"Degraded" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... imperial legions. After a man has served, with credit, for a certain number of years in the line, he is promoted to be an officer—an acting officer. If he conducts himself well, he may rise to be a Colonel or a General of Division; if ill, he is degraded to the ranks again; or, worst degradation of all, drafted into a regiment of Cossacks or Austrians. Cossacks is the lowest depth, however; nay, it is said that the men who perform these Cossack parts receive higher wages than the mimic grenadiers and old guard. They will not ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the shocking thing which we know as Comstockery, goes back into the centuries for its origin; being, indeed, the perfect flower of that asceticism, which was engrafted on the degraded Christianity which took its name from Christ without in the least comprehending the spirit ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... not safely remain in the chair for another moment; that he would, on all future occasions, be liable to disgrace whenever he fulfilled his duty; that the dignity of the house would be at an end if the chair should be degraded; and that the step which the court-faction had taken was an attempt to render the representatives of the people despicable in the eyes of their constituents. Ministers and the court faction were compelled to bow before the storm. The motion for an adjournment ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... it was the workers subject to the successful group of capitalists who were most to be pitied, for, other conditions being equal, they were likely to be those whose wages had been cut lowest and whose general condition was most degraded." ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... precipitated a conflict that divided the Republican party into administration and anti-administration factions, the latter being led by Charles Sumner and Carl Schurz. Sumner had long been chairman of the Senate committee on foreign relations, but he was degraded through the influence of the President's friends in the Senate. Bitter personal animosities were aroused in this contest which never were healed. It was alleged that the sentiment of the people of Santo Domingo had not been fairly taken, ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... cause of such a fatal falling away. The portals of chivalry had been opened to too many unworthy candidates. It had been made vulgar! In consequence of having become so cheap the grand title of "knight" was degraded. Eustace Deschamps, in his fine, straightforward way, states the scandal boldly and "lashes" it with his tongue. He says: "Picture to yourself the fact that the degree of knighthood is about to be conferred now upon babies of eight and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... "Will it be any more endurable when I have ruined my nerves and the coats of my stomach?" It did not seem probable that it would be. If death had been the risk he might have faced it, but he recoiled from the thought of a premature and degraded old age, still chained to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... backs, and others of them measuring the road to the temple by prostrating themselves every yard or two as they advance. These self-torturers are all asking the same question: 'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?' It sometimes rises in the thoughts of the most degraded, and it is present always with some of the better and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... at that corner of the room which was nearest to the master's desk, and by it Nicholas sat down, so depressed and self-degraded by the consciousness of his position, that if death could have come upon him at that time, he would have been almost happy to meet it. The cruelty of which he had been an unwilling witness, the coarse and ruffianly behaviour of Squeers ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... so clear. The Annales Augustani minores (Mon. Germ. SS., vol. x, p. 8) declare that the Pope hanged the rebel. Another anonymous writer (cf. Tanon, Hist. des tribunaux de l'Inq. en France, p. 456, n. 2) says with more probability, that Adrian merely degraded him. According to Otto of Freisingen (Mon. Germ. SS., vol. xx, p. 404), Arnold principis examini reservatus est, ad ultimum a praefecto Urbis ligno adactus. Finally, Geroch de Reichersberg tells us (De investigatione ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... Ham were the most free-born, enlightened, and enterprising! Never was such a perversion of Scripture interpretation to palliate and bolster up the systems of wickedness of this and former days! Shall we compare the Model Republic and the miserable and degraded nations of Brazils, Spain, and Portugal, the present enslavers of the alleged posterity of Ham, with the once ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... and, as we might say, degraded, is still poetical. There is so much poetry in the thought that the flattening of the phraseology cannot smother it, the lines still remaining poetically alive, their poetry shining through the plainer and less figurative words. And the thought is poetical because it is the result of ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... application of her talent, send a nobleman of ordinary estate to the poor-house or the pension list, which last may be justly regarded as the poor-book of the aristocracy. How many noblemen and gentlemen, of fine estates, have been ruined and degraded by the extravagance of their wives! More frequently by their own extravagance, perhaps; but, in numerous instances, by that of those whose duty it is to assist in upholding their stations by ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... one of the most decisive proofs of the awfully degraded state of human nature. Men believe, or pretend to believe, that this life is but a span in companions with eternity—that there is a heaven to reward the righteous and a hell to receive the unconverted sinner; and yet make no personal inquiry at the holy oracles of God whether they ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... impressions, they earnestly entreat your serious attention to the subject of slavery; that you will be pleased to countenance the restoration of liberty to those unhappy men, who alone, in this land of freedom, are degraded into perpetual bondage, and who, amidst the general joy of surrounding freemen, are groaning in servile subjection; that you will devise means for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people; that you will ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Popes who preceded Leo. The infamous Alexander VI., the Pope who has made his name synonymous with the worst infamies that disgrace mankind, was not spared the attacks of the subjects whom he and his children, not unworthy of such a father, degraded and abused. Two ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a moment, during that springtime of passion which returns no more, when Vanderlyn had for a wild instant hoped that he would be able to take her away from the life in which he had felt her to be playing the terrible role of an innocent and yet degraded victim. ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... this wondrous, seeking love of His for all the outcasts is the sign to us of His boundless hopefulness concerning the most degraded. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... mother had ever fondled her, no father or brother had protected her from outrage; and the man who had plunged her into infamy, and deserted her when she stood in greatest need of support, deigned not to smooth with kindness the road to ruin. Thus degraded, was she let loose on the world; and virtue, never nurtured by affection, assumed the ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... verification inspections. Continued Iraqi noncompliance with UNSC resolutions over a period of 12 years resulted in the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the ouster of the SADDAM Husayn regime. Coalition forces remain in Iraq, helping to restore degraded infrastructure and facilitating the establishment ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the cities, nominal freedom was of little use to masses kept from starvation by the alms of the government, and drugged into brutish good humour by a vast system of public spectacles, in which the realms of nature and of art were ransacked to glut the wonder, lust, and ferocity of a degraded populace. ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... degraded," cried old Joe, with a surly, dangerous nod. "That there little tailor has degraded the honour of our flag. What's to be ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... invention, as the fruit of duration and creative genius, by liberty, by pure mind; then comes habit, a kind of body, as the body is already a group of habits; and habit, taking root, being a work of consciousness which escapes it and turns against it, is little by little degraded into mechanism in which the soul ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... wonderfully self-denying Jesus was, Miss Sliver. Nobody appreciated the Saviour when he was upon earth, not even the disciples; yet this was nothing to him, for he did not seek his own glory. He went cheerfully about his Father's work, never thinking of himself, and never feeling himself degraded by the presence of a poor, ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... but the countenance of an ugly animal is pleasanter to look upon than that of an ugly degraded human being, and as I saw the rough stubbly jaws open, displaying some yellow and blackened teeth that glistened in the light as their owner yawned widely, I began to think our dog ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... I am inclined rather to call it, an 'injured' flower, is one in which some of the petals have inferior office and position, and are either degraded, for the benefit of others, or expanded and honoured at the cost ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... more readable, than the English; their evil is done more effectively, in America for the masses, in French for the few that care to read; but with us as with them, the duties of literature are daily neglected, truth daily perverted and suppressed, and grave subjects daily degraded in the treatment. The journalist is not reckoned an important officer; yet judge of the good he might do, the harm he does; judge of it by one instance only: that when we find two journals on the reverse sides of politics each, on the same day, openly garbling a piece of news for the interest ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... recognized the rustic bacchanalian for the first time. He had always had a peculiar antipathy to this young gentleman; but at this moment it was intensified into a loathing. How could he ask assistance from such a degraded creature as this? ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... Churches, which was not, even in the case of Catholics, allowable; or have even given them higher rank undeservedly. John is an instance of this. When he was not accepted by the Catholics at Apamea, and had been driven away from Antioch, you set him over the Tyrians. Humerius also, having been degraded from the diaconite and deprived of the Christian name, you advanced to the priesthood. And as if these seemed to you minor offences, in the boldness of your pride you assaulted the truth itself of apostolic doctrine. That Peter, whose condemnation by my predecessor of holy memory you ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... sunrise Froude's meditations were far from cheerful: "The sense of natural beauty is nothing where man is degraded." So far Bishop ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... possible. A man in debt is not his own master: he is at the mercy of the tradesmen he employs. He is the butt of lawyers, the byword of creditors, the scandal of neighbours; he is a slave in his own house; his moral character becomes degraded and defiled; and even his own household and family regard him with ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... all, content with the abolition of slavery. Many of them are rejoiced that it is done. But to raise the negro, in his present ignorant and degraded condition, to be their political equals would be, in their opinion, to enslave them [the white citizens]. If they did not rebel against it, it would only be because rebellion would be hopeless. A government so organized would in no sense ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... to wish her good-by, she will keep out of my way, and part with me at the last moment like a stranger. After my experience of women, to be in love again—in love with a girl who is young enough to be my daughter—what a fool, what a driveling, degraded fool I must be!" ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... somewhat futile. It is said that from Genesis to Revelation the Bible degrades woman. Does it not, as it stands, equally in many passages degrade the conception of the Supreme Being? Many noble and Divine truths have been utterly degraded by the coarse fallacies of men. All this is so sure to be made clear in the near future that I am doubtful of the wisdom of laying too much stress on passages whose meaning is entirely misunderstood by the vast ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... organization of the people, and the framing of the general constitution of society. The community over which he was called to preside had consisted thus far of very heterogeneous and discordant materials. Vast numbers of the people were of the humblest and most degraded condition, consisting of ignorant peasants, some stupid, others turbulent and ungovernable; and of refugees from justice, such as thieves, robbers, and outlaws of every degree. But then, on the other hand, there were many ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... decided these by mere rule of common sense, her new vocation might not have puzzled her as much as it did. But it was uncommon, superfine, intuitive sense that was required. She discovered, for example, that not only was sin a virtue in disguise, but that a virtue might be degraded ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... this civilization, in its varied aspects, both good and evil, lofty and degraded, which in the following chapters I seek to show. This is the real point of interest in Roman history. Let us see what the Romans really accomplished—the results of their great enterprises; the systems they matured with so much thought; the institutions they bequeathed to our times; yea, even ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... servility of judges, gave scarce a hope that justice would not be wrested to serve the purposes of the crown; that considerations of state policy would not prove stronger than any abstract belief of the prisoner's innocence or guilt. That we have not misrepresented the degraded condition of the English tribunals during the period we have mentioned, a reference to the state trials passim, will abundantly prove. Nor is it at all strange that such should have been the case. During the dynasty of the Tudors, and the reign ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... life, disgusted and angered her. The thought, in any man's mind, that she could be so base, in consideration of a guilty affection for him, as to betray the confidence of an innocent child on his behalf, disgraced and degraded her. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... here is the world! A bright sphere rising, Setting, whirling, glancing, Round the sun in circles dancing; Trembling, toiling, Yielding, spoiling, Want and plenty by turn enfold it— This world, behold it! On its surface, by time abraded, Dwelleth a vile race, defiled, degraded; Abject, haughty, Cunning, naughty, Carrying war and desolation From the top to the foundation Of creation. For them Satan has no being; They scorn with laughter A hell hereafter, And heavenly glory As idle story. Powers eternal! I'll join their laugh ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... guided, directed, and intensified the prevalent excitement. These were the men who originated those daily rumors which threw both government and people into a fever of agitation; who taught new hopes and new desires to the most degraded population of Christendom, and inspired even the lazaroni with wild ideas of human rights—of liberty, fraternity, and equality. These agents had a far-reaching purpose, and to accomplish this they worked steadily, in all parts and among all classes, until at last the ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... said Westerman, rising from his seat and coming into the middle of the room. "I do then utterly despise, scorn, and abominate him, and all such as him. I can conceive nothing in human form more deplorably low, more pitiably degraded, than such a poor subservient slave ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... recovery, but while she lived he gave himself to her service as to that of a living soul capable of justice and love. The night was more than warm, but she had fits of shivering. He wrapped his coat round her, and wiped from the poor degraded face the damps of suffering. The woman-heart was alive still, for she took the hand that ministered to her and kissed it with a moan. When the morning came she fell asleep. He crept out and went to his grandmother's, where he roused Betty, and asked her to get him some peat and coals. Finding ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... Honorius, or rather of his miserable court, brought Alaric a second time to Rome in 409. The city capitulated, and he raised Attalus to the purple as a rival to Honorius. But Attalus proved utterly incompetent, and the next year Alaric publicly and insultingly degraded him to a private position. In 410 a fresh insult and wrong inflicted on the Goths by Honorius brought Alaric once more to Rome. He burst in by the Salarian gate, and sacked the city, which was only saved from irretrievable destruction by the respect of the Goths for ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... mother, who was as weak as himself, begged of her husband not to tease their darling, and he was at last obliged to give way to her importunities, when Antony again sunk into his former destructive effeminacy. The strength of his body declined, in proportion as his mind was degraded by ignorance. ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... capital, to rescue the neglected perishing young among us from out the very jaws of destruction?—forthwith rival institutions start up, on the ground of religious differences, to dwarf one another into inefficiency, like starveling shrubs in a nursery run wild; and projected exertions in the cause of degraded and suffering humanity degenerate into an attack on a benevolent Presbyterian minister, who refuses to accept, from conscientious motives, of a directorship in a Popish institution. This is surely a sad state of things,—a state grown very general, and which threatens to become more so; and in a ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... the new man whirled him out into the street!" Harding went on, his attention on the incident, as Leslie's apparently was not. "Just the treatment he deserved for being brutal to a woman, no matter how lost or degraded she may be! Tearing off her dress was all right enough, however, for all the woman deserve nothing better than to have their dresses torn into ribbons for thrusting them under our feet and sweeping the streets with ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... we have another variant of the same passion, perhaps at an even more degraded and animal level. This specimen was taken from the astral body of a man just as he entered at the door of a drinking-shop; the expectation of and the keen desire for the liquor which he was about to absorb showed ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... feel degraded in his own eyes by all this hypocrisy; but it was so necessary, and was answering its purpose so well, that his mental suffering was less than might have ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... exhibitions from his pure republic. Seneca considered, that vice made insensible approaches by means of the stage, and that it stole on the people in the disguise of pleasure. The Romans, in their purer times, considered the stage to be so disgraceful, that every Roman was to be degraded, who became an actor, and so pernicious to morals, that they put it under the power of a ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... iconoclasts was not irreparable, but it was grave. True to their class, Byzantine officials indulged a taste for furniture, giving thereby an unintentional sting to their attack. Like the grandees of the Classical Renaissance, they degraded art, which is a religion, to upholstery, a menial trade. They patronised craftsmen who looked not into their hearts, but into the past—who from the court of the Kalif brought pretty patterns, and from classical antiquity elegant illusions, to do duty for significant design. They looked to ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... their pious rites over anointed stones, sacred springs and blossoming trees, as in the past, and continued celebrating their rustic holidays during seed-time and harvest. They adhered with invincible tenacity to their traditional usages. Degraded and lowered to the rank of superstitions, these were destined to persist for centuries under the Christian orthodoxy without exposing it to serious peril, and while they were no longer marked in the ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... life. As Harvey walked homewards through the streets, some power must have guided his steps, for he saw or knew nothing of what was about him. With the sense of the reality of his imaginations came an energy he had never before felt: his soul took complete possession of him: he knew, though degraded, that he was a spirit. Then, in that supreme moment, gathered about him the memories of light and darkness, and they became the lips through which eternal powers spake to him in a tongue unlike the speech of men. The spirit of light was behind the visions ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... that this is to me quite the most amazing among the phenomena of humanity. I am surprised at no depths to which, when once warped from its honor, that humanity can be degraded. I do not wonder at the miser's death, with his hands, as they relax, dropping gold. I do not wonder at the sensualist's life, with the shroud wrapped about his feet. I do not wonder at the single-handed murder of a single victim, done by the assassin in the darkness of the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... was to watch over the integrity of the state, the inviolability of the Constitution, and the sanctity of the laws; but this collegiate authority not presenting any element of personal responsibility, the Vienna cabinet gradually degraded this council to the position of an administrative organ of court absolutism. In this manner, while Hungary had ostensibly an independent government, the despotic Vienna cabinet disposed at will of the money and blood of ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... in gold. This Stephen was a great miser, and tradition says that he trebled the sum in his lifetime. Anyhow, he died rich as Croesus, and abominated alike by his tenants and by the country side, as might be expected when a gentleman of his race and fame degraded himself, as this Sir Stephen undoubtedly did, ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... doctrines were thus beginning to take hold; but one feels, nevertheless, that the nobles followed their King rather for the sake of their material gains than for the spiritual comforts of the Aton-worship. There is reason to suppose that at least one of these nobles was degraded and banished ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... though saddened, was not discouraged. The more barbarous and degraded he found the Indians to be, the more vivid was his sense of their need of the Gospel; and was anything too hard for the Lord? So he continued vigorously his study of the language, assisted by an Indian named Clah. Taking an English ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... though something of herself, of her person, had been thus exposed and degraded; all that she held sacred pilloried, gibbeted, and exhibited to the world's derision. Tears of anguish sprang to her eyes, a red flame of outraged modesty overspread ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... in arms, is there a man among you, who can bear the thought of living to see his dear country and friends in so degraded and wretched a state as this? If there be, then let that man leave me and retire to his home. I ask not his aid. But, thanks to God, I have now no fears about you: judging by your looks, I feel that there is ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... regard to this subject of temperance, of which you were just speaking, and upon which you say woman has so much influence, what shall I do? How can I reclaim the drunkard while I move in a circle where the degraded creatures are not admitted. They will not be influenced by a person who has no feelings or sympathies in common with them, even were it proper for me to descend to their level in order ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... in the forlorn streets of a Puritan city—when for one day the cheating tradesmen leave their barbarous shops—to the wailing of unlovely hymns, empty of everything except a degraded sentimentality that would make an Athenian or a Roman slave blush with shame, is enough to cause one to regard the most scandalous levity of Voltaire as something ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... I am afraid to have you simulate such passions. They will leave their mark on you. It is defilement. Your womanhood is too fine, too beautiful to be so degraded." ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... against Her Majesty's person nor her Government, but against Colonial mis-government.... We remonstrated; we were derided.... We were goaded on to madness, and were compelled to show that we had the spirit of resistance to repel injuries, or to be deemed a captive, degraded and recreant people. We took up arms, not to attack others, but to defend ourselves."—Letter to Lord Durham from Dr. Wolfred Nelson and others, confined at ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... think why you keep it up," he remarks, and then almost wearily tells me the facts about my Utopian self. They are a little difficult to understand. He says I am one of the samurai, which sounds Japanese, "but you will be degraded," he says, with a gesture almost of despair. He describes my position in this world in ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... petticoat upon that chilled and shivering nakedness. Her girdle was a string, her head ribbon a string, her pointed shoulders emerged from her chemise, a blond and lymphatic pallor, earth-colored collar-bones, red hands, a half-open and degraded mouth, missing teeth, dull, bold, base eyes; she had the form of a young girl who has missed her youth, and the look of a corrupt old woman; fifty years mingled with fifteen; one of those beings which are both feeble and horrible, and which cause those to shudder whom they ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... majority learn with wonderful rapidity. Many of the grown people are desirous of learning to read. It is wonderful how a people who have been so long crushed to the earth, so imbruted as these have been,—and they are said to be among the most degraded negroes of the South,—can have so great a desire for knowledge, and such a capability for attaining it. One cannot believe that the haughty Anglo-Saxon race, after centuries of such an experience as these people have had, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... Nivelle. Tournay and Tongres, both Episcopal cities, were by that title somewhat less oppressed than the other ancient towns founded by the Romans; but they appear to have possessed only a poor and degraded population. ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... not, you see!" said the fare, who had sought this information. "You stop here, my lad, till I come back." This to the cabman, who sees him, not without misgivings about a source of income, plunge into the filthy and degraded throng that is filling the court, and elbow his way ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... than the king who sits upon it. On the contrary, it gives me a just indignation to see a person whose action gives new majesty to kings, resolution to heroes, and softness to lovers, thus sinking from the greatness of his behaviour, and degraded into the character of the London Prentice. I have often wished that our tragedians would copy after this great master in action. Could they make the same use of their arms and legs, and inform their faces with as significant looks and passions, how glorious would an English tragedy appear ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... distress and perhaps cruelty may abound. How many of the dark spots on our community has the single zeal of the Earl of Shaftesbury forced upon the public mind, of which we were utterly ignorant, though living in the midst of them. The degraded female drudge in a coal-pit, the agonized infant in a chimney, and the death-wrought child in a factory—each and all bear testimony to how much of suffering may exist while surrounded by those ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... just darted past the three watchers, stood at his feet. As though warned by an inner subconsciousness of danger, it had come in its sleep, for safety and care, to its mother's old lover—the strong and the weak—the degraded and disgraced, but exalted—the persecuted, drugged, and all ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... is base. But the worst of it is, she did not realize herself that that was all she wanted to prove by her departure! She went away in response to some inner prompting to do something disgraceful, in order that she might say to herself—'There—you've done a new act of shame—you degraded creature!' ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... distinguished from the larva of a weevil or other beetle, by its relatively smaller head and smoother, less wrinkled cuticle; it strikes the observer as a feebler, more helpless creature than a beetle-grub. And it is of interest to note that this somewhat degraded type of larva is remarkably constant through a great series of families—gall-flies, ichneumon-flies, wasps, bees (fig. 18), ants—that vary widely in the details of their structure and in their habits and mode of life. Almost without exception, however, they make ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... sits enthroned between Poetry and History. Even those who are ignorant of its laws feel its influence, and the soothing grace which it sheds, falling like the rain, equally upon the just and the unjust. Man's nature always responds to the truly high and beautiful; only the most degraded are deprived of this source of happiness. And there are but few women, till debased by cruelty, misery, or drink, that do not try in some humble way (but especially with their needle) to adorn their own persons, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... was taking a boat ride in the harbor with two of my lady assistants and six stalwart boy oarsmen, when a boat shot out at us from Blackwell's Island with four villainous men and two degraded women. Coming alongside, one of the women said to the boys: "Throw that officer overboard, and come with us; we will get you $400 a piece as bounty, then you can desert from the army, and have a jolly good time." My teachers fainted with fear; my crew rested on their oars, wild ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... presumptuous to attempt it. This is not only because he is a familiar subject, the triumphs and sorrows of whose career have been often portrayed, but also because he presents so many contradictions in his life and character,—lofty yet degraded, earnest yet frivolous, an impersonation of noble deeds and sentiments, and also of almost every frailty which Christianity and humanity alike condemn. No great man has been more extravagantly admired, and none more bitterly assailed; but generally ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... charge which his age, and Pascal afterwards, brought against the Jesuits. The essay, besides being a picture of the times as regards religion, is an example of what was to be Bacon's characteristic strength and weakness: his strength in lifting up a subject which had been degraded by mean and wrangling disputations, into a higher and larger light, and bringing to bear on it great principles and the results of the best human wisdom and experience, expressed in weighty and pregnant maxims; his weakness in forgetting, as, in spite of his philosophy, he so often did, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... present fee system, whereby the native is degraded, imposed upon, and taught the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Epiphanius."[1910] In the worship of Anaitis in Armenia male and female slaves were dedicated to the goddess, but men of rank also consecrated their daughters. After long service they married, no one considering them degraded. They were not mercenary, being well provided for by their families. Therefore they received only their social equals.[1911] Baal Peor seems also to have been a case of sacral harlotry.