Degrade Quotes & Sayings

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

The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow. — W. H. Auden

The function of our Government is to insure to all its citizens, now and hereafter, their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If we of this generation destroy the resources from which our children would otherwise derive their livelihood, we reduce the capacity of our land to support a population, and so either degrade the standard of living or deprive the coming generations of their fight to life on this continent. — Theodore Roosevelt

There will be little drudgery in this better ordered world. Natural power harnessed in machines will be the general drudge. What drudgery is inevitable will be done as a service and duty for a few years or months out of each life; it will not consume nor degrade the whole life of anyone. — H.G.Wells

I am not living my life to impress anyone, not of a big head to degrade anyone, not of negative thoughts to influence anyone. But a positive mind to inspire the people that surrounds me and the world. — Henry Johnson Jr

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sebastian Vettel's brilliant talent will ultimately come forth and he'll continue to show what he's capable of. I will never ever degrade Vettel's ability. Sooner or later, he'll prove anyone so wrong — Mario Andretti

Hollywood is a showman's paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making - and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay. — Raymond Chandler

For human beings to destroy the biological diversity of God's creation; for human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth's waters, its land, its air, and its life -- these are sins. — Patriarch Bartholomew

Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it. — Jacques Lacan

Genius, when employed in works whose tendency it is to demoralize and to degrade us, should be contemplated with abhorrence rather than with admiration; such a monument of its power, may indeed be stamped with immortality, but like the Coliseum at Rome, we deplore its magnificence because we detest the purposes for which it was designed. — Charles Caleb Colton

No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it,
but longing to degrade not even death;
we shall learn earthliness, and serve its ends,
to feel its hands about us like a friend's. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Degrade first the Arts if you'd Mankind Degrade. Hire Idiots to Paint with cold light & hot shade: Give high Price for the worst, leave the best in disgrace, And with Labours of Ignorance fill every place. — William Blake

It's not that I refuse to look at the world around me, but that I refuse to pretend it's anymore important than everything else, you know what I mean? The moments from the past or from the future, the unreal scenes from tales, dreams, the projects we push aside each day that exist in the doubt we stop having in order to live--they're all worlds as true as this one, and I neither abandon or degrade them. So, I suppose that if I live in so many spaces at once, being absent from this one from time to time should be excusable, don't you think? — Gustavo Faveron Patriau

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. — Aristotle.

Servitude degrades people to such a point that they come to like it. — Luc De Clapiers

The bare bones tools for a cyber-attack are to identify a vulnerability in the system you want to gain access to or you want to subvert or you want to deny, destroy, or degrade, and then to exploit it, which means to send codes, deliver code to that system somehow and get that code to that vulnerability, to that crack in their wall, jam it in there, and then have it execute. — Edward Snowden

I love you, I know this must come as something of a surprise, since all I've ever done is scorn you and degrade you and taunt you, but I have loved you for several hours now, and every second, more. I thought an hour ago that I loved you more than any woman has ever loved a man, but a half hour after that I knew that what I felt before was nothing compared to what I felt then. But ten minutes after that, I understood that my previous love was a puddle compared to the high seas before a storm. — William Goldman

I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now so he shall never know how I love him and that not because he's handsome Nelly but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of his and mine are the same and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning or frost from fire. — Emily Bronte

No one can degrade us except ourselves. — Booker T. Washington

Tshe suffering of adversity does not degrade you but exalts you. Human tribulation teaches you; it does not destroy you. The more we are afflicted in this world, the greater is our assurance for the next. The more we sorrow in the present, ..the greater will be our joy in the future. — Isidore Of Seville

Poverty cannot deprive us of many consolations. It cannot rob us of the affection we have for each other, or degrade us in our own opinion, of in that of any person, whose opinion we ought to value. — Ann Radcliffe

I mean, if you degrade someone, you isolate them, you control them, you call them names, you demean them. That's a horrible existence for people. — Phil McGraw

And she looked upon the mirror that was given as a gift. She hated everything about it, from the circular size of it, to the color, and the wooden frame that held it in place. But mostly, she hated looking at herself. Especially into this one that had a scratch on its glass surface, which would reflect back to her face. And as she looked, it would cut her as the words her father would often say, in telling her she was ugly. — Anthony Liccione

Many otherwise decent men and women could find no other solution. They are willing to degrade themselves to their basest levels to prevent the traditional laborer from rising in status or, to put it bluntly, from "winning," even though what he wins has been rightfully his from the moment he was born into the human race. I — John Howard Griffin

It would seem that if despotism were to be established among 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

The moment anyone tries to demean or degrade you in any way, you have to know how great you are. Nobody would bother to beat you down if you were not a threat. — Cicely Tyson

