Immoderate Greatness Quotes

“This is the tragedy of civilization: its very “greatness”—its panoply of wealth and power—turns against it and brings it down.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Mental and physical illness proliferates. The majority lives for bread and circuses; worships celebrities instead of divinities; takes its bearings from below rather than above; throws off social and moral restraints, especially on sexuality; shirks duties but insists on entitlements; and so forth.7”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results. Niccolò Machiavelli1”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“In essence, immoderate greatness exemplifies what the ancient Greeks would have called hubris: “overbearing pride or presumption.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Humanity will undoubtedly survive. Civilization as we know it will not.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Wealth and power have never been long permanent in any place…. [T]hey travel over the face of the earth, something like a caravan of merchants. On their arrival everything is found green and fresh; while they remain, all is bustle and abundance, and, when gone, all is left trampled down, barren, and bare. William Playfair1”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Addressing one problem creates new ones; not addressing small problems turns them into big ones.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“As Will Durant noted, “From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Civilizations are trapped in a vicious circle. They must keep solving the problems of complexity, for that is the price of civilized existence, but every solution creates new, ever more difficult problems, which then require new, ever more demanding solutions.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“technology has a shadow side—it destroys more than it creates.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“bull contents himself with one meadow, and one forest is enough for a thousand elephants; but the little body of a man devours more than all other living creatures. Seneca1”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within,” said Will Durant.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Thus the end of progress is necessarily the beginning of decline.9”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Indeed, civilization is a kind of Moloch whose demands for material and human sacrifice grow in proportion to its greatness.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“…civilization is effectively hardwired for self-destruction.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Anthropologists have long noted that the initial response of primal peoples to radically changed circumstances is not adaptation, but a “revitalization movement”—that is, a fanatical, last-ditch, and often self-destructive effort to preserve the old ways—and the more successful the culture has been in the past, the more likely it is to resist change.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Thus unless the progression toward greater complexity is interrupted by outside forces, they must eventually reach the point of breakdown.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail