Top 100 Degenerate Quotes
#1. But because their ancestors were men of righteousness, shall we consent to the abuses of their degenerate descendants? Because they did us a great good, would we be guilty if we prevented them from doing us evil?
Jose Rizal
#2. 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
#3. Are you a degenerate, Fisher?"
"I'm working on it.
Claire Gibson
#4. Sienna Rivers, ex-nerd, undisputed reigning chess champion of the class of 09 and the proverbial all round wise-ass degenerate pain in your backside.
Ali Harper
#5. Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#6. It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty.
James Monroe
#7. The love we have for our native land would be good and praiseworthy if it did not degenerate, as we see it does everywhere, into vanity, the spirit of predominance, acquisitiveness, hate, envy, nationalism, and militarism
Henri Barbusse
#8. It's a great medium for trivia and hobbies, but not the place for reasoned, reflective judgment. Suprisingly often, discussions degenerate into acrimony, insults and flames.
Clifford Stoll
#9. [The superstitious, "bound in to saucy doubts and fears," degenerate into cowards and "die many times before their deaths.
Sun Tzu
#10. Pure faith in the benevolece of the Divine can also degenerate into destructive forms of religion like othodoxy, fundamentalism, sectarianism, fanaticism, black magic and witchcraft.
Nirmala Srivastava
#11. Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow.
Elias Boudinot
#12. And surely, he that hath taken the true Altitude of Things, and rightly calculated the degenerate state of this Age, is not like to envy those that shall live in the next, much less three or four hundred Years hence, when no Man can comfortably imagine what Face this World will carry.
Thomas Browne
#13. He'd been up early all his life and though everybody said the best thing about retirement was sleeping in, he just couldn't feature it. If he found himself in bed later than six he felt like a degenerate,
T.C. Boyle
#14. The effort, diligence, and care required in practicing must be quickly suspended when pressure coming from anxiety or a desire for fast results causes them to degenerate.
Paul Caponigro
#15. One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done.
Peter Drucker
#16. I like computers. I like the Internet. It's a tool that can be used. But don't be misled into thinking that these technologies are anything other than aspects of a degenerate economic system.
Jerry Brown
#17. Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.
Alfred North Whitehead
#18. Vinny was flying on Learjets all over the country to gamble. The fact is, Vinny Gorgeous was the mirror image of John Gotti. The two mob bosses were degenerate gamblers. Vinny even got himself barred from Atlantic City.
Dominick Cicale
#19. A rational reaction against irrational excesses and vagaries of skepticism may * * * readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity.
William E. Gladstone
#21. We are in a degenerate state of self-government. In fact, even to use the words self-government, is not only an exaggeration, it's a lie. It's a big lie!
Jerry Brown
#22. Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.
Arthur C. Clarke
#23. She could see the worst parts of him, in the ugliness of his face and the degenerate use of her body. He showed her every dirty, unkind desire and God help her, she never told him no.
Skye Warren
#24. The West needs to relearn what the rest of the world has never forgotten - that there is nothing sinful in leisure as long as it does not degenerate into mere sloth.
Arthur C. Clarke
#26. He would deny this is confronted, citing evasively his affection for Dante and Giotto, but anything overtly religious filled him with a pagan alarm; and I believe that like Pliny, whom he resembled in so many respects, he secretly thought it to be a degenerate cult carried to extravagant lengths.
Donna Tartt
#27. Now, at times this issue has tended to degenerate into an 'either-or' type of debate. Either we protect our people from terror or we protect our most cherished principles. But that is a false choice. It asks too little of us and assumes too little about America.
Barack Obama
#28. I do not want chemistry to degenerate into a religion; I do not want the chemist to believe in the existence of atoms as the Christian believes in the existence of Christ in the communion wafer.
Marcellin Berthelot
#29. 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
#30. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#31. As a stone in the sea withers from water,
and a stone at the mountaintop withers from heat,
and a stone in the air withers from wind,
so a degenerate person withers from vice.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#32. The lust of gold succeeds the rage of conquest; The lust of gold, unfeeling and remorseless! The last corruption of degenerate man.
Samuel Johnson
#33. Change is almost always negative. Things degenerate.