[1912] The strongest reason for thinking so is Hosea ix. 10. Rosenbaum[1913] interprets the pestilence as ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... nothing was left for her but that. She felt that it was an impossibility to draw back from her present position. She did not even entertain the idea of an attempt to escape from it, it seemed such a hopeless task, she was so cowardly, so crushed and degraded, and she felt that she was still so firmly bound to that man by all sorts of vile, degrading chains, even by the contempt that he no longer tried to conceal ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... to the foundling, Heathcliff, and degrades him. Heathcliff, when his hour comes, pays back his wrong with the interest due. He is brutal beyond brutality to Hindley Earnshaw, and he degrades Hareton, Hindley's son, as he himself was degraded; but he is not brutal to him. The frustrated passion of Catherine Earnshaw for Heathcliff, and of Heathcliff for Catherine, hardly knows itself from hate; they pay each other back torture for torture, and pang for hopeless pang. ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... various character and singular manners afforded an ample scope for pleasantry and ridicule. [137] In the exercise of his uncommon talents, he often descended below the majesty of his rank. Alexander was transformed into Diogenes; the philosopher was degraded into a priest. The purity of his virtue was sullied by excessive vanity; his superstition disturbed the peace, and endangered the safety, of a mighty empire; and his irregular sallies were the less entitled to indulgence, as they appeared ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... situation gave the author, in his youth, an opportunity of seeing a little, and hearing a great deal, about that degraded class who are called gipsies; who are in most cases a mixed race, between the ancient Egyptians who arrived in Europe about the beginning of the fifteenth century, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... it on the other, are entirely responsible for this contrast; difference of food and other obvious causes have had something to do with it; but we say that hard labor has, directly and indirectly, degraded from a true style of manhood the great mass of the Irish peasantry. They are a marked class, and carry in their forms and faces the infallible insignia ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... know! That is your strongest argument. Creatures degraded by centuries of slavery, drunk with the first hours of freedom, commit crimes. You argue from this, that they were meant for slaves. Yes, it is true that if you take a child from the leading strings that upheld it, the child falls down. But you who watch over it, you rejoice at ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... become their oracles, their dictators, or even their gods. The multitude most naturally surrendered themselves to all such delusions. If it may be conceived to have been possible that their feeble and degraded reason, in the absence of divine light and of sound human discipline, might by earnest exertion have attained in some small degree to judge better that exertion was precluded by indolence, by the immediate wants and unavoidable employments of life, by sensuality, ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... and yet slaves. They were permitted to prosper until their vices wrought out their own destruction, and they became finally subservient to the posterity of Japhet. But among some of the descendants of Ham civilization never advanced. The negro race of Africa ever has been degraded and enslaved. It has done nothing to advance human society. None of these races, even the most successful, have left durable monuments of intellect or virtue: they have left gloomy monuments of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Conquest, and had done good service again during the Revolution, especially in Carleton's victory over Arnold on Lake Champlain in 1776. It had not, however, been kept up as a proper naval force, but had been placed under the quartermaster-general's department of the Army, where it had been mostly degraded into a mere branch of the transport service. At one time the effective force had been reduced to 132 men; though many more were hurriedly added just before the war. Most of its senior officers were ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... everything, except the misery of my own degraded position! I ask for nothing save that God, in his mercy, will free me from it, I care not how! I look despairingly on all sides, and see no escape! I am bound, hand and foot, by the chains of my own noble birth, and shut within the iron walls of circumstance. ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... be introduced with propriety, where the sentence breaks off abruptly; where a significant pause is required; or where there is an unexpected turn in the sentiment; as, "If thou art he, so much respected once—but, oh! how fallen! how degraded!" "If acting conformably to the will of our Creator;—if promoting the welfare of mankind around us;—if securing our own happiness;—are objects of the highest moment: then we are loudly called upon to cultivate and extend the great interests ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... railroads and steamboats and telegraphs; who would see undone in Egypt all that great Mehemet Ali achieved, and would prefer rather to forget than emulate him; a man who found his great empire a blot upon the earth—a degraded, poverty-stricken, miserable, infamous agglomeration of ignorance, crime, and brutality—and will idle away the allotted days of his trivial life and then pass to the dust and the worms and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... OF LIFE... Improvement implies, I suppose, EACH FORM OBTAINING MANY PARTS OR ORGANS, all excellently adapted for their functions." "All this," he adds, "seems to me quite compatible with certain forms fitted for simple conditions, remaining unaltered, or being degraded." (Ibid. Vol. II. page 177.) But the great question is, if the conditions of life will in the long run favour "improvement" in the sense of differentiation (or harmony of differentiation and integration). Many beings are best adapted to their conditions of life if they have few organs and ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... long series of desolating civil wars, the free middle classes of Italy had almost wholly disappeared. Above the position which they had occupied, an oligarchy of wealth had reared itself; beneath that position a degraded mass of poverty and misery was fermenting. Slaves; the chance sweepings of every conquered country; shoals of Africans, Sardinians, Asiatics, Illyrians, and others made up the bulk of the population of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... need make no apology for attaching my name to that of one so worthy the esteem of his co-dogs, ay, and co-cats too; for in spite of the differences which have so often raised up a barrier between the members of his race and ours, not even the noblest among us could be degraded by raising a "mew" to the honour of ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... very sore on his back and in his feelings. He felt humiliated to be beaten like a dog, and even a dog feels degraded in being beaten. He told his mother about it—the tall, dignified, sweet-faced mother, patient in trouble and full of a goodness that did not talk much about goodness. She always took it for granted that her boy would not do anything ...
— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston
... upon, stated, in a few concise words, the facts to the master. His tone was low, but the boys caught the sense, that Arthur was really innocent, and that poor Tom had been degraded for nothing. ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... never fish, except in stress of dire necessity, in the Odyssey, and Homer's own Diomede and Odysseus would never stoop to assassinate a companion when engaged in the contemplative man's recreation. We here see the heroes in late degraded form as on the Attic stage. (4) The Cyclics introduce Helen as daughter of Nemesis, and describe the flight of Nemesis from Zeus in various animal forms, a Marchen of a sort not popular with Homer; an Ionic ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... If anything could ever persuade me to be a Christian, it would be the fact that Shakespeare was one. If England's name is rendered imperishable, it will be through the fame of Shakespeare alone,—just as we have a kind of tenderness for degraded modern Greece, because of Homer. Ay, ay! countries and nations are worthless enough; it is only the great names of heroes that endure, to teach the lesson that is never learned sufficiently,—namely, that man and man alone is fitted to grasp the ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... with the full respect of all their fellow-citizens. To how many does that lot now fall? During the last years of their lives they were to be saved from any of the horrors of poverty. How many now lack the comforts they cannot earn for themselves? And to them there would be no degraded feeling that they were the recipients of charity. They would be prepared for their departure, for the benefit of their country, surrounded by all the comforts to which, at their time of life, they would be susceptible, ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... association with what we deem most holy and most venerable. In the hands of the later painters the result was just the reverse—what was most spiritual, most hallowed, most elevated, became secularized, materialized, and shockingly degraded. ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... elevates the mind and thoughts to God! Zeal in a sacred cause alone is deemed An aberration of our mental powers. The sons of pleasure cannot bear that light Of heavenly birth which penetrates the souls Of men, who, deeply conscious of their guilt, Mourn o'er their lost, degraded state, and seek, Through faith in Christ's atonement, to regain The glorious liberty of sons of God! Who, as redeemed, account it their chief joy To praise and celebrate the wondrous love That called them out of darkness into ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... with homes wrecked, and children neglected, stunted and slain. The proud edifice of modern industry itself, on whose account homes are turned into workshops, children into slaves, and mothers into slave-drivers, is undermined and degraded by this illegitimate competition, the most powerful of all factors in lowering wages, and preventing organization among regular factory hands. The matter lies in a nutshell. Industry which originated in the home could be safely carried ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... dukes, marquises, earls, and hereditary officials arrived for consecutive days from various parts; all of whom were, if not the relatives of the Jung and Ning mansions, at least their old friends. There were either those who had obtained transfers on promotion, or others who had been degraded; either those, who had married, or those who had gone into mourning, and Madame Wang had so much congratulating and condoling, receiving and escorting to do that she had no time to attend to any entertaining. There was therefore less than ever any one in the front part to look after things. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... prostitutes, as he supposes,—for he says there is one put on this paper, and he infers that the rest are of the same description,—that has not altered my opinion at all. Where is your law that says that the mean, the low, and the degraded, shall be deprived of the right of petition, if their moral character is not good? Where, in the land of free-men, was the right of petition ever placed on the exclusive basis of morality and virtue? Petition is supplication—it is entreaty—it is prayer! And where is the degree ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the age of ten years, to a crown which his father had degraded. The Pope addressed him as "Vassallus Noster," and sent his legates, one after another, to maintain his authority. It was in St. Paul's Cathedral that this authority was most conspicuously asserted. Before the high altar these ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... leadership of Moses Mendelssohn the Jews of Germany discarded the use of the German-Jewish jargon or Yiddish, the language of the Jew's degradation, (for there would have been no such thing as Yiddish had the Jew not been degraded and excluded as he was in the countries of Europe) and began the employment of pure German. Secondly, there was the educational emancipation. The Jews had been educated in chedarim where they received instruction only in Hebrew branches and no so-called secular ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... powerful and popular writers in the cause of error had wrought most harm to their race, I should hesitate in reply whether to name Voltaire, or Byron, or the last most ingenious and most venomous of the degraded philosophers of Germany, or rather Cervantes, for he cast scorn upon the holiest principles of humanity—he, of all men, most helped forward the terrible change in the soldiers of Europe, from the spirit of Bayard ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... archers, having previously determined by lot their order of precedence, were to shoot each three shafts in succession. The sports were regulated by an officer of inferior rank, termed the provost of the games; for the high rank of the marshals of the lists would have been held degraded had they condescended to superintend the sports of ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... very atmosphere that surrounds her followers, and she is not satisfied by confining her contaminating influences to her own followers, but she is everlastingly stretching her filthy grasp to pull Protestantism down to her degraded level. Catholicism lowers the standard of public opinion. She makes war on morality and virtue, which destroys character. Catholicism countenances wrong-doings. Catholicism tolerates evil and rewards vice, and it is a well-known fact that "evil communications ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... public gaze; but no such delicacy was observed. The criminal's cart, with its ghastly faggot for a seat, was her ordained conveyance; but her step did not falter as she stepped into the vehicle which had been previously tenanted by the vilest and most degraded culprits. Never had there been seen so dense a crowd in the Place de Greve; and as she glanced hurriedly around, unaware of the popular reaction of feeling, she cowered for an instant panic-struck, and murmured ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... was indeed the one true Church, but she had been under an eclipse since the Reformation; in fact, since she had begun to exist. She had, it is true, escaped the corruptions of Rome; but she had become enslaved by the secular power, and degraded by the false doctrines of Protestantism. The Christian Religion was still preserved intact by the English priesthood, but it was preserved, as it were, unconsciously—a priceless deposit, handed down blindly from generation to generation, and subsisting less by the ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... on this occasion, suffer ourselves to be degraded from legislators to messengers from the commons to the throne; should we be content only to transmit the laws which we ought to amend, and resign ourselves up implicitly to the wisdom of those whom we have formerly considered as our inferiours, I know ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... the standard theologian of the evangelical party, declared: "We have no reason at all to believe that the animal had a serpentine form in any mode or degree until its transformation; that he was then degraded to a reptile to go upon his belly imports, on the contrary, an entire loss and alteration of the original form." Here, again, was a ripe result of the theologic method diligently pursued by the strongest thinkers in the Church during nearly ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the funds of the parish," answered my mother, "he becomes what is called a pauper, and among the English peasantry of the better sort, there is the greatest possible aversion to be ranked with this degraded class. Consequently, the inmates of the workhouses are either those whose infirmities prevent their earning a subsistence, or the idle and the dissolute, who feel none of the honest prejudices of self-dependence, and care ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Roland still in front, they went up several steps, and found themselves in the choir of the chapel, where the scene we have related between Morgan and the Company of Jehu took place. Only now the stalls were empty, the choir was deserted, and the altar, degraded by the abandonment of worship, was no