Top 100 Quotes About Decline
#1. If I could wish for my life to be perfect, it would be tempting; but
I would have to decline, for life would no longer teach me
anything.
Allyson Jones
#2. We need to find three Saudi Arabias just to offset [the] decline.
Matthew Simmons
#3. General improvements in health/decline in mortality do not affect all classes equally. As mortality rates fall, social inequalities commonly widen.
Michael Marmot
#4. Our present stress on growth and productivity is, I believe, intimately related to the decline in rootedness. Faced with loneliness and vulnerability that come with deprivation of a securely encompassing community, we have sought to quell the vulnerability through our possessions.
Paul L Wachtel
#5. As people ages, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline - the illusion of the good old days. And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it
Steven Pinker
#6. 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
#7. There has been a noticeable decline in the labor factor in all wealthy countries in the past 20 years. The rich are getting richer, but those at the lower end aren't moving ahead as quickly as the capitalists.
Kenneth Rogoff
#8. One common behavior of late Stage 3 [in the process of a company's decline] is when those in power blame other people or external factors- or otherwise explain away the data- rather than confront the frightening reality that the enterprise may be in serious trouble.
Susan Collins
#9. I think that - apart from the fields of science and medicine - we live in an age of decline. Look at the world. There is decline in morals, ideals, manners, respect, truthfulness: just about everything, in fact.
Christopher Lee
#10. The fact that the Bush administration, and those in Europe who have followed its 9/11-inspired agenda, somehow believe that the future of the world is being played out in the Middle East and Central Asia rather than East Asia has only served to accelerate China's rise and the U.S.'s decline.
Martin Jacques
#11. Possessing the ideal makes a person nervous: you sense the inevitable decline just ahead.
Garrison Keillor
#12. Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.
Noam Chomsky
#13. Along with issues like global warming, I think a problem with the world today is population decline.
Talulah Riley
#14. Put simply, the church finds itself in a post-Christendom era, and it had better do some serious reflection or face increasing decline and eventual irrelevance.
Alan Hirsch
#15. When we see the human race, we must see before all else environment and food. Historians write about social change without taking these factors into account. This is why it is difficult for them to see the reasons decline and prosperity in society.
Michio Kushi
#16. A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.
William Graham Sumner
#18. During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.
Bob Graham
#19. One of the main causes of our artistic decline lies beyond doubt in the separation of art and science.
Gino Severini
#20. Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#21. How could human civilization decline so far, yet seem so normal in many respects? And is it scientifically possible that a blight could wipe out all edible
Kip S. Thorne
#22. And surely some large proportion of the world's current danger and decline is not inevitable but rather the result of people scrambling fearfully away from the things that have long made sense.
Ben H. Winters
#23. A society that has no respect, no regard for its bards, its historians, its storytellers, is a society in steep decline, a society that has lost its very soul and may never find its way.
Laurence Overmire
#24. On the strength of his literary output alone ... any woman of sense would decline to tackle D.H. Lawrence at 1,000 pounds a night.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#25. A great deal of stupidity has chipped away at the massive advantages of Western civilization, which could terminally decline if it remains on the current path. But these problems can be solved - and swiftly - if the right leaders emerge.
Paul Singer
#26. A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.
Ted Turner
#27. A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.
Emil Cioran
#28. Labor force participation peaked in early 2000, so its decline began well before the Great Recession. A portion of that decline clearly relates to the aging of the baby boom generation. But the pace of decline accelerated with the recession.
Janet Yellen
#29. As brands become larger, the need to reach greater numbers of customers makes them less edgy and dilutes their unique positioning as they try to please everyone. It is therefore not surprising to find such brands go into a few years of decline before they are able to reinvent themselves.
Nirmalya Kumar
#30. A stock market decline is as routine as a January blizzard in Colorado. If you're prepared, it can't hurt you. A decline is a great opportunity to pick up the bargains left behind by investors who are fleeing the storm in panic.
Peter Lynch
#31. Reader was by far the most popular feed reader out there, and its user base had been in a steep decline for two years before Google decided to shut it down.
Annalee Newitz
#32. The decline of violence isn't a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.
Steven Pinker
#33. Horselover Fat continued his insidious, long decline into misery and illness, the sort of chaos that astrophysicists say is the fate in store for the whole universe.
Philip K. Dick
#34. China and the U.S. have a very symbiotic relationship which will not decline any time soon. There are more shared interests as compared to shared differences and for this reason relations will continue to be good.
