Morris Sheppard Quotes

As I look around, I get this sinking feeling that we're off track, that there's something sick in the soul of our country. I examine the fruit that's hanging on the tree of America, and I can see that it's rotting. And that concerns me deeply.

But through world wars and a Great Depression, through painful social upheaval and a Cold War, and now through the attacks of September 11, 2001, our Nation has indeed survived.

Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

America might be a dying empire, but it's not going to die in our lifetime - and it doesn't have to die at all.

Civilizations do not collapse because the citizenry are corrupt or lazy or anti-intellectual. These people do not have the power and influence to either lead or destroy. Civilizations collapse when those who have power fail to do their jobs.

Our position is extremely perilous; if we do not earnestly promote nationalism and weld together our four hundred millions into a strong nation, we face a tragedy - the loss of our country and the destruction of our race. To ward off this danger, we must espouse nationalism and employ the national spirit to save the country.

You can still do the Big Lie in Miami and get away with it. This is a town where the basic institutions have collapsed.

Governments do not know what they cannot do until after they cease to be governments. Each government carries the seeds of its own destruction.

Betrayal isn't ridiculous. It's the reason empires fall.

Armenia is dying, but it will survive. The little blood that it still has left is precious blood that will give birth to a heroic generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not die.

Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.

When the house of a great one collapses Many little ones are slain.

Freedom of speech means nothing to a people who are too weak in their convictions to speak out against the evil that is eating at the heart of the nation like a cancer.

There is no good reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.

Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs

We cannot cure the evils of politics with politics.

If the present economic structure can change only by collapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible.

Like men, nations are purified and strengthened by trials.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.

So in Jewry we recognise a contemporary universal anti-social phenomenon, which has reached its present pitch through a process of, historical development in which the Jews have zealously co-operated. And this evil anti-social aspect of Jewry has grown to a stage at which: it must necessarily collapse.

Patriotism depends as much on mutual suffering as on mutual success; and it is by that experience of all fortunes and all feelings that a great national character is created.

With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink.

We are no longer dealing with historical events, but with places of collapse.

When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.