Johan Huizinga Quotes

There's been cultural rot since there's been culture.

I can say, particularly as a mother of four small children. I can talk about the coarsening of our culture.

Our political system cannot stop the degradation of our culture.

Just carrying a ruler with you in your pocket should be forbidden, at least on a moral basis. The ruler is the symbol of the new illiteracy. The ruler is the symptom of the new disease, disintegration of our civilisation.

There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.

It's too hard for me to comment on the sorry state of our culture.

Dixie has just fallen to pieces. There are little patches of Dixie. But even in the heart of Dixie - in Alabama - Dixie is slipping. They've stopped using the word in commercial listings.

Countries have lost their culture because what they wanted was money. Money became the running theme in every country and culture was sacrificed.

Cajun culture is dying.

We are committing cultural suicide. The barbarians at the gate will only need to give us a slight push, and the emancipated body of Western civilization will collapse in a heap.

We are not far from the kind of moral decay that has brought on the fall of other nations and peoples.

Our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner, for the kind of influence he exercises.

There's a lot to be done; I just see a total moral decay in our society.

Cultural relativism has made it so people don't know who they are anymore.

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

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings

You know that you can't make references to the Classics any longer and less and less to the English classics even.

... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

Maybe the culture is [particularly] shabby now. Maybe it's because I'm over sixty, that I can feel that about everything.

Bad art was as good as good art. Grammar and spelling were no longer important. To be clean was no better than to be filthy. Good manners were no better than bad. Family life was derided as an outdated bourgeois concept. Criminals deserved as much sympathy as their victims. Many homes and classrooms became disorderly - if there was neither right nor wrong there could be no basis for punishment or reward. Violence and soft pornography became accepted in the media. Thus was sown the wind, and we are now reaping the whirlwind.

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

The absence of hope can rot a society from within.

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.

But a people unable to reform will not be able to preserve its old culture either.

Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken.