Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

“All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it.”

— Joseph Conrad

“The utmost extremity of degradation is the obscene merriment to which it gives rise.”

— Victor Hugo

“Conceive a world-society developed materially far beyond the wildest dreams of America. Unlimited power, derived partly from the artificial disintegration of atoms, partly from…

— Olaf Stapledon

Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.

— Jacques Ellul

“We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is…

— William Peter Blatty

Civilization degrades many in order to exalt the few.

— Amos Bronson Alcott

DEGRADATION, n. One of the stages of moral and social progress from private station to political preferment.

— Ambrose Bierce

With European powers no new subjects of difficulty have arisen, and those which were under discussion, although not terminated, do not present a more…

— Martin Van Buren

“Institutionalization is not, however, an irreversible process, despite the fact that institutions, once formed, have a tendency to persist.49 For a variety of historical…

— Peter L. Berger

Why do people think that we’re degraded when we’re examining positions of degradation, or examining the cycle of our own degradation?

— Chris Kraus

All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man…

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“The most obvious and the most distinctive features of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increase of industrial…

— Thomas Henry Huxley