#degenerate

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

#bear #degenerates #discussion #does #even

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

#cannot #ceases #degenerates #essence #into

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms. ↗

— Aristotle

#degenerate #democracies #into #republics

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

#appendage #bound #competing #degenerate #first

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

#aspects #computers #degenerate #economic #economic system

While I shared many of the same emotions Bill describes, in no way did my experience ever degenerate into the grimness I find in his book - I didn't have to live with Don, and I think that made a big big difference. ↗

— Gary Lucas

#big difference #bill #book #degenerate #describes

Rose was patently a degenerate. Nature, in scheduling his characteristics, had pruned all superlatives. The rude armour of the flesh, under which the spiritual, like a hide-bound chrysalis, should develop secret and self-contained, was perished in his case, as it were, to a semi-opaque suit, through which his soul gazed dimly and fearfully on its monstrous arbitrary surroundings. Not the mantle of the poet, philosopher, or artist fallen upon such, can still its shiverings, or give the comfort that Nature denies. Yet he was a little bit of each - poet, philosopher, and artist; a nerveless and self-deprecatory stalker of ideals, in the pursuit of which he would wear patent leather shoes and all the apologetic graces. The grandson of a 'three-bottle' J.P., who had upheld the dignity of the State constitution while abusing his own in the best spirit of squirearchy; the son of a petulant dyspeptic, who alternated seizures of long moroseness with fits of abject moral helplessnes, Amos found his inheritance in the reversion of a dissipated constitution, and an imagination as sensitive as an exposed nerve. Before he was thirty he was a neurasthenic so practised, as to have learned a sense of luxury in the very consciousness of his own suffering. It was a negative evolution from the instinct of self-protection - self-protection, as designed in this case, against the attacks of the unspeakable. ("The Accursed Cordonnier") ↗

— Bernard Capes

#decadent #degenerate #degeneration #neurasthenic #design

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. ↗

— Peter Drucker

#degenerate #good #good intentions #hard #hard work

Fear is proof of a degenerate mind. ↗

— Virgil

#fear #mind #proof

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs. ↗

— Simone Weil

#church #considered #degenerate #inevitably #into