Top 100 Degraded Quotes
#1. Woman has so long been subject to the disabilities and restrictions with which her progress has been embarrassed that she has become enervated, her mind to some extent paralyzed; and like those still more degraded by personal bondage she hugs her chains.
Lucretia Mott
#2. What a degraded cosmos. What a case of something starting out nice and going bad.
George Saunders
#3. I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value
certainly no large value.
Mark Twain
#4. A mass of ignorant, culturally degraded citizens easily becomes an immense drag on the system. They become easy prey to demagogues and applaud every attempt to undermine the foundations of that "natural liberty" which they have enjoyed in the first place.
Arthur Herman
#5. Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.
Gilbert Ryle
#6. Women are degraded by the propensity to enjoy the present moment, and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#7. Oh, well," yawned Vernon, "we all know that it's you Christians who go in for whips and tortures and burnings alive. Poor degraded sensualists like myself believe in the motto 'Live and let live.
Eleanor Scott
#8. What I'd really like to write is a romantic comedy. This is my favorite kind of movie. I feel almost embarrassed revealing this, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity.
Mindy Kaling
#9. She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from childhood; but she has a mother's instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother's agonies.
Harriet Jacobs
#10. All men die in solitude; all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me
Eugene Ionesco
#11. Honour forbid! at whose unrivall'd shrine 105 Ease, pleasure, virtue, all our sex resign. Methinks already I your tears survey, Already hear the horrid things they say, Already see you a degraded toast, And all your honour in a whisper lost! 110 How shall I, then, your helpless fame
Alexander Pope
#12. There is something in us, somehow, that, in the most degraded condition, we snatch at a chance to deceive ourselves into a fanciedsuperiority to others, whom we suppose lower in the scale than ourselves.
Herman Melville
#13. I mention all this so that you will understand that is part of the process: once you've found out he's cheated on you, you have to keep finding it out, over and over and over again, until you've degraded yourself so completely that there's nothing left to do but walk out.
Nora Ephron
#14. We talk about our military being degraded over time and yet we've had folks who've been a part of Congress who have participated in sequester; who participated in the degrading of this military over time.
Chris Christie
#15. Marriage is a very sacred institution and should not be degraded by allowing every other type of relationship to be made equivalent to it.
Ben Carson
#16. Then, we realize that the degraded cocoon we have been hiding in is revolting, and we want to turn up the lights as far as we can. In fact, we are not turning up the lights, but we are simply opening our eyes wider. We catch a certain kind of fever.
Chogyam Trungpa
#17. Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.
Henry Adams
#18. The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.
Al Gore
#19. Business is a subset of the environment, not the other way around. You can't have a healthy economy, you can't have a healthy anything in a degraded environment.
Peter Coyote
#20. Since I'm essentially optimistic, I can't imagine a world in which man is totally decimated or degraded.
Nelson Algren
#21. Addicts and alcoholics will tell you that their recovery began when they woke up in pitiful and degraded enough shape to take Step Zero, which is: "This shit has got to stop.
Anne Lamott
#22. By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
Henry David Thoreau
#23. The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it governments sink into police, and a nation is degraded into a mob.
Benjamin Disraeli
#24. I love romantic comedies. I feel almost sheepish writing that, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years or so that admitting you like these movies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity. But that has not stopped me from watching them.
Mindy Kaling
#25. All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.
Karl Marx
#26. In real life, women don't enjoy being degraded and treated like objects/receptacles.
Jackson Katz
#27. If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing - a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#28. I'm not really saddened that [Pussy Riot] ended up in jail, though there is nothing good in that. What saddens me is that they took things to such a level, here, from my point of view, that they degraded the dignity of women.
Vladimir Putin
#29. I love my nation, I cannot see you degraded, weakened any more than you are now. Therefore I am bound for your sake and for truth's to cry, "Hold!" and to raise my voice against this degradation of my race. Give up these weakening mysticism and be strong ...
Swami Vivekananda
#30. A mother's yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.
George Eliot
#31. The Americans will never solve the Indian problem till the Indian is extinct. They have treated them after a fashion which has intensified their treachery and 'devilry' as enemies, and as friends reduces them to a degraded pauperism, devoid of the very first elements of civilization.
Isabella Bird
#32. It gradually became clear that the Green Belt Movement's work with communities to repair the degraded environment could not be done effectively without participants embracing a set of core spiritual values.
Wangari Maathai
#33. 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
#34. The name of God should no longer come from the mouth of man. This word that has so long been degraded by usage no longer means anything ... To use the word God is more than sloth, it is a refusal to think, a king of short cut, a hideous shorthand.
Arthur Adamov
#35. To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good- - that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.
Simone Weil
#36. ideas whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken, oral, degraded, unrecognisable, and alive.
Marcel Proust
#37. I thought I wanted to be degraded, but I wanted to be degraded with love. You wanted me to talk during sex and what came out was, "You hate me.
Fiona Helmsley
#38. You can manage cancer. You don't have to be degraded by humiliating treatments and protocols. And in some cases, you can be cured of cancer.
Suzanne Somers
#39. Women are at once the guardians and the well-spring of the world's faith, morality, and tenderness; and if ever they are degraded to a commonplace level with men, this fine essential quality will be impaired, and their weakness will have to beg and follow where now it guides and controls.
John Boyle O'Reilly
#40. Before Israel dies, it must be humiliated and degraded. Allah willing, before they die, they will experience humiliation and degradation every day.
Khaled Mashal
#41. Man's sense of values is so degraded that he does not revere the Geetha, as much as he values and scans the pages of the daily newspaper. This is to be attributed to sheer ignorance and perversity, or pitiable fate.
Sathya Sai Baba
#42. Character is undergoing constant change, for better or for worse
either being elevated on the one hand, or degraded on the other.
Samuel Smiles
#43. I had finally learned that it was better to be alone than to be in a relationship that degraded my soul.
Chrissy Moon
#44. This is not a war, this is a test of how far man can be degraded
Sebastian Faulks
#45. Proteins are constantly being degraded. Therefore, simultaneous production of proteins is required.
Ada Yonath
#46. Every hour I spent on manual work, every hour I was humiliated in England or degraded has helped me because that's the same way other people feel in the townships here. People are still walking long distances and are working long hours.
Michael Sata
#47. No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa & America.
Thomas Jefferson
#48. Much of the same sort of degraded and filthy talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#49. I doubt if there is any occupation which is more consistently and unfairly demeaned, degraded, denounced, and deplored than banking.
William Proxmire
#50. We have broken down the self-respecting spirit of man with nursery tales and priestly threats, and we dare to assert, that inproportion as we have prostrated our understanding and degraded our nature, we have exhibited virtue, wisdom, and happiness, in our words, our actions, and our lives!
Frances Wright
#51. When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.
Roger Scruton
#52. The merely political aspect of the land is never very cheering; men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organization.
Henry David Thoreau
#53. The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.
Benjamin Disraeli
#54. She had been born with a different name, to a woman with laughing eyes and warmly whispered words of love who'd died degraded and afraid on a misty Irish morning.
C.S. Harris
#55. All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept.
Honore De Balzac
#56. Love, the one supreme, unceasing source of human felicity, the one sole joy which lifts the whole mortal existence into the empyrean, was by it [Christianity] degraded into the mere mechanical action of reproduction.
Ouida
#57. Many of the green places and open spaces that need protecting most today are in our own neighborhoods. In too many places, the beauty of local vistas has been degraded by decades of ill-planned and ill-coordinated development.
Al Gore
#58. Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to their sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#59. I think all women in Hollywood are known as sex symbols. That's what our purpose is in this business. You're merchandised, you're a product. You're sold and it's based on sex. But that's okay. I think women should be empowered by that, not degraded.
Megan Fox
#60. The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.
James G. Frazer
#61. A protect-yourself-first-and-foremost idea has subverted the mission of law-enforcement officers, just as it may have degraded the military's.
Ann Medlock
#62. The aim of the joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
George Orwell
#63. Pecuniary embarrassment, he thought, was the cause of all evil to the blacks, for poverty kept them ignorant and their lack of enlightenment kept them degraded.
Carter G. Woodson
#64. Somehow Photoshop and the ease with which one can produce an image has degraded the quality of photography in general.
