Debasement Quotes

“Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils. The unhappy man who has been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart… To instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty… and to procure for their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan, which we have adopted.

[For the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, 1789]”
― Benjamin Franklin, Writings: The Autobiography / Poor Richard’s Almanack / Bagatelles, Pamphlets, Essays & Letters

“The inartistic methods that we use to blunt anxiety and unartful expedients that we resort to in order to escape pain and numb banality reveals what we dread most, the act of suffering from a mortal loss or the debasement that we earn by wallowing in our decadent acts of escapism.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The law of supply and demand affects money just as it affects pencils and everything else. If there is very little money the money is very valuable and it will buy a great deal. But if there is a lot of money it is not so valuable and it will buy very little .”
― Richard J. Maybury, Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?

“At the midnight of our trouble,
there are signs in the moon and in the stars.
He will not say that he belongs to me,
and still I bend to wash his feet.”
― Jill Alexander Essbaum, Heaven

“The cinema today: end or impossibility of ending? Most current films, through the bloody drift of their content, the weakness of their plots and their technological trumpery – useless high-tech – reveal an extraordinary contempt on the part of film-makers for the tools of their own trade, for their own profession: a supreme contempt for the image itself, which is prostituted to any special effect whatsoever; and, consequently, contempt for the viewer, who is called upon to figure as impotent voyeur of this prostitution of images, of this promiscuity of all forms beneath the alibi of violence. There is in fact no real violence in this, nothing of a theatre of cruelty, but merely a second-level irony, the knowing wink of quotation, which no longer has anything to do with cinematic culture, but derives from the resentment that culture feels towards itself, that culture which precisely cannot manage to come to an end and is becoming infinitely debased - a debasement being raised to the power of an aesthetic and spiritual commodity, bitter and obsolescent, which we consume as a 'work of art' with the same complicity with which we savour the debasement of the political class. The sabotaging of the image by the image professionals is akin to the sabotaging of the political by the politicians themselves.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“The brave man fears shame, the average man fears death, and the debased man fears life. The first is guided by the voice of conscience, the second by the will to survive, and the third by spasms of hysteria. The third is usually the one who, wanting to be the second, gives up on being the first.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

“The Uncle Tom, the grinning nigger, the house nigger who is to blame for her debased place in this world. Pompey gave them a blueprint for colored folk. How they acted. How they pleased white folks. How eager they would be for a piece of the dream that they would do anything for massa.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist

“Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come off clean?”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick