Quotes about degradation
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“The doctrines of grace humble man without degrading him and exalt him without inflating him.”

Charles Hodge (1797–1878) American Presbyterian theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 334.

“Tis degrading to undertake difficult trifles; and foolish is the labour spent on puerilities.”
Turpe est difficiles habere nugas, Et stultus labor est ineptiarum.

Martial book Epigrammata

Turpe est difficiles habere nugas,
Et stultus labor est ineptiarum.
II, 86 (Loeb translation).
Epigrams (c. 80 – 104 AD)

“And so I set these things down before the onset of the first of a thousand small physical degradations as, in a still-distant suburb, Death strides whistling towards me.”

Barry Humphries (1934) Australian comedian and actor

My Life as Me: A Memoir (closing line)

Death, Distant

“Things should be so fixed in government, that there should be neither degrading checks, nor alluring baits to the ministry. … In some of the states, the property of preachers is free from tax. In Virginia, their persons are exempt from bearing arms. Though this is an indulgence that I feel, yet it is not consistent with my theory of politics.”

John Leland (Baptist) (1754–1841) American Baptist minister

Source: The Virginia Chronicle (1790), p. 122

Feeling, Personality

“In an unenlightened society some people are forced to play degrading social roles; in an enlightened society, everyone is.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)

People

“I do not see that it is possible, nor can I discover that it would be right, for me now to withdraw from the cause in which I have so long taken so deep an interest. The work is great, and vast are the results depending upon it, and unhappily our laborers are not abundant…But conscious of the increasing hazard we run owing to the long continuance of monopolies, and beholding the appalling sufferings of multitudes of my fellow-creatures, and satisfied that all benevolence and charity and the teaching of religion and of schools fall short of much of their full effect owing to the degraded and impoverished condition of the people—I should feel myself guilty, as possessing abundance and leaving others to hunger, nakedness and immorality and deepest ignorance and crime, if I were to retire into domestic quiet and leave the struggle to be carried on entirely by others.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to his mother-in-law Mrs. Priestman (November 1842), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 102-103.
1840s

Hunger, People, School, Religion

“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.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

II, 11
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book II

Men, Pain, Pleasure, Evil

“Why and how did our country fall from its brilliant antiquity to the degradation of pre-British days? The answer is that defeat of the oppressed castes at the hands of the Brahminic overlordship, of materialism by idealism, constituted the beginning of the fall of India’s civilization and culture which in the end led to the loss of national independence.”

E. M. S. Namboodiripad (1909–1998) Indian politician

Above two quotes are on Adi Sankara’s success of idealism vis-a-vis materialism in page=11.
History, Society, and Land Relations: Selected Essays

Loss, Country

“One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one's soul is the failure to recognize the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised, especially if the helpless come to be treated as animals, and degraded.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, NYU Speech (2004)

Exercises, Soul, Failure, Loss

“If heretics no longer horrify us today, as they once did our forefathers, is it certain that it is because there is more charity in our hearts? Or would it not too often be, perhaps, without our daring to say so, because the bone of contention, that is to say, the very substance of our faith, no longer interests us? Men of too familiar and too passive a faith, perhaps for us dogmas are no longer the Mystery on which we live, the Mystery which is to be accomplished in us. Consequently then, heresy no longer shocks us; at least, it no longer convulses us like something trying to tear the soul of our souls away from us…. And that is why we have no trouble in being kind to heretics, and no repugnance in rubbing shoulders with them.

In reality, bias against ‘heretics’ is felt today just as it used to be. Many give way to it as much as their forefathers used to do. Only, they have turned it against political adversaries. Those are the only ones with whom they refuse to mix. Sectarianism has only changed its object and taken other forms, because the vital interest has shifted. Should we dare to say that this shifting is progress?

It is not always charity, alas, which has grown greater, or which has become more enlightened: it is often faith, the taste for the things of eternity, which has grown less. Injustice and violence are still reigning; but they are now in the service of degraded passions.”

Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) Jesuit theologian and cardinal

Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), pp. 226-227

Men, Faith, Way, Soul

“The irony is that the healthier Western society becomes, the more medicine it craves… Immense pressures are created – by the medical profession, by the media, by the high pressure advertising of pharmaceutical companies to expand the diagnosis of treatable illnesses. Scares are created, people are bamboozled into lab tests, often of dubious reliability. Thanks to diagnostic creep or leap, ever more disorders are revealed, extensive and expensive treatments are then urged … [This] is endemic to a system in which an expanding medical establishment, faced with a healthier population, is driven to medicalising normal events, converting risks into diseases and treating trivial complaints with fancy procedures… The law of diminishing returns necessarily applies. Extending life becomes feasible, but it may be a life exposed to degrading neglect as resources grow overstretched. What an ignominious destiny if the future of medicine turns into bestowing meagre increments of unenjoyed life?”

Roy Porter (1946–2002) British historian

Roy Porter as cited in: " The cost of chronic disease and the lack of NHS reform http://abetternhs.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-cost/" at abetternhs.wordpress.com. Posted on May 16, 2011

Life, People, Disease, Law

“Today, our developed nations live in opulence, excess and waste, with the consequences that our environment is degrading and the climate is wreaked.”

Jacques Dubochet (1942) Nobel prize winning Swiss chemist

French: Aujourd'hui, nos nations développées vivent dans l'opulence, l'excès et le gaspillage avec pour conséquences notre environnement qui se dégrade et le climat boulversé.
Source, in French: Jacques Dubochet, Parcours, Éditions Rosso, 2018, page 209 (ISBN 9782940560097).

“The Omarahs mostly consist of adventurers from different nations who entice one another to the court; and are generally persons of low descent, some having been originally slaves, and the majority being destitute of education. The Mogol raises them to dignities, or degrades them to obscurity; according to his own pleasure and caprice.”

