#degenerate

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

#aesthetic #beautiful #defined #degenerate #domain

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#degenerates #every #government #only #people

The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells - caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls. ↗

— John Hersey

#blast #body #broke #burns #caused

It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption. ↗

— Charles de Montesquieu

#already #corruption #degenerate #into #mature

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

#degenerate #die #gamble #gambled #gambler

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

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

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

— Simone Weil

#church #considered #degenerate #inevitably #into