“It is common knowledge that nothing reinforces social order, providing it with stability, strength, and the ability to withstand alien influences better than … small private owners, whose interests would suffer adversely from all disruptions of normal working conditions.”
Dmitry Sipiagin
“A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.”
Will Durant