Quotes about collapse
page 4

“Always remember, as bad as it may be for you, it is worse for the lost. They may have it better for a while if they go along with the beast and take his mark, but that “better” will come to an end. Those who obeyed Hitler had it good, too—for a few years. The lost face some of the same problems of economic collapse, wars, earthquakes, PLUS, they will be here for the next 1,040 days of God's wrath being poured out after the rapture and THEN eternity in the Lake of Fire!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 235

God, War, Problem

“A new global financial environment has unfolded in several stages since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in 1971.”

Michel Chossudovsky (1946) Canadian economist

Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 20, Global Financial Meltdown, p. 309

“The Pakistani military created the Taliban in 1995 — six years after the Red Army left Afghanistan. Al Qaeda funneled money to some mujahedeen, but never played a role in the fighting. Even the mujahedeen couldn’t claim to have driven out the Red Army — which left as part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s strategic retreat. And the Communist regime remained for three years after the Soviets left, collapsing only when its Uzbek militia switched sides and, forging an alliance with Tajik fighters under Ahmad Shah Massoud, captured Kabul. The massive aid for the mujahedeen from America and allies proved a crucial factor in forcing the Soviet withdrawal. The claim that a handful of Pushtun, on their own, defeated the Red Army is laughable.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Myths of our Afghanistan debate" http://nypost.com/2009/10/15/myths-of-our-afghanistan-debate/, New York Post (October 15, 2009). New York Post

Money, Fight, Parting

“The East knows a true lucidity, but to be an inheritor of the West is to hack through jungles of indiscipline, devoured by vile ants and words unstrung from sense, until the dripping foliage of delirium opens out onto a space of comprehensive ruin. This has never been understood, nor can it be. The foulness of our fate only deepens with the centuries, as the tracts of insanity sprawl. From bodies gnawed by tropical fevers we swim out through collapse to inexistence in forever, destined for Undo.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Shamanic Nietzsche" (1995), in Fanged Noumena, p. 223

Fate, Sense

“Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

The Precession of Simulcra, Ramses, or the Rosy-Colored Resurrection
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

Past

“We cannot understand the preaching of the resurrection if it is understood as a miraculous moment which founds a new religion. If it is taken thus, we are in fact denying the force and efficacy of the resurrection. For the resurrection brings about the definitive installation in our midst, as a constructive hermeneutical principle, of the cult of Yahweh who knows not death, and who is worshipped in a continuous apprenticeship in participating in and not being scandalised by the collapse of the sacred. A sacred whose secret is always the victims which it hides, and on whose sacrifice it depends.”

James Alison (1959) Christian theologian, priest

Source: Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001), " Theology amidst the stones and dust http://girardianlectionary.net/res/alison_elijah.htm", p. 34.

Death, Secret, Religion, Understanding

“I have said, and I believe, that potentially we have in this country a free enterprise system of radio and television which is superior to any other. But to achieve its promise, it must be both free and enterprising. There is no suggestion here that networks or individual stations should operate as philanthropies. But I can find nothing in the Bill of Rights or in the Communications Act which says that they must increase their net profits each year, lest the Republic collapse.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

RTNDA Convention Speech (1958)

Communication, Country

“Individually speaking, death is always a rupture, a violence. But taking a total view, death is the bell curve upon which the cosmos is balanced. Without it, nothing would work, everything would collapse, clogged and stagnant. Death is flow. It is the necessary lubrication of universal motion. It is, in itself, neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 3, Chapter 8, “The Wrath of Diana” (p. 337).
Jack Glass (2012)

Death, Universe

“The extreme moment of shock in battle presents in heightened and distorted form some of the distinctive characteristics of a whole society involved in war. These characteristics in turn represent a heightening and distortion of many of the traits of a social world cracked open by transformative politics. The threats to survival are immediate and shifting; no mode of association or activity can be held fixed if it stands as an obstacle to success. The existence of stable boundaries between passionate and calculating relationships disappears in the terror of the struggle. All settled ties and preconceptions shake or collapse under the weight of fear, violence, and surprise. What the experience of combat sharply diminishes is the sense of variety in the opportunities of self-expression and attachment, the value given to the bonds of community and to life itself, the chance for reflective withdrawal and for love. In all these ways, it is a deformed expression of the circumstance of society shaken up and restored to indefinition. Yet the features of this circumstance that the battle situation does share often suffice to make the boldest associative experiments seem acceptable in battle even if they depart sharply from the tenor of life in the surrounding society. Vanguardist warfare is the extreme case. It is the response of unprejudiced intelligence and organized collaboration to violence and contingency.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987), p. 160

Love, Life, War, World

“And the harder the SSC ["safe, sane and consensual"] gets pushed at me, the harder I feel like pushing back. Passion, that's what I'm into, passion and blood and honor, so powerful that it pounds through my veins and blinds me, so terrible that I can't look away. Danger, Dementia, and Denial. I want to hear that panic, scream "No, Please!" and struggle through the haze of pain and pleasure and all that stuff that goes on between the moment we touch eyes and the moment when we both collapse and try to catch our breaths and break the silence.”

Laura Antoniou (1963) American novelist

Source: "Unsafe at Any Speed or: Safe, Sane and Consensual, My Fanny", p. 14

Pain, Pleasure, Feeling, Silence

“In 1972, Americans watched in disbelief as the Nixon Presidency was virtually brought to collapse, not because of the Watergate "break-in," but by the cover-up and its entanglements. What if the Watergate Scandal had been handled differently? The illegal activities of a few bungling second-story men pale in comparison to the colossal management blunders by the White House inner circle.”

Wheeler L. Baker (1938) President of Hargrave Military Academy

Source: Crisis Management: A Model For Managers (1993), p. 3

Men, Housing

“It's my nature to go around in high spirits most of the time and then to collapse.”

Margaret Sullavan (1909–1960) actress

from Haywire (1977) by Brooke Hayward. Jonathan Cape Ltd., p. 215. ISBN 0224014269.

Nature, Time

“My main problem was, naturally, religion: from it I moved later on to the principles of ethics. First to be examined was my positive religion [ie. Judaism]. It collapsed. So I wanted to base myself on naturaly religion: but my agony was so great, that this [foundation] also collapsed before my eyes. Nothing, nothing remained. I was the most miserable person in the world. I became an atheist.”

Moses Hess (1812–1875) German philosopher

Hess' Diary p. 40

World, Religion, Nature, Problem

“I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make. … Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew, or the lettuce has frozen, or the cake has collapsed—eh bien, tant pis! Usually one's cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile … then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile—and learn from her mistakes.”

