Cultural Destruction Quotes

The Mohammadan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

Destroy the Buffalo herds. When they disappear, the Indians will disappear along with them.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

World history is tragic.

Wherever books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

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.

When our forefathers first met on this island, your red brethren were more numerous; but since the introduction amongst us, of what you call spirituous liquors, and what we think may justly be called poison, our numbers have greatly diminished…It is not an evil of our own making; we have not placed it amongst ourselves; it is an evil placed amongst us by white people.

In war, the first thing that goes, when you try to take over culture, is the statues. I think we all can recall statues with their heads cut off in museums.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

Once genocide is under way, it is unlikely that anything but military force will end the horror.

When someone tries to take over a country or a culture, they destroy the art.

Genocide, massacre, and human slaughter; pillage, rape, and torture have been much more common than war and revolution. But historians do not dwell on such events. And even if they do, they very rarely attach numbers to them. They prefer the glamour of war, of diplomacy, of the clash of nations and personalities.

You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933... Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.

Without a complex knowledge of one's place and without the faithfulness to one's place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed. Without such knowledge and faithfulness, moreover, the culture of a country will be superficial and decorative, functional only insofar as it may be a symbol of prestige, the affectation of an elite or "in" group.

It was only a generation ago that we learned that the burning of books may precede the burning of people.

The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. the history of the capsulize era is characterized by the degradation of my people: despoiled of their lands, their true culture destroyed...denied equal protection of the law, and deprived their rightful place in the respect of their fellows.

The Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed into a dance of [French] Jacobin phrensy, our wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat.

Genocide

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

The looting of archeological sites and museums in Iraq particularly has reached industrial proportions.

Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed

The destruction of Chinese traditional culture didn't start in 1949. It started long before that, with the succession of revolutions. It was particularly bad during the Cultural Revolution, the destruction of traditional Chinese culture.