Quotes About Decline

I am much afraid that we shall have very greatly hastened the decline and ruin of the New World by our contagion, and that we willhave sold it our opinions and our arts very dear.

In 1974, the basin—really a collection of several different giant oil fields—reached its peak, providing almost a quarter of total U.S. oil supplies.7 But thereafter output in the Permian began a precipitous decline, hitting a low point in 2007.

Always, before, whenever one culture went into decline, there were others ready to take up the slack. If Rome toppled, there was light shining in Constantinople, then the Baghdad Caliphate and in China. If Philippine Spain turned repressive, Holland welcomed both refugees and science. When most of Europe went mad, in the mid–twentieth century, the brightest minds moved to America. When America grew self-indulgent and riven by new civil war, that migration sloshed and shifted East.

This abattement and degradation did not take place all at once; it was brought about by degrees

This is the way the world will end, not with a bang, but a whimper.

By steady, persistent steps the sense of security departed from Roman Britain. Its citizens felt by daily experience a sense that the world-wide system of which they formed a partner province was in decline. They entered a period of alarm.

When we have degenerated, as we must eventually degenerate, when we have lost our intrinsic superiority…our morals will be gone, but our Maxims will remain.

L'Europa conseguì la leadership della cultura mondiale non mediante la ricchezza materiale, ma mediante la preminenza nelle cose dello spirito: nella scienza, nella letteratura e nelle idee. Essa creò gli ideali che il resto del mondo seguì. Se la democrazia moderna dovesse comportare la cessazione di questa missione e l'abbandono della leadership spirituale per l'appagamento materiale, allora ciò significherebbe proprio il declino della cultura occidentale.

The notion that all peoples are on the road to progress is as incorrect as that they are continuously declining and degenerating.

I would prefer not to.

For no one, in our long decline, So dusty, spiteful and divided, Had quite such pleasant friends as mine, Or loved them half as much as I did.

Callum has turned down the

Most historians agree that the decline of the Great Library of Alexandria was due to what endangers libraries of the present day--general indifference and bureaucratic neglect.

They say that your powers of memory are at their peak when you're 26, and it's all downhill after that.

It's a long, slow sunset for ink-on-paper magazines, but sunsets can produce vast sums of money.

There was only one decline in church attendance, and that was in the late 1960s when the Vatican said it was not a sin to miss Mass. They said Catholics could act like Protestants, and so they did.

I use iTunes for downloading music, but I always decline when prompted to update this or that new version.

and I have always found that if things have a choice of directions, they are most likely to go downhill.

With attempts to find scientific support for free will failing badly, it is no surprise that the twentieth century saw the slow decline of free will as a scientifically tenable concept. In 1931, Einstein had declared it "man's illusion that he [is] acting according to his own free will.

Everything human … has its period: nations, like mortal men, advance only to decline; dismembered empire and diminished glory mark a crisis in the constitution;

I'm having a birthday party. Do you want to come?" Evie glanced at the invitation. "Thanks, but no." She didn't use any excuses, just said it simple and straight, handing my humiliation right back to me, thanks but no thanks.

As artists get wealthier and more famous, often their work gets worse... I'm fascinated by the decline of artists. I suspect I'll be in decline myself. It's a fact of life.

Child poverty in the United States declined after the work requirement was put in there. People realized that they had to work and people went out and worked and they got off welfare.

I am studying ancient civilizations, trying to find what happened to them, finding out why they went into a decline, why they died.