Degree

Famous quotes containing the word degree:

    Some crimes get honor and renown by being committed with more pomp, by a greater number, and in a higher degree of wickedness than others. Hence it is that public robberies, plunderings, and sackings have been looked upon as excellencies and noble achievements, and the seizing of whole countries, however unjustly and barbarously, is dignified with the glorious name of gaining conquests.
    François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)

    Men commonly couple with their idea of marriage a slight degree at least of sensuality; but every lover, the world over, believes in its inconceivable purity.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind—the mind of a fighter—in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man’s first beginning.
    Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)