Degrade Quotes

#1. Curiously enough, it seems that at times the spiritual side prevails, and then the materialistic side - in wave-like motions following each other. ...At one time the full flood of materialistic ideas prevails, and everything in this life - prosperity, the education which procures more pleasures, more food - will become glorious at first and then that will degrade and degenerate. Along with the prosperity will rise to white heat all the inborn jealousies and hatreds of the human race. Competition and merciless cruelty will be the watchword of the day. To quote a very commonplace and not very elegant English proverb, "Everyone for himself, and the devil take the hindmost", becomes the motto of the day. Then people think that the whole scheme of life is a failure. And the world would be destroyed had not spirituality come to the rescue and lent a helping hand to the sinking world. Then the world gets new hope and finds a new basis for a new building, and another wave of spirituality comes, which in time again declines. As a rule, spirituality brings a class of men who lay exclusive claim to the special powers of the world. The immediate effect of this is a reaction towards materialism, which opens the door to scores of exclusive claims, until the time comes when not only all the spiritual powers of the race, but all its material powers and privileges are centered in the hands of a very few; and these few, standing on the necks of the masses of the people, want to rule them. Then - Author: Swami Vivekananda

#2. The law says if you poison the water, you'll die. The law says that if you poison the air, you'll suffer. The law says if you degrade where you live, you'll suffer ... If you don't learn that, you can only suffer. There's no discussion with this law. - Author: Oren Lyons

#3. Our world needs us to show up and stand up for our beliefs. I just hope we're civil and respectful. When we degrade and diminish our humanity, even in response to being degraded and diminished, we break our own wild hearts. - Author: Brene Brown

#4. Don't you long to shout to those youths who are bustling around you: Fools! Leave those worldly things that shackle the heart - and very often degrade it - leave all that and come with us in search of Love! - Author: Josemaria Escriva

#5. Religion, in refusing to degrade you, has placed in doubt the crime imputed to you; the government, in surrounding your case with mystery and shadow, gives reason for belief in some error, committed in fatal moments; and all the Philippines, in venerating your memory and calling you martyrs, in no way acknowledges your guilt. - Author: Jose Rizal

#6. Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins. - Author: Geoffrey Wood

#7. In India, the sapling was planted by the nation's founders, who lived long enough (and worked hard enough) to nurture it to adulthood. Those who came afterwards could disturb and degrade the tree of democracy but, try as they might, could not uproot or destroy it. - Author: Ramachandra Guha

#8. That's what Papa counting on, no doubt. But romantic love is . . .I don't wish to say that romantic love itself is a fraud - I'm sure the feelings it inspires are genuine enough, however temporary. But the way it's held up as this pristine, everlasting joy every woman ought to strive for - when in fact love is more like beef brought over from Argentina on refrigerated ships: It might stay fresh for a while under carefully controlled conditions, but sooner or later it's qualities will begin to degrade. Love is by and large a perishable good and it is lamentable that young people are asked to make irrevocable, till-death-do-we-part decisions in the midst of a short-lived euphoria. - Author: Sherry Thomas

#9. The air, soil and water cumulatively degrade; the climates and oceans destabilize; species become extinct at a spasm rate across continents; pollution cycles and volumes increase to endanger life-systems at all levels in cascade effects; a rising half of the world is destitute as inequality multiplies; the global food system produces more and more disabling and contaminated junk food without nutritional value; non-contagious diseases multiply to the world's biggest killer with only symptom cures; the vocational future of the next generation collapses across the world while their bank debts rise; the global financial system has ceased to function for productive investment in life-goods; collective-interest agencies of governments and unions are stripped while for-profit state subsidies multiply; police state laws and methods advance while belligerent wars for corporate resources increase; the media are corporate ad vehicles and the academy is increasingly reduced to corporate functions; public sectors and services are non-stop defunded and privatized as tax evasion and transnational corporate funding and service by governments rise at the same time at every level. - Author: John McMurtry

#10. People try to get out of themselves and to escape from the man. This is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they turn into beast; instead of lifting, they degrade themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible heights. - Author: Michel De Montaigne

#11. I think that sacrifices of animals in the name of religion are barbarous and they degrade the name of religion. - Author: Jawaharlal Nehru

#12. As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only. - Author: Christopher Hitchens

#13. But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people. - Author: James Lee Burke

#14. What right have you to take the word wealth, which originally meant 'well-being,' and degrade and narrow it by confining it to certain sorts of material objects measured by money. - Author: John Ruskin

#15. We're not locked in to these conditions that degrade the environment, and jeopardize the future of our children. - Author: Dennis Kucinich

#16. Let no one imagine that he will lose anything of human dignity by this voluntary sell-out of his all to his God. He does not by this degrade himself as a man; rather he finds his right place of high honor as one made in the image of his Creator. His deep disgrace lay in his moral derangement, his unnatural usurpation of the place of God. His honor will be proved by restoring again that stolen throne. In exalting God over all, he finds his own highest honor upheld. - Author: Aiden Wilson Tozer

#17. No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it,
but longing to degrade not even death;
we shall learn earthliness, and serve its ends,
to feel its hands about us like a friend's. - Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

#18. Nothing is gained except by sacrifice ... Do not degrade it to the level of the brutes ... Make yourselves decent men! ... Be chaste and pure! ... There is no other way. Did Christ find any other way? - Author: Swami Vivekananda

#19. [I]t's impossible to evade the fact that Endless War will inevitably degrade the citizenry of the country that engages in it. A country which venerates its military above all other institutions, which demands that its soldiers be spoken of only with religious-like worship, and which continuously indoctrinates its population to believe that endless violence against numerous countries is necessary and just - all by instilling intense fear of the minorities who are the target of that endless violence - will be a country filled with citizens convinced of the virtues and nobility of aggression. - Author: Glenn Greenwald

#20. To get rid of predestination we have been willing to degrade our God into a godling. - Author: B. B. Warfield

#21. You degrade us and then ask why we are degraded. You shut our mouths and ask why we don't speak. You close your colleges and seminaries against us and then ask why we don't know. - Author: Frederick Douglass

#22. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. - Author: Frederick Douglass

#23. That God is the sum of all created things. Nature and God are one, so that whoever touches a leaf or a stone touches God. That is of course to degrade the glory of the incorruptible Deity and, in an effort to make all things divine, banish all divinity from the world entirely. - Author: A.W. Tozer

#24. Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own; and, even while they sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon, invent excuses for the oppression which prompts their tears. - Author: Thomas Hardy

#25. The Church has been and now is unalterably opposed to gambling in any form whatever. It is opposed to any game of chance, occupation, or so-called business, which takes money from the person who may be possessed of it without giving value received in return. It is opposed to all practices the tendency of which is to encourage the spirit of reckless speculation, and particularly to that which tends to degrade or weaken the high moral standard which the members of the Church, and our community at large, have always maintained - Author: Heber J. Grant

#26. Cry Out in Your Weakness
A dragon was pulling a bear into its terrible mouth.
A courageous man went and rescued the bear.
There are such helpers in the world, who rush to save
anyone who cries out. Like Mercy itself,
they run toward the screaming.
And they can't be bought off.
If you were to ask one of those, "Why did you come
so quickly?" He or she would say, "Because I heard
your helplessness."
Where lowland is,
that's where water goes. All medicine wants
is pain to cure.
And don't just ask for one mercy.
Let them flood in. Let the sky open under your feet.
Take the cotton out of your ears, the cotton
of consolations, so you can hear the sphere-music. . . .
Give your weakness
to One Who Helps.
Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.
A nursing mother, all she does
is wait to hear her child.
Just a little beginning-whimper,
and she's there.
God created the child, that is, your wanting,
so that it might cry out, so that milk might come.
Cry out! Don't be stolid and silent
with your pain. Lament! And let the milk
of Loving flow into you.
The hard rain and wind
are ways the cloud has
to take care of us.
Be patient.
Respond to every call
that excites your spirit.
Ignore those that make you fearful
and sad, that degrade you
back toward disease and death. - Author: Rumi

#27. The grand design of nature perceived broadly in four dimensions, including the forces that move the universe and created man, with special focus on evolution in our own biosphere, is something intrinsically good that it is right to preserve and enhance, and wrong to destroy and degrade. - Author: Roger Wolcott Sperry

#28. One's prescription can seem extensive--even overwhelming, depending on an individual's circumstance--and I can imagine the prospects exciting few people of any stripe. Lots of eaters are going to balk at abstaining, but to learn that recovery is going to require rigorous honesty, or more attention to spirit, could be far more off-putting.
Then again, who gets excited about any serious treatment prescription? Certainly not the cancer patient told she'll have to undergo radiation, or the back patient ordered to a month's uninterrupted bed rest, or the lung patient told he'll need a double transplant.
To some, the flaw of those comparisons will be their being equated with food addiction, and that is the rub, entirely. The medical profession and the public at large don't see that they are equivalent. The consequences of obesity (the chief consequence of food addiction) constitute the fastest-growing, and soon the gravest, threat to public health. Obesity is suicide on lay-away: It has plenty of time to degrade quality of life before finally ending life prematurely. - Author: Michael Prager

#29. People take time. But in our haste, we size them up or cut them down to what we take to be a more manageable size, labeling people instead of trying to hear, understand or welcome them. And we love our labels as ourselves even as they don't - and can't - do justice to the complexity of our own lived lives or anyone else's. It's as if we'll do anything to avoid the burden of having to think twice. To form an opinion about someone or something is to assert - or to believe we've asserted - some kind of control. And in the rush to opine, we degrade ourselves and whatever it is we'd like to think we've spoken meaningfully about and defensively stick to hastily prepared and unconvincing scripts, as others have before us, of radical denial. - Author: David Dark

#30. Our objective is clear: we will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy. - Author: Barack Obama

#31. Whatever we do to shame or degrade others, we do to ourselves. - Author: Marty Rubin

#32. Emotional abuse poisons a relationship and infuses it it with hostility, contempt, and hatred. No matter how much a couple once loved each other, once emotional abuse becomes a consistent aspect of the relationship, that love is overshadowed by fear, anger, guilt, and shame. Whether it is one or both partners who are being emotionally abusive, the relationship becomes increasingly more toxic as time goes by. In this polluted environment it is difficult for love not only to grow but to survive.

At the very least, emotional abuse causes both the abuser and the victim to lose sight of any redeeming qualitites his or her partner once had. The more a partner is allowed to degrade, criticize, or dominate her partner, the less she will respect her partner. And the more a partner is emotionally abused, the more he will slowly build up an intense hatred towards his abuser. The disrespect and hatred each partner begins to feel leads to more and more emotional abuse and to each partner justifying inappropriate, even destructive, behavior. Over time, anger can build up on the part of both abuser and victim, and emotional abuse can turn to physical violence. - Author: Beverly Engel The Emotionally Abusive Relationship How To Stop Being Abused And How To Stop Abusing

#33. Monster. And yet ... For her friends, for her family, she would gladly be a monster. For Rowan, for Dorian, for Nehemia, she would debase and degrade and ruin herself. - Author: Sarah J. Maas

#34. And if you can't shape your life the way you want, at least try as much as you can not to degrade it ... - Author: Constantine P. Cavafy

#35. No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. As a right over a man's subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman's subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature. - Author: Susan B. Anthony

#36. To limit the time resource applied to any one company, he reminds himself of psychological research which suggests that in many contexts decisions are best made with no more than five to seven points of information. Any more information beyond that does not significantly improve decisions, and may even degrade them. - Author: Guy Thomas

#37. Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows. - Author: Octavio Paz

#38. Humans are no less eager than in the past to dominate, degrade, humiliate, and control - often in order to confirm their own sense of pride and superiority. (Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that this was the main motive for slavery.) But - Author: David Brion Davis

#39. The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war ... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage. - Author: H.L. Mencken

#40. Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it. - Author: Nadine Gordimer

#41. No one can degrade us except ourselves. - Author: Booker T. Washington

#42. Today the great gift of God's Creation is exposed to serious dangers and lifestyles which can degrade it. Environmental pollution is making particularly unsustainable the lives of the poor of the world ... we must pledge ourselves to take care of creation and to share its resources in solidarity. - Author: Pope Benedict XVI

#43. An elite class that is free to operate without limits - whether limits imposed by the rule of law or fear of the responses from those harmed by their behavior - is an elite class that will plunder, degrade, and cheat at will, and act endlessly to fortify its own power. - Author: Glenn Greenwald

#44. My meaning is, that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades. - Author: Charles Dickens

#45. How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation
for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature. - Author: Soren Kierkegaard

#46. AT&T will not block access to the public Internet or degrade service, period. - Author: Edward Whitacre, Jr.

#47. The American people have this to learn: that where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither person nor property is safe. - Author: Frederick Douglass

#48. The men who made the war were profuse in their praises of the man who kicked the P.M. out of his office and now degrades by his disloyal, dishonest and lying presence the greatest office in the State. - Author: John Burns

#49. True self-confidence never needs to degrade the confidence of others in order to grow and survive. If it does, it's not confidence at all ... it's ego. - Author: Charles F. Glassman

#50. Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it. - Author: Jacques Lacan

#51. Happier thoughts lead to essentially a happier biochemistry. A happier, healthier body. - Author: John Hagelin

#52. You punk asshole. What was this? A game for you? This is my life's work you just annihilated and for what? Shits and giggles? Or was this nothing more than a fraternity prank? Please tell me that you didn't just ruin my integrity to get some kind of drinking points. This is something I've been working for since before you were born. How dare you make a mockery of me. I hope to God that one day someone degrades you like this so that you'll know, just once in your spoiled pompous life, what humiliation feels like! (Tory) - Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

#53. Guilt once harbored in the conscious breast, intimidates the brave, degrades the great. - Author: Samuel Johnson

#54. Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize. - Author: Gene Wolfe

#55. When there are so many people willing to degrade women so horrifically just for having the nerve to express an opinion, it doesn't take long for us to regress into silence. - Author: Clementine Ford

#56. 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. - Author: Doug Stanhope

#57. I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven. - Author: Barack Obama

#58. Contraceptive methods are like putting a premium on vice. It makes men and women reckless ... As it is, man has sufficiently degraded woman for his lust, and [contraception] , no matter how well meaning the advocates may be, will still further degrade her. - Author: Mahatma Gandhi

#59. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. - Author: Oscar Wilde

#60. For times when you feel pain:
See that it doesn't disgrace you, or degrade your
intelligence - doesn't keep it from acting rationally or
unselfishly.
And in most cases what Epicurus said should help: that
pain is neither unbearable nor unending, as long as you keep
in mind its limits and don't magnify them in your imagination.
And keep in mind too that pain often comes in disguise
as drowsiness, fever, loss of appetite ... When you're
bothered by things like that, remind yourself: I'm giving in
to pain. - Author: Marcus Aurelius

#61. But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you - the social reformers - see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them. - Author: Isaiah Berlin

#62. This is American leadership at its best. We stand with people who fight for their own freedom, and we rally other nations on behalf of our common security and common humanity. - Author: Barack Obama

#63. It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. - Author: Alexis De Tocqueville

#64. Some ISPs are blocking all BitTorrent traffic, because BitTorrent can be used to share files in a piratical way. Hollywood lobbying groups are trying to pass laws which would force ISPs to block or degrade BitTorrent traffic, too. Personally, I think this is like closing down freeways because a bank robber could use them to get away. - Author: Wil Wheaton

#65. The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose. - Author: William Blake

#66. We degrade Providence too much by attributing our ideas to it out of annoyance at being unable to understand it. - Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#67. Prostitution demoralizes men far more than women. Prostitution does not degrade the whole female sex, but only the luckless women that become its victims, and even those not to the extent generally assumed. But it degrades the character of the entire male world. - Author: Friedrich Engels

#68. The little respect paid to chastity in the male world is, I am persuaded, the grand source of many of the physical and moral evils that torment mankind, as well as of the vices and follies that degrade and destroy women; yet, at school, boys infallibly lose that decent bashfulness, which might have ripened into modesty at home. - Author: Mary Wollstonecraft

#69. Chigurh shot him through the forehead and then stood watching. Watching the capillaries break up in his eyes. The light receding. Watching his own image degrade in that squandered world. - Author: Cormac McCarthy

#70. Family members have a personal stake in honoring and mourning their dead and objecting to unwarranted public exploitation that, by intruding upon their own grief, tends to degrade the rites and respect they seek to accord to the deceased person who was once their own. - Author: Anthony Kennedy

#71. Some global hazards are insidious. They stem from pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. And they will be aggravated as the population rises to a projected nine billion by mid-century, and by the effects of climate change. An 'ecological shock' could irreversibly degrade our environment. - Author: Martin Rees

#72. She drew back from the spectacle of my humiliation and of her triumph. The sudden silence that had fallen upon me seemed to frighten her. "I spared you, at the time," she said. "I would have spared you now, if you had not forced me to speak." She moved away as if to leave the room-- and hesitated before she got to the door. "Why did you come here to humiliate yourself?" she asked. "Why did you come here to humiliate me?" She went on a few steps, and paused once more. "For God's sake, say something!" she exclaimed, passionately. "If you have any mercy left, don't let me degrade myself in this way! Say something--and drive me out of the room! - Author: Wilkie Collins

#73. Other anatomical changes associated with long-duration space flight are definitely negative: the immune system weakens, the heart shrinks because it doesn't have to strain against gravity, eyesight tends to degrade, sometimes markedly (no one's exactly sure why yet). The spine lengthens as the little sacs of fluid between the vertebrae expand, and bone mass decreases as the body sheds calcium. Without gravity, we don't need muscle and bone mass to support our own weight, which is what makes life in space so much fun but also so inherently bad for the human body, long-term. - Author: Chris Hadfield

#74. Words have consequences, and I judge people not only by their words but what they do. And if you look at people who have a pattern, who've built a career out of dividing people and who built a career out of often not just Obama but finding ways to degrade and diminish African-Americans and African-American leaders. It's racist to consistently make your living on the backs of black people. - Author: Joan Walsh Anglund

#75. We are naturally moral beings, but our environments can enhance - or, sadly, degrade - this innate moral sense. - Author: Paul Bloom

#76. Ours is one continued struggle against degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the European, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness. - Author: Mahatma Gandhi

#77. the way you speak of yourself
the way you degrade yourself
into smallness
is abuse

-self-harm - Author: Rupi Kaur

#78. There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language. - Author: Northrop Frye

#79. War is not the only arena where peace is done to death. - Author: Aung San Suu Kyi

#80. The aim of the joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded. - Author: George Orwell

#81. It's horrible to be a sex object at any age, but at least when you're an adult you can make the decision if you want to degrade yourself. - Author: Natalie Portman

#82. Wealth means power: the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade. - Author: Emma Goldman

#83. within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of mise - Author: Karl Marx

#84. Many otherwise decent men and women could find no other solution. They are willing to degrade themselves to their basest levels to prevent the traditional laborer from rising in status or, to put it bluntly, from "winning," even though what he wins has been rightfully his from the moment he was born into the human race. I - Author: John Howard Griffin

#85. If you tell people what you are going to do, and you suggest it's going to be successful, you need to be successful. Because once you create those expectations and you don't fulfill them, when you already have a significant credibility problem, it just further degrades your credibility. - Author: Chris Lehane

#86. All praise and honor! I confess
That bread and ale, home-baked, home-brewed
Are wholesome and nutritious food,
But not enough for all our needs;
Poets-the best of them-are birds
Of passage; where their instinct leads
They range abroad for thoughts and words
And from all climes bring home the seeds
That germinate in flowers or weeds.
They are not fowls in barnyards born
To cackle o'er a grain of corn;
And, if you shut the horizon down
To the small limits of their town,
What do you but degrade your bard
Till he at last becomes as one
Who thinks the all-encircling sun
Rises and sets in his back yard? - Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#87. Whoever degrades another degrades me, And whatever is done or said returns at last to me. - Author: Walt Whitman

#88. Some of the farm's work reached a level of granularity that stunned Lyudmilla. Two trolls would go on the comments sections of small' provincial newspapers and start chatting about the street they lived in, the weather, then caually recommend a piece about the nefarious West attacking Russia.

No one who worked at the farm described themselves as trolls. Instead, they talked about their work in the passive voice ('a piece was written', 'a comment was made'). Most treated the farm as if it was just another job, doing the minimum required and then clocking off. Many of them seemed pleasant enough young people, with open, pretty faces, and yet they didn't blink when asked to smear, degrade, insult and humiliate their victims. The ease with which victims were attacked, the scale at which the farm operated, it all stunned Lyudmilla. - Author: Peter Pomerantsev

#89. Remember that every relationship in your life starts with your relationship with yourself. How can you expect to have healthy relationships with others when you can't even love and respect the person you are with all the time, yourself. Treat yourself with respect. Do not insult yourself everytime you pass a mirror. Do not degrade yourself for your past actions. Notice your beauty. Notice all the wonderful things about yourself that make you a great person. - Author: Avina Celeste

#90. Genius, when employed in works whose tendency it is to demoralize and to degrade us, should be contemplated with abhorrence rather than with admiration; such a monument of its power, may indeed be stamped with immortality, but like the Coliseum at Rome, we deplore its magnificence because we detest the purposes for which it was designed. - Author: Charles Caleb Colton

#91. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. - Author: Susan Sontag

#92. We ourselves, will resurrect the memory in order to savor it and carry it forth into the world. We will fling it at one another for laughs. Distort it. We will toss the story into the air at parties and howl over its ripeness. Degraded as it was, we will degrade it further. Make it more swollen. We shall render it impossibly awful, making of it the mythology of ourselves. A comfort. Proof of the trials we've survived. - Author: Chuck Palahniuk

#93. Be critical. Women have the right to say: This is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades. - Author: Tillie Olsen

#94. Sebastian Vettel's brilliant talent will ultimately come forth and he'll continue to show what he's capable of. I will never ever degrade Vettel's ability. Sooner or later, he'll prove anyone so wrong - Author: Mario Andretti

#95. Of all the vices which degrade the human character, Selfishness is the most odious and contemptible. An undue love of Self leads to the most mon¬strous crimes and occasions the greatest misfortunes both in States and Families. As a selfish man will impoverish his family and often bring them to ruin, so a selfish king brings ruin on his people and often plunges them into war. - Author: William Makepeace Thackeray

#96. Revere your senses; don't degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Try to notice something new every day, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you're not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like, notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet feel like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is - your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbors, and this planet. Don't pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge. You can never become a real man if you have a careless and destructive attitude, Eustace said, but maturity will follow mindfulness even as day follows night. - Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

#97. If you take a perfectly well-adjusted normal person of any age from anywhere in the country and stick them in L.A., within about a week I do believe that a lot of their values and morals will start to degrade. - Author: Chris Eigeman

#98. For human beings to destroy the biological diversity of God's creation; for human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth's waters, its land, its air, and its life -- these are sins. - Author: Patriarch Bartholomew

#99. It's not that I refuse to look at the world around me, but that I refuse to pretend it's anymore important than everything else, you know what I mean? The moments from the past or from the future, the unreal scenes from tales, dreams, the projects we push aside each day that exist in the doubt we stop having in order to live--they're all worlds as true as this one, and I neither abandon or degrade them. So, I suppose that if I live in so many spaces at once, being absent from this one from time to time should be excusable, don't you think? - Author: Gustavo Faveron Patriau

#100. Poverty cannot deprive us of many consolations. It cannot rob us of the affection we have for each other, or degrade us in our own opinion, of in that of any person, whose opinion we ought to value. - Author: Ann Radcliffe

#101. Must we believe those who tell us that a hand foul with the filth of a shameful life is the only one a young girl cares to be caressed by?

That is the teaching that is bawled out day by day from between those yellow covers. Do they ever pause to think, I wonder, those devil's lady-helps, what mischief they are doing crawling about God's garden, and telling childish Eves and silly Adams that sin is sweet, and that decency is ridiculous and vulgar? How many an innocent girl do they not degrade into an evil-minded woman? To how many a weak lad do they not point out the dirty by-path as the shortest cut to a maiden's heart? It is not as if they wrote of life as it really is. Speak truth, and right will take care of itself. But their pictures are coarse daubs painted from the sickly fancies of their own diseased imaginations.

We want to think of women not--as their own sex would show them--as Loreleis luring us to destruction, but as good angels beckoning us upward. They have more power for good or evil than they dream of. It is just at the very age when a man's character is forming that he tumbles into love, and then the lass he loves has the making or marring of him. Unconsciously he molds himself to what she would have him, good or bad. I am sorry to have to be ungallant enough to say that I do not think they always use their influence for the best. . . .

And yet, women, you could make us so much better, if you only would. It rests with you more - Author: Jerome K. Jerome

#102. I am a congenital optimist about America, but I worry that American democracy is exhibiting fatal symptoms. DC has become an acronym for Dysfunctional Capital: a swamp in which partisanship has grown poisonous, relations between the White House and Congress have paralyzed basic functions like budgets and foreign agreements, and public trust in government has all but disappeared. These symptoms are rooted in the decline of a public ethic, legalized and institutionalized corruption, a poorly educated and attention-deficit-driven electorate, and a 'gotcha' press - all exacerbated by digital devices and platforms that reward sensationalism and degrade deliberation. Without stronger and more determined leadership from the president and a recovery of a sense of civic responsibility among the governing class, the United States may follow Europe down the road of decline. - Author: Graham Allison

#103. Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body's inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people's DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls - at which point the brain should "notice" the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don't realize they should stop revving. Lithium helps cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down. Notice that sunlight still trumps lithium during the day and resets the proteins; it's only when the sunlight goes away at night that lithium helps DNA shake free. Far from being sunshine in a pill, then, lithium acts as "anti-sunlight." Neurologically, it undoes sunlight and thereby compresses the circadian clock back to twenty-four hours - preventing both the mania bubble from forming and the Black Tuesday crash into depression. - Author: Sam Kean

#104. The chaste severity of the fathers in whatever related to the commerce of the two sexes flowed from the same principle
their abhorrence of every enjoyment which might gratify the sensual and degrade the spiritual nature of man. It was their favourite opinion, that if Adam had preserved his obedience to the Creator, he would have lived for ever in a state of virgin purity, and that some harmless mode of vegetation might have peopled paradise with a race of innocent and immortal beings. - Author: Edward Gibbon

#105. Capitalism, far from affording "privileges" to the middle classes, tends to degrade them more abjectly than any other stratum in society. The system deploys its capacity for abundance to bring the petty bourgeois into complicity with his own oppression - first by turning him into a commodity, into an object for sale in the marketplace; next by assimilating his very wants to the commodity nexus. Tyrannized as he is by every vicissitude of bourgeois society, the whole personality of the petty bourgeois vibrates with insecurity. His soporifics - commodities and more commodities - are his very poison. In this sense there is nothing more oppressive than "privilege" today, for the deepest recesses of the "privileged" man's psyche are fair game for exploitation and domination. - Author: Murray Bookchin

#106. The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities ... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions
one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. - Author: Oscar Wilde

#107. It's only through the degradation of the soul that you can know who you really are; when all else is stripped away, leaving you bare." Somehow, his black eyes darkened, the venom in his words more deadly than a viper's bite. "Let me degrade you, Katherine. - Author: Dianna Hardy

#108. I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him. - Author: Booker T. Washington

#109. If I have to degrade myself or do something that I'm not willing to do as a Christian to get something, I'm just not willing to do it. - Author: Quinton Aaron

#110. if he wants to be a whore then let him. if he chooses to degrade and demean himself, just walk away. you can't make a man respect you, the relationship or himself. - Author: R H Sin

