Top 40 Degradation Quotes

Ours is one continued struggle against degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the European, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.

No one can live under degradation.

I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

The ocean is our planet’s life support system, yet in my travels and at home, I’ve seen its degradation firsthand.

People who need therapy are in Afghanistan. They’ve seen horrible human cruelty and degradation, but they don’t have time or the money for therapy.

From a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation.

So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.

The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.

I think it’s important to understand that in the big historical context of things, there has been land degradation from civilisation since the beginning of history. I mean, the Rajputana desert in India is a manmade desert caused by overgrazing.

Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.

Unprecedented technological capabilities combined with unlimited human creativity have given us tremendous power to take on intractable problems like poverty, unemployment, disease, and environmental degradation. Our challenge is to translate this extraordinary potential into meaningful change.

I have come to the conclusion that it’s a waste of time to have too much pride in anything. Perhaps it’s good to have a sense of duty, a jealous zeal to protect or improve, but pride ultimately is only that which stands vulnerable to offense and degradation.

With ‘Nostromo’, Joseph Conrad said that he had wanted to write a novel about the degradation of an idea. That’s what we wanted to show in the case of Dustin Hoffman’s character, Bernstein.

We dragged the National Health Service from the depths of degradation. I’ve got a United Nations heart bypass to prove it and it was done by a Syrian cardiologist, a Malaysian surgeon, a Dutch doctor and a Nigerian registrar.

Some experts look at global warming, increased world temperature, as the critical tipping point that is causing a crash in coral reef health around the world. And there’s no question that it is a factor, but it’s preceded by the loss of resilience and degradation.

Reclaiming the word ‘fat’ was the most empowering step in my progress. I stopped using it for insult or degradation and instead replaced it with truth, because the truth is that I am fat, and that’s ok. So now when someone calls me fat, I agree, whereas before I would get embarrassed and emotional.

We have seen a degradation from the highest levels of authority politically in this nation, including through the department of justice, for the rule of law.

The audience too should be respected by being presented with a film as they remember it, and for those who have not seen it, as it was intended to be seen. Anything less is a degradation of the film and its audience.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

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

Land degradation did not start with chemical agriculture. But chemical agriculture offered new tools for annihilation.

Environmental degradation has one cause above all others: the propensity of human beings to take the benefit and leave the costs to someone else, preferably someone far away in space or time, whose protests can be safely ignored.

War is a blessing compared with national degradation.

We see evidence that lakes and forests and wetlands can have different equilibria – so you have a savanna system that may be stable and thriving, but it can also tip over and become an arid steppe if pushed too far by warming, land degradation, and biodiversity loss.

Peace should be understood in a human way – in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.

The degradation of natural resources such as forests and freshwater has removed much of the resilience that societies formerly enjoyed.

The three great problems of this century; the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness.

The national debate on health care once centered on improving access to quality care, yet the effect of Obamacare will be the exact opposite, resulting in the shameful degradation of care for the neediest individuals.

Land degradation, rising sea levels, famine, and conflict will continue to drive people from their homes and towards cities, with megacities like Mexico City and Lagos becoming increasingly common in some of the poorest parts of the world.

Presidents and prime ministers, whether they live in the rich or the poor world, are insulated and isolated from the devastating impact of global poverty. They read the statistics, but they rarely witness at first hand the misery and degradation of life on a dollar a day.

So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be inevitable.

For the record, I am sticking with my claim that the simultaneous degradation of air quality, water quality, water supply, food safety, soil quality, and other environment-related variables is the main challenge to China’s continued development.

But it will be said that the husband provides for the wife, or in other words, he feeds, clothes and shelters her! I wish I had the power to make every one before me fully realize the degradation contained in that idea.

Reticulocytes are terminally differentiating red blood cells that do not contain lysosome. Therefore, it was postulated that the degradation of hemoglobin in these cells is mediated by a non-lysosomal machinery.

The more I think on the present condition of woman, the more am I oppressed with the reality of their degradation.

It is hard to conceive of the utter demoralization, of the political blindness and immorality, of the patriotic dishonesty, of the cruelty and degradation of a people who supplemented the incomparable Declaration of Independence with the Fugitive Slave Law.

As in any person’s life, there have been difficult moments: I have a son with Down’s syndrome; through my photography, I have witnessed all manner of human degradation. But there have also been very happy moments.

Israel is following policies which maximise its security threats… policies which choose expansion over security… policies which lead to their moral degradation, their isolation, their delegitimation, as they call it now, and very likely ultimate destruction. That’s not impossible.

Man, in spite of his fatal degradation, bears always the evident marks of his divine origin, in that every universal belief is always more or less true.

Dramas about addiction can be exciting to watch. And then dispiriting. Exciting because degradation is fascinating to follow from the relative safety and smugness of an ‘appropriate’ life, and dispiriting because if all that sad mayhem can happen to this or that character, what’s to keep it from happening to me or you?