A Quote by Wendell Berry

We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them. (pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America")
[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy. (pg. 44, "The Unsettling of America")
The influence of woman is the same everywhere. Her condition influences the morals, manners, and character of the people of all countries. Where she is debased, society is debased; where she is morally pure and enlightened, society will be proportionately elevated.
You can be debased without relinquishing your identity, just as you can relinquish your identity without being debased.
A good work ethic is not so much a concern for hard work but rather one for responsibility. There have been a great many men and women who have in fact used work or hustle or selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility, an escape from purpose. In matters such as these, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the sloth.
If I have chosen the female form in particular, it is because beauty has been debased and exploited in our sensual 20th century.
You have debased my child....You have made him a laughingstock of intelligence...a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere.
I have been accused of being a ‘black magician.’ No more foolish statement was ever made about me. I despise the thing to such an extent that I can hardly believe in the existence of people so debased and idiotic as to practice it.
I could not have known Colin Campbell would turn out to be the debased, cruel monster he turned out to be.
The Senate has been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.
If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth.But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work
I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it's high, it's good - but it's escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means.
All you see on television are debased images.
The fascination of somebody with original creative gifts is something that's always drawn me. I get attached to them, but I can't call it being in love, because the words are so debased.
I go through life as a transient on his way to eternity, made in the image of God but with that image debased, needing to be taught how to meditate, to worship, to think.
The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
Disregarding the fact that I am old enough to be [Walter] Schellenberg's mother, I would feel nauseated to be coupled with a man whose ideology has debased our hearts.
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