Debased Quotes & Sayings

The man who submits to violence is debased by his compliance; but when he submits to that right of authority which he acknowledges in a fellow creature, he rises in some measure above the person who give the command. — Alexis De Tocqueville

When depreciated, mutilated, or debased coinage (or currency) is in concurrent circulation with money of high value in terms of precious metals, the good money automatically disappears. — Thomas Gresham

Our political culture is now so debased that we regularly hear 'do gooders' getting the blame for things. Enviromentalists trying to stop a coal-burning power plant or a new runway that will (let's just remember) DESTROY THE EARTH are branded as our enemies, these 'do gooders'. Like doing good is a bad thing. You read all the time in the press that 'do gooders' are to blame - a sweepingly derogatory term. Or even worse, the 'so-called do gooders'. I've never once read that the blame was being put fairly and squarely on 'cunts', and let's face it 'cunts' must be behind fucking things up far more things than 'do gooders'. If it's not 'cunts' then I blame those 'so-called cunts'. — Frankie Boyle

With affluence come the debased gifts born of abuse, misuse, and overuse. — John Zande

But before Derby go, would they mind telling the rest of the Premier League - the league which it has debased with its pathetically-inadequate presence for the past 12 months - where the money has gone? You know, the £30m or so in prize money that every team, even the one at the bottom of the table from August to May, automatically receives by being in the Premier League ... So what happened to that money? Or put another way, why was such a meaningless fraction of it spent on recruiting new players? It's one thing not to compete; it's quite another not to even attempt to do so. — Pete Gill

But now, our daily monkeyshines are such, our preoccupations are so low, our language has be come so debased, the words so blunted and damaged, we've said such stupid and dull things, the the higher beings hear only babbling and grunting and TV commercials - the dog-food level of things. This says nothing to them. What pleasure can these higher beings take in this kind of materialism, devoid of higher thought or poetry? As a result, all that we can hear in sleep is matter creaking and hissing and washing, the rustling of plants, and air conditioning. So we are incomprehensible to the higher beings. They can't influence us and they themselves suffer a corresponding privation. — Saul Bellow

True evil - conscious, calculating evil - does not seek to destroy life, but rather encourage it. True evil - malicious in every action - cheers life on. True evil - defiled in every pursuit - is not, as Max Andrews proposes, maximally selfish, rather full of restraint and accommodating in every way to the needs of men, mice, mushrooms, and microbes. True evil - debased in every motion - promotes, defends, and even admires life in its struggle to persist and self-adorn. True evil - known only to itself - urges life to grow more complex, more bold, more adventurous and more expressive, for only then is it at its most vulnerable, and when it is at its most vulnerable it is pregnant with possibility. Nothing, after all, can be truly lost or truly broken before it is first acquired, held to the bosom, adored, and cherished. — John Zande

What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry? — Emile M. Cioran

All boys wish to be manly; but they often try to become so by copying the vices of men rather than their virtues. They see men drinking, smoking, swearing; so these poor little fellows sedulously imitate such bad habits, thinking they are making themselves more like men. They mistake rudeness for strength, disrespect to parents for independence. They read wretched stories about boy brigands and boy detectives, and fancy themselves heroes when they break the laws, and become troublesome and mischievous. Out of such false influences the criminal classes are recruited. Many a little boy who only wishes to be manly, becomes corrupted and debased by the bad examples around him and the bad literature which he reads. The cure for this is to give him good books, show him truly noble examples from life and history, and make him understand how infinitely above this mock-manliness is the true courage which ennobles human nature. — James Clarke

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life - they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all. — Gene Wolfe

Here the phenomenologist has nothing in common with the literary critic who, as has frequently been noted, judges a work that he could not create and, if we are to believe certain facile condemnations, would not want to create. A literary critic is a reader who is necessarily severe. By turning inside out like a glove an overworked complex that has become debased to the point of being part of the vocabulary of statesmen, we might say that the literary critic and the professor of rhetoric, who know-all and judge-all, readily go in for a simplex of superiority. As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader's pride mixed in with much enthusiasm. — Gaston Bachelard

