Quotes about degradation
page 2

Vladimir Lenin photo
Susan Sontag photo

“It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.”

AIDS and Its Metaphors, (1989), ch. 4, p. 125, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42013-7
AIDS and Its Metaphors was later published in combination with Illness As Metaphor. This combined edition is the one referenced here.

Jefferson Davis photo
Robert Jeffress photo

“It is less degrading to fear than to be feared.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Temer no humilla tanto como ser temido.
Voces (1943)

Lupe Fiasco photo
Hugo Black photo

“The Establishment Clause, unlike the Free Exercise Clause, does not depend upon any showing of direct governmental compulsion and is violated by the enactment of laws which establish an official religion whether those laws operate directly to coerce nonobserving individuals or not. This is not to say, of course, that laws officially prescribing a particular form of religious worship do not involve coercion of such individuals. When the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain. But the purposes underlying the Establishment Clause go much further than that. Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion. The history of governmentally established religion, both in England and in this country, showed that whenever government had allied itself with one particular form of religion, the inevitable result had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect and even contempt of those who held contrary beliefs. That same history showed that many people had lost their respect for any religion that had relied upon the support of government to spread its faith. The Establishment Clause thus stands as an expression of principle on the part of the Founders of our Constitution that religion is too personal, too sacred, too holy, to permit its "unhallowed perversion" by a civil magistrate. Another purpose of the Establishment Clause rested upon an awareness of the historical fact that governmentally established religions and religious persecutions go hand in hand. The Founders knew that only a few years after the Book of Common Prayer became the only accepted form of religious services in the established Church of England, an Act of Uniformity was passed to compel all Englishmen to attend those services and to make it a criminal offense to conduct or attend religious gatherings of any other kind-- a law which was consistently flouted by dissenting religious groups in England and which contributed to widespread persecutions of people like John Bunyan who persisted in holding "unlawful [religious] meetings... to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom...."”

Hugo Black (1886–1971) U.S. Supreme Court justice

And they knew that similar persecutions had received the sanction of law in several of the colonies in this country soon after the establishment of official religions in those colonies. It was in large part to get completely away from this sort of systematic religious persecution that the Founders brought into being our Nation, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights with its prohibition against any governmental establishment of religion.
Writing for the court, Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962).

Lupe Fiasco photo
Nathanael Greene photo
William Morris photo

“Nothing should be made by man's labour which is not worth making; or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Art and Socialism (1884)

Pierre Trudeau photo
James Frazer photo
Václav Havel photo
Willem de Sitter photo
Charles Webster Leadbeater photo
Anthony Trollope photo

“Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.
Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents — preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless.
That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”

Donella Meadows (1941–2001) American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer

Pages 3-4.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

Abu Musab Zarqawi photo

“The mujahideen will give America a taste of the degradation you have inflicted on the Iraqi people.”

Abu Musab Zarqawi (1966–2006) Jordanian jihadist

On the beheading of Eugene Armstrong. Statement accompanying a video of the beheading of US hostage Eugene Armstrong https://www.irishtimes.com/news/abu-musab-al-zarqawi-in-quotes-1.786124 The Irish Times (September 2004)

Benjamin Franklin photo

“I fully agreed with Gen. Washington that we must safeguard this young nation, as yet in its swaddling clothes, from the insidious influence and impenetration of the Roman Catholic Church which pauperizes and degrades all countries and people over whom it holds sway.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Claimed by American Fascist William Dudley Pelley in Liberation (February 3, 1934) to have appeared in notes taken at the Constitutional Convention by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney; reported as debunked in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 28, noting that historian Charles A. Beard conducted a thorough investigation of the attribution and found it to be false.
Misattributed

Alphonse de Lamartine photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo
George S. Patton photo
Leo Tolstoy photo

