Abject Quotes

Terrorists are not 100 feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill.

Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.

The Holocaust remains unique in contemporary Jewish consciousness for its capacity to engender the most visceral grief and abject pain.

Memphis is the place where rock was born and Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed. It’s full of contradictions, abject poverty, and riches that only music can provide.

My mother grew up in abject poverty in Mississippi, an elementary school dropout. Yet, with the support of women around her, she returned to school and graduated as class valedictorian – the only one of her seven siblings to finish high school. She became a librarian and then a United Methodist minister.

I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn’t exist.

Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject and contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes.

OOO objects have all the abjection added back in. They don’t behave like normalized patriarchal subjects at all.

The first time I got up in front of an audience was terror, abject terror, which continued for another four or five years. There still is, a little bit.

Pollution is everywhere, in that ancient Greek sense of miasma: guilt experienced as abject body fluid, moral pollution defining what kinds of beings count in social space.

Open markets offer the only realistic hope of pulling billions of people in developing countries out of abject poverty, while sustaining prosperity in the industrialized world.

I had been an abject fan of Martin and Lewis when I was a kid. I just thought they were terribly funny. None of their movies captured the kind of chemistry they really had.

My work is really abject and self-effacing sometimes. I mean, it’s big and overwrought, but it’s just paper dolls, and it’s kind of silly.

Good diet and exercise are key, but abject fear has its own rewards. And arriving on the first day for rehearsals for ‘Spamalot’ and seeing all these much younger, much fitter people, who I was going to be on stage with, became a catalyst for cutting out the more unhealthy aspects of my life.

With everything that is complex, we learn. If you don’t learn, then it’s an utter and abject failure. If you do learn, and you’re able to apply that to the next situation, then you take away a measure of success.

Education is the only billion dollar industry that tolerates abject failure.

There are still hundreds of millions, billions of people living in abject poverty around the world. They need electricity. They need electricity they can count on, that they can afford. They need fuel to cook their food on that’s not animal dung.

If not met promptly and decidedly, the two portions of the Union will gradually become thoroughly alienated, when no alternative will be left to us, as the weaker of the two, but to sever all political ties or sink down into abject submission.

I had been an abject fan of Robert Stone since the early eighties, when I borrowed a copy of ‘A Flag for Sunrise‘ to read on a plane to Rome. I was twenty-something, with a first novel under my belt.

If beggars do not hate the rest of us, they are even more abject than I had imagined.

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

When you see in places like Africa and parts of Asia abject poverty, hungry children and malnutrition around you, and you look at yourself as being people who have well being and comforts, I think it takes a very insensitive, tough person not to feel they need to do something.

We must be welcoming to those who flee their country because of violence and abject poverty in hopes of a better future – that’s who we are as Americans.

I came from abject poverty. There was nowhere to go but up.

We can’t leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for 80% of the world’s people, while bringing it down considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. It doesn’t subdue you and make you feel abject. It’s stimulating loneliness.

Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.

One is guilty of all abjection that one does not help to relieve.

As members of a social species endowed with large brains, we are natural-born marketers. Capitalism, the economic system that has elevated innumerable people out of abject poverty and misery, is founded on marketing. Everything that defines your daily existence has the indelible marks of marketing on it.

The U.S. has a law on the books called the debt limit, but the name is misleading. The debt limit started in 1917 for the purpose of facilitating more national debt, not reducing it. It still serves that purpose. It’s unconnected to spending, hurts our credit rating and has been an abject failure at limiting debt.

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

I had big problems with stage fright in the past. I think, slowly, as I’ve gotten better at it, I’ve started to enjoy it. It’s made me a more confident person in my normal life. I can open up and be myself in situations that used to be abject terror.