Decadence Quotes - Page 4

• My brothers and sister and I were brought up in an atmosphere which I would describe as 'Puritan decadence'. Puritanism names the behaviour which is condemned; Puritan decadence regards the name itself as indecent, and pretends that the object behind that name does not exist until it is named.

  Stephen Spender

  Brother, Names, Atmosphere

  1951 World within World, p.314-15.

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• For me, I wanted to create something that's much more driven by a type of selfishness, a type of decadence.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Selfishness, Driven, Type

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• Everybody knows about Las Vegas. It's a state of mind. Some people want to come with their kids and have a great weekend. Some people want to shop. Some people want to find hookers. Some people want to eat. Some people just want to gamble. It's a potpourri of decadence.

  Michael Douglas

  Kids, Weekend, Vegas

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• It is true that the Muslim world is not totally mistaken when it reproaches the West of Christian tradition of moral decadence and the manipulation of human life. ... Islam has also had moments of great splendor and decadence in the course of its history.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Christian, Islam, World

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• It does if you put yourself out there being a pirate. It's like if you have an army and your army sit around and not doing anything and living the lives of decadence and they're faced with a battle, and you slide. Do they deserve the right to call themselves an army? Do these pirates who are basically languishing deserve the right to call themselves pirates? They're victims of their own success.

  Ray Stevenson

  Army, Pirate, Battle

  Source: www.ramascreen.com

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• There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often - as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned.

  John Irving

  Book, Grandmother, Finals

  John Irving (2012). “A Prayer For Owen Meany”, p.275, Random House

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• As a youth, I sought out decadence; as an elder, I try to avoid decay.

  Mason Cooley

  Trying, Age, Decay

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• A city built upon mud;
  A culture built upon profit;
  Free speech nipped in the bud,
  The minority always guilty.
  Why should I want to go back
  To you, Ireland, my Ireland?

  Louis MacNeice

  Cities, Culture, Bud

  Louis MacNeice (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.177, Faber & Faber

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• Just as the body has its progress and decadence, so also has the mind, and, therefore, the mind is not the soul, because the soul can neither decay nor degenerate.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Soul, Mind, Progress

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “Jnana Yoga: The Yoga of Knowledge”, p.102, editionNEXT.com

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• It is rather the nature of America - our freewheeling, outspoken, prosperous, liberty-loving citizens extend equality to women, homosexuals, minorities, and almost anyone who comes to our shores, and thereby create desire and with it shame for that desire. Indeed, it is worse still than that: Precisely because we worry publicly that we are insensitive, our enemies scoff privately that we in fact are too sensitive - what we think is liberality and magnanimity they see as license and decadence. If we don't have confidence in who we are, why should they?

  Victor Davis Hanson

  Thinking, America, Worry

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• How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late.

  Wilfrid Sheed

  Doe, Too Late, These Days

  Wilfrid Sheed (1978). “The good word and other words”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Fascism was an explosion against intolerable conditions, against remediable wrongs which the old world failed to remedy. It was a movement to secure national renaissance by people who felt themselves threatened with decline into decadence and death and were determined to live, and live greatly.

  Oswald Mosley

  People, Movement, World

  Oswald Mosley (2012). “My Life - Oswald Mosley”, p.298, Black House Publishing Ltd

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• I definitely consider 'Poses' - the whole album in fact - to be kind of a miracle. Like the last breath of that moment when decadence is healthy, 'Poses' encapsulates that feeling. It's a kind of song and a kind of album that I'll never be able to repeat.

  Rufus Wainwright

  Song, Miracle, Healthy

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• The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Spring, Writing, Civilization

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• The inside operation of Congress - the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building - is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it.

  Bella Abzug

  Believe, Careers, Government

  Bella S. Abzug (1972). “Bella!: Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington”, Saturday Review Press

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• When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn't contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted.

  Jodi Picoult

  Simple, Expectations, Comfort

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “Handle with Care: A Novel”, p.208, Simon and Schuster

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• I'm an ambitious person. I mean, if I did that... I would self-destruct, in the sense that the decadence would be too strong an attraction for me. Whether that be in the form of gambling, fast cars, alcohol, drugs, whatever it happens to be... I think the lure of that lifestyle would be too strong.

  James Packer

  Strong, Mean, Thinking

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• There's a kind of decadence about all this: If 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it. Fantasy is a by-product of security: it's the difference between hanging upside down in your dominatrix's bondage parlor after work on Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam's prisons.

  Mark Steyn

  Friday, Jobs, Real

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• For this remains as I have already pointed out the essential difference between the two religions of decadence : Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Buddhism, Two, Differences

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (2005). “The Anti-Christ”, p.59, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Rome tolerated every abominable practice, embraced every foul idea in the name of freedom and the rights of the common man. Citizens no longer carried on deviant behavior in private, but pridefully displayed it in public. It was those with moral values who could no longer freely walk in a public park without having to witness a revolting display. What happened to the public censors who protected the majority of citizenry from moral decadence? Did freedom have to mean abolishing common decency? Did freedom mean anyone could do anything they wanted anytime they wanted, without consequences?

  Francine Rivers

  Mean, Men, Rights

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• The parliamentary principle of decision by majorities only appears during quite short periods of history, and those are always periods of decadence in nations and States.

  Adolf Hitler

  Decision, Majority, Principles

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• I certainly do not lament the decadence of knight errantry, nor wish to exchange the protection of the laws for that of the doughtiest champion who ever set lance in rest; but I do, in truth, believe that this knightly sensitiveness of honorable feeling is the best antidote to the petty soul-degrading transactions of every-day life, and that the total want of it is one reason why this free-born race care so very little for the vulgar virtue called probity.

  Frances Trollope

  Believe, Knights, Race

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• The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence but a mighty passion for the redemption of man.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Passion, Men, Creative

  Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 8, 1978.

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• When a republic's most venerable institutions no longer operate as they were intended, it becomes possible for small cabals to usurp power, and, while keeping the forms, corrupt the function of those institutions for their own ends. Looking at things that way, the George W. Bush presidency has been both result and symptom of the decadence of America's constitutional mechanisms.

  T. D. Allman

  America, Republic, Way

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• I think Illium can take care of himself.” “Not if he keeps flirting with you.” A fine, almost elegant tendril of heat, champagne and sunshine, decadence in the light. “Raphael’s not the sharing kind.

  Nalini Singh

  Sunshine, Flirting, Thinking

  Nalini Singh (2010). “Archangel's Kiss”, p.23, Penguin

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