Quotes About Degradation

Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize.

Poverty doesn't bring unhappiness; it brings degradation.

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.

It saddens me to see the reality-television shows that are getting so much fanfare that are a celebration of stupidity and the degradation of women. And those women are consistently wearing too short, too tight dresses. I hope the trend of aging gracefully returns.

Women are at once the guardians and the well-spring of the world's faith, morality, and tenderness; and if ever they are degraded to a commonplace level with men, this fine essential quality will be impaired, and their weakness will have to beg and follow where now it guides and controls.

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.

To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.

All things deteriorate in time.

An industrial system predicated on the delusion of limitless expansion will, in time, consume its own basis of support.

All my life I've read that the life of the mind is preeminent, and that it can transcend all bodily degradation. But that's just not my experience. When your body has to deal all day with shit and string beans, your mind does too.

One way of seeing all this was as a symptom of postmillennial decay, the degradation of public discourse, and the encroachment of celebrity worship into the arena of national affairs. Another way of looking at it was as an indication of the GOP's state of disarray. Then there was the way Trump perceived the thing: as a manifestation of his magnificence...

like all material things, they were not immune to the corruptions of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant, Entropy.

No closed ecology can be one-hundred-per-cent efficient; there is always waste, loss—some degradation of the environment and build-up of pollutants. It may take billions of years to poison and wear out a planet, but it will happen in the end. The oceans will dry up; the atmosphere will leak away.

Is it, moreover, a question merely of the replacement of the [psychical] representative by a regressive form of expression or is it a question of a genuine regressive degradation of the genitally-directed impulse in the id? It is not at all easy to make certain. The case history of the Russian 'Wolf Man' gives very definite support to the second, more serious, view ...

David Lurie is so appalled by his degraded state—no longer sexually attractive but still squirming with lust—that he finds himself musing about actual castration, the possibility that one might get a doctor to do it, or even, with the help of a textbook, do it oneself. For would that really be any more disgusting than the antics of a dirty old man? Instead, he forces himself on one of his students, a cannonball dive into disgrace that will be his undoing.

There was still the dirty snow, piles of it that looked like they were rotting, stained black, peppered with garbage. The white powder that loosed itself from the sky in small handfuls, like plaster falling from a ceiling, never managed to cover up the filth.

In many cases, the man can commit acts with woman's complicity that degrade her without tarnishing his lofty image.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt.

For now I seePeace to corrupt no less than war to waste.

the partner of his guilt, should be hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation: in fine, that all those females whom he had sought, apparently on account of their virtue, had, since his departure, thrown even the mask aside, and had not scrupled to expose the whole deformity of their vices to the public gaze.

he had required, to enhance his gratification, that his victim, the partner of his guilt, should be hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation: