Top 50 Downward Quotes

The upside of a downward spiral into despair and defeat in young adulthood is that pretty early on, I was forced to face not only the foolish things I had done but also the stark realization that there was likely no end to what I was capable of doing.

One of my favorite workouts to do with my girlfriends is yoga. We are equally impatient with our yoga. We are those people who are sweating in the back, and we’ll be in downward dog giggling and looking at each other. And I know what we’re all thinking: What are we going to order for dinner afterward?

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

What I was concerned about when I wrote the ‘Downward Spiral’ record was being a self-centred destructive force. The point was tearing down everything in a search for something else.

The subjectivization of the universal in art brings the universal downward on one hand, while on the other it helps raise the individual toward the universal.

That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one’s kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.

I was so busy fighting and so busy trying to keep everything above water that I didn’t realize I was spiraling downward with nowhere to go.

The point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward, but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.

I probably will not live to see Turkey become an exemplary democracy, but I pray that the downward authoritarian drift can be stopped before it is too late.

I knew ‘Hurt‘ way before Dad recorded it. In 1992, ‘Downward Spiral’ was one of my favorite albums.

Most Americans know we are in a mess, and as they look at Donald Trump, they believe he is the one leader who can reverse the downward death spiral of this nation we love so dearly.

All places where women are excluded tend downward to barbarism; but the moment she is introduced, there come in with her courtesy, cleanliness, sobriety, and order.

In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn’t be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path.

Every day on our streets there are people who are facing a combination of homelessness, mental illness, and addiction. Each of these conditions is challenging alone, but when experienced at the same time it creates a downward spiral that makes it even more difficult for the person to get treated and housed.

I remember thinking, ‘Downward dog’ is so not a resting pose!’ Now it actually can be.

When there’s downward pressure on growth, one choice is to adjust economic policy, increase deficits, relax monetary policy. That might have a short-term benefit, but may not be beneficial for the future.

Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.

If yoga was the only thing I’d ever done, maybe I’d think exercise is boring, but there’s more to exercise than downward dogs, or running, or squats.

I had a terrible manager once who described my career as ‘spiraling downward.’

While crime is indeed up in some cities in the last month or so since the stay-at-home orders lifted, crime is nonetheless down overall for 2020. Indeed, violent crime has trended downward now for decades.

Fear stifles our thinking and actions. It creates indecisiveness that results in stagnation. I have known talented people who procrastinate indefinitely rather than risk failure. Lost opportunities cause erosion of confidence, and the downward spiral begins.

There are many, many communities, many ethnic minorities, many civilizations that have been brutalised by others and you have to move on. You cannot perpetually stay in that place of blame, otherwise it’s just a downward spiral.

When I entered politics, I took the only downward turn you could take from journalism.

When interest rates are high you want the average direction in which interest rates are moving to be downward; when interest rates are low you want the average direction to be upward.

I think my music‘s more disturbing than Tupac‘s – or at least I thought some of the themes of ‘The Downward Spiral’ were more disturbing on a deeper level – you know, issues about suicide and hating yourself and God and people and everything else.

If we had a starting XI that no one could argue about it wouldn’t say a lot for English football. We’d probably be on a downward spiral. It’s good that people have different ideas about who should play.

My sentiments for the American cause, from the Stamp Act downward, have never changed… I am still of opinion that it is the cause of liberty and of human nature.

I retired at 35 in ’98 and thought, ‘There’s only one place to go, and that’s downward.’ I retired at a good level. I was at peace after 15 years – I was lucky to play that long.

News-free existence is not a serious proposal, but it is worth noting that while today’s 24/7 media environment is wonderful in many ways, it can also be like drinking out of a fire hose and intensify a downward reinforcing cycle of despair.

My relationship with my first child was nonexistent. I was broke and I was a new rapper whose career was spiraling downward.

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off.

Our tree is actually a tree of the short-term interest rate. The average direction in which the short-term interest rate moves depends on the level of the rate. When the rate is very high, that direction is downward; when the rate is very low, it is upward.

A study by Treasury economists estimated that a country with a tax rate one percentage point lower than another country’s attracts 3 percent more capital. It’s not surprising then, that average OECD corporate tax rates have trended steadily downward.

Love, it has been said, flows downward. The love of parents for their children has always been far more powerful than that of children for their parents; and who among the sons of men ever loved God with a thousandth part of the love which God has manifested to us?

When you’re No. 8 in the world, then you start losing some matches, I think it was the first time in my career my confidence went down, and from there it was a downward spiral.

Your mind simply can’t focus forward and downward all at the same time.

Corporate America cannot afford to remain silent or passive about the downward spiral we are undergoing. It cannot turn a blind eye to how difficult the experience of life is for so many of their customers.

‘Downward Spiral’ felt like I had an unending bottomless pit of rage and self-loathing inside me and I had to somehow challenge something or I’d explode. I thought I could get through by putting everything into my music, standing in front of an audience and screaming emotions at them from my guts.

Protectionism is a very real danger. It is understandable that in times of a severe downturn protectionist pressures mount but the lessons of history are clear. If we give in to protectionist pressures, we will only send the world into a downward spiral.

Why are we so obsessed with celebrity culture? We have front-page news about divorces instead of front-page news about global warming, about women being abused, about children being abused. We’re going on a downward spiral.

Being against other people’s policies eventually puts you in a downward spiral. It’s fine to be principled and oppose views that you don’t agree with, but you also have to have an alternative.

Walmart‘s period of explosive growth coincided with decades of wage stagnation and deindustrialization. By applying relentless downward pressure on prices and wages, the company came to dominate both consumer spending and employment in small towns and rural areas across the middle of the country.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

I was working as a volunteer in a village, 25 km. from Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, in 2012 when India Against Corruption movement started. I had realized that change needs to come from top downward, so I decided to join the movement as a volunteer and started policy research for the same.

In an extreme credit crunch, leveraged purchases of gold cause forced sales, because any price correction triggers margin calls. As a result, gold can be very volatile – upward and downward – at the peak of a crisis.

After a long period in which the desired direction for inflation was always downward, the industrialized world’s central banks must today try to avoid major changes in the inflation rate in either direction.

It is fatal for any body of workers to have forever hanging from the fringes of its skirts other bodies on a level just below its own; for that means continual pressure downward, additional difficulty to be overcome in the struggle to maintain reasonable rates of wages.

There is no ‘slippery slope‘ toward loss of liberties, only a long staircase where each step downward must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.

The ‘Downward Spiral’ album was a record all about beating everybody up – and then ‘Hurt’ was like a coda saying maybe I shouldn’t have done that. But to make the song sound impenetrable because I thought it was a little too vulnerable, I tried to layer it in noise.

New York City in particular is the economic engine of not just our state, but arguably the nation. If that engine stalls, this entire country could get dragged into the same downward spiral.