We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The aim of the joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded. — George Orwell

The Greek knows how to live with his rags: they don't utterly degrade and befoul him as in other countries I have visited. — Henry Miller

If I have to degrade myself or do something that I'm not willing to do as a Christian to get something, I'm just not willing to do it. — Quinton Aaron

I think that sacrifices of animals in the name of religion are barbarous and they degrade the name of religion. — Jawaharlal Nehru

Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it, and commend it, and are busy about it. At the same time they degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work. — Jacques Barzun

The Church has been and now is unalterably opposed to gambling in any form whatever. It is opposed to any game of chance, occupation, or so-called business, which takes money from the person who may be possessed of it without giving value received in return. It is opposed to all practices the tendency of which is to encourage the spirit of reckless speculation, and particularly to that which tends to degrade or weaken the high moral standard which the members of the Church, and our community at large, have always maintained — Heber J. Grant

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

Nothing is gained except by sacrifice ... Do not degrade it to the level of the brutes ... Make yourselves decent men! ... Be chaste and pure! ... There is no other way. Did Christ find any other way? — Swami Vivekananda

Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death. — Rumi

To limit the time resource applied to any one company, he reminds himself of psychological research which suggests that in many contexts decisions are best made with no more than five to seven points of information. Any more information beyond that does not significantly improve decisions, and may even degrade them. — Guy Thomas

Random mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that this is true even of the helpful mutations. Let me emphasize, our experience with malaria's effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied genetic system) shows that most helpful mutations degrade genes. What's more, as a group the mutations are incoherent, meaning that they are not adding up to some new system. They are just small changes - mostly degradative - in pre-existing, unrelated genes. The take-home lesson is that this is certainly not the kind of process we would expect to build the astonishingly elegant machinery of the cell. If random mutation plus selective pressure substantially trashes the human genome, why should we think that it would be a constructive force in the long term? There is no reason to think so. — Michael J. Behe

Revere your senses; don't degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Try to notice something new every day, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you're not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like, notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet feel like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is - your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbors, and this planet. Don't pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge. You can never become a real man if you have a careless and destructive attitude, Eustace said, but maturity will follow mindfulness even as day follows night. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Our main difference from chimps and gorillas is that over the last 3 million years or so, we have been shaped less and less by nature, and more and more by culture. We have become experimental creatures of our own making. This experiment has never been tried before. And we, its unwitting authors, have never controlled it. The experiment is now moving very quickly and on a colossal scale. Since the early 1900s, the world's population has multiplied by four and its economy - a rough measure of the human load on nature - by more than forty. We have reached a stage where we must bring the experiment under rational control, and guard against present and potential dangers. It's entirely up to us. If we fail - if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us - nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea. — Ronald Wright

And if you can't shape your life the way you want, at least try as much as you can not to degrade it ... — Constantine P. Cavafy

Degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL — Barack Obama

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things. — Christian Nestell Bovee

She paused. "But 4chan aims to degrade the target, right? And one of the highest degradations for women in our culture is rape. We don't talk about rape of men, so I think it doesn't occur to most people as a male degradation. With men, they talk about getting them fired. In our society men are supposed to be employed. If they're fired, they lose masculinity points. With Donglegate she pointlessly robbed that man of his employment. She degraded his masculinity. And so the community responded by degrading her femininity. — Jon Ronson

Know mankind well,
don't degrade every man as evil,
and don't exalt every man
thinking he is good.
He who cannot discover himself;
cannot discover the world. — Rumi

The soul that is within me no man can degrade. — Frederick Douglass

I don't like to degrade women, but I like pornography. — Lupe Fiasco

Chigurh shot him through the forehead and then stood watching. Watching the capillaries break up in his eyes. The light receding. Watching his own image degrade in that squandered world. — Cormac McCarthy

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

Never marry a person less educated than you. You, not only degrade yourself but also your kids will suffer whole life. — Himmilicious

Man cannot degrade woman without himself falling into degradation; he cannot elevate her without at the same time elevating himself. — Alexander Walker

If the society that we're talking about is a society that starts wars all over the world, degrades indigenous cultures, is misogynistic in itself, if that's the society we're talking about, then it's not a bad thing if hip-hop did degrade that society. — KRS-One

This was why people got mated, Rehv suddenly thought. Fuck the sex and the social position. If they were smart, they did it to make a house that had no walls and an invisible roof and a floor that no could walk on-and yet the structure was a shelter no storm could blow down, no match could torch up, no passage of years could degrade.
That was when it hit him. A mated bond like that helped you through shit nights like this. — J.R. Ward

AT&T will not block access to the public Internet or degrade service, period. — Edward Whitacre Jr.

