Our luxuries have condemned us to weakness; we have ceased to be able to do that which we have long declined to do.

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.

Worth less, men considered themselves worthless.

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.

Luxury, nowadays, is ruinous. We criticize, but must conform, and superfluities in the end deprive us of necessities.

If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?
Nobody but a defeated, deflated, pathetic testimony to a wrong way of living.

Of all thy blessings reckon wealth the least,
For 'tis the least secure of our possessions.

People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they are ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth

Their glory in earthly power had brought them to decadent ruin, as it brought down all empires who gloried in gold or conquest or those other ambitions which can never be satisfied but must forever be fed.

Those, who have wealth, must be watchful and wary;
Power, alas! nought but misery brings!

I’m talking about our defeat and about realizing that we are worthless, that we are the dregs of the Earth’s nations. I was still a student when I said that we were in the garbage bin of nations. We are in the garbage bin of nations, and we don’t even know it. We feel as if we are like the Pharaohs, like Ramesses, and so on.

We mean are so weak. Our bodies betray even the noblest of us.

You see what a poor sinner I am, and how unworthy to possess what was given me; for that reason, it has been taken away.