Quotes About Decline

No, I'm not doing 'Star Wars.'

Something is great when it starts low and rises to the heights. Or starts high and sinks low.

Our brain starts a long degenerative arc beginning around age 40.

The individual organs follow the same pattern as the whole organism, i.e. they have their period of growth, of stationary, maximum activity and then of aging decline.

Stay-at-home mothers are building our future. And I feel like if we had more of them, our society would not be in such a decline.

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.

Americans have seen the value of the dollar slowly decline due to the steady erosion of inflation.

The Steps to Folly as well as Sin are gradual, and almost imperceptible, and when we are once on the Decline, we go down without taking notice on't.

Jefferson did not detail his objections, but he likely was irked by Montesquieu's conclusion that a major cause of Rome's decline was Epicurean thought.

The world's failure to live up to the impossible promises of the positive-thinking credo did not convince these men of the credo's impracticality, but rather that the world was in a sad state of decline, that it had forsaken the true and correct path.2

Talk to just about any farmer in Kansas, and you will find him extremely pessimistic about his livelihood. Except for the owners of the very largest spreads, farmers simply cannot make a profit. Kansas has only about half as many farms as it did in 1950; those that remain continue to grow. A few are getting big; most are getting out.

Labor unions are on the wane today, as everyone knows, down to 9 percent of the private-sector workforce from a high water mark of 38 percent in the fifties.

opioids or unemployment or deindustrialization.

Indeed, over two-thirds of Kansas counties lost population between 1980 and 2000, some by as much as 25 percent. I am told that there are entire towns in the western part of the state getting by on Social Security; no one is left there but the aged. There are no doctors, no shoe stores. One town out here even sold its public school on eBay.

It's not that we grow old, I thought, but that we grow old in decline and discomfort, and these hardships are made worse by the awareness that nothing will improve. No coming days will dawn brighter than the last that dawned, and this sorrow is further deepened by a fear of death…

My lands showed like a full moon about me, but now the moon's i'the last quarter, waning, waning; and I am to think that moon was mine. Mine and my father's and my forefathers': generations, generations! Down goes the house of us, down, down it sinks. Now is the name a beggar, begs in me; that name, which hundreds of years has made this shire famous, in me and my posterity runs out.

What is this metaphor called a crown, or rather what is monarchy? . . . It appears to be something going much out of fashion, falling into ridicule, and rejected in some countries, both as unnecessary and expensive. In America it is considered as an absurdity; and in France it has so far declined, that the goodness of the man, and the respect for his personal character, are the only things that preserve the appearance of its existence.

ON the decline of the Roman power, about five centuries after Christ, the countries of Northern Europe were left almost destitute of a national government.

I am not involved with 'Hera Pheri 3.' I have told the makers that I am not interested.

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?

As investments and as an energy source, fossil fuels have nowhere to go but down.

No one can fail to see that the power of the Church among large numbers in many communities is today diminishing, or has already ceased.

If the experience of delight presupposes a sustained, patient, sympathetic, and affectionate embrace of the world, then the decline of delight will be preceded by the erosion of the practical conditions that make such an embrace possible. What trends and practices in culture work to undermine a loving regard for creatures and things, and how have these trends and practices contributed to a situation in which relatively few people bow their heads before raising their forks?

I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement.