#decline

I have the not altogether unsatisfying impression that civilisation is collapsing around me. Is it my age, I wonder, or the age we live in? I am not sure. Civilisations do collapse, after all, but on the other hand people grow old with rather greater frequency. ↗

— Theodore Dalrymple

#civilization #decline #age

Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country. ↗

— Oswald Spengler

#men

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. ↗

— Oswald Spengler

#journalist

What I'm primarily saying,' he says, 'is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response. Gratitude, and being careful never to make the same mistake twice. ↗

— George Saunders

#narcissism #personal-growth #personal-growth

I decline all noisy, wordy, confused, and personal controversies. ↗

— Josiah Warren

#controversies #decline #i #noisy #personal

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation. ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#indicates #literature #nation

Snooker players go into steady decline and lose their intensity after a while. But I will have real purpose the next five years. I want to prove people wrong and win a lot more tournaments. ↗

— John Higgins

#decline #five #go #i #intensity

If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies. ↗

— Patricia Highsmith

#decline #i #know #mine #movies

I am studying ancient civilizations, trying to find what happened to them, finding out why they went into a decline, why they died. ↗

— L. Ron Hubbard

#ancient #civilizations #decline #died #find

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring. ↗

— Samuel P. Huntington

#certainly #civilization #decline #dominant #into