Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

It is only when the hearts of the Women are in the mud, that the People are destroyed.

I'm very disappointed in my country right now, because I think we've kind of lost our moral compass.

I cannot resign myself to the decline of Europe, and of France.

Gaming is among the surest means to debauch a people, and draw them from God and his worship to superstition and idolatry.

All great nations inevitably end up committing suicide.

Like so many Americans, I am sick and tired of watching the rapid decline of our culture right in front of our eyes.

A sign of a culture that has lost its faith - Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse.

At the rate America is decaying morally, we shall have to change our national symbol from an eagle to a vulture.

It will be a gay world. There will be lights everywhere except in the minds of men, and the fall of the last civilization will not be heard above the din.

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their oscillated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.

Sin will usher in the greatest and the saddest losses that can be upon our souls.

The saint endeavors to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall.

The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.

If it were left to us, we would all fall away from the faith and perish.

We know we are falling from grace, millennium.

Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.

America is ensnared in self-indulgence and its future hangs in the balance. Our moral and spiritual foundations are rapidly being destroyed. Our arrogance is producing a socialist state that is becoming our god. The entitlement state of mind has created a nation that looks to the government for the answer to our problems, when the only answer is, "Our Father which art in heaven."

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald’s contemporaries couldn’t bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall.

A nation dies culturally and spiritually first. Its money and its army are the last to go, but go they do once the light goes out in the nation's soul.

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.

Whenever a nation turns its back on God or beings to live as if He does not exist, it begins to show up in its citizens' disregard for human life.

What greater calamity can fall upon a nation, than the loss of worship? Then all things go to decay. Genius leaves the temple, to haunt the senate, or the market. Literature becomes frivolous. Science is cold. The eye of youth is not lighted by the hope of other worlds, and age is without honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die, we do not mention them.

Ladies and gentlemen, if some of the leading artists in a civilization see a man urinating in another man's mouth and see composition and lighting and do not see their civilization being pissed upon, we are in trouble.

Would you like to play With the thought of a friend In a distant passing stage While you lie around With your hands up and out So resigned you will fall down.