Quotes & Sayings About Degenerates

Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

If we lose our significance (character) we fall in ruin. The exploiters take over and sell freedom from fear, from guilt, from want. They excuse all corrupt actions. Collective status degenerates the human spirit. — Moxie Will

The empiric easily degenerates into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge begins or leaves off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he begins to pretend-to make claims for which there is no justification, and to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others-to "bluff." — John Dewey

Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work. — Calvin Trillin

If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport. — Patricia Hampl

Hospitality sometimes degenerates into profuseness, and ends in madness and folly. — Francis Atterbury

James Bond in his Sean Connery days ... was the first well-known bachelor on the American scene who was not a drifter or a degenerate and did not eat out of cans. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The people are the ultimate guardians of their own liberties. In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy ... Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. — Thomas Jefferson

All good strategy eventually degenerates into work. — Peter Drucker

It must be confessed that horses at present work too exclusively for men, rarely men for horses; and the brute degenerates in man's society. — Henry David Thoreau

Sir, when the love of peace degenerates into fear of war, it becomes of all passions the most despicable." - Senator Giles of Virginia, to President Thomas Jefferson, before the War of 1812 — Joe Buff

Most of the trades, professions, and ways of living among mankind, take their original either from the love of the pleasure, or the fear of want. The former, when it becomes too violent, degenerates into luxury, and the latter into avarice. — Joseph Addison

As iron rusts when not used, and water gets foul from standing or turns to ice when exposed to cold, so the intellect degenerates without exercise.
-Leonard Da Vinci — Leonardo Da Vinci

A man's ability cannot possibly be of one sort and his soul of another. If his soul be well-ordered, serious and restrained, his ability also is sound and sober. Conversely, when the one degenerates, the other is contaminated. — Seneca The Younger

Frugality and economy are virtues without which no household can prosper. Whatever the income, waste of all kinds should be most sternly repressed ... Economy and frugality must never, however, be allowed to degenerate into meanness. — Isabella Beeton

We should not permit tolerance to degenerate into indifference. — Margaret Chase Smith

Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life. — Roger Kimball

Children of India, I am here to speak to you to-day about some practical things, and my object in reminding you about the glories of the past is simply this. Many times have I been told that looking into the past only degenerates and leads to nothing, and that we should look to the future. That is true. But out of the past is built the future. Look back, therefore, as far as you can, drink deep of the eternal fountains that are behind, and after that, look forward, march forward, and make India brighter, greater, much higher than she ever was. Our ancestors were great. We must recall that. We must learn the elements of our being, the blood that courses in our veins; we must have faith in that blood, and what it did in the past: and out of that faith, and consciousness of past greatness, we must build an India yet greater than what she has been. And — Annie Besant

You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base. — Anthony Bourdain

Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp. — George Santayana

Still, we've gone soft since those days of wartime sacrifice, haven't we? Contemporary humans are too self-centered, too addicted to gratification to live without the full freedom to satisfy our every whim - or so our culture tells us every day. And yet the truth is that we continue to make collective sacrifices in the name of an abstract greater good all the time. We sacrifice our pensions, our hard-won labor rights, our arts and after-school programs. We send our kids to learn in ever more crowded classrooms, led by ever more harried teachers. We accept that we have to pay dramatically more for the destructive energy sources that power our transportation and our lives. We accept that bus and subway fares go up and up while service fails to improve or degenerates. We accept that a public university education should result in a debt that will take half a lifetime to pay off when such a thing was unheard of a generation ago. — Naomi Klein

Prayer is not one of the many things the community does. Rather, it is its very beingBut when prayer is no longer its primary concern, and when its many activities are no longer seen and experienced as part of prayer itself, the community quickly degenerates into a club with a common cause but no common vocation. — Henri Nouwen

The activities of these parasites and degenerates gave rise to Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Pointillism, Constructivism, Orphism, Surrealism, Dada, and also Impossibleism, Supersurrealism, Dynamic Double-Dog Realism, Ishkabibbleism, and Mama, which is like Dada only nicer. — Daniel Pinkwater

