Quotes About Degradation

For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors.

Reliving his degradation had struck some spark in him and it was glowing now like a blown-on coal.

The kind of people I know now don't have barbecues, Mama. They stand up alone at nights in small rooms and eat cold weenies. My so-called friends are bums. Many of them are nothing but rats. They spread T.B. and use dirty language. They're wife-beaters and window peepers and night crawlers and dope fiends. They have running sores on the backs of their hands that never heal. They peer up from cracks in the floor with their small red eyes and wait for chances.

Nowhere else in the whole range of life on earth, is this degradation found--the female capering and prancing before the male. It is absolutely and essentially his function, not hers.

if gold rust, what then will iron do?/ For if a priest be foul in whom we trust/ No wonder that a common man should rust. . . .

A joke is at most a temporary rebellion against virtue, and its aim is not to degrade the human being but to remind him that he is already degraded.

I swore that I would be better. But man gets used to anything, and I am afraid that perhaps he gets used quickest of all to living in a state of degradation.

He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance.

The evidence is overwhelming that it should be deemed as such: solitary confinement in the U.S. is arbitrary, abused, and unnecessary in many situations. It is cruel, degrading, and inhumane and is effectively a 'no touch' torture.

The idea of passing one's whole life in moral idleness, and having one's hardest work and duty done by another-whether God or man-is most revolting to us, as it is most degrading to human dignity.

One hundred million acres had lost most of its topsoil and nearly half had been "essentially destroyed" and could not be farmed again, Bennett said.

Armed groups first degrade a political order, and then transform it. Violent right-wing groups, such as the Iron Guard in interwar Romania or the Arrow Cross in interwar Hungary, intimidated their rivals.

I was offered 'I'm A Celebrity...' for a lot of money, but I don't like the level of degradation.

So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)

Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the purple-and-gold pall as a curtain.

It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time.

Marriage requires a radical commitment to love our spouses as they are, while longing for them to be what they are not yet. Every marriage moves either toward enhancing one another's glory or toward degrading each other.

Between these two programs---the industrial and the agrarian, the global and the local---the most critical difference is that of knowledge. The global economy institutionalizes a global ignorance, in which producers and consumers cannot know or care about one another, and in which the histories of all products will be lost. In such circumstances, the degradation of products and places, producers and consumers, is inevitable.

How, I am asking, can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to? And that question is made legitimate by another: How have men improved themselves by submitting to it? The answer is that men have not, and women cannot, improve themselves by submitting to it.

The floor was covered with a faded, barely legible carpet, its traditional pattern of tanks and helicopters worn to colorless patterns of weft.

It was in the plunder not of material goods but of human lives that the mercifully short-lived New Order will be longest remembered. Here Nazi degradation sank to a level seldom experienced by man in all his time on earth.

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

Witch mothers possess a laser-like ability to detect areas of vulnerability in others. Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, the borderline Witch has "a keen sense of smell" for human weakness. Witch mothers know what to say to hurt or scare their children, and use humiliation and degradation to punish them.

Ought I not to have been more careful to win the good opinion of others, more determined to conquer their hostility or indifference? It would have been a joy to me to be smiled upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain what I was so ready to give, kindness and goodwill. But to hunt down consideration and reputation--to force the esteem of others--seemed to me an effort unworthy of myself, almost a degradation.