

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.

We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.

We are living in a cultural dark age of musical pollution. You put the radio on, and five minutes later you need an aspirin.