Quotes & Sayings About Impoverishment

Few Westerners understand the post-Soviet soul like Lawrence Sheets. Whether it is his hair-raising stories of the region's myriad armed conflicts or the black humor with which he captures the moral and physical impoverishment of a collapsing empire, Sheets brilliantly condenses twenty tumultuous years into an eminently readable tale. — Matthew Brzezinski

In an ecological perspective, in other words, there are few accidents or anomalies, only outcomes based on system structure and dynamics. Climate change and glittering malls, Calcuttan poverty and sybaritic wealth, biotic impoverishment and economic growth, militarism and terrorism, global domination and utter vulnerability are not different things but manifestations of a single system. — David W. Orr

Kuan Yin speaks on The Law of Prosperity and Abundance: Continue down the path that makes you feel fulfilled. Those who continue on an unrewarding path for the sake of only monetary gain are displaying a lack of trust in life. Continuing in such a mistrustful way will only bring impoverishment. Following one's heart, continuing on one's divine path can bring abundance. — Hope Bradford

Orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular. Mere orderliness leads to increasing impoverishment and finally to the lowest possible level of structure, no longer clearly distinguishable from chaos, which is the absence of order. A counterprinciple is needed, to which orderliness is secondary. It must supply what is to be ordered. — Rudolf Arnheim

History is a raw onion sandwich, it just repeats, it burps. We've seen it again and again this year. Same old story, Same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment — Julian Barnes

But if I lack respect for and enjoyment of who I am, I have very little to give - except my unfilled needs. In my emotional impoverishment, I tend to see other people essentially as sources of approval or disapproval. I do not appreciate them for who they are in their own right. I see only what they can or cannot do for me. I am not looking for people whom I can admire and with whom I can share the excitement and adventure of life. I am looking for people who will not condemn me - and perhaps will be impressed by my persona, the face I present to the world. My ability to love remains undeveloped. This is one of the reasons why attempts at relationships so often fail - not because the vision of passionate or romantic love is intrinsically irrational, but because the self-esteem needed to support it is absent. — Nathaniel Branden

As modern physics started with the Newtonian revolution, so modern philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian Catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with conscious thinking. The result of this identification was the shallow rationalism of l' esprit Cartesien, and an impoverishment of psychology which it took three centuries to remedy even in part. — Arthur Koestler

Little bits of Norwegian came to me by a kind of aural osmosis. The most surprising linguistic fact I learned was the impoverishment of that language in swear words. In fact, there is only one- 'farn'- which merely means something like 'devil take it!', but is considered very rude by a well brought-up Viking. It has to pass muster for most of the everyday tragedies that beset an expedition. If a finger is hammered, you jump up and down and cry 'farn'; if you drop an outstanding fossil irretrievably into the sea, you splutter for a while and then mutter 'farn' under your breath. If all your provisions were carried away by a hurricane and death were guaranteed, all the poor Norwegian could do would be to stand on the shingle and cry 'farn' into the wind. Somehow this does not seem adequate for the occasion. — Richard Fortey

I believe that as we face unparalleled prosperity in some quarters and deep impoverishment in others, it is the willingness of the next generation to bridge the gap between the two that will return us to our sense of purpose and focus. — Lynn Schusterman

I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, subtracting rather than adding. When I first met Joyce, I didn't intend to be a writer. That only came later when I found out that I was no good at all at teaching. When I found I simply couldn't teach. But I do remember speaking about Joyce's heroic achievement. I had a great admiration for him. That's what it was: epic, heroic, what he achieved. I realized that I couldn't go down that same road. — Samuel Beckett

The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few. — Niall Ferguson

In my very first term there was an issue that brought us [George Mitchell, Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd] together in a very deep, emotional, and personal level.It was called 'spousal impoverishment' and it meant that for one person [to go into] a nursing home, the family [ ], could go near bankruptcy, and then they'd end up with a lien on the family farm or the home. And so I wanted to change that. — Barbara Mikulski

Perhaps nuns felt like this, she thought, when they passed within convent walls and left the glitter of the world behind. But their renunciation was of the will, while circumstances beyond her control had stripped her of the people who meant everything to her. And yet was it not possible that they had endured the same impoverishment, so that when the glory that was life had become husks they found it good to exchange those dead things for service and whatever vicarious happiness could be salvaged? Maybe selflessness was only selfishness on another level. — Margaret Landon

A child without an acquaintance of some kind with a classic of literature ... suffers from that impoverishment for the rest of his life. No later intimacy is like that of the first. — Lizette Woodworth Reese

If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. — John Maynard Keynes

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration. — Ludwig Von Mises

Practically all government attempts to redistribute wealth and income tend to smother productive incentives and lead toward general impoverishment. — Henry Hazlitt

We're still a long way from knowing where our clicks will lead us. But it's clear that two of the hopes most dear to the Internet optimists - that the Web will create a more bountiful culture and that it will promote greater harmony and understanding - should be treated with skepticism. Cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation seem equally likely outcomes. — Nicholas Carr

Africa is a paradox which illustrates and highlights neo-colonialism . Her earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below the soil continue to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa's impoverishment. — Kwame Nkrumah

[ ... ] passion is by no means the fuller life which it seems to be in the dreams of adolescence, but is on the contrary a kind of naked and denuding intensity, verily, a bitter destitution, the impoverishment of a mind being emptied of all diversity, an obsession of the imagination by a single image. — Denis De Rougemont

The maltreatment of the natural world and its impoverishment leads to the impoverishment of the human soul. It is related to the outburst of violence in human society. To save the natural world today means to save what is human in humanity. — Raisa Gorbacheva

It is much easier to make intellectual messes than it is to clarify complicated issues, especially when real solutions would challenge the status quo and require much careful thought across many fields of knowledge. Problems of climatic change, biotic impoverishment, population growth, and the choices to be made by various technologies and the transition to a sustainable and decent society with an economy that works over the long-term are difficult, complex, and intertwined problems with many possible answers. — David W. Orr

And if this disenchanted vision were elevated to the status of being the only legitimate vision of the nature of the cosmos upheld by an entire civilization, what an incalculable loss, an impoverishment, a tragic deformation, a grief, would ultimately be suffered by both knower and known.
— Richard Tarnas

The achievements of past struggles and the aspirations of an entire nation are [being] undone and erased ... No Agent Orange or steel pellet bombs, no napalm, no toxic chemicals: a new phase of economic and social (rather than' physical) destruction has unfolded. The seemingly neutral and scientific tools of macro-economic policy constitute a non-violent instrument of recolonization and impoverishment. — Michel Chossudovsky

Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes,and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born, and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule?
Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan? — Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Man's access in prayer to God opens everything and makes his impoverishment his wealth. All things are his through prayer. — Edward McKendree Bounds

The entire stock of relationships which suited in war - militiae - was regarded as inadmissible and improper in peace - domi. We have the measure of how right the Romans were in this respect in the experience of the intellectual and moral impoverishment brought about by total mobilisation. — Bertrand De Jouvenel

When we experience inner impoverishment, love for another too easily becomes hunger: for reassurance, for acclaim, for affirmation of our worth. — Sharon Salzberg

One barrier ... is the impoverishment of classroom language, the failure to cultivate a common vocabulary about inquiry, explanation, argument and problem solving. — David Perkins

The boom squanders through malinvestment scarce factors of production and reduces the stock available through overconsumption; its alleged blessings are paid for by impoverishment. — Ludwig Von Mises

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood. — Rollo May

But if we don't have experience with solitude - and this is often the case today - we start to equate loneliness and solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don't know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness. — Sherry Turkle

She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love — Thomas Pynchon

Wealth and power are also often disasters, with casualties and wreckage. Maybe what often gets called wealth in booms should mostly be imagined as impoverishment of the majority who don't become wealthy and often become displaced or priced out locally, served up with the collateral damage from the concentration of power, resources, and the control of place. — Rebecca Solnit

In Tom's River, an hour away from Vineland, there's also a large tent city. Increasingly pessimistic, most of us don't dream of any bright future, but are planning for the worst. How many of us are squatting in foreclosed homes? How many are scraping by on just a fraction of what we used to earn just a few years ago? How many are quickly exhausting their scant savings? How many will be fired next week? Meanwhile, this criminal government continues its systematic impoverishment and suppression of us all. Fragmented and confused, we have no plan to combat any of this, but are looking to be saved by the very architects of our ruination. — Linh Dinh

Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists? — Alfred Kazin

A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen ... Except the act of writing. — E.L. Doctorow

How can a man understand a woman who is expecting a child. He can't get pregnant. Is that an advantage or a limitation? Up until yesterday it seemed to me an advantage, even a privilege. Today it seems to me a limitation, even an impoverishment. There's something glorious about enclosing another life in your own body, in knowing yourself to be two instead of one. At moments you're even invaded by a sense of triumph, and in the serenity accompanying that triumph nothing bothers you: neither the physical pain you'll have to face, nor the work you'll have to sacrifice, nor the freedom you'll have to give up. — Oriana Fallaci

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable. — Lynne Truss

My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer. — Richard Dawkins

Gender is a natural necessity for living things. Show me a species that doesn't have gender roles and I'll show you a rock. But saying no to cultural Marxism can be punishable by impoverishment and even death. — Greg Deane

The extent to which we live from day to day, from week to week, intent on details and oblivious to larger presences, is a gauge of our impoverishment in time. — Robert Grudin

Thus, constriction and impoverishment of personality make it possible to avoid subjective conflict and concomitant anxiety. But the person's freedom, originality, capacity for independent love, as well as his other possibilities for expansion and development as an autonomous personality are renounced in the same process. By accepting impoverishment of personality, one can buy temporary freedom from anxiety, to be sure. But the price for this 'bargain' is the loss of those unique and most precious characteristics of the human self. — Rollo May

A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself. — Northrop Frye

Once I finally understand the immensity of my own impoverishment, I am finally in a position to see the enormity of God's majesty. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

When did "sentimental" become a pejorative barb? I do not at all share the notion that a piece of music, or a poem, or a film that bypasses the brain and aims straight for the heart ... should automatically be heaped with scorn. I think it is symptomatic of a sad and dangerous impoverishment of spirit. — Bill Richardson

But what must be the character of that policy, which aims at national prosperity through the impoverishment of a large proportion of the home producers, with a view to supply foreigners at a cheaper rate, and give them all the benifet of the national privation and self denial? — Jean-Baptiste Say

It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational
order matters that are not susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those
of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a
frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness
of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen
like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again. — Hermann Hesse

This is not for the purpose of personal criticism. The point is much larger and more fundamental: Mr. Obama is descriptive of an almost perfect example of a man who embodies the sum game result, the cumulative effect of America's slow but sure march to cultural impoverishment and political collectivism. Actions of his that unfailingly advance the agendas of previous activists and presidents will be highlighted as proof that the original, seminal, "transformational" objectives are still operative in the present. — Alexandra York

Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment. — Diego Rivera

How does our self-sufficiency ruin safety? Primarily by preventing us from experiencing our impoverishment. People who "have it together" are not hungry, or thirsty, for others. They do not feel a lack within when they're alone or in distress. They do not connect with other people, because they do not experience any need for it. — Henry Cloud

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment. — Derrick Jensen

Archaism, in the linguistic order, is not, in any event, synonymous with simplicity of structure, very much to the contrary. Languages generally grow poorer with the passing oftime by gradually losing the richness of their vocabulary, the ease with which they can diversify various aspects of one and the same idea, and their power of synthesis, which is the ability to express many things with few words. In order to make up for this impoverishment, modern languages have become more complicated on the rhetorical level; while perhaps gaining in surface precision, they have not done as as regards content. Language historians are astonished by the fact that Arabic was able to retain a morphology attested to as early as the Code of Hammurabi, for the nineteenth to the eighteenth century before the Christian era, and to retain a phonetic system which preserves, with the exception of a single sound, the extremly rich sound-range disclosed by the most ancient Semitic alphabets discovered, [...] — Titus Burckhardt

I guess I suffer from an impoverishment of the sociopathic spirit necessary to go big time. — Glen Cook

The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment. — Albert Einstein

If we are serious about these big problems, we have got to see that the solutions begin and end with ourselves. Thus we put an end to our habit of oversimplification. If we want to stop the impoverishment of land and people, we ourselves must be prepared to become poorer. If — Wendell Berry

The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment. — Ludwig Von Mises

My novels are about a generation of Americans who lived between 1940 and 2000, who resisted the postwar political and cultural forces by choosing a wandering life of impoverishment and wonder. Inevitably, race and economics are a big part of their stories. Childhood, childishness, and children are never far. — Fanny Howe

Perhaps the greatest and least visible form of impoverishment caused by the Corporate State is the destruction of community. — Charles A. Reich

We could start, perhaps, with the seemingly simple question, What is History? Any thoughts, Webster?' 'History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly. 'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. Simpson?' Colin was more prepared than me. 'History is a raw onion sandwich, sir.' 'For what reason?' 'It just repeats, sir. It burps. We've seen it again and again this year. Same old story, same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment.' 'Rather a lot for a sandwich to contain, wouldn't you say?' We laughed far more than was required, with an end-of-term hysteria. 'Finn?' '"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." ' 'Is it, indeed? Where did you find that?' 'Lagrange, sir. Patrick Lagrange. He's French. — Julian Barnes

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet. — Carl Jung

Actuality is a running impoverishment of possibility. — John Updike

One man in one mood will attack Industrial Capitalism for its destruction of beauty; another for its incompetence; another for the vileness of the men who chiefly prosper under it; another for its mere confusion and noise; another for its false values; it was until recently most fiercely attacked for its impoverishment of the workers, its margin of unemployment and the rest - indeed so fiercely that it was compelled to seek palliatives for the evil. With a mass of men it was attacked from a vague but strong sense of injustice; it allowed a few rich to exploit mankind. — Hilaire Belloc

Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, hungry nomads turn their herds out into fragile African rangeland, reducing it to desert, and small farmers in India and the Philippines cultivate steep slopes, exposing them to the erosive powers of rain. Perhaps half the world's billion-plus absolute poor are caught in a downward spiral of ecological and economic impoverishment. In desperation, they knowingly abuse the land, salvaging the present by savaging the future. — Alan Thein Durning

When we consider that labor is the producer of all wealth, is it not evident that the impoverishment and, dependence of labor are abnormal conditions resulting from restrictions and usurpations, and that instead of accepting protection, what labor should demand is freedom. That those who advocate any extension of freedom choose to go no further than suits their own special purpose is no reason why freedom itself should be distrusted. — Henry George

The quest for slowness, which begins as a simple rebellion against the impoverishment of taste in our lives, makes it possible to rediscover taste. — Carlo Petrini

There are three reasons, ... apart from scientific considerations, mankind needs to travel in space. The first ... is garbage disposal; we need to transfer industrial processes into space so that the earth may remain a green and pleasant place for our grandchildren to live in. The second ... to escape material impoverishment: the resources of this planet are finite, and we shall not forego forever the abundance of solar energy and minerals and living space that are spread out all around us. The third ... our spiritual need for an open frontier. — Freeman Dyson

While art should never become exclusionary and elitist, any culture which fails to support its artists is only contributing to its own impoverishment. (Beyond Religion, p. 122) — David N. Elkins

All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment. — Eudora Welty

The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit. — Ashley Montagu

Love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannot exist without the other. Desire is an enemy to contentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considered healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake. — Lauren Oliver

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. — Saidiya V. Hartman

To love in the sense of passion-love is the contrary of to live. It is an impoverishment of one's being, an askesis without sequel, an inability to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent, a never-ending flight from possession. — Denis De Rougemont

There has been significant debate in the scientific community about whether desire is a symptom of a system infected with amor deliria nervosa, or a pre-condition of the disease itself.
It is unanimously agreed, however, that love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannnot exist without the other. Desire is enemy to ncontentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considereed healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake. Fortunately, that can now be corrected.
- From The Roots and Repercussions of Amor Deliria Nervosa on Cognitive Functioning, 4th edition, by Dr. Phillip Berryman — Lauren Oliver

All human life, from the very beginning of its development within capitalist society, has undergone an impoverishment. More than this, capitalist society is death organized with all the appearances of life. Here it is not a question of death as the extinction of life, but death-in-life, death with all the substance of power of life. The human being is dead and is no more than a ritual of capital. — Jacques Camatte

According to a Pew poll, 49% of young Americans have a favorable view of socialism. What is socialism? it is a system that leads to mass misery, mass impoverishment, and human slaughter. That's what it means. Yet almost half of the young think it's benign. — David Horowitz

A taste for kitsch among the well-to-do is a sign of spiritual impoverishment; but among the poor, it represents a striving for beauty, an aspiration without the likelihood of fulfilment. — Theodore Dalrymple

The constructive schizoid person stands against the spiritual emptiness of encroaching technology and does not let himself be emptied by it. He lives and works with the machine without becoming a machine. He finds it necessary to remain detached enough to get meaning from the experience, but in doing so, to protect his own inner life from impoverishment. — Rollo May

People have had to make up for their spiritual impoverishment by accumulating material things. When spiritual blessings come, material blessings seem unimportant. As long as we desire material things this is all we receive, and we remain spiritually impoverished. — Peace Pilgrim

From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monasticism is condemned. Monasteries, when they abound in a nation, are clogs in its circulation, cumbrous establishments, centres of idleness where centres of labor should exist. Monastic communities are to the great social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is to the human body. Their prosperity and their fatness mean the impoverishment of the country. The monastic regime, good at the beginning of civilization, useful in the reduction of the brutal by the spiritual, is bad when peoples have reached their manhood. — Victor Hugo

Humanity is undergoing, in the post-Cold War era, an economic and social crisis of unprecedented scale leading to the rapid impoverishment of large sectors of the world population. — Michel Chossudovsky

One unlikely Luddite was also one of the first long-term beneficiaries. Plato (channeling the nonwriter Socrates) warned that this technology meant impoverishment: For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. — James Gleick

Let me be strong, for to be anything else is to languish in the abyss of compromise and to descend to places of impoverishment so destitute that they will squelch my soul and crush my heart. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

I believe it's our responsibility as citizens to get in there and not accept the constant failure of prisons to deal with racism, lack of privilege, and impoverishment - not accept any of that. Just get in there! — Jimmy Santiago Baca