Coveting, pouting, or tearing others down does not elevate your standing, nor does demeaning someone else improve your self-image.
It's very demeaning that we have to put on a show to prove that we know how to put on a show.
I am going to sit there and watch Michael Phelps break my record anonymously? That's almost demeaning to me. It is not almost - it is.
There has to be so many other ways of approaching airline security than demeaning ourselves by giving up a lot of our dignities and our liberty to do this.
I never respond to Donald Trump's personal insults about me. I could care less what he says about me. I'm going to respond when he calls a judge unqualified because of his Mexican heritage, or mocks a reporter with a disability, or says demeaning things about women. And the list goes on.
To be told that one can be dependent on one's parents until age 26 should strike a young person who wants to grow up as demeaning, not as something to celebrate.
I don't really think myself that sex work is necessarily more demeaning than other kinds of demeaning work.
It was demeaning to scrape affection from virtually everyone you encountered. That was immature.
I don't like the term 'black people', I find it demeaning to those of us that actually qualify as 'people'.
Abject poverty is demeaning, is an assault on the dignity of those that suffer it. In the end it demeans us all. It makes the freedom of all of us less meaningful.
I'd find it demeaning to be cleaning toilets.
Why can't we have fine black restaurants with fine service by black people who always gave good service? Because we thought that is demeaning and it's not, it's a good living.
In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.
Malcolm X found the language that communicated across the board, from college professor to floor sweeper, all at the same time, without demeaning the intellect of either.
One of the great tragedies of life, it seems to me, is when a person classifies himself as someone who has no talents or gifts. When, in disgust or discouragement, we allow ourselves to reach depressive levels of despair because of our demeaning self-appraisal, it is a sad day for us and a sad day in the eyes of God. For us to conclude that we have no gifts when we judge ourselves by stature, intelligence, grade-point average, wealth, power, position, or external appearance is not only unfair but unreasonable.
I don't like it when they [media critics] see me as this little person who doesn't know what to do with herself -- like I have no idea what I want, like I'm just a puppet. . . That's demeaning to me, because that ain't how it is, and it never was.
And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. . . . When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.
A man with money to pay for a meal can talk about hunger without demeaning himself. . . . But for a man with no money hunger is a disgrace.
Smiling without good reason is demeaning.
We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning?