François Bernier (1620–1688) French physician and traveller

Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 5
Travels in the Mogul Empire (1656-1668)

Pleasure, Education, Personality

“He had been across the veldt, he had seen the battlefields, the still open trenches, and it all came to Chinese labour. They were told it was going to release the slaves, the Uitlanders, to open up South Africa to a great flood of white emigrants. They were told it was going to plant the Union Jack upon the land of the free. But the echoes of the muskets had hardly died out on the battlefields, the ink on the treaty was hardly dry, before the men who plotted the war began to plot to bring in Chinese slaves. (Cheers.) They could talk about their gold; their gold is tainted. (Hear, hear.) They could talk about employing white men; it was not true, and even if it were true, was he going to stand and see his white brothers degraded to the position of yellow slave drivers? No, he was not. (Loud and continued cheers.) These patriots! These miserable patriots! If they had had the custodianship of the opinions of the country 75 years ago, slavery in the colonies would have continued. When the north was fighting the south for the liberty of men, these men would have counted their guineas, would have told them how many white men had plied the lash in the southern states, and they would have said that for miserable cash, miserable trash, the great name of the country required to be bought and sold. Thank God there were no twentieth century Unionist imperialists in office then.”

Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) British statesman; prime minister of the United Kingdom

Loud cheers.
Leicester Daily Mercury (6 January 1906)
1900s

Men, God, War, Fight

“If, therefore, our personal religious life is likely to be sapped by our devotion to social work, it would be a calamity second to none. But is it really likely that this will happen? The great aim underlying to whole social movement is the creation of a free, just, and brotherly social order. This is the greatest moral task conceivable. Its accomplishment is the manifest will of God for this generation. Every Christian motive is calling us to do it. If it is left undone, millions of lives will be condemned to a deepening moral degradation and to spiritual starvation. Does it look probable that we will lose our contact with God if we plunge too deeply into this work? Does it stand to reason that we shall go astray from Jesus Christ if we engage in the unequal conflict with organized wrong? What kind of ‘spirituality’ is it which is likely to get hurt by being put to work for justice and our fellow-men?”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianizing the Social Order (1912), p. 104

Life, Men, God, Justice

“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.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

10 August 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

People

“An uneducated population may be degraded; a population educated, but not in righteousness, will be ungovernable. The one may be slaves, the other must be tyrants.”

Henry Melvill (1798–1871) British academic

Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 364.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Education

“Bernie wants us to live under the heavenly socialist–communist system like China. We never hear the left criticize that Mao Tse-Tung killed over 80 million people—the Chinese government admits—biggest mass murder in history. That's why there's so many liberal trendy places in Austin, in Denver, in New York, in LA, and San Francisco named after Mao. And people go and love play on their iPhones and the free market and their Chinese slave goods, and they drink beer and expensive wine and giggle about how fun it is to wear red stars. You couldn't put more bad luck on you, you couldn't trash your mojo better. Wearing swastika armbands, you stupid snot-nosed crud! That live off the backs of everybody that fought Nazism and Communism. You need to have your jaws broken! Don't you worry, reality is gonna crash in on you, trash! Who lowered our defenses and brought the Republic down; oh, we're already gone! And you celebrate it like you've joined the globalists mounting America's head on the wall, your great victory! A mass rape of women across Europe. The national draft coming in for women! The families falling apart! Women degraded into nothing but sexual objects! ALL in the name of Gloria Steinem and the Central Intelligence Agency program! And a Bernie Sanders with his fake Einstein hair, and his 'I'm a man of the people!' We go out and talk to Bernie Sanders' supporters, they can hardly talk—they're like him—'Free! Free! I want free stuff!' As if the New World Order is gonna give you anything free! Oh, it's free like a piece of cheese. And a little mouse comes out and it smells it and goes to bite it and, WA BAM! Breaks your neck. But your stupider than the little mouse. You can see all the countries and all the people caught in the mouse traps, caught in the big bear traps. You know what you do? You go into a trendy shop. On some capitalist strip. And you go in and you snuggle in with that credit card that daddy put money in for the trust fund. And you put on that little fur-rimmed coat and you're all sexy with your hammer and sickle on, and your Che Guevara and, you know, shirt from Rage Against the Machine, and the whole capitalist record company system selling it to you, and you go out on the street and you walk into McDonald's and you have yourself a double latte, oh yeah. Pathetic! Scum! Oh, how you'll burn in the camps, later. Wishing you had done something; I mean, you are the ultimate chumps, the ultimate buffoons, the ultimate schmucks!… But the public had so much freedom! They were so wealthy, even our poorest, they had no idea that what they were replacing it with was abject slavery.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

"Sanders Supporters are Pathetic Scum" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooNxJnf_UAI, February 2016

Love, Women, Money, Bad luck

“Trained in a less severe school than that of geometry and physics, his reasonings are almost always loose and inconclusive. His generalizations seem to have been reached before he had obtained the materials upon which he rests them: His facts, though frequently new and interesting, are often little more than conjectures; and the grand phenomena of the world of life, and instinct, and reason, which other minds have woven into noble and elevating truths, have thus become in Mr. Darwin's hands the basis of a dangerous and degrading speculation.”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

Referring to Charles Darwin
The facts and fancies of Mr. Darwin (1862)

Life, Truth, World, School

“The Revolution of ’82 (1782) was a revolution which enabled Irishmen to sell at a much higher price their honour, their integrity, and the interests of their country; it was a revolution which while at one stroke it doubled the value of every borough monger in the Kingdom, left three-fourths of our countrymen [Catholics] slaves as it found them, and the Government of Ireland in the base, wicked and contemptible hands who had spent their lives plundering and degrading her … Who of the veteran enemies of the country lost his place, or his pension? Not one. The power remained in the hands of our enemies, again to be exerted for our ruin, with this difference, that, formerly, we had our distresses gratis at the hands of England, but now we pay very dearly to receive the same with aggravations at the hands of Irishmen—yet this we boast of and call a Revolution.”

Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–1798) Irish politician

Attributed, An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland by a Northern Whig. (September, 1791)

Country

“War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to 'a war against' whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Afterword to the 2012 edition.
Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)

Life, War, World

“But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you — the social reformer — 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.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)

Men

“Voluptuous habits speedily bind all the powers of the soul in loathsome vassalage, and exclude every thought except such as relate to the beastly pleasures of which it is the slave. Distracted by cravings as inexorable as they are base, and in their vileness perpetually reproduced, — tantalized by the impure fountains of a diseased imagination, and oppressed with its own effeminacy, — the mind loses its vigor and its productiveness. Every faculty rapidly deteriorates and decays; memory becomes extinguished, inanity destroys resolution, and the heart is as cold and callous as a cinder extinct. It ceases to love, to sympathize, and diffuse the delicious tears that sanctify friendship's shrine. The whole countenance assumes an expression of obdurateness and repugnance. The features, marked with premature decay, proclaim that the source of gentle sentiments, pure emotions, and innocent joys, is exhausted, like a limpid fountain invaded by the scoria and flame of a volcano. All the elements of life seem to have retreated into their abused organs only to perish there. Even the organs themselves are withered, and worse than dead; their infirmities, maladies, sufferings, rush in a multitude upon the degraded victim, and overwhelm him in awful retribution.”

Elias Lyman Magoon (1810–1886) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 354.

Love, Life, Friendship, Pleasure

“They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me…”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Upon being forced to leave a train car due to his color, as quoted in Up from Slavery (1901), Ch. VI: "Black Race And Red Race, the penalty of telling the truth, of telling the simple truth, in answer to a series of strange questions", by Booker T. Washington

Soul

“Lo where the stage, the poor, degraded stage,
Holds its warped mirror to a gaping age.”

Charles Sprague (1791–1875) Boston businessman and poet

Curiosity, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Age

“Some think that we are approaching a critical moment in the history of Liberalism…We hear of a divergence of old Liberalism and new…The terrible new school, we hear, are for beginning operations by dethroning Gladstonian finance. They are for laying hands on the sacred ark. But did any one suppose that the fiscal structure which was reared in 1853 was to last for ever, incapable of improvement, and guaranteed to need no repair? We can all of us recall, at any rate, one very memorable admission that the great system of Gladstonian finance had not reached perfection. That admission was made by no other person than Mr. Gladstone himself in his famous manifesto of 1874, when he promised the most extraordinary reduction of which our taxation is capable. Surely there is as much room for improvement in taxation as in every other work of fallible man, provided that we always cherish the just and sacred principle of taxation that it is equality of private sacrifice for public good. Another heresy is imputed to this new school which fixes a deep gulf between the wicked new Liberals and the virtuous old. We are adjured to try freedom first before we try interference of the State. That is a captivating formula, but it puzzles me to find that the eminent statesman who urges us to lay this lesson to heart is strongly in favour of maintaining the control of the State over the Church? But is State interference an innovation? I thought that for 30 years past Liberals had been as much in favour as other people of this protective legislation. Are to we assume that it has all been wrong? Is my right hon. friend going to propose its repeal or the repeal of any of it; or has all past interference been wise, and we have now come to the exact point where not another step can be taken without mischief? …other countries have tried freedom and it is just because we have decided that freedom in such a case is only a fine name for neglect, and have tried State supervision, that we have saved our industrial population from the waste, destruction, destitution, and degradation that would otherwise have overtaken them…In short, gentlemen, I am not prepared to allow that the Liberty and the Property Defence League are the only people with a real grasp of Liberal principles, that Lord Bramwell and the Earl of Wemyss are the only Abdiels of the Liberal Party.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Annual presidential address to the Junior Liberal Association of Glasgow (10 February 1885), quoted in 'Mr. John Morley At Glasgow', The Times (11 February 1885), p. 10.

People, School, History, Thinking

“First of all, no one can accuse me, Ayad Jamal Aldin, of secatarianism, because I support a secular regime that fully separates religion and the state. […] I believe that my freedom as a Shia and as a religious person will never be complete unless I preserve the freedom of the Sunni, the Christian, the Jew, the Sabai and the Yazidi. We will not be able to preserve the freedom of the mosque unless we preserve the freedom of entertainment clubs. […] The curricula - both the modern ones, in some Arab and Islamic countries, and the books of jurisprudence and heritage - have many flaws that must be fixed once and for all. There are rulings about Ahl al-Dhimma - even if, Allah be praised, no current regime can enforce these rulings. However, just for the sake of amusement and diversion, I recommend that the viewers read the books of jurisprudence, and see how Ahl al-Dhimma are treated. I especially recommend this to people with a lust for Arab and Islamic history, who claim that our history is a source of pride, and that others were treated with kindness and love - especially Christians and Jews. Among these rulings, a Dhimmi must wear a belt, so he would be identifiable. Moreover, it is recommended that he be forced to the narrowest paths, and there are even jurisprudents who say that it is recommended to slap a Christian on the back of his neck so he would feel humiliated and degraded. This is how we harass him and then invite him to join Islam. I can swear that the Prophet Muhammad is innocent of such inhuman jurisprudence. I challenge anyone among the people with a lust for history to talk candidly to the West, to the advocates of human rights, and tell them that our heritage has such evils and flaws. We are a nation of blackout and darkness. We cannot live in the light of day. […] We do not hold ourselves accountable. This is why America came to demand that the Arabs be accountable. We must have more self-confidence and be accountable before others hold us accountable. We must discipline ourselves before the Americans and English discipline us. We must maintain human rights, which we have neglected for 1,300 or 1,400 years, to this day - until the arrival of the Americans, the Christians, the English, the Zionists, the Crusaders - call them what you will. They came to teach you, the followers of Muhammad, how to respect human rights.”

Iyad Jamal Al-Din (1961) Iraqi politician

Sayyed Ayad Jamal Aldin: Sayyed Ayad Jamal Aldin: The Arabs Want Tyrannical Regimes, in Line with Their Backward Culture, LBC TV, July 31, 2005 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_ZKffu6Wsg,

Love, People, Books, Religion

“In addition to the poll-tax and public degradation in dress and demeanour imposed on them, the non-Muslims were subjected to various hopes and fears. Rewards in the form of money and public employment were offered to apostates from Hinduism. The leaders of Hindu religion and society were systematically repressed, to deprive the sect of spiritual instruction, and their religious gatherings and processions were forbidden in order to prevent the growth of solidity and a sense of communal strength among them. No new temple was allowed to be built nor any old one to be repaired, so that the total disappearance of all places of Hindu worship was to be merely a question of time. But even this delay, this slow operation of Time, was intolerable to many of the more fiery spirits of Islam, who tried to hasten the abolition of ‘infidelity’ by anticipating the destructive hand of Time and forcibly pulling down temples.”

Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) Indian historian

Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Volume III, Calcutta, 1928, pp. 164-67. Quoted in S.R.Goel, The Calcutta Quran Petition (1999) ISBN 9788185990583

Money, Fear, Religion, Hope

“How many we know who have fled the sweetness of a tranquil life in their homes, among the friends, to seek the horror of uninhabitable deserts; who have flung themselves into humiliation, degradation, and the contempt of the world, and have enjoyed these and even sought them out.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book I, Ch. 14
Essais (1595), Book I

Life, World, Home

“Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, 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.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Address given in Bombay (26 September 1896), Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 1, p. 410 (Electronic Book), New Delhi, Publications Division Government of India, 1999, 98 volumes.
1890s

Life

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.”

Winston S. Churchill book The River War

The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (1899), Volume II pp. 248–250 This passage does not appear in the 1902 one-volume abridgment, the version posted by Project Gutenberg. Downloadable etext version(s) of this book can be found online http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=4943 at Project Gutenberg Early career years (1898–1929)

Life, Men, World, Fear

“Whereas slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than the most barbarous, unprovoked and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens against another portion, the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude, or absolute extermination, in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence. Therefore, we, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people who, by a recent decision of the Supreme' Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do, for the time being, ordain and establish for ourselves the following Provisional Constitution and Ordinances, the better to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties, and to govern our actions.”

John Brown (abolitionist) (1800–1859) American abolitionist

Preamble.
Provisional Constitution and Ordinances (1858)

War, People, Truth, Law

“If people want to eat meat, they should kill the animals for themselves… Nor should they say that if they did not do it the slaughter would still go on… Every person who eats meat takes a share in that degradation of his fellow-men; on him and on her personally lies the share, and personally lies the responsibility.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Vegetarianism in the Light of Theosophy(1913), p. 18-20

Men, People, Animals, Personality

“The impressionistic method leads into a complete splitting and dissolution of all areas involved in the composition, and color is used to create an overall effect of light. The color is, through such a shading down from the highest light in the deepest shadows, sacrified an degraded to a (black-and-white) function. This leads to the destructions of the color as color.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

Hofmann's quote in: 'Space pictorially realized through the intrinsic faculty of the colors to express volume' in New Paintings by Hans Hofmann (1951); also in Hans Hofmann (1998) by Helmut Friedel and Tina Dickey
1950s

Color, Light

“As there was no open opposition to Aryanism from the beginning, it grew in stages and made us degraded”

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973) Tamil politician and social reformer

Quoted in Collected Works of Thanthai Periyar E.V. Ramasami, Volume 1 http://books.google.co.in/books?id=I2xDAAAAYAAJ, p. 56. Aryanism

“To suppose that God Almighty has confined his goodness to this world, to the exclusion of all others, is much similar to the idle fancies of some individuals in this world, that they, and those of their communion or faith, are the favorites of heaven exclusively; but these are narrow and bigoted conceptions, which are degrading to a rational nature, and utterly unworthy of God, of whom we should form the most exalted ideas.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. II Section III - Of The Eternity and Infinitude of Divine Providence

God, World, Faith, Idea

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

"Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs", written in 1956, first published in The British Journal of Addiction, Vol. 52, No. 2 (January 1957), p. 1 and later used as footnotes in Naked Lunch

“Love and desire are both thoroughly human. Our problem with them is that they orient us toward very different goals. Love seeks control, stability, continuity, certainty. Desire seeks surrender, adventure, novelty, the unknown. In love we are searching for points of attachment, anchoring, something we know we can count on. In desire we are searching both for missing, disowned pieces of ourselves and for something beyond ourselves, outside the borders of self-recognition that, under ordinary circumstances, we protect so fiercely.Erotic passion destabilizes one's sense of self. When we find someone intensely arousing who makes possible unfamiliar experiences of ourselves and an otherness we find captivating, we are drawn into the disorienting loopiness of self/other. We tend to want to control these experiences and the others who inspire them. Thus emotional connection tends to degrade into strategies for false security that suffocate desire.”

Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) American psychologist

Can Love Last? (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), pp. 91-92

Love, Search, Problem, Sense

“The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had nearly abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The public women of the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies — a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themself fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Source: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 1

Women, Pain, Marriage, Youth

“Like many of my generation, I became interested in another Black Muslim. There were no “Sweet-By-and-By” refrains in the testimony of Malcolm X. His voice was the puritan voice of the American North. Malcolm X had a strong story to tell of white racism and of his own degradation, but also of spiritual struggle and change.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Strong, Change

“Maulana Muhammad Ali wrote:… Some Mussulman friends have been constantly flinging at me the charge of being a… Gandhi-worshipper… Since I hold Islam to be the highest gift of God, therefore, I was impelled by the love I bear towards Mahatmaji to pray to God that he might illumine his soul with the true light of Islam… As a follower of Islam I am bound to regard the creed of Islam as superior to that professed by the followers of any non-Islamic religion. And in this sense, the creed of even a fallen and degraded Mussulman is entitled to a higher place than that of any other non-Muslim irrespective of his high character, even though the person in question be Mahatma Gandhi himself”

Muhammad Ali (writer) (1874–1951) Pakistani scholar and leading figure of the Ahmadiyya Movement

Gandhi’s reaction was: “In my humble opinion the Maulana has proved the purity of his heart and his faith in his own religion by expressing his view. He merely compared two sets of religious principles and gave his opinion as to which was better” (Navajivan, 13.4.1924).
(Young India, 10.4.1924). Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 8

Love, God, Religion, Soul

“They (the emperors) frequently abused their power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or of life: their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the greater number;.. But it would seem that if despotism were to be established amongst 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.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Four, Chapter VI.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Four

Life, Men

“There were abuses, many of them. I do not pretend to defend these abuses. There were kind masters and cruel masters. There were violations of the moral law that made mulattoes as common as blackberries. In this one particular slavery doomed itself. When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded as another man's slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four bloody years of war.”

Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) American politician

On slavery, in her 1919 autobiography Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth Felton, p.79 http://www.google.com/books?id=gHsLIvQ_BN0C&dq=rebecca+latimer+felton&printsec=frontcover&source=in#PPA79,M1.

Men, War, Law, Country

“The adversities that we have had to face together have taught all of us involved in the struggle to build a truly democratic political system in Burma that there are no gender barriers that cannot be overcome. The relationship between men and women should, and can be, characterized not by patronizing behavior or exploitation, but by METTA (that is to say loving kindness), partnership and trust. We need mutual respect and understanding between men and women, instead of patriarchal domination and degradation, which are expressions of violence and engender counter-violence. We can learn from each other and help one another to moderate the "gender weaknesses" imposed upon us by traditional or biological factors.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Opening Keynote Address at NGO Forum on Women, Beijing China (1995)

Love, Women, Men, Behavior

“This gift… which God gave us in order to enable us to perfect ourselves, to learn and to teach, must not be employed in doing that which is for us most degrading and perfectly disgraceful… Those who employ the faculty of thinking and speaking in the service of that sense which is no honour to us, who think more than necessary of drink and love, or even sing of these things; they employ and use the divine gift in acts of rebellion against the Giver, and in transgression of his commandments.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.8

Love, God, Drink, Thinking

“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.”

Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–1966) The second Prime Minister of the Republic of India and a leader of the Indian National Congress party

Freedom, Learning, Country

“Those who seek a pro-life culture must accept that we will never persuade all 300 million Americans to agree with us. A pro-life culture can be built only from the ground up, person by person. For too long we have viewed the battle as purely political, but no political victory can change a degraded society. No Supreme Court ruling by itself can instill greater respect for life. And no Supreme Court justice can save our freedoms if we don't fight for them ourselves.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Federalizing Social Policy, January 30, 2006 http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2006/tst013006.htm 2000s, 2006-2009

Life, Justice, Freedom, Change

“Degrade first the arts if you'd mankind degrade,
Hire idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses, title page (c. 1798–1809)
1790s

Art, Light, Painting

“In our day and generation let us seek to raise and improve the moral sentiment, so that we may look, not for a degraded, but for an elevated and improved future…. And then, when honored and decrepit age shall lean against the base of this monument, and troops of ingenuous youth shall be gathered round it, and when the one shall speak to the other of its objects, the purposes of its construction, and the great and glorious events with which it is connected, there shall rise from every youthful breast the ejaculation, "Thank God, I — I also — am an American!"”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

Source: On the Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument (1843), p. 107

God, Youth, Age, Future

“The people of the Qur’an (those who recite and those who memorize the Qur’an) will be in the highest level (in Heaven) from amongst all of the people with the exception of the Prophets and Messengers. Thus, do not seek to degrade the people of the Qur’an, nor take away their rights, for surely they have been given a high rank by Allah.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Thawabul A’mal, Page 224
Shi'ite Hadith

People

“It is a fundamental and deplorable error by which we in this country have confused education with the acquisition of knowledge…. Amount of knowledge is in itself not of first importance, but to make the best use of what we know. The easy assumption of our educationists that we have only to supply the mind with a smattering of facts in each department of knowledge and the mind can be trusted to develop itself and take its own suitable road is contrary to science, contrary to human experience…. Much as we have lost as a nation, we have always preserved our intellectual alertness, quickness and originality; but even this last gift is threatened by our University system, and if it goes, it will be the beginning of irretrievable degradation and final extinction.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Early 1900s, Centenary Edition of Sri Aurobindo's works (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1972) 3.125-127
India's Rebirth

Education, Error, Knowledge, Universe

“Textualism should not be confused with so-called strict constructionism, which is a degraded form of textualism that brings the whole philosophy into disrepute. I am not a strict constructionist, and no one ought to be--though better that, I suppose, than a nontextualist. A text should not be construed strictly, and it should not be construed leniently; it should be construed reasonably, to contain all that it fairly means.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation 23 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). http://web.archive.org/web/20060911103004/http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/scalia97.pdf (PDF). 1990s

“It must now be added that these attempts at proof not only fail of their purpose, and so do no good to religion, but that they positively degrade it.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p. 150.

Religion

“The test of the worth of work is its effect on the worker. If it degrade him, it is bad; if it ennoble him, it is good.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

12
Aphorisms and Reflections (1901)

“I'm just a dark guy from a den of iniquity. A dark shadowy figure from the bowels of iniquity. I wish I could be Mike who gets an endorsement deal. But you can't make a lie and a truth go together. This country wasn't built on moral fiber. This country was built on rape, slavery, murder, degradation and affiliation with crime.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

As quoted in Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?xml=/sport/2002/05/01/sotys02.xml (2002).

Truth, Lie, Guy, Country

“The key to a successful restaurant is dressing girls in degrading clothes.”

Michael O'Donoghue (1940–1994) American actor and writer

Mr. Mike's America: A Comic's Trek with SNL's First Head Writer (1983)

Girl, Success, Clothes

“If a gentleman, or an inferior thane, killed a stag in the king's forests, he was degraded from his rank; if a ceorl, or husbandman, committed the same offence, he was reduced to slavery; and if a slave killed one, he suffered death. Magistrates were appointed, in every county, or shire, to put these laws in execution, and under them were appointed inferior officers or gamekeepers, whose province it was to apprehend the offenders.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 9
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Hunting

Death, Law, Suffering

“Decoupling growth from environmental degradation is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation.”

Achim Steiner (1961) German politician

"UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report-meat-free-diet, The Guardian, 2 June 2010.