I cannot favour laws such as that of Idaho, which allows sterilization of 'mental defectives, epileptics, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sex perverts.' The last two categories here are very vague ... The law of Idaho would have justified the sterilization of Socrates, Plato, Julius Caesar, and St. Paul. — Bertrand Russell

It seems to be almost inevitable that the man who accepts a subordinate economic position in the Family degenerates into a loafer and a tyrant. — Helen Bosanquet

The primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races. — Harry J. Anslinger

The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions. — Colin Wilson

The prejudice of unfounded belief often degenerates into the prejudice of custom, and becomes at last rank hypocrisy. When men, from custom or fashion or any worldly motive, profess or pretend to believe what they do not believe, nor can give any reason for believing, they unship the helm of their morality, and being no longer honest to their own minds they feel no moral difficulty in being unjust to others. — Thomas Paine

As Pope Benedict writes in Caritas in Veritate: Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality.[2] — James Schall

Letter-writing too often degenerates into a communicating of facts, and not of truths; of other men's deeds and not our thoughts.What are the convulsions of a planet, compared with the emotions of the soul? or the rising of a thousand suns, if that is not enlightened by a ray? — Henry David Thoreau

David Simon [the creator of The Wire] and I have a running controversy for years. It all stems from a telephone call I made to KPFA [Pacifica radio] when he was a guest there in the 90's on Chris Welche's show. He was going around the country with a Black kid from the Ghetto to promote something called The Corner - it was all about Blacks as degenerates selling drugs, etc. — Ishmael Reed

By consequence I hold that no one ever did, or can do, anything for "society." ... Comte invented the term altruism as an antonym for egoism , and it found its way at once into everyone's mouth, although it is utterly devoid of meaning, since it points to nothing that ever existed in mankind; This hybrid or rather this degenerate form of hedonism served powerfully to invest collectivism 's principles with a specious moral sanction, and collectivists naturally made the most of it. — Albert J. Nock

Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life. — Alfred North Whitehead

I became a degenerate artist. My parents were shaped by their own experiences, and artists weren't so useful in the death camps. — Art Spiegelman

How do you think I got to this point? Each day another step on an unending staircase? Months of searching, dredging through the filthiest places you could ever imagine, all in an attempt to find knowledge in the words of degenerates? To weed truths from the mouths of liars? You have no cause to judge my actions, and more than that you have no right. You do not know the things I have been through or the evil of the man I am searching for. He stole everything I had. Tortured me to the point of madness and left me with nothing. I am destroyed. All I could have had is gone, and there will never be an opportunity to regain it. Do you truly think a man like that deserves to be left alive? After all he has done? Or that, given the chance, he would not do the same thing to others? — Angela B. Wade

Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists — Max Nordau

In work consists the true pride of life; grounded in active employment, though early ardor may abate, it never degenerates into indifference, and age lives in perennial youth. Life is a weariness only to the idle, or where the soul is empty. — Leopold Hartley Grindon

Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen. — Peter Drucker

Without the truth of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void. — Jerry Brown

Pleasure, scarcely in one instance, is ever able to reach ecstasy and rapture; and in no one instance can it continue for any time at its highest pitch and altitude. The spirits evaporate, the nerves relax, the fabric is disordered, and the enjoyment quickly degenerates into fatigue and uneasiness. But pain often, good God, how often! rises to torture and agony; and the longer it continues, it becomes still more genuine agony and torture. Patience is exhausted, courage languishes, melancholy seizes us, and nothing terminates our misery but the removal of its cause, or another event, which is the sole cure of all evil, but which, from our natural folly, we regard with still greater horror and consternation. — David Hume

The cell is immortal. It is merely the fluid in which it floats that degenerates. Renew this fluid at regular intervals, give the cells what they require for nutrition, and as far as we know, the pulsation of life can go on forever. — Alexis Carrel

The most persistent hate is that which doth degenerate from love. — Walter Map

Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. — John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

Aristocracy has three successive ages. First superiority s, then privileges and finally vanities. Having passed from the first, it degenerates in the second and dies in the third. — Bill Vaughan

This evil of taking our cue from others has become so deeply ingrained that even that most basic feeling, grief, degenerates into imitation. — Seneca.

Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. — Pope Benedict XVI

All the public business in Congress now connects itself with intrigues, and there is great danger that the whole government will degenerate into a struggle of cabals. — John Quincy Adams

Fear is the proof of a degenerate mind. — Virgil

So who the hell, exactly, are these guys, the boys and girls in the trenches? You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base. The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong. Maybe they didn't make it through high school, maybe they're running away from something-be it an ex-wife, a rotten family history, trouble with the law, a squalid Third World backwater with no opportunity for advancement. Or maybe, like me, they just like it here. — Anthony Bourdain

Wisdom degenerates in governments as governments increase in age. — Thomas Paine

So hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip ... In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. — Henry David Thoreau

A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism. The distinguishing characteristic of small republics is stability: the character of large republics is mutability. — Simon Bolivar

Prudence is a necessary ingredient in all the virtues, without which they degenerate into folly and excess. — Jeremy Collier

We humans progressively exterminate every support mechanism. The earth progressively degenerates toward a form of quadriplegia, completely impotent to protect all it sustains. — Luke Gracias

Religion only helps; until and unless it degenerates into either ritualism or fanaticism, or worse the both! — Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre

Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility, and the young should not only shun it, but by the most thorough culture relieve themselves from all temptation to indulge in it. It is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are country neighborhoods in which it rages like a pest. Churches are split in pieces by it. Neighbors are made enemies by it for life. In many persons it degenerates into a chronic disease, which is practically incurable. Let the young cure it while they may. — J.G. Holland

There may be something petty in a refined taste; it easily degenerates into effeminacy. It does not consider the broadest use. It is not content with simple good and bad, and so is fastidious and curious or nice only. — Henry David Thoreau

Alas, 'tis force alone that can compel to virtuous actions a degenerate people. — Vittorio Alfieri

Art must be in touch with nature - and wherever that touch is gone, Art degenerates - yet it must be above nature. — Swami Vivekananda

Hey'? Seriously?" I spared a moment to be grateful that my voice worked when the rest of me seemed to be malfunctioning. "I pass out under your care, then wake up half paralyzed to hear that some kind of 'horde' is in our area, and that's your opener? 'Hey'?"
Finn shrugged while I glared up at him. "I almost went with 'Get up and help me pack before we're overrun by a horde of degenerates,' but I was afraid that might lead to more panic than the situation actually warrants."
"There's a limit to how much panic a situation like that warrants? — Rachel Vincent

It is a triumph of the Omnimalevolent Creator's design. As technique is improved, joy declines. Inevitably, talent degenerates too. — John Zande

The whole psychoanalytical establishment in America at midcentury was geared to make people with homosexual proclivities feel like monsters, moral degenerates. — Blake Bailey

Love of goodness without love of learning degenerates into simple-mindedness. Love of knowledge without love of learning degenerates into utter lack of principle. Love of faithfulness without love of learning degenerates into injurious disregard of consequences. Love of uprightness without love of learning degenerates into harshness. Love of courage without love of learning degenerates into insubordination. Love of strong character without love of learning degenerates into mere recklessness. — Confucius

Derivative trading with mark-to-market accounting degenerates into mark-to-model. Two firms make a big derivative trade and the accountants on both sides show a large profit from the same trade. — Charlie Munger

Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. — Vladimir Bukovsky

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate. — Neil Young

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched. — Henry David Thoreau

The effervescence of the previous months was losing its splendor, like the faded letters of the posters that, in these same bars, written by the same men, still recalled the Great Plans: DANCE IS THE BROTHEL'S WAITING ROOM; THE TAVERN WEAKENS CHARACTER; THE BAR DEGENERATES THE SPIRIT: LET'S CLOSE THEM! — Leonardo Padura

Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos. — Polybius

No matter how carefully records are kept and filed and computerized, they grow fuzzy with time. Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate
like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history
until it degenerates into fables. — Isaac Asimov

Prayer and action ... can never be seen as contradictory or mutually exclusive. Prayer without action grows into powerless pietism, and action without prayer degenerates into questionable manipulation. — Henri Nouwen

