Cultural Extinction Quotes

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder

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.

If we do not find a solution quickly the land where our faith was born and survived for two thousand years will soon be empty of indigenous Christians. The living faith will only be represented by dead stones and Imported custodians.

The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them.

These tribes cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and continual contact with our citizens. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement. They must necessarily yield to the force of circumstance and, ere long, disappear.

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space-each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

Blood mixture and the result drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life

The loss of the culture is one of the main reasons Ciro Guerra wanted to tell their story.

I am afraid that Yazidis and Yazidism will vanish and will not be able to resist the extremists.

In fact, Guerra based his story on the diaries of two explorers, German Theodor Koch-Grunberg and American Richard Evans Schultes. There work is some of the only documentation of cultures that have since vanished. But Guerra did not want white men to be his protagonists.

Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life

When certain branches of the economy become obsolete, as in the case of the steel industry, not only do jobs disappear, which is obviously a terrible social hardship, but certain cultures also disappear.

I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

Tibet has a very proud people but it's culturally gone and overrun ever since the Chinese took over. It's like saving the rhino. When a species is endangered, it's gone.

I'm the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don't really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.

We Japanese are like the fish in a pond that is slowly but surely being drained of its water.

This world has seen a great many civilizations. And many of them have survived for longer periods than ours up to the present. They were all as sure as we are today of having founded the first eternal civilization. We today differ from them in having our western civilization spread to embrace the entire planet, leaving no room on any continent for any other culture to take over if we fail.

When the culture dies, the country dies.

We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs.

A nation dies culturally and spiritually first. Its money and its army are the last to go, but go they do once the light goes out in the nation's soul.

A people that does not protect its racial purity will perish!

All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.

Sober-thoughted men, far from the scenes of danger, in the security of cities and populous regions, can talk of exterminating measures, and discuss the policy of extirpating thousands… in a little while, the remaining tribes will go the way that so many have gone before. They will vanish like a vapor from the face of the earth – their very history will be lost in forgetfulness.