Erosion Quotes - Page 3

There is no doubt that constitutional freedoms will never be abolished in one fell swoop, for the American people cherish their freedoms, and would not tolerate such a loss if they could perceive it. But the erosion of freedom rarely comes as an all-out frontal assault but rather as a gradual, noxious creeping, cloaked in secrecy, and glossed over by reassurances of greater security.

Robert Byrd

Loss, People, Doubt

"Life in the Shadows of the Empire" by Eamon Martin, www.counterpunch.org. March 18, 2006.

32 Copy quote

Show source
A lot of publishers have close relationships with people in power. So the press, which used to speak truth to power, doesn't. The big result of that has been the erosion of trust.

Craig Newmark

People, Speak, Bigs

4 Copy quote
To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Writing, Language, Rebellion

7 Copy quote
For most mothers, vaccinations become a matter of faith - faith in pharmaceutical companies, faith in public health officials - and I think there's been an erosion of faith.

Paul A. Offit

Mother, Thinking, Matter

Source: www.nytimes.com

5 Copy quote

Show source
The bottom has fallen out of America's wage floor. And the erosion of the minimum wage has lowered pay and working standards for all of us.

Richard Trumka

America, Political, Minimum Wage

"$7.25 an hour is not a living wage" by Richard Trumka and Christine Owens, www.cnn.com. December 2, 2013.

13 Copy quote

Show source
The new puritans have been highly successful. All of the preconditions for new prohibitions on alcohol and tobacco are in place. ... Indeed, the future agenda of the federal government has already been established to outlaw alcohol and tobacco in the near future. ... If current trends persist, America will be moving toward stricter prohibitions, greater restrictions, and more centralized control over consumption. This represents an erosion of liberty at its most fundamental level.

Mark Thornton

Moving, Successful, America

4 Copy quote
The external view [of agency] forces itself on us at the same time that we resist it. One way this occurs is through the gradual erosion of what we do by the subtraction of what happens.

Thomas Nagel

Agency, Views, Psychology

Thomas Nagel (1991). “Mortal Questions : Canto”, p.38, Cambridge University Press

4 Copy quote

Show source
Some golfers blast their ball from traps, With one adroit explosion, But others, out in ten perhaps, Depend upon erosion.

Richard Armour

Golf, Balls, Explosions

7 Copy quote
Erosion, desertification, and pollution have become our lot. It is a weird form of suicide, for we are bleeding our planet to death.

Gerald Durrell

Suicide, Suicidal, Bleeding

17 Copy quote
Today, people are talking about many things: the danger of war and frequent clashes, water and air pollution, hunger, the increasing erosion of moral values, and so on. As a result, many other concerns have come to the fore: peace, contentment, ecology, justice, tolerance, and dialogue. Unfortunately, despite certain promising precautions, those who should be tackling these problems tend to do so by seeking further ways to conquer and control nature and produce more lethal weapons.

Fethullah Gulen

War, Air, Talking

51 Copy quote
For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.

Emile M. Cioran

Spiritual, Pride, Long

Emile M. Cioran (1976). “The Trouble with Being Born”, Viking Books

7 Copy quote

Show source
It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology.

Carl Sagan

Jobs, Rain, Technology

Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.25, Ballantine Books

18 Copy quote

Show source
The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Ernest Hemingway

Cancer, Reflection, Hands

Ernest Hemingway (1995). “The old man and the sea”, p.5, Hueber Verlag

5 Copy quote

Show source
Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.

George Saunders

Grace, Intellectual, Comfort

George Saunders (2013). “Tenth of December”, p.27, A&C Black

4 Copy quote

Show source
Perhaps reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our earth: erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption.

Pope Benedict XVI

Ocean, Order, Fuel

Pope Benedict XVI's address during The XXIII World Youth Day in Sydney Harbour, Australia, w2.vatican.va. July 17, 2008.

11 Copy quote

Show source
A rill in a barnyard and the Grand Canyon represent, in the main, stages of valley erosion that began some millions of years apart.

George Gaylord Simpson

Years, Valleys, Canyons

4 Copy quote
The erosion of a nation's concern for life and for individual rights, has always preceded the intrusion of tyranny.

Gerry Spence

Rights, Individual, Intrusion

Gerry Spence (1989). “With justice for none: destroying an American myth”, Crown

37 Copy quote

Show source
Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly has been disturbed over what he sees as the erosion of presidential powers since the Watergate scandal and has urged Bush to take a stronger stand against what Cheney sees as congressional intrusions into the executive branch.

Helen Thomas

Presidential, Stronger, Scandal

9 Copy quote
Now, to find dinosaurs, you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur. It sounds really dumb, but that's what it is. It's horrible conditions, because wherever you have nice weather, plants grow, and you don't get any erosion, and you don't see any dinosaurs.

Nathan Myhrvold

Nice, Weather, Dumb

5 Copy quote
The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

Terry Eagleton

Mistake, Play, Nebraska

Terry Eagleton (2013). “How to Read Literature”, p.2, Yale University Press

4 Copy quote

Show source
... For all our alarm, it is clear that the religious right is responding to a real hunger in our society... a deep-seated yearning for stable values... When conservative Christian groups talk of failures in our educational system, the erosion of our moral standards, and the waste of young lives, they are addressing real and legitimate concerns... Among secularists, the aversion toward discussion of moral values, let alone religion, can reach absurd extremes.

Norman Lear

Christian, Religious, Real

4 Copy quote
With each passing year, people of faith grow increasingly distressed by the hostility of public institutions toward religious expression. We have witnessed the steady erosion of the time-honored rights of religious Americans - both as individuals and as communities - to practice what they believe in the public square.

Ralph E. Reed, Jr.

Christian, Religious, Believe

12 Copy quote
The new concept of the child as equal and the new integration of children into adult life has helped bring about a gradual but certain erosion of these boundaries that once separated the world of children from the word of adults, boundaries that allowed adults to treat children differently than they treated other adults because they understood that children are different.

Marie Winn

Children, Adults, Different

13 Copy quote
In Maureen Owen's perfectly titled Erosion's Pull, words and lines map, unmap, and revamp our everyday postcontemporary geographies: ironies and ambiguities, surrealistic conundrums, kaleidoscopic comedies, puzzlements, certain and uncertain loves and losses.

Susan Howe

Loss, Everyday, Maps

4 Copy quote
Somewhere along the way, the idea, which I think was initially to get some fair transaction between people, went out the window. And what came in was, the most you can get and the least you can give. That's why cars are the way they are nowadays. It's just an erosion of all the things that were true and right about the original idea.

Bruce Springsteen

Thinking, Ideas, People

4 Copy quote