A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.
Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day
History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.
The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.
It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.
From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.
The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.
Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.
If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.
War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.
In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.
Education is the transmission of civilization.
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.
The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
The time when you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying it can't be done.
So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.
Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
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