Moribund Quotes & Sayings

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial. — Martin Luther King Jr.

How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well? — William James

Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science - the science against which it had vainly struggled - the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome. — Winston S. Churchill

That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund. — Anthony Bourdain

It was to a moribund horse, and Mr. Sidlow, describing the treatment to date, announced that he had been pushing raw onions up the horse's rectum; he couldn't understand why it was so uneasy on its legs. Siegfried had pointed out that if he were to insert a raw onion in Mr. Sidlow's rectum, he, Mr. Sidlow, would undoubtedly be uneasy on his legs. — James Herriot

To try to give our infatuation a higher place than Truth is a sign of inherent slavishness. Where our minds are free we find ourselves lost. Our moribund vitality must have for its rider either some fantasy, or someone in authority, or a sanction from the pundits, in order to make it move. So long as we are
impervious to truth and have to be moved by some hypnotic stimulus, we must know that we lack the capacity for self- government. Whatever may be our condition, we shall either need some imaginary ghost or some actual medicine-man to terrorize over us. — Rabindranath Tagore

One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counterstatements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue: responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another. — Susan Sontag

...the work of his favourite painter at the time, brett whitely, seemed to offer some focus for his rebellious attitude towards moribund suburban melbourne. cave was intrigued by the intensity and diversity of the themes that the sydney-based painter included in his landscapes — Ian Johnston

In an era when most bands were about nothing, the Manics were about everything: an eloquent scream, a j'accuse to the entire moribund millennium. — Simon Price

The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund's last breath. — Vladimir Nabokov

It's the same thing that makes all pop music so heartbreaking. Even when Miley Cyrus sings "So I put my hands up, they're playin' my song / The butterflies fly away / I'm noddin' my head like 'Yeah!' / Movin' my hips like 'Yeah!'" in her song "Party in the U.S.A." It's that chirping mirth against a backdrop of despair, that juxtaposition of blithe optimism against all the crushing brutalities and inadequacies of life. The image of an ineffably beautiful butterfly flitting by the shattered windows of a dilapidated, abandoned factory is not so poignant because it highlights the indomitable life force. To the contrary, the butterfly (and the pop song) is like a PowerPoint cursor; it's there to whet our perception of and strengthen our affinity for what's moribund, for what's always dying before our eyes. Loving the moribund is our way of signaling the dead from this shore: "We are your kinsmen ... — Mark Leyner

A Power sidled into the diner.
Say what you will about them, but they know how to make an entrance. An inky shadow wrapped in a lashing rain of ash and sleet, it rode on 144,000 constantly flickering legs of forked lightning. This particular jasper's proper name was the basso profundo thrum of dark matter winging through the void, the fizz of neutrinos boiling off a moribund blue supergiant, and the bitter-tangerine taste of a quadrillion-dimension symmetry group. But I called it Sam for short. — Ian Tregillis

The distance we set between ourselves and the events of our past life, which reduces their scale, the backlog of things we failed to notice at the time, the logic which connects them, which back then was invisible, the light shed on them by the epoch they belong to, which mankind already considers a moribund piece of history, their ultimate strangeness, which makes us look back on the person we were as though they were a different being, all these things conspire to turn our past into a dream. — Catherine Millet

But neither will anyone ask us whether we will it or do not will it when the spiritual strength of the West fails and the West starts to come apart at the seams, when this moribund pseudocivilization collapses into itself, pulling all forces into confusion and allowing them to suffocate in madness.
Whether such a thing occurs or does not occur, this depends solely on whether we as a historical-spiritual Volk will ourselves, still and again, or whether we will ourselves no longer. Each individual has a part in deciding this, even if, and precisely if, he seeks to evade this decision.
But it is our will that our Volk fulfill its historical mission. — Martin Heidegger

Ah! that Senate is a world of ice and darkness! It votes the destruction of peoples as the simplest and wisest thing; for its members themselves are moribund. — George Sand

She tends to think the sanest policy is a sort of spiritual triage, saving your efforts for those who are likely to make it with a little immediate aid - a small loan, a job recommendation, a couch to crash on for a week or two - and dispassionately ignoring the moribund. But what do you do if you don't have the option to walk away, to hang up or hit IGNORE, because you're bound to someone by obligation or love? What — Tim Kreider

Hinduism is a relentless pursuit of Truth. "Truth is God" and if today it has become moribund, inactive, irresponsive to growth, it is because we are fatigued; and as soon as the fatigue is over, Hinduism will burst upon the world with a brilliance perhaps unknown before. — Mahatma Gandhi

in a postmodern world, even gods and sacred objects must travel or lose their vitality; any deity that remained stuck in its place and original purpose would soon become moribund. — Okey Ndibe

When I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State after Grinnell, I joined the moribund remnants of the Actor's Workshop, until I saw Kay Hayward and Sandy Archer in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and drove down that day to audition. The rest is history. — Peter Coyote

While the official church was moribund, the house churches kept alight the flame of Christian witness. The church survived as a lay movement, often led by poorly educated Bible women who memorized Scripture and passed on the faith to family members and (if they dared) to neighbors and friends. — Kim-Kwong Chan

33,3% of the mice used in this experiment were cured by the test drug; 33,3% of the population were unaffected by the drug and remained in a moribund condition; the third mouse got away. — Erwin Neter

Angela Carter ... refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life. From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale's rescuer, the form's own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself.
(from "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter") — Marina Warner

Sometimes when the year grinds to its end and the new term begins I feel I'm living the life of a fruit fly - the endless ephemeral cycle, each new semester a "fresh start" that leads to the same moribund conclusions. — Julie Schumacher

Better a good venereal disease than a moribund peace and quiet. — Henry Miller

No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. — Winston Churchill

As soon as we confront concrete marriages with other foreign images-such as well-being, happiness, a home for children-marriage appears to be senseless, withered, moribund, and kept alive largely by a great apparatus of psychologists and marriage counselors. Marriage is dead. Long live marriage! — Adolf Guggenbhuhl-Craig

No amount of artificial protection can permanently maintain an obsolete product, an inferior process or a moribund organization against competitors which are based on scientifically improved products or methods. — Karl Taylor Compton

'Blue Valentine,' Derek Cianfrance's emotional gunslinger of a film, tears into the topic of moribund marriages with an honesty that's hard to come by in Hollywood these days. — Katie Hafner

A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. — Toni Morrison

When Limbaugh entered the world of talk radio, the AM dial was essentially moribund. He turned it into a weapon for conservatism, and in the process, led the revolution that has ended in the disintegration of the old media monopoly. — Ben Shapiro

Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed. — David Quammen

It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to re-establish the worship of Wotan. Our old mythology ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself. Nothing dies unless it is moribund. — Adolf Hitler

All our lives are miraculous if only we are willing to view them that way. The world keeps on pulsing new amazements, providing a constant series of epiphanies, illuminations, peak experiences. If, out of inattention, cynicism or a moribund view of the world, we don't respond to the wondrous, then we get what we expect: a confirmation that life is unsurprising. — Pierre Delattre

Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case ... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two. — Arnold J. Toynbee

Geometry is moribund. I want a lilt and joy to art. — Ellsworth Kelly

Loving a holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands. Unless we are born of the Spirit of God, unless God sheds His holy love in our hearts, unless He stoops in His grace to change our hearts, we will not love Him ... To love a holy God requires grace, grace strong enough to pierce our hardened hearts and awaken our moribund souls. — R.C. Sproul