Top 100 Undermined Quotes
#1. He was arguably the best-qualified FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover; he thought Clinton was the most talented politician since Richard Nixon. That made their mutual contempt all the more tragic. It undermined the FBI and ultimately damaged the United States.
Tim Weiner
#2. The Nick Boles text is kiboshed [Mike] Gove's chances. It undermined people's confidence in him. It made it look as if he's been conspiring all along. It did more damage to his reputation than anything else.
Andrea Leadsom
#3. The problem in society is not kids not knowing science. The problem is adults not knowing science. They outnumber kids 5 to 1, they wield power, they write legislation. When you have scientifically illiterate adults, you have undermined the very fabric of what makes a nation wealthy and strong.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#4. Too often, advances in civil rights or women's rights are undermined by wrong-headed legislation or weak-kneed political leadership.
Mike Quigley
#5. Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.
Jurgen Habermas
#6. Now, what of the entertainment that is available to our young people today? Are you being undermined right in your homes through your television, radio, slick magazines, and rock music records?
Ezra Taft Benson
#7. Technical devices or processes which receive intensified investment during cold or hot wars spread through societies contagiously once their monopoly by the state has been undermined.
Kode9
#8. The Negro has no room to make any substantial compromises because his store of advantages is too small. He must press unrelentingly for quality, integrated education or his whole drive for freedom will be undermined by the absence of a most vital and indispensable element - learning.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#9. Softened by Time's consummate plush,
How sleek the woe appears
That threatened childhood's citadel
And undermined the years!
Bisected now by bleaker griefs,
We envy the despair
That devastated childhood's realm,
So easy to repair.
Emily Dickinson
#10. In an odd way, we have really destroyed two of our strongest allies against the Islamists. Saddam Hussein, and we've probably fatally undermined Bashir al Assad in Syria.
Michael Scheuer
#11. Eventually became convinced that the Cuban government was completely committed to eliminating all forms of racism. There were no racist institutions, structures, or organizations, and i understood how the Cuban economic system undermined rather than fed racism.
Assata Shakur
#12. We communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground. We are undermined by faith and love.
Henry David Thoreau
#13. Peace and Violence complement one another and both are undermined without the presence of the other.
Kannan
#14. Whatever may be the pros and cons of going to the public theatre, it is a patent fact that it has undermined the morals and ruined the character of many a youth in his country.
Mahatma Gandhi
#15. We cannot blame other people for our troubles. We are not victims of the influx of foreign people into South Africa. We must remember that it was mainly due to the aggressive and hostile policies of the apartheid regime that the economic development of our neighbours was undermined.
Nelson Mandela
#16. An elected government making huge changes with the consent of its people, is being undermined by concentrated powers in unregulated markets-powers which go beyond those of any individual government.
George Papandreou
#17. Houses were knocked down ... enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped up by great beams of wood ... The yet unfinished and unopened Railway was in progress.
Charles Dickens
#18. Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.
Anne Applebaum
#19. While the Nazi party never officially condemned the Christian churches of the country (Hitler didn't want that problem on top of all the others), they undermined the meaning of Christianity by slowly replacing people's allegiance to God with loyalty to the party.
Rudi Wobbe
#20. As long as females take up the banner of feminist politics
without addressing and transforming their own sexism, ultimately
the movement will be undermined.
Bell Hooks
#21. There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11.
Noam Chomsky
#22. When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for the great structure where all shall be united into a universal brotherhood - a truly free society.
Emma Goldman
#23. So long as peace is not attained by law (so argue the advocates of armaments) the military protection of a country must not be undermined, and until such is the case disarmament is impossible.
Ludwig Quidde
#24. This country was founded on a core set of family values. These values should not be discouraged and blatantly undermined by the airing of offensive material on broadcast television and radio.
Kenny Marchant
#25. Events in the train of prophecy that had their fulfillment away in the past are made future, and thus by these theories the faith of some is undermined.
Ellen G. White
#27. I feel that Julian Assange came to be both paranoid and self-regarding in ways that ultimately undermined his own mission. And so, the transparency radical became a secret-keeper instead of a secret-leaker. And that, I think, is a big problem.
Alex Gibney
#28. You all know my commitment to the National Health Service. While I am Secretary of State, the NHS will never be fragmented, privatised or undermined. I am personally committed to an NHS which gives equal access, and excellent care.
Andrew Lansley
#29. The power of large corporations is still a scourge on the earth, but at least the arguments supporting them are undermined.
Rebecca Solnit
#30. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.
Albert Camus
#31. America has lost the moral high ground with the rest of the world, and we have fewer allies as a result. President Bush and his administration have undermined the war on terror by using tactics outlawed by international treaty and condemned by even our closest friends.
John Olver
#32. The same undisciplined government spending and social engineering that has undermined our economy over the past 30 years has also been tearing at the social fabric of this land.
Stockwell Day
#33. Assertions that Russia has undermined efforts to strengthen partnerships on the European continent do not correspond to the facts.
Sergei Lavrov
#34. My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined.
Penelope Lively
#35. The atomic weapons race and the secrecy surrounding it crushed American democracy. It induced us to conduct government according to lies. It distorted justice. It undermined American morality.