“The Christianity of the first centuries recognized as productions of good art, only legends, lives of saints, sermons, prayers, and hymn-singing evoking love of Christ, emotion at his life, desire to follow his example, renunciation of worldly life, humility, and the love of others; all productions transmitting feelings of personal enjoyment they considered to be bad, and therefore rejected … This was so among the Christians of the first centuries who accepted Christ teachings, if not quite in its true form, at least not yet in the perverted, paganized form in which it was accepted subsequently.
But besides this Christianity, from the time of the wholesale conversion of whole nations by order of the authorities, as in the days of Constantine, Charlemagne and Vladimir, there appeared another, a Church Christianity, which was nearer to paganism than to Christ's teaching. And this Church Christianity … did not acknowledge the fundamental and essential positions of true Christianity — the direct relationship of each individual to the Father, the consequent brotherhood and equality of all people, and the substitution of humility and love in place of every kind of violence — but, on the contrary, having founded a heavenly hierarchy similar to the pagan mythology, and having introduced the worship of Christ, of the Virgin, of angels, of apostles, of saints, and of martyrs, but not only of these divinities themselves but of their images, it made blind faith in its ordinances an essential point of its teachings.
However foreign this teaching may have been to true Christianity, however degraded, not only in comparison with true Christianity, but even with the life-conception of the Romans such as Julian and others, it was for all that, to the barbarians who accepted it, a higher doctrine than their former adoration of gods, heroes, and good and bad spirits. And therefore this teaching was a religion to them, and on the basis of that religion the art of the time was assessed. And art transmitting pious adoration of the Virgin, Jesus, the saints, and the angels, a blind faith in and submission to the Church, fear of torments and hope of blessedness in a life beyond the grave, was considered good; all art opposed to this was considered bad.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

Dominique Bourg photo

“He who remains with himself for a long time, degrades.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Quien se queda mucho consigo mismo, se envilece.
Voces (1943)

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo

“If I wished to convince an impartial Englishman of the policy of abolishing these [anti-Catholic] laws, I should bid him repair to the south of Ireland; to mix with the Catholic gentry; to converse with the Catholic peasantry…to see what a fierce and unsocial spirit bad laws engender, and how impossible it is to degrade a people, without at the same time demoralizing them too. But if this should fail to convince him…I should then tell him to go among the Protestants of the north. There he would see how noble and generous natures may be corrupted by the possession of undue and inordinate ascendancy; there he would see men, naturally kind and benevolent, brought up from their earliest infancy to hate the great majority of their countrymen, with all the bitterness which neighbourhood and consanguinity infuse into quarrels; and not satisfied with the disputes of the days in which they live, raking up the ashes of the dead for food to their angry passions; summoning the shades of departed centuries, to give a keener venom to the contests of the present age.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (18 March 1829) in favour of Catholic Emancipation, quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), p. 98.
1820s

Sallust photo

“Is it not better to die in a glorious attempt, than, after having been the sport of other men's insolence, to resign a wretched and degraded existence with ignominy?”
Nonne emori per virtutem praestat quam vitam miseram atque inhonestam, ubi alienae superbiae ludibrio fueris, per dedecus amittere?

Sallust (-86–-34 BC) Roman historian, politician

Source: Bellum Catilinae (c. 44 BC), Chapter XX, section 9; quoting Catiline

Andrea Dworkin photo
Yitzhak Shamir photo
Alex Steffen photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Woody Allen photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Bill McKibben photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Glenn Greenwald photo
James Anthony Froude photo
Dharampal photo

“There is a sense of widespread neglect and decay in the field of indigenous education within a few decades after the onset of British rule. (…) The conclusion that the decay noticed in the early 19th century and more so in subsequent decades originated with European supremacy in India, therefore, seems inescapable. The 1769-70 famine in Bengal (when, according to British record, one-third of the population actually perished), may be taken as a mere forerunner of what was to come. (…) During the latter part of the 19th century, impressions of decay, decline and deprivation began to agitate the mind of the Indian people. Such impressions no doubt resulted from concrete personal, parental and social experience of what had gone before. They were, perhaps, somewhat exaggerated at times. By 1900, it had become general Indian belief that the country had been decimated by British rule in all possible ways; that not only had it become impoverished, but it had been degraded to the furthest possible extent; that the people of India had been cheated of most of what they had; that their customs and manners were ridiculed, and that the infrastructure of their society mostly eroded. One of the statements which thus came up was that the ignorance and illiteracy in India was caused by British rule; and, conversely, that at the beginning of British political dominance, India had had extensive education, learning and literacy. By 1930, much had been written on this point in the same manner as had been written on the deliberate destruction of Indian crafts and industry, and the impoverishment of the Indian countryside.”

