Quotes About Decline

When the old men kill themselves, the cities are dying.

Moving beyond mere correlation, if you lesion the amygdala in an animal, rates of aggression decline. The same occurs transiently when you temporarily silence the amygdala by injecting Novocain into it. Conversely, implanting electrodes that stimulate neurons there, or spritzing in excitatory neurotransmitters (stay tuned), triggers aggression.4

Skyscrapers, said Speaker. With so much room on the Ringworld, why build so tall? To prove they can do it. No, that's asinine, said Louis. There'd be no point, if they could build something like the Ringworld itself. Perhaps the tall buildings came later, during the decline of civilization.

The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome's did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.

J. Edgar Hoover: When morals decline and good men do nothing, evil flourishes. A society unwilling to learn from past is doomed. We must never forget our history.

When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.

It is always the Age of Iron, and the Golden Age is always behind us, giving off a luster that illuminates the terminal shabbiness of our present condition.

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.

National decline can be precipitated not only or principally by sentimental optimism, but also by a version of media-induced clinical depression.

Before Cook's arrival the native population of Hawai'i was more than a quarter of a million people; a hundred years later, it had plummeted to fewer than sixty thousand.

population of Hawai'i was more than a quarter of a million people; a hundred years later, it had plummeted to fewer than sixty thousand.

The first sign on a declining civilization is a decline in the arts.

Keep in mind, we are past the age of enlightenment. This is past reason. We are pretty deep into modern history and the decline of religion. This is when nature itself has been stripped bare of its cozy personality and we all feel homeless in our natures as well. "The Limits Of The World

It's kind of ironic that the two sports with the greatest characters, boxing and horse racing, have both been on the decline. In both cases it's for the lack of a suitable hero.

Crockery has been withdrawn from American culture below a certain level.

Life is on an incline; you either go up, or you come down.

Stupid entropy ruins everything.

As we explore later in this chapter, virtually no asset, except for long-term U.S. Treasury bonds, served as an effective hedge against the sudden and sharp decline in asset values that took place during the financial crisis.

The forgotten of this country have a consistent history of turning on their champions, and I suppose the way working men and women have forsaken the very politicians who could help them most speaks of the primacy of emotion in politics. Perhaps the great decline of FDR's party, which was beginning in Henry Bonwiller's time, didn't come about because Democrats favored a logical argument over a moral one, but simply because they clung to the idea that either one mattered at all.

Countries rise to power and then fall into triviality.

On the soft bed of luxury many kingdoms have expired.

It's just amazing how long this country has been going to hell without ever having got there.

Indeed, children's intrinsic motivation in school has been shown to decline every year over the course of traditional schooling.