Quotes about Systemic Decay

Arun Jaitley

Step by step, brick by brick, the edifice of India's legislature is being destroyed.

Clarence Darrow

My constitution was destroyed long ago; now I am living under the bylaws.

Thomas Jefferson

Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.

Melville Fuller

Our form of government may remain notwithstanding legislation of decision, but, as long ago observed, it is with governments, as with religion, the form may survive the substance of the faith.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess Salisbury

...institutions like the House of Lords must die, like all other organic beings, when their time comes.

For a conservative this is an amazing position to take because the House of Lords was and is the most conservative institution in Great Britain. However, what makes Salisbury such an effective conservative political thinker is that the mere advantage of having a House of Lords to further the conservative agenda and protect its positions does not offset the principle of having a hereditary group of people—many without merit--with no checks on them by the rest of the body politic. Conservatism ought not support aristocracy but those who have achieved by merit.

Algernon Sidney

All human constitutions are subject to corruption and must perish unless they are timely renewed and reduced to their first principles.

Thomas Jefferson used this quotation on several occasions.

John M. Ellis

The biggest threat to our future isn’t climate change, China or the national debt. It is the tyrannical grip that a hopelessly corrupt higher education now has on our national life.

Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of “The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done.”

Norman Mailer

So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.

Systemic Decay Quotes