Werner Herzog Quotes

Images have become our true sex objects. It is this promiscuity and the ubiquity of images, this viral contamination of images which are the fatal characteristics of our culture.

Culture is just a shambling zombie that repeats what it did in life; bits of it drop off, and it doesn't appear to notice.

It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.

Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted.

The word civilization to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture.

A picture was once a rare sort of symbol, rare enough to call for attentive concentration. Now it is the actual experience that is rare, and the picture has become ubiquitous.

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.

Civilization is not a burden. It is an opportunity.

Allen's Law of Civilization: It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it.

If the theatre has taught me anything, it's that when things change in the body, in the body politic, in the body of the world, in the body of the earth, in the body of the person, there's change. You never go back.

We are shaping the world faster than we can change ourselves, and we are applying to the present the habits of the past.

You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.

We have new media, new forms of connectivity, and an enormous transference of knowledge. When you study evolution, you see that when new genes meet and multiply, they create new contexts and new species. In a sense, the gene-pool of knowledge and of people connecting at all levels is literally spawning a kind of mind-pool of possibilities.

Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.

When we destroy an old prejudice, we have need of a new virtue.

In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood.

When bands come from that underground scene and go into the mainstream, people just hate it. And it blows my mind. If you're saying you don't like what pop culture is, then change it. And when someone does make an effort to change it, everyone rebels against it and hates it. You can't win. People just want that division to exist. They don't want that division to go away.

Today evolution of human intelligence has advanced us to the stage where most of us are too smart to invent new gods but are reluctant to give up the old ones.

No religion is suddenly rejected by any people; it is rather gradually outgrown. None sees a religion die; dead religions are like dead languages and obsolete customs: the decay is long and - like the glacier march - is perceptible only to the careful watcher by comparisons extending over long periods.

To genetic evolution, the human lineage has added the parallel track of cultural evolution.

If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

Over the epitaph of this generation it will say ENTERTAINED TO DEATH.

If you found a mammal with feathers, then you'd know that Darwin was wrong. Well, it's rather the same with memes.

Nations don't start out. There is not a particular moment when they unveil the essence of themselves. They are always a work in progress.

Western Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.