“Financiers flourish only when nations decline.”
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838) French diplomat
Reported in, Bernard, J. F., Talleyrand: A Biography. (1973), p. 592
Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 202
“Financiers flourish only when nations decline.”
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838) French diplomat
Reported in, Bernard, J. F., Talleyrand: A Biography. (1973), p. 592
William H. Seward (1801–1872) American lawyer and politician
On the Irrepressible Conflict (1858)
Context: As a general truth, communities prosper and flourish, or droop and decline, in just the degree that they practise or neglect to practise the primary duties of justice and humanity. The free-labor system conforms to the divine law of equality, which is written in the hearts and consciences of man, and therefore is always and everywhere beneficent.
The slave system is one of constant danger, distrust, suspicion, and watchfulness. It debases those whose toil alone can produce wealth and resources for defence, to the lowest degree of which human nature is capable, to guard against mutiny and insurrection, and thus wastes energies which otherwise might be employed in national development and aggrandizement. The free-labor system educates all alike, and by opening all the fields of industrial employment and all the departments of authority, to the unchecked and equal rivalry of all classes of men, at once secures universal contentment, and brings into the highest possible activity all the physical, moral, and social energies of the whole state.
John Robert Seeley (1834–1895) British historian
p. 110 https://books.google.com/books?id=Zsm3TLe1cAUC&pg=PA110 <br class="br">The Expansion of England (1883)
“Fragmentation occurs when a civilization is in decline.”
Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911–1983) British lecturer, novelist, historian, poet and biographer
The Corruptions of Our Time, p. 238
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)
William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist
Public Address, Blake's Notebook c. 1810
1810s
Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist
Discours d'ouverture, congrès de la paix http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Congr%C3%A8s_de_la_Paix_1849, [Opening address, Peace Congress], Paris (21 August 1849); published in Actes et paroles - Avant l'exil (1875) <br class="br">Context: A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas. A day will come when the bullets and bombs are replaced by votes, by universal suffrage, by the venerable arbitration of a great supreme senate which will be to Europe what Parliament is to England, the Diet to Germany, and the Legislative Assembly to France.<br>A day will come when a cannon will be a museum-piece, as instruments of torture are today. And we will be amazed to think that these things once existed!<br>A day will come when we shall see those two immense groups, the United States of America and the United States of Europe, facing one another, stretching out their hands across the sea, exchanging their products, their arts, their works of genius, clearing up the globe, making deserts fruitful, ameliorating creation under the eyes of the Creator, and joining together, to reap the well-being of all, these two infinite forces, the fraternity of men and the power of God.
“When nations grow old, the Arts grow cold,
And Commerce settles on every tree.”
William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist
On Art And Artists (1800) 'On the Foundation of the Royal Academy'
Arthur Young (1741–1820) English writer
Arthur Young (1770) A six months tour through the north of England http://books.google.com/books?id=mf9KAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA557. p. 557; Partly cited in: Paul Mantoux (2013), The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, p. 345
Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet
The Uttarpara Address (1909)
Context: This is the word that has been put into my mouth to speak to you today. What I intended to speak has been put away from me, and beyond what is given to me I have nothing to say. It is only the word that is put into me that I can speak to you. That word is now finished. I spoke once before with this force in me and I said then that this movement is not a political movement and that nationalism is not politics but a religion, a creed, a faith. I say it again today, but I put it in another way. I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is the Sanatan Dharma which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatan Dharma, with it it moves and with it it grows. When the Sanatan Dharma declines, then the nation declines, and if the Sanatan Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatan Dharma it would perish.
Rick Perry (1950) 14th and current United States Secretary of Energy
Republican presidential debate, 2011-11-09
2011