Gradual Decline Quotes

How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

Freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once and openly. It is far more likely to be eroded away, bit by bit, amid glittering promises and expressions of noble ideals.

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

How did we go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden.

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.

Death By A Thousand Cuts

Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.

Let me tell you something you haven't learned yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn't matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events - they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn't have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don't even notice at first, and then one day it's there. You wake up and you just don't have the fire anymore." He smiled.

Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.

An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards.

Every couple needs glue to stay together. Like all marriages, I suspect, if you're busy you don't see it coming until you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. It's a bit like going broke. It happens slowly and then very quickly.

Public outrage gets used up. You just move to a lower standard.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

If one by one we counted people out

I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.

If we mix only a moderate minority share of turds with the raisins each year, probably no one will recognize what will ultimately become a very large collection of turds.

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

When you see the way things deteriorate before your very eyes. Everything running down hill. It's kind of silly to even think about youth.

Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you're both aware and unaware of it almost all the time, all you know is you'd die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It's a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

At the touch of mankind, things wear away with heartbreaking slowness.

We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out.

No one becomes depraved all at once.