longer covered by the burning ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... that sound strange, Raby? Oh, how little we know what is good for us. Once I thought Hugh's love was everything, but I see now I was wrong. I suppose I should have been like other women if I had married him; but I should not have tasted the joy I know now. Oh, how I love my children—dirty, degraded, sinful as they are; how I love to spend myself in their service. God has been good to us, and given us both what He knew we wanted," and Raby's low "Amen" ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was to bastardise the brothers, that the act was calculated and passed; and as the words all the issue comprehend male and females, it is clear that both were intended to be bastardized. I must however, impartially observe that Philip de Comines says, Richard having murdered his nephews, degraded their two sisters in full parliament. I will not dwell on his mistake of mentioning two sisters instead of five; but it must be remarked, that neither brothers or sisters being specified in the act, but under the general term of king Edward's issue, it would naturally ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... arms to receive and restore to his long lost birthright, the trampled and abused child of poverty: to bid him stand up a free inheritor of a free soil, who so long laboured for a scanty pittance of bread, as an ignorant and degraded slave, in the country to which you now cling with such passionate fondness, and leave ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... Eunice interrupted his thoughts. At sight of her all his cares and troubles vanished without a trace. He forgot Caesar, the disfavor into which he had fallen, the degraded Augustians, the persecution threatening the Christians, Vinicius, Lygia, and looked only at her with the eyes of an anthetic man enamoured of marvellous forms, and of a lover for whom love breathes from those forms. She, in a transparent violet robe ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... worshipped nearly every object in nature indiscriminately; made war their pastime, and feasted on the flesh of their slaughtered captives. The Sun, the great luminary and parent of mankind, taking compassion on their degraded condition, sent two of his children, Manco Capac and Mama Oello Huaco, to gather the natives into communities, and teach them the arts of civilized life. The celestial pair, brother and sister, husband and wife, advanced along the high plains in the neighborhood of Lake Titicaca, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... "you may read the real condition of the country. In all that requires something more than usual, a deficiency; in all that is deemed an average, better than common. The tendency is to raise every thing that is elsewhere degraded to a respectable height, when there commences an attraction of gravitation that draws all towards the centre; a little closer too than could be ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... a floor in my life; but I had seen it done, without taking much account of the art in it. I set to work, feeling more degraded each moment, as the hardness of the deck began to make my knees sore. When I had done about half of the cabin (in a lazy, neglectful way, leaving patches unscrubbed, only just wetted over, so as to seem clean to a chance observer) I thought ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... soldiery; the people hid themselves in dens and caves of the earth, took to the woods and mountains, where many of them remained swelling the multitude of brigands. When they could they wreaked upon the lansquenets a vengeance as dreadful as what they had suffered, and were thus degraded to the same level of ferocity. Moral life was broken up. The Germany of Luther with its order and piety and domestic virtue, with its old ways and customs, even with its fashions of dress and furniture, perished almost as ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... to see what marriage sometimes is, compared with what it might be—to see it degraded to the level of a business transaction when it was meant to be infinitely above the sordid touch of the dollar and the dime. It is a perverted instinct which leads one to marry for money, for it will not buy happiness, though ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... go hand in hand, whenever it is possible, in the dealings of the detective with the criminal. There is no human being so degraded but there is some little bright spark of conscience and of right still ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... slavery is that it was as much detrimental to the white race as it was to the Negroes, as one elevated ones minds too highly, and the other degraded ones mind ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... save her. And to think that I, through pity, have received such a wretch into my house.' 'How,' said the priest to me, with indignation, 'in spite of the salutary counsels which your master has given you so often before me, you have thus degraded yourself? Oh, this is unpardonable. My friend, after the kindness you have shown her and her family, pity would be a weakness. Be inexorable,' said the priest, a dupe, like everybody else, of the hypocrisy of ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... legally righteous act the policeman in the moral world would be amusing were it not so sad. They are always making the evil "move on," driving it to do its mischiefs to other people instead of them; dispersing nests of the degraded to crowd them the more, and with worse results, in other parts: why should such be shocked at the idea of sending out of the world those to whom they will not give a place in it to lay their heads? They treat them in this world as, according to the old theology, their God treats ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... I expected. When I found all this anxiously sought and eagerly accepted, I was lost in astonishment. At times—may I venture to confess?—your regard for me brought your judgment into question! It failed to inspire me with more respect for myself; and not to look at me with my own eyes degraded you in my opinion. ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... what he remembers of him either to traits of outward appearance or to appreciations of his genius. I must say a few, a very few words of what Dickens appeared to me as a man. I think that an epithet, which, much and senselessly as it has been misapplied and degraded, is yet, when rightly used, perhaps the grandest that can be applied to a human being, was especially applicable to him. He was a hearty man, a large-hearted man that is to say. He was perhaps the ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... use their ballot agin us? Ef I know myself, I think not. Kin they read? Kin they write? Aint the bulk uv em rather degraded and low than otherwise? Methinks. Aint that the kind uv stock we want, and the kind wich hez alluz set us up? Readin hez alluz bin agin us. Every skool master is a engine uv Ablishnism; every noosepaper is a cuss. General Wise, uv Virginia, when he thanked ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... account of Vespasian's reign. His praise of Augustus and of Trajan was never written. The emperors whom he depicts for us were all either tyrannical or contemptible, or both: no floods of modern biography can wash them white. They seemed to him to have degraded Roman life and left no room for virtus in the world. The verdict of Rome had gone against them. So he devotes to their portraiture the venom which the fifteen years of Domitian's reign of terror had engendered ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... fact, the chief significance of this action, which ratified and in a measure closed the effete system to which the middle eighteenth century had degraded the erroneous, but comparatively hearty, tradition received by it from the seventeenth. It is true, the same blundering method was illustrated in the War of 1778. Arbuthnot and Graves, captains when Byng was tried, followed his plan in 1781, with like demonstration ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... an hour later, when he and the publican were tying a tow-rope round the pony's lean neck, Mr. Denny was aware of a sinking of the heart as he surveyed his bargain. It looked, and was, an utterly degraded little object, as it stood with its tail tucked in between its drooping hindquarters, and