Degrading Quotes - Page 6

• Enslavement to your own weakness - be it an addiction to alcohol, or to a woman or to fame - it's degrading, and it means losing your dignity and your freedom.

  Wojciech Kurtyka

  Mean, Climbing, Addiction

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• My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God; but was I free?

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Men, Needs, Found

  Vladimir Nabokov (1992). “Pale fire”

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• For tens of millions of people [television] has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.

  Louis Kronenberger

  People, Brain, Television

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• I want to be indifferent to vengeance. It's degrading. Not having a spirit of vengeance protects me, internally.

  Segolene Royal

  Want, Spirit, Vengeance

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• Reverence is an ennobling sentiment; it is felt to be degrading only by the vulgar mind, which would escape the sense of its own littleness by elevating itself into an antagonist of what is above it. He that has no pleasure in looking up is not fit so much as to look down. Of such minds are mannerists in Art; in the world, tyrants of all sorts.

  Washington Allston

  Art, Tyrants, Mind

  Washington Allston, Richard Henry Dana (1850). “Lectures on Art, and Poems”, p.168, Scholarly Pub Office Univ of

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• Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.

  Erich Fromm

  Men, Belief, Isolation

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Escape from Freedom”, p.30, Open Road Media

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• We are, in fact, hyper-dimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter, and the shadow in matter is the body. And at death, what happens basically, is that the shadow withdraws, or the thing which cast the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases, and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and expelling it, that whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that.

  Terence McKenna

  Cycling, Shadow, Body

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• Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.

  H. L. Mencken

  Class, People, Leader

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• Voters are more than Catholics, Protestants or Jews. They make up their minds for many diverse reasons, good and bad. To submit the candidates to a religious test is unfair enough - to apply it to the voters is divisive, degrading and wholly unwarranted.

  John F. Kennedy

  Religious, Catholic, Mind

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• Ignorance is degrading only when found in company with great riches.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Ignorance, Riches, Found

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• Vicious habits are so odious and degrading that they transform the individual who practices them into an incarnate demon.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Practice, Demon, Habit

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• A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of life-styles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist.

  Ivan Illich

  Hands, Choices, Style

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• You're never the same. You're degrading, or you're getting better. You don't stay the same.

  M. Night Shyamalan

  Get Better

  Source: collider.com

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• Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.

  Clay Shirky

  Thinking, Gym Rats, Tasks

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• The whole question of evolution seems less momentous than it did, because, unlike the Victorians, we do not feel that to be descended from animals is degrading to human dignity.

  George Orwell

  Animal, Dignity, Evolution

  George Orwell (1986). “The complete works of George Orwell”

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• Segregation, as even the segregationists know in their hearts, is morally wrong and sinful. If it weren't, the white South would not be haunted as it is by a deep sense of guilt for what it has done to the Negro - guilt for patronizing him, degrading him, brutalizing him, depersonalizing him, thingifying him; guilt for lying to itself. This is the source of the schizophrenia that the South will suffer until it goes through its crisis of conscience.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Lying, Heart, White

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• When we consider that women are treated as property it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Children, Abortion, Pro Life

  Letter to Julia Ward Howe recorded in Howe's diary at Harvard University Library, October 16, 1873.

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• Consider a very natural process, menstruation, and how the association has been created in which this process is dirty, degrading.

  Frederick Lenz

  Women, Dirty, Enlightenment

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• We are still barely conscious of how harmful it is to treat children in a degrading manner. Treating them with respect and recognizing the consequences of their being humiliated are by no means intellectual matters; otherwise, their importance would long since have been generally recognized.

  Alice Miller

  Children, Mean, Long

  Alice Miller (2002). “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”, p.177, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• It has always been thought perfectly womanly to be a scrub- woman in the Legislature and to take care of the spittoons; that is entirely within the charmed circle of woman's sphere; but for women to occupy any of those official seats would be degrading.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Circles, Care, Politics

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Gage, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Ida H. Harper (2017). “The Suffragettes – Complete History Of the Movement (6 Volumes in One Edition): The Battle for the Equal Rights: 1848-1922 (Including Letters, Newspaper Articles, Conference Reports, Speeches, Court Transcripts & Decisions)”, p.4257, e-artnow

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• Violence begets violence by whomever used. War is a dirty business and entails the use of degrading means, whoever wages it.

  A. J. Muste

  Peace, War, Dirty

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• Newspapers. . . give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details. . .

  Oscar Wilde

  Giving, Facts, Details

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.697, GENERAL PRESS

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• In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll's Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit.

  Charlie Chaplin

  Discovery, Philadelphia, Atheism

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• I am liberating man from the degrading chimera known as `conscience'.

  Adolf Hitler

  Men, Evil, Chimera

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• There can be, therefore, no true education without moral culture, and no true moral culture without Christianity. The very power of the teacher in the school-room is either moral or it is a degrading force. But he can show the child no other moral basis for it than the Bible. Hence my argument is as perfect as clear. The teacher must be Christian. But the American Commonwealth has promised to have no religious character. Then it cannot be teacher.

  Robert Dabney

  Christian, Education, Teacher

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