Degradation Quotes

Falsehoods of convenience or vanity, falsehoods from which no evil immediately visible ensues, except the general degradation of human testimony, are very lightly uttered, and once uttered are sullenly supported. ~ Samuel Johnson

Every man who is not for us in this prolonged struggle for liberty is responsible for the present degradation of the mothers of the race. It is pitiful to see how few men ever have made our cause their own, but while leaving us to fight our battle alone, they have been unsparing in their criticism of every failure. Of all the battles for liberty in the long past, woman only has been left to fight her own, without help and with all the powers of earth and heaven, human and divine, arrayed against her. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Merlin: "Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit lately, I notice, of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish. I trust we are free of this?"
Arthur: "Everybody knows that children are more intelligent than their parents."
Merlin: "You and I know it, but the people who are going to read this book do not.
Our readers of that time ( ... ) have exactly three ideas in their magnificent noodles. The first is that the human species is superior to others. The second, that the twentieth century is superior to other centuries. And the third, that human adults of the twentieth century are superior to their young. ( ... ) ~ T.H. White

God's forgiveness is not just a casual statement; it is the complete blotting out of all dirt and degradation of our past, present, and future. ~ Billy Graham

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art. ~ Peter Weiss

To vindicate the sanctity of human life by taking it is an outrage upon reason. The spectacle of a human being dangling at the end of a gallows-rope is a degradation of humanity. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee

The steps to degradation are only three: the actuality of the shameful condition, the recognition of the actuality while feeling unable to do anything about it, and then acceptance of it as the normal state of affairs. ~ John Myers Myers

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

Extinction, the irrevocable loss of a species, causes pain that can never find relief. It is an ache that will pass from generation to generation for the rest of human history. ~ Callum Roberts

In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world. ~ Frederick Douglass

It is a well-worn saying but one nonetheless true and nonetheless worthy of repetition, inasmuch as it expresses peculiarly the situation now widely prevalent, that "where there is no vision the people perish. " Mankind as a whole, or more particularly the Western element, has lost in some incomprehensible way its spiritual vision. An heretical barrier has been erected separating itself from that current of life and vitality which even now, despite willful impediment and obstacle, pulses and vibrates passionately in the blood, pervading the whole of universal form and structure. The anomalies presented today are due to this rank absurdity. Mankind is slowly accomplishing its own suicide. A self-strangulation is being effected through a suppression of all individuality, in the spiritual sense, and all that made it human. It continues to withhold the spiritual atmosphere from its lungs, so to speak. And having severed itself from the eternal and never-ceasing sources of light and life and inspiration, it has deliberately blinded itself to the fact - than which no other could compare in importance - that there is a dynamic principle both within and without from which it has accomplished a divorce. The result is inner lethargy, chaos, and the disintegration of all that formerly was held to be ideal and sacred. ~ Israel Regardie

How can a man find a sensible way to live? One way and one only- Philosophy. And my philosophy means keeping that vital spark within you free from damage and degradation, using it to transcend pain and pleasure, doing everything with a purpose, avoiding lies and hypocrisy, not relying on another person's actions or failings. To accept everything that comes, and everything that is given, as coming from that same spiritual source. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Land degradation did not start with chemical agriculture. But chemical agriculture offered new tools for annihilation. ~ Joel Salatin

All men know that by sheer weight of physical force, the mass of men must in the last resort become the arbiters of human action. But reason, skill, wealth, machines and power may for long periods enable the few to control the many. But to what end? The current theory of democracy is that dictatorship is a stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character. But always the temptation is to use the stopgap for narrower ends, because intelligence, thrift and goodness seem so impossibly distant for most men. We rule by junta; we turn Fascist, because we do not believe in men; yet the basis of fact in this disbelief is incredibly narrow. We know perfectly well that most human beings have never had a decent human chance to be full men. Most of us may be convinced that even with opportunity the number of utter human failures would be vast; and yet remember that this assumption kept the ancestors of present white America long in slavery and degradation.

