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Degeneration   /dɪdʒˌɛnərˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Degeneration

noun
1.
The process of declining from a higher to a lower level of effective power or vitality or essential quality.  Synonym: devolution.
2.
The state of being degenerate in mental or moral qualities.  Synonyms: decadence, decadency, degeneracy.
3.
Passing from a more complex to a simpler biological form.  Synonym: retrogression.



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"Degeneration" Quotes from Famous Books



... medicine, and reflects before it sentences. But in the case of those poor nameless creatures, justice does not stop to consider whether that microbe in the criminal world who steals under the influence of hereditary or acquired degeneration, or in the delirium of chronic hunger, is not worthy of more pity. It rather replies with a mephistophelian grin when he begs for a humane understanding of ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri

... by vote, by arms if need be, against the enforced equality of an inferior race. Equality anywhere, means ultimately, equality everywhere. Equality at the polls means social equality; social equality means intermarriage and corruption of blood, and degeneration and decay. What gentleman here would want his daughter to marry a blubber-lipped, cocoanut-headed, kidney-footed, etc., ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt

... teaching. The principle of law was in the air during the Victorian era, and we have already noted how deeply Tennyson was influenced by it. With George Eliot law is like fate; it overwhelms personal freedom and inclination. Moral law was to her as inevitable, as automatic, as gravitation. Tito's degeneration, and the sad failure of Dorothea and Lydgate in Middlemarch, may be explained as simply as the fall of an apple, or as a bruised knee when a man loses his balance. A certain act produces a definite moral effect on the individual; and character is the added ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneration and ruin." ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... the doctrine of equality. To mention only one of the early writers,—[For copious references to authorities on the spread of communistic and socialistic ideas and libertine community of goods and women in four periods of the world's history—namely, at the time of the decline of Greece, in the degeneration of the Roman republic, among the moderns in the age of the Reformation, and again in our own day—see Roscher's Political Economy, notes to Section LXXIX., et seq.] —Marsilio, a physician of Padua, in 1324, said that the laws ought to be made by all the citizens; and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner


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