Civilization Decline Quotes

“...Fields told himself furiously that the humanists and humanitarians of all casts were undoubtedly the last and most arrogant aristocrats, that they never learned anything and always forgot everything They went into ecstasies over the splendor of nature, refused to be discouraged or to give up, and went on believing in liberty and humanity in spite of the evidence of forced labor camps and nationalistic hatred, of fear and cruelty and betrayal around them. They went on dreaming of freedom and of the rights of man, refusing to face the fact that their disappearance, like the disappearance of the elephants, was an irreversible process, the price paid by mankind for a new, modem and ruthlessly efficient world.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“Something kills human societies when they get successful. Most likely, it is socializing: humans gather in groups, decide that they dislike reality, and create an alternative reality instead, then enforce it through peer pressure. This is usually a response to the means-over-ends approach of jobs and control which value obedience over reality.

When humans socialize, they converge on the lowest common denominator, namely the desire for each person to be a god in his own little world. He wants his desires to take precedence over the whole of reality. Socializing replaces nature as the environment to which humans adapt, and so individualism becomes accepted as real.”
― Brett Stevens

“Americans had concluded they had been lied to and swindled when they had enlisted in the allied cause in 1917. They had sent thier sons across the ocean to "Make the world safe for democracy", only to see the British empire add a million square miles. They had been told it was a "war to end wars". But out of it had come Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, far more dangerous despots than Franz Josef or the Kaiser. They had lent billions to the Allied cause, only to watch the Allies walk away from their war debts. They had given America's word to the world that the peace imposed on Germany would be a just peace based on the Fourteen Points and Wilson's principle of self-determination, then watched the Allies dishonour America's word by tearing Germany apart, forcing millions of Germans under foreign rule, and bankrupting Germany with reparations.”
― Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World