Civilizational Decline Quotes

“In evil times, when public virtue has left the earth, ancient writings are of little account, and no one cares to disturb the silence of the libraries.”
― Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races

“You see, deep in their hearts they’re convinced that a colonization that doesn't end in a seditious movement and massacres is not a successful colonization. Perhaps they’re right, in a way.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“Family life was and always will be the foundation of any civilization. Destroy the family and you destroy the country.”
― Erin Pizzey

“They went wild. I raised my eyes to their faces in the gloom and saw the thin skin of civilization stripped away, the rage laid out like raw flesh beneath.”
― Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

“Civilization does not have to be ugly; civilization can well be civilized! And the only way to create a civilized civilization is to create an environmentally friendly civilization!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“What progress requires inexorably of human beings and of continents is that they should renounce their strangeness, that they should break with mystery; and somewhere along that road is inscribed inexorably the end of the last elephant. The cultivated lands must encroach upon the forests, and the roads will bite more and more deeply into the quietude of the great herds. There will be less and less room
for natural splendor. A pity.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“Upon the proper use and conservation of sexual force the progress of civilization itself depends. All history shows that just in proportion as the sex instinct is kept sacred, pure, and the life essence properly used and converted into creative, productive power, does a nation reach a high state of civilization. Wherever this instinct becomes generally perverted, as it did in ancient Rome, people become devitalized, lose their physical and mental stamina, and rapidly deteriorate. Where it is protected by virtue and purity of life, the nation rises in the scale of civilization; where it is abused, perverted, the nation sinks to the level of low-flying ideals.”
― Orison Swett Marden, The crime of silence