On this showing, the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff - well, it might as well be dead.

The penalty of affluence is that it cuts one off from the common lot, common experience, and common fellowship. In a sense it outlaws one automatically from one's birthright of membership in the great human family.

Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.

No being can be what he is unless he is putting his essence into action in his field.

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.