Oswald Spengler Quotes

In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.

Civilization develops man, and if he is, according to his whole character and destiny, made for development, civilization is his truly natural state …

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.

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.

There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.

The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

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.

History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

Civilization is not a spontaneous generation with any race or nation known to history, but the torch to be handed down from race to race from age to age.

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

I have thought it a sufficient definition of civilization to say, it is the influence of good women.

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

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

Woman's success in lifting men out of their way of life nearly resembling that of the beasts who merely hunted and fished for food, who found shelter where they could in jungles, in trees, and caves was a civilizing triumph.

As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere taboos.

Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind. The difference lies not in the respective natures of savagery and civilization, but in their attendant circumstances, institutions, and so forth. The difference, therefore, does not operate in every sense, but it does in most of them. Even the most civilized peoples, in short, can be fired with passionate hatred for each other.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

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

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

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

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.