I use iTunes for downloading music, but I always decline when prompted to update this or that new version.
Just six years into the 21st century, one can say this is not shaping up to be anything like an American century. Rather, the U.S. seems much more likely to be faced with a very different kind of future: how to manage its own imperial decline.
I'm very concerned about the tone of politics in recent years. We've seen a decline in civility and bipartisanship, and a rapid increase in hostility between those who have differing opinions. I think this has led to the alienation of the public in governance, which jeopardizes democratic participation.
As long as we decline to allow sick, uninsured people to just lie down and die on the side of the road, everybody has to have insurance for the health care system to work sanely.
Take your time, however long the book needs. I've seen a lot of promising careers go into decline because writers succumbed to the pressure to write faster than was comfortable for them or the story.
The dynamic of globalisation in financial and economic terms, but also in geopolitical terms, confronts Europeans with a stark choice: live together, share a common destiny and count in the world; or face the prospect of disunity and decline.
It isn't just that Obama's policies have failed; it's that he has essentially given up and is asking us to accept a lesser America going forward, as if resigned to the fatalistic belief that America has begun an inevitable and unavoidable decline.
In the U.S. the powerful critics of austerity such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich rightly identify the decline of 'labor' as a problem, and renewing trade unionism part of the solution. Our opportunity is to make the same case in the UK.
I cannot resign myself to the decline of Europe, and of France.
Those who obstruct the Senate should pay a price in public notoriety and physical exhaustion. That would lead to a significant decline in frivolous filibusters.
The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.
It could fairly be said that America, during the Bush years, has entered an Age of Denial - arguably the first stage of a nation's decline.
The steep decline in America's image and standing after 9/11 is a direct reflection of global distaste for the instruments of American hard power: the Iraq invasion, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, Blackwater's killings of Iraqi civilians.
It may be coincidence that the decline of newspapers has corresponded with the rise of social media. Or maybe not.
I think partly the decline in the peso was due to worry about renegotiation of NAFTA, but I think we also need to think about some other mechanisms for making the peso/dollar exchange rate a bit more stable.
Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
The decline and fall of the modern religious right's notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.
Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God's favor, corruption.
I am so sorry to see the state of reading in such decline. I think it says something really scary and terrible about us as a culture. I think it does have to do with everyone's total global embrace of technology.
Success comprises in itself the seeds of its own decline and sport is not spared by this law.
The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.
Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality.
Mugabe's resignation fascinates because the fall of tyrants is always a family story, decline of the father, writ large. What a strange creature he is.
Many troubled Midwestern towns are grasping for ways to fend off decline and, in some cases, extinction.
A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.
News in printed form is in secular decline. However, news delivered the way consumers want it is growing and thriving.
I would suggest that faith is everyone's business. The advance or decline of faith is so intimately connected to the welfare of a society that it should be of particular interest to a politician.
The world is fortunate - for the time being, at least - that it has an American president in Obama who is prepared to take a conciliatory and concessive attitude towards America's decline and that it has a Chinese leadership which has been extremely cautious about expressing an opinion, let alone flexing its muscles.
