Leadership Quote by Christian Lous Lange

A politician’s scariest move is to sound less like a salesman for progress and more like an actuary for doom. Lange’s line is built to puncture complacency: “highly developed” is the bait, a flattering phrase that lets modern societies feel advanced, rational, insulated. Then he yanks it away with “collapsed.” No romance, no barbarian caricature - just the cold reminder that complexity doesn’t equal durability.

The rhetorical trick is the pivot from the comfort of precedent to the discomfort of implication. By invoking “history,” Lange borrows the authority of inevitability without naming a single empire; the examples (Rome, the ancien regime, any number of “golden ages”) hover as a chorus the reader supplies. That vagueness is strategic. It makes the warning portable, usable in parliamentary debate, diplomacy, or public persuasion: he isn’t accusing one policy or party, he’s indicting the assumption that “we” are different.

“Who knows” is doing heavy political work. It sounds humble, even reasonable, while smuggling in a demand: act as if collapse is possible. The double negative (“whether the same fate does not await”) slows the sentence down, forcing the reader to sit with uncertainty. In the interwar era Lange lived through, that uncertainty wasn’t abstract. Europe had watched old orders implode and new ones harden into militarism. The subtext is that civilization is not a trophy you win once; it’s a system you maintain - and, if you mismanage it, history doesn’t punish you with drama. It just stops.