Julia Child (1921–2004) American chef

My Life In France: Le Cordon Bleu, p. 71

Food, Smile, Cats, Thinking

“To unstable money are to be traced nearly all our economic troubles since 1918: the unemployment of the inter-war period; the over-employment and scarcity of labour since the Second World War; the labour unrest incidental to perpetual wage demands; the hardships and dislocation caused by the declining value of small savings, annuities and endowments; the vexation of continual price rises even for those whose incomes on the whole keep pace with them; the collapse of the prices of Government securities through distrust of the unit in which they are valued.”

Ralph George Hawtrey (1879–1975) British economist

‘Foreword’ (1961) to A Century of Bank Rate (1962, 2nd ed.), p. xxii.
A Century of Bank Rate (1938)

Money, War, World

“What should have occurred after the fall of the Berlin Wall? For almost 50 years, America had sacrificed its wealth and at times the lives of its young, to contain armed communism. Its brave pilots risked their lives by skimming the hills of Western Europe to the great annoyance of German picnickers whose liberty depended, in fact, on such sacrifice. Its submariners left behind comfort, family, and friends, to make full deterrents real. Its men and women in uniform stood at places of peril, willing to risk their lives for our liberty. The West did whatever it had to do to prevent the armed Bolsheviks from achieving tactical or strategic superiority. It sustained its will and its great burden of debt even when its artists, college students, professors, authors and filmmakers, turned against the alleged folly of such efforts. It obsessed on communism and anti-communism; it was haunted by its own and its enemy's bombs, missiles, and nuclear strategies. This was the burden it chose to bear. And then, in a seeming miracle, the fatal weaknesses of tyranny, central planning, and il-liberalism, at a moment of American will, were actualized in the collapse of European communism. Now we could assess and do a real accounting of what we had fought to preserve and to prevent.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

Women, Men, Family, Communication

“Ah, UNESCO is the most garbage. Any kind of organization for the good will of the people is impossible. It is necessary for the contrary. Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something, you know? If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ig-no-min-i-ously!”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Dali interviewed by Victor Bockris, 1974

Money, People

“Tangibles trump conceptuals. Modern fiat currencies are generally accepted, but have essentially no backing. Because they are largely a by-product of interest-bearing debt, modern currencies are destined for inflation. In the long run, inflation dooms fiat currencies to collapse. The majority of your assets should be invested in productive farmland and other tangibles such as useful hand tools. After you have your key logistics squared away, anything extra should be invested in silver and gold.”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

Source: How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Plume, New York (2009), p. 14

“Time was a flickering gray fire constantly consuming all things, so that what appeared to be motion was actually the oxidation and reduction of possibilities, the collapse of potential matter from grace to nothingness.”

Michael Swanwick book Stations of the Tide

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 6, “Lost in the Mushroom Rain” (p. 105)

Appearance, Time

“The societal decision to reduce beef will profoundly affect the economics of human survival in the coming century. In the new world that is coming, millions of human beings will voluntarily choose to eat lower on the food chain so that millions of others may obtain the minimum food calories they need to sustain their lives. This grand redistribution of the earth's bounty, the most far-reaching in history, will unite the human race in a new fraternal bond. A new species awareness will begin where the rich meet the poor on the descending rungs of the world's protein ladder. The decision to eat further down on the planet's food chain will force a wholesale reassessment of the entire grain-fed meat complex ranging from factory farm chickens to hogs. The collapse of the global cattle complex will likely precipitate a chain reaction, resulting in the elimination of other grain-fed meats from the human diet. The dissolution of the commercial cattle complex will spare the rich and might help save the poor. Eliminating grain-fed beef and eating lower on the food chain will dramatically reduce the incidence of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.”

Jeremy Rifkin book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture

Source: Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992), p. 290

World, Disease, Food, History

“The [president] is right to point to an international [jihadist] movement aimed at the collapse of the United States. He has gone after that threat in the right way and with great energy and vigor, and I applaud the fact that he has taken it on very seriously and has not considered it just a criminal action but instead a war action, which requires a military … response.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

Interview with James Taranto, December 2005.
2003–2007 Governor of Massachusetts

War, Way

“The last time there were so many Thapas in government, the Panchayat regime collapsed under their weight.”

Manjushree Thapa (1968) Nepali writer

About Thapa ministers in Nepali Times http://nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=3344#.WZ2zbhnA7qA

Time

“Outside in the garden, the greenhouse collapses. Masonry crashes from the roof and splashes into the moat. The grave-marker for the pig Hortense moves up out of the ground. The Maillol statue stands firm as the shrubs around it quiver. A water-main bursts in the yard sending a shower into the air. Trees fall as though whipped down to the ground. The water on the lake shimmers and ripples like a film run backwards.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Penultimate paragraph of the published script.
8 1/2 Women

Tree, Water

“All of Paul's preaching, all of his theology, is characterised by the process of the collapse of a certain sacred structure, and by the slow discovery of the perspective given by a new focus on Yahweh, the Pauline equivalent of Elijah's still, small voice.”

James Alison (1959) Christian theologian, priest

Source: Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001), " Theology amidst the stones and dust http://girardianlectionary.net/res/alison_elijah.htm", p. 33.

“Only a year after the collapse of the Third Reich a strangely conclusive piece of evidence can be advanced to support the claim that "fanatical", this key National Socialist term, never really had the sting taken out of it by excessive use. For although scraps of the LTI surface all over the place in contemporary language, "fanatical" has disappeared. From this one can safely conclude that either consciously or subconsciously people remained aware of the real facts of the case all through those twelve years, namely, that a confused state of mind, equally close to sickness and criminality, was for twelve years [of Nazi rule] held to be the greatest virtue.”

Victor Klemperer book LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii

Source: LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich) (1947), p. 61.

People, Support

“If Iraq collapses in chaos and civil war, there will be a ferocious fight in this country over who misled us and who may have lied us, into war. Into the dock will go the neoconservatives whose class project this was.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, Where the Right Went Wrong (2004)

War, Fight, Country

“There is no such concept as one limit for the entice system: rather different parts of the system face different limits at different times with the traumatic experiences for the entire system depending on the interrelationship of the constituent parts - the collapse, if it occurs, would he regional rather than global, even though the entire global system would be affected.”