It is then one's moral duty to see that every human being, to the extent of his capacity, escapes ignorance, poverty and crime. With this high ideal held unswervingly in view, monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorships may rule; but the end will be the rule of All, if mayhap All or Most qualify. The only unforgivable sin is dictatorship for the benefit of Fools, Voluptuaries, gilded Satraps, Prostitutes and Idiots. The rule of the famished, unlettered, stinking mob is better than this and the on ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

I have never, God or whatever knows, prostrated myself to be famous, but I would meander through all the sewers of the world, through all degradations and humiliations, in order to paint. I have to do this. Until the last drop every vision that exists in my being must be purged; then it will be a pleasure for me to be rid of this damned torture ~ Max Beckmann

Focus on rewarding and praising yourself instead of degrading and punishing yourself. You'll get far better results! ~ Akiroq Brost

Every woman whether rich or poor, married or single, has a circle of influence within which, according to her character, she is exerting a certain amount of power for good or harm. Every woman, by her virtue or her vice, by her folly or her wisdom, by her levity or her dignity, is adding something to our national elevation or degradation. A community is not likely to be overthrown where woman fulfills her mission, for by the power of her noble heart over the hearts of others, she will raise that community from its ruins and restore it again to prosperity and joy. ~ John Angell James

More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or "externalize" such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The people who abandon Jihad fall a victim to humility and degradation. ~ Abu Bakr

People are looking for someone to blame. Our heritage comes from two groups who always denied that they were part of the problem. The early ecologists blamed industrialization for environmental degradation even while they continued to purchase all the goods and services produced by industry. And the forerunners of the parashintos always looked down on and isolated strangers. ~ L.E. Modesitt Jr.

People who need therapy are in Afghanistan. They've seen horrible human cruelty and degradation, but they don't have time or the money for therapy. ~ David Chase

I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility. [An anarchist] ~ Joseph Conrad

Long before many of us were even conscious of our own degradation, Marcus Garvey fought for African national and racial equality. ~ Kwame Nkrumah

A foolish picture I live in disgust, degradation being eaten by lust. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation. ~ T. S. Eliot

If a person refuses to develop his potential, it can lead to nervous or mental disorders, somatic diseases and personal degradation ~ Sunday Adelaja

Needless to say, this fragile experiment began by taking for granted the ugly conquest of Amerindians and Mexicans, the exclusion of women, the subordination of European working-class men and the closeting of homosexuals. These realities made many of the words of the revolutionary Declaration of Independence ring a bit hollow. yet the enslavement of Africans -- over 20 percent of the population -- served as the linchpin of American democracy; that is, the much-heralded stability and continuity of American democracy was predicated upon black oppression and degradation. Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white -- they would be only Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and others engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. ~ Cornel West

Water sluices away soap and grime, even some of the shame comes with it. If she were to scrub for a thousand years she would not be clean, but she is too tired to care and she has grown accustomed to scars she cannot scour away. The sweat, the alcohol, the humid salt of semen and degradation, these she can cleanse. It is enough. She is too tired to scrub harder. Too hot and too tired, always.
At the end of her rinsing, she is happy to find a little water left in the bucket. She dips one ladleful and drinks it, gulping. And then in a wasteful, unrestrained gesture, she upends the bucket over her head in one glorious cathartic rush. In that moment, between the touch of the water, and the splash as it pools around her toes, she is clean. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be inevitable. ~ Jonathan Kozol

But the sun itself, however beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering more death than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the thing it looks upon to bless. ~ Charles Dickens

ethanol may actually make some kinds of air pollution worse. It evaporates faster than pure gasoline, contributing to ozone problems in hot temperatures. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ethanol does reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent relative to gasoline, but it calculated that devoting the entire U.S. corn crop to make ethanol would replace only a small fraction of American gasoline consumption. Corn farming also contributes to environmental degradation due to runoff from fertilizer and pesticides.
But to dwell on the science is to miss the point. As the New York Times noted in the throes of the 2000 presidential race, ―Regardless of whether ethanol is a great fuel for cars, it certainly works wonders in Iowa campaigns. The ethanol tax subsidy increases the demand for corn, which puts money in farmers' pockets. Just before the Iowa caucuses, corn farmer Marvin Flier told the Times, ―Sometimes I think [the candidates] just come out and pander to us, he said. Then he added, ―Of course, that may not be the worst thing. The National Corn Growers Association figures that the ethanol program increases the demand for corn, which adds 30 cents to the price of every bushel sold.
Bill Bradley opposed the ethanol subsidy during his three terms as a senator from New Jersey (not a big corn-growing state). Indeed, some of his most important accomplishments as a senator involved purging the tax code of subsid ~ Charles Wheelan