Dharampal (1922–2006) Indian historian

Dharmapal: The Beautiful Tree, Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century. (1983)

Mahmud of Ghazni photo
Chris Hedges photo
Max Beckmann photo

“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 degradation 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 (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

letter to his first wife Minna, from the front, 1915; as quoted in Max Beckmann, Stephan Lackner, Bonfini Press Corporation, Naefels, Switzerland, 1983, p. 5
1900s - 1920s

Lucian photo
Nelson Mandela photo
James A. Garfield photo
William Cobbett photo
Anne Brontë photo
Henry Fielding photo
David Morrison photo
Max Stirner photo
James Marsters photo
Roger Wolcott Sperry photo
John F. Kennedy photo
James A. Garfield photo
Francis Escudero photo

“Let an hour of darkness enlighten us of the need to change our lifestyles if we are to arrest the continuing degradation of the planet. Let it also remind us of the dark future we are facing if we don't act now.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

GMA News http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/154536/news/nation/palace-senators-lgus-to-switch-off-lights-on-earth-hour
2009

John Gray photo
Partha Dasgupta photo

“In the quantitative models that appear in leading economics journals and textbooks, nature is taken to be a fixed, indestructible factor of production. The problem with the assumption is that it is wrong: nature consists of degradable resources.”

Partha Dasgupta (1942) British economist

Partha Dasgupta "Nature's role in sustaining economic development." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 365.1537 (2010): 5-11.

“He [Anthony Crosland] and his Socialist fellow-theoreticians did a terrific job in degrading scholastic standards in the name of equality, which meant dragging down the good to the level of the mediocre.”

George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) English-born author of Scottish descent

Dumbing Down, Down, Down... p. 247.
The Light's On At Signpost (2002)

John Adams photo

“There are many other evils in our country which are growing, whereas the practice of slavery is fast diminishing, and threaten to bring punishment on our land more immediately than the oppression of the blacks. That sacred regard to truth in which you and I were educated, and which is certainly taught and enjoined from on high, seems to be vanishing from among us. A general relaxation of education and government, a general debauchery as well as dissipation, produced by pestilential philosophical principles of Epicurus, infinitely more than by shows and theatrical entertainments; these are, in my opinion, more serious and threatening evils than even the slavery of the blacks, hateful as that is. I might even add that I have been informed that the condition of the common sort of white people in some of the Southern States, particularly Virginia, is more oppressed, degraded, and miserable, than that of the negroes. These vices and these miseries deserve the serious and compassionate consideration of friends, as well as the slave trade and the degraded state of the blacks. I wish you success in your benevolent endeavors to relieve the distresses of our fellow creatures, and shall always be ready to cooperate with you as far as my means and opportunities can reasonably be expected to extend.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1800s, Letter to George Churchman and Jacob Lindley (1801)

Robert Owen photo
William Ernest Henley photo
James Harvey Robinson photo
Alexander Berkman photo

“Communist writers likewise maintain that the Judaic-Christian code of ethics is "class" morality. By this they mean that the Ten Commandments and the ethics of Christianity were created to protect private property and the property class. To show the lengths to which Communist writers have gone to defend this view we will mention several of their favorite interpretations of the Ten Commandments. They believe that "Honor thy Father and thy Mother" was created by the early Hebrews to emphasize to their children the fact that they were the private property of their parents. "Thou shalt not kill" was attributed to the belief of the dominant class that their bodies were private property and therefore they should be protected along with other property rights. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" were said to have been created to implement the idea that a husband was the master of the home and the wife was strictly private property belonging to him. This last line of reasoning led to some catastrophic consequences when the Communists came into power in Russia. In their anxiety to make women "equal with men" and prevent them from becoming private property, they degraded womankind to the lowest and most primitive level. Some Communist leaders advocated complete libertinism and promiscuity to replace marriage and the family.”