Apostasy occurs when a church leaves its historic moorings, abandons its historic confessional position, and degenerates into a state where either essential Christian truths are blatantly denied or the denial of such truths is widely tolerated. — R.C. Sproul

Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system. — Alfred North Whitehead

When an apple ripens and falls - what makes it fall? Is it that it is attracted to the ground, is it that the stem withers, is it that the sun has dried it up, that it has grown heavier, that the wind shakes it, that the boy standing underneath wants to eat it? No one thing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions under which every organic, elemental event of life is accomplished. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue degenerates, and so on, will be as right and as wrong as the child who stands underneath and says that the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. — Leo Tolstoy

It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax. — Edgar Allan Poe

I do not want to presuppose anything as known. I see in my explanation in section 1 the definition of the concepts point, straight line and plane, if one adds to these all the axioms of groups i-v as characteristics. If one is looking for other definitions of point, perhaps by means of paraphrase in terms of extensionless, etc., then, of course, I would most decidedly have to oppose such an enterprise. One is then looking for something that can never be found, for there is nothing there, and everything gets lost, becomes confused and vague, and degenerates into a game of hide and seek. — David Hilbert

Change is almost always negative. Things degenerate. — Woody Allen

Freedom of choice makes it possible to plan our lives and to make the most of ourselves. Yet if this freedom lacks noble goals or personal discipline, it degenerates into an inability to give oneself generously to others. — Pope Francis

Now it must be taken for granted that simplicity of life and thought is the highest and sanest ideal for civilization and culture, that when a civilization loses simplicity and the sophisticated do not return to unsophistication, civilization becomes increasingly full of troubles and degenerates. Man then becomes the slave of the ideas, thoughts, ambitions and social systems that are his own product. — Lin Yutang

Did it ever occur to you, Charlie, that tolerance can reach a point where it is no longer tolerance? When that happens, the noble-sounding attitude on which most of us pride ourselves degenerates into weakness and acquiescence. — Grace Metalious

The house of representatives ... can make no law, which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as the great mass of society. This has always been deemed one of the strongest bonds by which human policy can connect the rulers and the people together. It creates between them that communion of interest, and sympathy of sentiments, of which few governments have furnished examples; but without which every government degenerates into tyranny. — James Madison

If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind. — John Galt

A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society. — Robert McKee

The great challenge of the twentieth century ... is to create a new financial architecture in which private decisions produce a less degenerate capitalism. — Will Hutton

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. — Eric Hoffer

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion must mainly be a matter of principles only. It cannot be a matter of rules. The moment it degenerates into rules, it ceases to be a religion, as it kills responsibility which is an essence of the true religious act. — B.R. Ambedkar

It is wonderful when God saves a drunkard which He sometimes does, but it is more wonderful still when God saves little children before they become drunkards, libertines, and degenerates. — Bob Jones, Sr.

In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes. — Henry David Thoreau

Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy. — E. M. Forster

The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride, or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point - for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness. — Lawrence Durrell

Materialism is decadent and degenerate only if the spirit of the nation has withered and if individual people are so unimaginative that they wallow in it. — Brooks Atkinson

The white man in the tropics degenerates every day. — Christina Stead

Democracy is an impossible thing until the power is shared by all, but let not democracy degenerate into mobocracy. — Mahatma Gandhi

The profession to which we belong, once venerated ... -has become corrupt and degenerate to the forfeiture of its social position ... — Nathaniel Chapman

Christianity is not a law of bondage; and if it respect the hand of God which sometimes raises up tyrants, it draws up where obedience degenerates into guilty cowardice. — Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

The incentive to peacemaking is love, but it degenerates into appeasement whenever justice is ignored. To forgive and to ask for forgiveness are both costly exercises. All authentic Christian peacemaking exhibits the love and justice-and so the pain-of the cross. — John Stott

When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. — Robert McKee

I propose that 100,000 degenerate Britons should be forcibly sterilized and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race. — Winston Churchill

Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind — Theodore Roosevelt