Degenerated Quotes & Sayings

As with most revolutions, the counterculture's call for total freedom quickly turned into a demand for total control. The phenomenon of 'political correctness', with its speech codes and other efforts to enforce ideological conformity, was one predictable result of this transformation. What began at the University of California at Berkeley with the Free Speech Movement (called by some the 'Filthy Speech Movement'} soon degenerated into an effort to abridge freedom by dictating what could and could not be said about any number of politically sensitive issues. — Roger Kimball

Luther had said that grace alone can save; his followers took up his doctrine and repeated it word for word. But they left out its invariable corollary, the obligation to discipleship ... The justification of the sinner in the world degenerated into the justification of sin and the world. Costly grace was turned into cheap grace without discipleship. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Quote of the day: (Opening chapter from, Heresy)

"He zaps from channel to channel, finally accepting to complete the job, bravely initiated by the alcohol, to further numb his tortured brain, and watch an emission, perfectly tailored for the degenerated masses, cynically named, 'Switzerland has talent — Gary Edward Gedall

Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items. — Stanley Fish

Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Present-day Hinduism and Buddhism were growths from the same branch. Buddhism degenerated, and Shankara lopped it off! — Swami Vivekananda

You'll enjoy it. There is much you can learn from books and scrolls," said Jeod. He gestured at the walls. "These books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life."
"It sounds intriguing," admitted Eragon.
"Always the scholar, aren't you?" asked Brom.
Jeod shrugged. "Not anymore. I'm afraid I've degenerated into a bibliophile. — Christopher Paolini

Democracy in itself does not define or guarantee a free society. History has told many stories of democratic societies that have degenerated into corruption, plunder, and tyranny. — Richard Ebeling

a samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a 'function', one cog in a machine. — Yukio Mishima

I love chess, and I didnt invent Fischerandom chess to destroy chess. I invented Fischerandom chess to keep chess going. Because I consider the old chess is dying, or really its dead. A lot of people have come up with other rules of chess-type games, with 10x8 boards, new pieces, and all kinds of things. Im really not interested in that. I want to keep the old chess flavour. I want to keep the old chess game. But just making a change so the starting positions are mixed, so its not degenerated down to memorisation and prearrangement like it is today. — Bobby Fischer

Time. Particles of darkness configured mysterious patterns on my retina. Patterns that degenerated without a sound, only to be replaced by new patterns. Darkness but darkness alone was shifting, like mercury in motionless space.
I put a stop to my thoughts and let time pass. Let time carry me along. Carry me to where a new darkness was configuring yet newer patterns. — Haruki Murakami

The mind of the man who receives gifts is acted on by the mind of the giver, so the receiver is likely to become degenerated. Receiving gifts is prone to destroy the independence of the mind, and make us slavish. Therefore, receive no gifts. — Swami Vivekananda

The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the could and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows. — Paul Goodman

Religion now has degenerated and it has turned into a wolf; it has opened its mouth to show his ugly teeth; its spreading fear instead of love; and science has hidden in a corner like a lamb, trembling with fear! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos. — George Eliot

When fate wronged me, I had not the wisdom to remain cool: I turned desperate; then I degenerated. — Charlotte Bronte

Get your butt over there and start reading before I beat you with my Rod of Time. (Sin)
I can think of much better things to do with your rod than beat me, baby. (Kat)
Aww, gawd, we've degenerated into really bad punage. I yield. Save me before my IQ points are damaged. (Sin) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Paganism therefore implies the rejection of this discontinuity, this rupture, this fundamental tear, which is the "dualistic fiction," which, as Nietzsche wrote in The Antichrist, "degenerated God into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! — Alain De Benoist

Rome herself was no longer new. She had grown old and decrepit. The republic of Cicero had degenerated into the despotism of Caesar. Tyrant after tyrant had seized power at the price of much bloodshed. Devotion to family, hard work, and frugality had been replaced by an addiction to pleasure and power. A welfare state based on conquest and slave labor bought the loyalty of the mob with free bread and gladiator games. The people were all too ready to trade their liberty for creature comforts. — Marcellino D'Ambrosio

Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain. — Rebecca West

Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication - but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling — Isaac Asimov

Not anymore. I'm afraid I've degenerated into a bibliophile."
"A what?" asked Eragon.
"One who loves books," explained Jeod. — Christopher Paolini

Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon. — Oscar Wilde

I think the political process has degenerated into name-calling and extremism, and I think that that's unfortunate. — Bill Bradley

Learning and education have frequently degenerated into the systematic accumulation of facts and information. — Stephen Batchelor

The most widely raised type of silkworm, the larva of the 'Bombyx mori', no longer exists anywhere in a natural state. As my encyclopedia poignantly puts it: 'The legs of the larvae have degenerated, and the adults no longer fly'. — Jeffrey Eugenides

A few of the other Traders who dispute that the dragons are anything but animals said that she was taking the matter too seriously, that creatures that can only communicate with some people rather than everyone should not be treated as if they are equal to humans. And then, of course, the arguments degenerated. Some demanded to know if that meant speakers of foreign languages were not full humans. Someone else quipped that surely — Robin Hobb

hatred is degenerated love, — Henryk Sienkiewicz

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on. — Ursula K. Le Guin

And who had the honor to be, as a child, the play-fellow of our king, Louis XIII, whom God preserve! Sometimes their play degenerated into battles, and in these — Alexandre Dumas

In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique. — Charles Jencks

Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated! — Charles Dickens

Over the years, our political system has degenerated to the extent that it is difficult for anyone to make any headway yet keep his hands clean. — Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

Unless a decision has degenerated into work, it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention. — Peter Drucker

About Justice departing from the shepherds: Justice illustrates a passage from Virgil's Georgics, in which he describes how Astraea, the goddess of Justice, who used to live among mortals during the Golden Age, took refuge among country people, as times degenerated, and at length fled even from them. Rosa shows the cloud-borne goddess departing from a tumbledown farmstead as she hands her sword and scales to a bemused group of peasants, one of whom awkwardly pulls of his hat in respect. — Jonathan Scott

He is the best gentleman that is the son of his own deserts, and not the degenerated heir of another's virtue. — Victor Hugo

The patchwork political landscape of the Arab world - the client monarchies, degenerated nationalist dictatorships, and the imperial petrol stations known as the Gulf states - was the outcome of an intensive experience of Anglo-French colonialism. — Tariq Ali

When we act pugnaciously, and injuriously, and angrily, and rudely, to what level have we degenerated? To the level of the wild beasts. Well, the fact is that some of us are wild beasts of a larger size, while others are little animals, malignant and petty. — Epictetus

Caballero said the CIA's psychological torture methods often degenerated into physical torture, citing a young woman who was stripped, starved, deprived of sleep, beaten, burned, electrically shocked and sexually molested. — Anonymous

The principle of real leadership ignored, the immortal objects of society forgotten, practical conservatism degenerated into mere laudation of private enterprise, economic policy almost wholly surrendered to special interests. — Russell Kirk

The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight. — Barbara Tuchman

In proportion as architecture degenerated, printing throve and flourished. The capital of forces which human thought had expended in building, it henceforth expended in books. — Victor Hugo

Instead of preaching the good news that sinners can be made righteous in Christ and escape the wrath to come, the gospel has degenerated into the pretext that we can be happy in Christ and escape the hassles of life. — Ray Comfort

But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not from The Home, or The School, or The Church, but from that fourth and other great moulder of social conscience, The Movies. From all those movies that had begun to come out when Roosevelt went in.
He had been a kid back then, a kid who had not been on the bum yet, but he was raised up on all those movies that they made then, the ones that were between '32 and '37 and had not yet degenerated into commercial imitations of themselves like the Dead End Kid perpetual series that we have now. He had grown up with them, those movies like the every first Dead End, like Winternet, like Grapes Of Wrath, like Dust Be My Destiny, and those other movies starring John Garfield and the Lane girls, and the on-the-bum and prison pictures starring James Cagney and George Raft and Henry Fonda. — James Jones

