Quotes About Decline

The tendency to think that a city can build itself out of decline is an example of the edifice error, the tendency to think that abundant new building leads to urban success. Successful cities typically do build, because economic vitality makes people willing to pay for space and builders are happy to accommodate. But building is the result, not the cause, of success. Overbuilding a declining city that already has more structures than it needs is nothing but folly.

Between 1950 and 2008, Detroit lost over a million people—58 percent of its population. Today one third of its citizens live in poverty. Detroit's median family income is $33,000, about half the U.S. average. In 2009, the city's unemployment rate was 25 percent, which was 9 percentage points more than any other large city and more than 2.5 times the national average. In

To be clear: the West's souring mood is about the psychology of dashed expectations rather than the decline in material comforts.

All empires become arrogant. It is their nature.

On the soft bed of luxury, most kingdoms have expired.

the way in which the market took my wheat and the disproportionate decline on my selling told me that there was no buying power there. Such being the case, what was the only thing to do? Of course, to sell a lot more.

is probably as good a single explanation as any for the fall of both Greece and Rome.

In hyperbolic tones he listed the catastrophes that in his view were approaching: one, the decline of the revolutionary subject par excellence, the working class; two, the definitive dispersion of the political patrimony of socialists and Communists, who were already perverted by their daily quarrel over which was playing the role of capital's crutch; three, the end of every hypothesis of change, what was there was there and we would have to adapt to it.

I stand with Livy, who at the final hardening of Rome's republican arteries, wrote that the study of his land's history was the study of the rise and fall of moral strength, with duty and severity giving way to ambition, avarice, and license, till his fellow Romans "sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to the present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

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

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.

What I found was a hidden source of anguish that wasn't just widespread but nearly universal among people who have done well in their careers. I came to call this the "striver's curse": people who strive to be excellent at what they do often wind up finding their inevitable decline terrifying, their successes increasingly unsatisfying, and their relationships lacking.

To contemplate your eulogy, however, is the easy part. Now the harder part: staring right at your death and decline itself. This is what will truly eradicate the fear.

The rest of this book, therefore, is dedicated to helping you make the jump. First, I will show you the three forces holding you back, and how to remove them. They are your addiction to work and success, your attachment to worldly rewards, and your fear of decline.

So ask yourself: Which type of person do you want to be? One who declines with seeming indifference while suffering privately? Or one who—like Paul—acknowledges loss openly and yet maintains faith, believes in the power of love, and continues to serve others? Your decline, as painful as it is, should be experienced—and shared.

The decline problem is a double whammy, then: we need ever-greater success to avoid dissatisfaction, yet our abilities to stay even are declining. No, it's actually a triple whammy, because as we try to stay even, we wind up in patterns of addictive behavior such as workaholism, which puts strivers into unhealthy relationship patterns at the cost of deep connection to spouses, children, and friends.

The age-related decline among air-traffic controllers is so sharp—and the consequences of decline-related errors so dire—that the mandatory retirement age is fifty-six.

I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in financial history.

If CART continues on, it's just going to drag all of open-wheel racing down.

Horse racing is waning in popularity.

People my age, we would hear from our parents and grandparents who were raised in Detroit about how great this city was from 1900 to the '60s.

I feel like if you start taking a lot of days off, you start taking breaks from training, you start taking breaks because you use the 'I'm getting old' excuse, that's the fastest way to a decline.