Decadence Quotes - Page 4

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

  Mason Cooley

  Trying, Age, Decay

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• The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Father, Rome

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Selected Essays of Henry David Thoreau”, p.170, Simon and Schuster

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• To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Animal, Men, Years

  Henry David Thoreau (1993). “Civil Disobedience, and Other Essays”, p.63, Courier Corporation

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• 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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• 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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• Our institutions, if they do not erode entirely, can survive periods of decadence brought on by our material success, eras when the whole notion of civic militarism seems bothersome, and in which free speech is used to focus on our own imperfections without concern for the ghastly nature of our enemies.

  Victor Davis Hanson

  Focus, Imperfection, Enemy

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• All of the spiritualities that are now clamoring for attention, from explicit Satanism to what we hear on Oprah, are concerned with the two issues of identity and empowerment. Who am I? How can I have the power to live? Those are the questions everyone has to deal with. If we don't come to terms with these, we lapse into some form of human decadence and failure.

  Dallas Willard

  Issues, Two, Empowerment

  Source: renovare.org

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Sundance [festival] is all your Hollywood buds and buddies and rolling out and high-fiving and "Hell, yeah. Here comes the movie," and in Venice, it's very elegant, and respectful...It's decadence. It's such a fun way to formalize a movie that is for us a down-and-dirty, gritty movie. And to see it with the red carpet, and rolling up in a Maserati.

  David Gordon Green

  Fun, Dirty, Venice

  Source: collider.com

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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