Quotes About Degradation

The State of the Union has become, under presidents of both parties, a political pep rally degrading to everyone. The judiciary and uniformed military should never attend. And Congress, by hosting a spectacle so monarchical in structure (which is why Thomas Jefferson sent his thoughts to Congress in writing) deepens the diminishment of the legislative branch as a mostly reactive servant of an overbearing executive.

All crimina carnis contra naturam debase the human condition below that of the animal, and make man unworthy of his humanity; he then no longer deserves to be a person, and such conduct is the most ignoble and degraded that a man can engage in, with regard to the duties he has towards himself. Suicide is certainly the most dreadful thing that a man can do to himself, but is not so base and ignoble as these crimina carnis contra naturam which are the most contemptible acts a man can commit.

The pictures up on that wall in Cupertino illustrated that not just one person but hundreds of thousands could have their lives extinguished, die at the whim of others, and the next day their deaths would be meaningless. But even more telling was that those who had brought about these deaths (the most terror-filled, even if inevitable, tragedy of the human experience) could also degrade the victims and force them to expire in maximum pain and humiliation.

There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.

A hateful act is the transference to others of the degradation we bear in ourselves.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

The only religion that ought to be taught is the religion of fearlessness. Either in this world or in the world of religion, it is true that fear is the sure cause of degradation and sin. It is fear that brings misery, fear that brings death, fear that breeds evil. And what causes fear? Ignorance of our own nature.

second fallacy lies in failing to take into account forecast degradation as the projected period lengthens. We

Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best.

This reasoning shows that sophistication can, at some level, cause degradation, what economists call "negative utility.

b) The more volatile the something—the more uncertainty—the more the function divorces itself from the something. Let us consider the average number of cars again. The function (travel time) depends more on the volatility around the average. Things degrade if there is unevenness of distribution. For the same average you prefer to have 100,000 cars for both time periods; 80,000 then 120,000, would be even worse than 90,000 and 110,000.

These feelings, together with the deep degradation of his mind, made him resolve that no circumstances should again draw him into an axcess of wine.

Man—all mankind, that is to say—is so naturally depraved that he suffers less from universal degradation than from the establishment of a reasonable hierarchy.

Barney, when a man gets old enough, trapped enough, hungry enough, weary enough — he'll suck dick, tit, eat shit to stay alive; either that or suicide. the human race ain't got it, man. it's a bad crowd.

Vogt and Borlaug have the same mission: to use the discoveries of modern science to spare Mexico from a future of poverty and environmental degradation. But prospects are unlikely, in Mexico in 1946, for this to happen; indeed, Vogt and Borlaug believe that the situation grows direr by the day.

Chattel slavery on colonial plantations, by contrast, made slaves anonymous—they were, so to speak, something bought in a store, selected purely on physical characteristics, like so many cans of soup. (In account books, slavers called their human cargo "pieces," a revealing term.)

the illness of a good child is so far less trying than the sinfulness of one's sons – like your two elder brothers. Oh! Then one feels that death in purity is so far preferable to life in sin and degradation!

Those who slip into this illusion ignore the signs of impending disaster. The physical degradation of the planet, the cruelty of global capitalism, the looming oil crisis, the collapse of financial markets, and the danger of overpopulation rarely impinge to prick the illusions that warp our consciousness,.

Be critical. Women have the right to say: This is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.

But it would be more precise to say that the master aimed to transform the slave into an automaton by obliterating his sense of personhood.

Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up.

For most Europeans World War Two was experienced not as a war of movement and battle but as a daily degradation, in the course of which men and women were betrayed and humiliated, forced into daily acts of petty crime and self-abasement, in which everyone lost something and many lost everything.

Many years later, Martha revisited the same Caribbean islands. She found yachts and rubber Zodiac dinghies, plastic bottles on the seabed, casinos and boutiques in the sleepy ports, and great bald patches of land, stripped for development, where once all had been jungle and green. It was, she wrote sadly, a world lost. Returning

I can't get myself to say what happened next. I cannot cope with even thinking about this let alone living with it." "It is so degrading and I try to forget, it hurts so much because she is my mother." - Graham talks about being sexually abused by his mother