Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.

First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass.

We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.

Sept. 11 jolted America out of its second gilded age.

The culture of independent film criticism has totally gone down the drain and this seems to come with the territory of the consumer age that we are now living in.

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.

In the Middle Ages, everything bad was the work of the devil, everything good, the work of God. Today, the French see everything in reverse and blame the Germans for it.

Television is not hurting. Television is in fantastic shape. It's just a golden age for other people.

I feel like it's a golden age for television.

After the golden age of Latinity, we gradually slide into the silver, and at length precipitately descend into the iron.

We're in the second golden age of television, and to me, one of the most profound things that's happening in TV is just that by default that opened the door to more women, more people of color, more outliers. It's one of the greatest side effects of the digital revolution.

The three values which men had held for centuries and which have now collapsed are: mysticism, collectivism, altruism. Mysticism — as a cultural power — died at the time of the Renaissance. Collectivism — as a political ideal — died in World War II. As to altruism — it has never been alive. It is the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization, and men survived it only to the extent to which they neither believed nor practiced it.

In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.

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.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

...what makes you older is when your bones, muscles and blood wear out, when the heart sinks into oblivion and all the houses you ever lived in are gone and people are not really certain that your civilization ever existed.

Specialization is the great evil of civilization.

If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.

nothing like a few restful weeks contemplating the decline of civilization to restore the humors. What I did on my summer vacation was listen to a lot of people talk about the decline of practically everything - you could call it the leisure of the theory class.

Why is old considered useless? Because in old age, the emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: Being? What do you do with it?

The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.

The currents rage so deep upon us, this is the age of video violence.

You're 25 and you're looking at adults of your parents' age and older saying, "I don't want to live that way," and this is how it happens. It evolves slowly and it's not the result of any movement. It's just young people look at the way their parents are living and if they don't like it they don't want to duplicate it.

But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hyper-educated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.