We, the Jews, not only have degenerated and are located at the end of the path, we spoiled the blood of all the peoples of Europe ... Jews are descended from a mixture of waste of all races. — Theodor Herzl

Christianity was created by some decadent and degenerated Romans as a tool of oppression, in the late Roman era, and it should be treated accordingly. It is like handcuffs to the mind and spirit and is nothing but destructive to mankind. In fact I don't really see Christianity as a religion. It is more like a spiritual plague, a mass psychosis, and it should first and foremost be treated as a problem to be solved by the medical science. Christianity is a diagnosis. It's like Islam and the other Asian religions, a HIV/AIDS of the spirit and mind. — Varg Vikernes

The Four Black Boxes To demonstrate that Western institutions have indeed degenerated, I am going to have to open up some long-sealed black boxes. The first is the one labelled 'democracy'. The second is labelled 'capitalism'. The third is 'the rule of law'. And the fourth is 'civil society'. Together, — Niall Ferguson

Men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes. — William Winwood Reade

In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route. — Charles Eames

A King, by disallowing Acts of this salutary nature, from being the father of his people, degenerated into a Tyrant and forfeits all rights to his subjects' obedience. — Patrick Henry

Text talk? How can the art of writing, once performed by monastic scribes, have degenerated into little more than creative candyfloss? — Fennel Hudson

He said that knowledge was of little use without wisdom, and that there was no wisdom without spirituality, and that true spirituality always included service to others. As he explained many times, the essence of a good physician consisted of a capacity for compassion and a sense of the ethical, without which qualities the sacred art of healing degenerated into simple charlatanism. — Isabel Allende

See how the world (whose chaste and pregnant womb Of late conceiv'd, and brought forth nothing ill) Is now degenerated, and become A base adult'ress, whose false births do fill The earth with monsters, monsters that do roam And rage about, and make a trade to kill: Now glutt'ny paunches, and avarice a pawn; Pale envy pines, pride swells, and sloth begins to yawn. — Francis Quarles

It is simply the truth that the political system that I am part of has degenerated to the point that it needs fundamental change. — Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

The sad and tragic fact is that the civil rights movement, despite its honorable and courageous past, has over the years degenerated into a demagogic hustle, promoting the mindless racism they once fought against. — Thomas Sowell

Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males. — Newt Gingrich

The proper role of humanists is not to bring 'human values' to the attention of technicians otherwise engaged in a purely instrumental approach to their calling, but to demand the restoration of the practical or moral element in callings that have degenerated into techniques. — Christopher Lasch

The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy. — Theodor Adorno

Bertrand Russell started off as a mathematician and then degenerated into a philosopher and finally into a humanist; he went downhill rapidly! — Gregory Chaitin

That this liberty [of the press] is often carried to excess; that it has sometimes degenerated into licentiousness, is seen and lamented, but the remedy has not yet been discovered. Perhaps it is an evil inseparable from the good with which it is allied; perhaps it is a shoot which cannot be stripped from the stalk without wounding vitally the plant from which it is torn. However desirable those measures might be which might correct without enslaving the press, they have never yet been devised in America. — James Madison

Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills. — David Mamet

people to ourselves rather than Jesus, and then wonder why power has left the pulpit and why the deep theological treasures of some of the old hymns have degenerated into songs that exalt us above the glory of our Creator. Despite our pretensions, our pride grows — Matt Boswell

Stepan Arkadyevitch felt exactly the difference that Pyotr Oblonsky described. In Moscow he degenerated so much that if he had had to be there for long together, he might in good earnest have come to considering his salvation; in Petersburg he felt himself a man of the world again. — Leo Tolstoy