Quotes About Decline

The golden era for coal is over.

All higher education belongs only to the exception: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. All great, all beautiful things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum. What contributes to the decline of German culture? That "higher education" is no longer a privilege — the democratism of Bildung, which has become "common" — too common.

Deutschland über alles - I fear that was the end of German Philosophy.

Corruption is just a rude word for the autumn of a people.

What a man is begins to betray itself when his talent decreases—when he stops showing what he can do. Talent, too, is finery; finery, too, is a hiding place.

Fourth proposition. To divide the world into a 'real' and an 'apparent' world, whether in the manner of Christianity or in the manner of Kant (which is, after all, that of a cunning Christian –) is only a suggestion of décadence – a symptom of declining life.…

Culture and the state — one should not deceive oneself over this — are antagonists: the ?cultural state? is merely a modern idea. The one lives off the other, the one thrives at the expense of the other. All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline: that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political.

All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline: that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political.…

By and large, pity runs counter to the law of development, which is the law of selection. Pity preserves things that are ripe for decline, it defends things that have been disowned and condemned by life. […] In the middle of our unhealthy modernity, nothing is less healthy than Christian pity.

A predominance of mandarins always means something is wrong; so do the advent of democracy, international courts in place of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and whatever other symptoms of declining life there are.

Nihilism. It is ambiguous: A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.

The morality that would un-self man is the morality of decline par excellence—the fact, I am declining, transposed into the imperative, all of you ought to decline—and not only into the imperative... This only morality that has been taught so far, that of un-selfing, reveals a will to the end; fundamentally, it negates life.

The long-standing wisdom that everyone wins in a single world market has been undermined. Global trade, capital flows, and immigration are declining.

All great empires die from within.

Empires implode from within due to their own excesses.

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

We will either bring on another American century, or we are doomed to witness America's decline.

There was much woe and lamentation in the seventies that the game was dying.

In specific circumstances the period of aging decline can set in earlier in a particular organ than in the organism as a whole which, in a certain general or theoretical sense, is left a cripple or invalid.

There's been an unquestionable decline in American culture. The education system is thin on the ground. People don't read as deeply and at length as they used to. And the media has been scattered into so many cable channels.

In 2004, I predicted in a nationally televised conference in Washington, D.C., that the U.S. would be a Third World country in 20 years.

I don't think we're crumbling as a civilization, but this is not our finest hour, and it's good to be mindful that we're all susceptible to fall and to look at what are the earmarks of a civilization on the wane. What are they - destruction of the environment? Conspicuous consumption? Heard of those?

I came in on the decline. Phil Elliot was in first, he got his book out, he sold thirteen thousand, I think he got two issues out before I got mine in, this was March '87. He was out in December '86.

An old saying went back to the time of the Venerable Bede: "As long as the Colosseum stands, Rome shall stand; when the Colosseum falls, Rome will fall; when Rome falls, the world will fall."11 The Roman people seemed sorely neglectful of this vital harbinger of the world's fate. It was used as a limestone quarry, as an open-air market, and, in the case of the Frangipane and Annibaldi clans, as a fortified palace from which to wage violent feuds against their enemies.