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"But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors."
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"From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization."
"The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps."
"In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions."
"If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts."
"From first to last the civilization of America has been bound up with its physical environment."
"The Industrial Revolution was another of those extraordinary jumps forward in the story of civilization."
"Civilization could not exist without tremors of desire and without the counteracting, negation force of disciplined denial. Nor would the gyratory pulsations of a lively civilization exist devoid of the convulsive chemistry of union and repellency. We are born with a desire to be immortal. Cursed with the knowledge that we must die, people live their orthodox lives out by displaying reckless abandon as to the outcome of human life or nervously hounded by utter despondency nipping their heels. How we resolve this decidedly human complex of carrying out our daily lives while burden by our inescapable mortality determines our essential character. The collation of similar values adopted by our community determines who we are as a people."
"The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period."
Explore more quotes by James H. Breasted
"It is this conception of the unity of the human career which is perhaps the greatest achievement of historical study, since it gained a place analogous to that of natural science."
"This recognition of the earlier human background, now so obvious to us, did not come all at once, for the inclusion of history itself in university instruction is an event less than two centuries old."
"There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time."
"It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history."
"To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean."
"In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America."
"By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile."
"Today the traveller on the Nile enters a wonderland at whose gates rise the colossal pyramids of which he has had visions perhaps from earliest childhood."
"There is but little room for doubt that Egypt led the way in the creation of the earliest known group of civilizations which arose on both sides of the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia in the fourth millennium B.C."
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