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic (1928) Serbian academic

Source: Mankind at the Turning Point, (1974), p. 55; cited in: S.W. Moore, F. Jappe (1980) " Christianity As An Ethical Matrix for No-Growth Economics http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1980/JASA9-80Moore.html". In: Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation. Vol 32 (September 1980). pp. 164-168.

Time, Parting, Dependency

“Punk: [after hearing John Laurinaitis propose a WWE Championship match at Survivor Series against Alberto Del Rio] Okay, pardon me for not being all smiles, that's exactly what I want, but… what's the catch? You gonna make it a handicap match, or is Ricardo Rodriguez the special guest referee? No, are you gonna be the special guest ring announcer with your majestic voice?
Laurinaitis: Punk, there's only one thing you have to do.
Punk: There's one thing I have to do… for you. I have to do something for you to get a title shot? Let me guess—I gotta re-grip your skateboard, you need new ball bearings?
Laurinaitis: You know what, Punk? I know you don't like me, okay? And that's okay. I'm not playing the part of Executive Vice President of Talent Relations, I am the Executive Vice President of Talent Relations and the General Manager of Raw. So in order for me to make it official, you need to tell me in front of the WWE Universe that you respect me. Tell me that you respect me.
Punk: Are you Aretha Franklin? You want me to tell these people I respect you when I know clearly that you don't respect me 'cause I don't wear a bourgeois suit and I don't tow the company line? You wanna talk about respect? Respect, Johnny, is earned, it isn't just given. And you're gonna come out here and say that when you're in charge, this place… this place is just oh so run like a tight ship. Have you watched the product? We've got rings collapsing, you got Kevin Nash interfering in every other match of mine; this place isn't any better with you in charge. How's that for respect?
Laurinaitis: Punk, you're about to make a big mistake. Okay, swallow your pride, stand up like a man, and tell me that you respect me.
Punk: Okay. All right. Don't get hot. [Imitating Laurinaitis] I respect you, Funk-man. That all right? Was that good enough?
Laurinaitis: I tell you what, Punk. You've got one more chance to show me and tell me you respect me, and I mean it.
Punk: Okay, Mr. Laurinaitis, sir, Executive Vice President of Talent Relations and interim Raw General Manager. I respect you. I respect the fact that each week, you come out here in front of the millions of fans in the WWE Universe, live on the USA Network, with this awesome, completely lost deer-in-the-headlights look on your face; I respect the fact that you don't know how close to hold the microphone to your mouth when you speak; I respect the fact that you used to compete in this ring with your awesome Kentucky waterfall mullet, and you were never any good, but you somehow still ascended to the top of the WWE corporate structure, showing the world new-found levels of brown-nosery; but above all, I respect the fact that never before in this business has somebody with so little done so much! I respect you! How's that sound?! Does that sound good enough for you?!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

October 24, 2011
WWE Raw

People, World, Smile, Business

“Yeah. ‘Environment’ was very big for a while. Ecology Now stickers on the windshields of cars belonging to hairy young men—cars which dripped oil wherever they parked and took off in clouds of smoke thicker than your pipe can produce…Before long, the fashionable cause was something else, I forget what. Anyhow, that whole phase—the wave after wave of causes—passed away. People completely stopped caring…
I feel a moral certainty that a large part of the disaster grew from this particular country, the world’s most powerful, the vanguard country for things both good and ill…never really trying to meet the responsibilities of power.
We’ll make halfhearted attempts to stop some enemies in Asia, and because the attempts are halfhearted we’ll piss away human lives—on both sides—and treasure—to no purpose. Hoping to placate the implacable, we’ll estrange our last few friends. Men elected to national office will solemnly identify inflation with rising prices, which is like identifying red spots with the measles virus, and slap on wage and price controls, which is like papering the cracks in a house whose foundations are sliding away. So economic collapse brings international impotence…As for our foolish little attempts to balance what we drain from the environment against what we put back—well, I mentioned that car carrying the ecology sticker.
At first Americans will go on an orgy of guilt. Later they’ll feel inadequate. Finally they’ll turn apathetic. After all, they’ll be able to buy any anodyne, any pseudo-existence they want.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 5 (pp. 53-54)

Men, People, World, Hope

“We went to a club where singers and stand-up comedians performed in the hope of being discovered. A thin girl with bright red hair and sequined T-shirt reached the end of her passionately murmured song on a sudden shrill, impossible top note. All conversation ceased. Someone, perhaps maliciously, dropped a glass. Halfway through, the note became a warbling vibrato and the singer collapsed on the stage in an abject curtsy, arms held stiffly in front of her, fists clenched. Then she sprang to her tiptoes and held her arms high above her head with the palms flat as if to forestall the sporadic and indifferent applause."They all want to be Barbra Streisand or Liza Minnelli," George explained as he sucked a giant cocktail through a pink plastic straw. "But no one's looking for that kind of stuff anymore."”

Ian McEwan book In Between the Sheets

Page 139. (From the seventh and final short story, 'Psychopolis')
In Between the Sheets (1978)

Hope, Girl, Passion, Indifference

“The ultimate goal of a revolutionary movement today must be the total collapse of the worldwide technological system.”

Theodore Kaczynski (1942) American domestic terrorist, mathematician and anarchist

Source: Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (2016), p. 138

“The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive "policies" and "Plans" of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word "socialism", but what else can one call it?”

H. G. Wells book The New World Order

The New World Order (1939)

Success

“We know nothing about the Christian transcendental God except His total indifference both to individual suffering and to the collapse of the pseudo Christian civilization which the Church supported. The pretension to a transcendental authority… was a hypnotic given to children and remaining with them as adults. During one period in history it served a purpose… its early rational opponents… were strangely naive, for they imagined that a half-developed faculty called "reason" should, and could, lead the species. But reason… is not a prime mover.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

God, Children, Imagination, History

“Men everywhere yearn for the collapse of this current mode of civilization that, as an inevitable consequence of its design, must devalue and emasculate them. Apocalyptic fantasies are a particularly male preoccupation. More and more men are focusing on survivalism and preparedness to give themselves a sense of purpose in a world that doesn't need or want them to be strong, courageous or prepared for anything.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 71
Becoming A Barbarian (2016)

Men, World, Courage, Sense

“The crisis of the West is a collapsing culture and vanishing peoples, as a Third World that grows by 100 million people, the equivalent of a new Mexico, every 18 months, mounts the greatest invasion in history of the world. If we do not shake off our paralysis, the West comes to an end.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, State of Emergency (2006)

People, World, History

“People in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those that do regret it have no brain. We do not regret this, we simply state the fact and know that we need to look ahead, not backwards. We will not allow the past to drag us down and stop us from moving ahead. We understand where we should move. But we must act based on a clear understanding of what happened..”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

Interview with German television channel ARD and ZDF, May 2005. Kremlin, RU, http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2005/05/05/2355_type82912type82916_87597.shtml (May 2005) 2000 - 2005

People, Understanding, Past, Heart

“If we and the rest of the backboned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if they were to disappear, the land's ecosystems would collapse. The soil would lose its fertility. Many of the plants would no longer be pollinated. Lots of animals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals would have nothing to eat. And our fields and pastures would be covered with dung and carrion. These small creatures are within a few inches of our feet, wherever we go on land – but often, they're disregarded. We would do very well to remember them.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Closing lines
Life in the Undergrowth (2005)

World, Bird, Animals

“147, on the situation in Greece: "imminent collapse due to mounting guerrilla activity, supplied and directed from outside, economic chaos, and the Greek governmental inability to meet the crisis."”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Truman Doctrine, Cold War

“Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep", and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U. N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U. S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome.”

George H. W. Bush book A World Transformed

A World Transformed (1998) by George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft; also as an excerpt http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm in Time Magazine in 1998.

Hostility, War, World, Hope

“There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation.”

Donald Davidson (philosopher) (1917–2003) scriitor amator

Davidson. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, (2001) p. 208, as cited in: Dermot Moran (ed). The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy, (2008), p. 681

World, Question, Nature, Problem

“America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn't entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these 'isms' wouldn't today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government — and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Published as having been made in an (August 1936) interview http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-churchill.html with William Griffin, editor of the New York Enquirer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Enquirer, who was indicted for sedition http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,773366,00.html by F.D.R.'s http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/fr32.html Attorney General Francis Biddle http://www.usdoj.gov/osg/aboutosg/biddlebio.htm in 1942. In a sworn statement before Congress in 1939 Griffin affirmed Churchill had said this; Congressional Record (1939-10-21), vol. 84, p. 686. In 1942, Churchill admitted having had the 1936 interview but disavowed having made the statement (The New York Times, 1942-10-22, p. 13). In his article "The Hidden Tyranny," Benjamin Freedman attributed this quotation to an article in the isolationist http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,795133,00.html publication Scribner's Commentator in 1936. However, that magazine did not exist until 1939. He may have gotten the date wrong or might have been referring to one of its predecessors, Scribner's Monthly http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.journals/scmo.html or Payson Publishing's The Commentator http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,765655,00.html. Disputed

War, World, Peace, Spring

“It's bad to use words like 'genius' unless you are talking about the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, the black Chatterton of the 80s who, during a picturesque career as sexual hustler, addict and juvenile art-star, made a superficial mark on the cultural surface by folding the conventions of street graffiti into those of art brut before killing himself with an overdose at the age of twenty-seven. The first stage of Basquiat's fate, in the mid-80s, was to be effusively welcomed by an art industry so trivialized by fashion and blinded by money that it couldn't tell a scribble from a Leonardo. Its second stage was to be dropped by the same audience, when the novelty of his work wore off. The third was an attempt at apotheosis four years after his death, with a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum designed to sanitise his short, frantic life and position him as a kind of all-purpose, inflatable martyr-figure, thus restoring the dollar value of his oeuvre in a time of collapsing prices for American contemporary art. One contributor to the catalogue proclaimed that "Jean remains wrapped in the silent purple toga of immortality"; another opined that "he is as close to Goya as American painting has ever produced." A third, not to be outdone, extolled Basquiat's "punishing regime of self-abuse" as part of "the disciplines imposed by the principle of inverse ascetism to which he was so resolutely committed."”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

These disciplines of inverse ascetism, one sees, mean shooting smack until you drop dead.
Page 195
Culture of Complaint (1993)

Life, Death, Money, Fate

“You know, we all have our inner demons. I, for one — I can't speak for you, but I'm on the verge of moral collapse at any time. It can happen by the end of the show.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

Glenn Beck
Television
Fox News
2006-11-06
2000s

Time

“Injustice having always hold sway (- be predominant, - régné", Fr.) on earth, there are some who ("d'aucuns", Fr.) imagine (or pretend) that the existing social order may ("pourra", Fr.) subsist (or remain) for ever. Whether this order could last until now, this was mainly due to the conviction of people, that it was of divine institution. But this belief is vanishing (or disapearing, or fainting), and with it the only moral support of the actual order will collapse, leaving (or letting) only brutal forces opposed to each others clashing, with no peaceful way out (or solution) ("et avec elle s'effondrera le seul soutient moral de l'ordre présent, ne laissant aux prises que des forces brutales opposés les unes aux autres, sans issue pacifique.", Fr.)”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 45.

People, Peace, Way, Imagination

“Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be made like this?”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

In a letter to his wife Clemmie, during the build up to World War I.
Early career years (1898–1929)

Happiness

“Waiting for power to move to its inevitable collapse is suicidal for all concerned. Blacks and other Third World peoples have the very imminent prospect of genocidal tactics to contend with, and we can now all see that the modern industrial state, motivated by exclusive groups of capitalist masters, cannot regulate itself to make possible an inclusive production and distribution of goods, or production without a massive waste of resources and destruction of all that stands about. The debate ends, the action begins. It is not question of the necessity of violence, but of how to organize it.”

George Jackson (activist) (1941–1971) activist, Marxist, author, member of the Black Panther Party, and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family

Source: Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 51

People, World, Motivation, Question

“When challenges to our prosperity emerged, we rose to meet them. Facing the prospect of a financial collapse, we took decisive measures to safeguard our economy. These are very tough times for hardworking families, but the toll would be far worse if we had not acted. All Americans are in this together. And together, with determination and hard work, we will restore our economy to the path of growth. We will show the world once again the resilience of America's free enterprise system. The decades ahead will bring more hard choices for our country, and there are some guiding principles that should shape our course.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2009, Farewell speech to the nation (January 2009)

World, Family, Decision, Time

“The outbreak of cholera in Zimbabwe became a symbol of that country's collapse — but who noticed the spread of cholera across Iraq? The McCainiacs chorused that "the surge worked" — but a study by the journal Environment and Planning found the truth. Between 2003 and 2007, Iraq was ripped by a massive ethnic cleansing. The mixed Sunni-Shia areas were destroyed. By the time the surge started, there was nobody left to purge: the country was carved into ethnically homogeneous neighbourhoods. All the surge did was build vast concrete walls between the collapsing hoods, cementing the cleansing. That's success?”