People, World

“I am far from wishing to treat lightly or inconsiderately the evils attendant upon a standing army. The history of those countries where standing armies have been allowed to usurp an ascendancy over the civil authorities, is a volume pregnant with instruction to every one. We may look at France, for instance, and derive a lesson of eternal importance. But when it is said, that in ancient Rome twelve thousand praetorian bands were potent enough to dispose of that empire according to their will and pleasure, it should be remembered that that was the result of a number of pre-disposing causes, which have no existence in England. Before the civil constitution of any country can be overturned by a standing army, the people of that country must be lamentably degenerate; they must be debased and enervated by all the worst excesses of an arbitrary and despotic government; their martial spirit must be extinguished; they must be brought to a state of political degradation, I may almost say of political emasculation, such as few countries experience that have once known the blessings of liberty.”

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

Speech in the House of Commons (8 March 1816), 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. 12.
1810s

People, Pleasure, History, Evil

“Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Letter to an American mother's plea to cure her son's homosexuality (1935)
1930s

“The debate concerns only some of the problems of society in the United States (anti-feminism and racism in particular). It does not call into question the economic foundations of the system that are the root cause of the degradations of social conditions in important segments of society. The sacredness of private property, including that of monopolies, remains intact; the fact that Trump is himself a billionaire was an asset and not an obstacle to his election.”

Samir Amin (1931–2018) Egyptian economist

The Election of Donald Trump https://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2016/amin301116.html (30 November 2016), Monthly Review Magazine (MRzine)

Question, Problem

“Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that. Why should I be filthy and inhuman? Why should I be an accomplice in the wholesale horror and degradation of the slaughter-house?”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Interview "What Vegetarianism Really Means: a Talk with Mr Bernard Shaw", in Vegetarian (15 January 1898), reprinted in Shaw: Interviews and Recollections, edited by A. M. Gibbs, 1990, p. 401 https://books.google.it/books?id=45muCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA401 1890s

Animals, Housing

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client”

William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch

Introduction
Naked Lunch (1959)

“My object in all my proceeding has been simply to establish the independence of Ireland for the benefit of all the people of Ireland - noblemen, clergymen, judges, professional men - in fact, all Irishmen. I sought that object first, because I thought it was our right; because I thought, and think still, national independence was the right of the people of this country. And secondly, I admit, that being a man who loves retirement, I never would have engaged in politics did I not think it necessary to do all in my power to make an end of the horrible scenes the country presents - the pauperism, and starvation, and crime, and vice, and the hatred of all classes against each other. I thought there should be an end to that horrible system, which while it lasted, gave me no peace of mind, for I could not enjoy anything in my country, so long as I saw my countrymen forced to be vicious, forced to hate each other, and degraded to the level of paupers and brutes. This is the reason I engaged in politics.”

John Martin (1812–1875) (1812-1875) Irish nationalist activist

Love, Men, Hate, People

“History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

As quoted in Essays on Freedom and Power, Introduction, p. xlvii (1949) https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Essays%20on%20Freedom%20and%20Power_3.pdf

Men, History

“President Herbert Hoover promised “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” With warnings about global warming reaching feverish levels, many are having second thoughts about all those cars. It seems they should instead be worrying about the chickens. … It turns out that raising animals for food is a primary cause of land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, and not least of all, global warming. …The researchers found that, when it’s all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius. … Now that we know a greener diet is even more effective than a greener car, we can make a difference at every single meal, simply by leaving the animals off of our plates. Who would have thought: what’s good for our health is also good for the health of the planet!”

Kathy Freston American self-help writer

"Vegetarian is the New Prius", in the HuffPost (18 January 2007) https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/vegetarian-is-the-new-pri_b_39014.html.

Health, Food, Cars, Water

“In the American view, there is nothing vile or degraded about serving your customers either as a CEO or as a waiter. The ordinary life of production and supporting a family is more highly valued in the United States than in any other country. America is the only country in the world where we call the waiter 'sir', as if he were a knight. America has achieved greater social equality than any other society. True, there are large inequalities of income and wealth in America. In purely economic terms, Europe is more egalitarian. But Americans are socially more equal than any other people, and this is unaffected by economic disparities. Alexis de Tocqueville noticed this egalitarianism a century and a half ago and it is, if anything, more prevalent today. For all his riches, Bill Gates could not approach the typical American and say, 'Here's a $100 bill. I'll give it to you if you kiss my feet.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Most likely, the person would tell Gates to go to hell! The American view is that the rich guy may have more money, but he isn't in any fundamental sense better than anyone else.
Articles, 10 Things to Celebrate: Why I'm an Anti-Anti-American (June 2003)

Life, Money, People, World

“Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of the Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary (and in absolute denial of this doctrine) by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull. Nor is depth created by tonal gradation (another doctrine of the academician which, at its culmination, degraded the use of color to a mere function of expressing dark and light).”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 44
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Color, Sense, Light

“In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST : TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE.
Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. That war is yet flagrant; nor can it cease but by the extinction of that imposture, which has been permitted by Providence to prolong the degeneracy of man. While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men. The hand of Ishmael will be against every man, and every man's hand against him.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Passage on Muhammad by an anonymous author in The American Annual Register for the Years 1827-8-9 (1830), edited by Joseph Blunt, Ch. X, p. 269. Robert Spencerattributed the authorship to Adams in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (2005), p. 83, but provided no clear documentation as to why this attribution was made.
Disputed

Life, Men, God, War

“The radical left thinks that the lines in Genesis about dominating the animals and plants has given rise to the environmental degradation that we are facing today. I disagree with that. I think that is the wrong interpretation of the text. It tells us to 'tend' the garden, which means to make the proper decisions that will be good for the things that are living there that aren't people, and also that will be good for the people too. This is a different take on the text than the ultimately cynical take that is often discussed today.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

People, Thinking, Decision, Animals

“My days – the blossom of my youth and the flower of my manhood – have been darkened by the dreariness of servitude. In this my native land – in the land of my sires – I am degraded without fault as an alien and an outcast.”

Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847) Irish political leader

July 1812, aged 37, reflecting on the failure to secure equal rights or Catholic Emancipation for Catholics in Ireland. Quoted from Vol I, p. 185, of O'Connell, J. (ed.) The Life and Speeches of Daniel O'Connell, 2 Vols, Dublin, 1846)

Youth, Flowers

“In combination with other infernal contraptions, like rockets to deliver bombs at large distances, chemical, biological and radioactive poisons, such a war must mean a degree of human suffering and degradation which is beyond the power of imagination. No country would be immune, but those with highly developed industry would suffer most. It is very doubtful whether our technological civilization would survive such a catastrophe.
One may be inclined to regard this as no great loss, but as a just punishment for its shortcomings and sins: the lack of productive genius in art and literature, the neglect of the moral teachings of religion and philosophy, the slowness to abandon outdated political conceptions, like national sovereignty. Yet we are all involved in this tragedy, and the instinct of self-preservation, the love of our children, makes us think about a way of salvation.”

Max Born (1882–1970) physicist

Physics in my generation (1956)

Love, War, Children, Religion

“The great national and political revolution of '76 set the seal to the liberties of North America. And but for one evil, and that of immense magnitude, which the constitutional provision we have been considering does not fairly reach — I allude to negro slavery and the degradation of our coloured citizens — we could foresee for the whole of this magnificent country a certain future of uniform and peaceful improvement.”

Frances Wright (1795–1852) American activist

Independence Day speech (1828)

Peace, Evil, Future, Country

“For an author Jerry Vail was rather nice-looking, most authors, as is widely known, resembling in appearance the more degraded types of fish, unless they look like birds, when they could pass as vultures and no questions asked.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Pigs Have Wings

Pigs Have Wings (1952)

Question, Bird, Fish, Appearance

“An idea, a relationship, can go extinct, just like an animal or a plant. The idea in this case is 'nature,' the separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted, under whose rules he was born and died. In the past, we spoiled and polluted parts of that nature, inflicted environmental 'damage.' But that was like stabbing a man with toothpicks: though it hurt, annoyed, degraded, it did not touch vital organs, block the path of lymph or blood. We never thought that we had wrecked nature. Deep down, we never really thought we could: it was too big and too old; its forces—the wind, the rain, the sun—were too strong, too elemental. But, quite by accident, it turned out that the carbon dioxide and other gases we were producing in our pursuit of a better life… could alter the power of the sun, could increase its heat. And that increase could change the patterns of moisture and dryness, breed storms in new places, breed deserts… We have produced the carbon dioxide—we are ending nature.”

Bill McKibben book The End of Nature

Source: The End of Nature (1989), p. 41

Life, World, Idea, Nature

“It is, thank heaven, difficult if not impossible for the modern European to fully appreciate the force which fanaticism exercises among an ignorant, warlike and Oriental population. Several generations have elapsed since the nations of the West have drawn the sword in religious controversy, and the evil memories of the gloomy past have soon faded in the strong, clear light of Rationalism and human sympathy. Indeed it is evident that Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men's passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccination. But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace. Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Story of the Malakand Field Force

The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), Chapter III.
Early career years (1898–1929)

Death, Men, War, People

“The finest achievement of the new woman has been personal liberty. This is the foundation of civilization; and as long as any one class is watched suspiciously, even fondly guarded, and protected, so long will that class not only be weak, and treacherous, individually, but parasitic, and a collective danger to the community. Who has not heard wives commended for wheedling their husbands out of money, or joked [about] because they are hopelessly extravagant? As long as caprice and scheming are considered feminine virtues, as long as man is the only wage-earner, doling out sums of money, or scattering lavishly, so long will women be degraded, even if they are perfectly contented, and men are willing to labor to keep them in idleness!

Although individual women from pre-historic times have accomplished much, as a class they have been set aside to minister to men's comfort. But when once the higher has been tried, civilization repudiates the lower. Men have come to see that no advance can be made with one half-humanity set apart merely for the functions of sex; that children are quite liable to inherit from the mother, and should have opportunities to inherit the accumulated ability and culture and character that is produced only by intellectual and civil activity. The world has tried to move with men for dynamos, and "clinging" women impeding every step of progress, in arts, science, industry, professions, they have been a thousand years behind men because forced into seclusion. They have been over-sexed. They have naturally not been impressed with their duties to society, in its myriad needs, or with their own value as individuals.

The new woman, in the sense of the best woman, the flower of all the womanhood of past ages, has come to stay — if civilization is to endure. The sufferings of the past have but strengthened her, maternity has deepened her, education is broadening her — and she now knows that she must perfect herself if she would perfect the race, and leave her imprint upon immortality, through her offspring or her works.”

Winnifred Harper Cooley (1874–1967) American author and lecturer

The New Womanhood (New York, 1904) 31f.

Women, Men, Money, Children

“Our common speech contains numberless verbs with which to describe the infliction of violence or cruelty or brutality on others. It only really contains one common verb that describes the effect of violence or cruelty or brutality on those who, rather than suffering from it, inflict it. That verb is the verb to brutalize. A slaveholder visits servitude on his slaves, lashes them, degrades them, exploits them, and maltreats them. In the process, he himself becomes brutalized. This is a simple distinction to understand and an easy one to observe. In the recent past, idle usage has threatened to erode it. Last week was an especially bad one for those who think the difference worth preserving…Col. Muammar Qaddafi's conduct [killing his protesters] is far worse than merely brutal—it is homicidal and sadistic…and even if a headline can't convey all that, it can at least try to capture some of it. Observe, then, what happens when the term is misapplied. The error first robs the language of a useful expression and then ends up by gravely understating the revolting reality it seeks to describe…Far from being brutalized by four decades of domination by a theatrical madman, the Libyan people appear fairly determined not to sink to his level and to be done with him and his horrible kin. They also seem, at the time of writing, to want this achievement to represent their own unaided effort. Admirable as this is, it doesn't excuse us from responsibility. The wealth that Qaddafi is squandering is the by-product of decades of collusion with foreign contractors. The weapons that he is employing against civilians were not made in Libya; they were sold to him by sophisticated nations.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2010s, 2011

People, Error, Understanding, Thinking

“The Foundation of Empire is Art & Science Remove them or Degrade them & the Empire is No More — Empire follows Art & Not Vice Versa as Englishmen suppose.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses
1790s

Art, Science

“We have lived for 200 years in a growth economy. In this time we have come to believe that all our major economic ills – from unemployment and poverty to overpopulation and even environmental degradation – can be solved by more growth. And if the global economy existed in a void perhaps that would be true. But it does not.”

