Quotes About Collapse

The old bastions of the post-communist regime collapsed before my very eyes. The monsters who had kept Ukraine in a criminal state left the stage.

Species have been disappearing from ocean ecosystems and this trend has recently been accelerating…. If the long-term trend continues, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse within my lifetime—by 2048." But, he continued, "The good news is that it is not too late to turn things around.

Russia's collapse into Bolshevist anarchy, however, presently opened up new vistas.

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, everyone in America assumed that there would be wars to follow - wars over the reunification of Germany, over the nations within the sphere of Soviet influence, and more. There weren't, because George H. W. Bush's policies and diplomacy prevented that.

Oh, god!" Carl Hollywood said, and collapsed into a big, tatty, overstuffed chair they kept backstage for such purposes.

Certain objects that are supposed to (a) remain horizontal and (b) support heavy things have ceased to do either.

The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over.

Where men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater is the ruin.

It is the destiny of stars to collapse.

If you feed a black hole, its event horizon (that boundary beyond which light cannot escape) grows in direct proportion to its mass, which means that as a black hole's mass increases, the average density within its event horizon actually decreases. Meanwhile, as far as we can tell from our equations, the material content of a black hole has collapsed to a single point of near-infinite density at its center.

rigid structures of a hierarchical order can disintegrate with astounding rapidity.

The Abyss. Globalization had many economic benefits but, as in our own times, the creation of a truly international economic network combined greater efficiency with greater fragility. In 1914 a highly optimized system crashed in what was, without doubt, the biggest financial collapse of all time. (Unlike in 1929 or in 2008, the world's major stock markets were forced to suspend trading for no less than five months.)

Everyone in my industry, the movie industry, is looking at the music industry and going, 'How do we avoid that collapse?' And I don't know if you can, to be quite honest!

Short of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, the death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two.

combination of unemployment or underemployment, the failure of marriages, the loss of social cohesion, and declining health. They argue that the "collapse of the white, high school educated, working class after its heyday in the 1970s" led to a variety of "pathologies" that fostered a potentially fatal despair.

The idiots know only one word—"more." They are unencumbered by common sense. They hoard wealth and resources until workers cannot make a living and the infrastructure collapses. They live in privileged compounds. They see the state as a projection of their vanity. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov, Wilhelmine, Pahlavi, and Soviet dynasties crumbled because the whims and obsessions of ruling idiots were law.

greatest beneficiaries of the chaos of the Soviet collapse, however, were those who acquired state property.

to bring about the downfall of

All societies that have tried to keep themselves 'pure,' from the Confucian Chinese through to the Castilian Spanish to the post-Wilhelmine Germans, have collapsed into barbarism, insularity and superstition. And swiftly enough for us to be certain that the fall was no more connected to the genes than was the rise. There is no gene for I.Q., and there is no genetic or evolutionary timing that is short enough to explain histories or societies.

Empires never do feel the touch of mortality. . .You might have individuals who see the writing on the wall, but the imperial power as such doesn't seem able to read the signs, it hangs on for dear life and always ends in a bloody mess.

family stood poised on the edge of a great precipice that could collapse at any second, crumble away like the houses that crashed down Seattle's unstable, waterlogged hillsides.

Now, Lovecraft was notoriously fond of sweets. He consumed vast quantities of chocolate and ice cream; he so saturated his coffee with sugar that a sticky mass was left in the cup. If he was hyperinsulinic, such a practice was guaranteed to cause a collapse of the kind he told about.

Honesty is occasionally the best policy," she said yawning. And then she added, "By the Black Staff of Beldar, I am tired. If I can find a usable bed in what's left of my house I intend to collapse on it. And Elwyn, if you disturb me before dawn, I promise, I will turn you into a train of thought, and lose you.

Music. Close your eyes and it's a rosebush blooming in time lapse so that it shoots and blossoms flow outward in a swift choreography of growth and collapse, twine and coil, release and fade. Close your eyes and music paints light vines and calligraphy on the darkness within you.