It is very expensive to achieve high unreliability. It is not uncommon to increase the cost of an item by a factor of ten for each factor of ten degradation accomplished. ~ Norman Ralph Augustine

The gravel road widened into a large turnaround where three similar looking and designed brothels sat waiting for customers. They were called Sheila's Front Porch, Tawny's High Five Ranch and Miss Delilah's House of Holies.
"Nice," Rachel said as we surveyed the scene. "why are these places always named after women
as if women actually own them?"
"You got me. I guess Mister Dave's House of Holies wouldn't go over so well with the guys."
Rachel smiled.
"You're right. I guess it's a shrewd move. Name a place of female degradation and slavery after a female and it doesn't sound so bad, does it? It's packaging. ~ Michael Connelly

Poverty, ignorance and degradation are the combined evils, these constitute the social disease of the free colored people of the US. ~ Frederick Douglass

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original. ~ Anthony Doerr

No one should dogmatize about the capacity of human nature for degradation or exaltation. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

But her no leather - no fur policy drew fire. Critics charged that faux hides, many of which are petroleum based, were more damaging to the earth than the real stuff.

Bull, said McCartney. "Livestock production is one of the major causes of ... global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity", she shot back, with more than fifty million animals farme and slaughtered each year just to make handbags and shoes. Conventional leather tanning employs heavy metals such as chromium, which results in waste that is toxic to humans. ~ Dana Thomas

The love for God is the love to protect the environment. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Any use of a human being in which less is demanded of him and less is attributed to him than his full status is a degradation and a waste. ~ Norbert Wiener

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

I think I would much rather push the boundaries of the degradation that the characters face. ~ Dave Rowntree

The soul that is within me no man can degrade. ~ Frederick Douglass

Why do people think that we're degraded when we're examining positions of degradation, or examining the cycle of our own degradation? ~ Chris Kraus

The women of the Green Belt Movement have learned about the causes and the symptoms of environmental degradation. They have begun to appreciate that they, rather than their government, ought to be the custodians of the environment. ~ Wangari Maathai

The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honorable term 'female physician' should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women. ~ Elizabeth Blackwell

Cutting a tree down doesn't kill it; it erases it from history. ~ The Wombat

Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live ... They won't become involved in economic or political change until something brings the seriousness of the situation home to them. ~ Shirley Chisholm

Why is it that scuba divers and surfers are some of the strongest advocates of ocean conservation? Because they've spent time in and around the ocean, and they've personally seen the beauty, the fragility, and even the degradation of our planet's blue heart. ~ Sylvia Earle

In a society where the degradation of man was (and is still) being proclaimed, humans defined in lowly terms, and Deity described as an abstract, impersonal concept, the heavens were opened and God and his Son Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph Smith and taught him the real nature of man. 14. ~ Gilbert W. Scharffs

That's what fantasies are for: they allow you to skip the degradation and head straight to the top. ~ David Sedaris

The fear and anxiety that infect humanity today are the results of this degradation of values, this ignorance of what is of significance and what is not, this want of faith in what the elders and sages have handed down as the wisdom of ages. People prefer what is pleasing to what is beneficial. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

Listen you..you.."he sputtered.
"You what ? You've already used hellion,draft girl and missy' .i can think of several more degradation,but then again im not the one trying so hard to be intimidating."
"How about you,maddending,foolish,moronic little chit ?"
"Much better !" she applauded. ~ Kate Noble

People are kept unaware of the reality, with the sweet and illusive candy of nationalism. They are made to believe in their bones that killing people in the name of sovereignty is the most glorious act of all - they are made to believe that the citizens of the neighboring country are their arch-enemies - they are made to believe that nationality is far greater than humanity. They are made to believe that surgical strikes against the nation across the border is a great patriotic deed - they are made to believe that raising wall and separating children from their parents are deeds of great glory. In short, politicians (not all) in the government keep doing whatever they desire, and the citizens choose to keep their mouth silent in obedience because that to them is the greatest act of patriotism. In short, to these spineless citizens, their country is always right and the neighboring country is always wrong - their country is always good and the neighboring country is always evil - their country is always on the side of ethics and morality, and the neighboring country is always on the side of moral degradation. And this has been going on since the rise of human civilization across the world. When will this change, one wonders! And the answer is now. You change - just you - you the individual - you the one human - and slowly but surely, little by little, the entire society will change. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I cant take it like this much longer, Milt," Karen said muffledly into the big CKC shirt with its male smell, allowing herself the luxury of letting the bars all the way down for once, enjoying for just this moment the eternal degradation of being a woman.
"I cant take it much longer," she whimpered, tasting it, the eternally caught and held hard in the grasp of some man, the forever humiliated heavy weight it was impossible to squirm out from under, the forever helpless except for the mercy of him who always takes what he wants without any, and that all women learn instinctively not to expect [ ... ] That was all they wanted. That was all any of them wanted. You give them the greatest thing you possess, the most intimate secret, and they
just take it. Well, let them have it. Let them all have some of it. Let them root and rut and rowel, as if it was no more important than that why were they all so anxious to keep it away from each other? ~ James Jones

[At the scene of a murder]
The cats' bloodthirst was normal; it was the way God had made them. They were hunters, they killed for food and to train their young
well maybe sometimes for sport. But this violent act by some unknown human had nothing to do with hunting
for a human to brutally maim one of the own kind out of rage or sadism or greed was, to Joe and Dulcie (the cats), a shocking degradation of the human condition. To imagine that vicious abandon in a human deeply distressed Dulcie; she did not like thinking about humans that way. ~ Shirley Rousseau Murphy

Reticulocytes are terminally differentiating red blood cells that do not contain lysosome. Therefore, it was postulated that the degradation of hemoglobin in these cells is mediated by a non-lysosomal machinery. ~ Aaron Ciechanover

The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay. ~ Thomas Merton

We hit slavery through a great civil war. Did we destroy it? No, we only changed it into hatred between sections of the country: in the South, into political corruption and chicanery, the degradation of the blacks through peonage, unjust laws, unfair and cruel treatment; and the degradation of the whites by their resorting to these practices, the paralyzation of the public conscience, and the ever over-hanging dread of what the future may bring. ~ James Weldon Johnson

Whatever we do to shame or degrade others, we do to ourselves. ~ Marty Rubin

By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without. Noble ~ Colson Whitehead

But it will be said that the husband provides for the wife, or in other words, he feeds, clothes and shelters her! I wish I had the power to make every one before me fully realize the degradation contained in that idea. ~ Ernestine Rose

The best armor is to keep out of range. ~ Abraham J. Twerski

To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Muhammad and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have kept on developing. ~ George S. Patton

In Shanghai, there were several pro-right circles of former officers. They realized that the Great War and European revolutions were a direct consequence of rotten liberalism. Words like order, family, discipline and duty didn't mean anything anymore. Civil liberties, so dear to Nina Kupina and people like her, resulted in monstrous egotism and total moral degradation: I do what I want and don't give a damn about others. ~ Elvira Baryakina

Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society's economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the Industrial Revolution. Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The "ideological superstructure" of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of striptease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will, and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

That's what interested me: their characters. I wanted to know what they had acquired from the world around them and how their formative experiences found expression in a dimly lighted basement in Glen Ridge. What was it in their upbringing as children and adolescents, so seemingly comfortable and secure, that inclined them to take pleasure in the conscious degradation of a helpless woman? ~ Bernard Lefkowitz

Don't pack your bags just yet, stay awhile,
Don't try to run away to higher ground,
You're in my twisted clouds of sad misfortune,
And you are such an entertaining crowd!
(I've never had such cheerful toys to play with...)
Forget I said that – just a little natural disaster Humour,
Ha-ha-ha.

Pull up a rusty lawn chair
On the waterfront in New Orleans,
And ignore the wind that howls,
Things aren't always as they seem.
I can smell fear in the air,
Fresh amidst the cornbread steam,
Forgive me if I sound excited,
(I'm going to be famous, you know!)
And let me take your money, please!

