#Decline Quotes

“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?”

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

“That England, that was wont to conquer others,Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”

“Though now this grained face of mine be hidIn sap-consuming winter's drizzled snow,And all the conduits of my blood froze up,Yet hath my night of life some memory,My wasting lamps some fading glimmer left,My dull deaf ears a little use to hear.”

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

“The weakest kind of fruit drops earliest to the ground.”

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

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

“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.”

“Farewell! a long farewell to all my greatness!”

“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.”

“Men shut their doors against a setting sun.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We have seen better days.”

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

“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.”

“A nation never falls but by suicide.”

“My wits begin to turn.”

“Let me not live, after my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff of younger spirits.”

“There is nothing that sets a nation back as far in civilization as prosperity.”

“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.”

“I am already sensible of decay in the power of walking, and find my memory not so faithful as it used to be. This may be partly owing to the incessant current of new matter flowing constantly through it; but I ascribe to years their share in it also.”

“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.”

“That strain again! It had a dying fall:O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet soundThat breathes upon a bank of violets,Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:'Tis not so sweet as it was before.”

“If America ever passes out as a great nation, we ought to put on our tombstone: America died from a delusion she had Moral Leadership.”

“What shall I do with this absurdity- O heart, O troubled heart-this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog's tail? Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Required to be constantly recumbent I write slowly and with difficulty.... Weakened in body by infirmities and in mind by age, now far gone into my 83rd year, reading one newspaper only and forgetting immediately what I read.”

“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.”

“France has never gotten over the fact that it was once a great power and is now just a great nuisance.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Wisdom degenerates in governments as governments increase in age.”

“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.”

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

“I'm beginning to wonder if the symbol of the United States pretty soon isn't going to be an ambassador with a flag under his arm climbing into an escape helicopter.”

“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.”

“I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.”

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

“To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.”