Cultural Decay Quotes

Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

After the vision of the anointed was given increasing scope in the education and public policy of the United States and other Western societies during the decades beginning with the 1960s, the social degeneration became palpable, documented beyond issue, and immense across a wide spectrum of social phenomena—declining educational standards, rising crime rates, broken homes, soaring rates of teenage pregnancy, growing drug usage, and unprecedented levels of suicide among adolescents. This social devastation was not due to poverty, for the material standard of living was rising substantially during this time. It was not due to repression, for an unprecedented variety of new “rights” emerged from the courts and legislatures to liberate people from the constraints of the law while they were being liberated from social constraints by the spread of “nonjudgmental” attitudes. Neither was this social degeneration due to the disruptions of war or natural catastrophes, for it was an unusually long period of peace, and science conquered many diseases that had plagued the human race for centuries, as well as providing better ways of protecting people from earthquakes and other destructive acts of nature. It was instead an era of self-inflicted wounds.

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.

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.

A world ends when its metaphor has died.

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

I don't see much future for the Americans ... it's a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities ... my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance ... everything about the behaviour of American society reveals that it's half Judaised, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together?

Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its lifespan and brings about its corruption.

We need to define what culture is. Every human being lives within a culture, and culture means "To grow in." It means to literally fall, and this is exactly what I believe is happening all around us right now.

A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

Just as there's garbage that pollutes the Potomac river, there is garbage polluting our culture. We need an Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up.

Where the carcass of a nation rots there will be the filibusters be gathered together. Every raven in the hungry flock of American politicians looks that way, wipes his greedy beak, prunes his wings, and screams “Manifest Destiny.”

Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire, and the dragoons of Marat, or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?

I mourn the fact that my beautiful country has deteriorated in every way.

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.

Civilization has always been a bust.

The Westoxified Pakistanis have been selling their souls and killing their own people for a few million dollars.

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

Capitalism and power politics have made our generation creatively sluggish, and our vital art is mired in a broad bourgeois philistinism.

Every individual or national degeneration is immediately revealed by a directly proportional degradation in language.

Although, from the point of view of sociology, the overt ambition of 'American Pastoral' - to imagine the impact on a good man of America's fall from the family decencies of the '30s and '40s to the self-centred violence of the '60s - outstrips anything Sabbath's Theater attempts, the writing is no less fervid an excurse into the writer's mind.

England is a memory now. The gates are flooded and anybody can have access to England and join in.

Socialist ideology is making France go to pot, and the French language with it.

Virtue is not a chemical product...it is a historic product, like language and literature; and this means that if we cease to care about it, cease to cultivate it, cease to transmit its funded values, a large part of it will become meaningless, like a dead language to which we have lost the key.

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