Squalid Quotes

Under the dominion of the priests our earth became the ascetic planet; a squalid den careering through space, peopled by discontented and arrogant creatures, who were disgusted with life, abhorred their globe as a vale of tears, and who in their envy and hatred of beauty and joy did themselves as much harm as possible. (Georg Brandes)
What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition. View quote
Learned Hand
There are no police to deal with the thousands of squalid little crimes like this committed every day in the city. View quote
Norman Lewis
I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk - and I would have liked to have the boozing scholars of the Universities wheeled into line and properly chastised for their squalid misuse of what I must ever regard as a gift of the gods. View quote
Winston Churchill
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand. View quote
Aldous Huxley
The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute. View quote
Rebecca Harding Davis
The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease. View quote
William James
Becky Sharp's acute remark that it is not difficult to be virtuous on ten thousand a year, has its application to nations; and it is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
Virtue, who was of squalid look and dress, said, if you obey me you will adorn yourself not with ornament nor beauty that passes away and perishes, but with everlasting and precious graces. And we are persuaded that everyone who flees from what is superficially good and follows what is reckoned hard and foolish finds happiness awaiting him. For Vice, veiling her actions in the beauties which properly belong to Virtue and are genuine, enslaves groveling people. View quote
Justin Martyr
Who do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs? I'd have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me. (John le Carré)
What a squalid and irresponsible little profession it is. Nothing prepares you for how bad Fleet Street really is until it craps on you from a great height. View quote
Ken Livingstone
When I was younger I used to go out looking for squalid brawls in the streets of Newpest. This got a couple of people stabbed, neither of them me, and led in turn to my apprenticeship in one of the Harlan's World gangs, Newpest chapter. Later on I upgraded this kind of retreat by joining the military: brawling with a purpose, and with more extensive weaponry, but as it turned out, just as squalid. I don't suppose I should have been as surprised as I was-the only thing the Marine Corps recruiter had really wanted to know was how many fights I had won. View quote
Richard Morgan
What argument have they to persuade the young men to fight except merely in another squalid attempt to defend themselves against a redistribution of the international swag? View quote
Aneurin Bevan
Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy and squalid in practical life. Literature reverses this process. View quote
Northrop Frye
The Fascists got what they deserved,” Floyd said. "My husband lived long enough to see those monsters come to come to power. He saw through their lies and promises, but he also knew that they spoke to something nasty and squalid in the human spirit. Something in all of us. We want to hate those who are not like us. All we need is an excuse, a whisper in the ear. View quote
Alastair Reynolds
I found the offer of a knighthood something that I couldn't possibly accept. I found it to be somehow squalid, a knighthood. There's a relationship to government about knights. View quote
Harold Pinter
If one thinks only of winning, a sordid victory will be worse than a defeat. For the most part, it becomes a squalid defeat. View quote
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
Sex is squalid, uncomfortable, and messy. View quote
Ben Croshaw
That abject, squalid, shameless avowal...It is a very disquieting and disgusting symptom...My mind turns across the narrow waters of Channel and the North Sea, where great nations stand determined to defend their national glories or national existence with their lives. I think of Germany, with its splendid clear-eyed youths marching forward on all the roads of the Reich singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland. I think of Italy, with her ardent Fascisti, her renowned Chief, and stern sense of national duty. I think of France, anxious, peace-loving, pacifist to the core, but armed to the teeth and determined to survive as a great nation in the world. One can almost feel the curl of contempt upon the lips of the manhood of all these people when they read this message sent out by Oxford University in the name of young England. View quote
Winston Churchill
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. (Aldous Huxley)
And Reason kens he herits in A haunted house. Tenants unknown Assert their squalid lease of sin With earlier title than his own. View quote
Robert Bridges
For all that she'd had no great expectations for it, sex was turning out to be even more squalid, tawdry, and cynical than she had suspected it would. View quote
Michael Swanwick
If you live in a squalid environment, then of course you are going to want to get out of it, you are probably going to want to get into the country, because that's what it does. View quote
Richard Rogers
I shall present as certain only those data corroborated by exhaustive research, or by my own personal investigations, as I am not untraveled for a bookish man. Wherever doubt exists, I shall unambiguously state its degree and nature, along with whatever grounds I may have for preferring one hypothesis over another. If, despite all I have said, the reader disdains such honest ambiguity, and stubbornly prefers the unequivocal assertiveness to be found in factitious travelogues penned by raffish "explorers,” or in the specious "natural histories” compiled by crapulous and unprincipled hacks who have never left their squalid lofts in Scrivener's Row, then there is nothing further I can do, and I leave him, with apologies, to his deception. View quote
Michael Shea