Elliott Erwitt
#66. 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
#67. What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#68. There exists among the intolerable degraded, the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.
James A. Baldwin
#69. When Sir Joshua Reynolds died
All Nature was degraded;
The King dropped a tear in the Queen's ear,
And all his pictures faded.
William Blake
#70. Degraded bird, I give you back your eyes forever, ascend now whither you are tossed;
Forsake this wrist, forsake this rhyme;
Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost,
But climb.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#71. He felt useless and degraded, as if he no longer lived for others but for himself alone.
Bernard Werber
#72. Catholicism has made man stupid, but it has not degraded him; it has introduced as many good and beautiful things as bad things. The United States have simply degraded humanity. Catholicism has done less harm in two thousand years than the United States in two hundred.
Henry De Montherlant
#73. I'm an actor, so I love to be degraded!
Emmy Rossum
#74. When I went to school, you had to take art, you had to play an instrument. You had to play an instrument. But it's all degraded since then. I do not know what kind of nation we are that is cutting art, music, and gym out of the public-school curriculum.
Spike Lee
#75. The love of Christ reaches to the very depths of earthly misery and woe, or it would not meet the case of the veriest sinner. It also reaches to the throne of the eternal, or man could not he lifted from his degraded condition, and our necessities would not be met, our desires would be unsatisfied.
Ellen G. White
#76. We shall convince France and the world, that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and a sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest.
John Adams
#77. The same animal which hath the honour to have some part of his flesh eaten at the table of a duke, may perhaps be degraded in another part,and some of his limbs gibbeted, as it were, in the vilest stall in town.
Henry Fielding
#78. If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God's work only may express that, but ours may never have that sentence written upon it, Behold it was very good.
John Ruskin
#79. The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.
Mark Twain
#80. Our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist commiseration.
Jean Baudrillard
#81. (After death.) So few people who come across, possess awareness of any kind. All they bring along with them are worthless values. All they desire is continuation of what they had in life no matter how misguided or degraded ... Will those people ever progress, even with our help?
Richard Matheson
#82. Its surface sheened with saft that evaporated out from its crystal shielding in threads that degraded to nothing.
China Mieville
#83. Wealth and vegetation go together, and that exacerbates environmental injustice. The poor bear the burden of degraded environments.
Natalie Jeremijenko
#84. Man is not made better by being degraded; he is seldom restrained from crime by harsh measures, except the principle of fear predominates in his character, and then he is never made radically better for its influence.
Dorothea Dix
#85. These have no hope that death will overcome.
And so degraded is the life they lead
all look with envy on all other fates.
Dante Alighieri
#86. It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other portion of the population of the earth could have endured the privations, sufferings and horrors of slavery, without having become more degraded in the scale of humanity than the slaves of African descent.
Frederick Douglass
#87. I have degraded myself by ever thinking of him as my husband.
Wilkie Collins
#88. The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war ... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
H.L. Mencken
#89. A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.
Victor Hugo
#90. The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.
Thornton Wilder
#91. One moment it's a cathedral, at another time there is no words to describe it when it ceases, for short periods of time, to have any regard for the proprieties that constitute not only Parliament, but its tradition. I've seen it in all its greatness. I have inwardly wept over it when it is degraded.
John Diefenbaker
#92. People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#93. I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side ... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.
Robert Byrd
#94. Africa is the most weathered continent in the world; 75 percent of its soil has been degraded. You don't just bring that back. I always like to say it's like putting an oxygen mask on a cadaver; it just isn't going to work.
Howard Graham Buffett
#95. Reshape yourself through the power of your will; never let yourself be degraded by self-will.
Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
#96. If something's public then it seems like the important thing is the person in that public. And the notion of rhetoric. I went to Jesuit schools that focused on first there's grammar, then there's rhetoric, and rhetoric's usually seen as a kind of degraded method, because you're trying to persuade.
Vito Acconci
#97. Only the degraded want to degrade others.
Marty Rubin
#98. Humanity cannot be degraded by humiliation.
Edmund Burke
#99. I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
Simone Weil
#100. Adam & Eve have been degraded, reduplicated forever, photocopies of photocopies, mistakes copied, magnified, augmented.
Johnny Rich
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