'The first ten million years were the worst,'said Marvin, 'and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.'

-Adams, Douglas Noe«  l
  Marvin, the paranoid android. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, ch.18.

It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.

-Gibbon, Edward
Memoirs of My Life (published1796), ch.6, note. Variations of the lines can be found in the various drafts of Gibbon's autobiography and in the last lines of the Decline and Fall:'It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public' (vol.6, ch.71).

   To preserve a trading state from decline, the greatest care must be taken, to support a perfect balance between the hands employed in work and the demand for their labour.

-Steuart (later Denham), SirJames
  Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy.