Quotes About Degeneracy

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy hypocrisy.

MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. Animals, as distinct from man, are not machine-like, not sadistic; their societies, within the same species, are incomparably more peaceful than those of man. The basic question, then is: What has made the animal, man, degenerate into a machine?

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creatures could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet?

In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve.

But in all despotic governments, though a particular prince may favour arts and letter, there is a natural degeneracy of mankind.

It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse, physical or mental, stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the normal sex instinct, for example, is responsible for a thousand ills. In Puritan countries one inevitably finds a morbid preoccupation with sex coupled with every form of perversion and degeneracy.

if he lost his way in a moment of collective hysteria, that's because the horrors of everyday life are sufficiently powerful to overwhelm all defenses, and human degeneracy is deeper than any abyss.

But the forces of evil have not abdicated. The malevolent ghosts of hatred are resurgent with a fury and a boldness that are as astounding as they are nauseating: ethnic conflicts, religious riots, anti-Semitic incidents here, there, and everywhere. What is wrong with these morally degenerate people that they abuse their freedom, so recently won?

The degeneracy of mankind is distinguished from its uprise by the dominance of chill abstractions, divorced from aesthetic content.

Very rarely are you going to see a story about a comic winning a fight. Yeah we're all degenerates in some way and we're all awful people, so we just show our weaknesses.

The ruin of a State is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners and contempt of religion.

Depravity feeds on depravity, and with no sense right and wrong, there is nothing for them to hold on to.

They were failing by the hundreds and thousands in their attempt to fill the shoes of a man like the Emperor, but she dared to call the Archive chaos. What did she call the mess the self-appointed Provisional Council was creating out there? What word did she have for the infinite loss of direction in the souls of the people whose lives they had destroyed? What word for the deterioration of morality, for the spreading degeneracy? How would she describe the results of their limitless failure?

Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.

Love is basic for the birth of a true society, while violence has in it the essence of anti-sociality. Love is positive, is eternal: violence is degeneracy, it is it's own destruction.

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.

Those who wallow around in the sickness of their immorality and degeneracy get very little joy out of life here and certainly not much promise is held out for them hereafter.

In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain – hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause – will claim to be great leaders

Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this 'living down', which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.

Your authority and my degeneracy are one in the same.

Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says 'All for me' is a horror to us.

The lust of gold succeeds the rage of conquest; The lust of gold, unfeeling and remorseless! The last corruption of degenerate man.

Degeneracy follows every autocratic system of violence, for violence inevitably attracts moral inferiors. Time has proven that illustrious tyrants are succeeded by scoundrels.

Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people.