The desire to build a risk-free society has always been a sign of decadence. It has meant that the nation has given up, that it no longer believes in its destiny, that it has ceased to aspire to greatness, and has retired from history to pet itself. Henry Fairlie
The inside operation of Congress – the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building – is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it. Bella Abzug
The difference between our decadence and the Russians’ is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic. James Thurber
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts. Ernest Hemingway
The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence – luxury, scepticism, weariness and superstition – are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next. Cyril Connolly
A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect. E M Cioran
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. Gore Vidal
Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages. Charles Baudelaire
Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them. Emile Durkheim
I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence. Christopher Hampton