Abject Quotes

What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism - its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure. ~ Michael Pollan

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low. ~ Bill Gates

He had a gray face. As his sullen eyes, sunken into the shallow holes formed from years of suffering stared at me, from behind the dark lenses, I could feel myself being penetrated. Not in my pussy - though it was wet, stirred by the violent tension - I was being penetrated by his gaze. The gray faced one was fucking me with his mind, and the feeling of abject violation was grotesque. Despite my arousal, I could not deal with the unwanted intrusion on my personhood. I smiled, and gently led him by hand into the kitchen. The wallpaper was floral, in varying shades of orange and light brown. I gently guided one of his hands, to the moist slit between my legs, and I could feel his glee as it slid inside. And at that moment, I hit the switch. His other hand was completely shredded to bits of bone and flesh by the garbage disposal, spurting blood like a broken pipeline, an unstoppable wave of red. He died with 2 fingers inside me. ~ Klusterfvk, Bamafuk

Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary
mentions a German lieutenant - for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost
unbearable - who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery,
perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music which was audible to him alone.
And for us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished
beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection
which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity. ~ Albert Camus

There's no doubt about it, show business lures the people who didn't get enough love, attention, or approval early in life and have grown up to become bottomless, gaping vessels of terrifying, abject need. Please laugh. ~ Dennis Miller

[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy. ~ Anna Quindlen

To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Sure, on a larger scale, it was healthy to have people out there you cared about more than yourself. She knew that. But then there was the abject fear you would lose it. They say possessions own you. Not so. Loved ones own you. You are forever held hostage once you care so much. ~ Harlan Coben

The Blushing Pansy," his cousin read aloud, in a tone of abject horror. "Tea shop and confectionery."
Bram swore. This was going to be ugly. ~ Tessa Dare

In one way, traveling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight. This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people. In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere. ~ Christopher Hitchens

But you can't be a scientist if you're uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. This is very different from the way journalists portray us. So many articles begin, "Scientists now have to go back to the drawing board." It's as though we're sitting in our offices, feet up on our desks - masters of the universe - and suddenly say, "Oops, somebody discovered something!"
No. We're always at the drawing board. If you're not at the drawing board, you're not making discoveries. You're not a scientist; you're something else. The public, on the other hand, seems to demand conclusive explanations as they leap without hesitation from statements of abject ignorance to statements of absolute certainty. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

For just a heartbeat I picture the life I could've had if I'd joined a sterile corporate law firm on the partner track. I imagined meeting my clients in paneled wood conference rooms instead of re-purposed storage closets that smell like bleach and pee. I imagine shaking the hand of a client whose hand isn't trembling from meth withdrawal or abject terror at a justice system he doesn't trust. ~ Jodi Picoult

That was a day that taught me the meaning of abject failure. ~ Walter Moers

The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway. ~ George Washington

If you want something, my dearest love, the duke had once told her, you will never get it. Want is a timid, abject word. It implies that you know you will be left wanting, that you know you do not deserve the object of your desire but can only hope for a miracle. You must expect that object instead, and it will be yours. There is no such thing as a miracle. ~ Mary Balogh

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Now, as a non-Amish person in the twentieth century who is not a part of the aging and thus noncoveted seventy-five-plus marketing demographic that views things like cell phones and iPads with that quaint, old-people mixture of astonishment, fascination, confusion, and abject fear, I spend as much time pawing my cell phone as members of the postpubescent marketing demographic spend pawing each other and themselves. ~ BikeSnobNYC

We must begin by acknowledging that there is a complete absence of two things in Indian Society. One of these is equality. On the social plane we have an India based on the principles of graded inequality, which means elevation for some and degradation for others. On the economic plane we have a society in which there are some who have immense wealth as against many who live in abject poverty. ~ B.R. Ambedkar

We make a goddess of Fortune ... and place her in the highest heaven. But it is not fortune that is exalted and powerful, but we ourselves that are abject and weak. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Good diet and exercise are key, but abject fear has its own rewards. And arriving on the first day for rehearsals for 'Spamalot' and seeing all these much younger, much fitter people, who I was going to be on stage with, became a catalyst for cutting out the more unhealthy aspects of my life. ~ Sanjeev Bhaskar

George Bernard Shaw once said: "Capitalism has destroyed our
belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force."
When liberals make the argument that capitalism is the cause of all
of our problems, they are either speaking out of abject ignorance
or being totally disingenuous to protect their own political interests.
We have not had true free-market capitalism in this country on any
wide scale. Where we have had economic successes in this nation's
history, it has been those times when people have done something
outside of the government's involvement. Every single time the federal
government has been involved, it has created chaos, waste, and
corruption. The historical record is overwhelmingly one of gross
incompetence. ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for 80% of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources. ~ Jane Goodall

