Quotes About Decline

It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming

I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.

And the looks on the faces of my countrymenpassive heads bent arms at their trousers everyone guilty of not being their best of not earning their daily bread the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.

Things inexorably get worse.

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

Io commentai scherzosamente che la passione per i giganti è, in genere, un sintomo di declino: un'epoca che scambia l'Ercole Farnese per un ideale era destinata a finire male.

The art of storytelling and the capacity to listen are on the decline. The result is a more self-absorbed, more anxious, more depressed—and less resilient—population.

A hung jury, however, suggests that any decline was not overwhelming; and, in common with most historians, I believe the empire was still very powerful at the end of the fourth century. Unfortunately, a series of disasters was soon to change things.

The new Late Antiquity is in part a deliberate corrective to a previous bias, which assumed that the entire Roman world declined in the fifth century, because this is what happened in the West. Relocating the centre of the world in the fourth to eighth centuries to Egypt, the Levant, and Persia is a stimulating challenge to our mental framework and cultural expectations.

There is, however, an obvious problem in imposing, on the basis of eastern evidence, a flourishing Late Antiquity on the whole of the late Roman and post-Roman worlds. In the 'bad old days' western decline at the end of Antiquity was imposed on the eastern provinces. Now, instead of all the different regions of the empire being allowed to float free (some flourishing in the fifth to eighth centuries, others not), a new and equally distorting template is being imposed westwards.

His descent was like nightfall.

The experience of the Mayas is one more reminder that any interpretation of human evolution based on the idea of unilineal progress forwards (or upwards) is an illusion. Peoples decline as well as rise.

The downward spiral of Dumbness in America is about to hit a new low.

It was like a scene from the final hours of the Roman Empire: Everywhere you looked, some prominent politician was degrading himself in public.

It's dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.

In our decline we live in the shadow of giants.

The worsening of relations between a declining America and an internally troubled Mexico could even give rise to a particularly ominous phenomenon: the emergence, as a major issue in nationalistically aroused Mexican politics, of territorial claims justified by history and ignited by cross-border incidents.

Some scholars attribute the decline in nicknaming to the evolutionary process that turned folk heroes into entrepreneurs. The truth is: George Herman Ruth, the namely-est guy ever, exhausted our supply of hyperbole.

Civilizations in decline are notable when certain of their members escape justice, and do so with impunity.

Indolence takes many forms, but it comes to every civilization that has outlived its will.

Tell me, Philostratus, do you subscribe to the school of philosophy that holds mankind is in a state of continual decline, beginning with the supermen of a long-ago Golden Age and descending to the present, so that each generation is a little less hardy, a little less touched with the original fire of creation than the last, so that we dwindle in vigor and lifespan from father to son? In that case, I shall be lucky to live as long as Ã¢â'¬Â¦ as you.

I think this illustrates succinctly what the Magravandian kings have become," Tayven said. "Moldy, stagnant, rotten, and dank.

J.I. Packer sees society's decline in this way: "The truth is that because we have lost touch with God and his word we have lost the secret both of community (because sin kills neighbor-love) and of our own identity (because at the deepest level we do not know who or what we are, or what we exist for)" (J.I. Packer, Knowing Man. (Westchester, IL: Cornerstone Books, 1978) p. 43).

The monarchy is finished. It was finished a while ago, but they're still making the corpses dance.