Gary Shteyngart Quotes

Barbarism recommences by the excess of civilization.

History shows us that other highly developed forms of civilization have collapsed. Who knows whether the same fate does not await our own?

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

I do see that the world that we live in is collapsing to a certain extent, and civilization as we know it is caving in on itself. I believe that we are at a very low level of consciousness, and we do not know how to treat each other as human beings. We are caught up in our own lives, our own needs, our own ego gratification. I feel a strong sense of responsibility in delivering that message.

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.

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.

Whatever Romney's failings, he certainly doesn't suggest that the United States is teetering on the brink of a moral cesspool.

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

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

No civilization on the brink of collapse has ever changed fast enough to avert collapse.

When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community.

… the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

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.

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.

The precedent is that civilizations collapse, and everything's stacked up for this one to go, and it's a mess when it happens.

That contagion idea is so relevant and shows how quickly civilization could self-destruct.

I can quickly go to a place where I worry about society spiralling out of control.

The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control.

It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world's total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.

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.

What times! What manners!

The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.

Television is the Antichrist, and I can assure you after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to medieval savagery and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb...it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything and a lousy joke at that.

Civilization is coming to an end, you understand.

We are a culture that relies on technology over community, a society in which spoken and written words are cheap, easy to come by, and excessive. Our culture says anything goes; fear of God is almost unheard of. We are slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry.