"Degrading" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the earth. But we said "largely," for there are millions of people in this nation that are still in the lowest grades of ignorance and superstition. There are four millions of colored people who can neither read nor write, and have not yet escaped from the degrading effects of centuries of slavery. There are among the mountaineers of the South two millions of people, descendants of a noble race, who have for more than a hundred years been largely without schools or intelligent churches, ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 4, April 1896 • Various
... will cudgel my brains without ceasing, I will chastise my laziness without mercy. I will toil, suffer, even to the extent of making myself ill; but I will put a stop, once for all, to this languishing and tiresome life, which is degrading me and causing sorrow to others. Courage! to work! To work with all my soul, and all my nerves! To work, which will restore to me sweet repose, pleasing games, cheerful meals! To work, which will give me back again ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... alluded in particular to that German criticism, which views our sacred books as nothing better than a system of mythology, and to that too well-known romance of a French writer, M. Renan, entitled: "The Life of Jesus." He condemned materialism, pantheism, naturalism, and all those more or less degrading systems which deny human liberty, proclaim a morality independent of the laws of God; which derive from material force and superior numbers all law and authority: and which in philosophy make reason their God, the state in politics, and passion in the daily ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... fashions are equally tasteful with those of our Palmyrenes, I must confess. The love of the beautiful, the magnificent, and the luxurious, is our national fault, Lucius; it betrays itself in every department of civil and social life, and not unfrequently declines into a degrading effeminacy. If any thing ruin us, it will be this vice. I assure you I was rather jesting than in earnest, when I bade you look to your toilet. When you shall have seen some of our young nobles, you will find reason to be proud of your comparative simplicity. I hear, however, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... unhappy child. It had been neglected and seemed almost starved. Those around apparently took pleasure in tormenting it and rendering it miserable, and vied with each other in applying to it insulting and degrading epithets. The little articles that Cecil gave to it, in the hope that the Indians seeing him manifest an interest in it would treat it more tenderly, it put to its mouth eagerly; but not finding them eatable, it threw them aside in disgust. ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... be much better for the child, if she could be wholly removed from the city, in which she had lived so unhappy and discreditable a life, and where it was to be feared she would always be subject to the degrading influence or annoying ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... does not work. She is simply "worked." And there is all the difference in the world between "working" and "being worked." To work is a privilege and a boon to either man or woman, and, properly regulated, it ought to be a pleasure. To be worked is degrading. To work is dignified and ennobling, for to work means the exercise of the mental quite as much as the physical self. But the average working girl puts neither heart nor mind into her labor; she is merely a machine, though the comparison is a libel ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... same in Ajax. His arrogance, which was punished with a degrading madness, is atoned for by the deep shame which at length drives him even to self-murder. The persecution of the unfortunate man must not, however, be carried farther; when, therefore, it is in contemplation to dishonour his very corpse by the refusal of interment, even Ulysses interferes. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... the right to ask me that degrading question," he said, in a voice weakened by the ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... standing by the Rhine, a galley with silken streamers appeared, into which he was invited to enter. After he had been gliding for some time down the stream, he found that he was a prisoner. The archbishops of Milan and Cologne, with other powerful lords, having consigned him to a degrading captivity, administered, in his name, the government of the empire. By affording him every means of vicious indulgence, they were only too successful in corrupting a noble and generous nature. Very soon he was guilty of crimes, and plunged into ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer's sombre imagination ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... recovering herself after the first instant of consternation, "you are degrading the greatest noble in the land! You, the head of the house of Lorraine, the chief of the League, the commander of the allied armies, debase yourself in stooping to take vengeance ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... following year (1830) he was told that he might be elected to the House of Representatives, and the gentleman who made the proposition ventured to say that he thought an ex-President, by taking such a position, "instead of degrading the individual would elevate the representative character." Mr. Adams replied that he had "in that respect no scruples whatever. No person can be degraded by serving the people as Representative in Congress, nor, in my opinion, would an ex-President of the United States be degraded ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... on a table in the sitting-room beyond which extended other rooms that, in addition to being ugly, were dark. But Lennox had no degrading manias for comfort. Pending the great day he camped in these rooms, above which, on an upper storey was a duplex apartment which, if Margaret liked, he proposed ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... in the commonly used animal sense is not a theory or principle for a "time-binding" being. This theory is only for the physical bodies of animals; its effect upon humanity is sinister and degrading (see App. II). We see the principle at work all about us in criminal exploitation and profiteering. As a matter of fact, the ages-long application of this animal principle to human affairs has degraded the whole human morale in an inconceivably far-reaching way. Personal greed and selfishness ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... thoughts but to menace and alarm them. They cannot strike the sun out of heaven, but they are able to raise a smouldering smoke that obscures Him from their own eyes. Not being able to revenge themselves on God, they have a delight in vicariously defacing, degrading, torturing, and tearing in pieces, His image in man. Let no one judge of them by what he has conceived of them, when they were not incorporated, and had no lead. They were then only passengers in a common vehicle. ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... nothing worse than what he richly deserved. And who should say that all was not upon the whole for the best as it had pleased heaven to cause it to fall out? The Marchese Lamberto was saved, despite his own folly, from a disgraceful and degrading marriage; and Ludovico was saved from the ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... woman that he should be righteous? Behold, he putteth no trust in his saints. Yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight; how much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water?" Strange, that after all these thousands of years, we should still persist in this degrading confession, as a thing which it is impious to deny, and impious to attempt to render otherwise, when scripture itself, in language so emphatic, declares that it is a lie. Job is innocent, perfect, righteous. God ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... had a taste for them, one must suppose. But she treated Tihon on a different plan: she did not torture him; she played with him. She did not once drive him to desperation, she did not set him to suffer the degrading agonies of hunger, but she led him a dance through the whole of Russia from one end to the other, from one degrading and ludicrous position to another; at one time Fate made him 'majordomo' to a snappish, choleric Lady Bountiful, at another a humble parasite on a wealthy skinflint merchant, then ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... unavoidable, but would be very profitable to themselves. He overcame their prejudice against labour by showing them that an occupation to which we powerful and rich white men were glad to devote ourselves could be neither degrading nor burdensome. They were not to suppose that we intended them to grub about in the earth, like the barbarous negroes, with wretched spades; the hard work would be done by oxen; they need only walk behind the implements, which were already on the ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... issues: air pollution from power plant emissions results in acid rain; acidification of lakes and reservoirs degrading water quality and threatening aquatic life; Japan's appetite for fish and tropical timber is contributing to the depletion of these resources in Asia and elsewhere natural hazards: many dormant and some active volcanoes; about 1,500 seismic occurrences ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... in this respect, we must also consider the difficulties and privations to which the people of England will be subjected." These words of the First Minister were evidently spoken in a spirit of kindness and compassion; still it is hard for an Irishman to avoid feeling that they are degrading and offensive. Ireland is not regarded as part and parcel of the United Kingdom in any part of the quotation. He speaks of placing a serious burthen on the finances "of this country," meaning England only. Again: the sums advanced are, he feels, derived from the people "of this country," by their ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... failings, and his whole manner had grown dry and sarcastic, not merely to her, but sometimes to Cynthia,—and even—but this very rarely, to Molly herself. He was not a man to go into passions, or ebullitions of feeling: they would have relieved him, even while degrading him in his own eyes; but he became hard, and occasionally bitter in his speeches and ways. Molly now learnt to long after the vanished blindness in which her father had passed the first year of his marriage; yet there ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... my mother," responded she hastily. "She was too pure and noble to be dishonored by your cruel laws. She would never have entered into any such base and degrading arrangement as you propose. She couldn't have lived under the perpetual shame of deceiving another wife. She couldn't have loved my father, if he had deceived her as you have deceived me. She trusted him entirely, and in return he gave her ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... Brooks at Edgefield Court House, and guarded the fatal notice during the day with a loaded pistol. A relative of Brooks, a feeble, retiring, and unassuming young man, braved the vengeance of Wigfall, and tore the degrading challenge from the court house door in spite of the warning and threats of the Knight of the Code. A pistol shot rang out, and the young champion of Brooks fell dead at his feet. Preston Brooks, hearing of the indignity placed upon his father, the death of his kinsman and defender of his family ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... well-known passage in a brilliant modern satire, where a trenchant satirist declares that he has tracked all human emotions to their lair, and has discovered that they all consist of some dilution of primal and degrading instincts. But the pure and passionless love of natural beauty can have nothing that is acquisitive or reproductive about it. There is no physical instinct to which it can be referred; it arouses no sense of proprietorship; it cannot be connected with any impulse for self-preservation. ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... bitterness and temptation. And because of this she had shown him that she had taken it for granted that whatever he had done in the past had not put him beyond the pale of her friendship. There had been no degrading entanglements, and women forgive or condone all ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... you pretend, Lucy," Mr. Nowell wrote on one occasion, "you would speedily exchange this degrading slavery for liberty and happiness with me, and would be content to leave the future utterly in my hands, without question or fear. A really generous ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... Canterbury, one day received a severe thrashing from a famous member of the ring. This changed the editor's opinions as to the propriety of boxing—at any-rate pugilism was repudiated by the Dispatch about 1829; and boxing, from the Dispatch point of view, was henceforward treated as a degrading and brutal amusement, unworthy ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... even the principal ministers felt in the presence of Napoleon would not be credited in England. His courtiers literally trembled before him. 'In what sort of a humour is the Emperor to-day?' was a frequent question in Paris.... How I have blushed for the adulation, the degrading, I may almost say the blasphemous flattery that has been offered before the throne of Napoleon by men of the highest rank. But perhaps I ought to make some allowance for those who had witnessed the horrors ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... of Fifteen ought therefore to take the lead of his fellow-citizen, not in frivolous amusements, not in the degrading pursuits of the ambitious vulgar; but in the truly noble task of enlightening the mass of his countrymen, and of leaving his own name encircled, not with barbaric splendor, or attached to courtly gewgaws, but illustrated by the honors most worthy ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... environment, which in any degree tends to limit her power of choice, or to narrow its range, or to lower her standards of selection, works out in a national and racial deprivation. And surely no one will deny that the degrading industrial conditions under which such a large number of our young girls live and work do all of these, do limit and narrow the range of selection and do lower the standards of the working-girl in ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... socks and bonnets tied with pink and blue. The ruthless hand of man had ransacked each drawer and crevice, and all that calls forth the sacred care of women lay tossed and tumbled in the dirt of floor and passage. To those who had time to think, a sad, heart-rending sight, pitiful evidence of the degrading influence of war. During the first year of the struggle there was not a man in the British army who would have pushed a woman aside to ransack the sacred corners of her chamber. But war's brutal influence in ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... even now see what I could have done save endure. To have struggled with him in the street, or to have exacted any lower recompense from him than his heart's best blood, would have been futile and degrading. Moreover, he was a boy whom no man could hurt; an invulnerable and dodging serpent who, when chased into a corner, flew out again between his captor's legs, scornfully yelping. I wrote, however, to Mr. Trabb by next day's post, to say that Mr. Pip must decline to deal further ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... me to the heart. The guilty, I believe, in every case, less patiently bear the detecting truth, than the innocent do the degrading falshood. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... of regarding servitude is not a degrading one, but the reverse. Nothing is so pleasant to a reasonable and truly noble mind as to pay obedience to those to whom it is due; and if the adaptability of the same individual to be both master and servant was more practically carried out, our civilisation ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... could be satisfactory. The President was openly attacked; his whole system strongly condemned; and the mission of Mr. Jay, particularly, was reprobated in terms of peculiar harshness. That a treaty of amity and commerce should have been formed, whatever might be its principles, was a degrading insult to the American people; a pusillanimous surrender of their honour; and an insidious injury to France. Between such a compact, and an alliance, no distinction was taken. It was an abandonment of the ancient ally of the United States, whose friendship had given them ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... game, and, from the very fact of its fascination, it is extremely dangerous for boys. It is usually associated with drinking saloons, where the air is filled with evil influences and the fumes of rum and tobacco; and, aside from these degrading surroundings, it is a very expensive game. It is a very common occurrence for one to find himself two or three dollars short for a single evening's entertainment of this sort, and this, too, when no drinking or ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey
... did, my dear. But that is not the point. As a woman of advanced views, you were determined to be free. You regarded marriage as a degrading bargain, by which a woman sold herself to a man for the social status of a wife and the right to be supported and pensioned in old age out of his income. That's the advanced view—our view. Besides, if you had married me, I might have turned out a drunkard, ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... God. His enemies were active and powerful, but the queen and many of the nobles were his friends, and the people in great numbers sided with him. Comparing his pure and elevating teachings and holy life with the degrading dogmas which the Romanists preached, and the avarice and debauchery which they practised, many regarded it an honor to be on ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... invasion of the Transvaal, with the design of seizing that country and adding it to the British Empire, was planned by Cecil Rhodes and Beit—which made a revulsion in English feeling, and brought out a storm against Rhodes and the Chartered Company for degrading British honor. For a good while I couldn't seem to get at a clear comprehension of it, it was so tangled. But at last by patient study I have managed it, I believe. As I understand it, the Uitlanders and other Dutchmen were dissatisfied because the English would not allow ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the most enthusiastic and resolute secessionist and supporter of the Confederacy. He was just rising in the world, and anything which barred the upward way was denounced as degrading and insulting. A larger class of Southerners who joined with measured alacrity the armies of defense were the small farmers of the hills and poorer eastern counties; but the "sand-hillers" and "crackers," the illiterate and neglected by-products of the planter counties, were not minded ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... duties and helps of married life; but as society becomes more intelligent it will recognize the fitness of some persons, and the unfitness of others, making it impossible for these to accept such responsibilities and obligations, and so dignify and elevate home life instead of degrading it. ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... consideration which his knowledge of the world told him was well calculated to gain the good will of his haughty and arrogant acquaintance; but all this was in effectual in conquering Borodaile's coldness and reserve. To have been once seen in a humiliating and degrading situation is quite sufficient to make a proud man hate the spectator, and, with the confusion of all prejudiced minds, to transfer the sore remembrance of the event to the association of the witness. Lord Borodaile, though always ceremoniously civil, was immovably ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... towards the group of black penitents kneeling near the altar? Before he could cast a second look they were hid from his sight; and now the Bishop of Placencia advances towards the group of those sentenced to death, and with a knife commences the operation of degrading the priests by scraping off the crown of the head the part which was supposed to have received the holy oil at their consecration. Then garment after garment was torn from them, the Bishop pronouncing all the time terrible ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... haunted air, Hawthorne favours us with a brave conclusion of the good sort, the old sort. They come into money, they marry, they are happy ever after. This is doing things handsomely, though some of our modern novelists think it coarse and degrading. Hawthorne did not think so, and they are not exactly better ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... with those pages that treat of the fashions,—profoundly versed, I warrant, in the 'Magasin des Modes' tacked to the end of the index. But shall I, even with all the mastership which my mind must exercise over his,—shall I be able utterly to free myself in this 'peer of the world's' mind from a degrading remembrance? Cuckold! cuckold! 't is an ugly word; a convenient, willing cuckold, humph!—there is no grandeur, no philosophical varnish in the phrase. Let me see—yes! I have a remedy for all that. I was married privately,—well! under disguised names,—well! It was a ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... their studded harness. Lionel and his wife of a few days descended from it, when they found themselves in the midst of this unexpected crowd. They had cause, those serfs, to shout out a welcome to their lord; for never again would they live in a degrading position, if he could help it. The various improvements for their welfare, which he had so persistently and hopefully planned, were not ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... a release. Do you think there is any virtue or beauty in your present life, or any merit in continuing it? From first to last, your existence is a lie. Do you think a wedding-ring redeems the honour of a woman who sells herself for money? There is no slavery more degrading than the ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... "Isabella Wardle devoted herself exclusively to Mr. Trundle." Pointed enough, surely. We may be fortified in this view by finding that on the return of the party, all dead drunk, at one in the morning, on Trundle was specially cast the degrading menial duty of carrying Wardle to bed—his ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... granted that he was bad, and, wonderful to say, he was provided for accordingly. His treatment was a disgrace. The barrack-room, with its corners curtained off as married quarters, the lash, the hideous and degrading medical inspection—samples of the general treatment—all tended to destroy what remained of manly self-respect and virtue. Whilst the neighbourhood of the barracks and the naval ports, teeming with public-houses ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... their favourite weapon, calumny. In a communication directed to us, they have had the audacity to accuse you of having attacked some property. Miserable wretches! No, the soldiers of the people are not robbers; the cause of liberty is very noble, and its defence will not be stained by a degrading action. This is the answer given to your calumniators by your chiefs, who are as much interested in your reputation as in their own. Soldiers of the people! let valour, as well as all other civic virtues, shine in your conduct, that you may never dim the renown of valiant ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... stings of this bitter, haunting, horrible poverty! The ghastly weight that has hung about my neck since ever I can remember! Oh, shall I ever be free from it? Shall I ever know what it is to have what I ought to have, to think of my work without the intrusion of these degrading pettinesses? ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... is proverbial. To earn and save money they will live in conditions unsanitary, unhealthy, and degrading. It is not because they love dirt and degradation, but that they want money so much that they will put up with anything to get it. They can live and save a bit where an American family would starve. They have fairly monopolized for a time certain ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... Democracy's illustrious Candidate and the Noble Cause, mashallah! one ought to do a little canvassing for Honesty and Truth among Democracy's leaders, tuft-hunters, political stock-jobbers, and such like. O, for a higher stump, my Boss, to preach to those who are supporting and degrading the stumps and the stump-orators ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... that confined me to my bed for several days, succeeded the degrading and exciting scene through which I had passed, and, as Mrs. Clayton had at the same time one of her prostrating neuralgic attacks, the services of Dinah were in active requisition. During my own peculiar phase of suffering, the small racket ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... slaves, the Roman coloni and the German lidi—were concurrently absorbed by the feudal organisation, a few of them assuming a menial relation to the lords, but the greater part receiving land on terms which in those centuries were considered degrading. The tenures created during this era of universal infeudation were as various as the conditions which the tenants made with their new chiefs or were forced to accept from them. As in the case of the benefices, the succession to ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... with. And if at last we concede the ultramundane origin of these manifestations, whether as objective reality or only as truth-teaching allegory, what a field is opened to our speculations regarding the realms of spirit and the possible punishments there in store for those who, by degrading their natures in this world, may have rendered themselves unfit for happiness in the next,—and who, perhaps, still attracted to earth by the debasing excesses they once mistook for pleasure, may be doomed, in the phantom repetition of their sins, to detect their naked reality, to have stamped ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... moral side of the Renaissance intellect it had its tastes and refinements, as shown in its high quality of art; but it also had its polluting and degrading features, as shown in its political and social life. Religion was visibly weakening though the ecclesiastical still held strong. People were forgetting the faith of the early days, and taking up with the material things about them. They ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... guard-house, barracks, and jetty. The military force numbered about sixty men, who, with convict-warders and constables, took charge of more than three hundred and fifty prisoners. These miserable wretches, deprived of every hope, were employed in the most degrading labour. No beast of burden was allowed on the settlement; all the pulling and dragging was done by human beings. About one hundred "good-conduct" men were allowed the lighter toil of dragging timber to the wharf, to assist in shipbuilding; the others cut down the ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... more, not only of the men of our society, but of all societies, even peasants,—this frightful thing that I had fallen, and not because I was subjected to the natural seduction of a certain woman. No, no woman seduced me. I fell because the surroundings in which I found myself saw in this degrading thing only a legitimate function, useful to the health; because others saw in it simply a natural amusement, not only excusable, but even innocent in a young man. I did not understand that it was a fall, and I began to give myself to those pleasures (partly ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... was set and stern. "You ask me to teach him morals. The fact is, we are both teaching him. From whom, do you think, will he take his lesson? What a ghastly farce the thing is! Listen, while the teaching goes on. 'Kalman,' I say, 'don't drink whiskey; it is a beastly and degrading habit.' 'Fudge!' he says, 'Jack drinks whiskey, and so will I.' 'Kalman,' I urge, 'don't swear.' 'Rot,' says he, 'Jack swears.' 'Kalman, be a man, straight, self-controlled, honourable, unselfish.' The answer is,—but no! the answer never will be,—'Jack is a drunken, swearing, selfish, ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... believe with certainty, that the Duke of Richmond has retired from the Cabinet, and means at the same time to keep the Ordnance. What other people mean about that, is, I think, not quite so clear; though the Duke of Richmond's bitterest enemy could not, I should think, wish to see him in a more degrading situation—such a situation, indeed, as it seems impossible should last for any length of time, or a moment longer than till a proper successor ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... did she find greater satisfaction than in being neither "the bride" nor "the little woman" nor any like degrading thing which recently married girls are by their sentimental spinster friends expected to be. She did not whisper the intimate details of her honeymoon to other young married women; she did not run about quaintly and tinily telling ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Elwood was food. He had fasted for thirty hours, and was faint and feeble. A month before such severe abstinence would have left him unable to stand; but the severe deprivation and hardship of the last week, united with its firm, buoyant constitution, and his freedom from the degrading use of tobacco, had developed a strength and endurance remarkable in one so young. He felt that he could wait until the next day without a mouthful, and still be able to travel; but the fainting, craving, hollow feeling rendered ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... dancing-master in a hay-field. He smoked cigarettes and read the sporting page of the paper in the garage, where gasoline rather deadened the country smells of flowers and hay, and tried to forget his degrading surroundings, but he was overjoyed when the day to start for home arrived. I did not share his feelings, and yet I was ready to go. It had been a great success, and the only time I had felt lonely was in a crowded restaurant in San Diego, where J—— and I had had many jolly ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... this apology the sweetness of Hamlet's nature. How few are alive enough, that is unselfish and true enough, to be capable of genuine apology! The low nature always feels, not the wrong, but the confession of it, degrading.] ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... addresses his volumes. We have a whole chapter on Practical Life, [24] on self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, full of portentous platitudes and ancient saws; St. Paul's doctrine of charity, and all that is best in the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, is liberated from its degrading association with the belief in a God who rewards and punishes.[25] We are "to act strenuously in that direction which, after conscientious inquiry, seems the best, ... and trust to what religious men call Providence, and scientific men Evolution, for the result," ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... bear more direct fruit in his day, for it would have turned Mozart, as well as many others, from the loose, clumsy mannerisms of the later virtuoso style, which ran to the Alberti bass and other degrading platitudes, paralleled in our comparatively modern days by the Thalberg arpeggios, repeating notes, ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... a table like his landlord, anticipates seasons in their productions, is as choice in his wines, his horses, and his furniture.' Let him be more thrifty. 'Let him dismiss his steward, a character a few years back only known to the great landowner, and cease from degrading the British farmer into a synonym for prodigality.' Lord Liverpool, in the House of Lords, in a speech which roused great opposition among agriculturists, minimized the distress; distress there was, he admitted, but it was not confined to England, it was world-wide; neither was it produced ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... strange to insist upon, but one has only to mark the injury to everything noble, of an atmosphere of flippancy and constant strain after smart language. There is nothing in flippancy to have awe of—any one can learn the knack of it—but it is foolish and degrading, while seriousness is the color ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... elevation," said I, "I confess I prefer the spectacle of Socrates, relying even on feeble arguments rather than sink to this tame acquiescence in a notion so degrading to the Deity, as that man was created for a dog's life with the tormenting aspiration for something better. The spectacle of the heathen sage, who, amidst the thick gloom, the 'palpable obscure,' which involved this subject, gazed intently into the darkness, and 'longed for the ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... climate. More men kill themselves by a happy mixture of both than the importance of their achievements justifies. I was chaffing Lenox only last night about his leaning towards that unrecognised form of suicide; and all the answer I got was that a man might die of a more degrading disease. You never by any chance get a ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... concealed themselves under the forms of animals; and lastly, from the doctrine of the metempsychosis, according to which there was a continual circulation of the souls of men and animals. But behind the open and popular exercise of this degrading worship the priests concealed a symbolism full of philosophical conceptions. How this symbolism was corrupted and misinterpreted by the uninitiated people, is shown by Gliddon, and ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... wrote the letter before he went to his bed. It was not very easily written. Here, at any rate, he had to make those confessions of which I have before spoken—confessions which it may be less difficult to make with pen and ink than with spoken words, but which, when so made, are more degrading. The word that is written is a thing capable of permanent life, and lives frequently to the confusion of its parent. A man should make his confessions always by word of mouth, if it be possible. Whether such a course would have been possible to Harry Clavering may ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... right of every individual to live in some degree of comfort and security is nothing but the taking shape of these ideas and emotions; for the end of all civilisation is to ensure that there shall be freedom for all from debasing and degrading conditions, and that is perhaps as far as we have hitherto advanced; but the further end in sight is to set all men and women free to some extent from hopeless drudgery, to give them leisure, to provide them with tastes and interests; and further still, to contrive, if possible, ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... officers of the transport looking grinning on) when a boat came from the shore bringing our captain to the ship; and though I started and blushed red as he recognised me—a descendant of the Barrys—in this degrading posture, I promise you that the sight of Fagan's face was most welcome to me, for it assured me that a friend was near me. Before that I was so melancholy that I would certainly have deserted had I found the ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a spark to gunpowder. The oaths, the insult, the whole degrading episode, combined to drive McRae out of the self-restraint he had imposed on himself. He took one step forward. With a wide sweep of the clenched fist he buffeted the smuggler on the ear. Taken by surprise, West went spinning against the ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... condition of the people. I wandered around and examined the idols, most of which had in front of them, and in some instances on their flat heads, offerings of tobacco, food, red cotton, and other things. My heart was sad at these evidences of such degrading idolatry, and I was deeply impressed with my need of wisdom and aid from on high, so that when I met the people who here worshipped these idols I might so preach Christ and Him crucified that they would be constrained to accept ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... that these soul-blasting and hope-killing exposures—so degrading to the criminal, so demoralizing to the community,—these foul, in-human blots on our fair and dearly loved Puritan Lord's Day, were never frequent, nor did the form of punishment obtain for a long ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... bring into existence new jingo armies and new jingo frontiers? All the other revolutionists fell in instinctively with Home Rule for Ireland. Shaw urged, in effect, that Home Rule was as bad as Home Influences and Home Cooking, and all the other degrading domesticities that began with the word "Home." His ultimate support of the South African war was largely created by his irritation against the other revolutionists for favouring a nationalist resistance. The ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... difference of height is, however, scarcely a sufficient reason for pronouncing them to be of a different race from the other two classes; is it not more reasonable to conclude it to be the result of the degrading servitude to which they have been subjected? These plebeians could under no circumstances raise themselves to a higher class; and a seafaring life was forbidden to them. Each of the three castes had its ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... sight more welcome. The heat of the sun, the excitement of the encounter with the rebels, the strain of the sixty miles' ride, all combined to weary him both mentally and bodily. The thought that after months of degrading captivity he was at last free was scarcely sufficient to raise his flagging spirits. As he saw the miles of white lines of tents stretching before him, a feeling of contentment gradually crept over his tired body, but there was none of the exhilaration ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... and old Hollis, who thinks that monkeys have as good a right to vote as women, belongs to the other. At a surface glance their views regarding women seem to be diametrically opposed, but to me it has always appeared that they equally serve the purpose of degrading the position of women. You should have seen how cruel Walker looked to-night when an old man asked if he approved of women entering the senate. He said no like ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... those causes which in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tended to increase information, and to secure the liberty of the mass of the people. The invention of printing; the reformation; the destruction of the feudal system, at least in its most objectionable, degrading, and paralizing features; the contentions between the nobility and the sovereigns, and between the latter and the people; gave a stimulus to the human mind, and thus enlarged its capacities, desires, and views, in such ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... solar influence continues to act upon it; that no power but that of Jehovah can change this solar influence; that he can suspend the operation of this influence; that he can and does manipulate—handle the laws which he has established—whenever his wisdom sees proper. It would be degrading to allow that the Almighty One threw this universe of his under laws over which he ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... morning came, nor did any other engagements prevent him from putting in an appearance at his habitual haunt, even though it were past midnight before he were free. As already remarked, however, it was not to sit and drink like a sot that he gave way to this degrading habit, but to get himself "exalted" as he called it, and then when he was duly "exalted" came the firework display of wit and glowing fancy, going on hour after hour without rest or interruption for the space of five or six hours at once. ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... for I was aloof from Spain and her sons. The days of my shame were those when I was clasped in her embraces and was polluted by her crimes; when I was a forced partaker in her bad faith, soul-subduing tyranny, and degrading fanaticism; when I heard only her bragging tongue, and was redolent of nought but the breath of her smoke-loving borrachos; when I was a prison for her convicts and a garrison for her rabble soldiery—Spain, accursed ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... document by the friends and relatives of the girl, it was recognized and identified as her handwriting; and it established the fact that the father had died innocent of every crime, except that of trying to save his child from a degrading marriage. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... say that you have the worst opinion of me; that you deny me the possession of all I value most. That is to say that I am a traitor to all my sisters; that I have acted as no woman can act without degrading herself and her sex; that I have sought where the incorrupt of my kind naturally scorn and abhor to seek.' She and I were silent for many a minute. 'Lucifer, Star of the Morning,' she went on, 'thou art fallen! You, once ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... place, curiously enough, it barely mentions the saint's life-work—his writings. Secondly, it is a good example of what I call the pious palimpsest. It is over-scored with contradictory matter. The author, for example, while accidentally informing us that Alfonso kept a carriage, imputes to him a degrading, Oriental love of dirt and tattered garments, in order (I presume) to make his character conform to the grosser ideals of the mendicant friars. I do not believe in these traits—in his hatred of soap and clean apparel. From his works I deduce a different original. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... invented by vile persons to bring good things, in their own estimates, to their own level, or beneath it. The really worst power of this kind of blasphemy is in its often making it impossible to use plain words without a degrading or ludicrous attached sense:—thus I could not end my translation of this epitaph, as the old Latinist could, with the exactly accurate image "to the proud, a file"—because of the abuse of the word in lower English, retaining, however, quite shrewdly, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... that he obtained was not of much value, but had he brought his work into the market in its natural condition he could not have lived by his trade. He was, therefore, compelled to foster that which he no doubt felt to be degrading. The copies of Stradivari by Jacob Fendt are among his best efforts. The work is well done; the discoloration of the wood cleverly managed, the effects of wear counterfeited with greater skill than had ever ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... as the highest virtue, the true Baluch of the Derajat is a pleasant man to have dealings with. As a revenue payer he is not so satisfactory, his want of industry and the pride which looks upon manual labour as degrading making him but a poor husbandman. He is an expert rider; horse-racing is his national amusement, and the Baluch breed of horses is celebrated throughout northern India. Like the Pathan he is a bandit by tradition and descent and makes a first-rate fighting man, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... with green cinctures sloped away towards the hills. In the midst rose the king's palace, the largest wooden edifice in Europe, while the old grey cathedral—stately and grand, in spite of the slow destruction of the elements, the mutilations of man's hands, or his yet more degrading rough-cast and stucco reparations—still towered above the perishable wooden buildings at his feet, with the solemn pride which befits the shrine of a ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... witnessing tragedies of carnage, hearing incessant plaintive cries, walking about on clogs among pools of clotting or steamy blood, and breathing the fumes of it. And scarce a mile away from the scene of all these loathsome and degrading sights, sounds, and odors, you might have found fastidious and courtly gentlemen, and ladies all belaced and bejewelled, sentimentalising over their "aspic de foie gras," or their "cotelettes a la jardiniere," or some other euphemism for the dead flesh which could ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... Grand Lama was an inferior chess-player, and preferred other forms of innocent amusement, such as cutting off people's heads. So he discouraged chess as a degrading game, that did not improve either the mind or the morals, and abolished the tournament summarily. Then he sent for the four priests who had had the effrontery to play better than a Grand Lama, and addressed them as follows: "Miserable and heathenish ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... to me that to put one's self at the beck and call of another man is essentially degrading. In the long perspective of eternity, was his soul any more majestic than mine? In this luminous new vision of my importance as a fragment of immortal mind, could I, should I, bow to ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... renunciation—of self-sacrifice. It seemed to her that some great work to do, something which should occupy every moment, and all her powers and thoughts, was her only hope of contentment. What it might be, what it ought to be, she had not conceived. Was it not offered now? Horrible, repulsive, degrading—yes, but was it not so much the worthier? Here stood the man she had loved in all the prime and power of his youth, full of hope, and beauty, and vigor—the hero that satisfied the girl's longing—and he was bent, gray, wan, shaking, utterly lost, except for her. Should she restore ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... evils which to a large extent result from the fact that a few votes in each electorate decide whether a party gets all the representation or none at all. Candidates are impelled, in order to gain support from every faction, to acts degrading to themselves and destructive to the moral tone of the people. Foremost among these evils is the great incentive to bribery and corruption; it is manifested not only in direct expenditure at the elections, but also ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... artistic; and by the murk and muck of yellow journalism, with its hideous colored supplements and spine-thrilling tales. So much for the reader. But the publisher himself—well, he battens materially, of course, upon the tired victims of our degrading social system. He sees but the sordid revenue in dollars and cents. Beyond that his morals do ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... him to painting Venuses for keepers of bar rooms, who regarded art only as a means to excite the baser passions of the vulgar. And though he was by this enabled to meet the demands on his purse, the thought of degrading an art to which he had given the devotions of his life, grieved him to the heart. He therefore resolved that, as he could not make it serve the high purpose for which it was intended, he would abandon ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... first was declared by the clergy to be brutal, degrading, atheistic, and anti-Christian, is now included as part of ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... brute beasts,' he said, and he spat over the side of the ship contempt 'Were ye Americans I would trice ye both up and give ye each a hundred lashes, for so degrading thyselves. Out of my ship, ye filthy tatooed swine. Thou art a disgrace to thy race!' So terrified were they that they could not speak, and went away ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... his system of peace. Henry clung to peace in spite of the threatening growth of the French monarchy: he refused to be drawn into any serious war even by its acquisition of Britanny and of a coast-line that ran unbroken along the Channel. Nor was any expedient too degrading if it swelled the royal hoard. Edward by a single stroke, the grant of the customs to the king for life, secured a source of revenue which went far to relieve the Crown from its dependence on Parliament. He stooped to add to the gold which his confiscations amassed by trading on a vast ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... justifies you. Your cowardly seducer must pay with his life the penalty due to his crime, and he ought never to receive, by marrying you, an unjust reward, for he is not worthy of possessing you after degrading himself ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... returned in all to live at Tette. Some were drawn away by promises made to them as elephant-hunters. I had no objection to their trying to better their condition, but was annoyed at finding that they would not tell their intentions, but ran away as if I were using compulsion. I have learned more of the degrading nature of slavery of late than I ever conceived before. Our 20 millions were well spent in ridding ourselves of the incubus, and I think we ought to assist our countrymen in the West Indies to import free labor from India.... I cannot tell you how glad ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... it degrading," Lois insisted, "not only to the old man himself, but to the people living here. He seems such a gentleman, that I was drawn to ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... limitation. He cleaves to the ethical, not to the intellectual, worship of "Nature," which moderns define to be an "unscientific and imaginary synonym for the sum total of observed phenomena." Consequently he holds to the "dark and degrading doctrines of the Materialist," the "Hylotheist"; in opposition to the spiritualist, a distinction far more marked in the West than in the East. Europe draws a hard, dry line between Spirit and Matter: Asia ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... England, sat in his council chamber surrounded by the great lords and nobles who composed his suit. He awaited Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, whom he had summoned that he might heap still further indignities upon him with the intention of degrading and humiliating him that he might leave England forever. The King feared this mighty kinsman who so boldly advised him against the weak follies which were bringing his kingdom to ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... remote suspicion of this Barratt's connection with the shop which he had not accidentally entered; and the sudden appearance of this wretch it was, at the very moment of finding herself charged with so vile and degrading an offence, that contributed most of all to rob her of her natural firmness, by suddenly revealing to her terrified heart the depth of the conspiracy which thus yawned like a gulf below her. And not only had this sudden horror, upon discovering a ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... means, everything FOR the people, nothing BY them,—a doctrine which, if taken as a guide, must, by destroying the free conscience of a community, speedily prepare the way for any form of despotism. Caesarism is human idolatry in its worst form—a worship of mere power, as degrading in its effects as the worship of mere wealth would be. A far healthier doctrine to inculcate among the nations would be that of Self-Help; and so soon as it is thoroughly understood and carried into action, ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... recollection returned; and, springing from his bed, George dressed himself, with a trembling hand, whilst, for the first time, a sense of his degrading situation stole over his mind; and his heart throbbed with feelings which till this moment had been strangers ...
— The Little Quaker - or, the Triumph of Virtue. A Tale for the Instruction of Youth • Susan Moodie
... to admit that they are the necessary conditions of the existence of all things, and moreover, that they must continue to exist, although all existing things were annihilated— we cannot blame the good Berkeley for degrading bodies to mere illusory appearances. Nay, even our own existence, which would in this case depend upon the self-existent reality of such a mere nonentity as time, would necessarily be changed ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Texas, he having claimed that he held a very profitable position in a large business concern in that city. When they arrived there the poor girl had her awful awakening, for she was promptly sold into the life of shame without hope of escape from its degrading servitude. ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... the troops, some too true, but many of them false or frivolous; and when Wellington ordered courts-martial for the trial of the accused, the magistrates refused to attend as witnesses, because Portuguese custom rendered such attendance degrading, and by Portuguese law a magistrate's written testimony was efficient in courts-martial. Wellington in vain assured them that English law would not suffer him to punish men on such testimony; in vain he pointed out the mischief which must infallibly overwhelm the country, if the soldiers discovered ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... what appertains to their national independence, and if, unhappily, a different impression should at any time obtain in any quarter, they will, I am sure, rally round the Government of their choice with alacrity and unanimity, and silence for ever the degrading imputation. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... Ridicule, degrading labor, insufficient food and inhumane treatment generally are the lot of American soldiers taken prisoner by the Huns. This is the experience of three Americans captured last Autumn by the German Army at the Canal de la Marne au Rhin, in the forest ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... and ambitious, the dissenters from blind obedience and the original thinkers, the colonists and state builders, have broken camp with the morning, and followed the sun till the close of day. They have left behind narrow and degrading laws, traditions, and castes. Their triumphant success is pushing behind every bayonet carried at the order of Kaiser or Czar; men, who, in doing their own thinking, will one day decide for themselves the problems ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... mentioned in this connection. It consists of a comfortably and elegantly fitted-up clubhouse, within easy driving distance of a large city, and surrounded by facilities for tennis, racquets, golf, polo, baseball, racing, etc. So far it has kept clear of the degrading ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... be about the mansion, but different faces. All of we young students endeavored not to believe the rumor, as we were Catholics in every sense of the word, and we did not want to believe that anything so degrading would be tolerated in the very mansion of one of the officials ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... He had had six children, of whom one died an infant and two more in early childhood. The second son, John, after a boyhood of great promise, fell into temptation at the University and led a wild and degrading course; ending by his retirement to the Continent, where he died in 1833, after a very painful illness, in which he had evinced great agony of mind, which softened at length into repentance and hope. The eldest son, Daniel, who attended him on his death-bed, had taken holy ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... certain that he, the chief of the sectarians, and a great number of the nobility of Southern France, were led to embrace the Albigensian error by the degrading habits which ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... too, the reference is visible: "I gave my back to the smiters ( [Greek: mastigosantes], LXX. [Greek: eis mastigas]), and my cheeks to those plucking ( [Greek: empaichthesetai]—the plucking of the beard, an act of degrading wantonness), my face I hid not from shame ( [Greek: hubristhesetai]) and spitting." Bengel draws attention to the fact of how highly Christ, in the passage quoted, placed the prophecy of the Old Testament: "Jesus most highly valued that which was written. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... the corrupting effect upon practice and morals of a religious system which embraced within it so many sensual and degrading elements. Where impurity is made an essential part of religion, there the very fountain of life is poisoned, and that which should have been "a savour of life unto life"—a cleansing and regenerating influence—becomes ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... rank and affluence. Mrs. Kauffman, it is said, by the intervention of friends had recourse to legal authorities, was enabled to separate from the impostor, but did not return to this country, and died a few years after, having never recovered her spirits after the shock of so degrading an alliance. It is not a little surprising that a lady so intelligent and accomplished should have been the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... associates and the war against villany and trickery, being haunted by continual suspicions, discovering the trust-unworthiness of one's most intimate friends, the necessity of insincerity and concealment sometimes where one feels that one ought and would desire to be most open; then the degrading nature of the occupation, mixing with the lowest of mankind, and absorbed in the business for the sole purpose of getting money, the consciousness of a sort of degradation of intellect, the conviction of the deteriorating effects ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... into barbarism. The ladies hated both the cause and the consequence, they had a revulsion from the object, of the above contention. But call it not a contention: there is nobility in that. This was a compromise, a degrading union, with very sickening results. Whether they came of an excess of the sprinkling, could not well be guessed. The drenching at least ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be too much work to it. I don't believe in the nobility of labor. I believe that work is the crowning shame and humiliation of the human race. It's all right for a horse or a dog or an ox to work, but a man ought to be above it. It's degrading, interferes with his pleasures and wastes ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... impaired. This gave him hope. He was persuaded that organisation would outlive persecution. When he reflected on what they had endured, it was only marvellous that the race had not disappeared. They had defied exile, massacre, spoliation, the degrading influence of the constant pursuit of gain; they had defied Time. For nearly three thousand years, according to Archbishop Usher, they have been dispersed over the globe. To the unpolluted current of their Caucasian structure, and to the ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... mendicants as a recognized class of society; and as such they are worse than useless. They necessarily lose all sense of personal dignity; they remain ignorant or become incapable of all modes of regular industry, and it is impossible for them to form associations that will be otherwise than degrading and corrupting. ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... shame that mingled with his amusement—a shame which—is it not odd!—he would not have felt had his sporan been full of sovereigns. But the shame was not altogether a shameful one; a fanciful fear of degrading the chieftainship, and a vague sense of the thing being an imposition, had each a part in it. There could be nothing dishonest, however, in thus earning a shilling for poor ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... review, whose dress, and quiet and orderly demeanor would have done credit to any congregation breaking up from their place of worship. One of the gentlemen with me, who is from a slave State, where all labor is considered degrading, remarked, with emotion, "What would I give if, (naming a near relative in the slave States,) could witness this only for a quarter of an hour!" We dined with one of our abolition friends at Lowell, who informed us that ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... recognised as a potent factor in the formation of character, and the Negro pulpit is not an exception to the general rule. Its influence may be elevating or degrading. The character and the ability of the man in the pulpit will determine ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... laborer he is poorly paid. This fact, together with his improvidence, tends to swell the proletariat in warm countries of the Temperate Zone; and though here it does not produce the distressing impression of a proletariat in Dublin or Liverpool or Boston, it is always degrading. It levels society and economic status downward, while in the cooler countries of the Temperate Zone, the process is upward. The laborer of the north, owing to his providence and larger profits, which render small economies possible, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... to do, according to all unwritten laws of the conduct of a gentleman, would be to destroy such communications and at once forget them. To show them to her, Percy felt, would be degrading to himself and to such a woman as his wife, whom he now realised he placed on a pedestal. The idea of seeing the pedestal rock seemed to take the earth from under his feet. But not only that, he now felt that, though ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... not commands. You showed a petulant, foolish temper, quite unworthy of you, in turning your back on Uncle John, and saying in effect, 'I don't intend to take your advice, I intend to take my own way, even though it lead me to a Fife fishing village—and a degrading love affair." ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... receive the ores at the pit's mouth, and dress and sort them. The hard nature of the employment may not be actually injurious to health, yet it quite unsexes them. Their whole demeanor becomes as coarse and rude as their degrading occupation. As they labor at men's work, so they wear men's clothing. A stranger would feel sure that they were men, and it would be by their conversation alone that he could identify them as women. He would think it strange to hear persons dressed like men conversing together about their husbands, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... forward; he made a speech of some length, and one that was very impressive. Nothing could be more clear, more just, more true, than the picture he drew of the manifold evils of intemperance; a vice so deceitful in its first appearance, so treacherous in its growth; so degrading, so brutalizing in its enjoyments; so blasting and ruinous in its effects—ruinous to body and mind, heart and soul—blasting all hopes for this life and for the next, so long as it remains unconquered. He entreated his friends to count the cost of indulgence in this ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... most important of the teachings of the early church was to dignify labor. There was a new dignity lent to service. Prior to the dominion of the church, labor had become degrading, for slavery had supplanted free labor to such an extent that all labor appeared dishonorable. Another {273} potent cause of the demoralization of labor was the entrance of a large amount of products from the conquered nations. The introduction of these supplies, won by conquest, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... noble and beautiful thing to be a martyr, especially if you are a martyr in the cause of truth, and not, as is often the case, of some debasing and degrading superstition. But nobody has a right to demand of you that you should be a martyr. And some people have often a right to demand that you should resolutely refuse the martyr's crown on the ground that you have ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... a better answer than that we do as our fathers have done. What have we better than a blind guess to show that the criminal law in its present form does more good than harm? I do not stop to refer to the effect which it has had in degrading prisoners and in plunging them further into crime, or to the question whether fine and imprisonment do not fall more heavily on a criminal's wife and children than on himself. I have in mind more far-reaching questions. Does punishment ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... is the universal dinner time in the east, I went to dine with the Governor Mohammed 'Abdu'l Hadi; it was a miserable degrading scene of gorging the pilaff with the hands and squeezing the butter of it through the fingers, without even water for drink supplied by the servants. The guests were about a dozen in number, and they were crowded so closely round the tinned tray as only to admit ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... NATURE.—For a certain period between her monthly illness, every woman is sterile. Conception may be avoided by refraining from coition except for this particular number of days, and there will be no evasion of natural intercourse, no resort to disgusting practices, and nothing degrading. The following facts have been established, without a doubt: The Graafian Vesicle, containing the egg in the ovary, enlarges during menstruation and bursts open to let the egg escape usually on the first day after the ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... sensuality. The wickedest city of antiquity meets with the most terrible punishment that is recorded of any city in the world's history. Not only were pride and cruelty the peculiar vices of its kings and princes, but a gross and degrading idolatry, allied with all the vices that we call infamous, marked the inhabitants of the doomed capital; so that the Hebrew language was exhausted to find a word sufficiently expressive to mark its foul depravity, or sufficiently exultant to rejoice over its predicted fall. Most cities ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... work as degrading. They make their wives do all the drudgery. Women were made to work, men to fight. To humiliate their prisoners they put them to work, degrading them to the condition of women. John Stark understood their character, and acted accordingly, and ...
— Harper's Young People, October 5, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... province in order; he appointed Boduoc to an important office under him, and to act for him during his absences, which were at first frequent, as he constantly travelled about the country holding courts, redressing grievances, punishing and degrading officials who had abused their position or ill treated the people, and appointing in many cases natives in their places. Bitter complaints were made by the dispossessed Roman officials to Celsius, who, however, declined in any ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... and forgotten deities were resuscitated. Sages shook off superstitious bonds, priests forged new fetters on ancient patterns for themselves and their flocks. Philosophy explained away the more degrading myths; myths as degrading were suggested to dark and servile hearts by unscientific etymologies. Over the whole mass of ancient mythology the new mythology of a debased Brahmanic ritualism grew like some luxurious and baneful parasite. It is ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... power in it which enables it to exert an attraction on him even after death. For we must remember that the influence of music, though always powerful, is not always for good. We can scarcely doubt that as certain forms of music tend to raise us above the sensuality of the animal, or the more degrading passion of material gain, and to transport us into the ether of higher thought, so other forms are directly calculated to awaken in us luxurious emotions, and to whet those sensual appetites which it is the business of a philosopher not indeed to annihilate or to be ashamed ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... weakness for which he more than once paid dearly, for they were remembered against him when be had forgotten them. Meanwhile Clodius—a sort of milder Catiline, not without many popular qualities—had got himself elected tribune; degrading himself formally from his own order of nobles for that purpose, since the tribune must be a man of the commons. The powers of the office were formidable for all purposes of obstruction and attack; Clodius had taken pains to ingratiate himself with all classes; and ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... the conviction that everything must be left to evolve itself, and that there is nothing to be done. They have withdrawn into the sanctuary of critical learning and serene art, abjuring all theology and politics, and, above all, abjuring controversy of all kinds as utterly vulgar and degrading, though, as might be expected, they are sometimes controversial and even rather tart in an indirect way, and without being conscious of it themselves. Mr. Pattison's air when he comes into contact with ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... made by old maids—any one can see that. And they have decreed that conjugal love, apart from passion, is elevating and a woman in yielding herself may evict the sanctum of love if the man may legally call her his own. It's all wrong dear—woman has been sacrificed to the family. And what a degrading imitation of Nature to propagate the species. How glorious never again to be shod in the slippers of matrimony—I seem to demand the advantages of marriage with none ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... headsman's child, it is probable the young man might have found the means to indulge his passion without making too great a sacrifice of his pride. By transporting his wife to his castle, conferring his own established name, separating her from all that was unpleasant and degrading in the connexion, and finding occupation for his own mind in the multiplied and engrossing employments of his station, he would have diminished motives for contemplating, and consequently for lamenting, the objectionable features ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper |
