Civilizational Change Quotes

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.

In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.

All "if" statements about the past are as dubious as prophecies of the future are. It seems fairly plausible that if Alexander or Ghengis Khan had never been born, some other individual would have filled his place and executed the design of the Hellenic or Mongolic expansion; but the Alexanders of philosophy and religion, of science and art, seem less expendable; their impact seems less determined by economic challenges and social pressures; and they seem to have a much wider range of possibilities to influence the direction, shape and texture of civilizations.

The time has come to choose a new direction of global development, to opt for a new civilization.