Johann Hari (1979) British journalist

"What did we misjudge in 2008?," http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-what-did-we-misjudge-in-2008-1202269.html The Independent (2008-12-18).

Truth, Study, Time, Success

“Blue Labour has complete disrespect for the managerialism of New Labour and has much more honour for the workforce. If you talk about schooling, we'd like to see parents have a third of the power, teachers have a third of the power and the funders – whether it's the state or local authority – a third of the power, and negotiate a common good. New Labour sought managerial solutions in the private sector and that's what led to the banking collapse; they sought managerial solutions in the public sector which led to the erosion of the public ethos – so we will put people first, relationships first and that's a very different thing.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

The Guardian article, 30 June 2011 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/jun/30/labour-guru-german-public-service-vision

People, School, Parent, Teachers

“Sarah Palin: That was another one of those WTF moments, when he so often repeated the "Sputnik moment" that he would aspire Americans to celebrate, and he needs to remember that, uh, what happened back then with the former Communist USSR and their victory in that, uh, er, race, to space. Yeah, they won but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it, it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union. So I listen to that "Sputnik moment", uh, talk over and over again and I think no, we don't need one of those.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

On the Record w/Greta Van Susteren
Television
Fox News
2011-01-26
Palin Calls Obama's Sputnik Analogy A "WTF Moment"
2011-01-26
Media Matters
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201101260055
2011-01-27
Jed
Lewison
Palin completely misunderstands what "Sputnik Moment" means
2011-01-27
Daily Kos
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2011/1/27/939263/-Palin-completely-misunderstands-what-Sputnik-Moment-means
2011-01-27
referring to Barack Obama saying of investing in biomedical research, information technology, and clean energy, "This is our generation's Sputnik moment."
2014

Thinking, Time, Victory

“And indeed, if VSL is correct, black holes may have very different properties than we thought. Collapsing stars could have a totally different demise and die a rather eccentric death.”

João Magueijo (1967) Portuguese scientist

pg. 10
Faster than the Speed of Light

Death, Star

“If we don't change, our species will not survive… Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.”

Maurice Strong (1929–2015) Canadian businessman

Maurice Strong, September 1, 1997 edition of National Review magazine

World, Way, Change

“The future states that there is no time other than the collapsation of that sensation of the mirror of the memories in which we are living. Common knowledge, but important nonetheless.”

Reggie Watts (1972) singer, musician and comedian

Cited in: Beats That Defy Boxes: Reggie Watts at TED 2012 https://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_most_entertaining_way. Posted February 2012.

Knowledge, Memory, Time, Future

“Sitting back in the hard plastic chair on the hotel roof, I reflected on that talk I'd given to the CENTCOM intelligence staff the previous Friday. America was in deep shock, reeling from the images of airliners smashing into buildings and those proud towers collapsing like flaming tinsel. Would my fellow citizens now be persuaded to abandon their hard-won individual freedoms to earn a bit more security in a clearly insecure world? As I stood up, another thought struck me. Today is like Pearl Harbor. The world was one way before today, and will never be that way again. We stand at a crease in history.”

Tommy Franks (1945) United States Army general

Source: American Soldier (2004), p. 246

World, Way, History, Intelligence

“The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Atheist Delusion (2008)

Religion

“It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm — this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), An Absurd Reasoning

Sleep, Time

“There is a limit to how much the country can take; you don’t want us to collapse. You don’t want our economic plans, our economic reform to be disrupted . . . You don’t want Jordan to be destabilised.”

Abdullah Ensour (1939) prime minister of Jordan

Abdullah Ensour, the Prime Minister of Jordan on Syrian refugees entering Jordan, quoted on Ft, "Jordan seeks international aid in deal over Syrian refugees" http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/37d35b58-c8c3-11e5-a8ef-ea66e967dd44.html#axzz41ZFvNw7K, February 1, 2016.

Country

“If consumer society is to continue to exist in the manner to which it has become accustomed, it is essential that this latent power be appropriated, tamed and made docile. The ways in which contemporary capitalism undermines women's bodies, from advertising to pornography to the structure of gendered labour and domestic conflict, are not private troubles with no bearing upon the wider world. They are necessary fetters in a superstructure of oppression that has become so fundamental to the experience of femininity that it is effectively invisible. This superstructure is vital to the very survival of the patriarchal capitalist machine. If women on earth woke up tomorrow feeling truly positive and powerful in their own bodies, the economies of the globe would collapse overnight.”

Laurie Penny book Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

Introduction
Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2010)

Women, World, Way, Feeling

“Ostalgie [≈ “East German Nostalgia”] is not my kind of thing. To some, the GDR appears in a backward-looking bleary-eyed view as a palladium of social security. In truth, the GDR collapsed not least because, being economically inefficient, it could not finance its social promises.”

Günter Schabowski (1929–2015) German politician

Ostalgie ist nicht mein Ding. Manchem erscheint die DDR in rückblickender Verklärung als ein Hort sozialer Sicherheit. Tatsächlich ist die DDR nicht zuletzt daran zugrunde gegangen, dass sie infolge wirtschaftlicher Ineffizienz ihre sozialen Verheißungen nicht finanzieren konnte.
from: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, 6 November 2004.

Truth, Nostalgia, Appearance

“Let them fail; let everybody fail! I made my fortune when I had nothing to start with, by myself and my own ideas. Let other people do the same thing. If I lose everything in the collapse of our financial structure, I will start in at the beginning and build it up again.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

February 11, 1934; quoted in: Peter Collier, ‎David Horowitz (2001). The Fords: An American Epic. p. 108

People, Idea

“Since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production that it induces by its avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus, in pulling Society down it pulls itself down. Its ultimate collapse is usually occasioned by a disastrous war, but preceding that event is a history of increasing and discouraging levies on the marketplace, causing a decline in the aspirations, hopes, and self-esteem of its victims.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: The Rise & Fall of Society (1959), p. 150

War, Hope, History

“In adding Iran to the travel ban, President Trump is clearly appeasing the neoconservative snakes slithering around his administration. They’re fixing for a fight with Iran, stupidly collapsing the distinction between the Iranian State (sponsor of terrorism), and the Iranian people (who’re not the reason the Eiffel Tower is being walled-off by bullet-proof glass).”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"High-Tech Traitors Are Social Justice Warriors 1st; Businessmen 2nd" http://www.unz.com/imercer/high-tech-traitors-are-social-justice-warriors-1st-businessmen-2nd/?highlight=mercer The Unz Review, February 17, 2017 2010s, 2017

