The original communitarianism of Chinese Confucian society has degenerated into nepotism, a system of family linkages, and corruption, on the mainland. And remnants of the evils of the original system are still found in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and even Singapore.

Lee Kuan Yew

Very rarely are you going to see a story about a comic winning a fight. Yeah we're all degenerates in some way and we're all awful people, so we just show our weaknesses.

Ari Shaffir

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

Aristotle

Religion must mainly be a matter of principles only. It cannot be a matter of rules. The moment it degenerates into rules, it ceases to be a religion, as it kills responsibility which is an essence of the true religious act.

B. R. Ambedkar

The whole psychoanalytical establishment in America at midcentury was geared to make people with homosexual proclivities feel like monsters, moral degenerates.

Blake Bailey

In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route.

Charles Eames

In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.

Charles Jencks

Public discourse degenerated. There's no longer a place for intelligent debate at universities, where people just work for degrees and careers. My own experience was how my trade union's lively branch debates dwindled to a few people round cups of coffee. There's a climate of people frightened to say what they think for fear of offending someone.

Claire Fox

It turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA - 30 to 50 letters in length - and it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are.

Craig Venter

Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills.

David Mamet

The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.

E. T. Bell

Without a notion of the transcendental, human beings would, indeed, be animals; however, only fools can be convinced of it, and only degenerates need such a conviction.

Franz Grillparzer

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

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

Over the years, our political system has degenerated to the extent that it is difficult for anyone to make any headway yet keep his hands clean.

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

It is simply the truth that the political system that I am part of has degenerated to the point that it needs fundamental change.

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

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.

Hans Haacke

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

Modern man is in crisis. He has degenerated from the redoubtable pillar he became through centuries of refinement and slipped resignedly into the popular depiction of himself as a witless under-achiever, incapable of looking after himself or those around him.

James May

It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty.

James Monroe

For people that are degenerates, if you've spent so much time feeling a certain way, it's actually uncomfortable to feel like a winner. The familiarity of losing is, in an inverse way, comforting. At least you know where you stand.

Jason Gedrick