Quotes About Decline

I'd begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.

Between 1971 and 2013, Conservative Judaism went from being the denominational home of 41 percent of American Jews to representing only 18 percent. Along the way, the career of Jeffrey Myers would suffer the same fortunes as the movement.

However, why do so many loving parents, as part of the ruling generation, abandon the civil society for the growing tyranny of a voracious central government that steals their children's future, thus condemning their children and unborn generations to a dangerously precarious and unstable environment, despite a large majority acknowledging the national decline for which they blame politicians?

There's evidence of a social decline in direct proportion to technology and the industrialization of the motion picture industry.

when you hit the expressway to Declinistan there are few exit ramps. That America's animating principles should require a defense at all is a melancholy reflection on how far we've already gone. Live free--or die from a thousand soothing caresses of nanny-state sirens.

power was bleeding from Benito Mussolini's grasp like joy from a young widowed heart.

One great thing about getting old is that you can get out of all sorts of social obligations just by saying you're too tired.

They stayed away in droves.

10 years ago, I would've host Saturday Night Live. But to me, the show has declined. For some reason, humor isn't what it was. It just, to me, it's not as funny as it was, not as sharply satirical.

It's just amazing how long this country has been going to hell without ever having got there.

Here, I thought, I had found the human race in its final stages of decadence perverse, insouciant, without ambition. And I could not blame them. After all, they had no future.

And when the angel orders the resurrection of Christ to be announced to the disciples, he wants it to be made known to Peter in particular, because he was in the greatest distress. Peter knew how to decline the word !

America's current economic decline must be halted, or else one day the crime that is rampant in the streets of New York and Washington, D.C. may develop into low intensity conflict by coalescing along racial, religious, social, and political lines, and run completely out of control

Keith Thomas' Magic and the Decline of Religion (1971).

Unchecked competition eventually did more to destroy than to uphold the Republic.

she too faded away like the sun that had just been swallowed by the horizon

But as things made their decline from ripeness, they could taste wonderful, I realized.

All empires fall, eventually." "But why? It's not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires.["]

The Götterdämmerung of the bourgeois world is approaching.

From my examination of many declining industries, the firms that seem to be the most objective about managing the decline process are those that also participate in the substitute industry. They have a clearer perception concerning the prospects of the substitute product and the threat of decline.

The myth of worldly decline can seem old-fashioned, darkly pessimistic, and deeply discouraging when compared to the tales of upward evolution and unending progress. Yet this world is essentially a place of mystery and what looks darkest at the beginning can have bright threads hidden within. Conversely, things that seem most positive can be found to have a dark shadow that eventually comes to the light of day and obscures what seemed so bright to begin with.

Toynbee's idea that civilizations die not by murder but by suicide.

Et voilà comment une civilisation meurt… une civilisation meurt juste par lassitude, par dégoût d'elle-même…

The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge. More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline.