societal downfall Quotes

A strange species we are; we can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick.

The civilization you sit in ... is now obvious in crisis, perhaps death pangs, twisting grotesquely like a dying animal, swirling down the garbage drain-this civilization was founded on God's road map.

Civilization has always been a bust.

What makes human power erupt like a volcano? What destroy's it? The civilizations of Rome, Greece, Egypt, China were all eruptions from a human core.

The first sign of corruption in a society ... is that the ends justify the means.

A society which permits anything will eventually lose everything.

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

Civilization is coming to an end, you understand.

... the negation of the ideals upon which our civilization has been based.

One civilization after another has been wrecked upon the attempt to secure sufficient leadership from a single group or class.

Corrupt citizens breed corrupt rulers, and it is the mob who finally decides when virtue shall die.

The tribe that constitutes a woman its ruler will not find redemption.

It would be wonderful if I could see the end of civilization during my lifetime.

New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you.

When the family dies, the nation follows.

The downfall of every civilization comes, not from the moral corruption of the common man, but rather from the moral complacency of common men in high places.

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

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

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.

If the world suffers from mental deterioration or from moral degradation, then something goes wrong at the very root of civilization or culture. Even though that civilization may drag out for a considerable period, it grows less and less vital and ultimately tumbles down.

Barbarism recommences by the excess of civilization.

In taking action we must remember that the things which are happening to the Jews today are but a part of the general disintegration anticipated by philosophers and historians of different schools for almost half a century.

It will be a gay world. There will be lights everywhere except in the minds of men, and the fall of the last civilization will not be heard above the din.

Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.

The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment.