Birth Rate Decline

Famous quotes containing the words birth, rate and/or decline:

    The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind—the mind of a fighter—in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man’s first beginning.
    Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)

    I don’t know but a book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf—at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety—& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.
    Herman Melville (1819–1891)

    Or else I thought her supernatural;
    As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
    On this foul world in its decline and fall,
    On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
    Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
    Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)