“All great civilizations, in their early stages, are based on success i...” — Kenneth Clark Quote

“All great civilizations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.”

“The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.”

“Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.”

“We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.”

“Our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them.”

“In the end, what brings civilizations down is when the elites lose confidence in the rightness of their cause.”