People, Travel, Fight

“When the mayor of Nagoya denies the Nanjing Massacre, he gets blacklisted by the city of Nanjing. When the government of Sichuan denies “tofu dregs” construction [which caused the collapse of several schools], they get blacklisted by me.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Ai Weiwei on Twitter in English (beta). (February 26, 2012) http://aiwwenglish.tumblr.com/
2010-, Twitter feeds, 2010-12

School

“In the summer of 1864, pessimists warned that the North could not win the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln faced opposition for the Republican-party nomination, and even if he won it, he was considered likely to lose the November election to Union general George McClellan. General Grant’s Army of the Potomac was being bled white in Virginia in vain attempts to dislodge Robert E. Lee’s defenders from their entrenchments around the Confederate capital of Richmond. Gruesome encounters such as the Battle of Cold Harbor and the Battle of the Wilderness had given the depressed Northern public nightmares. Then, suddenly, fantasy became reality. The maverick General William Tecumseh Sherman unexpectedly took Atlanta on September 2, 1864. Euphoria swept the North. McClellan’s sure-thing candidacy crashed. The mercurial Sherman then headed off with his huge army on the famous “March to the Sea” through Georgia. He next plowed through the Carolinas to the rear of Lee’s army in Virginia. In less than nine months the entire Confederate cause collapsed. The supposedly endless Civil War ended with a sudden and absolute Union victory that no one had foreseen.”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, The American Art of Renewal (2018)

War, Reality, Victory, Summer

“Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 29.

Democracy

“Troops without ammunition or food. Effective command no longer possible. 18,000 wounded without any supplies or dressings or drugs. Further defence senseless. Collapse inevitable. Army requests immediate permission to surrender in order to save lives of remaining troops.”

Friedrich Paulus (1890–1957) German general

Radio message to Adolf Hitler, January 24, 1943. Quoted in "The World Changers" - Page 171 - by Bruce Bliven - 1965

Food

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”

Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747–1813) Scottish advocate, judge, writer and historian

The earliest known attribution of this quote was December 9, 1951, in what appears to be an op-ed piece in The Daily Oklahoman under the byline Elmer T. Peterson, [This is the Hard Core of Freedom, Elmer T. Peterson, Daily Oklahoman, 9 December 1951, 12A]. The quote has not been found in Tytler's work. It has also been attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville. There are many variants circulating with various permutations of majority, voters, citizens, or public. Ronald Reagan is known to have used this in speeches, as reported in Loren Collins, "The Truth About Tytler http://lorencollins.net/tytler.html": Other variants: The American Republic will endure until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money. The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money. Attributed

Democracy

“León Krauze: I am sure that you know about this topic: various leftist governments, especially the populists, are in serious trouble in Latin America. The socialist model in Venezuela has the country near collapse. Argentina, also Brazil, how do you explain that failure?
Bernie Sanders: You are asking me questions…
Krauze: I am sure you're interested in that.
Sanders: I am very interested, but right now I'm running for President of the United States.
Krauze: So you don't have an opinion about the crisis in Venezuela?
Sanders: Of course I have an opinion, but as I said, I'm focused on my campaign.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Interview with Univision's León Krauze, as quoted in "Bernie Hits Bump on Univision: Speechless on Socialism’s Failures" http://newsbusters.org/blogs/latino/edgard-portela/2016/05/26/bernie-hits-bump-univision-speechless-socialisms-failures by Edgard Portela, NewsBusters (26 May 2016) 2010s, 2016

Failure, Question, Country

“Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed … History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized... So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

Cited in "Identifying the Wild Beast and Its Mark" http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2004241?q=durant&p=par, in The Watchtower (1 March 2004) 2000s

History, Sense, Effort

“The presently existing global financial and monetary system will disintegrate during the near term. The collapse might occur this spring, or summer, or next autumn; it could come next year; it will almost certainly occur during President William Clinton's first term in office; it will occur soon. That collapse into disintegration is inevitable, because it could not be stopped now by anything but the politically improbable decision by leading governments to put the relevant financial and monetary institutions into bankruptcy reorganization.”

Lyndon LaRouche (1922–2019) American political activist and founder of the LaRouche movement

"The Coming Disintegration of Financial Markets" (June 1994) http://spanish.larouchepac.com/static/about-larouche.html.

Spring, Autumn, Decision, Summer

“We are only one of many groups through which the Masters of the Wisdom are working, and any group that forgets this is apt to become smug isolationist and, therefore, in imminent danger of collapse.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter 6

Wisdom, Forgetting

“Personal religion collapses with some individuals, because in their case it had long been growing hollow and thin. … In reality there was little personal religion to lose, and that little would probably have been lost in some other way.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianizing the Social Order (1912), p. 106

Religion, Way, Reality, Personality

“We Social Democrats dare not be like the other parties, all of whom are equally guilty of the injustices of the present system and equally responsible for them. Every one who suffers under these injustices looks to us for deliverance. Every one of us has had these victims of society after failing to get justice from the courts, from the government, from the Emperor himself, and from all the other parties, come to us as the last and only ones that can help them. They do not know our scientific program; they do not know what capital and capitalism mean; but they have the belief, the feeling, that we are a party that can help when all other parties fail. This belief is for us an inexhaustible source of power. It was a similar faith of despair that spread more and more in the decaying Roman empire and slowly undermined the heathen world until it finally collapsed. We give up this inexhaustible source of power if we ally ourselves with other parties and drive suffering humanity from us by saying to it: “We are not essentially different from the others.””

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

Once the boundary line of the class struggle is wiped away and we have started upon the inclined plane of compromise, there is no stopping. Then we can only go down and down until there is nothing deeper.
No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

World, Faith, Justice, Feeling

“Curiously, it is hard not to be a little optimistic about the future for Zimbabwe (as nobody at all calls it yet, except in political speeches). The fear is not that there will be mass slaughter of the whites, followed by their flight to South Africa and the collapse of the economy, but that the need to retain white confidence may mean that the blacks are badly disappointed.”