There are three ways YOU can GET OUT of abject poverty. The first is inheritance which is always volatile and very scarce. The second is Education which very sustainable. The third and the most EFFECTIVE way is DEATH (or to Die ). But I recommend YOU to Choose Education ~ Oppong Amankwaa

If you are sure that you are about to fail, then this strange and serene calmness can come over you or the most abject fear and panic and feeling of helplessness. ~ Peter Gallagher

The United States, and other advanced nations, will someday be able to produce instruments of death so terrible the world will be in abject terror of itself and its ability to end civilization ... Such war-making weapons should be developed - but only for purposes of discovery and experimentation ~ Thomas A. Edison

The catechisms also tell the truth about who I am, what I want and how I feel, and it can be unsettling to hear yourself described as you have thought of yourself in your most honest and abject moods, just as it is humbling to hear what you have thought about in your most hopeful and unrealistic moments. ~ Iain Banks

This upper class is disgusting and I'm furious at all these rich people here, having seen thousands of people in abject squalor. ~ Frida Kahlo

Politicians - power itself - are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power. ~ Jean Baudrillard

The characters aren't the only ones stranded in their country retreat: Huysmans is stranded there, too. It would almost seem that he was trying to go back to Naturalism - the sordid Naturalism of the countryside, where the peasants turn out to be more abject and greedy even than Parisians - if not for the dream sequences, which interrupt and ultimately hobble the story, and make it so impossible to classify. ~ Michel Houellebecq

No spiritual exercise is such a blending of complexity and simplicity. It is the simplest form of speech that infant lips can try, yet the sublimest strains that reach the Majesty on high. It is as appropriate to the aged philosopher as to the little child. It is the ejaculation of a moment and the attitude of a lifetime. It is the expression of the rest of faith and of the fight of faith. It is an agony and an ecstasy. It is submissive and yet importunate. In the one moment it lays hold of God and binds the devil. It can be focused on a single objective and it can roam the world. It can be abject confession and rapt adoration. ~ John F. MacArthur Jr.

Yudenow was a controlled panic of self-preservation on two uncertain legs; abject slave to a mad desire for what beasts know as blind survival.
A comical beast, I thought, but asked myself, 'Why prolong mere living for its own sake?' The question answered itself: 'Because a beast is blind.' In Yudenow's case, he was animated by nothing but a terror of Nothing, a horror of ceasing to be; by a hopeless desire to evade consequence and issue, parry cause and duck effect. But he had - and you can read it in the faces of defeated fighters, doglike to the verge of tears in the outer offices - the hope-against-hope that, by fiddling and scraping against all the odds of the world, his ringcraft might outmaneuver the inevitable.
And do you know what? There is the Spirit of Man in this - good, bad, or indifferent, a certain heroism. ~ Gerald Kersh

Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.
Diary of a Country Priest ~ Georges Bernanos

People who crack wise tend to cause just as much laughter as abject anger. ~ Rick Gualtieri

Our Lord loves you and loves you tenderly; and if He does not let you feel the sweetness of His love, it is to make you more humble and abject in your own eyes. ~ Pio Of Pietrelcina

The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. It doesn't subdue you and make you feel abject. It's stimulating loneliness. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Yet a world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses - a world consisting only of thrusting, vigorous men walking boldly out of frame - will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion. ~ Zadie Smith

The Millennium Declaration was a solemn pledge to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty. ~ Kevin Watkins

There are still hundreds of millions, billions of people living in abject poverty around the world. They need electricity. They need electricity they can count on, that they can afford. They need fuel to cook their food on that's not animal dung. ~ Rex Tillerson

It is more than petty treason to the Republic, to call a free citizen a servant. The whole class of young women, whose bread depends upon their labour, are taught to believe that the most abject poverty is preferable to domestic service. Hundreds of half-naked girls work in the paper-mills, or in any other manufactory, for less than half the wages they would receive in service; but they think their equality is compromised by the latter, and nothing but the wish to obtain some particular article of finery will ever induce them to submit to it. ~ Frances Trollope

In addition, unlike Othello, whose profession of arms is socially honorable, Shylock is a professional usurer who, like a prostitute, has a social function but is an outcast from the community. But, in the play, he acts unprofessionally; he refuses to charge Antonio interest and insists upon making their legal relation that of debtor and creditor, a relation acknowledged as legal by all societies. Several critics have pointed to analogies between the trial scene and the medieval Processus Belial in which Our Lady defends man against the prosecuting Devil who claims the legal right to man's soul. […] But the differences between Shylock and Belial are as important as their similarities. The comic Devil of the mystery play can appeal to logic, to the letter of the law, but he cannot appeal to the heart or to the imagination, and Shakespeare allows Shylock to do both. In his "Hath not a Jew eyes…" speech in Act III, Scene I, he is permitted to appeal to the sense of human brotherhood, and in the trial scene, he is allowed to argue, with a sly appeal to the fear a merchant class has of radical social evolution:

You have among you many a purchased slave
Which like your asses and your dogs and mules,
You use in abject and in slavish parts,

which points out that those who preach mercy and brotherhood as universal obligations limit them in practice and are prepared to treat certain classes of human beings as things. ~ W.H. Auden

Failing to recognize the worth of beauty independent from utilitarian function is symptomatic of an abject poverty of the soul. It's like saying that if we turned St. Peter's Basilica into a parking garage, we would improve it by making it practical. There's a word for this, and it is vandalism. We must not vandalize the faith in the name of pragmatism! ~ Brian Zahnd

My work is really abject and self-effacing sometimes. I mean, it's big and overwrought, but it's just paper dolls, and it's kind of silly. ~ Kara Walker

She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself. ~ David Foster Wallace

I've always been drawn to a certain kind of dark aesthetic in cinema and in film, to what's abjected or considered abject. I've been tremendously influenced by noirish cinema whether that's Von Sternberg or Scorsese in the 70s or Lynch, etc. ~ Anton Yelchin

In sexual love we seek our own pleasure through the intermediary of another's body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure through the intermediary of an idea we have. The onanist may be an abject creature but in truth he is the logical expression of the lover. He is the only one who neither diguises nor deludes himself. ~ Pessoa, Fernando

I had several teachers who inspired me, in both the public school system and the Upward Bound program. I needed several, because I lived in such abject poverty and dysfunction. And they're still in my life today, because I consider them to be friends, actually. ~ Viola Davis

He who knows himself well is mean and abject in his own sight, and takes no delight in the vain praise of men. ~ Thomas A Kempis

Along with the sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and the father who proffer it. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire; "I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it. "I" expel it. But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself with the same motion through which "I" claim to establish myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see the "I" am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death, During that course I'm which "I" become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symptom, shattering the violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer to it, it abreacts. It abjects ~ Julia Kristeva

He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of the war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death ... ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We could easily have been abject strangers with no history of brief unsatisfying cinematic sex between us. ~ T.R. Pearson

The reason that the World Trade Center got hit is because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don't have any hope for a better life. ~ Ted Turner

Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure. ~ H.L. Mencken

I started thinking about the endless bullshit about quotas, and how certain types of character are fine "as long as it's important to the story," and so on, started thinking about the absence of the abject. ~ Hal Duncan

Let death be daily before your eyes, and you will never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything. ~ Epictetus

Economics is not a gay science. It is a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science. ~ Thomas Carlyle

I was writing a lot of true love songs-true love almost gone wrong but saved at the last moment ... Many of the best songs get written in a state of abject misery. I prefer to write fewer songs and have less cataclysmic events in my life ... Some hit songs are really stupid, and who knows why they're hits. But a lot of hit songs are really good. ~ Jorma Kaukonen

Harry has heard this before. Thelma's voice is dutiful and deliberately calm, issuing small family talk when both know that what she wants to discuss is her old issue, that flared up a minute ago, of whether he loves her or not, or why at least he doesn't need her as much as she does him. But their relationship at the start was established with her in pursuit of him, and all the years since, of hidden meetings, of wise decisions to end it and thrilling abject collapses back into sex, have not disrupted the fundamental pattern of her giving and his taking, of her fearing their end more than he, and clinging, and disliking herself for clinging, and wanting to punish him for her dislike, and him shrugging and continuing to bask in the sun of her love, that rises every day whether he is there or not. He can't believe it, quite, and has to keep testing her. ~ John Updike

I didn't think I was in a morbid mood, but it appears I am. My mind goes round and round trying to figure things out, but I always come back to the same two things: Loneliness and Death. Life ends before we figure anything out, most importantly how not to be lonely. Solitude is fine. But feeling like you have no one to love - abject lonliness - is not alright. ~ Jonathan Ames

Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance. ~ Saki

There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who live in our most abject conditions. Maybe there are some things at work in deciding who gets to be society's winners and who gets to be society's losers that don't have to do with merit. ~ Katherine Boo

A passionately lived life is not always comfortable. Going for it involves being open to all of life - the joys, the sorrows, the mundane as well and the magic, the splendid victories, the most abject defeats. You might even stop closing your eyes during the scary parts of the movie. ~ Nicholas Lore

