#decadence

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined. ↗

— Milos Forman

#branded #dangerous #decadence #everybody #first

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

— David Sarnoff

#between #brutal #decadence #difference #our

In this game he had acquired a great deal of muddled knowledge, more than one approximation and less than one certitude. And absence of energy, a curiosity that was too sharp to be crushed immediately, a lack of order in his ideas, a weakening of his spiritual boundaries, which were promptly twisted, an excessive passion for running along forked roads and wearying of the path as soon as he had started on it, mental indigestion demanding varied dishes, quickly tiring of the foods he desired, digesting almost all, but badly, was his state. ↗

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

#decadents #food

A very special case. A few years more, and that pretty creature who you love too much, I think, will, without ever loving them, have known as many men as there are beads on her aunt's rosary. No happy medium! Either a nun or a monster! God's bosom or sensual passions! It would, perhaps, be better to put her in a convent, since we put hysterical women in the Saltpetriere! She does not know vice, she invents it!" That was ten years ago before the day our story begins and... Raoule was not a nun. ↗

— Rachilde

#decadents #hysteric #lust #nun #passion

Everyone is always proclaiming the decline of civilization, but it takes a true prophet to look into his wine glass and embody it. ↗

— Bauvard

#decadence #funny #humor #prophets #funny

Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment. ↗

— Jennifer Birkett

#decadents #guilt #masochism #murder #punishment

For Zola, as for Huysmans, nature itself is uncanny because it is the domain of the feminine, a domain that is constitutionally defective, lacking, even pathological. ↗

— Charles Bernheimer

#decadent #emile-zola #feminine #joris-kerl-huysmans #nature

Bully the jade, and she will love you. ("The Accursed Cordonnier") ↗

— Bernard Capes

#decadence #decadent #decadents #love

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