Quotes About Decline

Tolerance is the last virtue of a dying society

Tolerance and Apathy are the last virtues of a dying society

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.

worst of all, beginning to forget, and knowing that he was forgetting. His mind, though tortured, had always been peculiarly acute: Now, by 1918 and the end of World War I, he seemed to know that his faculties were dimming, that his mind was at last becoming as weakened as his body, and that the sands were running out.

They are dying, the old oracles sent to Laius, now our masters strike them off the rolls. Nowhere Apollo's golden glory now -- the gods, the gods go down.

Nowhere Apollo's golden glory now— the gods, the gods go down.

She's forgetting,' Ellen said to Jack, plumping herself down on a chair. 'All of her life is leaking out of her. Soon there will be nothing left.

Growth in the number of humans is associated with decline in humanity.

America's stock markets declined by 38% in 2008, but most of the world's major stock markets fell by closer to 50% for the same period. The destruction of the American engine of enterprise will bring down markets, corporations, and individuals worldwide.

who's to blame for our declining culture? Has the church in America become "Christianity Light," or like the Coke product, "Christianity Zero?

Sri Lanka's problems were caused by declining even-handedness and transparency of its democratic processes and institutions.

I think this [Obama] administration, if its policies were pursued for an extended period of time, would take us into decline, but there's nothing wrong with this country that a real president couldn't cure.

Mighty as Gaea was, she had seen better days.

He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken;

There is a certain point—she has known this since her father-in-law's long battle with heart disease—when a person begins to die in earnest. There is a hollowness about them. They begin to retreat. She has seen this, and she knows.

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

The Romans were not wiped out by the invasions of the barbarians, nor by the Christian virus, but by a more subtle evil, boredom.

The West: a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse.

In vain the West seeks a form of final agony worthy of its past.

A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to end with the hermeticism of schizophrenia.

A nation which no longer rapes is in its decadence; the number of rapes reveals its instincts, and its future. Find out in which war it has stopped practicing, on a large scale, this variety of crime: you will have found the first symbol of its decline; find out at what moment love has become for a nation a ceremonial, and the bed a condition of orgasm, and you will identify the beginning of its deficiencies and the end of its barbaric inheritance.

What at first was the delight of nations declines by slow but inevitable gradation into the luxury, or the business, or even the vanity of a few. What once spoke in accents understood by all is now painfully spelt out by a small band of scholars. What was once read for pleasure is now read for curiosity. It becomes "an interesting illustration of the taste of a bygone age," a "remarkable proof of such and such a theory of aesthetics."

History, again, tells us of successive civilizations which have been born, have for a space thriven exceedingly, and have then miserably perished.

Havoc in a given period does not cover all the people all the time, and though its effect is cumulative, the decline it drags behind takes time before it is recognized.