Herman E. Daly (1938) American economist

A steady-state economy, 2008

Time

“I can imagine nothing except being a footman or common soldier as more degrading than being either a barber or a tailor.”

Francis Place (1771–1854) English social reformer

Source: The Autobiography of Francis Place: 1771-1854, 1972, p. 216

Imagination

“I will never degrade my manhood, and stifle the sympathies of human nature. It is an insult to claim it. I wish I had nothing worse to meet at the judgement day than that. I would not have the guilt of causing that wail of man's despair or that wild shriek of woman's agony, as the one or the other is captured, for all the diadems of all the stars in heaven.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838&ndash;64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA178 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 178 1850s, The Fanaticism of the Democratic Party (February 1859)

Star, Nature, Despair

“I cannot think of a system of law that dehumanizes & degrades women more than Islamic Law.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969) Dutch feminist, author

7 News Sydney, (April 4, 2017)

Women, Law, Thinking

“For a long time — always, in fact — I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn't able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Life, Time

“… contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 56.

Parting

“Cells are required to stick precisely to the point. Any ambiguity, any tendency to wander from the matter at hand, will introduce grave hazards for the cells, and even more for the host in which they live. Minor inaccuracies may cause reactions in which neighboring cells are recognized as foreign, and done in. There is a theory that the process of aging may be due to the cumulative effect of imprecision, a gradual degrading of information. It is not a system that allows for deviating.”

Lewis Thomas book The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

"Information"
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

Age

“Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in possession and under our direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?”

Patrick Henry (1736–1799) attorney, planter, politician and Founding Father of the United States

Speech on the Federal Constitution, Virginia Ratifying Convention (Monday, 9 June 1788), as contained in The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution: Volume 3, ed. Jonathan Elliot, published by the editor (1836), pp. 168-169
1780s

“We have tested, in matters where ordinary intelligence and knowledge are competent to judge, the logical methods and intellectual honesty of the foremost of those who in the name of science eliminate God and degrade man, taking from human life its highest dignity and deepest hope. Now, if in simple matters we find such confusion, such credulity, such violation of every canon of sound reasoning as we have found here, shall we blindly trust in deeper matters — in those matters which always have and always must perplex the intellect of man?
Let us rather, as I said in the beginning, not too much underrate our own powers in what is concerned with common facts and general relations. While we may not be scientists or philosophers we too are men. And as to things which the telescope cannot resolve, nor the microscope reveal, nor the spectrum analysis throw light on, nor the tests of the chemist discover, it is as irrational to accept blindly the dictum of those who say, "Thus saith science!"”

Henry George (1839–1897) American economist

as it is in things that are the proper field of the natural sciences to bow before the dictum of those who say, "Thus saith religion!"
Conclusion : The Moral of this Examination
A Perplexed Philosopher (1892)

Life, Men, God, Religion

“You say you are fighting for liberty. Yes you are fighting for liberty: liberty to keep four millions of your fellow-beings in ignorance and degradation;– liberty to separate parents and children, husband and wife, brother and sister;– liberty to steal the products of their labor, exacted with many a cruel lash and bitter tear;– liberty to seduce their wives and daughters, and to sell your own children into bondage;– liberty to kill these children with impunity, when the murder cannot be proven by one of pure white blood. This is the kind of liberty– the liberty to do wrong– which Satan, Chief of the fallen Angels, was contending for when he was cast into Hell.”

David Hunter (1802–1886) Union Army general

As quoted in The Smart Culture: Society, Intelligence, and Law https://books.google.com/books?id=Jc8VCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA59, by Robert L. Hayman, pp. 59&ndash;61 1860s, Letter to Jefferson Davis (1863)

Children, Angels, Hell, Parent

“Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Source: The Culture of Cities (1938), Ch. 1, sct. 5

Life

“Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

As quoted at ContemporaryWriters.com http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth03D25I553012635618

Life, Art

“Women have ironically enjoyed a greater symbolic, if not practical freedom. Thus it is that male and not female homosexuality has been harshly punished by law. A debater in Lucian declares, “Far better that a women, in the madness of her lust, should usurp the nature of man, than that man’s noble nature should be so degraded as to play the woman.” Similarly today, lesbian interludes are a staple of heterosexual pornography. Ever since man emerged from the dominance of nature, masculinity has been the most fragile and problematic of psychic states.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 125

Women, Law, Nature, Freedom

“What can he do who lacks the necessary work, if he comes to be unemployed? He has nothing but to let himself die of hunger. Then a few phrases of pity will thrown on his cadaver. That's what I decided to leave to others. I preferred to make myself a black-marketer, forger, thief, murderer and assassin. I could have begged: it's degrading and cowardly and even punished by your laws that make a crime of poverty. If all those in need, instead of waiting, took wherever there was enough to be taken and by any means whatever, the satisfied would perhaps understand quicker that there is danger in trying to consecrate the current social condition, where worry is permanent and life threatened at every instant.”

Ravachol (1859–1892) French anarchist

Que peut-il faire celui qui manque du nécessaire en travaillant, s'il vient à chômer ? Il n'a qu'à se laisser mourir de faim. Alors on jettera quelques paroles de pitié sur son cadavre. C'est ce que j'ai voulu laisser à d'autres. J'ai préféré me faire contrebandier, faux-monnayeur, voleur, meurtrier et assassin. J'aurais pu mendier : c'est dégradant et lâche et même puni par vos lois qui font un délit de la misère. Si tous les nécessiteux, au lieu d'attendre, prenaient où il y a et par n'importe quel moyen, les satisfaits comprendraient peut-être plus vite qu'il y a danger à vouloir consacrer l'état social actuel, où l'inquiétude est permanente et la vie menacée à chaque instant.
Trial statement

Life, Hunger, Law, Understanding