#degrade

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

#degraded #despise #enjoy #freedom #last

I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung my out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, but because he's more myself than I am. What ever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.' Ere this speech ended, I became sensible of Heathcliff's presence. Having noticed a slight movement, I turned my head, and saw him rise from the bench, and steal out noiselessly. He had listened till he heard Catherine say it would degrade her to marry him, and then he stayed to hear no further. ↗

— Emily Brontë

#degrade #fire #frost #handsome #heath

Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it. ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#degrade #efficient #his way #instrument #made

When resources are degraded, we start competing for them, whether it is at the local level in Kenya, where we had tribal clashes over land and water, or at the global level, where we are fighting over water, oil, and minerals. So one way to promote peace is to promote sustainable management and equitable distribution of resources. ↗

— Wangari Maathai

#competing #degraded #distribution #equitable #fighting

Park women, properly so called, are those degraded creatures, utterly lost to all sense of shame, who wander about the paths most frequented after nightfall in the Parks, and consent to any species of humiliation for the sake of acquiring a few shillings. ↗

— Henry Mayhew

#acquiring #after #any #called #consent

It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#degrades #feared #most #such #suffering

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded. ↗

— George Orwell

#already #being #degrade #degraded #him

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

#curriculum #cutting #degraded #gym #had

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#decayed #degraded #feeling #moral #much

Media corporations have a civic responsibility not only to prevent fraud and financial abuse, but also to not corrupt or degrade our culture. ↗

— Charles W. Pickering

#also #civic #corporations #corrupt #culture