"In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads--in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and enforced from within."

- Jacques Barzun

Voltaire: "Decadence was brought about by doing work too easily and being too lazy to do it well, by a surfeit of fine art and a love of the bizarre."

Alexander the Weightless: "2 mnee bg wrds, 2 mch spling."

Aristides the Aristocrat: "In the 60s we were all Sartreans, in the 70s Levi-Straussians, in the 80s Foucauldians, in the 90s Derrideans. Now we are all Alexandrians, but now without any character or force within to fall away from."

[Barzun, Jacques. "Look It Up! Check It Out!" (1986). In his THE CULTURE WE DESERVE, Wesleyan University Press, 1989.]