Abject Quotes

“To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.”

“To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.”

“We seem to assume that no one really wants to be a girl or a woman, and therefore some people, say female-bodied people, must be forced into these abject genders”

“If someone's personhood is in doubt (or seen as lacking), all the easier to direct death wishes at them. When a tiny minority of them transgresses, their crimes of violence only confirm their abjection from the human [. . .] Anxiety, threat, dread, fear, and prejudice feed into the explanatory mechanisms that construct them as somehow beyond human, beyond mercy.”

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

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

“There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we response to noise.”

“Success is relative. We shouldn't compare the financial success between a person born into riches and the one born into abject poverty.”

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

“The Fed’s policies have been an unqualified success for financiers and an abject failure for the bottom 99.5% who have to work for a living.”

“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.”