Civilization Decline Quotes & Sayings

A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs. — Gustave Le Bon

When they come to chronicle the decline of this civilization," he said, "they're going to wonder why we were debating flag burning, abortion, and broccoli eating instead of the fundamental issues of how we live and use the environment. — James Howard Kunstler

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation. — Adam Smith

The acceptance of homosexuality is the last step in the decline of Gentile civilization, — Pat Robertson

A civilization is always judged in its decline. — Melvin B. Tolson

How could human civilization decline so far, yet seem so normal in many respects? And is it scientifically possible that a blight could wipe out all edible — Kip S. Thorne

It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping.
Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets.
It weeps
for the black people who think like white people.
It weeps
for the Indians who think like settlers.
It weeps
for the children who think like adults.
It weeps
for the free who think like prisoners.
Most of all, it weeps
for the cowgirls who think like cowboys. — Tom Robbins

I have the not altogether unsatisfying impression that civilisation is collapsing around me.
Is it my age, I wonder, or the age we live in? I am not sure. Civilisations do collapse, after all, but on the other hand people grow old with rather greater frequency. — Theodore Dalrymple

Osbert was the only one who didn't seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose. — Meg Rosoff

Why do so many ingenious theorists give fresh reasons every year for the decline of letter writing, and why do they assume, in derision of suffering humanity, that it has declined? They lament the lack of leisure, the lack of sentiment ... They talk of telegrams, and telephones, and postal cards, as if any discovery of science, any device of civilization, could eradicate from the human heart that passion for self-expression which is the impelling force of letters. — Agnes Repplier

From the 18th to the 20th Century it was the boast that human thought had at least come out of the dark woods of medieval superstition, credulity and obscurantism, into the sunshine of clear thinking where the dry breezes of skepticism blow unhindered. 'Fell the trees and level the hills that still obscure the view; let the winds drive off the mist' - they said. But now that much of this work has been accomplished it is beginning to be felt that there is no shade in all these flat plains of perpetual parching wind and sunshine, and through this desert no flooding Nile flows. There are those who, secretly, would like, if they could, to reconstruct the dim, wet, haunted woods before they die of thirst. — Nanamoli Thera

The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized. — Gao Xingjian

Fragmentation occurs when a civilization is in decline. — Robert Payne

The state of our civilization manifests itself both in the non-problems that terrify us beyond all reason - rising sea levels - and in the real problems we pay no heed to [population decline] ... In reality, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it's uninhabitable — Mark Steyn

A great deal of stupidity has chipped away at the massive advantages of Western civilization, which could terminally decline if it remains on the current path. But these problems can be solved - and swiftly - if the right leaders emerge. — Paul Singer

As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Nothing like a few restful weeks contemplating the decline of civilization to restore the humors. What I did on my summer vacation was listen to a lot of people talk about the decline of practically everything - you could call it the leisure of the theory class. — Molly Ivins

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession. — Emil Cioran

As people ages, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline - the illusion of the good old days. And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it — Steven Pinker

My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline. — Ludwig Von Mises

The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players. — Nikki Giovanni

Proud houses fall into decline and great cities pass into ruin. The stories of those things are lost to forgotten languages and moth-eaten scrolls. Vine and root grapple with the rune carved in stone, and rust carries away, fleck by fleck, the great gates of iron. — William Timothy Murray

Anguish over the decline of civilization is the affliction of a reactionary.
The democrat cannot lament the disappearance of something of which he is ignorant. — Nicolas Gomez Davila

The civilization of the West, which was brilliant by virtue of its scientific perfection for a long time, and which subjugated the whole world with the products of this science to its states and nations, is now bankrupt and in decline. — Hassan Al-Banna

Classical Islamic civilization had long passed its prime when the Mongols arrived on the scene in the thirteenth century, and was already in an advance state of what most historians would call decline. — Bernard Lewis

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries. — Anais Nin

Perhaps Western civilization is in a post-decline phase, or maybe the decline is just taking a really long time, like the Roman Empire's did. The Romans had gladiators and Christian-hungry lions and that sort of thing. We have MTV. — Tom Shales

Art is always the index of social vitality, the moving finger that records the destiny of a civilization. A wise statesman should keep an anxious eye on this graph, for it is more significant than a decline in exports or a fall in the value of a nation's currency. — Herbert Read

The first sign on a declining civilization is a decline in the arts. — Diana Palmer

To keep any great nation up to a high standard of civilization there must be enough superior characters to hold the balance of power, but the very moment the balance of power gets into the hands of second-rate men and women, a decline of that nation is inevitable. — Christian D. Larson