#111. Never marry a person less educated than you. You, not only degrade yourself but also your kids will suffer whole life. - Author: Himmilicious

#112. Sometimes it is our mistakes that make us the best among men in the world. if we listen to the voices of the world, they speak not to degrade us but to encourage us to overcome that which we have been ultimately blessed with ... for what more could we lose if we never choose to overcome anything? I tell you that you are dead if you are foolish enough to not try. - Author: Danish Sayanee

#113. if he can't help but
degrade other women
when they're not looking
if toxicity is central to his language
he could hold you
in his lap and be soft
honey
that man could feed you sugar and
douse you in rose water
but that still could not
make him sweet

-if you want to know what the type of man he is - Author: Rupi Kaur

#114. Stay with me...opponents of gay marriage claim that granting equal legal rights to gay couples would degrade the sanctity of a sacred familial institution. What they don't seem to notice is that Who Wants to Marry A Multi-Millionaire?, Married By America and the Bachelor have been degrading the notion of marriage on prime time for an entire decade... - Author: Jennifer L. Pozner

#115. But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.

The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality. - Author: Jaron Lanier

#116. Anger is like an intoxicant; it reduces man and degrades him to the level of an animal. - Author: Sathya Sai Baba

#117. Most raw fooders don't embrace fruit, instead they embarrass it. by stripping the avocado down to fats and proteins, they paint a portrait that is most uncomely, unflattering and entirely dishonest. By reducing a banana to 100 calories, in the most ugliest of fashions, they attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. By converting a fruit salad to a plate of LFHCs, they degrade and insult the innocence and beauty of fruit. - Author: Mango Wodzak

#118. How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention. - Author: Adrienne Rich

#119. And she looked upon the mirror that was given as a gift. She hated everything about it, from the circular size of it, to the color, and the wooden frame that held it in place. But mostly, she hated looking at herself. Especially into this one that had a scratch on its glass surface, which would reflect back to her face. And as she looked, it would cut her as the words her father would often say, in telling her she was ugly. - Author: Anthony Liccione

#120. If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil. - Author: Simone Weil

#121. The maxim that men are not to be praised before their death was invented by envy and too lightly adopted by philosophers. I, on the contrary, maintain that they ought to be praised in their lifetime if they merit it; but jealousy and calumny, roused against their virtue or their talent, labour to degrade them if any one ventures to bear testimony to them. It is unjust criticism that they should fear to hazard, not sincere praise. - Author: Luc De Clapiers

#122. I mean, if you degrade someone, you isolate them, you control them, you call them names, you demean them. That's a horrible existence for people. - Author: Phil McGraw

#123. We ought to be listening to see who the world-system wants to devalue and degrade, most often first with words, so that we can know for whom we should be speaking and standing. - Author: Russell D. Moore

#124. I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung my out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, but because he's more myself than I am. What ever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.'
Ere this speech ended, I became sensible of Heathcliff's presence. Having noticed a slight movement, I turned my head, and saw him rise from the bench, and steal out noiselessly. He had listened till he heard Catherine say it would degrade her to marry him, and then he stayed to hear no further. - Author: Emily Bronte

#125. Words Are The Ones Used To Degrade And Demean Another Human Being - Author: Karlyle Tomms

#126. Random mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that this is true even of the helpful mutations. Let me emphasize, our experience with malaria's effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied genetic system) shows that most helpful mutations degrade genes. What's more, as a group the mutations are incoherent, meaning that they are not adding up to some new system. They are just small changes - mostly degradative - in pre-existing, unrelated genes. The take-home lesson is that this is certainly not the kind of process we would expect to build the astonishingly elegant machinery of the cell. If random mutation plus selective pressure substantially trashes the human genome, why should we think that it would be a constructive force in the long term? There is no reason to think so. - Author: Michael J. Behe

#127. We need to learn ... how war brutalises and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonise our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance. - Author: Tony Judt

#128. One does not have to hit you to abuse you. They can degrade, humiliate, blame, curse, manipulate and try to control you. It still is violence. - Author: Nitya Prakash

#129. Do not pursuit such character, and attitude, that humiliate and degrade you in the eyes and heart of the people. - Author: Ehsan Sehgal

#130. We want freedom for our country, but not at the expense or exploitation of others, not us to degrade other countries ... I want the freedom of my country so that other countries may learn something from my free country so that the resources of my country might be utilized for the benefit of mankind. - Author: Lal Bahadur Shastri

#131. Degrade first the Arts if you'd Mankind Degrade. Hire Idiots to Paint with cold light & hot shade: Give high Price for the worst, leave the best in disgrace, And with Labours of Ignorance fill every place. - Author: William Blake

#132. It is easier to understand if you think of it in terms of music. Sometimes a man enjoys a symphony. Elsetimes he finds a jig more suited to his taste.
The same holds true for lovemaking. One type is suited to the deep cushions of a twilight forest glade. Another comes quite naturally tangled in the sheets of narrow beds upstairs in inns. Each woman is like an instrument, waiting to be learned, loved, and finely played, to have at last her own true music made.
Some might take offense at this way of seeing things, not understanding how a trouper views his music. They might think I degrade women. They might consider me callous, or boorish, or crude.
But those people do not understand love, or music, or me. - Author: Patrick Rothfuss

#133. This was why people got mated, Rehv suddenly thought. Fuck the sex and the social position. If they were smart, they did it to make a house that had no walls and an invisible roof and a floor that no could walk on-and yet the structure was a shelter no storm could blow down, no match could torch up, no passage of years could degrade.
That was when it hit him. A mated bond like that helped you through shit nights like this. - Author: J.R. Ward

#134. It is one thing to kill someone. It is another to degrade and humiliate, to strip away a person's dignity like stripping away flesh. One made a man a murderer. The other made him a monster. - Author: Amy Harmon

#135. I am not living my life to impress anyone, not of a big head to degrade anyone, not of negative thoughts to influence anyone. But a positive mind to inspire the people that surrounds me and the world. - Author: Henry Johnson Jr

#136. In Iraq and Syria, American leadership - including our military power - is stopping ISIL's advance, instead of getting dragged into another ground war in the Middle East, we are leading a broad coalition, including Arab nations, to degrade and ultimately destroy this terrorist group. - Author: Barack Obama

#137. Anyone so lacking in empathy that he could systematically torment and physically degrade another should not be suffered to live. - Author: Patrick Rothfuss

#138. A man engrossed in sensual pleasures may form a mistaken out look
upon life and
think that he enjoys life more than others do. But soon he realizes his
mistake as not long
after this he is reduced to a mere slave to his blind passions,
He is doomed to a perpetual
life of deprivation and restlessness, for animal desires once run ra
mpant are never
satisfied: they are rather sharpened all the more and degrade ma
n to lower levels of
animalism where all his efforts are focused on one object: how to
derive the maximum
possible sensual pleasure in life? - Author: Mohammad Qutub

#139. To give my freedom blindly to a being equal to or inferior to myself is to degrade myself and throw away my freedom. I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God. If - Author: Thomas Merton

#140. I love you, I know this must come as something of a surprise, since all I've ever done is scorn you and degrade you and taunt you, but I have loved you for several hours now, and every second, more. I thought an hour ago that I loved you more than any woman has ever loved a man, but a half hour after that I knew that what I felt before was nothing compared to what I felt then. But ten minutes after that, I understood that my previous love was a puddle compared to the high seas before a storm. - Author: William Goldman

#141. Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood. - Author: George Bernard Shaw

#142. The women in porn plead to be abused. They call themselves whores and sluts. They are beaten and penetrated by groups of men. Their faces are covered with semen from dozens of masturbating men, their anuses are penetrated repeatedly by lines of partners, and they are raped. The women portrayed in the films exist to fulfill the desire of men in the most degrading and painful way possible. Nearly all porn dialogue includes lines from women such as I am a cunt, I am a bitch. I am a whore. I am a slut. - Author: Chris Hedges

#143. A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion. - Author: Hugo Black

#144. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now so he shall never know how I love him and that not because he's handsome Nelly but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of his and mine are the same and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning or frost from fire. - Author: Emily Bronte

#145. No matter how many plots we uncover and disrupt, no matter how many terrorist organizations we degrade or destroy, another individual or group will rise to take their place. - Author: Cofer Black

#146. It is not true that sex degrades women ... if it is any good. - Author: Steve Coogan

#147. We're going to achieve our goal. We are going to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL. - Author: Barack Obama

#148. Yet living and dying, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, riches and poverty, and so forth are equally the lot of good men and bad. Things like these neither elevate nor degrade; and therefore they are no more good than they are evil. - Author: Marcus Aurelius

#149. The bare bones tools for a cyber-attack are to identify a vulnerability in the system you want to gain access to or you want to subvert or you want to deny, destroy, or degrade, and then to exploit it, which means to send codes, deliver code to that system somehow and get that code to that vulnerability, to that crack in their wall, jam it in there, and then have it execute. - Author: Edward Snowden

#150. What more degrades woman today than that she so often seeks marriage as a support? Why is the holy sacrament of love, the sanctity of the family state, so often prostituted and destroyed, but because marriage is entered upon as a necessity or a convenience? And what can so place marriage on its only true basis of mutual love, mutual fitness, mutual esteem, as for woman to make herself independent of it as a mere means of subsistence? - Author: Mary C. Ames

#151. Oh! why was I born with a different face? why was I not born like the rest of my race? when
I look,each one starts! when I speak, I offend; then Im silent & passive & lose every friend. Then
my verse I dishonour, my pictures despise, my person degrade & my temper chastise; and the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame; all my talents I bury, and dead is my fame. Im either too low or too highly prized; when elate I m envy'd, when meek Im despis'd - Author: William Blake

#152. …many currently profitable conventional farming methods would become uneconomical if their true costs were incorporated into market pricing. Direct financial subsidies, and failure to include costs of depleting soil fertility and exporting pollutants, continue to encourage practices that degrade the land - Author: David R. Montgomery

#153. Today, we are tabling a motion seeking the support of the House for the government's decision to renew our military mission against ISIL for up to an additional 12 months. Our objectives remain the same: we intend to continue to degrade the capabilities of ISIL, that is, to degrade its ability to engage in military movements of scale, to operate bases in the open, to expand its presence in the region, and to propagate attacks outside the region. - Author: Stephen Harper

#154. Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to their sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority. - Author: Mary Wollstonecraft

#155. The decision to give an indicative date for a return is a mistake. It degrades the process. It degrades human life. - Author: David Trimble

#156. Pervert is a verb, and we do it all the time. To pervert is to degrade, to cut down to size - and we do it to people in our minds. We devalue them. We reduce them to the limit of our appetites, of our sense of what might prove useful to us, of our sense of what strikes us as appropriate. ...we often only file them away - these living and breathing human beings - into separate files of crazy-making issues - talk. When we think of a person primarily as a problem ... we're reducing them to the tiny sphere of our stunted attention span. This is how perversion works. Perversion is a failure of the imagination, a failure to pay adequate attention. - Author: David Dark

#157. Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death. - Author: Rumi

#158. Man cannot degrade woman without himself falling into degradation; he cannot elevate her without at the same time elevating himself. - Author: Alexander Walker

