Robert E. Howard Quotes

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.

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

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

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

The standards have sunk so low throughout our culture that who really knows.

Because Roman civilization perished through barbarian invasions, we are perhaps too much inclined to think that that is the only way a civilization can die. If the lights that guide us ever go out, they will fade little by little, as if of their own accord.... We therefore should not console ourselves by thinking that the barbarians are still a long way off. Some peoples may let the torch be snatched from their hands, but others stamp it out themselves.

Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history.

The ruin of a State is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners and contempt of religion.

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

Barbarisation may be defined as a cultural process whereby an attained condition of high value is gradually overrun and supersededby elements of lower quality.

In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics...For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

... 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.

Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes! How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges.

The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless... From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to affect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.

In a state of nature, the weakest go to the wall; in a state of over-refinement, both the weak and the strong go to the gutter.

We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.

The redeeming feature of war is that it puts a nation to the test. As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgment upon social systems that have outlived their vitality.

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.

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.

It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow field, just as well as under a pile of money.