77 Squalid Quotes

Following is our list of squalid quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .

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Famous Squalid Quotes

They are so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a water-closet doormat. — Charles Dickens

You must put the odor of the human body into images describe for me the implacable, the egoistic, the sensual, the cruel there are nothing but disgusting people in this world. — Kenji Mizoguchi

Vulgar and obscene, the papers run rumors daily about people in show business, tales of wicked ways and witless affairs. — Carroll O'Connor

The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish, and short. So is his style — Stella Gibbons

Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile; Filths savour but themselves. — William Shakespeare

Dirty, stained, withered, broken things seem beautiful to me. — Yohji Yamamoto

When you defile the pleasant streams, And the wild bird's abiding place, You massacre a million dreams, And cast your spittle in God's face — John Drinkwater

The slum is the measure of civilization. — Jacob Riis

If you threw a stone into a gutter, it would only spurt filth in your face. — R.K. Narayan

Sorrow makes an ugly face odious. - Samuel Richardson

Sorrow makes an ugly face odious. — Samuel Richardson

We all know that crap is king, give us dirty laundry. — Don Henley

It is an ill bird that fouls its own nest; Don't wash your dirty linen in public. — Icelandic Proverbs

Often a noble face hides filthy ways. — Euripides

Dirt used to be a badge of honor. Dirt used to look like work. But we've scrubbed the dirt off the face of work and consequently we've created this suspicion of anything that's too dirty. — Mike Rowe

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans. — Jacques Yves Cousteau

Short Squalid Quotes

  • Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal. — Charles Baudelaire
  • Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. — Aldous Huxley
  • Most drama in our lives is really rather squalid. — Tom Baker
  • The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease. — William James
  • The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line. — Basil Bunting
  • War, which used to be cruel and magnificent has now become cruel and squalid. — Winston Churchill
  • A squalid phantasmagoria of breath — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Squalor Quotes

Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction; the others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness. — William Beveridge

Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction; the others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness. — Baron William Henry Beveridge

Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community. — John W. Gardner

In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway. — John Kenneth Galbraith

There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue. — Theodore Dalrymple

Straightforwardness and simplicity are in keeping with goodness. The things that are essential are acquired with little bother; it is the luxuries that call for toil and effort. To want simply what is enough nowadays suggests to people primitiveness and squalor. — Seneca

South Africa is such a fraught place to live. The anxiety about crime, the crunching on racial eggshells, the juxtaposition of First World materialism with Third World squalor. — Rory Carroll

Better a sovereign in squalor than a slave in splendor. — Donald James

Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soulless army of human prey. — Emma Goldman

Suppose we took a thousand negatives... combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city - that would be my favorite picture. — Berenice Abbott

People Writing About Squalid

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens
quotes on love, christmas and life

1001 11529
Read quotes by Carroll O'Connor

Carroll O'Connor
quotes on leadership, politics and education

28 153
Read quotes by Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons
quotes on friendship, life and love

26 855
Read quotes by William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare
quotes on success, death and love

4052 36000
Read quotes by Yohji Yamamoto

Yohji Yamamoto

41 1039
Read quotes by John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater
quotes on drinking, drinking water and love

25 92

More Squalid Quotes

Old religious factions are volcanoes burned out; on the lava and ashes and squalid scoriae of old eruptions grow the peaceful olive, the cheering vine and the sustaining corn. — Edmund Burke

Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God. — Eugene H. Peterson

Jesus comes for sinners, for those outcast...and those caught up in squalid choices and failed dreams. — Brennan Manning

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. — Harold Pinter

England has become a squalid, uncomfortable, ugly place ... an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian, rat-hole run by vicious, suburban-minded, materialistic philistines. — Hanif Kureishi

Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure-above all, it means loneliness. — George Orwell

I am sure no other civilization, not even the Romans, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid dirty sex. Because no other civilization has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the W.C. — D. H. Lawrence

While I regard the Nakba as an ongoing crime that needs to be prosecuted and reversed...Shavit defends its necessity and lectures Palestinians trapped in squalid refugee camps to just get over it. — Max Blumenthal

Much of the same sort of degraded and filthy talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong. — J. R. R. Tolkien

Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons. — Honore de Balzac

We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike. — Evelyn Underhill

She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. He mouth was cold, her lips rough from the winter wind, and if the mystics are right and we are doomed to repeat our squalid lives ad infinitum, at least I will always return to that kiss — David Benioff

What 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. — John Le Carre

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. — Aldous Huxley

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. — Rebecca Harding Davis

Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes! How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges. — Henry George

What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition. — Learned Hand

For me, the single word "God" suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque. — Andre Breton

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. — Winston Churchill

We have all seen with a sense of nausea the abject, squalid, shameless avowal made in the Oxford Union. We are told that we ought not to treat it seriously. The Times talked of the childrens hour. I disagree. It is a very disquieting and disgusting symptom. One can almost feel the curl of contempt upon the lips of the manhood of Germany, Italy, and France when they read the message sent out by Oxford University in the name of Young England. Let them be assured that it is not the last word. But before they blame, as blame they should, these callow ill-tutored youths, they must be sure that they have not been set a bad example by people much older and much higher up. — Winston Churchill

Actual happiness looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn — Aldous Huxley

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. — Ken Livingstone

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. — William James

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. — Richard Rogers

One can find a squalid America as easily as a scenic America; a bitter, hopeless America as easily as the confident America of polyethylene wrapping, new cars, and camping trips in the summer. — Robert Kennedy

During the Cold War, the West was extremely careful not to allow the gap between the rich and poor to widen too far, first and foremost to counter communist depictions of the squalid masses in the West. But the same remains true today: If the West does nothing about the growing social inequities, it endangers its internal legitimacy. — Heinrich August Winkler

What other developed democracy has such a ridiculous and squalid history of intolerance? From the imprisonment and roasting of heretics, witches and poachers, to the censorship of literature, art and television: from St Alban through Wilde, Joyce and Lawrence I think we can point with pride to as grim a catalogue of intemperate, bigoted repression as any nation on earth. — Stephen Fry

The people of America care about baseball, not about your squalid little squabbles. Reassume your dignity and remember that you (players during the 1981 strike) are the temporary custodians of an enduring public trust. — A. Bartlett Giamatti

Material advancement has its share in moral and intellectual progress. Becky Sharp's acute remark that it is not difficult to be virtuous on ten thousand a year has its applications to nations; and it is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross. — Thomas Huxley

On New York subways in the 1980s: Riding on the IRT is usually a matter of serving time in one of the city's most squalid environments-noisy, smelly, crowded and overrun with a ceaseless supply of graffiti. — Paul Goldberger

The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well. — Jorge Luis Borges

One can't live without fear, it's a question of what is your attitude towards fear? I'm afraid of a sordid death. I'm afraid that I will die in an ugly or squalid way, and cancer can be very vigorous in that respect. — Christopher Hitchens

I'd love to write about my growing sexual awareness, but the press would turn it into something squalid. — Ken Livingstone

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

The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages. — Theodore Roosevelt

And in the end, bin Laden died in a squalid suburban compound surrounded by his wives and children and far from the front lines of his holy war. — Peter Bergen

No one as yet has approached the management of New York in a proper spirit; that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance. No one is likely to do so, because reflections on the long narrow pig-trough are construed as malevolent attacks against the spirit and majesty of the American people, and lead to angry comparisons. — Rudyard Kipling

Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve. — Roland Barthes

If one thinks only of winning, a sordid victory will be worse than a defeat. For the most part, it becomes a squalid defeat. — Yamamoto Tsunetomo

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