Woody Allen
#34. The word 'beauty' is as easy to use as the word 'degenerate.' Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you
Charles Ives
#35. The profession to which we belong, once venerated ... -has become corrupt and degenerate to the forfeiture of its social position ...
Nathaniel Chapman
#36. 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?
Wilhelm Reich
#37. Filth!' Ignatious shouted, spewing wet popcorn over rows. 'How dare she pretend to be a virgin. Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!
John Kennedy Toole
#38. A presidential campaign may easily degenerate into a mere personal contest, and so lose its real dignity. There is no indispensable man.
Woodrow Wilson
#39. We are a race of women that of old knew no fear and feared no death, and lived great lives and hoped great hopes; and if today some of us have fallen on evil and degenerate times, there moves in us yet the throb of the old blood.
Olive Schreiner
#40. I want to kill this degenerate bastard brother of yours. But I am not selfish, I do not want to deprive you of that honor.
William Balsamo
#41. The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.
Neil Young
#42. normal condition of man is hard work, self-denial, acquisition and accumulation; as soon as his descendants are freed from the necessity of exertion they begin to degenerate sooner or later in body and mind.
Jane Mayer
#43. Aristocracy has a tendency to degenerate the human species.
Thomas Paine
#44. He was a degenerate gambler. That is, a man who gambled simply to gamble and must lose. As a hero who goes to war must die. Show me a gambler and I'll show you a loser, show me a hero and I'll show you a corpse.
Mario Puzo
#45. The elderly are spooky when they degenerate into
reflections of their younger selves. They say things that
make sense on some grammatical level, but it's not always
connected to reality.
Scott Adams
#46. Literature, art, science, and religion degenerate when polemical struggle supplants the independent creation of ideas.
Semen Frank
#47. I admit to having worn suede and leather pants myself for a while, but you just never feel clean, and it's degenerate, anyway, to wear animal skins ... So I went back to bluejeans after my degenerate period.
Andy Warhol
#48. A people of scholars, if they are physically degenerate, weak-willed and cowardly pacifists, will not storm the heavens, indeed, they will not be able to safeguard their existence on this earth.
Adolf Hitler
#49. He underlines the solemn truth that even in the highest religious positions men may degenerate into crass materialists living only for today. Proximity to sacred things does not of itself make a man holy. A sacred office may not give rise to sacred thoughts and a godly life.
Leslie Hardinge
#50. When Julian ascended the throne, he declared his impatience to embrace and reward the Syrian sophist, who had preserved, in a degenerate age, the Grecian purity of taste, of manners and of religion. The emperor's prepossession was increased and justified by the discreet pride of his favourite.
Edward Gibbon
#52. In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
Simone Weil
#53. The work of an artist who attempts lovingly to embrace reality, will ring false, will degenerate into kitsch.
Karsten Harries
#54. 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
#55. Through the years, I have combined meditation, action, and the Iron into a single strength. I believe that when the body is strong, the mind thinks strong thoughts. Time spent away from the Iron makes my mind degenerate. I wallow in a thick depression. My body shuts down my mind.
Henry Rollins
#56. If you're going to be degenerate, you might as well be a lady about it, don't you think?
Armistead Maupin
#57. All in all, the League of Nations is not inevitably bound, as some maintain from time to time, to degenerate into an impotent appendage of first one, then another of the competing great powers.
Hjalmar Branting
#58. Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind,
And makes it fearful and degenerate;
Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep.
William Shakespeare
#59. Man's rights are linked with man's duties, and when they are distorted into extravagant claims for a species of freedom and equality and worldly aggrandizement which human character cannot sustain, they degenerate from rights to vices.
Russell Kirk
#60. I am determined not to assume the sacerdotal office, for I have seen many men whom I have regarded as persons of good character and liberal dispositions, degenerate into avarice, sloth, and dissipation, in consequence of their introduction into the priesthood
Poggio Bracciolini
#61. To their simple, degenerate minds there was only one thing to do when faced by a God more powerful than their own: Convert.
Brandon Sanderson(Elantris)
Brandon Sanderson
#62. Was there a degenerate sex goddess lurking beneath her innocent skin?
