"Turpitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would be impossible to elect him. An impartial but kindly judge had, some months before, while expressing great admiration for Mr. Blaine, informed me of some transactions which, while they showed no turpitude, revealed a carelessness in doing business which would certainly be brought to bear upon him with great effect in a heated political campaign. It was clear to me that, if nominated, he would be dragged through the mire, the Republican party defeated, and the country at large besmirched ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... portion, where he defends his marriage with Pudentilla and justifies his dealings with his step-sons, he clears himself in good earnest, nay does more than clear himself. For he unveils in the most merciless fashion the villany of his accusers—the base ingratitude of Pudens, and the unspeakable turpitude of Rufinus. ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... in his day implied loyalty and fidelity to the King of England; but how changed the meaning of that word in New England after the Declaration of Independence! Words and deeds before deemed patriotic were now traitorous, and so deeply was their moral turpitude impressed on the public mind as to have tainted popular opinions concerning the heroic deeds of our ancestors, performed in the King's service in the French Wars.... The War of the Revolution absorbed and neutralised all the heroic fame of the illustrious men that preceded, and the achievements ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... Though he is continually at pains to speak of his "moral" comedies, it is manners and not morals that he satirizes. He is interested, not so much in effecting a fundamental reform in the lives of his characters, as in giving them a little social sense. He preaches, not against distinct moral turpitude like hypocrisy and avarice, but against inordinate affection for lap-dogs (Melampe), pietistic objections to masked balls {Masquerades}, and superstitious belief in legerdemain (Witchcraft). Holberg voices the urbane humanistic spirit that ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... provides deportation only within five years after entry, and for "persons who have been convicted of or admit having committed a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude," or who are sentenced to a term of one year or more in this country, within five years of entry, for such crime (or who may suffer a second conviction at any time after entry). This would clearly cover bigamy committed within five years after entry; whether it could be stretched ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... nothing, so as to have lost whatsoever could be called gratitude for all pleasures one can do him,"—marrying against one's will, and the like. "As to his health, it is one day better, another worse; but the legs, they are always swelled, Judge what my joy must be to get out of that turpitude,—for the King will only stay a fortnight, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... "Aristides," taking up the cause of Burr, struck at higher game than Richard Riker or Ambrose Spencer. DeWitt Clinton was portrayed as "formed for mischief," "inflated with vanity," "cruel by nature," "an object of derision and disgust," "a dissolute and desperate intriguer," "an adept in moral turpitude, skilled in all the combination of treachery and fraud, with a mind matured by the practice of iniquity, and unalloyed with any virtuous principle." "Was it not disgraceful to political controversy," continues "Aristides," with an audacity of denunciation and sternness of animosity, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the world, who first bestowed motion on this immense machine, and placed all beings in that particular position, whence every subsequent event, by an inevitable necessity, must result. Human actions, therefore, either can have no moral turpitude at all, as proceeding from so good a cause; or if they have any turpitude, they must involve our Creator in the same guilt, while he is acknowledged to be their ultimate cause and author. For as a man, who fired a mine, is answerable for all the consequences whether the train he employed ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... selection, gave rise to a relation which continued for life. It was called necessitudo sortis; and it was looked upon with a sacred reverence. Breaches of any of these kinds of civil relation were considered as acts of the most distinguished turpitude. The whole people was distributed into political societies, in which they acted in support of such interests in the State as they severally affected. For it was then thought no crime, to endeavour by every honest means to advance to superiority and power those of your own sentiments ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... Assizes, 1830, Mr. Justice Gazalee, addressing the grand jury, said that none of the crimes appeared to be marked with circumstances of great moral turpitude. The prisoners numbered one hundred and thirty; he passed sentences of death on twenty-nine, life transportations on five, fourteen years on five, seven years on eleven, and various terms of hard ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... affectionate regard for Johnny, though many an hour have I spent at our masthead at his instigation; while Dicky, promoted by the like authority, was taking sights at me from another. We were sent there not without cause, I own, and still the amount of moral turpitude which gained us that elevated distinction was not such as to make me blush as I think of it, or to make me anxious to conceal it from the public. Neither as a first-lieutenant nor as a man was Lieutenant Du Pre perfect; but who is there with whom ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... Mrs. Bixbee, wondering not more at the deacon's turpitude than at the lapse in David's acuteness, of which she had an immense opinion, but commenting only on the former. "I'm 'mazed at ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... reflect on his own conscious experience, without discovering, in the disordered state of his moral nature, a reason which sufficiently explains his natural aversion from God; he finds there an evidence, which he can neither overlook nor deny, of his own personal turpitude and guilt; he is self-convinced and self-condemned at the bar of his own conscience; he remembers with remorse and shame many cases of actual transgression in which he resisted the dictates of reason, and resigned himself to the dominion of evil passions; and ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... i. 104. It would be a great relief could we believe that inordinate fondness for the dance was the chief vice of the French court. Unfortunately the moral turpitude of the king and his favorites rests upon less suspicious grounds than the revolting stories told on hearsay by the unfriendly writer of the Eusebii Philadelphi Dialogi (Edinburgi, 1574), ii. 117, 118. ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... on the part of the senate that was surprising, on the part of all Italy surpassing belief, and of all the loyalists unparalleled, in standing forth in my defence, I will not say what happened—for the blame attaches to many, and is of various shades of turpitude—I will only say briefly that it was not the rank and file, but the leaders, that played me false. And in this matter, though some blame does attach to those who failed to defend me, no less attaches to those who abandoned me: and if those who were frightened deserve reproach, ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... identity, in my estrangement from the house of her protector since she first entered it, I have unconsciously committed such an offense against Mr. Blyth as no contrition can ever adequately atone for. Now indeed I feel how presumptuously merciless my bitter conviction of the turpitude of my own sin, has made me towards what I deemed like sins in others. Now also I know, that, unless you have spoken falsely, I have been guilty of casting the shame of my own deserted child in the teeth of the very man who had nobly and tenderly given her an asylum in his ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... The sins of childhood are by nine tenths of mankind enormously overrated, and perhaps none overrate them, more extravagantly, than teachers. We confound the trouble they give us, with their real moral turpitude, and measure the one by the other. Now if a fault prevails in school, one teacher will scold and fret himself about it, day after day, until his scholars are tired both of school and of him: and yet he will do nothing effectual to remove it. ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... the American war. He remarked:—"The war was conceived in injustice, nurtured in folly, and its footsteps are marked with slaughter and devastation. It exhibits the height of moral depravity and human turpitude. The nation is drained of its best blood and its vital resources, for which nothing is received in return but a series of inefficient victories or disgraceful retreats; victories obtained over men struggling in the holy cause of liberty, or defeats which filled the land with mourning for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Priests, are regularly admitted within the Convents for the same infamous purpose; and that many Infants and Nuns, in proportion to the aggregate amount of the whole body of females, are annually murdered and buried within their precincts. All this turpitude is as assuredly believed by the vast majority of the enlightened Protestants, as well as by multitudes of even the Papists in Montreal and Quebec, as their own existence; and judging from their declarations, ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... frequently occurred, produced odd situations by the thousand. And then, woman was physically little understood, and what was actually sickness in her, was considered a prodigy, witchcraft or monstrous turpitude. In those days these creatures, treated by the law as reckless children, and put under guardianship, were by the manners of the time deified and adored. Like the freedmen of emperors, they disposed ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... obliged to make our morality a profession and our innocence an art. They all hang their romances to motives that no woman recognises as feminine; they ascribe to us instincts which we do not possess, passions of which we are ignorant—a ridiculous moral turpitude in the overmastering presence of love. Pooh! If they only knew what a small part love plays with us, ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... us illuminate another aspect of this turpitude that people call "the plebiscite of the 20th of December." How was the question put? Was any choice possible? Did he—and it was the least that a coup d'etat man should have done in so strange a ballot as that wherein he put everything at stake—did he ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... judges regret being compelled to set a rogue at liberty simply because he had been ingenious enough to invent a fraud (very likely with the assistance of a shyster lawyer) which involved the additional turpitude of seducing another into a criminal conspiracy. Livingston was turned loose upon the community in spite of the fact that he had swindled a man out of $500 because he had incidentally led the latter to believe ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... League may consider itself to be an earnest and active body, but I can never look upon its efforts as anything but lukewarm, standing, as I do, with the light of other days around me. As a child, whatever I might question, I never doubted the turpitude of Rome. I do not think I had formed any idea whatever of the character or pretensions or practices of the Catholic Church, or indeed of what it consisted, or its nature; but I regarded it with a vague terror as a wild beast, the only good point ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... a challenge to Mr. Lyttleton, Lewis was put on his trial. The conventional turpitude of the offence wholly depended on the provocation. A magistrate could not be covered by his privilege when standing in the street, and announcing his opinions to the loungers there; but Lyttleton, himself the sole witness, denied the words imputed, and ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... inclined very much to applaud what he has done. The difficulty is properly met, according to Fitzjames, by leaving a wide discretion in the hands of the judge. The jury says the law has been broken; the judge must consider the more delicate question of the degree of turpitude implied. Yet in some cases, such as that of a patriotic rebel, it is impossible to take this view. It is desirable that a man who attacks the Government should attack it at the risk of his life. Law and morality, therefore, cannot be brought into perfect coincidence, although the moral ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the chiefs obtain the condemnation and disposal of their subjects, are nearly all imaginary; for few exist which, under their laws, are considered as acts of turpitude. The abuse of authority, the action of violent passions, barbarous customs, ferocious