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.
Quotes about baseness (16 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.
In civil business what first boldness what second and third boldness and yet boldness is a child of ignorance and baseness.
I encountered among my comrades the most varied human traits, from frankness to reserve, from goodness, uprightness and kindness, to brutality and baseness.
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service.
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.
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
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.
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.
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.
Do we indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side Is there no baseness we would hide No inner vileness that we dread How many a father have I seen A sober man, among his boys Whose youth was full of foolish noise.
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.
For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest . . .
Women have climbed higher on the scale of virtue than man, and I have always believed that. But people say, and I believe it, that when they fall, women reach a level of baseness the the most vile men could not reach.
In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.
No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world, but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement.