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“Is it true that man was once perfectly pure and innocent, and that he became degenerate by disobedience? No. The real truth is, and the history of man shows, that he has advanced. Events, like the pendulum of a clock have swung forward and backward, but after all, man, like the hands, has gone steadily on. Man is growing grander. He is not degenerating. Nations and individuals fail and die, and make room for higher forms. The intellectual horizon of the world widens as the centuries pass. Ideals grow grander and purer; the difference between justice and mercy becomes less and less; liberty enlarges, and love intensifies as the years sweep on. The ages of force and fear, of cruelty and wrong, are behind us and the real Eden is beyond. It is said that a desire for knowledge lost us the Eden of the past; but whether that is true or not, it will certainly give us the Eden of the future.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“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, Gaslit Nightmares: Stories by Robert W. Chambers, Charles Dickens, Richard Marsh, and Others

“Most priests wish they were as righteous as they seem to most members of their congregations.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I do not want chemistry to degenerate into a religion; I do not want the chemist to believe in the existence of atoms as the Christian believes in the existence of Christ in the communion wafer.”
― Marcellin Berthelot

“You can either grow or degenerate. Either of these is happening all around you, all the time.
There is nothing called a "safe comfort zone". This is a convenient name depicting the process of degeneration.”
― Manoj Arora, Happiness Unlimited: How to be happy always

“Who indeed, in these degenerate days, would hesitate between an ode and an omelette, a sonnet and a salmi?”
― Oscar Wilde, Beautiful and Impossible Things - Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde

“While wise men create different ideals for an ideal society, the sane ideals degenerate when smart people learn how to manipulate them.”
― Awdhesh Singh, Myths are Real, Reality is a Myth

“Don't hit rock bottom unless you reach the bottom of your coffin.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov