Top 92 Quotes About Degenerates
#1. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
Thomas Jefferson
#2. Hospitality sometimes degenerates into profuseness, and ends in madness and folly.
Francis Atterbury
#3. The cell is immortal. It is merely the fluid in which it floats that degenerates. Renew this fluid at regular intervals, give the cells what they require for nutrition, and as far as we know, the pulsation of life can go on forever.
Alexis Carrel
#4. Sir, when the love of peace degenerates into fear of war, it becomes of all passions the most despicable." - Senator Giles of Virginia, to President Thomas Jefferson, before the War of 1812
Joe Buff
#5. Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind
Theodore Roosevelt
#6. Without a notion of the transcendental, human beings would, indeed, be animals; however, only fools can be convinced of it, and only degenerates need such a conviction.
Franz Grillparzer
#7. It is when it is contended that "in a democracy right is what the majority makes it to be" that democracy degenerates into demagoguery.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#8. Christianity is not a law of bondage; and if it respect the hand of God which sometimes raises up tyrants, it draws up where obedience degenerates into guilty cowardice.
Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
#9. Prayer and action ... can never be seen as contradictory or mutually exclusive. Prayer without action grows into powerless pietism, and action without prayer degenerates into questionable manipulation.
Henri Nouwen
#10. Did it ever occur to you, Charlie, that tolerance can reach a point where it is no longer tolerance? When that happens, the noble-sounding attitude on which most of us pride ourselves degenerates into weakness and acquiescence.
Grace Metalious
#11. There may be something petty in a refined taste; it easily degenerates into effeminacy. It does not consider the broadest use. It is not content with simple good and bad, and so is fastidious and curious or nice only.
Henry David Thoreau
#12. Posterity always degenerates till it becomes our ancestors.
Horace Walpole
#13. Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work.
Calvin Trillin
#14. Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#15. Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.
E. M. Forster
#16. Religion must mainly be a matter of principles only. It cannot be a matter of rules. The moment it degenerates into rules, it ceases to be a religion, as it kills responsibility which is an essence of the true religious act.
B.R. Ambedkar
#17. Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
#18. So hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip ... In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office.
Henry David Thoreau
#19. Most of the trades, professions, and ways of living among mankind, take their original either from the love of the pleasure, or the fear of want. The former, when it becomes too violent, degenerates into luxury, and the latter into avarice.
Joseph Addison
#20. Without the truth of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void.
Jerry Brown
#21. Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.
Polybius
#22. Aristocracy has three successive ages. First superiority s, then privileges and finally vanities. Having passed from the first, it degenerates in the second and dies in the third.
Bill Vaughan
#23. I had got to the dawn of the beautiful not caring, but fully aware, stage, which degenerates so imperceptibly into the doing something unpermissible stage.
Caitlin Thomas
#24. This evil of taking our cue from others has become so deeply ingrained that even that most basic feeling, grief, degenerates into imitation.
Seneca.
#25. The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.
Colin Wilson
#26. All knowledge degenerates into probability.
David Hume
#27. In work consists the true pride of life; grounded in active employment, though early ardor may abate, it never degenerates into indifference, and age lives in perennial youth. Life is a weariness only to the idle, or where the soul is empty.
Leopold Hartley Grindon
#28. Religion only helps; until and unless it degenerates into either ritualism or fanaticism, or worse the both!
Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre
#29. Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
George Santayana
#30. Letter-writing too often degenerates into a communicating of facts, and not of truths; of other men's deeds and not our thoughts.What are the convulsions of a planet, compared with the emotions of the soul? or the rising of a thousand suns, if that is not enlightened by a ray?
Henry David Thoreau
#31. All good strategy eventually degenerates into work.
Peter Drucker
#32. Art must be in touch with nature - and wherever that touch is gone, Art degenerates - yet it must be above nature.
Swami Vivekananda
#33. Apostasy occurs when a church leaves its historic moorings, abandons its historic confessional position, and degenerates into a state where either essential Christian truths are blatantly denied or the denial of such truths is widely tolerated.
R.C. Sproul
#34. If we lose our significance (character) we fall in ruin. The exploiters take over and sell freedom from fear, from guilt, from want. They excuse all corrupt actions. Collective status degenerates the human spirit.
Moxie Will
#35. Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.
Roger Kimball
#36. The incentive to peacemaking is love, but it degenerates into appeasement whenever justice is ignored. To forgive and to ask for forgiveness are both costly exercises. All authentic Christian peacemaking exhibits the love and justice-and so the pain-of the cross.
John Stott
#37. A man's ability cannot possibly be of one sort and his soul of another. If his soul be well-ordered, serious and restrained, his ability also is sound and sober. Conversely, when the one degenerates, the other is contaminated.
Seneca The Younger
#38. A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.
Robert McKee
#39. It is a triumph of the Omnimalevolent Creator's design. As technique is improved, joy declines. Inevitably, talent degenerates too.
John Zande
#40. It is wonderful when God saves a drunkard which He sometimes does, but it is more wonderful still when God saves little children before they become drunkards, libertines, and degenerates.
Bob Jones, Sr.
#41. Derivative trading with mark-to-market accounting degenerates into mark-to-model. Two firms make a big derivative trade and the accountants on both sides show a large profit from the same trade.
Charlie Munger
#42. An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion soon degenerates. For force always attract men of low morality.
Albert Einstein
#44. It must be confessed that horses at present work too exclusively for men, rarely men for horses; and the brute degenerates in man's society.
Henry David Thoreau
#45. The activities of these parasites and degenerates gave rise to Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Pointillism, Constructivism, Orphism, Surrealism, Dada, and also Impossibleism, Supersurrealism, Dynamic Double-Dog Realism, Ishkabibbleism, and Mama, which is like Dada only nicer.
Daniel Pinkwater
#46. It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.
Edgar Allan Poe
#47. You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn't be too far off base.
Anthony Bourdain
#48. In religious matters it is now fashionable to define tolerance as the absence of criticism of any standard religion. All too often, this absence of criticism degenerates into a conspicuous absence of thought.
Paul Blanshard
#49. In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.
Henry David Thoreau
#50. Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists
Max Nordau
#51. The people are the ultimate guardians of their own liberties. In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy ... Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.
Thomas Jefferson
#52. For people that are degenerates, if you've spent so much time feeling a certain way, it's actually uncomfortable to feel like a winner. The familiarity of losing is, in an inverse way, comforting. At least you know where you stand.
Jason Gedrick
#53. We humans progressively exterminate every support mechanism. The earth progressively degenerates toward a form of quadriplegia, completely impotent to protect all it sustains.
Luke Gracias
#54. Freedom of choice makes it possible to plan our lives and to make the most of ourselves. Yet if this freedom lacks noble goals or personal discipline, it degenerates into an inability to give oneself generously to others.
Pope Francis
#55. The human mind is like Van Halen. If you just pull out one piece and keep replacing it, it just degenerates.
Fran Kranz
#56. The whole psychoanalytical establishment in America at midcentury was geared to make people with homosexual proclivities feel like monsters, moral degenerates.
Blake Bailey
#57. When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates.
Robert McKee
#58. Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#59. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip.
Henry David Thoreau
#60. As iron rusts when not used, and water gets foul from standing or turns to ice when exposed to cold, so the intellect degenerates without exercise.
-Leonard Da Vinci
Leonardo Da Vinci
#61. No matter how carefully records are kept and filed and computerized, they grow fuzzy with time. Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate
like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history
until it degenerates into fables.
Isaac Asimov
#62. It seems to be almost inevitable that the man who accepts a subordinate economic position in the Family degenerates into a loafer and a tyrant.
Helen Bosanquet
#63. Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
Eric Hoffer
#64. The empiric easily degenerates into the quack. He does not know where his knowledge begins or leaves off, and so when he gets beyond routine conditions he begins to pretend-to make claims for which there is no justification, and to trust to luck and to ability to impose upon others-to "bluff."
John Dewey
#65. Wisdom degenerates in governments as governments increase in age.
Thomas Paine
#66. Alas, 'tis force alone that can compel to virtuous actions a degenerate people.
Vittorio Alfieri
#67. Fear is the proof of a degenerate mind.
Virgil
#68. 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
#69. Democracy is an impossible thing until the power is shared by all, but let not democracy degenerate into mobocracy.
Mahatma Gandhi
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.
Peter Drucker
#73. The great challenge of the twentieth century ... is to create a new financial architecture in which private decisions produce a less degenerate capitalism.
Will Hutton
#74. Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.
Alfred North Whitehead
#75. The most persistent hate is that which doth degenerate from love.
Walter Map
#76. The primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races.
Harry J. Anslinger
#77. Materialism is decadent and degenerate only if the spirit of the nation has withered and if individual people are so unimaginative that they wallow in it.
Brooks Atkinson
#78. Prudence is a necessary ingredient in all the virtues, without which they degenerate into folly and excess.
Jeremy Collier
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#84. Aristocracy has a tendency to degenerate the human species.
Thomas Paine
#85. The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.
Neil Young
#86. The profession to which we belong, once venerated ... -has become corrupt and degenerate to the forfeiture of its social position ...
Nathaniel Chapman
#87. 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
#88. Change is almost always negative. Things degenerate.
Woody Allen
#89. 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
#91. Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.
Alfred North Whitehead
#92. 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