Action disconcerts us, partly because of our physical incompetence, but mainly because it offends our moral sensibility. We consider it immoral to act. It seems to us that every thought is debased when expressed in words, which transform the thought into the property of others, making it understandable to anyone who can understand it. — Fernando Pessoa

It was his belief, furthermore, that this religion, so elevated and simple, had repeatedly been corrupted and debased by man, and especially outraged by idolatry; wherefore a succession of prophets, each inspired by a revelation from the Most High, had been sent from time to time, and at distant periods, to restore it to its original purity. Such was Noah, such was Abraham, such was Moses, and such was Jesus Christ. By each of these, the true religion had been reinstated upon earth, but had again been vitiated by their followers. The faith, as taught and practiced by Abraham when he came out of the land of Chaldea, seems especially to have formed a religious standard in his mind, from his veneration for the patriarch as the father of Ishmael, the progenitor of his race. — Washington Irving

For example, the ancient Japanese had onna-zumo (women's wrestling), but as the sports historian Allen Guttmann writes, "The debased motivation for this activity is suggested by the names of the wrestlers: 'Big Boobs,' 'Deep Crevice,' and 'Holder of the Balls. — Jonathan Gottschall

Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are
retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on. — Edward Abbey

Debased men, but they all had something in common: They showed a keen regard for virtue, and tried to dress themselves in that costume. Hypocrisy, for all its bad reputation, at least showed a decent respect for goodness. — Orson Scott Card

It must not be thought, however, that in pagan Ireland Fairyland was altogether conceived as a Hades or place of the dead. We have already seen that in some of its types and aspects it was inherently nothing of the sort; as when, for example, it came to be confused with the Land of the Gods. In all likelihood these separate paradises and deadlands of a nature so various were the result of the stratified beliefs of successive races dwelling in the same region. A conquering race would scarcely credit that its heroes would, after death, betake themselves to the deadland of the beaten and enslaved aborigines. The gods of vanquished races might be conceived as presiding over spheres of the dead for which their victors would have nothing but contempt, and which, because of that very contempt, might come to be conceived as hells or places of a debased and grovelling kind, pestiferous regions which only the spirits of despised "natives" or the undesirable might inhabit. — Lewis Spence

Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible. — Janice Rogers Brown

The reactionary of any kind condemns sexual pleasure because it stimulates and repulses him at the same time. He is unable to solve the conflict within him between sexual demands and moralistic inhibitions. The revolutionary refutes the perverse, unhealthy kind of pleasure, because it is not his kind of pleasure, because it is not the sexuality of the future, but the sexuality which results from the conflict between instinct and morals, the sexuality of authoritarian society, a debased, smutty, pathological sexuality. — Wilhelm Reich

The Senate has been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity. — Margaret Chase Smith

You have debased my child ... You have made him a laughingstock of intelligence ... a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere. — Lee De Forest

He wanted me to be clean, and I'd sullied myself, debased myself, not with sex but violence. I was supposed to be his escape, and I'd walked into a trap where I was empowered to commit murder. — Pepper Winters

Disregarding the fact that I am old enough to be [Walter] Schellenberg's mother, I would feel nauseated to be coupled with a man whose ideology has debased our hearts. — Coco Chanel

Our Saviour would love at no less rate than death; and from the supereminent height of glory, stooped and debased Himself to the sufferance of the extremest of indignities, and sunk himself to the bottom of abjectness, to exalt our condition to the contrary extreme. — Robert Boyle

Happy, beautiful people have no need of God. It is only when people are debased by degeneracy of the mind or body that they consciously seek me out. And I desire to be sought out. Worshiped. For — Nicole Cushing

He pleasures his body with drugs and deadens his soul with his savage amusements. Aye, and spreads the disease to those around him, until they take no satisfaction in a contest of skill that draws no blood, until games are only amusing if lives are wagered on the outcome. The very coinage of life becomes debased. Slavery spreads, for if it is accepted to take a man's life for amusement, then how much wiser to take it for profit? — Robin Hobb

I go through life as a transient on his way to eternity, made in the image of God but with that image debased, needing to be taught how to meditate, to worship, to think. — Donald Coggan

