Erosion Quotes - Page 3

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?

Jane Jacobs

Cities, Attrition, Automobile

Jane Jacobs (2016). “Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs”, p.84, Random House

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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... 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

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If you had to explain America's economic success with one word, that word would be "education".... Until now, the results of educational neglect have been gradual - a slow-motion erosion of America's relative position. But things are about to get much worse, as the economic crisis ... deals a severe blow to education across the board.... We need to wake up and realize that one of the keys to our nation's historic success is now a wasting asset. Education made America great; neglect of education can reverse the process.

Paul Krugman

Education, Blow, America

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The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize.

Evgeny Morozov

Self, Goal, Privacy

Evgeny Morozov (2014). “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism”, p.346, PublicAffairs

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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

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To see rich land eaten away by erosion, to stand by as continual cultivation on sloping fields wears away the best soil, is enough to make a good farmer sick at heart.

Henry A. Wallace

Heart, Land, Agriculture

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