Internal 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.

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

It is possible for great nations to rot from within.

There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

Empires implode from within due to their own excesses.

The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident and removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed we should rather be surprised that it has subsisted for so long.

nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.

In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature. They can't help it.

Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.

Everything is destroyed by its own particular vice: the destructive power resides within. Rust destroys iron, moths destroy clothes, the worm eats away the wood; but greatest of all evils is envy, impious habitant of corrupt souls, which ever was, is, and shall be a consuming disease.

We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.

All great empires die from within.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

The rottenness comes from within.

Every government of the world has the seeds of its own destruction in itself.

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

You are literally filled with the fruit of your own devices, with rats and mice and such small deer, paramecia, and entomostraceæ, and kicking things with horrid names, which you see in microscopes at the Polytechnic, and rush home and call for brandy-without the water-stone, and gravel, and dyspepsia, and fragments of your own muscular tissue tinged with your own bile.

In the last five or six thousand years, empires one after another have arisen, waxed powerful by wars of conquest, and fallen by internal revolution or attack from without.

Every movement that burns hot enough will attract opportunists, zealots, and eventually, destroyers. Even the most righteous cause can be hollowed out from within.

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

A nation never falls but by suicide.