Quite apart from how debased Nature becomes in a picture, nothing seems to me to express so much contempt for Nature as a painting of Nature. — Halldor Laxness

The end result of positively reinforcing bad behavior is that you get more of it. The culmination of a failure to punish predators is a debased, dissolute, slum-dog society in which, by legal decree, the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper. — Ilana Mercer

As DH Lawrence said, the Protestant societies do dirt on sex, it is their dirty mind which aligns sex and a woman's genitals with the debased and soiled. This is something terrible, I think, and to be contended with head-on in art. — Micheline Aharonian Marcom

The influence of woman is the same everywhere. Her condition influences the morals, manners, and character of the people of all countries. Where she is debased, society is debased; where she is morally pure and enlightened, society will be proportionately elevated. — Samuel Smiles

The problem with being ravished by books at an early age is that later rereadings are often likely to disappoint. "The sharp luscious flavor, the fine aroma is fled," Hazlitt wrote, "and nothing but the stalk, the bran, the husk of literature is left." Terrible words, but it can happen. You become harder to move, frighten, arouse, provoke, jangle. Your education becomes an interrogation lamp under which the hapless book, its every wart and scar exposed, confesses its guilty secrets: "My characters are wooden! My plot creaks! I am pre-feminist, pre-deconstructivist, and pre-postcolonialist!" (The upside of English classes is that they give you critical tools, some of which are useful, but the downside is that those tools make you less able to shower your books with unconditional love. Conditions are the very thing you're asked to learn.) You read too many other books, and the currency of each one becomes debased. — Anne Fadiman

The one who had not ever conceived his own annulment, who had not foreseen the resource of the cord, the bullet, the poison or the sea, is a debased prisoner or a crawling worm on the cosmic carrion. This world can take off us everything, it can forbid us everything, but nobody can't prevent us our self-abolition. — Emil Cioran

They are deceived who flatter themselves that the ignorant and debased slave has no conception of the magnitude of his wrongs. They are deceived who imagine that he arises from his knees with back lacerated and bleeding, cherishing only a spirit of meekness and forgiveness. A day may come - it will, if his prayer is heard. A terrible day of vengeance when the master in his turn will cry in vain for mercy. — Solomon Northup

Just as the room of the Inquisitor in Dr. Talos's play, with its high judicial bench, lurked somewhere at the lowest level of the House Absolute, so we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present. — Gene Wolfe

Few societies treasured dignity, and feared humiliation, as did the Japanese, for whom a loss of honor could merit suicide. This is likely one of the reasons why Japanese soldiers in World War II debased their prisoners with such zeal, seeking to take from them that which was most painful and destructive to lose. — Laura Hillenbrand

This stunning act of humble love resulted not from Jesus's forgetting who he was but from remembering who he was. This was the holy mission of the Son Savior. He had to be willing to enter the lowest human condition, to do the most debased thing, and to let go of his rights of position in order that we might be redeemed. It was a high and holy calling, and it was the only way. — Paul David Tripp

He spoke a kind of ecclesiastical jargon; a debased rhetoric that explained nothing but brought the truth into disrepute. It begged all the questions and answered none. The massive structure of reason and revelation on which the church was founded was reduced to ritual incantation, formless, fruitless and essentially false. Peppermint piety. It deceived no one but the man who peddled it. It satisfied no one but old ladies and girls in green-sickness; yet it flourished most rankly where the Church was most firmly entrenched in the established order. It was the mark of accommodation, compromise, laxity among the clergy, who find it easier to preach devotion than to affront the moral and social problems of the time. It covered fatuity and lack of education. It left people naked and unarmed in the face of terrifying mysteries: pain, passion, death and the great perhaps of the hereafter. — Morris L. West

There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away. — Norman Mailer

The growth of the exploiters' revolution on this continent has been accompanied by the growth of the idea that work is beneath human dignity, particularly any form of hand work. We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. — Wendell Berry

Fitzgerald to Zelda's DR. Oct. 1932

"Why can't I sell my short stories?" she says.

"Because you're not putting yourself in them. Do you think the Post pays me for nothing?"

