If we have built on the fragile cornerstones of human wisdom, pride, and conditional love, things may look good for a while, but a weak foundation causes collapse when storms hit.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

One can see the professionals and intellectuals talking to their rural brethren with an amused and condescending smile. They forget that but for the toiling rural masses, all their professional training and erudition would collapse like a castle of cards.

Out of all the ridiculous religion stories - which are greatly, wonderfully ridiculous - the silliest one I've ever heard is, 'Yeah, there's this big, giant universe, and it's expanding, and it's all going to collapse on itself, and we're all just here, just 'cuz. Just 'cuz.' That to me, is the most ridiculous explanation ever.

Censorship is saying: 'I'm the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say, the conclusion is mine.' But the internet is like a tree that is growing. The people will always have the last word - even if someone has a very weak, quiet voice. Such power will collapse because of a whisper.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

Without legal aid, and the dedicated lawyers who deliver it, our system of justice would quite simply collapse.

It is common knowledge now that we depend on insects for our continued existence; that, without key pollinators, the human population would collapse in less than a decade.

It's very important that we keep our imagination, which is our capacity to open the future, awake at a time at which the urge to collapse into the fetal position is high.

If your theory is found to be against the second law of theromodynamics, I give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Your home is regarded as a model home, your life as a model life. But all this splendor, and you along with it... it's just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come, a word can be spoken, and both you and all this splendor will collapse.

Any time a country transitioned to a fiat currency, they collapsed. That's just world history; you don't have to know about cryptocurrency to know that.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

Among young people, often a key factor in them committing suicide is the trauma of transient relationships. They throw themselves into a friendship or network of friendships, then it collapses and they're desolate.

If you're overfishing at the top of the food chain, and acidifying the ocean at the bottom, you're creating a squeeze that could conceivably collapse the whole system.

People in all walks of life, and especially business, do not want to experience the collapse of cities like New York along with global finance and economy in chaos, but this is what business faces if we continue to attribute climate change to fossil fuels alone.

Civilization must stand up and combat the current collapse of governance, the rise of violence, and the spread of chaos and fear in many parts of the world.

I think it would collapse my heart if I was super famous. I don't have the nerve for it, I'm too anxious. I don't know how you're not obsessed with how people perceive you, because they're real people, you know? You can convince yourself that they don't really know you, and that's true, but how can it not hurt your feelings?

The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.

America cannot continue to lead the family of nations around the world if we suffer the collapse of the family here at home.

2013 was a year of myths falling apart. The myth of President Obama - a myth in which Obama was a messianic figure descending to bequeath health care, equality, and brotherhood on mankind - imploded. The myth of an America embracing the leftist social agenda collapsed.

Threats that could wipe out the bulk of life on earth abound. Planetary catastrophe could come in the form of a killer asteroid impact, the eruption of massive supervolcanoes, a nearby gamma ray burst that sterilizes the earth, or by human-driven environmental collapse.

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity.