Quotes About Collapse

In the morning he stepped from his tent looking haggard, fearful and guilt-ridden, an eaten shell of a human building rocking perilously on the brink of collapse.

Were you wounded when your marriage collapsed? When your love collapsed? Or does love never "collapse," only just fade gradually away?

Civilization is faces, appearances: when these collapse, civilization collapses as well.

The French had shown themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy, their church, their nobility, their law, their revenue, their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufactures. Burke, speech in the House of Commons (1790)

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within

I fell as a dead body falls.

We can't cut down rainforests forever. And anything that we can't do forever is by definition, unsustainable. If we do things that are unsustainable, the damage accumulates, ultimately, to a point where the whole system collapses. No ecosystem, not matter how big, is secure. Even one as vast as the ocean.

Attention Deficit Democracy produces the attitudes, ignorance and arrogance that pave the way to political collapse.

Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing.

Yet "perfection," as C. Northcote Parkinson shrewdly noted, "is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.

Another important contributing factor to Rome's collapse was a demographic deficit caused by the Antonine plagues.

Nothing in my life had prepared me to see things that were strange or beyond belief. I was a simple kid in a simple town in a simple family. But what I saw then, right after the collapse of the woman, ripped the "simple" out of my understanding of the rules of the world, and changed my life forever.

it seemed like he'd just dozed off. Or passed out was probably more accurate.

New York has collapsed.

The luncheon ended with a warning. "Mankind can no longer wait to respond to this crisis," Ivar Karlsen said, standing at a podium at the far end of the dining hall. "A global collapse faces this generation or the next." Painter shared the table

I remembered the words particularly: Somebody pulled a thread of the fabric and it all dissolved.

But so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed

economic recession?" "Well, you see, five million years ago the Galactic economy collapsed, and seeing that custom-built planets are something of a luxury commodity, you see …

MID TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.

Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over.

When the team excavated, they uncovered the shattered ruins of a fortress, over fifteen centuries old, with massive walls and eight towers, matching the description in the Koran. They also figured out what had happened: The constant removal of water from the watering hole undermined the fortress, which one day collapsed into a sinkhole and was buried by drifting sands. The legend recorded in the Koran was based on a real event.

The Maya created a vibrant and brilliant society that, in the end, failed to adjust to a changing environment and the needs of its people;

If the foundations are rotten - everything's rotten.

We crawl out of rocks, set our calendars, make a civilisation, scrabble around for quoins, build our proud little empires, and then one day someone puts too many quoins in the same place and it all comes crashing down.