The chains of military despotism, once fastened upon a nation, ages might pass away before they could be shaken off.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off.
Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.
The past could liberate or imprison - it creates a nation's character, provides the nourishment or the poison a people imbibe in their very marrow.
Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.
Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality.
Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
When a noble life has prepared for old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.
When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.