from  Troilus and Cressida

[ULYSSES]:

                    . . . Degree being vizarded
 Th'unworthiest shews as fairly in the mask.
 The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center
 Observe degree, priority, and place,
 Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
 Office, and custom, in all line of order . . .
                             . . . O, when degree is shak'd,
 Which is the ladder to all high designs,
 The enterprise is sick. How could communities,
 Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
 Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
 The primogenitive 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. The bounded waters
 Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
 And make a sop of all this solid globe.
 Strength should be lord of imbecility,
 And the rude son should strike his father dead.
 Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
 Between whose endless jar justice resides,
 Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
 Then everything includes itself in power,
 Power into will, will into appetite,
 And appetite, an universal wolf,
 So doubly seconded with will and power,
 Must make perforce an universal prey,
 And at last eat up himself.
 (Act One, Scene 3, ll. 83-88, 109-124)

       
           ——William Shakespeare (1564-1616)