The Naked Communist (1958)

George Eliot photo
Habib Bourguiba photo

“Bourguiba on people who patronized the Zéro de Conduite (Zero for Conduct), nightclub- "practice a shameful exhibitionism in morbid and degrading dances."”

Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000) Tunisian politician

[Tunisia: Shudder at the Knees, TIME, Friday, Aug. 26, 1966, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,842668,00.html, September 6, 2011]

Herman Melville photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Charlie Brooker photo
John Ruskin photo

“We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that it divided; but the men: — Divided into mere segments of men — broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished, — sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is — we should think that there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, — that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach at them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can only be met by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.”

Volume II, chapter VI, section 16.
The Stones of Venice (1853)

Thomas Jefferson photo

“I forgot to ask the favor of you to speak to Lilly as to the treatment of the nailers. it would destroy their value in my estimation to degrade them in their own eyes by the whip. this therefore must not be resorted to but in extremities. as they will again be under my government, I would chuse they should retain the stimulus of character.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to colonel Randolph as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine, (October 2012)
Attributed

Charles Lindbergh photo

“Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?”

Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist

After visiting the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in Germany, as quoted in The New York Times (20 April 1980) http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/lindbergh-jews.html

Gottfried Feder photo
Helen H. Gardener photo

“Women are indebted today for their emancipation from a position of hopeless degradation, not to their religion nor to Jehovah, but to the justice and honor of the men who have defied his commands. That she does not crouch today where St. Paul tried to bind her, she owes to the men who are grand and brave enough to ignore St. Paul, and rise superior to his God.”

Helen H. Gardener (1853–1925) American writer and academic

Helen Gardner : ‘Men, Women and Gods’, p. 30, as quoted in K. M. Talreja, Holy Vedas and Holy Bible: A Comparative Study https://books.google.com/books?id=9qkoAAAAYAAJ, New Delhi: Rashtriya Chetana Sangathan, 2000

Florence Nightingale photo
Jared Diamond photo
Larry Sanger photo
J. Bradford DeLong photo
Tobias Smollett photo

“To send the injur'd unredress'd away,
How great soe'er th' offender, or the wrong'd
Howe'er obscure, is wicked—weak and vile:
Degrades, denies, and should dethrone a king!”

Tobias Smollett (1721–1771) 18th-century poet and author from Scotland

Act IV, scene ix.
The Regicide (1749)

Gopal Krishna Gokhale photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Hillary Clinton photo

“Mr. Khan, paid the ultimate sacrifice in his family, didn't he. And what has he heard from Donald Trump? Nothing but insults, degrading comments about Muslims, a total misunderstanding of what made our country great, religious freedom, religious liberty. It's enshrined in our Constitution, as Mr. Khan knows, because he's actually read it.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

At a church in Cleveland. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/07/31/khizr-khan-calls-trump-a-black-soul-says-mcconnell-ryan-have-moral-obligation-to-repudiate-him/ The Washington Post (July 31, 2016)
Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016)

Henry George photo
John Gray photo
George W. Bush photo
Karl Kraus photo
Aimé Césaire photo
Michelle Phillips photo

“I've always had a reputation as the pretty girl. Pretty girls rarely get the good parts. We all have to do a film like The Burning Bed where we can really be degraded so that people think we can act.”

Michelle Phillips (1944) Singer, actress

The Chicago Tribune http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-07-05/entertainment/8602170918_1_michelle-phillips-mamas-papa-john (July 5, 1986)

Mark Hopkins (educator) photo
Cornel West photo

“In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.”

Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist

"The Role of Law in Progressive Politics" in Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1993)

Heather Brooke photo

“By making everything secure [governments] have degraded the quality of secrecy.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Attributed, In the Media
Source: Financial Times http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9098a06a-9c1c-11df-a7a4-00144feab49a.html#axzz45lPGQfQg - "Online leaks: A digital deluge" by Richard Waters, 30 July 2010.

Eugene V. Debs photo