Decay 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.

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain.

Fascism is capitalism in decay.

Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.

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.

Rome is the most dreadful cesspit … the great sewer of Tarquin itself would have been incapable of dealing with such a mass of filth.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

Things fall apart, it's scientific.

What makes people want to live forever? I don't think it's limited to our materialistic society of today. Even back to Christian times, they were writing about eternal life after death. So even in death there was a discussion of eternal life. I think this is a universal human desire. It's a horrible thought that this conscious being of ours - with our beautiful bodies - is one day going to decay and die. I don't think it so much has to do with the fear of meeting God, as it is just the thought that this all ends.

The great god Pan is dead.

I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both….

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

Everything good needs replacing

Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

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.

After his death the gardener does not become a butterfly, intoxicated by the perfumes of the flowers, but a garden worm tasting all the dark, nitrogenous, and spicy delights of the soil.

What doesn't quicken dies. That's an indisputable truth of life.

See the wild Waste of all-devouring years! How Rome her own sad Sepulchre appears, With nodding arches, broken temples spread! The very Tombs now vanish'd like their dead!

What falls away is always. And is near.

All things are subject to decay and change.

Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption, also.

And the rest is rust and stardust.