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Quotes About Decay

Seventy-five percent of our soldiers were manual laborers. Many among them had been susceptible, once, to Soviet propaganda. They stood with their mouths agape when they saw in what conditions of decay and exhaustion the Russian proletariat existed. They shook their heads, having to look twice at the scene before believing it.
~ Leon Degrelle
Mentir ha llegado a ser una forma de espíritu. El honor ha perdido todo sentido, el honor del juramento, el honor a servir, el honor de morir. Se ríen de quienes se aferran todavía a esos viejos ritos. La virtud ha perdido su dulce canto de fuente. Las sonrisas no son ya los sentimientos del corazón, sino suspiros, estafas o rictus. Las almas se asfixian, el aire es pesado, cargado de todos los renunciamientos espirituales
~ Leon Degrelle
Though murdered kings, like all dead men, lie quiet and unoffending in the ground, they rot and spread contagion in men's minds.
~ Leon Garfield
The fundamental evil of the capitalist system is not the extravagance of the possessing classes, however disgusting that may be in itself, but the fact that in order to guarantee its right to extravagance the bourgeoisie maintains its private ownership of the means of production, thus condemning the economic system to anarchy and decay.
~ Leon Trotsky
JINGLE To show the fat brain rotting like stumps of brown teeth in an old bright throat is the final clever thrill of summer lads all dead with love. So here is mine, torn and stretched for the sun, to be used for a drum or a tambourine, to be scratched with poetry by Kafka's machine
~ Leonard Cohen
I'm stubborn as those garbage bags That time cannot decay
~ Leonard Cohen
One thing and one thing alone keeps us from complete decay in this hour - the church, the true Church.
~ Leonard Ravenhill
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
~ lessing doris v
It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended.
~ Lev Grossman
She was a goddess of darkness as well as light. A Black Madonna: the blackness of death, but also the blackness of good soil, dark with decay, which gives rise to life.
~ Lev Grossman
until sunlight came bleeding up over the horizon, like more acid blood oozing out of his sick ruptured heart, which felt - not that anybody cared - like a rotten drum of biohazardous waste at the very bottom of a landfill, leaching poison into the groundwater, enough poison to kill an entire suburb full of innocent and unsuspecting children.
~ Lev Grossman
A Black Madonna: the blackness of death, but also the blackness of good soil, dark with decay, which gives rise to life.
~ Lev Grossman
I was perfectly happy where I was, deliquescing, atom by atom, amid a riot of luxury.
~ Lev Grossman
We might make a public moan in the newspapers about the decay of conscience, but in private conversation, no matter what crimes a man may have committed or how cynically he may have debased his talent or his friends, variations on the answer Yes, but I did it for the money, satisfy all but the most tiresome objections.
~ Lewis Lapham
Civilizations are built by the ceaseless toil of a succession of generations. With softness and sloth, civilizations succumb. Let us beware of decadence.
~ Rajiv Gandhi
Living in Barcelona, I have my own little ghetto utopia. There are 3,000 ghost towns in Spain, and I've used the images of them a lot in my backdrops for my solo spoken-word stuff. The ghost towns could be from two buildings to 40 - things died out, or there were plagues, the roads don't lead there, whatever.
~ Lydia Lunch
Downtown Detroit has more vacant buildings over 10 storeys than any city in the world.
~ Meg White
I'm not very keen on ageing. I'm not keen on the physical decay. I probably am quite vain. I think you want to try and look OK for the benefit of other people.
~ Jarvis Cocker
half of its carbon 14 content decays into nitrogen 14 every 5,700 years, until
~ Jared Diamond
He jerked a thumb in the direction of the baby on the stretcher, who had put his fingers in his mouth and stopped yelling. 'That was the driver. Before the accident he was thirty-one. By the time we got here he was eight – in a few hours he'll be nothing more than a damp patch on the blanket.
~ Jasper Fforde
más tarde rebajadas a la categoría del ornamento ideológico por el militante gordezuelo, afeminado, incompetente, astuto y conservador que las usurpó, acabarían convertidas en a parafernalia cada vez más podrida y huérfana de significado con la que un puñado de patanes luchó durante cuarenta años de pesadumbre para justificar su regimen de mierda.
~ Javier Cercas
I had stayed still and let the days pass, which is the best way to allow things in the real world to dissolve or break down, although they remain forever in our thoughts and in our knowledge, solid and putrid and stinking to high heaven. But that is bearable and we can live with it. Who doesn't carry something of that nature around with them?
~ Javier Marías
We were all moving to a pre-ordained end. You just had to open the papers and read the international news, or the crime reports. We didn't need nuclear weapons. We were killing each other with prehistoric savagery. We were just dinosaurs, and the worst thing of all was that we knew it.
~ Jean-Claude Izzo
What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star.
~ Jeanette Winterson