Degree

Famous quotes containing the word degree:

    The germ of violence is laid bare in the child abuser by the sheer accident of his individual experience ... in a word, to a greater degree than we like to admit, we are all potential child abusers.
    F. Gonzalez-Crussi, Mexican professor of pathology, author. “Reflections on Child Abuse,” Notes of an Anatomist (1985)

    Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for- the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.
    Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)

    Take but degree away, untune that string,
    And hark what discord follows!
    ...
    Force should be right, or, rather, right and wrong—
    Between whose endless jar justice resides—
    Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
    Then everything includes itself in power,
    Power into will, will into appetite;
    And appetite, an universal wolf,
    So doubly seconded with will and power,
    Must make perforce an universal prey,
    And last eat up himself.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)