(She wants to make money but she wants to save her good stuff for books so her stories are simply casually observed, unfelt phenomena, while mine are sectiobs, debased, over- simplified, if you like, of my own soul. That is our bread and butter and her health and Scotty's education.) p. 221 — F Scott Fitzgerald

One of the most painful things in the Western States and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children - only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old. — Isabella Bird

Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegal and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive. — Alexis De Tocqueville

All you see on television are debased images. — Prince

But as Newton grew more and more aware of his own sin and the evil that debased his best service, he was careful not to take his eyes off Christ. "I could go on complaining," Newton wrote a friend, "but I check myself. I am vile indeed, but Jesus is full of grace and truth. He leads and guides, he feeds and guards, he restores and heals. He is an all-sufficient Savior."66 Under the care of such an all-sufficient Christ, the chief of sinners does not despair, but presses on toward holiness. — Tony Reinke

A novelist's sense that he or she is 'above' a certain genre mainly comes out of the notion that the genre is somehow a debased version of his or her preferred form. — Lynn Coady

But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half-love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.
It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only ... or if what we feel is pain, then we must feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything than the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences ... — Doris Lessing

The way we react to the Indian will always remain this nation's unique moral headache. It may seem a smaller problem than our Negro one, and less important, but many other sections of the world have had to grapple with slavery and its consequences. There's no parallel for our treatment of the Indian. In Tasmania the English settlers solved the matter neatly by killing off every single Tasmanian, bagging the last one as late as 1910. Australia had tried to keep its aborigines permanently debased - much crueler than anything we did with our Indians. Brazil, about the same. Only in America did we show total confusion. One day we treated Indians as sovereign nations. Did you know that my relative Lost Eagle and Lincoln were photographed together as two heads of state? The next year we treated him as an uncivilized brute to be exterminated. And this dreadful dichotomy continues. — James A. Michener

And I want to become a woman I can love. I want to meet women who love themselves, who are alive, who are not debased, overshadowed, wiped out. — Helene Cixous

If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth.But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work — C. Sommerville

Man is the highest essence of man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence. — Karl Marx

Even speech was for them was a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech. — Thornton Wilder

but when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power. — Plato

Society has wrongly driven the concept of immorality down to only the most debased and despicable behaviors imaginable. Immorality is not subjective; it is anything that transgresses God's Word. Our mind, mouth and body are instruments of either immorality or Godliness. Why argue over the relatively few unclear issues in God's Word while regularly doing what He clearly prohibits? — William Branks

High justice would in no way be debased
if ardent love should cancel instantly
the debts these penitents must satisfy. — Dante Alighieri

We might make a public moan in the newspapers about the decay of conscience, but in private conversation, no matter what crimes a man may have committed or how cynically he may have debased his talent or his friends, variations on the answer Yes, but I did it for the money, satisfy all but the most tiresome objections. — Lewis H. Lapham

Oh, I will be cruel to you, Marya Morevna. It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be. But you understand, don't you? You are clever enough. I am a demanding creature. I am selfish and cruel and extremely unreasonable. But I am your servant. When you starve I will feed you; when you are sick I will tend you. I crawl at your feet; for before your love, your kisses, I am debased. For you alone I will be weak. — Catherynne M Valente

However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience. — Jeanette Winterson

They are a great essay in male friendship, which has gone now. Men's friendship has been debased. One of the lovely things about Holmes and Watson is that they do have this great platonic relationship. — Jeremy Brett

We're making tin gods out of those poor buffoons in Hollywood; I dote on movies and appreciate the scanty art therein but I consider the profession about the most debased and debasing I know. — Robert E. Howard

The word "religion" has been hi-jacked and debased by the priests of faiths like these, until now it has become a dirty word amongst intelligent, right-thinking people in the Western world. The word "religion" springs from roots meaning piety, the Latin religio, the opposite idea to negligens, negligent, uncaring, unaware. It also springs from a root meaning to join together things that are separate, which in fact is the same meaning as the word "yoga" (compare the English word yoke, which ties oxen together, for example). So religion is a word which describes the process of becoming aware and unified, of joining together all things which are diverse; it is the union of body and spirit, self and not-self, human and god. — Rodney Orpheus