Mark Mobius
#35. We are at the tail end of a decline in infant mortality that began just over a century ago. Babies no longer wander into open hearths or are mauled by marauding pigs. We have vaccines, lead-free educational toys, diapers that can sop up a typhoon. But we have never been more worried.
Nicholas Day
#36. But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#37. I've come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages. An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick on the inside,
James C. Collins
#38. Most people spend less than 20 hrs a year learning about freedom, yet many wonder why it's in decline. Don't fight upstream. Instead, turn it around.
Oliver DeMille
#39. I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
Harold Bloom
#40. Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
Alain De Botton
#41. Fundamental systemic crises are often associated with the decline of the dominant imperial power and its increasing inability to sustain the system over which it had previously presided. The profound instability of the interwar period owed much to Britain's inability to maintain its role.
Martin Jacques
#42. There's evidence of a social decline in direct proportion to technology and the industrialization of the motion picture industry.
Mark Rydell
#43. 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
#44. Aging nations have arteries clogged with obsolete laws, slowing blood flow and preventing oxygen from reaching all parts of the body politic. Physicians call this arteriosclerosis; historians see decline of empire.
Jim Cooper
#45. Greater completion marks the progress of art, absolute completion usually its decline.
John Ruskin
#46. I've always said, the key organ here isn't the brain, it's the stomach. When things start to decline - there are bad headlines in the papers and on television - will you have the stomach for the market volatility and the broad-based pessimism that tends to come with it?
Peter Lynch
#47. Why do the health of the body and the health of the earth decline together?
Wendell Berry
#48. Islam takes advantage of two structural flaws that exist in the Western society. One is political correctness and other is the decline of morality.
Ali Sina
#49. Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.
John Keats
#50. It may be coincidence that the decline of newspapers has corresponded with the rise of social media. Or maybe not.
Ryan Holmes
#51. Never underestimate the ability of political leaders to misread history on a monumental scale. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have both served to hasten western decline: they have both failed to achieve their objectives and in the process demonstrated an underlying western impotence.
Martin Jacques
#52. I am so sorry to see the state of reading in such decline. I think it says something really scary and terrible about us as a culture. I think it does have to do with everyone's total global embrace of technology.
Lee Smith
#53. The Endangered Species Act is the strongest and most effective tool we have to repair the environmental harm that is causing a species to decline.
Norm Dicks
#54. Real investment risk is measured not by the percent that a stock may decline in price in relation to the general market in a given period, but by the danger of a loss of quality and earnings power through economic changes or deterioration in management.
Benjamin Graham
#55. grief does not decline in a straight line or along a slow curve like a graph in a child's math book.
Helen Simonson
#56. We have experienced highly challenging global market conditions in the past quarter with significant steel price decline in all regions.
Lakshmi Mittal
#57. The global supply of oil is going to decline because we've used up a good deal of the easy-to-get oil. We're going to reach a point in the not-too-distant future when it is impossible to keep increasing the daily supply.
Michael Klare
#58. But I decline to say who has ever listened to them, who has written them, or other people who have sung them.
Pete Seeger
#59. Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.
G.K. Chesterton
#60. Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.
Susan Sontag
#61. In a virtuous government, and more especially in times like these, public offices are what they should be - burdens to those appointed to them which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring them intense labor and great private loss.
Thomas Jefferson
#62. The beginning of the decline of the Republic was the day they air-conditioned the Capitol.
Howard Baker
#63. When a daffadill I see, Hanging down his head towards me, Guess I may, what I must be: First, I shall decline my head; Secondly, I shall be dead: Lastly, safely buryed.
Robert Herrick
#64. I respectfully decline the invitation to join your hallucination.
Scott Adams
#65. More to the point, I am fifty-eight. I need grandchildren before my decline. It's not right for two generations of the family to be drooling at the same time.
Tessa Dare
#66. We've never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think what is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit. I don't think it's going to drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.
Ben Bernanke
#67. Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard professor who has devoted more than ten years to studying the decline in violence, the conclusion is evident: We live in the most peaceful era ever.
Jurriaan Kamp
#68. He would die early, since nothing so fair could decline by common degrees in a faded season.
Tennessee Williams
#69. Weve been taught that aging means decline of the mind and body , but that doesnt have to be the case. With TIMELESS YOU, I invite you to explore a different path , one where you feel youthful , vibrant and fit as you age.
Deepak Chopra
#70. I think democracy is on the decline in the West. Ruling parties are the same: neo-liberalism at home and wars abroad.
