Decline
Although she was one of Sydney's wealthiest women in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, by 1955, the Taxation Department ordered her to pay more than £20,000 in unpaid income tax and fines sending her close to bankruptcy. In 1953 Tilly Devine boasted to the media, "I am a lucky, lucky girl. I have more diamonds than the Queen of England's stowaways - and better ones too !"
She sold off her last brothel in Palmer Street, Darlinghurst in 1968, and died two years later.
Tilly was famous for flamboyant acts of generosity, and also for her violent feud with criminal vice rival Kate Leigh. Tilly Devine was charged by the famous Sydney Detective Frank Farrell on many occasions, and their feud lasted for 30 years.
Read more about this topic: Tilly Devine
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)