The Pythagoreans degrade impious men into brutes and, if one is to believe Empedocles, even into plants. — Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

Today the great gift of God's Creation is exposed to serious dangers and lifestyles which can degrade it. Environmental pollution is making particularly unsustainable the lives of the poor of the world ... we must pledge ourselves to take care of creation and to share its resources in solidarity. — Pope Benedict XVI

For times when you feel pain:
See that it doesn't disgrace you, or degrade your
intelligence - doesn't keep it from acting rationally or
unselfishly.
And in most cases what Epicurus said should help: that
pain is neither unbearable nor unending, as long as you keep
in mind its limits and don't magnify them in your imagination.
And keep in mind too that pain often comes in disguise
as drowsiness, fever, loss of appetite ... When you're
bothered by things like that, remind yourself: I'm giving in
to pain. — Marcus Aurelius

In Iraq and Syria, American leadership - including our military power - is stopping ISIL's advance, instead of getting dragged into another ground war in the Middle East, we are leading a broad coalition, including Arab nations, to degrade and ultimately destroy this terrorist group. — Barack Obama

If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil. — Simone Weil

We're not locked in to these conditions that degrade the environment, and jeopardize the future of our children. — Dennis Kucinich

Of the two, I prefer those who render vice lovable to those who degrade virtue. — Joseph Joubert

To introduce unconverted persons to the church, is to weaken and degrade it; and therefore an apparent gain may be a real loss. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

It is not true that sex degrades women ... if it is any good. — Steve Coogan

We degrade Providence too much by attributing our ideas to it out of annoyance at being unable to understand it. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Monster. And yet ... For her friends, for her family, she would gladly be a monster. For Rowan, for Dorian, for Nehemia, she would debase and degrade and ruin herself. — Sarah J. Maas

I find it difficult to accept that it is the will of God that humanity should degrade, deface, desolate, and ultimately perhaps destroy His Creation on Earth. Yet this is the course on which we are embarked. — Russell E. Train

If you take a perfectly well-adjusted normal person of any age from anywhere in the country and stick them in L.A., within about a week I do believe that a lot of their values and morals will start to degrade. — Chris Eigeman

There are two ways to become famous. Degrade yourself or have talent. The first way is easier. — Gary Janetti

We are naturally moral beings, but our environments can enhance - or, sadly, degrade - this innate moral sense. — Paul Bloom

You degrade us and then ask why we are degraded. You shut our mouths and ask why we don't speak. You close your colleges and seminaries against us and then ask why we don't know. — Frederick Douglass

Today, we are tabling a motion seeking the support of the House for the government's decision to renew our military mission against ISIL for up to an additional 12 months. Our objectives remain the same: we intend to continue to degrade the capabilities of ISIL, that is, to degrade its ability to engage in military movements of scale, to operate bases in the open, to expand its presence in the region, and to propagate attacks outside the region. — Stephen Harper

As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only. — Christopher Hitchens

A man engrossed in sensual pleasures may form a mistaken out look
upon life and
think that he enjoys life more than others do. But soon he realizes his
mistake as not long
after this he is reduced to a mere slave to his blind passions,
He is doomed to a perpetual
life of deprivation and restlessness, for animal desires once run ra
mpant are never
satisfied: they are rather sharpened all the more and degrade ma
n to lower levels of
animalism where all his efforts are focused on one object: how to
derive the maximum
possible sensual pleasure in life? — Mohammad Qutub

I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him. — Booker T. Washington

It is one thing to kill someone. It is another to degrade and humiliate, to strip away a person's dignity like stripping away flesh. One made a man a murderer. The other made him a monster. — Amy Harmon

Concord is just as idiotic as ever in relation to the spirits and their knockings. Most people here believe in a spiritual world ... in spirits which the very bullfrogs in our meadows would blackball. Their evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. The hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison. — Henry David Thoreau

What right have you to take the word wealth, which originally meant 'well-being,' and degrade and narrow it by confining it to certain sorts of material objects measured by money. — John Ruskin

Other anatomical changes associated with long-duration space flight are definitely negative: the immune system weakens, the heart shrinks because it doesn't have to strain against gravity, eyesight tends to degrade, sometimes markedly (no one's exactly sure why yet). The spine lengthens as the little sacs of fluid between the vertebrae expand, and bone mass decreases as the body sheds calcium. Without gravity, we don't need muscle and bone mass to support our own weight, which is what makes life in space so much fun but also so inherently bad for the human body, long-term. — Chris Hadfield

Inspiration is incompatible with selfish desire. Whoever wants something for himself sets truth aside. Such aims can only degrade work. — Antonin Sertillanges

Scientific and technological "solutions" which poison the environment or degrade the social structure and man himself are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction. — E.F. Schumacher

The law says if you poison the water, you'll die. The law says that if you poison the air, you'll suffer. The law says if you degrade where you live, you'll suffer ... If you don't learn that, you can only suffer. There's no discussion with this law. — Oren Lyons

Humanity is as much lacking as decency. Blood, suffering, does not move them. The court frequents bull and bear baitings; Elizabeth beats her maids, spits upon a courtier's fringed coat, boxes Essex's ears; great ladies beat their children and their servants. "The sixteenth century," he says, "is like a den of lions. Amid passions so strong as these there is not one lacking. Nature appears here in all its violence, but also in all its fullness. If nothing has been softened, nothing has been mutilated. It is the entire man who is displayed, heart, mind, body, senses, with his noblest and finest aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage appetites, without the preponderance of any dominant passion to cast him altogether in one direction, to exalt or degrade him. He has not become rigid as he will under Puritanism. — William Shakespeare

Words have consequences, and I judge people not only by their words but what they do. And if you look at people who have a pattern, who've built a career out of dividing people and who built a career out of often not just Obama but finding ways to degrade and diminish African-Americans and African-American leaders. It's racist to consistently make your living on the backs of black people. — Joan Walsh Anglund

People try to get out of themselves and to escape from the man. This is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they turn into beast; instead of lifting, they degrade themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible heights. — Michel De Montaigne

Words Are The Ones Used To Degrade And Demean Another Human Being — Karlyle Tomms

The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities ... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions
one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. — Oscar Wilde

Family members have a personal stake in honoring and mourning their dead and objecting to unwarranted public exploitation that, by intruding upon their own grief, tends to degrade the rites and respect they seek to accord to the deceased person who was once their own. — Anthony Kennedy

[I]t's impossible to evade the fact that Endless War will inevitably degrade the citizenry of the country that engages in it. A country which venerates its military above all other institutions, which demands that its soldiers be spoken of only with religious-like worship, and which continuously indoctrinates its population to believe that endless violence against numerous countries is necessary and just - all by instilling intense fear of the minorities who are the target of that endless violence - will be a country filled with citizens convinced of the virtues and nobility of aggression. — Glenn Greenwald

Degrade him from what position? As a happy, hard-working, goods-consuming citizen he's perfect. Of course, if you choose some other standard than ours, then perhaps you might say he was degraded. But you've got to stick to one set of postulates. You can't play Electro-magnetic Golf according to rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. — Aldous Huxley

During the last decades, films about the black experience have been produced, directed, and even scripted by white men. Some of them are excellent. But most reflect George Bernard Shaw's warning that 'if you do not tell your stories others will tell them for you and they will vulgarize and degrade you.' — Ishmael Reed

Stay with me...opponents of gay marriage claim that granting equal legal rights to gay couples would degrade the sanctity of a sacred familial institution. What they don't seem to notice is that Who Wants to Marry A Multi-Millionaire?, Married By America and the Bachelor have been degrading the notion of marriage on prime time for an entire decade... — Jennifer L. Pozner

Sometimes it is our mistakes that make us the best among men in the world. if we listen to the voices of the world, they speak not to degrade us but to encourage us to overcome that which we have been ultimately blessed with ... for what more could we lose if we never choose to overcome anything? I tell you that you are dead if you are foolish enough to not try. — Danish Sayanee

One pets what one degrades; and one has to support what one has enfeebled — Phyllis Bottome

Our health care approaches squander billions on extravagant treatment regimes that end up accomplishing little, as a society we refuse to adopt the small, even tiny adjustments that could easily reduce the clawing uncertainties that now degrade millions. — Robert Martensen

The grand design of nature perceived broadly in four dimensions, including the forces that move the universe and created man, with special focus on evolution in our own biosphere, is something intrinsically good that it is right to preserve and enhance, and wrong to destroy and degrade. — Roger Wolcott Sperry

That God is the sum of all created things. Nature and God are one, so that whoever touches a leaf or a stone touches God. That is of course to degrade the glory of the incorruptible Deity and, in an effort to make all things divine, banish all divinity from the world entirely. — A.W. Tozer

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language. — Northrop Frye

We ought to be listening to see who the world-system wants to devalue and degrade, most often first with words, so that we can know for whom we should be speaking and standing. — Russell D. Moore

When there are so many people willing to degrade women so horrifically just for having the nerve to express an opinion, it doesn't take long for us to regress into silence. — Clementine Ford