Societal Collapse Quotes

The prospect of a nuclear war is not a bad thing because defeating capitalism would be worth losing up to two-thirds of the world’s population.

The ruin of a State is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners and contempt of religion.

The commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts.

I do worry about civil unrest, or complete collapse of society, or having to flee, or Europe falling into a war.

Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.

To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, the destruction of our most cherished values, there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally, and breed. And how easy it is to do nothing

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph

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.

I'm running because I think the world is falling apart.

We are committing cultural suicide. The barbarians at the gate will only need to give us a slight push, and the emancipated body of Western civilization will collapse in a heap.

The rise of what's called Islamic fundamentalism is to a significant extent a result of the collapse of secular nationalist alternatives which were either discredited internally or destroyed, leaving few other options. Something like that may be true of American society.

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 civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics...For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.

We are not far from the kind of moral decay that has brought on the fall of other nations and peoples.

No nation can last which has made a mob of itself, however generous at heart.

Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.

The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

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.

If... if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! ........... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Every generation has a macabre notion that wars, government prohibition, natural disasters or mankind itself could be the downfall of society and the world as a whole.

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

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.