Terry Bradshaw Quotes

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

Historically, if you look at great civilizations, why do they crumble? Is it because of what's outside or because of something internal? It's always internal. It is.

This part of Brazil offered the curious spectacle of a great evil, which has been long suffered to exist and is now advancing, gradually yet surely, to that state which must entail inevitable destruction on the existing Government of the country.

It is possible for great nations to rot from within.

But the line of thought that I'd been chasing for several days was implicit in the ruins of the old Roman Empire, which gradually destroyed itself by substituting the faith in a legion of miraculous words for the strength of armies and the weight of walls.

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

It is conflict overall that mires people in poverty. That is the first law of development.

What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then, like any great place, it collapsed, and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in the world.

The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.

Is there a point at which we hit a tipping point and all of this economic, cultural and moral trouble sends us into a death spiral we can't get out of?

The Roman Empire was very, very much like us. They lost their moral core, their sense of values in terms of who they were. And after all of those things converged together, they just went right down the tubes very quickly.

Africa has been troubled for a long time - well, the world has been troubled ever since I was born.

For not only every democracy, but certainly every republic, bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will be either extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, or despotism will come from either of those excesses.

How miserable that man is that Governes a People where six parts of seven at least are Poor, Endebted Discontented and Armed.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

This amendment would destroy parental authority and responsibility throughout America, would give irrevocable support to a rebellion of childhood would to which menace our civilization.

Halve the income of the country and you double the risk of civil war.

Here are two ways by which every kind of government is destroyed; either by some accident that happens from without, or some evil that arises within itself. What the first will be is not always easy to foresee: but the latter is certain and determinate

Sometimes crime is provoked by economic and social conditions, as well as the weak government and the absence of lawful order.

Every government of the world has the seeds of its own destruction in itself.

I sometimes wonder what use there is in trying to protect the West against fancied external threats when the signs of disintegration within are so striking

Oligarchic societies may be able to achieve high rates of growth for a period of time, but continuing inequities in distribution lead to political instability and populism.

Only our own corruption can destroy us and cause our armed forces to be defeated without fighting.