#159. Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it, and commend it, and are busy about it. At the same time they degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work. - Author: Jacques Barzun

#160. Of the two, I prefer those who render vice lovable to those who degrade virtue. - Author: Joseph Joubert

#161. When you sit down to write a book about sex, as we hope you one day will, you will discover that centuries of censorship have left us with very little adequate language with which to discuss the joys and occasional worries of sex. The language that we do have often carries implicit judgments: If the only polite way to talk about sexuality is in medical Latin - vulvas and pudendas, penes and testes - are only doctors allowed to talk about sex? Is sex all about disease? Meanwhile, most of the originally English words - cock and cunt, fucking, and, oh yes, slut - have been used as insults to degrade people and their sexuality and often have a hostile or coarse feel to them. Euphemisms - peepees and pussies, jade gates and mighty towers - sound as if we are embarrassed. Maybe we are. - Author: Dossie Easton

#162. The magic had started to degrade, and Rosemary had slowly but surely become thoroughly, gruesomely human. And there were few things worse in this world than humans. - Author: Krystal Sutherland

#163. Color is made to obscure the brightest endowments, to degrade the fairest character, and to check the highest and most praiseworthy aspirations. - Author: Charles Lenox Remond

#164. The Pythagoreans degrade impious men into brutes and, if one is to believe Empedocles, even into plants. - Author: Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

#165. There are people who thirst for blood like tigers. Any man who has once tasted this unlimited power over the blood, over the body and spirit of a human creature like himself, a creature created in the same image and subject to the same law of Christ; any man who has tasted this power, this boundless opportunity to humiliate most bitterly another being made in the image of God - becomes the servant instead of the master of his own emotions. Tyranny is a habit. It can and does eventually develop into a disease. I believe that the best of men may grow coarse, degrade to the level of a beast by sheer force of habit. Blood and power intoxicate one, they develop callousness and lust. The greatest perversions grow finally acceptable and even delicious to mind and heart. The man and the citizen perish in the tyrant for ever and the return to human dignity, remorse and spiritual rebirth becomes scarcely possible to him. Besides, the example and mere possibility of arbitrary power are contagious; they are indeed a great temptation. A society which regards such things calmly is already corrupt at the roots. - Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#166. All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. - Author: Aristotle.

#167. Then my verse I dishonor, my pictures despise, my person degrade and my temper chastise; and the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame; and my talents I bury, and dead is my fame. - Author: William Blake

#168. We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him. - Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#169. The moment anyone tries to demean or degrade you in any way, you have to know how great you are. Nobody would bother to beat you down if you were not a threat. - Author: Cicely Tyson

#170. Show up for your own life, he said. Don't pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle-feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an instant-gratification sugar coma. The most extraordinary gift you've been given is your own humanity, which is about conciousness, so honor that consciousness.
Revere your senses; don't degrade them with drugs, with depression, with wilful oblivion. Try to notice something new everyday, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you're not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like; notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet fell like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is - your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbours, and this planet. Don't pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge. - Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

#171. Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. - Author: Frederick Douglass

#172. Inspiration is incompatible with selfish desire. Whoever wants something for himself sets truth aside. Such aims can only degrade work. - Author: Antonin Sertillanges

#173. Government intervention in the economy - through taxes, regulation and, most importantly, currency inflation - causes distortions and misallocations of capital that must eventually be unwound. The distortions degrade the general standard of living, and the economy goes into a recession (call that an incomplete cleansing). Or it goes into a depression - wherein the entire sickly structure comes unglued. - Author: Doug Casey

#174. Advertising degrades the people it appeals to; it deprives them of their will to choose. - Author: Carrie Snow

#175. In other words, the weight of the evidence filtering down from the high brain-rooms of both the New York Times and the Washington Post seems to say we're all fucked. Muskie is a bonehead who steals his best lines from old Nixon speeches. McGovern is doomed because everybody who knows him has so much respect for the man that they can't bring themselves to degrade the poor bastard by making him run for President… John Lindsay is a dunce, Gene McCarthy is crazy, Humphrey is doomed and useless, Jackson should have stayed in bed… and, well, that just about wraps up the trip, right? - Author: Hunter S. Thompson

#176. Do not degrade me in the military uniform I wear for it represents the love I have for my country, and the sacrifices myself and millions of other American soldiers make everyday to protect the freedom we enjoy by living in the United States of America. - Author: Larry David

#177. I Dream I am from a clash of Color, From an idea of love, modeled for others' perception. I see me as I am, but am hidden from others' views. I am who I am, but a living contradiction to my peers. I see life as a blessing, a gift granted to me. Why should my tint describe me? Why should my culture degrade me? Why should the ignorance of another conjure my presence? Too many times I've been disappointed by the looks, By the sneers and misconceptions of the people who don't get me, Who don't understand why it hurts. I dream of a place of glory and freedom, Of losing the weight of oppression on my back. I dream of the enlightenment of people, Of the opening of their eyes. I dream for acceptance, And for the blessing of feeling special just once. One moment of glory . . . for the true virtue in my life. For the glimmer of freedom, and a rise in real pride. - Author: Glenn E. Singleton

#178. Men who have lived significant lives are men who never waited: not for money, security, ease, or women. Feel what you want to give most as a gift, to your woman and to the world, and do what you can to give it today. Every moment waited is a moment wasted, and each wasted moment degrades your clarity of purpose. - Author: David Deida

#179. Even among the married, sexual satisfaction must not be sought in a way which disregards man's character as a person and degrades him to the animal level. - Author: Francis Arinze

#180. Scientific and technological "solutions" which poison the environment or degrade the social structure and man himself are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction. - Author: E.F. Schumacher