Cultural Downfall Quotes

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

If we are to be the last of the White men who conquered the world; if we are finally to be overwhelmed by a pack of rats, let us at least face the death of our race as our ancestors faced their death---like MEN.

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.

You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933... Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.

In the end, what brings civilizations down is when the elites lose confidence in the rightness of their cause.

Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.

I have seen the day, when, if a man made himself ridiculous, the world would laugh at him. But now, everything that is mean, disgusting, and absurd, pleases them but so much the better!

I've begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes. Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of.

The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people.

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

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.

To the masses, the catchwords of Socialism sound so enticing... so they will continue to work for Socialism, helping thereby to bring about the inevitable decline of the civilization which the nations of the West have taken thousands of years to build up.

Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.

Like so many Americans, I am sick and tired of watching the rapid decline of our culture right in front of our eyes.

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.

History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster.

I don’t think that a society that sanctifies death can prevail.

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

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.

There are messages about civilisations and we are trying to be true to history as much as possible. We wanted all this to gel with some good theory about why these civilisations went down, why they weakened and crumbled. Because they did, they vanished.

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

The standards have sunk so low throughout our culture that who really knows.

Civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them that they fail to meet.