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

We shall have to share out the fruits of technology among the whole of mankind. The notion that the direct and immediate producers of the fruits of technology have a proprietary right to these fruits will have to be forgotten. After all, who is the producer? Man is a social animal, and the immediate producer has been helped to produce by the whole structure of society, beginning with his own education.

A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.

The value of the goal lies in the goal itself; and therefore the goal cannot be attained unless it is pursued for its own sake.

The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole.

I believe that a religious conversion is the only way to stimulate the peoples of the industrialized nations to be willing to make sacrifices for the sake of esho funi (the oneness of self and environment). ... I wish the entire world would accept as an item of religious faith the concept of esho funi and its moral obligations.

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.