Tariq Ali
#71. Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.
William Faulkner
#72. I hate pork rinds. I couldn't imagine how anybody would ever get the idea of taking skin from a pig and frying it and then trying to sell it to people. And then people actually buy it to eat it. That is the true sign of the decline of the human race.
Joel Kinnaman
#73. You look at most artists, the arc of their career, there's a definite decline at the end. And that decline could set in at any time. In your 50s, or your 60s and 70s if you're lucky. Time goes by fast, and you've got to be busy all the time.
Seth
#74. Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.
Martin Amis
#75. The oldest regretted the decline of the custom of wearing hats, because what did today's youngsters have left to take off their heads when they bumped into the doctor on the street?
Dimitri Verhulst
#76. You're the measure of my true decline. Your home isn't in the underworld, you live in the back room of the liquor store. My eternally hung-over angel, my Satan crawling like an amber worm from a bottle of Zoladkowa Gorzka.
Jerzy Pilch
#77. I use iTunes for downloading music, but I always decline when prompted to update this or that new version.
Rachel Sklar
#78. The wonderful thing about modern medicine is that so many of these complaints that used to signify old age and decline can be coped with.
Ian McKellen
#79. Wherever the mutation conferring lactase persistence first became common, a few migrants must have made their way southeastward, while others headed northwest.56 In India as in Europe, there is a decline in this mutation toward the south, where dairying is much less important.57
Anonymous
#80. We are a country that lacks riches. The Jewish brain, that's what we have. Everything that we've had and will have in this country is the direct and clear product of higher education. If we harm this system, we will drastically decline and cease to exist.
Aaron Ciechanover
#81. People who want to know how stocks fared on any given day ask, "Where did the Dow close?" I'm more interested in how many stocks went up versus how many went down. These so-called advance/decline numbers paint a more realistic picture.
Peter Lynch
#82. Then the necessary decline of non-voluntary learning and rise of the self-assured will which perfects itself in the glorious sunlight of the free person may be somewhat expressed as follows: knowledge must die and rise again as will and create itself anew each day as a free person.
Max Stirner
#83. This cream will help one's nature strengthen and grow, The diet gives support in my decline.
Du Fu
#84. While farmers' markets are booming in cities, actual rural market towns are in decline.
Jasmine Guinness
#85. It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
Edward Gibbon
#86. The Church is going to have to recognise that secularisation is not the cause of their decline, it is the result of it.
Keith Porteous Wood
#87. The state of our civilization manifests itself both in the non-problems that terrify us beyond all reason - rising sea levels - and in the real problems we pay no heed to [population decline] ... In reality, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it's uninhabitable
Mark Steyn
#88. If there is some divine plan that requires my survival and the deaths of all those children in day care, I respectfully decline to participate.
Tim Kreider
#89. It is by no haphazard chance that in every age men have risen early to pray. The first thing that marks decline in spiritual life is our relationship to the early morning.
Oswald Chambers
#90. It is certainly much easier wholly to decline a passion than to keep it within just bounds and measures; and that which few can moderate almost anybody may prevent.
Pierre Charron
#91. Perhaps Western civilization is in a post-decline phase, or maybe the decline is just taking a really long time, like the Roman Empire's did. The Romans had gladiators and Christian-hungry lions and that sort of thing. We have MTV.
Tom Shales
#92. The period of financial distress is a gradual decline after the peak of a speculative bubble that precedes the final and massive panic and crash, driven by the insiders having exited but the sucker outsiders hanging on hoping for a revivial, but finally giving up in the final collapse.
Charles P. Kindleberger
#93. I decline to buy repentance at the cost often thousand drachmas.
Demosthenes
#94. In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking.
Bee Wilson
#95. In the U.S. the powerful critics of austerity such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich rightly identify the decline of 'labor' as a problem, and renewing trade unionism part of the solution. Our opportunity is to make the same case in the UK.
Frances O'Grady
#96. A jolt is necessary. Europe must reaffirm it values of freedom, solidarity, peace. The EU must be understood and controlled by its citizens. I will do everything to secure profound change rather than decline.
Francois Hollande
#97. I'd begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.
Mark O'Connell
#98. Public business must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise man decline, others will not; if honest man refuse it, others will not.
John Adams
#99. Deflation is defined as a general decline in prices, with emphasis on the word 'general.'
Ben Bernanke
#100. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer.
Anonymous
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