I believe in courtesy. It is the way we avoid hurting people's feelings. She thought that maybe, just maybe, western civilization was in decline because people did not take time to take tea at four o'clock. — E.L. Konigsburg

Perhaps the greatest Maya mystery of all is the cause of the civilization's abrupt decline. The last dated stela erected at Tikal was put up in A.D. 869; the last anywhere in the Maya world, in 909. — David Roberts

There can be no doubt that the young of today have to be protected against certain poisonous effects inherent in present-day civilization. Five social diseases surround them, even in early childhood. There is the decline in fitness due to modern methods of locomotion; the decline in initiative due to the widespread disease of spectatoritis; the decline in care and skill due to the weakened tradition of craftsmanship; the decline in self-discipline due to the ever-present availability of tranquilizers and stimulants, and the decline in compassion, which William Temple called spiritual death. — Kurt Hahn

Whenever I hear people clucking about the decline of civilization, what's wrong with young people, how vulgar popular culture is, how confusing and frightening they find the internet, alarms go off. I know I'm around somebody whose hinges are rusting. Death will be bad enough, but for me, this early harbinger is more fearsome, because a part of one's spirit and openness and ability to learn and grow disappears. — Jon Katz

Instead of Gnostics, we have Existentialists and God-is-dead theologians, instead of Neo-Platonists, devotees of Zen, instead of desert hermits, heroin addicts and Beats (who also, oddly enough, seem averse to washing), instead of mortification of the flesh, sado-masochistic pornography; as for our public entertainments, the fare offered by television is still a shade less brutal than that provided by the Amphitheatre, but only a shade and may not be so for long. — W. H. Auden

For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor - and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. — Steven Pinker

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring. — Samuel P. Huntington

To the masses, the catchwords of Socialism sound so enticing ... so they will continue to work for Socialism, helping thereby to bring about the inevitable decline of the civilization which the nations of the West have taken thousands of years to build up. — Ludwig Von Mises

The decline and fall of a civilization is barely noticed by most of its citizens. — James Cook

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow
haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to
I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline
they aren't remade. — Wallace Stegner

In so many ways, for so many people, freedom was still an illusion. Barrie thought of the statistics she had read about how many women and children were still enslaved all over the world. Now - not three hundred years ago - and she wondered how it was possible that so little could change. Sometimes it seemed like the world was sliding backward and no one was noticing. — Martina Boone

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. — Michel De Montaigne

I think that any authentic feeling one has of life should be a feeling of defeat. It's a losing game. You're going to die. Civilization is going to end. Our society is in decline, and we should feel OK about it because Roman society was in decline and before it the Assyrian one was, and they disappeared off this earth and we will disappear too. — Etgar Keret

While I have no empirical evidence to back this up, I bet that the number of homosexual people per thousand has not fluctuated all that much over the centuries. I do not believe the dented wisdom my father used to extol, that homosexuality was a sure sign of a civilization in decline. — Henry Rollins

. . . the authors had developed indices that could be employed to measure the state of a civilization, to determine if society was healthy, in decline, or perhaps even dead. The indicators keyed in on everything from the accumulation of refuse to declines in everyday civility. They looked at how a society treated its most vulnerable citizens; examined a culture's architecture, gauging its scale in relation to humans and the surrounding natural world. One of the primary indicators, however, was a measure of the ability of a society's citizens to listen to each other and truly hear what was being said. It evaluated by gradations the ability of individuals to stand motionless for prolonged periods, receptive to their surroundings. — Robert H. Lieberman

If kissing is man's greatest invention, then fermentation and patriarchy compete with the domestication of animals for the distinction of being man's worst folly, and no doubt the three combined long ago, the one growing out of the others, to foster civilization and lead Western humanity to its present state of decline. — Tom Robbins

Modern man has successfully razed the imaginative landscapes of primal peoples the whole world over. Kill the gods first, slaughter the sacred animals, rewrite the mythologies, and build roads through the holy places. Do all this and watch the people decline. Without souls, they soon die, leaving dead shells, zombie cultures, shambling aimlessly towards oblivion. — Grant Morrison

When I was young I used to read about the decline of Western civilization, and I decided it was something I would like to make a contribution to. — George Carlin

But there was also a notable decline in many quarters of the world of jingoist rhetoric and puerile self-congratulatory nationalism. There was a sense of the human species, billions of tiny beings spread over the world, collectively presented with an unprecedented opportunity, or even a grave common danger. To many, it seemed absurd for the contending nation states to continue their deadly quarrels when faced with a nonhuman civilization of vastly greater capabilities. There was a whiff of hope in the air. — Carl Sagan

The entire empire has sunk into a quagmire of extravagance from which they cannot extricate themselves. — Liu Cixin