Decline Quotes - Page 27

• Gentlemen, if we don't cut spending we will be bankrupt. Yes, the medicine is harsh, but the patient requires it in order to live. Should we withhold the medicine? No. We are not wrong. We did not seek election and win in order to manage the decline of a great nation.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Cutting, Winning, Medicine

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• American money was never more sound, or banking more free, than 200 years ago. Since then, it's been a long steady decline from the gold standard and competitive banking to our Fed-run system of inflated paper currency, deposit insurance, and perpetually shaky banks on the dole.

  Llewellyn Rockwell

  Running, Money, Years

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• While we bemoan the decline of literacy, computers discount words in favor of pictures and pictures in favor of video. While we fret about the decreasing cogency of public debate, computers dismiss linear argument and promote fast, shallow romps across the information landscape. While we worry about basic skills, we allow into the classroom software that will do a student's arithmetic or correct his spelling.

  David Gelernter

  Skills, Worry, Video

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• Conservatives believe government's principal functions are the preservation of freedom and removal of restraints on the individual. Liberalism's ascent in the first two-thirds of this century reflected the new belief that government should also confer capacities on individuals. Liberalism's decline in the final third of this century has reflected doubts about whether government can be good at that, or whether government that is good at that is good for the nation's character.

  George Will

  Believe, Character, Government

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• I cannot love evergreens - they are the misanthropes of nature. To them the spring brings no promise, the autumn no decline; they are cut off from the sweetest of all ties with their kind - sympathy. ... I will have no evergreens in my garden; when the inevitable winter comes, every beloved plant and favorite tree shall drop together - no solitary fir left to triumph over the companionship of decay.

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon

  Spring, Autumn, Cutting

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1834). “Francesca Carrara”, p.50

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• The investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage.

  Benjamin Graham

  Investing, Worried, Permit

  Benjamin Graham (1959). “The Intelligent Investor: A Book of Practical Counsel”

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• It is almost a general rule that nations do not decline gradually. Instead they fall abruptly from their greatest heights.

  Robert Payne

  Fall, Height, Nations

  Robert Payne (1975). “The Corrupt Society: From Ancient Greece to Present-Day America”, Praeger Publishers

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• The civilization of the West, which was brilliant by virtue of its scientific perfection for a long time, and which subjugated the whole world with the products of this science to its states and nations, is now bankrupt and in decline.

  Hassan al-Banna

  Civilization, Long, Perfection

  "Five Tracts of Hasan Al-Banna: A Selection from the Majmu at Rasail al-Imam al-Shahid Hasan al-Banna". Translated and annotated by Charles Wendell, p. 106,

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• Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Country, Loss, Frustration

  Simone de Beauvoir (1968). “Les Belles Images”

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• We are fast approaching a situation in which nobody will believe anything we [physicists] say in any matter that touches upon our self-interest. Nothing we do is likely to arrest our decline in numbers, support or social value.

  Leo Kadanoff

  Believe, Social Values, Self

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• As motherhood as a "private enterprise" declines and more mothers rely on the work of lower-paid specialists, the value accorded the work of mothering (not the value of children) has declined for women, making it all the harder for men to take it up.

  Arlie Russell Hochschild

  Mother, Children, Men

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• Alzheimer's usually comes later than AIDS, but I decline to call that progress.

  Mason Cooley

  Alzheimer's, Progress, Aids

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• There are many reasons for the decline in royal esteem. One is that so many of the royals are thick.

  Alastair Campbell

  Royal, Reason, Esteem

  "The royals are so thick" by Alastair Campbell, www.theguardian.com. April 11, 2001.

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

  Will Durant

  War, Struggle, Rome

  Will Durant, Ariel Durant (1944). “The Story of Civilization: Caesar and Christ, a history of Roman civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325”

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• Automobiles will start to decline almost as soon as the last shot is fired in World War II. The name of Igor Sikorsky will be as wellknown as Henry Ford's, for his helicopter will all but replace the horseless carriage as the new means of popular transportation. Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a helicopter.... These 'copters' will be so safe and will cost so little to produce that small models will be made for teenage youngsters. These tiny 'copters, when school lets out, will fill the sky as the bicycles of our youth filled the prewar roads.

  Harry Bruno

  Teenage, War, School

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• A decline in supervision is not the entire story. Even in the fifties there were undersupervised children . . . who nevertheless did not become pregnant at thirteen . . . and who did not smoke anything stronger than an occasional Camel or Lucky Strike. . . . It took a combination of unsupervised children and a permissive, highly charged sexual atmosphere and an influx of easily acquired drugs and the wherewithal to buy them to bring about precocious experimentation by young and younger children. This occurred in the mid-seventies.

  Marie Winn

  Children, Drug, Atmosphere

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• Art is always the index of social vitality, the moving finger that records the destiny of a civilization. A wise statesman should keep an anxious eye on this graph, for it is more significant than a decline in exports or a fall in the value of a nation's currency.

  Herbert Read

  Wise, Art, Fall

  Herbert Read (2002). “To Hell with Culture: And Other Essays on Art and Society”, p.28, Psychology Press

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• The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as avital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments--not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools--will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession.

  David Blankenhorn

  Children, School, Men

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• The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Soul, Religion, Withdrawal

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1993). “Self-reliance, and Other Essays”, p.63, Courier Corporation

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• This is my country. The Russian people are in bit of trouble. Russian court doesn't work. Russian education decline every year. I believe that Russia has a chance to be free. Has a chance. It's difficult, but we must do it.

  Boris Nemtsov

  Education, Country, Believe

  "Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown", edition.cnn.com. May 11, 2014.

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• If you expect to continue to purchase stocks throughout your life, you should welcome price declines as a way to add stocks more cheaply to your portfolio.

  Warren Buffett

  Add, Investing, Way

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• I was never a believer in decline.

  Max Gallo

  Believer

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• As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Appreciation, Civilization, Mind

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1976). “God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism”, p.46, Macmillan

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• nothing like a few restful weeks contemplating the decline of civilization to restore the humors. What I did on my summer vacation was listen to a lot of people talk about the decline of practically everything - you could call it the leisure of the theory class.

  Molly Ivins

  Summer, Vacation, Civilization

  Molly Ivins (2010). “You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You”, p.200, Vintage

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• Life teaches much, but to all thinking persons it brings ever closer the will of God - not because their faculties decline, but on the contrary, because they increase.

  Madame de Stael

  God, Thinking, Increase

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