. . . the community suffers nothing very terrible if its cobblers are bad and become degenerate and pretentious; but if the Guardians of its laws and constitution, who alone have the opportunity to bring it good government and prosperity, become a mere sham, then clearly it is completely ruined.
God's mercy on you degenerate swine.
James Bond in his Sean Connery days. . . was the first well-known bachelor on the American scene who was not a drifter or a degenerate and did not eat out of cans.
Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
It is not a question of skimming the surface of the art, it must be probed to its depths, for to seize upon superficial things only is to degenerate into mediocrity and obscurity.
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.
Fear is the proof of a degenerate mind.
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
Type production has gone mad, with its senseless outpouring of new types. . . only in degenerate times can personality (opposed to the nameless masses) become the aim of human development.
There is a clear acknowledgement all over the world that we should not teach people to read and then to leave them without literature. For they would then relapse into a dreary and ultimately dangerous state of half-education, in which they would be easily satisfied by crude semi-pictorial approximations of the strip cartoon and by the abundant supply of degenerate literature which destroys, rather than promotes, a capacity to face the problems of the world with skill and courage
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
Prudence is a necessary ingredient in all the virtues, without which they degenerate into folly and excess.
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.
My last piece of advice to the degenerate slot player who thinks he can beat the one-armed bandit consists of four little words: It can't be done.
One has to make a decision when a condition is likely to degenerate if nothing is done.
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
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.
There was an exhibition in Munich in 1937, 'Degenerate Art,' which included work by Klee, Kandinsky, Beckmann and many others. The work was called 'sick' and put in the trash heap. The sentiments expressed toward contemporary art by Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson and Mayor Giuliani recall the language used by the Nazis.
Democracy is an impossible thing until the power is shared by all, but let not democracy degenerate into mobocracy.
Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.