Public life is debased because it's only the nice people who are worried about imposing their views on others. — Alain De Botton

If it be asked what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer, the genius of the whole system, the nature of just and constitutional laws, and above all the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America, a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it. If this spirit shall ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the Legislature as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate anything but liberty. — Alexander Hamilton

Drink and dissipation had done their work on the coin-clean profile and now it was no longer the head of a young pagan prince on new-minted gold but a decadent, tired Caesar on copper debased by long usage. — Margaret Mitchell

Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda.
The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis. — Thomas Merton

Comradeship is part of war. Like alcohol, it is one of the great comforters and helpers for people who have to live under unbearable, inhuman conditions. It makes the intolerable tolerable. It helps us cope with filth, calamity, and death. It anaesthetizes us. It comforts us for the loss of all the amenities of civilisation. Indeed, its loss is one of its preconditions. It receives its justification from bitter necessities and terrible sacrifices. If it is separated from these, if it is exercised only for pleasure and intoxication, for its own sake, it becomes a vice. It makes no difference that it brings a certain happiness. It corrupts and depraves men like no alcohol or opium. It makes them unfit for normal, responsible civilian life. Indeed, it is at bottom, an instrument of decivilisation. The general promiscuous comradeship to which the Nazis have seduced the Germans has debased this nation as nothing else could. — Sebastian Haffner

We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies. No, — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Wrong thinking about God and people often begins with a debased image of ourselves. — Brennan Manning

A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers. — Victor Hugo

Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will not free himself. Again, it may be said that this instance is remote or extreme. But, again, it is exactly true of the men in the streets around us. It is true that the negro slave, being a debased barbarian, will probably have either a human affection of loyalty, or a human affection for liberty. But the man we see every day
the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory, the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office
he is too mentally worried to believe in freedom. — G.K. Chesterton

Ask about these numbers and you hear other numbers. As usual, the fate of the poor hangs upon the decision of those concerned only with what those above them think. An endless cycle of egotism, self-sympathy. You see it everywhere here, those too weak and ashamed to defend themselves are blamed for their own misfortune. Separated and debased, they're swept deeper under society's carpet, thus the richest society in the history of the world lacks the will and conscience to end poverty while the poor become the victims of their own spiritual and physical misery . . ." In other words, according to Swigge, our job is to hide from the public's view the suffering and helplessness of the constituents of our largest minority, and thereby further diminish them in their eyes and in ours. — Philip Schultz

'Tammy,' the new movie starring, produced, and co-written by Melissa McCarthy, could be an artifact from some alternate universe: the creatures there resemble Earthlings but have an entirely different and debased idea of what's funny. — Richard Corliss

The fascination of somebody with original creative gifts is something that's always drawn me. I get attached to them, but I can't call it being in love, because the words are so debased. — Emma Tennant

The generation of consumers who swallow this pessimistic sentiment can't see past the product to its debased morality. Instead, their excitement about The Dark Knight's dread (that teenage thrall with subversion) inspires their fealty to product. — Armond White

Those who think that it is only necessary to feed and clothe the prisoner, and to act towards him in all things according to the law, are much mistaken. However much debased he may be, a man exacts instinctively respect for his character as a man. Every prisoner knows perfectly that he is a convict and a reprobate, and knows the distance which separates him from his superiors; but neither the branding irons nor chains will make him forget that he is a man. He must, therefore, be treated with humanity. Humane treatment may raise up one in whom the divine image has long been obscured. It is with the "unfortunate," above all, that humane conduct is necessary. It is their salvation, their only joy. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Porn is now so deeply embedded in our culture that it has become synonymous with sex to such a point that to criticize porn is to get slapped with the label anti-sex.
...
But what if you are a feminist who is pro-sex in the real sense of the word, pro that wonderful, fun, and deliciously creative force that bathes the body in delight and pleasure, and what you are actually against is porn sex? A kind of sex that is debased, dehumanized, formulaic, and generic, a kind of sex not based on individual fantasy, play, or imagination, but one that is the result of an industrial product created by those who get excited not by bodily contact but by market penetration and profits? Where, then, do you fit in the pro-sex, anti-sex dichotomy when pro-porn equals pro-sex? — Gail Dines

