Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and…

Civilizations have come and gone and, in spite of our vaunted progress, I am tempted to ask again and again, 'To what purpose?'

— Mahatma Gandhi

For thousands of years it has been understood that, just as civilizations have to come to an end, there can even be times of…

— Peter Kingsley

My tears are like the quiet drift of petals from some magic rose; and all my grief flows from the rift of unremembered skies…

— Dylan Thomas

I think, that if I touched the earth, It would crumble; It is so sad and beautiful, So tremulously like a dream.

— Dylan Thomas

“Man is more ambitious than patient. When we realize we cannot split a true atom, cannot conquer the whole Earth, we redefine the terms…

— Ada Palmer

A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief…

— Sinclair Lewis

I wish outer space guys would conquer the Earth and make people their pets, because I'd like to have one of those little beds…

— Jack Handey

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

— Will Durant

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure.…

— Will Durant

“Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying…

— Will Durant

The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.

— Will Durant

All the civilizations we know have been created and directed by small intellectual aristocracies, never by people in the mass. The power of crowds…

— Gustave Le Bon

Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor. Civilizations are ghouls.

— Gutzon Borglum

In all civilizations we've studied, all cultures that we know of across the Earth and across time have invested some kind of attempt to…

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

— Paul Valery