52 Decline Quotes

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

The people of your world became so stupid and rude that my companions and I no longer enjoyed teaching them. You must surely have heard of us: we were called oracles, nymphs, spirits, fairies, household gods, lemures, larvas, lamias, sprites, water-nymphs, incubi, shades, spirits of the dead, specters and ghosts.

I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?

It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don't mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that's the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.

Sherry...a silly, sickly compound, the use of which will transform a nation, however bold and warlike by nature, into a race of sketchers, scribblers, and punsters, in fact into what Englishmen are at the present day.

The world's in a bad way, my man, And bound to be worse before it mends; Better lie up in the mountain here Four or five centuries, While the stars go over the lonely ocean...

Headmaster: Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.

We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place. Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale. W. takes no notice of this, to me, slightly surprising conversation:Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this, culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, 'And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?'

History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.

I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride; Of Him who walked in glory and in joy Following his plough, along the mountain-side: By our own spirits are we deified: We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

Like other systems in decay, the Roman Empire continued to function for several generations after its vitality was sapped. For nearly a hundred years our Island was one of the scenes of conflict between a dying civilization and lusty, famishing barbarism.

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

As to the essence of human nature, what our national experience has made plain is this, that to remain in a continually exalted moral condition is not human nature. That has happened which was prophesied: we have gone down hill from the Revolution until now; we are absorbed in 'mere money-getting.'

Ashes to ashes, funk to funky We know Major Tom's a junkie Strung out in heaven's high Hitting an all-time low.

I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence.

As we look at these challenges, we must never give in to the belief that America is in decline, or that our culture is doomed to unravel. The American people know better than that. We have proven the pessimists wrong before - and we will do it again.

In the Odyssey one may liken Homer to the setting sun, of which the grandeur remains without the intensity.

It's true that the average human in the Xeelee universe can't eat Jell-O with a straw without accidently removing an eye but these particular humans start off no stupider than than any other human of their era and proceed to breed themselves into imbecility. Well, farther into imbecility.

If civilisation has got the better of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself, it is too much to profess to be afraid lest barbarism, after having been fairly got under, should revive and conquer civilisation. A civilisation that can thus succumb to its vanquished enemy, must first have become so degenerate, that neither its appointed priests and teachers, nor anybody else, has the capacity, or will take the trouble, to stand up for it. If this be so, the sooner such a civilisation receives notice to quit the better. It can only go on from bad to worse, until destroyed and regenerated (like the Western Empire) by energetic barbarians. (p. 114)

You can't trust the quality any more...

'It's better to burn out than to fade away.' - 'My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)', quoted by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note.

I'll come no more behind your scenes, David [Garrick]; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.

When last comes to last, I have little power: I am merely an urn. I hold the bone-sap of myself, and watch the marrow burn. When last comes to last, I have little strength: I am only a tool. I work its work; and in its hands I am the fool. When last comes to last, I have little life. I am simply a deed: an action done while courage holds: a seed.

'The decay of giving is morrored in the distressing invention of gift-article, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to.'

[Promo from July 24th 2006] What has become of Ric Flair? You see I'm in a state of disbelief because I watched Raw last Monday and found it hard to believe that Ric Flair resorted to calling me fat boy. Fat boy, a name so effective he chose to use it twice and I have to admit the name hurt. Yeah, the name fat boy hurt when my brother used it on me 30 years ago. What has become of Ric Flair? You see it hurts me worse than anything just to see Ric Flair proving to the world, one of the all time great performers in our business, proving to the world that he had the creativity, the originality and the intellect of the average fourth grader. What has become of Ric Flair!? You see I thought I was going on a journey to meet the Great and Powerful Oz! And it turns out instead I see a weak and feeble man operating behind a curtain, digging into a bag of cliches because he's got nothing left to offer! 'To be the man, you've got to beat the man!' 'I'm a 16-time world champion!' 'All night long!' blah blah blah. You make me sick Ric! What has become of you!? You've reduced yourself to being a second rate circus side show, falling on thumbtacks on an ECW show, all in vain attempt to lure me back into the ring! It's not gonna work! What part of no did you not understand? I won't fight you here, there, or anywhere. What has become of you Ric Flair? Because now not only are you a second rate freak show, but you've resorted to attacking innocent, beautiful defenseless women. And even worse Ric Flair the woman you chose to attack was a friend of mine! Which mean I'll be coming to New Jersey, Ric Flair, but I won't be coming to wrestle, but I will be coming to look you in the ring face to face and air our differences in a very public venue. And I swear to your Ric, you leave the cliches at home and you bring your heart and your mind or I will swat you away and embarrass you in front on national TV, you washed up piece of crap! I'll see you next Monday on Raw! Yeah!

hey Jack now for the tricky part when you were the brightest star who were the shadows? of the San Francisco beat boys you were the favorite now they sit and rattle their bones and think of their blood stoned days

On his last legs.

'I would, but I'm going to be busy all day converting beer into pee.'

I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is toward barbarism.

The party in power, like Jonah's gourd, grew up quickly, and will quickly fall.

Capitalism is dying and its extremities are already decomposing. The blotches upon the surface show that the blood no longer circulates. The time is near when the cadaver will have to be removed and the atmosphere purified.

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

Life is a horizontal fall.

When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.

Man seems the only growth that dwindles here.

Doctor Labyrinth, like most people who read a great deal and who have too much time on their hands, had become convinced that our civilization was going the way of Rome. He saw, I think , the same cracks forming that had sundered the ancient world, the world of Greece and Rome; and it was his conviction that presently our world, our society, would pass away as theirs did, and a period of darkness would follow.

The Union (EU) is dead like stone. Unionen er stendod.