Cultural Longevity Quotes

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

'Upstream Color' in particular, it's got to infect culture at some level in order to have a life of its own. Then it'll be judged, and it'll either live or it won't by its own merit, and history will decide whether it's relevant however long into the future. I think that's more than enough to hope for.

Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

Hip-hop is such an amazing thing that kids still want to do it. They're not saying, "Ugh, that's the old people's music." No, they're younger than they've ever been that want to get into hip-hop music.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

There's a huge piece of humanity that's missing - a huge piece - and our [American] culture is infant, comparatively speaking, to these folks who have been around for thousands of years.

China is a country with a record of continuous self-government going back 4,000 years, the only society that has achieved this. One must start with the assumption that they must have learnt something about the requirements for survival, and it is not always to be assumed that we know it better than they do.

When culture is created in boardrooms with a panel of six or seven strategists for the masses to follow, to me that is no different than an aristocracy. It's not created from the people in the middle of the streets, so to speak. It is created from a petri dish for the sake of making money, and it is undermining the longevity of the culture.

The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But then again, modern poetry lasted a long time, too.

Lives of nations are determined not by the count of years, but by the lifetime of the human spirit. The life of a man is three-score years and ten: a little more, a little less. The life of a nation is the fullness of the measure of its will to live.

You can't possibly predict what will last or not. But once you attempt to write for the ages, you're doomed.

Look at native cultures - they've lasted for tens of thousands of years, not doing everything right. We wouldn't want to emulate them in many ways, but their basic philosophies - being a part of nature, a part of a tribe or group without elevating, not what you call dominator philosophies - they lasted for tens of thousands of years. It took us to come and put them asunder.