Quotes About Decline

Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.

American influence is not what it used to be.

Last year, in the year 2008, it just became normal to watch great American institutions crumble, almost dissolve like sand.

The first attempt at a response: there must have been a fall, a decline, and the road to salvation can only be the return of the sensible finite into the intelligible infinite.

Historically, if you look at great civilizations, why do they crumble? Is it because of what's outside or because of something internal? It's always internal. It is.

The rooms in those days were unfashionably sad enough to commit suicide in, and, in fact, that to me was the Château's charm, that it didn't have any objections to one's committing suicide. Things since then had gone steadily downhill

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives. There is probably no use in telling this to people who can't see it without being told.

The line between the public life and the private life has been erased, due to the rapid decline of manners and courtesy. There is a certain crudeness and crassness that has suddenly become accepted behavior, even desirable.

L'apogée, la splendeur de l'Islam se situent entre VIIIème et XIIème siècles. Mais la perte très dangereuse de vitesse n'a guère commencé pour lui qu'avec le XVIIIème siècle, c'est-à-dire, à l'échelle lente des civilisations.

L'Église a dû faire face constamment à cette déchristianisation régulière, monotone qui n'est souvent que vulgaire décivilisation.

Nations rise, they flourish for a time, and then they decline. Eventually every empire comes to an end; not even the greatest can last forever.

There is no doubt that nations come to an end when they have ceased to fulfill the function that God meant for them.

Ancient historians tell us that one of the symptoms of a declining civilization is a desexualization of the human race, with men becoming more effeminate and women becoming more masculine, not only in physical [appearance] but in their basic characters.

Man is not growing better! Man is not climbing upward. Instead of progress in man himself there is degeneracy—degeneracy of body, mind, and spirit. Man is going downhill.

Statistics indicate that the church is rapidly losing in the population explosion. There are fewer Christians per capita every day.

I went down like a tray of dishes

Every day we get better, or we get worse.

During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.

Chivalry is first and foremost the worldview of fighting men, and I am convinced that the decline of the gentlemanly ideal has occurred at least in part because men really are flabby—physically and spiritually.

Matt and Olivia lived in a declining two-family held together by aluminum siding.

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards to the literary scene. The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent. The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature.

Britain's done a lot of changing in the past 50 years. The decline of manufacturing and heavy industry under Margaret Thatcher ripped the economic heart out of huge swathes of the country, and dramatically transformed class composition.

The crisis of Western values has many aspects, many faces. There is a decline in faith in liberal democracy, a loss of confidence in universal human rights, a collapse in support for all kinds of transnational projects.