Debased Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. Public life is debased because it's only the nice people who are worried about imposing their views on others.

Alain De Botton

#17. 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

#18. '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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy.

Thomas Hardy

#22. 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

#23. I'll need hot water for washing." Hart barked.
Wellford murmured, "Immediately sir," as he bowed back out the door. He did not say, "Of course, sir. I bring you hot water every single morning, even when you haven't debased yourself for a woman.

Victoria Dahl

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

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

Dante Alighieri

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. All you see on television are debased images.

Prince

#38. 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

#39. [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

#40. With affluence come the debased gifts born of abuse, misuse, and overuse.

John Zande

#41. The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.

Nadine Gordimer

#42. 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

#43. he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment;

H.P. Lovecraft

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.

Charles Fourier

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. Wrong thinking about God and people often begins with a debased image of ourselves.

Brennan Manning

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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