Quotes About Decline

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

As a result of the awareness and consciousness of decline, an awareness and consciousness of a national ethnicity or an Islamic identity also came into being.

United States foreign policy, which includes national security, is literally disintegrating before our eyes.

Today this key component of revolution—the gap between what people want, and indeed expect, and what they get—is being played out in the United States and many states in Europe during a new age of mounting scarcity, declining wages, joblessness, government-imposed "austerity" measures, and assaults on civil liberties. The rising living standards experienced by the American working class in the 1950s have been in precipitous decline since the 1970s.

It began when we shifted, in the words of the historian Charles Maier, from an "empire of production" to an "empire of consumption." By the end of the Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and domestic oil production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a lifestyle we could no longer afford.

There is a familiar checklist for extinction. We are ticking off every item on it.

The technological basis for Japan's challenge to American hegemony began to crumble.

So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don't live up to their apparent billing.

as with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. How could it be otherwise?

every day represents more and more subtracted from less and less

YOUNGER MORTIMER: Base Fortune, now I see, that in thy wheel There is a point, to which when men aspire, They tumble headlong down: that point I touch'd, And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher, Why shall I grieve at my declining fall? Farewell, fair queen. Weep not for Mortimer, That scorns the world, and, as a traveller, Goes to discover countries yet unknown.

The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance.

The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance. Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer loves the active life, Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels. Everything is diverted from its proper course.

Mundus senescit, ? ?????? ??????.

Empires never do feel the touch of mortality. . .You might have individuals who see the writing on the wall, but the imperial power as such doesn't seem able to read the signs, it hangs on for dear life and always ends in a bloody mess.

Fortunes of all major nations have followed specific trajectories of rise and retreat, but perhaps the greatest difference in their paths has been the time they spent at the top of their performance: some had a relatively prolonged plateau followed by steady decline (both the British empire and the 20th-century United States fit this pattern); others had a swift rise to a brief peak, followed by a more or less rapid decline. Japan is clearly in the latter category.

She seemed to represent a conscious choice between (1) a healthy, strong future of thriving and surviving and (2) a slothful existence of inactivity, illness, decline, and dependence.

But that which pleases us in people who are rising pleases us less in the case of people who are falling.

To be nothing where he had been everything was an unendurable decline.

Monsieur, retorted Gavroche, perhaps you were a man of wit yesterday, but you have degenerated this morning.

He soured on life some seconds after he was born and has made a profession of deteriorating ever since.

All empires fail. They overreach, spread too thin, collect one enemy too many. They're gnawed at from within by corruption, greed, betrayal.

Thank you, but we respectfully decline your overture, being more enjoyably occupied at present.