Degenerate

Famous quotes containing the word degenerate:

    In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
    Simone Weil (1909–1943)

    A degenerate nobleman is like a turnip. There is nothing good of him but that which is underground.
    Seventeenth-century English saying.

    In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)