the rain running in brown streams down its legs. Its lips were decorated with the absurd, the almost incredible ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... shoulders, nor wonder if people, lifted from the dunghills of the world, have some stench and rags of their old vices hanging about them still. That thought should moderate our expectations of the characters of converts from heathenism, or from the degraded classes at home. And it should be present to ourselves, when we find in ourselves sad recurrences of faults and sins that we know should have been cast out, and that we hoped ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... structure of the bee, and in all its stages of growth, our parasite seems lower in the zooelogical scale than its host. It is structurally a degraded form of Working-bee, and its position socially is unenviable. It is lazy, not having the provident habits of the Working-bees; it aids not in the least, so far as we know, the cross-fertilization of plants—one great office in the economy of nature ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... realize the force of this argument, we reverse our view as to the nature of public assistance in such a case. We no longer consider it desirable to drive the mother out to her charing work if we possibly can, nor do we consider her degraded by receiving public money. We cease, in fact, to regard the public money as a dole, we treat it as a payment for a civic service, and the condition that we are inclined to exact is precisely that she should not endeavour to add to it by earning wages, ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... Things amuse us in the mouth of a fool that would not amuse us in that of a gentleman; a fact which shows how little incongruity and degradation have to do with our pleasure in the comic. In fact, there is a kind of congruity and method even in fooling. The incongruous and the degraded displease us even there, as by their nature they must at all times. The shock which they bring may sometimes be the occasion of a subsequent pleasure, by attracting our attention, or by stimulating passions, such as scorn, or cruelty, or self-satisfaction (for there is a good deal of ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... articles in the 'Review' were a series of inexcusably bitter attacks upon the Methodists. He is thoroughly alarmed and disgusted by their progress. He thinks them likely to succeed, and says that, if they succeed, 'happiness will be destroyed, reason degraded, and sound religion banished from the world,' and that a reign of fanaticism will be succeeded by 'a long period of the grossest immorality, atheism, and debauchery.' He is not sure that any remedy or considerable palliative ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... or Paganism, at the royal command. Thousands who were incompetent to appreciate what was really valuable in his speculations eagerly welcomed a theory which, while it exalted the kingly office, relaxed the obligations of morality and degraded religion into a mere affair of state. Hobbism soon became an almost essential part of the character of the fine gentleman. All the lighter kinds of literature were deeply tainted by the prevailing ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... and worse; the majority wholly degraded to the standard of the Herald and of the Times. The poor Tribune, daily fading away, altogether losing that bold, lofty spirit of initiative to which for so many years the Tribune owed its all-powerful and unparalleled influence over the free masses. Now, at times, the Tribune ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... the lowest and poorest order. Filth, vice, and poverty, held high carnival the whole year round. In the day time crowds of tattered roughs played rudely with one another in the streets, and after dark, drunken soldiers, sailors, and wharf men, made night hideous with their degraded revelry ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... promenaders were more rigorously expelled than ever. In consequence, "to-day," relates a chronicler of the period, "excepting on days of the opera, the Palais-Royal is nothing but a vast solitude." In 1784, the streets back of it, inhabited by a dissolute and degraded population of both sexes, had become "veritable cloacae." On the evening of the 31st of October, 1785, at a moment when the evening promenade was more crowded even than usual, a dragoon, having one ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... calamity. There was little indeed either to excite or to gratify any interest or curiosity separate from the personal interest inevitably connected with a case to which there were two such parties as a brutal, sensual, degraded ruffian, on one side in character of accuser, and on the other as defendant, a meek angel of a woman, timid and fainting from the horrors of her situation, and under the licentious gaze of the crowd—yet, at the same time, bold ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... borough would not be spared. There was no comfort for him at Percycross,—other than what arose from a pure political conscience. On the very morning on which he left, he besought his friends, the young men,—though they were about to be punished, degraded, and disfranchised for the sins of their elders, though it might never be allowed to them again to stir themselves for the political welfare of their own borough,—still to remember that Purity and the Rights of Labour were ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... blue glass vase poised on the back of a bronze swan, which had lost one wing and part of its bill in the combat with time, hinted at the rainbow splendors of its native Prague, and bewailed the captivity that degraded its ultra-marine depths into a receptacle ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... a fish of Westland, New Zealand, Neochanna apoda, Gunth. Guenther says Neochanna is a "degraded form of Galaxias [see Mountain-Trout], from which it differs by the absence of ventral fins. This fish has hitherto been found only in burrows, which it excavates 1n clay or consolidated mud, at a ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... subjects of little importance. It seems to have been, in all ages, the pride of wit, to show how it could exalt the low, and amplify the little. To speak not inadequately of things really and naturally great, is a task not only diflicult but disagreeable; because the writer is degraded in his own eyes, by standing in comparison with his subject, to which he can hope to add nothing from his imagination: but it is a perpetual triumph of fancy to expand a scanty theme, to raise glittering ideas from obscure properties, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... told, by saying: 'Every one may have his opinion. Had I been a stranger to the Power family, the case would have been different; but having been specially elected by the lady's father as a competent adviser in such matters, and then to be degraded to the position of a mere competitor, it ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... such distinguished services to his country as to merit the gratitude and reverence of every loyal American; a man who has spent the best years of his life in fighting his country's battles and in studying and obeying her laws, was insulted and degraded by men who, so far as true moral worth is concerned, are unworthy to sit at the same ...
— The Battle of the Big Hole • G. O. Shields
... would have prepared for them a sad future, for they would have become enemies of Religion and you would have seen them garroted or exiled; if you had kept them ignorant, you would have seen them tyrannized over and degraded. I could not consent to it! For this reason I sought for you a husband that could make you the happy mother of sons who would command and not obey, who would punish and not suffer. I knew that the friend of your childhood was good, I liked him as well as his father, but I have hated them both ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the instigation of the emperor, who wished to save his life on account of his own pledged honour. But all these efforts could not move the faith nor firmness of this pious and heroic man; and on the 6th of July, A.D. 1415, he was unanimously condemned, ignominiously degraded from the office of a priest, and burned alive the same day. His ashes were thrown into ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson |
