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"A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites..." »Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Commencement Address at Harvard University, June 8, 1978.
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"I must decline your invitation owing to a subsequent engagement." »Oscar Wilde
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"The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief." »Sigmund Freud
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"Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity." »Arnold Toynbee
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"Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest." »Marilyn Ferguson
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"Turn your midlife crisis to your own advantage by making it a time for renewal of your body and mind, rather than stand by helplessly and watch them decline." »Jane E. Brody
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"If someone offers you a gift, and you decline to accept it, the other person still owns that gift. The same is true of insults and verbal attacks." »Steve Pavlina, How to Win an Argument, 08-31-05
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"The most silent people are generally those who think most highly of themselves. They fancy themselves superior to every one else, and, not being sure of making good their secret pretensions, decline entering the lists altogether. Thus they ?lay the flattering unction to their souls? that they could have said better things than others, or that the conversation was beneath them." »Hazlitt
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"Jingshen is the Mandarin word for spirit and vivacity. It is an important word for those who would lead, because above all things, spirit and vivacity set effective organizations apart from those that will decline and die." »James L. Hayes
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"The integrity of states is ruled by the socioeconomic well-being theory. The degree of the stability of any social system is proportional to the degree of its economic growth and vice versa. Stated differently, the risk to national integrity increases proportionally to the country's economic decline." »Med Jones
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"Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end results of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay." »Eric Hoffer
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"The common dogma of fundamentalists is fear of modern knowledge, inability to cope with the fast change in a scientific-technological society, and the real breakdown in apparent moral order in recent years.... That is why hate is the major fuel, fear is the cement of the movement, and superstitious ignorance is the best defence against the dangerous new knowledge. ... When you bring up arguments that cast serious doubts on their cherished beliefs you are not simply making a rhetorical point, you are threatening their whole Universe and their immortality. That provokes anger and quite frequently violence. ... Unfortunately you cannot reason with them and you even risk violence in confronting them. Their numbers will decline only when society stabilizes, and adapts to modernity." »G Gaia
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"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over lousy fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world's great civilizations before they decline has been 200 years. These nations have progressed in this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to Complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage." »Alexander Fraser Tyler, Cycle of Democracy (1770)
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