While the newspaper press of America is in, or near, its present abject state, high moral improvement in that country is hopeless. Year by year, it must and will go back; year by year, the tone of public feeling must sink lower down; year by year, the Congress and the Senate must become of less account before all decent men; and year by year, the memory of the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged more and more, in the bad life of their degenerate child. ~ Charles Dickens

The scene had interested me. It was so different from the ordinary demeanour of tramps--from the abject worm-like gratitude with which they normally accept charity. The explanation, of course, was that we outnumbered the congregation and so were not afraid of them. A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor--it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it. ~ George Orwell

Take Marcus Aurelius! That's right! What did that old bugger do? In very similar situations! Harassed! Maligned! Transduced! On the brink of succumbing under the welter if abject plots ... of murderous perfidies! ... He withdrew, Ferdinand! ... He abandoned the steps of the Forum to the jackals! Yes! In solitude! In exile! That's where he sought his balm! That's where he found new courage! ... That's right! ... He took counsel on himself! And no one else! ... He didn't ask the mad dogs for their opinion! ... No! Faugh! ... Ah, despicable recantation! ... ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

What a vile and abject thing is man if he do not raise himself above humanity. ~ Seneca The Younger

Abject flattery and indiscriminate assentation degrade, as much as indiscriminate contradiction and noisy debate disgust. But a modest assertion of one's own opinion, and a complaisant acquiescence in other people's, preserve dignity. ~ Doug Stanhope

The enemies of living life; outdated little liberals, afraid of their own independence; lackeys of thought, enemies of the person and freedom, decrepit preachers of carrion and rot! What do they have: gray heads, the golden mean, the most abject and philistine giftlessness, envious equality, equality without personal dignity, equality as understood by a lackey or a Frenchman of the year ninety-three ... And scoundrells, above all, scoundrels, scoundrels everywhere! ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

To what base ends, and by what abject ways, Are mortals urg'd through sacred lust of praise! ~ Alexander Pope

The creature was weeping, and who could blame it, as hideous and abject and lonely as it was? But its tears, Hannah perceived suddenly, didn't just spring from wretchedness. They were also tears of relief, because it was alive, because it had survived another day. How could anything be grateful for such an existence? And yet, this creature was, and when it saw itself and knew that it wanted to live in spite of everything, it wept even harder, sobbing inconsolably until it was depleted. ~ Hillary Jordan

Excluded from all fellowship at meals, excluded from all sacrifices, excluded from instruction and from matrimonial alliances, abject and excluded from all religious duties, let them wander over ,this earth. ~ Guru Nanak

If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Enthusiasm, being the infirmity of bold and ambitious tempers, is naturally accompanied with a spirit of liberty; as superstition,on the contrary, renders men tame and abject, and fits them for slavery. ~ David Hume

Problem is, a lot of Christians who believe the world is headed for imminent destruction don't use their eschatology to motivate altruism. Some, in fact, use their belief in the coming apocalypse to justify negligence and destruction. Critics of pretrib theology point out that rapture obsession can make Christians overlook glaring social needs in the present, like genocide, disease, and abject poverty. ~ Kevin Roose

This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie - no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified. ~ James Russell Lowell

In naturalism, man is actually very insignificant, but arrogates to himself stupendous power. In Christianity, man is actually the apex of created significance, but is called to see it in abject humility. ~ Ravi Zacharias

If not met promptly and decidedly, the two portions of the Union will gradually become thoroughly alienated, when no alternative will be left to us, as the weaker of the two, but to sever all political ties or sink down into abject submission. ~ John C. Calhoun

Just as I prepared to stand and bow, a woman appeared with a miniature coffee cup in her hand.
She offered it to me.
As I took it, I noticed two things:
Bugs crawling on the ground and the men approving of me by snapping their fingers.
I bowed and took a sip of the coffee and almost fainted.
I had a cockroach on my tongue.
I looked at the peoples' faces and I could not spit it out.
My grandmother would have pushed away the grave's dirt and traveled by willpower to show me her face of abject disappointment.
I could not bear that.
I opened my throat and drank the cup dry.
I counted four cockroaches. ~ Maya Angelou

You said they were friends, Mr Worthington. Sometimes third parties become intermediaries in these affairs.' On the word affair, he looked up and found himself staring directly into Peter Worthington's honest, abject eyes: and for a moment the two masks slipped simultaneously. Was Smiley observing? Or was he being observed? ~ John Le Carre

To sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treach ery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison. ~ Virginia Woolf

Religion urges us to fight evil as contrary to the Divine Law. It urges us to combat abject misery, sin and disease because God is. In His name we can work, as we believe in co-operation with Him, since through Him goodness must ultimately prevail. ~ Lily Montagu

With an agenda dominated by global security and U.N. reform, it appears that the decisions needed to lift millions of people from abject poverty are not being given the prominence they deserve. ~ Kumi Naidoo

I think writing in general can help us deal with anything we fear, anything which troubles us, anything that makes us angry or moves us. In fact, in most cases, writing has to engage with these feelings - the lack of engagement you find in parts of American writing is a form of imperialism turned inward. We don't see the poor, the abject, the destitute in fiction and literature nearly as much as we should. ~ John Freeman

Even the most abject have a sense of superiority based on powerful though undefined merits. ~ Mason Cooley

When you see in places like Africa and parts of Asia abject poverty, hungry children and malnutrition around you, and you look at yourself as being people who have well being and comforts, I think it takes a very insensitive, tough person not to feel they need to do something. ~ Ratan Tata

The heroes in paganism correspond exactly to the saints in popery, and holy dervises in MAHOMETANISM. The place of, HERCULES, THESEUS, HECTOR, ROMULUS, is now supplied by DOMINIC, FRANCIS, ANTHONY, and BENEDICT. Instead of the destruction of monsters, the subduing of tyrants, the defence of our native country; whippings and fastings, cowardice and humility, abject submission and slavish obedience, are become the means of obtaining celestial honours among mankind. ~ David Hume

The first time I got up in front of an audience was terror, abject terror, which continued for another four or five years. There still is, a little bit. ~ Bob Newhart

Abject misery lies not in what the blanket reveals, but in what it hides. ~ Steven Erikson

May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times? ~ Charles Darwin

Jacqs' attempts at initiating sexual relationships usually involved either money or abject failure. ~ Lyn Gala

Social Science, is not a 'gay science' but rueful, which finds the secret of this universe in 'supply and demand' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone. Not a 'gay science', no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, the dismal science ~ Thomas Carlyle

Erwin Strauss, in his brilliant monograph on obsession, similarly earlier showed how repulsed Swift was by the animality of the body, by its dirt and decay. Straus pronounced a more clinical judgment on Swift's disgust, seeing it as part of the typical obsessive's worldview: "For all obsessives sex is severed from unification and procreation....Through the...isolation of the genitals from the whole of the body, sexual functions are experienced as excretions and as decay." This degree of fragmentation is extreme, but we all see the world through obsessive eyes at least part of the time and to some degree; and as Freud said, not only neurotics take exception to the fact that "we are born between urine and feces." In t his horror of the incongruity of man Swift the poet gives more tormented voice to the dilemma that haunts us all, and it is worth summing it up one final time: Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams. But even more immediately, it represents man's utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant female beauty, the veritable goddesses that beautiful women are; to bring this out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out-the eye that gave even the dry Darwi ~ Ernest Becker

Islam requires us to believe that Jesus was so incompetent as a teacher and prophet that he was not able to instill this most simple fact in his followers' minds: that he was merely a human. Given that Islam's central proclamation is tawhid, this means Jesus was an abject failure. In fact, he was worse than a total failure, since he left his disciples believing the exact opposite of tawhid. ~ Nabeel Qureshi

Pain is inevitable but so is joy. Too many of us resort to abject fear or anger due to our sufferings or unknowns in life. Remain steadfast by approaching discovery and love so you can embrace the present moment. The past can serve as nothing more than a lesson and the future can serve as nothing more than a notion. ~ Adam Starks

Learn to draw quick and shoot straight, - the former being even more important than the latter, - and probably has to take life after life in order to save his own. Some of these men are brave only because of their confidence in their own skill and strength ; once convince them that they are overmatched and they turn into abject cowards. Others have nerves of ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Baby talk has tremendous potential, despite its obvious dangers and its near-total incomprehensibility. The only reason you don't embrace it is your abject terror. ~ Ben Marcus

Oh, Maharaj! Maharaj! Won't you draw us some water, please? We beg you. We have been waiting here a long time, we will be grateful,' shouted the chorus of voices as they pressed towards him, some standing up, bending and joining their palms in beggary, others twisting their lips in various attitudes of servile appeal and abject humility as they remained seated. Either ~ Mulk Raj Anand

True humility is not an abject, groveling, self-despising spirit; it is but a right estimate of ourselves as God sees us. ~ Tryon Edwards

If you want to be a private eye, you have to get used to such things as hideous depression and abject despair. ~ Arthur Byron Cover

Grover cradeled his laurel sapling in his hands. Well ... sure is good to be back together again. Arguing. Almost dying. Abject terror. Oh, look It's our floor ~ Rick Riordan