Kitty French
#63. Type production has gone mad, with its senseless outpouring of new types ... only in degenerate times can personality (opposed to the nameless masses) become the aim of human development.
Jan Tschichold
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Here is your great soul - the man who has given himself over to Fate; on the other hand, that man is a weakling and a degenerate who struggles and maligns the order of the universe and would rather reform the gods than reform himself.
Seneca.
#67. 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
#68. Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
Aristotle.
#69. Tattooed men who are not behind bars are either latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If someone who is tattooed dies in freedom, then he does so a few years before he would have committed murder.
Adolf Loos
#70. My good friends, while I do most earnestly recommend you to take care of your health and safety, as things most precious to us, I would not have that care degenerate into an effeminate and over-curious attention, which is always disgraceful to a man's self, and often troublesome to others.
Edmund Burke
#71. The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.
E. T. Bell
#72. One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction.
John Steinbeck
#73. Alas, 'tis force alone that can compel to virtuous actions a degenerate people.
Vittorio Alfieri
#74. There cannot be a censor, or a censorship that does not degenerate into absurdity and corruption, there never has been, and there never will be and of all the excuses for it that there could be, that it protects superstition, and religious fanaticism would be the worst.
Christopher Hitchens
#75. Fear is the proof of a degenerate mind.
Virgil
#76. What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you
It takes life to love Life.
Edgar Lee Masters
#77. The boys at school are so degenerate that it makes one feel pessimistic about the future of the male gender in general.
Regina Doman
#78. TO worship God even for the sake of salvation or any other reward is equally degenerate. Love knows no reward. Give your love unto to God, but do not ask anything in return even from Him through pray.
Swami Vivekananda
#79. Not two strong men the enormous weight could raise,- Such men as live in these degenerate days.
Homer
#80. When a defiled man is born again, his habits are changed, his thoughts cleansed, his attitudes regenerated and elevated, his activities put in total order, and everything about him that was dirty, degenerate or reprobate is washed and made clean.
Spencer W. Kimball
#81. We have either to progress or to degenerate. Our ancestors did great things in the past, but we have to grow into a fuller life and march beyond even their great achievements.
Swami Vivekananda
#82. 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
#83. A poor degenerate from the ape, Whose hands are four, whose tail's a limb, I contemplate my flaccid shape And know I may not rival him Save with my mind.
Aldous Huxley
#84. My last piece of advice to the degenerate slot player who thinks he can beat the one-armed bandit consists of four little words: It can't be done.
John Scarne
#85. It is not a question of skimming the surface of the art, it must be probed to its depths, for to seize upon superficial things only is to degenerate into mediocrity and obscurity.
Jean-Georges Noverre
#86. It is the perfect contradiction: It is glamorous and degenerate, cultured and crude, beautiful and detestable, ethical and decadent, exciting and scary all at the same time.
Leslie Haskin
#87. A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.
Jonathan Swift
#88. Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
Peter F. Drucker
#89. Democracy is an impossible thing until the power is shared by all, but let not democracy degenerate into mobocracy.
Mahatma Gandhi
#90. I was a degenerate, with an insatiable capacity for perversion. Incapable of change. I could do anything except not drink.
Dan Fante
#91. Prejudice is not bigotry or superstition, although prejudice sometimes may degenerate into these. Prejudice is pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.
Russell Kirk
#92. Nobody, I believe, will deny, that we are to form our judgment of the true nature of the human mind, not from sloth and stupidity of the most degenerate and vilest of men, but from the sentiments and fervent desires of the best and wisest of the species.
Robert B. Leighton
#93. He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.
Henry David Thoreau
#94. It turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA - 30 to 50 letters in length - and it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are.
Craig Venter
#95. The dog which remembers only to bark and not to bite, and is led through the streets as a lady's pet, is only a degenerate wolf.
Lin Yutang
#96. The degree and duration of the torment of these degenerate and anti-Christian people, should be no other than would be approved of by those angels who had ever labored for their salvation, and that Lamb who had redeemed them with his most precious blood.
Isaac Newton
#98. At this moment, the story in his head was perfect. He also knew from experience that it would degenerate the second he started typing, because such was the nature of writing.
Sara Gruen
#100. 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
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