Simon Hoggart (1946–2014) English journalist and broadcaster

Hoggart's Guardian column 9 Feb 1980 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1980/feb/09/zimbabwe.simonhoggart

Fear, Disappointment, Confidence, Future

“The people of Iran are very talented people. They're heirs to one of the world's great civilizations. But in 1979, they were hijacked by religious zealots; religious zealots who imposed on them immediately a dark and brutal dictatorship. That year, the zealots drafted a constitution, a new one for Iran. It directed the revolutionary guards not only to protect Iran's borders, but also to fulfill the ideological mission of jihad. The regime's founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, exhorted his followers to "export the revolution throughout the world." I'm standing here in Washington, D. C. and the difference is so stark. America's founding document promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Iran's founding document pledges death, tyranny, and the pursuit of jihad. And as states are collapsing across the Middle East, Iran is charging into the void to do just that.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

2010s, 2015, Address to the United States Congress (March 2015)

Life, Death, People, World

“I promise you that if I wished to, I could destroy the Church in a few years; it is hollow and rotten and false through and through. One push and the whole structure would collapse. We should trap the priests by their notorious greed and self-indulgence.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Voice of Destruction (1940), p. 53

Falseness

“In order for there to be a variable quantity in some mathematical study, the domain of its variability must strictly speaking be known beforehand through a definition. However, this domain cannot itself be something variable, since otherwise each fixed support for the study would collapse. Thus this domain is a definite, actually infinite set of values. Hence each potential infinite, if it is rigorously applicable mathematically, presupposes an actual infinite.”

Georg Cantor (1845–1918) mathematician, inventor of set theory

"Über die verschiedenen Ansichten in Bezug auf die actualunendlichen Zahlen" ["Over the different views with regard to the actual infinite numbers"] - Bihand Till Koniglen Svenska Vetenskaps Akademiens Handigar (1886)

Mathematics, Support, Study

“Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.”

Eric S. Raymond (1957) American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

Why Python? http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882

Beauty, Way, Understanding

“He told me he was having the time of his life and then fell to the floor unconscious. I didn't take this too personally, although he was not the first person to collapse while talking to me; to tell the truth it has happened quite often.”

Tom Baker (1934) English actor

Life, Truth, Time, Personality

“The last 60 years have seen collapse of many democracies. For a poor country, it is more difficult to sustain a democracy. From poverty, we have come to being a developing nation. Not only did we survive, we have the distinction of becoming world’s largest democracy.”

Arun Jaitley (1952–2019) Indian politician

On the occasion of the Indian Parliament completing 60 years, as quoted in " Democracy is behind our growing global stature says PM http://www.abplive.in/india-news/democracy-is-behind-our-growing-global-stature-says-pm-153064", ABP Live (13 May 2012)

World, Democracy, Country

“You think the pissed-off steelworker in Akron has trouble now? Wait until we have a financial collapse and they take 25 percent off the dollar. He'll be serving hot dogs in an American restaurant in China.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

As quoted in "Debriefing Mike Murphy" https://www.weeklystandard.com/matt-labash/debriefing-mike-murphy (18 March 2016), by Matt Labash, The Weekly Standard 2010s

Dogs, Thinking, Waiting

“It is not hunger nor thirst that frightens the Bedu; they maintain that riding they can survive in cold weather for seven days without food or water. It is the possible collapse of their camels which haunts them. If this happens, death is certain.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 103.

Death, Hunger, Food, Water

“The partition of Czechoslovakia under pressure from England and France amounts to the complete surrender of the Western Democracies to the Nazi threat of force. Such a collapse will bring peace or security neither to England nor to France. On the contrary, it will place these two nations in an ever weaker and more dangerous situation. … It is not Czechoslovakia alone which is menaced, but also the freedom and the democracy of all nations. The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small State to the wolves is a fatal delusion. The war potential of Germany will increase in a short time more rapidly than it will be possible for France and Great Britain to complete the measure necessary for their defence.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Statement to the Press (21 September 1938), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), pp. 978-979
The 1930s

War, Peace, Democracy, Freedom

“Chaucer shares on the literary stock marker have been rising during the past ten years, owing chiefly to the enthusiasm, literary gifts and scholarship of an Oxford don, Nevill Coghill, and secondarily to the British Broadcasting Corporation. The fluctuations of the literary market are familiar to everyone; sometimes there is a fierce flutter in a virtually unknown commodity (like the John Donne boom in the twenties); occasionally an almost dead commodity bursts in new life (as in the Trollope boom of the forties); Foreign Moderns (Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Sagan) are eagerly pushed but are apt to collapse suddenly, wiping out those critics who have invested too heavily in them; in the USA the Deep South and Proletarian Anguish are solid, though all else fluctuates unpredictably.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Review of the Canterbury Tales (1957).

Life, Past, Dead

“To distort our faces with joy, or wail and weep with sorrow, or collapse in agony, or wallow in sentimentality – wasn’t an inviolable human trait but something we can lose simply by leading dull and dreary lives. ‘A rich emotional life,’ she’d written, ‘is a privilege reserved only for the daring few’.”

Ryū Murakami book Audition

Source: Audition (1997), Chapter

Life, Joy

“O nature, nature, life will not perish! Friends, Helena, life will not perish! It will begin anew with love; it will start out naked and tiny; it will take root in the wilderness, and to it all that we did and built will mean nothing — our towns and factories, our art, our ideas will all mean nothing, and yet life will not perish! Only we have perished. Our houses and machines will be in ruins, our systems will collapse, and the names of our great will fall away like dry leaves. Only you, love, will blossom on this rubbish heap and commit the seed of life to the winds. Now let Thy servant depart in peace, O Lord, for my eyes have beheld — beheld Thy deliverance through love, and life shall not perish!”

Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

Love, Life, Peace, Art

“We have entered an age of insecurity—economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity. The fact that we are largely unaware of this is small comfort: few in 1914 predicted the utter collapse of their world and the economic and political catastrophes that followed. Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Introduction

Age, World, Fear, Change

“And then a feminist rose to complain about the marginalization of women in liturgy and leadership in the Catholic church today. The speaker collapsed in fear, and answered her by mouthing a litany of cliches about sexual equality and decrying past Church practices for being insufficiently open to the contributions of women to the faith. His cowering was embarrassing.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: Jimmy Carter Excommunicates Himself, archive.lewrockwell.com, 2016-05-22 http://archive.lewrockwell.com/orig/tucker6.html,

Women, Fear, Faith, Past

“Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free rein to the free market, red in tooth and claw—just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 13, “Kemal: Spamcop” (pp. 154-155)

