Quotes About Decline

If Jucundus will listen to me," said Aristo, "I could satisfy him that the Christians are actually falling off. They once were numerous in this very place; now there are hardly any. They have been declining for these fifty years; the danger from them is past. Do you want to know how to revive them? Put out an imperial edict, forbid them, denounce them.

There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often - as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned.

We've been an empire in decline since I can remember, Ketchum said bluntly; he wasn't kidding. We are a lost nation, Danny. Stop farting around.

They sold box turtles by the gross to people in Philadelphia, who used the turtles to keep cellars free of snails—a market that has declined.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

How are the mighty fallen!

It's a pity that the tennis is really going down the drain. Every year it's getting worse and worse and worse. There has to be a radical change, and I hope it will be really soon.

Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust - it has a business model that either works or it doesn't.

By 375 the occupancy of villas had fallen by a third, and in towns it had fallen by a half.

after 410, but that within a generation the villas and towns of Roman Britain had been almost completely abandoned.

But in Britain, as we've seen, civic life had collapsed completely in the early fifth century

the king insisted, there was nobody able to read them, such had been the decline in literacy.

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

We scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see another who is of no account to-day, with whom we shall be in love to-morrow, with whom we might, perhaps, had we consented to see her now, have fallen in love a little earlier and who would thus have put a term to our present sufferings, bringing others, it is true, in their place.

The fucking world is running out of gas.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

The dregs of Romulus.

Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest.

At the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.

Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.

A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory

In postwar America, mass production of automobiles and tract housing signaled the beginning of urban decline and suburban sprawl.

The literature of civilizational decline, to which Zemour's Le Suicide Francais is a minor contribution, is typically brash and breathless. Not so Submission. There is not even drama here, no clash of spiritual armies, no martyrdom, no final conflagration. All one hears at the end is a bone-chilling relief. The old has passed away. The new has come. Whatever.

Christianity turned its back on these ancient stories of fated decline. But it has never been able to escape historical mythmaking, despite the best efforts of theologians from Augustine to Karl Barth. The reason, as Hegel formulated it so well, is that Christian revelation is based on a unique divine incursion into the flow of historical time that altered but did not delegitimize an earlier divine–human relationship.