Quotes About Decline

Where there is no strife there is decay:

Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows.

If the society does not keep up its power, if it lowers its organization or wastes its capital, it falls back toward the natural state of barbarism from which it rose, and in so doing it must sacrifice thousands of its weakest members. Hence

Mainline American Protestantism, as is often the case, plodded wearily along as if nothing had changed. Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.

Perhaps the most that can be said is that HCM had become a prisoner of his own creation, a fly in amber, unable in his state of declining influence to escape the inexorable logic of a system that sacrificed the fate of individuals to the higher morality of the master plan.

Benito Mussolini, tired and senile though he was only going on sixty, he who had strutted so arrogantly across Europe's stage for two decades, was at the end of his rope. When he returned to Rome he found much worse than the aftermath of the first heavy bombing.

You're the first," she said. "The first what?" "The first person who's declined the opportunity to see the asteroid that might destroy humanity." I shrugged. "I've seen humanity destroy itself enough times already.

To keep any great nation up to a high standard of civilization there must be enough superior characters to hold the balance of power, but the very moment the balance of power gets into the hands of second-rate men and women, a decline of that nation is inevitable.

Beauty, when it first discloses the mellowing touches of age, affects us painfully. It is like the tints of sunset, or the beauty of autumn--a melancholy beauty--beauty in decline--upon which we cannot gaze without a feeling of sadness--of sadness that it is passing away.

doing them – and the amazing times you had on them – ought to be punishable by death. He has never said this to anyone though, so any time he gets offered, there is an awkward moment after he declines. The person offering clearly wonders whether he or she is being judged, and Parlabane reciprocally wonders whether he is too. With

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.

La sociedad de consumo convirtió a la humanidad en una inmensa multitud materialista a la cual la simple idea de sacrificio le hacía temblar. Las fiestas, la televisión, la avidez de tenerlo todo, de poder pagar todo lo que se ve, de no someterse nunca a ninguna moral limitativa, de incluso hartarse de los ancianos (carga pesada) o de los niños (obstáculos), han enviado a la civilización occidental al declive

There is probably no part of the civilized world in which Marxism has declined so completely and socialist ideas have been so discredited and turned to ridicule as in the countries of victorious socialism.

New York City has 2 million rats. We used to have 8 million rats. Now we're down to 2 million. You know what that means? We lose four electoral votes.

Light was leaking out of the sky, and the fun was leaking out of the afternoon.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

Reader was by far the most popular feed reader out there, and its user base had been in a steep decline for two years before Google decided to shut it down.

It is absurd to suggest a president whose party controls the Senate should jointly decline to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat - ever.

My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.

As homeowners see the value of their homes decline, they become more likely to delay purchases of the big items - like automobiles, electronics and home appliances - that are ballasts of the American economy. When those purchases decline, large manufacturing firms, suddenly short on funds, could begin laying off employees.

The Roman Empire was very, very much like us. They lost their moral core, their sense of values in terms of who they were. And after all of those things converged together, they just went right down the tubes very quickly.

The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.

the Indian population of Hispaniola declined from around 8 million, when Columbus arrived in A.D. 1492, to zero by 1535.

La décadence est la grande minute où une civilisation devient exquise.