Degenerate

Famous quotes containing the word degenerate:

    It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    He was ... a degenerate gambler. That is, a man who gambled simply to gamble and must lose. As a hero who goes to war must die. Show me a gambler and I’ll show you a loser, show me a hero and I’ll show you a corpse.
    Mario Puzo (b. 1920)

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