What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

~ Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno Civilization Critical Theory Cultural Criticism Culture Culture Critique Decline Decline Of Civilization Dialectic Dialectics Enlightenment Philosophy Society The Dialectic Of Enlightenment The Enlightenment The West Western Culture

In so many ways, for so many people, freedom was still an illusion. Barrie thought of the statistics she had read about how many women and children were still enslaved all over the world. Now— not three hundred years ago— and she wondered how it was possible that so little could change. Sometimes it seemed like the world was sliding backward and no one was noticing.

~ Martina Boone

Martina Boone Decline Of Civilization Freedom History Slavery Women Women S Rights

Perhaps never before in history has the artist been so certain that the more daring, iconoclastic, absurd, and inaccessible he is, the more he will be recognized, praised, spoiled, idolatrized. In some countries the result has even been an academicism in reverse, the academicism of the “avant-garde” - to such a point that any artistic experience that makes no concessions to this new conformism is in danger of being stifled or ignored.

~ Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade Art Decline Of Civilization Modernity

...we can endure neither our vices nor the remedies needed to cure them.

~ Livy

Livy Antiquity Decadence Decline Of Civilization History Rome

Proud houses fall into decline and great cities pass into ruin. The stories of those things are lost to forgotten languages and moth-eaten scrolls. Vine and root grapple with the rune carved in stone, and rust carries away, fleck by fleck, the great gates of iron.

~ William Timothy Murray

William Timothy Murray Decline Of Civilization Loss Past Time