What history gives us leaves upon us, on the contrary, the…

Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization.

— Jerome Frank

Co-operation, like other difficult things, can be learned only by practice: and to be capable of it in great things, a people must be…

— John Stuart Mill

“Even for a well-to-do city family, making life comfortable is a problem. But arriving at a point where comfort becomes a problem for a…

— Joseph Gies

The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal…

— Matilda Joslyn Gage

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

— Cyril Connolly

The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring…

— Ellen Glasgow

“All culture, whatever significance it may have, just as all education, civilization, development, is absolutely powerless to renew the inner man.”

— Herman Bavinck

Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples that they…

— Barbara Tuchman

Content without style is propaganda or adolescence. Style without content is decadence.

— Rita Mae Brown

I definitely consider 'Poses' - the whole album in fact - to be kind of a miracle. Like the last breath of that moment…

— Rufus Wainwright

“After two years' absence she finally returned to chilly Europe, a trifle weary, a trifle sad, disgusted by our banal entertainments, our shrunken landscapes,…

— Octave Mirbeau

“(Decadent style) is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further the limits of language... forcing itself to express…

— Theophile Gautier

I think Illium can take care of himself.” “Not if he keeps flirting with you.” A fine, almost elegant tendril of heat, champagne and…

— Nalini Singh

“Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the…

— Asti Hustvedt

One defining symptom of decadence is a fondness for vast and nonsensical extravagance.

— Robert Silverberg