Decline Quotes

We have seen better days.

I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.

Like the lily That once was mistress of the field and flourished, I'll hang my head and perish.

Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.

Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.

Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.

England, an old and exhausted island, must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children.

Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher,Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.

deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone.

No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft, effortless ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted sentimentality.

It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind.

Last scene of all that ends this strange, eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion. I am sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

If we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain over national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life, then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

Farewell! a long farewell to all my greatness!

Man can have only a certain number of teeth, hair and ideas; there comes a time when he necessarily loses his teeth, hair and ideas.

Wherever in any society there are too many laws, it is a sure sign that that society will soon die. If you study the characteristics of India, you will find that no nation possesses so many laws as the Hindus, and national death is the result.

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

There lives within the very flame of love A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it.

Without such inspiration, we would rapidly deteriorate and finally perish.

Many companies forget what it means to make great products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over and the product people eventually make their way out.

'Tis thought the king is dead; we will not stay. The bay trees in our country are all wither'd.

My wits begin to turn.

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

When goodness is lost, it is replaced by morality.

There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.

One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot - and it's only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.

The weakest kind of fruit drops earliest to the ground.

The end of the day is near when small men make long shadows.

We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.

I have touch'd the highest point of all my greatness, And from that full meridian of my glory I haste now to my setting.

The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.

In the history of mankind many republics have risen, have flourished for a less or greater time, and then have fallen because their citizens lost the power of governing themselves and thereby of governing their state; and in no way has this loss of power been so often and so clearly shown as in the tendency to turn the government into a government primarily for the benefit of one class instead of a government for the benefit of the people as a whole.

America is, is no longer, uh, what it, uh, could be, uh, what it was once was, uh, and I say to myself, uh, I don't want that future, uh, for my children.

All I know is just what I read in the Congressional Record. They have had some awful funny articles in there lately. As our government deteriorates, our humor increases.

Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.

It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to rot away.

And in the general hardening of outlook that set in ... practices which had been long abandoned ... -- imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations -- not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.

It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge.

The good-they cannot create; they are always the beginning of the end.

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

It is wonderful to me that old men should not be sensible that their minds keep pace with their bodies in the progress of decay.

I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which lead to a dark gulf.

Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh.

Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.

Nature, as it grows again toward earth, is fashioned for the journey, dull and heavy.

The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.

Wisdom degenerates in governments as governments increase in age.

Far from New England's blustering shore,New England's worm her hulk shall bore,And sink her in the Indian seas,Twine, wine, and hides, and China teas.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

Like other systems in decay, the Roman Empire continued to function for several generations after its vitality was sapped. For nearly a hundred years our Island was one of the scenes of conflict between a dying civilisation and lusty, famishing barbarism.

A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.

The ruin of a State is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners and contempt of religion.

We may stop ourselves when going up, never when coming down.

As I give thought to the matter, I find four causes for the apparent misery of old age; first, it withdraws us from active accomplishments; second, it renders the body less powerful; third, it deprives us of almost all forms of enjoyment; fourth, it stands not far from death.

A nation never falls but by suicide.

Many ingenious lovely things are gone / That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.

Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?