Dying Culture Quotes

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.

At last, in the gray dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave.

The technologist was the final guise of the white missionary, industrialization the last gospel of a dying race and living standards a substitute for a purpose in living.

Cajun culture is dying.

We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.

It's a very American thing to hide away from death.

The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard.

A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory