Civilizational Decline Quotes

A democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.

If we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain over national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life, then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay.

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

All empires fall eventually. It is the way of things.

We are on the verge of events, the like of which the world has not seen since the time of the barbarian invasion. Soon everything that constitutes our lives will strike the world as useless. A period of barbarism is about to begin and it will last for decades.

The process by which civilization, as an abstract entity distinct from the societies in which it is embodied, dies or is reborn is a very significant one.

America is on her deathbed.

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

Never since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now.

That complacency and that willingness to give yourself over to a larger power structure is how civilizations destroy themselves. And I just hope people wake up from the slumber they've willed themselves to. Because we're really in a dark place right now.

Pundits, media companies and politicians have discovered that it is emotion, not reason, that wins votes and pulls in eyeballs. It’s fun and lucrative while it lasts, but the Greeks and Romans can tell you precisely what it does to a civilization in the long run.

Art is always the index of social vitality, the moving finger that records the destiny of a civilization. A wise statesman should keep an anxious eye on this graph, for it is more significant than a decline in exports or a fall in the value of a nation's currency.

Always, some great culture is dying to enrich the soil of new harvests, some civlization is crumbling to rubbish to be the hill of a more beautiful city, some race is spending itself that a lower and more barbarous world may inherit its stored treasure house.

And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and hardened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must ..... eventually ..... fall.

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.

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

Great nations do not succumb through lost wars, but rather through racial decay and the destruction of their internal order.

My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.

I believe that we are at or near the apex of a great civilization... In 50-100 years, if we're a poor third to some countries in Asia, I wouldn't be surprised. If I had to bet, the part of the world that will do best will be Asia.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

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.

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.

But the line of thought that I'd been chasing for several days was implicit in the ruins of the old Roman Empire, which gradually destroyed itself by substituting the faith in a legion of miraculous words for the strength of armies and the weight of walls.