I'll drown your family, hunt down your pets,
I've got tricks that I've never even tried yet,
And it's so easy when I get the chance!
(I'll swipe your house in just one glance!)

As the saying goes, it all comes out in the wash,
But I'm the only wash that leaves no stone unturned,
Financial devastation is my middle name,
And social degradation is my third!

You, little boy from the bayou bank,
You used to fish for pointless fun
(I can appreciate having fun),
But after I go, you'll find your parents poor,
You'll have eviction notices on your door,
You'll have to sell any fish you can catch,
In a desperate grasp for money,
Although I hate to break it to you,
That bayou's polluted, honey!
I see nothing in your future ~ Rebecca McNutt

All growth, progress, well - being, or degradation is but relative. ~ Swami Vivekananda

The ones who chose to live free of inconvenience by tolerating the agony and degradation of others? ~ Robin Hobb

No man or woman should depend upon another for maintenance and necessaries. Family discord and social degradation will never end till each depends upon herself. ~ Anandi Gopal Joshi

You shouldn't have to care about a women to recognize that the sexuel degradation of all women is a problem. You should recognize that it's wrong simply because they're humans. ~ Lyssa Kay Adams

But as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall - falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves. ~ Philip K. Dick

The real individuals of our time are the martyrs who have gone through infernos of suffering and degradation in their resistance to conquest and oppression, not the inflated personalities of popular culture, the conventional dignitaries. These unsung heroes consciously exposed their existence as individuals to the terroristic annihilation that others undergo unconsciously through the social process. The anonymous martyrs of the concentration camps are the symbols of the humanity that is striving to be born. The task of philosophy is to translate what they have done into language that will be heard, even though their finite voices have been silenced by tyranny. ~ Max Horkheimer

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

We are all addicts in various stages of degradation where I live on the Upper West Side, some to heroin, some to small dogs, and some to the New York Times. The heroin is cut, the dogs are paranoid, and the Times cheats by skimping on the West Coast ball scores. No matter, each of us goes upon the street solely in pursuit of his own particular curse. ~ Murray Kempton

Bringing up daughters for nothing but marriage, mingles poison in the cup of domestic life, is traitorous to the virtue of both sexes, for neither suffers alone
is adverse to the happiness, to the development of conscience and to religion, and introduces to the dwellings of wretchedness and despair. The result of this degradation is pride, intemperance, licentiousness
nay, every vice, misery, and degradation. ~ Harriot Kezia Hunt

[H]ow the force of one's adolescent curiosity and incipient lust often must war with the need to protect oneself from disgusting and wicked violators, how pleasure can coexist with awful degradation without meaning the degradation was justified or a species of wish fulfillment; how it feels to be both accomplice and victim; and how such ambivalences can live on in an adult sexual life. ~ Maggie Nelson

The instrumentalization of action and the degradation of politics into a means for something else has of course never really succeeded in eliminating action, in preventing its being one of the decisive human experiences, or in destroying the realm of human affairs altogether. ~ Hannah Arendt

Make no mistake. The greatest destroyer of ecology. The greatest source of waste, depletion and pollution. The greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, poverty, animal abuse and inhumanity. The greatest generator of personal and social neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety. Not to mention the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for personal health, global sustainability and progress on this planet, is not some corrupt government or legislation.
Not some rogue corporation or banking cartel.
Not some flaw of human nature and not some secret cabal that controls the world.
It is the socioeconomic system itself at its very foundation. ~ Peter Joseph

Class supremacy can rest only on class degradation ~ Jack London

The day dawns; the morning star is bright upon the horizon! The iron gate of our prison stands half open. One gallant rush from the North will fling it wide open, while four millions of our brothers and sisters shall march out into liberty. The chance is now given you to end in a day the bondage of centuries, and to rise in one bound from social degradation to the place of common equality with all other varieties of men. ~ Frederick Douglass

