Listen to Savage long enough and you may be persuaded to think that liberalism is code for all the stupid things we just can't conquer: weakness and decadence and human frailty and death itself.
His Scienza nuova (1725; New Science) interpreted history as an organic process involving language, literature, and religion and attempted to reveal the mentality or ethos of earlier ages: the age of the gods, the heroic age, and the human age, its climax and decadence.
In a speech to commemorate National Heroes Day, Mugabe said: "Surely keeping decapitated heads as war trophies, in this day and age, in a national history museum, must rank among the highest forms of racist moral decadence, sadism and human insensitivity".
Early writers, given to metaphor, often stressed the resemblance between the evolutionary character of economic development and human life e.g., growth, maturity, and decadence.
Barzun has simply continued the conversation, spinning out a story in "From Dawn to Decadence" that is moved along, in part, by recurring human impulses ("primitivism," "Emancipation") and set off by boldface quotations, printed in the margins, which act as verbal cartouches, bringing out the links and themes developed in the text.
There is an implication of a recent moral apocalypse, as if human ardor — pornography, tasting menus, credit default swaps — had bled over into annihilating decadence, and civilization as we had known it has been crushed out of existence.
He designed memorable sets, paired with equally memorable lighting, that evoked the titanic power struggles and intimate human dramas of Shakespeare, the missed connections and unspoken menace of Pinter and the decadence and sensuality of the opera "Salome".
In 1886 he published a new volume containing "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," consisting mainly of imprecations against modern decadence and liberalism and a retraction of the earlier poem's belief in inevitable human progress.
Desire Under the Elms (1924) presents a harsh analysis of decadence in the sexual and avaricious intrigues of a New England farmer's family, unrelieved by manifestations of the transcendent human spirit.
