Quotes About Decline

how low it has sunk—to 10 percent. In two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.

The ignorance is measurable. Pollsters repeatedly find that while people tend to be too optimistic about their own lives, they are too pessimistic about their societies. For instance, in most years between 1992 and 2015, an era that criminologists call the Great American Crime Decline, a majority of Americans believed that crime was rising.

Unlike the more gimmicky theories of the crime decline, massive imprisonment is almost certain to lower crime rates because the mechanism by which it operates has so few moving parts.

In no time, you find yourself left without civilization.

in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.

The undermining of the common fields, the declining effectiveness of the village's internal government, and the development of a distinct group of wealthy tenants [spelled the] triumph of individualism over the interests of the community," in the words of Christopher Dyer.

Allora, prima della grande guerra, all'epoca in cui ebbero luogo i fatti di cui si narra in queste pagine, non era ancora indifferente se un uomo viveva o moriva. Quando qualcuno spariva dalla schiera terrestre non veniva subito rimpiazzato da un altro affinché il morto venisse dimenticato: restava un vuoto, e i testimoni vicini e lontani del declino ammutolivano alla vista di quel vuoto.

The once-great country into which I'd been born now resembled its former self in name only. It didn't matter who was in charge. Those people were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and everyone knew it.

Basically, kid, what this all means is that life is a lot tougher than it used to be, in the Good Old Days, back before you were born. Things used to be awesome, but now they're kinda terrifying. To be honest, the future doesn't look too bright. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in 'decline.' Some people even say it's 'collapsing.

The once-great country into which I'd been born now resembled its former self in name only. It didn't matter who was in charge. Those people were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and everyone knew it.

To be honest, the future doesn't look too bright. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in 'decline.' Some people even say it's 'collapsing.

I was watching a collection of vintage '80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes.

There are eras of decline in which the form our inner life is destined to take becomes blurred. In these periods, we stagger this way and that like creatures who have lost their balance. We sink from hollow joys into dull sorrow, and a pervasive sense of loss lends the future and the past a more alluring air. And so we maunder through remote pasts or distant utopias while the present moment vanishes.

There is no surer sign of a society in decline than one that builds prisons faster than schools, as happens in many American states. In

Perhaps the starkest measure of the failure of our economic policies," Binyamin Appelbaum writes, "is that the average American's life expectancy is in decline, as inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health.

Perhaps the starkest measure of the failure of our economic policies," Binyamin Appelbaum writes, "is that the average American's life expectancy is in decline, as inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health." Meanwhile, life remains the ultimate privilege, the living lording over the dead.

The decline and fall of the modern religious right's notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.

One of the things that will decline over time is the demand that the society or the government bring forth a particularized racial remedy based on a history of deprivation. That will be even more difficult to do in the future.

The Democrats need to remind people of where were, in terms of our progress, as markers against where we are, and where we've fallen, and how we've declined under Bush.

Remove the predators, and the whole ecosystem begins to crash like a house of cards. As the sharks disappear, the predator-prey balance dramatically shifts, and the health of our oceans declines.

The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off.

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

The American Republic was bound - is still bound - to follow in the centuries to come the same course to destruction as did Rome.

Just six years into the 21st century, one can say this is not shaping up to be anything like an American century. Rather, the U.S. seems much more likely to be faced with a very different kind of future: how to manage its own imperial decline.