Benjamin Wittes Quotes

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.

The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people.

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

All you got to do is look around. This country's getting worse and worse and more and more immoral, and we're rotting from within.

Symptoms of ethical, political and economic impoverishment are all around us.

The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.

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?

Rome had Senators too, that's why it declined.

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.

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

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

Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction. A good form of government may hold the rotten materials together for some time, but beyond a certain pitch, even the best constitution will be ineffectual, and slavery must ensue.

The moral state of society was most terrible. We stole from ourselves, took and gave bribes, lied in the reports, in newspapers, from high podiums. And all of this from top to bottom; from bottom to top.

All great nations inevitably end up committing suicide.

All great empires die from within.

Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.

In the end, what brings civilizations down is when the elites lose confidence in the rightness of their cause.

'House of Cards' is full of hypocrites, some ashamed, many proud. There is no silver lining here, no appeal to a just system that is temporarily thwarted by corrupting forces.

There is an anatomical dysfunction in today's Lebanon, and we have been stuck in a socio-political vicious circle for decades.

What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.

Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square,From the first point of his appointed sourse,And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse.

My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

As long as we continue to fight in between the jamming with all we have to save America from the current suicidal deathwish of the corrupt, criminal punks intentionally destroying the last best place.

The United States has collapsed economically, socially, politically, legally, constitutionally, and environmentally.

There will he nothing more that posterity can add to our immoral habits; our descendants must have the same desires and act the same follies as their sires. Every vice has reached its zenith.