I suppose it was the end of the world for her when her husband and her baby were killed. I suppose she didn't care what became of her and flung herself into the horrible degradation of drink and promiscuous copulation to get even with life that had treated her so cruelly. She'd lived in heaven and when she lost it she couldn't put up with the common earth of common men, but in despair plunged headlong into hell. I can imagine that if she couldn't drink the nectar of the gods any more she thought she might as well drink bathroom gin.'
That's the sort of thing you say in novels. It's nonsense and you know it's nonsense. Sophie wallows in the gutter because she likes it. Other women have lost their husbands and children. It wasn't that that made her evil. Evil doesn't spring from good. The evil was there always. When that motor accident broke her defences it set her free to be herself. Don't waste your pity on her, she's now what at heart she always was. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

A mendacious umbrella is a sign of great moral degradation. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

They listened to the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, heard the horns of Elfland, and made designs on the culture that our own age is only beginning fully to appreciate. They were philologists and philomyths: lovers of logos (the ordering power of words) and mythos (the regenerative power of story), with a nostalgia for things medieval and archaic and a distrust of technological innovation that never decayed into the merely antiquarian. Out of the texts they studied and the tales they read, they forged new ways to convey old themes - sin and salvation, despair and hope, friendship and loss, fate and free will - in a time of war, environmental degradation, and social change. ~ Philip Zaleski

traumatic diagnoses such as post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative identity disorder describe a shared array of human responses to degradation and dehumanization (Good & Hinton, 2016; Ross, 2011) ~ Michael Salter

Pardon me, dear human self, capable of the most heinous degradation, capable of soaring. ~ Sena Jeter Naslund

And, don't you see, the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the head - though I had a very lively sense of that danger, too - but in this, that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had, even like the niggers, to invoke him - himself - his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground of floated in the air. ~ Joseph Conrad

Development requires modification and transformation of the environment ... the planet's capacity to support its people us being irreversibly reduced by the destruction and degradation of the biosphere and the need to understand the problem and take corrective action is becoming urgent. ~ Malcolm Fraser

In my stories, I controlled what happened in a way I couldn't in real life. My characters lived through the horror and degradation of the cruelty of others and they not only survived, they thrived. They gave me hope and laughter, and they kept me going in spite of everything else. They were my heroes. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Each person decides in early childhood how he will live and how he will die ... His trivial behavior may be decided by reason, but his important decisions have already been made: what kind of person he will marry, how many children he will have, what kind of bed he will die in ... It is incredible to think, at first, that man's fate, all his nobility and all his degradation, is decided by a child no more than six years old, and usually three ... (but) it is very easy to believe by looking at what is happening in the world today, and what happened yesterday, and seeing what will happen tomorrow. ~ Eric Berne

In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation ... The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and sexual anxiety. ~ Wilhelm Reich

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation which, in the midst of civilization, artificially creates a hell on earth, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; so long as the three problems of the century - the degradation of man by the exploitation of his labour, the ruin of women by starvation and the atrophy of childhood by physical and spiritual night are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, there should be a need for books such as this. ~ Victor Hugo

I consider it a degradation and a stain on my honor to submit to baptism in order to qualify myself for state employment in Prussia. ~ Heinrich Heine

Northerners know nothing at all about Slavery. They think it is perpetual bondage only. They have no conception of the depth of degradation involved in that word, SLAVERY; if they had, they would never cease their efforts until so horrible a system was overthrown. ~ Harriet Ann Jacobs

The portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the fear of God to us all. There were opiates for remorse, drugs that could lull the moral sense to sleep. But here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin. Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls. ~ Oscar Wilde

It's as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race - scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout human history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day ... all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. ~ Philip Roth

And we need to maintain our foothold in the fight against terrorism and terrorist groups and respond to any degradation of Iraqi security or stability. ~ Rick Larsen

The great have private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must curtsy. Their interests are so far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in direct and necessary opposition to them; their power is at the expense of OUR weakness; their riches of OUR poverty; their pride of OUR degradation; their splendour of OUR wretchedness; their tyranny of OUR servitude. ~ William Hazlitt

If religious books are not widely circulated among the masses in this country, I do not know what is going to become of us as a nation. If truth be not diffused, then error will be. If God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendency. If the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will. If the power of the gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of this land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end. ~ Daniel Webster