Baseness Quotes

Life is not an easy matter... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness. (Leon Trotsky)
National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right. View quote
Arthur Schopenhauer
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. View quote
Milan Kundera
It is because nations tend towards stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all. View quote
George Gissing
Atheism exists only in coldness, selfishness, and baseness. View quote
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
I encountered among my comrades the most varied human traits, from frankness to reserve, from goodness, uprightness and kindness, to brutality and baseness. View quote
Georg Brandes
What [Nietzsche] calls slave morality is to him purely spite-morality; and this spite-morality gave new names to all ideals. Thus impotence, which offers no reprisal, became goodness; craven baseness became humility; submission to him who was feared became obedience; inability to assert one's self became reluctance to assert one's self, became forgiveness, love of one's enemies. Misery became a distinction. View quote
Georg Brandes
In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking. View quote
James Russell Lowell
The motions of men must be such as suggest their dignity or their baseness. View quote
Leonardo da Vinci
Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness. View quote
Bryant H. McGill
I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, or how much goodness in the reprobate. (W. Somerset Maugham)
For thus it is, men of Athens, in truth: wherever a man has placed himself thinking it is the best place for him, or has been placed by a commander, there in my opinion he ought to stay and to abide the hazard, taking nothing into the reckoning, either death or anything else, before the baseness [of deserting his post]. View quote
Marcus Aurelius
There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul. View quote
Simone Weil
Communism was not the crazy fantasy of a few fanatics, nor the result of human stupidity and baseness; it was a real, very real part of the history of the twentieth century, and we cannot understand this history of ours without understanding communism. We cannot get rid of this specter by saying it was just "human stupidity,” or "human corruptibility.” The specter is stronger than the spells we cast on it. It might come back to life. View quote
Leszek Kołakowski
The Leaders have ever since gone...to propagate the principles of French Levelling and confusion, by which no house is safe from its Servants, and no Officer from his Soldiers, and no State or constitution from conspiracy and insurrection. I will not enter into the baseness and depravity of the System they adopt; but one thing I will remark, that its great Object is not, (as they pretend to delude worthy people to their Ruin) the destruction of all absolute Monarchies, but totally to root out that thing called an Aristocrate or Noblemen and Gentleman. View quote
Edmund Burke
When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently. View quote
Henry Miller
Schools are miniature universes. They encompass, on a child's scale, the same kind of domination and repression as the most despotically organised societies. A similar sort of injustice and comparable baseness preside over their choice of idols to elevate and martyrs to torment. View quote
Octave Mirbeau
There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. View quote
Theodore Roosevelt
The good citizen is the man who, whatever his wealth or his poverty, strives manfully to do his duty to himself, to his family, to his neighbor, to the States; who is incapable of the baseness which manifests itself either in arrogance or in envy, but who while demanding justice for himself is no less scrupulous to do justice to others. View quote
Theodore Roosevelt
A war for a great principle ennobles a nation. A war for commercial supremacy, upon some shallow pretext, is despicable, and more than aught else demonstrates to what immeasurable depths of baseness men and nations can descend. View quote
Albert Pike
Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity. (William Faulkner)
Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it, I love it very much, but I love it against my better judgment. View quote
Werner Herzog
Let us sum up this government! Who is at the Élysée and the Tuileries? Crime. Who is established at the Luxembourg? Baseness. Who at the Palais Bourbon? Imbecility. Who at the Palais d'Orsay?...And who are in the prisons... in the dungeons...in exile? Law, honour, intelligence, liberty, and the right. View quote
Victor Hugo
One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic. View quote
Robert Musil
There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished. View quote
Adam Smith