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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

Mountains aren't eternal: even the most imposing massifs are smoothed away by weathering in a few hundred million years or less. Plate tectonics makes new ones, and without it, our future would be flat.

Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.

History shows us that other highly developed forms of civilization have collapsed. Who knows whether the same fate does not await our own?

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.

Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

Historically, if you look at great civilizations, why do they crumble? Is it because of what's outside or because of something internal? It's always internal. It is.