Degenerates quotes:

Send

Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. -- Lord Acton
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories. -- Thomas Jefferson
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
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
Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists -- Max Nordau
All knowledge degenerates into probability. -- David Hume
Everything degenerates in the hands of man. -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms. -- Aristotle
Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen. -- Peter Drucker
Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind -- Theodore Roosevelt
Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. -- Peter Drucker
When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. -- Henry David Thoreau
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs. -- Simone Weil
Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos. -- Polybius
The whole psychoanalytical establishment in America at midcentury was geared to make people with homosexual proclivities feel like monsters, moral degenerates. -- Blake Bailey
It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption. -- Baron de Montesquieu
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust. -- Lord Chesterfield
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
Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. -- Vladimir Bukovsky
All good strategy eventually degenerates into work. -- Peter Drucker
Posterity always degenerates till it becomes our ancestors. -- Horace Walpole
Wisdom degenerates in governments as governments increase in age. -- Thomas Paine
The white man in the tropics degenerates every day. -- Christina Stead
Every good idea sooner or later degenerates into hard work. -- Calvin Trillin
Hospitality sometimes degenerates into profuseness, and ends in madness and folly. -- Francis Atterbury
Alas! poor human nature, pity, if hard pressed, degenerates into contempt. -- John Godfrey Saxe
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. -- Eric Hoffer
An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion soon degenerates. For force always attract men of low morality. -- Albert Einstein
The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions. -- Colin Wilson
In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes. -- Henry David Thoreau
The human mind is like Van Halen. If you just pull out one piece and keep replacing it, it just degenerates. -- Fran Kranz
Without the truth of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void. -- Jerry Brown
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
Art must be in touch with nature - and wherever that touch is gone, Art degenerates - yet it must be above nature. -- Swami Vivekananda
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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

Send