Authority Quote by Julian Jaynes

Human societies as temporally and spatially far-flung as the Mesopotamians, Mayans, and Easter Islanders likely came to ruin by expanding beyond the capacity of…

— William E. Rees

“Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the…

— Douglas Preston

My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when…

— Timothy Leary

Tribal life comes automatically to an end when a primitive people begins to live in a town or a city, for sooner or later…

— Arthur Keith

A period of high civilization is one in which thoughts fly freely from mind to mind, from one country to another-yes, from the past…

— Gilbert Highet

In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.

— Henry David Thoreau

That's what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last;…

— Philip Reeve

Physiologically adult humans are not meant to spend an additional 10 years in a school system; their brains map that onto "I have been…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

On this showing, the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the…

— Arnold J. Toynbee

“When you examine societies just as self-confident as ours that unraveled and were eventually swallowed by the jungle...you see that the balance between ecology…

— Arthur Demarest

For we know when a nation goes down and never comes back, when a society or a civilization perishes, one condition may always be…

— Carl Sandburg

Fragmentation occurs when a civilization is in decline.

— Robert Payne