Stewart Udall
#36. Unfortunately, corruption is widespread in government agencies and public enterprises. Our political system promotes nepotism and wasting money. This has undermined our legal system and confidence in the functioning of the state. One of the consequences is that many citizens don't pay their taxes.
George Papandreou
#37. We think of ourselves as our titles or our jobs or our position in a family. We depend on being praised by others. But something happens when that praise is undermined.
Sharon Salzberg
#38. It is the Constitution of the United States that has been undermined, undercut, and is under attack. It is the American people's liberties that is in jeopardy. That is why I wrote 'Losing America.'
Robert Byrd
#39. The persecution of the innovator and protestant has always been inspired by fear on the part of constituted authority of having its infallibility questioned and its power undermined.
Emma Goldman
#40. When reflection is thereby demystified, I believe that the temptation to view human knowledge as different in kind from animal knowledge is undermined.
Hilary Kornblith
#41. Once you've discounted your own moral authority, once you've undermined your own country's moral self-confidence, you cannot lead.
Anonymous
#42. As David lifted a suitcase onto the conveyor belt, he came to an unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing himself with him on his holiday. Whatever the qualities of the Dimitra Residence, they were going to be critically undermined by the fact that he would be in the villa as well.
Alain De Botton
#43. Paradoxically, in its quest to make Americans more secure, the NSA has made American communications less secure; it has undermined the safety of the entire internet.
Luke Harding
#44. Through reproductive technology, postmodernist art dispenses with the aura. The fiction of the creating subject gives way to a frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation, and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity, and presence ... are undermined.
Douglas Crimp
#45. The role of women has always been undervalued in the spy world, always undermined in terms of recognition. Unfairly so. It's a world that needs women.
Helen Mirren
#46. Already, China has undermined U.S. foreign policy in efforts to gain access to oil resources in Iran and Sudan. We simply cannot separate the political and economic values of oil.
Jo Ann Emerson
#47. No medicine man these days can afford to be without a portable tape recorder. Without the aid of this modern device, which may be easily concealed in the undergrowth of the jungle, the old tribal authority will rapidly become undermined by the mounting influenece of modern skepticism.
Muriel Spark
#48. In other words, to whatever extent migrants are crossing the border and thereby (ostensibly) taking other people's jobs, it is only because the economy of Mexico has been considerably undermined by the policies of our country.
Tim Wise
#49. I never weigh myself. That's the best advice I can give - never step on a scale. You know if you're being healthy, if you're exercising. You don't need to be undermined by some crazy number.
Elaine Irwin
#50. Two sturdy oaks I mean, which side by side, Withstand the winter's storm, And spite of wind and tide, Grow up the meadow's pride, For both are strong Above they barely touch, but undermined Down to their deepest source, Admiring you shall find Their roots are intertwined Insep'rably.
Henry David Thoreau
#51. This fundraising is consuming us. It's impossible to overstate, I think, what it's doing to members and their ability to just focus on the job that they were elected to do. The collective concentration of the institution is being undermined every day by the need to fund-raise.
John Sarbanes
#52. Barack Obama has fatally undermined our currency, our solvency, our financial stability, and - ultimately - our economy all to spend money that has had no economic effect!
Dick Morris
#53. Rigorous financial discipline that, together with monetary stability, ends once and for all the boom and bust that for 30 years has undermined stability
Gordon Brown
#54. A film can be undermined by the person you're seeing it with, there in the dark, a ripple effect of attitude, scene by scene, shot by shot.
Don DeLillo
#55. The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.
Daniel Kahneman
#56. Loyal and substansial Catholic service on the battlefield undermined one of the most longstanding objections to emancipation: namely, that since Catholics owed religious allegiance to a foreign authority in the person of the Pope, their political and patriotic allegiance must necessarily be suspect.
Linda Colley
#57. morality would be undermined without a belief in divine judgment, but
J. Budziszewski
#58. Rewards do not undermine people's intrinsic motivation for dull tasks because there is little or no intrinsic motivation to be undermined.
Daniel H. Pink
#59. The student who invades an administration building, roughs up a dean, rifles the files and issues 'non-negotiable demands' may have some of his demands met by a permissive university administration. But the greater his 'victory' the more he will have undermined the security of his own rights.
Richard M. Nixon
#60. Don't be sad that one day or another you met someone who undermined your capabilities and sapped your energy, what that person did could be the strongest crucible that forged a great leader
Ahmed Elkadi
#61. The fact that fairy tales remain a literary underdog-undervalued and undermined-even as they shape so many popular stories, redoubles my certainty that it is time for contemporary fairy tales to be celebrated in a popular, literary collection. Fairy tales hold the secret to reading.
Kate Bernheimer
#62. (liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion).
Michel Houellebecq
#63. What did you think would happen? We in Silicon Valley undermined copyright to make commerce become more about services instead of content: more about our code instead of their files.
Jaron Lanier
#64. One concrete way in which we all landscape our sanity is by having our experience of reality confirmed by others. When our experience of reality is disconfirmed by others, our confidence in our own sanity can be undermined.
(page 125, Chapter 9, Graeme Galton)
Graeme Galton
#65. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.
Aime Cesaire
#66. Insurgents have capitalized on popular resentment and anger towards the United States and the Iraqi government to build their own political, financial and military support, and the faith of Iraqi citizens in their new government has been severely undermined.
Tom Lantos
#67. The new focus on the image undermined traditional definitions of information, of news, and, to a large extent, of reality itself.
Neil Postman
#68. Nothing pisses me off like having my sacrifices undermined.
Rachel Bach
#69. The life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it, and always had done. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#70. The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody has severely undermined our Nation's position in the world.
Diane Watson
#71. I don't read reviews if I know in advance they're negative, because I can't have my confidence undermined when I'm writing.
Christopher Moore
#72. Someone dehumanises you by violating your child and every human thought you had for them is broken, undermined, then gone.
Abigail Tarttelin
#73. The long-standing wisdom that everyone wins in a single world market has been undermined. Global trade, capital flows, and immigration are declining.
Roger Altman
#74. The citizens begin by giving up some part of the constitution, and so with greater ease the government change something else which is a little more important, until they have undermined the whole fabric of the state.
Aristotle.
#75. It's just that to a lot of British people George Bush represents the worst of all things American. He's the right-wing Christian crusader, the toxic Texan who refused Kyoto, the poll-cheat eel who undermined democracy on the back of something called 'chads,' a notion we've never entirely grasped.
Graham Joyce
#76. If you have to invoke a distant past to justify a present grievance, the case for the grievance is already undermined.
David Horowitz
#78. If your faith is so shaky that it can be undermined by books that challenge it, then something is rotten at the core.
Rysa Walker
#79. A society that undermined its teachers and their authority only dug away at its own sure foundations.
Alexander McCall Smith
#80. Other colonies began to recognize that giving land to women undermined their dependent role
Rebecca Traister
#81. When desperate people seek easy solutions without doing the hard work of fundamental learning and change, resilience is undermined and real growth and learning fade.
Dave Ulrich
#82. Parliament has become so undermined it is almost unable to do the job that people expect of it. A glaring example is the budget bill, where there was no thoughtful debate or scrutiny of the legislation.
Sheila Fraser
#83. The machines, the modern mode of production, slowly undermined domestic production and not just for thousands but for millions of women the question arose: Where do we now find our livelihood?
Clara Zetkin
#84. Questions stripped away the platitudes and undermined the verities that provided a sheltered, nursery existence for people who did not want to think. Questions were the obligation of the intellect.
Morgan Llywelyn
#85. Christianity, as a product of the resentment of the botched and the weak, has put in ban all that is beautiful, strong, proud, and powerful, in fact all the qualities resulting from strength, and that, in consequence, all forces which tend to promote or elevate life have been seriously undermined.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#86. Have we unwittingly exaggerated the importance of individuals succeeding within pre-existing structures of power, and thereby undermined King's call for a "complete restructuring" of our society? Have
Michelle Alexander
#87. The Christian faith contributed to the rise of the modern world, but the Christian faith has been undermined by the modern world it helped to create. The Christian faith thus becomes its own gravedigger.
Os Guinness
#88. If the child shows through its conversation that the educational work of the school is being undermined by the attitude taken in his home, he will be sent back to his parents, to teach them thus how to take advantage of their good opportunities.
Maria Montessori
#89. I think that the legitimacy of the court would be undermined in any case if the court made a decision based on its perception of public opinion.
Samuel Alito
#90. Ingratitude is a nail which, driven into the tree of courtesy, causes it to wither; it is a broken channel, by which the foundations of the affections are undermined; and a lump of soot, which, falling into the dish of friendship, destroys its scent and flavor.
Giambattista Basile
#91. We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.
Alan Weisman
#92. Sexism is real and it persists in film and television. I've seen female directors openly undermined by male cinematographers in front of the entire crew
Liz W. Garcia
#93. We cannot stand by and allow the future of our country to be undermined by the reality of American children going hungry! Please join in to help the 12 million children who are malnourished in our country.
Donna Mills
#94. What I need is to believe in myself again - for my faith has been greatly undermined; it seems to me my role is over.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
#95. Some experts believe that somebody is deceiving WikiLeaks, that its reputation is being undermined in order for it to be used for political purposes.
Vladimir Putin
#96. The revolution of 1893 and the annexation that followed undermined a culture and ended the life of a nation. Compared to what such operations have brought to other countries, though, this one ended well.
Stephen Kinzer
#97. As a mom, I know it is my responsibility, and no one else's, to raise my kids. But we have to ask ourselves, what does it mean when so many parents are finding their best efforts undermined by an avalanche of advertisements aimed at our kids.
Michelle Obama
#98. I think democracy's undermined when those who own newspapers fill them with trivia rather than real issues.
Ken Livingstone
#99. We need to unlearn some of our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves.
Gloria Steinem
#100. He was in fact a poet without words, the more absorbed and endangered, that the springing waters were dammed back in his soul, where, finding no utterance, they grew, and swelled, and undermined.
George MacDonald
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