Degradation Quotes - Page 10

• Every time a new nation, America or Russia for instance, advances toward civilization, the human race perfects itself; every time an inferior class emerges from enslavement and degradation, the human race again perfects itself.

  Madame de Stael

  Russia, Race, Civilization

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• As my friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued persuasively, there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity. The color red, as an attribute of the world, is always there. It is something other than the absence of yellow and blue--and, thus, when that red becomes less red, it becomes more one or the other. It never exists in a linguistic condition of degradation or excess that must necessarily derive from our expectations.

  Dave Hickey

  Positivity, Blue, Color

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• Instead, we have found ourselves gasping for air in a sea of corruption, dysfunction, environmental degradation, waste, disenchantment and inequality—and the harder we compete, the more unequal we become.

  Margaret Heffernan

  Sea, Dysfunction, Air

  Margaret Heffernan (2014). “A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better than the Competition”, p.13, PublicAffairs

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• I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and degradation of women.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Book, Atheism, Teach

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton (2002). “Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897”

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• For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian & German political degradations which would envelop the globe & steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night & slaverly which would last till Christ comes again - which I hope he will not do; he made trouble enough before.

  Mark Twain

  Fall, Mean, Night

  Mark Twain, William Dean Howells (1960). “Mark Twain-Howells letters: the correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 1872-1910”, Belknap Press

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• The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him. Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way.

  Marquis de Sade

  Happiness, Light, Joy

  Sade (marquis de), Marquis de Sade (1987). “The 120 days of Sodom and other writings”, Grove Pr

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• Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Country, Cities, World

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• Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime--and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.

  Sigmund Freud

  Plato, Believe, Book

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• In her present ignorance, woman's religion, instead of making her noble and free, by the wrong application of great principles ofright and justice, has made her bondage but more certain and lasting, her degradation more hopeless and complete.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Ignorance, Justice, Religion

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• Are you saying we shouldn't be prepared? And I'm asking you that right now, Daniel. ... Why would you be against people being able not only to be prepared to have food and water for their friends, but to defend themselves from looters and some of these degradation of society that happen in these crises?

  Matt Shea

  Inspiring, People, Water

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• You cannot change someone using fear, degradation, humiliation, or by comparing them to others. It can only be done through love, with love, for love. Love.

  Suzy Kassem

  Done, Compare, Humiliation

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• So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape.

  Oscar Wilde

  Ignorance, Self, Mad

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.103, GENERAL PRESS

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• When we hit a nail with a hammer, the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into the point without any of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and the head of the nail were infinitely big it would be just the same. The point of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the point to which it was applied. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul and social degradation, all at the same time, constitutes the nail. The point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity, spreading throughout space and time.

  Simone Weil

  Pain, Mean, Space

  "Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)".

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• The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.

  Primo Levi

  Defeat, Conclusion

  Primo Levi (1996). “Survival In Auschwitz”, p.171, Simon and Schuster

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• Pardon me, dear human self, capable of the most heinous degradation, capable of soaring.

  Sena Jeter Naslund

  Self, Pardon Me, Soar

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• Many say our world is at a tipping point. If we do not act together, if we do not act responsibly, if we do not act now, we risk slipping into a cycle of poverty, degradation, and despair.

  Ban Ki-moon

  Our World, Risk, Together

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• For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Greshams law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

  Walter Lippmann

  Law, Liberty, Overcoming

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.196, Harvard University Press

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• The object of a comedy is not to correct morals or ridicule the vices of society; no, a comedy should depict the discrepancies between life and purpose, should be the fruit of bitter indignation aroused by the degradation of human dignity, should be sarcasm, and not an epigram, convulsive laughter and not an amused grin, should be written with bile and not diluted salt, in a word, it should embrace life in its highest significance.

  Vissarion Belinsky

  Laughter, Sarcasm, Discrepancies Between

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• A freak is basically anyone who needs fantasy, degradation, or punishment in order to achieve his interpretation of erotic gratification.

  Xaviera Hollander

  Order, Punishment, Erotic

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• The Germans take quite a knock for the holocaust, but the Catholic church manages to push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the holocaust managed in its entire show. And it's thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are in complicity with mass murder.

  Terence McKenna

  Years, Long, People

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• I think it's false, shallow, to be giving to others when your own need is great. The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse, to constantly put before them the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage.

  John Lennon

  Feel Better, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• The white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education. In one sense it is more evil for them because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Confused, Opportunity, Color

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• The fact that human beings do not put up forever with misery, humiliation, degradation, actual physical deprivation but act is a fact which every human being should know about. We are a species that makes changes.

  Tillie Olsen

  Forever, Facts, Misery

  Source: progressive.org

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• Please don't invent a debt that does not exist, or next you will be trying to feel gratitude - and that is the treacherous first step toward complete moral degradation.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Gratitude, Trying, Doe

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Stranger in a Strange Land”, p.105, Penguin

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• ... while in theory digital technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise; the noise which is even stronger than that of traditional photography.

  Lev Manovich

  Photography, Loss, Technology

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