Barbara Tuchman Quotes

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

I think that - apart from the fields of science and medicine - we live in an age of decline. Look at the world. There is decline in morals, ideals, manners, respect, truthfulness: just about everything, in fact.

I can't bear Britain in decline. I just can't.

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.

If America is a ship, it looks a lot like it's sinking - financially, morally, spiritually. It's frightening.

Here we are in the 70's when everything really is horrible and it really stinks. The mass media, everything on television everything everywhere is just rotten. You know it's just really boring and really evil, ugly and worse.

If movies are causing moral decay, then crime ought to be going up, but crime is going down.

It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption.

There's such cultural rot taking place, such a disintegration throughout our culture. Values, morality, you name it. Standards have been relaxed, and people are not being held to them. People's intentions, if they're said to be good and honorable, that's all that matters.

I'm not a reality-TV kind of guy. But it's almost like we're living in a reality show. Every day in this country, everybody keeps worrying about the deterioration of America, and it's like a big reality show.

The moral fiber of the American people is beset by rot and decay

Civilizations do not give out, they give in. They come apart not in a flash but by the inch. In a society where anything goes, everything eventually will.

History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.

Because of our sin, we as individuals and as a nation continue to experience a decline in moral values and beliefs. Our sinful behavior has resulted in increasing rates of unmarried adolescent and adult sexual activity, the birth of children to unwed mothers, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and decreasing marital fidelity. These are all signs of the decline of our culture.

Example and general milieu, once considered so important in the nurture of children, are sacrificed on the altars of the false god we call free choice but which imprisons us all in a collective moral paralysis and delivers an anarchy that the State itself shrinks from challenging.

If cleverness has often been a sign of decadence throughout history, the attempt to be too clever by half is an even more reliable marker of cultural decline.

There are a lot of problems in this country having to do with permissiveness.

I mourn the fact that my beautiful country has deteriorated in every way.

Civilization is going down the drain, and the sooner it does, the better.

The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value.

We used to have adults who set standards, moral standards, cultural standards, legal standards. They were better than we were. They gave us something to aspire to. They were people that we described as having dignity and character. That's all gone now, particularly the upper levels of the Democrat Party. There isn't any of that kind of decency, dignity, character, morality.

Continued dependence on relief inducers a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.

The loss of taste for what is right is loss of all right taste.

Where has the genius of the pedistal [sic] of the laws and constitution of our boasted country fled?

The canker has so eaten into the society that in many cases the only meaning of education is a knowledge of English.