So we may well believe that the King's men were shriven on the night before they fought. Something of the young man's vision had penetrated to his captains and his soldiers. Something of the new ideal of the Round Table which was to be born in pain, something about doing a hateful and dangerous action for the sake of decency
for they knew that the fight was to be fought in blood and death without reward. They would get nothing but the unmarketable conscience of having done what they ought to do in spite of fear
something which wicked people have often debased by calling it glory with too much sentiment, but which is glory all the same. This idea was in the hearts of the young men who knelt before the God-distributing bishops
knowing that the odds were three to one, and that their own warm bodies might be cold at sunset. — T.H. White

If I have chosen the female form in particular, it is because beauty has been debased and exploited in our sensual 20th century. — Ruth Bernhard

Albertus [Magnus] ... debased the doctrine of Aristotle with the itch of the chemists flowing with the bloody flux of quicksilver and the stench of sulphur. — Georgius Agricola

The idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing. — George W. S. Trow

he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment; — H.P. Lovecraft

As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference. — Stephen Jay Gould

Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him. — Charles Fourier

The study of eugenics had its beginning in Germany, sometime after the mid-19th century mark, stimulated by volkish concerns for Aryan racial purity. Rudolf Virchow, pathologist and politician, began a study of national ethnic statistics in 1871, convinced that the majority of Germans would prove to be of relatively pure Nordic descent. The results of his studies proved otherwise. According to Virchow, the obvious solution was to set about Nordicizing the debased German stock. — Jim Keith

Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy. — Thomas Hardy

Unfortunately, the real achievements of children on the ground became debased and devalued because Labor education secretaries sounded like Soviet commissars praising the tractor production figures when we know that those exams were not the rock-solid measures of achievement that children deserve. — Michael Gove

It is Mormonism, Mohammedanism and heathenism and not Christianity which have proclaimed polygamy and debased woman from the sacred place of wife to the lower level of concubine. It is not Christianity which has sustained the social evil. — David Josiah Brewer

But struggling with these better feelings was pride,
the vice of the lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and self-assured. The miserable companion of thieves and ruffians, the fallen outcast of low haunts, the associate of the scourings of the jails and hulks, living within the shadow of the gallows itself,
even this degraded being felt too proud to betray a feeble gleam of the womanly feeling which she thought a weakness, but which alone conneced her with that humanity, of which her wasting life had obliterated so many, many traces when a very child. — Charles Dickens

Centerless pop-culture country full of marginalized subnations that are themselves postmodern, looped, self-referential, self-obsessed, voyeuristic, passive, slack-jawed, debased. — D.T. Max

Something about doing a hateful and dangerous action for the sake of decency - for they knew that the fight was to be fought in blood and death without reward. They would get nothing but the unmarketable conscience of having done what they ought to do in spite of fear - something which wicked people have often debased by calling it glory with too much sentiment, but which is glory all the same. — T.H. White

The sinner does not need more grace than the saint, nor does the immature and undisciplined believer need more than the godly, zealous missionary. We all need the same amount of grace because the "currency" of our good works is debased and worthless before God. — Jerry Bridges

Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerales. — Samuel Johnson

In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think, an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and situations in words. — Leo Tolstoy

For the president to resign now would be wrong. President Clinton may have debased himself with his behavior, but we shouldn't debase the office with an impulsive overreaction. — George Stephanopoulos

The debased coinage of his reign bore his initials, ICR: Iohannes Casimirus Rex. These were taken to stand for Initium Calamitatum Reipublicae, the Beginning of the Republic's Catastrophes. — Norman Davies

We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.
(pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America") — Wendell Berry

This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviorists, "positive and negative reinforcements," usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, "If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything." Even worse, they say, "If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything."
It is the creed of a slave. — John Holt

[The monks'] credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science. — Edward Gibbon

Religion has debased the concept "man"; its ultimate consequence is that everything good, great, true is superhuman and bestowed only through an act of grace - — Friedrich Nietzsche

Can an idea a notion as abstract as Relativism produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism. — Jacques Barzun