Degree

Famous quotes containing the word degree:

    O, when degree is shaked,
    Which is the ladder of all high designs,
    The enterprise is sick. How could communities,
    Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
    Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
    The primogeniture and due of birth,
    Prerogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels,
    But by degree stand in authentic place?
    Take but degree away, untune that string,
    And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets
    In mere oppugnancy.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind—the mind of a fighter—in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man’s first beginning.
    Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)

    Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man, imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)