Degeneration Quotes

“The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate bondage, and the meanest and most servile preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principle put themselves forward as the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where all things are out of their natural connections, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I

“If there is anything good about nobility it is that it enforces the necessity of avoiding degeneracy”
― Boethius

“Every great phenomenon is followed by degeneration, particularly in the realm of art. The model of the great man stimulates vainer natures to imitate him outwardly or to surpass him; in addition, all great talents have the fateful quality of stifling many weaker forces and needs, and seem to devastate the nature around them. The most fortunate instance in the development of art is when several geniuses reciprocally keep each other in check; in this kind of a struggle, weaker and gentle natures are generally also allowed air and light.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Rose was patently a degenerate. Nature, in scheduling his characteristics, had pruned all superlatives. The rude armour of the flesh, under which the spiritual, like a hide-bound chrysalis, should develop secret and self-contained, was perished in his case, as it were, to a semi-opaque suit, through which his soul gazed dimly and fearfully on its monstrous arbitrary surroundings. Not the mantle of the poet, philosopher, or artist fallen upon such, can still its shiverings, or give the comfort that Nature denies.

Yet he was a little bit of each - poet, philosopher, and artist; a nerveless and self-deprecatory stalker of ideals, in the pursuit of which he would wear patent leather shoes and all the apologetic graces. The grandson of a 'three-bottle' J.P., who had upheld the dignity of the State constitution while abusing his own in the best spirit of squirearchy; the son of a petulant dyspeptic, who alternated seizures of long moroseness with fits of abject moral helplessnes, Amos found his inheritance in the reversion of a dissipated constitution, and an imagination as sensitive as an exposed nerve. Before he was thirty he was a neurasthenic so practised, as to have learned a sense of luxury in the very consciousness of his own suffering. It was a negative evolution from the instinct of self-protection - self-protection, as designed in this case, against the attacks of the unspeakable.

("The Accursed Cordonnier")”
― Bernard Capes, Gaslit Nightmares: Stories by Robert W. Chambers, Charles Dickens, Richard Marsh, and Others

“Degeneration and illness of our body is natural, but still we need to nurture it and take care of it, as we carry it until the last breath.”
― Anupama Garg, The Tantric Curse

“There are those who feel that the world is ultimately moving closer to Truth and to prosperity as the times evolve; then there are those who feel that it is ultimately moving farther away from Truth and into self-destruction. From this, and if it were really that simplistic, one might get the impression that life gravitates slightly into two types of people whom which are diametrically opposed in spirit.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“For many generations, as tradition tells, the people of Atlantis were obedient to the laws and to the gods, and practiced gentleness and wisdom in their intercourse with one another. They knew that they could only have the true use of riches by not caring about them. But gradually the divine portion of their souls became diluted with too much of the mortal admixture, and they began to degenerate, though to the outward eye they appeared glorious as ever at the very time when they were filled with all iniquity.”
― Plato, Critias

“It was inevitable, as soon as legends of miracles became attached to the names of the great mystics, that the credulous masses should applaud imposture more than true devotion; the cult of the saints, against which orthodox Islam ineffectually protested, promoted ignorance and superstition, and confounded charlatanry with lofty speculation. To live scandalously, to act impudently, to speak unintelligibly—this was the easy highroad to fame, wealth, and power.”
― A.J. Arberry, Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam

“Every generation looks back longingly to an earlier age when things were simpler and clearer, a time before degeneration began.”
― Arthur Miller

“The signal-fires of warning
They blaze, but none regard;
And on through night to morning
The world runs ruinward.”
― A.E. Housman, More Poems

“And still you wonder why your heart
is anxious and your breast constricted,
why a pain you cannot account for
inhibits your vitality completely!
You are surrounded, not by the living world
in which God placed mankind,
but, amid smoke and mustiness,
only by bones of beasts and of the dead.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

“Between the pleasure of a kiss and of what a man and woman do in bed seems to me only a gradation. A kiss, for instance, is not to be minimized, or its value judged by anyone else. I wonder do these men grade their pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a question of pleasure after all, and what's the use debating the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football gamme--or a Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I'll leave that to the philosophers. But their attitude was that I must be somehow demented or blind (plus a kind of regret, I thought, at the fact that a fairly attractive woman is presumably unavailable to men). [...] The most important point I did not mention and was not thought of by anyone--that the rapport between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing that happens between men and women. It was said or at least implied yesterday that my present course would bring me to the depths of human vice and degeneration. Yes, I have sunk a good deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial thing--that is degeneration. Or to live against one's grain, that is degeneration by definition.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“​More than GM Foods I am afraid of GMM People. Genetically and Mentally Mutated People. The Entire Ecosystem Mutates.”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“....the course of further American degeneration might have brought if nuclear war had not intervened. It is always difficult to know how far into degradation a nation can go before something snaps. Sometimes it is possible to escape the consequences of immorality if a society has clever leaders. But America was a democracy, and the combination of widespread immorality and stupidity cut off all hopes that immorality could find a cunning solution. That the immoral are, under the sensualist regime, anything but cunning, is absolutely fatal to the whole notion of sensualist progress.
J.R.Nyquist”
― J.R.Nyquist

“Non-Christians were alternately baffled and repelled by such excess. Pliny himself describes Christianity as nothing more than a ‘degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths’. For a long time, Romans struggled to understand why Christians couldn’t simply add the worship of this new Christian god to the old ones. It was known that Christianity had sprung from Judaism and that even the Jews had offered prayer and sacrifice to Augustus and later emperors in their temple. If they had done so – and theirs was the more ancient religion – then why couldn’t the Christians? Monotheism in the rigid Christian sense was all but unthinkable to polytheists. ‘If you have recognized Christ,’ as one official put it, ‘then recognize our gods too.’ Not just unthinkable but, to many, unnecessary to the point of histrionic. As another prefect in another trial pithily put it: ‘What is so serious about offering some incense and going away?’ The emperor Marcus Aurelius disparaged martyrdom as mere ‘stage heroics’. Others saw it as simply deluded: Lucian scornfully described the Christians as those ‘poor wretches [who] have convinced themselves, first and foremost, that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, in consequence of which they despise death and even willingly give themselves into custody’.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“It would be absurd to maintain that Marxism was, so to speak, the efficient cause of present-day Communism; on the other hand, Communism is not a mere 'degeneration' of Marxism but a possible interpretation of it, and even a well-founded one, though primitive and partial in some respects.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“¿Dónde se ha ido […] aquella familia que se reunía en las veladas alrededor del piano, protegida del frío de fuera por feas y confortables cortinas de paño verde?”
― Carmen Laforet, Nada

“Don't hit rock bottom unless you reach the bottom of your coffin.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Завжди існуватимуть жадібні люди. Зрештою вони завжди там, де є (чи мали би бути) гроші. Але жадібні люди шахраюватимуть чи дозволятимуть собі недбало ставитися, лише якщо відчуватимуть, що навряд чи їхній злочин помітять, чи суворо покарають за нього.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration

“When you no longer reward intelligence as much as simply going through school and memorizing enough stuff to fool the exams, the percentage of actually intelligent people drops and they are replaced by the middle of the bell curve. Since this happens across the board, no one notices because they lack the ability.”
― Brett Stevens