Money, War, Truth, World

“Barelvi’s confidence in a jihad against the British collapsed when he surveyed the extent and the magnitude of British power in India. He did the next best under the circumstances, and declared a jihad against the Sikh power in the Punjab, Kashmir and the North-West Frontier. The British on their part welcomed this change and permitted Barelvi to travel towards the border of Afghanistan at a leisurely pace, collecting money and manpower along the way. It was during this journey that Barelvi stayed with or met several Hindu princes, feigned that his fulminations against the Sikhs were a fake, and that he was going out of India in order to establish a base for fighting against the British. It is surmised that some Hindu princes took him at his word, and gave him financial help. To the Muslim princes, however, he told the truth, namely, that he was up against the Sikhs because they “do not allow the call to prayer from mosques and the killing of cows.”
Barelvi set up his base in the North-West Frontier near Afghanistan. The active assistance he expected from the Afghan king did not materialise because that country was in a mess at that time. But the British connived at the constant flow not only of a sizable manpower but also of a lot of finance. Muslim magnates in India were helping him to the hilt. His basic strategy was to conquer Kashmir before launching his major offensive against the Punjab. But he met with very little success in that direction in spite of several attempts. Finally, he met his Waterloo in 1831 when the Sikhs under Kunwar Sher Singh stormed his citadel at Balakot. The great mujahid fell in the very first battle he ever fought. His corpse along with that of his second in command was burnt, and the ashes were scattered in the winds. Muslims hail him as a shahid.”

Syed Ahmad Barelvi (1786–1831) Muslim activist

Goel, S. R. (1995). Muslim separatism: Causes and consequences.

Money, Truth, Way, Travel

“In the game of Dawn Card-Castles, fifty-two playing cards are stacked up into a castle in a draught-free space: the player can determine the dreams of the next night if he awakes before the castle collapses. Those players who wish to dream of Romance build their castle with the seven of hearts.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Drowning By Numbers

Dreams, Game, Heart, Night

“I find that Muslims are often allies. Their critique offers a salutary contrast to western indifference and inertia. Muslims rightly condemn the collapse of western moral authority, the failure of nerve that has created our epidemics of crime, drug abuse, family breakdown and promiscuity. They are right to be horrified at the wholesale destruction of the sacred, and the worship instead of consumer choice. They are right to point to the meaninglessness and vacuity of secular society, its arrogance and the paralysis of its institutions. This is, after all, why so many are turning to fundamentalism in Christianity and Judaism as well as Islam.”

Melanie Phillips (1951) British journalist

"How the West was lost" http://www.melaniephillips.com/how-the-west-was-lost (May 11, 2002)

Family, Failure, Indifference

“In 1680 the Pueblo Indians, led by a prophet named Popé who had been living in Taos, expelled the Spaniards... The god of the Spaniards was declared dead, and the religious ways came out into the open again. …But when Popé attempted to become the unchallenged leader of all the Pueblo Indians, the movement collapsed. …The Pueblo confederation soon broke apart and the people warred among themselves. In 1692 the Spaniards marched back to victory.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

God, War, People, Way

“… Any one of a million things could fail and cause our complex civilization to collapse for an hour, for a day, or however long. That's when you find out the extent to which you are reliant on technology and don't even know it. That's when you see that it's so interdependent, that if you take one thing away, the whole thing falls down and leaves you with nothing.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

Connections (1979), 1 - The Trigger Effect

“The conclusion drawn by … most of our élites … is that the population constitutes a deep and dangerous well of ignorance and irrationality; if our civilization is in crisis the fault must lie with the populace which is not rising to the inescapable challenges. And yet civilizations do not collapse because the citizenry are corrupt or lazy or anti-intellectual. These people do not have the power and influence to either lead or destroy. Civilizations collapse when those who have power fail to do their jobs.”

John Ralston Saul The Doubter's Companion

"Anti-Intellectualism"
The Doubter's Companion (1994)

People, Lie

“More and more of us have, over the last 10 years or so, become deeply involved in one or more of the movements mentioned above. At the same time, though, the radical political movements of the 1969's seem to have collapsed. Could there be a connection? I believe that the radical political movements declined as soon as they began to promote a doctrine of us-against-them, of "we have all the answers", of separation rather than healing. As soon as they began to promote a dogmatic Marxism that overstressed our need for things and tried to make us feel guilty about our deeper needs, which are emotional, psychological and spiritual”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

and which are what got us into the radical political movements in the first place
Pages 5–6.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

Feeling, Time

“The collapse of the Ice Ages hypothesis does not, of course, settle the debate about whether there are racial differences in genes for intelligence. If universities had their way, the necessary research will never be done. They fund the most mundane research projects, but never seem to have funds to test for genetic differences between races. I tell US academics I can only assume that they believe that racial IQ differences have a genetic component, and fear what they might find. They never admit that the politics of race affects their research priorities. It is always just far more important to establish whether squirrels enjoy The Magic Flute.”

James Robert Flynn (1934–2020) New Zealand scholar

Source: Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century (2012), p. 36, Box 4

Age, Fear, Way, Intelligence

“The budget targets imposed by the Bretton Woods institutions, combined with the effects of the devaluation, trigger the collapse of public investment.”

Michel Chossudovsky (1946) Canadian economist

Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 3, Policing Countries Through Loan "Conditionalities", p. 53

“When the Twin Towers collapsed do you know what was in the basement? […] Lots of gold. Do you know where it is? […] Nobody does. It disappeared. Did those buildings drop down to cover a great crime being committed? Somebody is taking all this gold out of the Twin Tower basement. Makes you wonder.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

3 April 2006
Truth Radio

“Every naturalism begins as involuntary naïveté. Initially, we cannot help thinking that the “order of things” is an objective order. For the first glance falls on the things and not on the “eyeglasses.” In the work of enlightenment, this first innocence becomes irretrievably lost. Enlightenment leads to the loss of naïveté and it furthers the collapse of objectivism through a gain in self-experience. It effects an irreversible awakening and, expressed pictorially, executes the turn to the eyeglasses, i. e., to one’s own rational apparatus. Once this consciousness of the eyeglasses has been awakened in a culture, the old naïveté loses its charm, becomes defensive, and is transformed into narrow-mindedness, which is intent on remaining as it is. The mythology of the Greeks is still enchanting; that of fascism is only stale and shameless. In the first myth, a step toward an interpretation of the world was taken; in simulated naïveté, an artful stupefaction (Verdummung) is at work—the predominant method of self-integration in advanced social orders.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 59

World, Art, Nature, Thinking

Quotes about collapse page 4

Quotes about collapse
page 4