WAR creates opportunities for brutishness and baseness, but also for great human accomplishment.
And yet boldness is a child of ignorance and baseness, far inferior to other parts".
Lev Shlosberg, an opposition deputy, told his colleagues, "We are offered to share full political responsibility for one of the most shameful laws in Russian history…and every deputy is personally invited to sign under this baseness".Having acquired considerable wealth and freedom of movement, Mr Putin's elite is growing increasingly tired of his rule.
He was a parasite without servility, a sycophant without baseness, a shrewd schemer who was also a blunderer, and a sinner whose errors were, as one close to him observed, "full of wisdom".
All this is redolent of high sophistication, not the brutal baseness of murder.
Whether or not this concept is pre-Zoroastrian, it shows that in Iranian religion human nature was held to be essentially good, in the sense that there was no myth about the baseness of the human condition such as that found in Babylonian mythology (for example, in the Enuma elish).
Cicero held that the province of the ridiculous lay in a certain baseness and deformity.
There was plenty of indignity and absurdity and just plain baseness as health-care reform made its way through Congress — death panels, the spectre of socialism, the great tickle-fight conspiracy.
And, like a lot of born con men, he was a sucker, as gullible as those he conned and, after the event, as shocked as were his own victims by the baseness of his deceivers.
You're doing your small part to hold off the contemporary world's tidal wave of ignorance and illiteracy and baseness and you deserve a little pat on the back, you warrior.
There's no normal range, no offhand or incidental moments — it's all injustice, love, heartbreak, cruelty, self-sacrifice, nobility, baseness.
