#decadence

In a free society, government reflects the soul of its people. If people want change at the top, they will have to live in different ways. Our major social problems are not the cause of our decadence. They are a reflection of it. ↗

— Cal Thomas

#cause #change #decadence #different #different ways

An impending sense of doom, a weariness of decadence - these are the deep concerns of a generation which charges into the darkness naked holding wine spritzers. ↗

— Bauvard

#fate #funny #humor #funny

I am the last reflection of the hero. Laurels are out of fashion, so my decadence is showered with champagne. ↗

— Bauvard

#funny #heroes #humor #funny

The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off. ↗

— Benito Mussolini

#birth #bound #decadence #empires #fate

The baronet, in his old age, had been cast up by his vices on the shores of melancholy; heavy-eyed, grey-haired, bent, he seemed to pass through life as in a dream. ("The Undying Thing") ↗

— Barry Pain

#old-age #vice #age

The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic. ↗

— James Thurber

#between #brutal #decadence #difference #our

Because I'm a Karamazov. Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#beauty #decadence #falling #humiliation #beauty

He saw a chamber, broad and low, designed, in its every rich stain of picture and slumberous hanging, to appeal to the sensuous. And here the scent was thick and motionless. Costly marqueterie; Palissy candlesticks reflected in half-concealed mirrors framed in embossed silver; antique Nankin vases brimming with pot-pourri; in one comer a suit of Milanese armour, fluted, damasquinee, by Felippo Negroli; in another a tripod table of porphyry, spectrally repeating in its polished surface the opal hues of a vessel of old Venetian glass half filled with some topaz-coloured liqueur - such and many more tokens of a luxurious aestheticism wrought in the observer an immediate sense of pleasurable enervation. He noticed, with a swaying thrill of delight, that his feet were on a padded rug of Astrakhan - one of many, disposed eccentrically about the yellow tassellated-marble floor; and he noticed that the sole light in the chamber came from an iridescent globed lamp, fed with some fragrant oil, that hung near an alcove traversed by a veil of dark violet silk. ("The Accursed Cordonnier") ↗

— Bernard Capes

#decadent #design

After two years' absence she finally returned to chilly Europe, a trifle weary, a trifle sad, disgusted by our banal entertainments, our shrunken landscapes, our impoverished lovemaking. Her soul had remained over there, among the gigantic, poisonous flowers. She missed the mystery of old temples and the ardor of a sky blazing with fever, sensuality and death. The better to relive all these magnificent, raging memories, she became a recluse, spending entire days lying about on tiger skins, playing with those pretty Nepalese knives 'which dissipate one's dreams'. ↗

— Octave Mirbeau

#decadent #exoticism #orientalism #death

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#evil #freedom #freedom