habits, and insatiate avarice among the chiefs, augment the number of captives and victims, and the operation of these is much greater ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... through, so cold was the air and thick the darkness; and wondered more at the old face of dawn, which appeared to know nothing of her agitation. But morning was better than night, and she ceased counting over her sins forward and backward; adding comments on them, excusing some and admitting the turpitude of others, with 'Oh! I was naughty, padre mio! I was naughty—she huddled them all into one of memory's spare sacks, and tied the neck of it, that they should keep safe for her father-confessor. At such times, after a tumult ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... power* is strongly felt for good, especially in communities where the administration of justice is strict and impartial. It is of no little worth that a child grows up with some fixed beliefs as to the turpitude of certain forms of evil, especially as the positive enactments of the penal law almost always coincide with the wisest judgments of the best men in the community. Moreover, law is progressive in every civilized community, and in ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... it cannot be shown that such a sportfulness of wit and fancy doth contain an intrinsic and inseparable turpitude; since it may be so cleanly, handsomely, and innocently used, as not to defile or discompose the mind of the speaker, nor to wrong or harm the hearer, nor to derogate from any worthy subject of discourse, ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... (5) paupers; (6) persons likely to become public charge; (7) professional beggars; (8) persons afflicted with a loathsome or contagious disease; (9) persons who have been convicted of a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, not including those convicted of purely political offences; (10) polygamists; (11) anarchists (or persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the government of the United States or of all government ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... pretorians were willing that the dream should come true. Emissaries were despatched, and Caracalla was stabbed. In his luggage poison was found to the value of five million five hundred thousand drachmae. What fresh turpitude he was devising no one knew, and the discovery might serve as an epitaph, were it not that by his legions he was adored. No one had abandoned to the army ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... a name, and so a distinct species, and the other not; yet, in respect of carnal knowledge, they are both taken in under INCEST: and that still for the same convenience of expressing under one name, and reckoning of one species, such unclean mixtures as have a peculiar turpitude beyond others; and this to avoid circumlocutions and ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... Publilia, who of course was of an age disproportionate to his own.[121] Yet, in reviewing this proceeding, we must not adopt the modern standard of propriety, forgetful of a condition of society which reconciled actions even of moral turpitude with a reputation for honour and virtue. Terentia was a woman of a most imperious and violent temper, and (what is more to the purpose) had in no slight degree contributed to his present embarrassments by her extravagance in the management of his private affairs.[122] ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... not chidden him for the use of that familiar salutation, nor did she chide him now, though she was promised to another. She wondered at herself—flushing at her own turpitude; for upon Barsoom it is a shameful thing for a woman to listen to those two words from another than her husband ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of a moving ship, and can not see its motion. We can not realize the world's yesterdays. We know them, but do not comprehend them, since between apprehending and comprehending an epoch lie such wide spaces. "Quo Vadis" has done good in that it has popularized a realization of that turpitude of condition into which Christianity stepped at the morning of its career; for no lazar-house is so vile as the Roman civilization when Christianity began—God's angel—to trouble that cursed pool. Christ has ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... right to punish such an offense on the ground that it deserves punishment. No man has, or ever had, the right to wield the awful attribute of retributive justice; that is, to inflict so much pain for so much guilt or moral turpitude. This is the prerogative of God alone. To his eye, all secrets are known, and all degrees of guilt perfectly apparent; and to him alone belongs the vengeance which is due for moral ill-desert. His law extends over the state of nature as well as over the state of civil ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... all others in European diplomacy, and more than any other has strained the conscience and the moral sense of Christian nations. We wish we might say that one nation had been able to resist this invitation to a moral turpitude masked by diplomatic subterfuges. ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... laughter always the end of comedy; that is rather a fowling for the people's delight, or their fooling. For, as Aristotle says rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man's nature without a disease. As a wry face without pain moves laughter, or a deformed vizard, or a rude clown dressed in a lady's habit and using her actions; we dislike and ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... Traitors and deserters are hung upon trees: [76] cowards, dastards, [77] and those guilty of unnatural practices, [78] are suffocated in mud under a hurdle. [79] This difference of punishment has in view the principle, that villainy should he exposed while it is punished, but turpitude concealed. The penalties annexed to slighter offences [80] are also proportioned to the delinquency. The convicts are fined in horses and cattle: [81] part of the mulct [82] goes to the king or state; part to the injured person, or his relations. In the ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... done in the flesh, I ask whether it is consistent with the idea we have of divine justice to think that both will be condemned to the same everlasting punishment? If it be, then there is no more moral turpitude in parricide than in telling a trivial falsehood, which injures no one, but still is offensive and displeasing to God. But if it be not consistent with divine justice, then you must admit the distinction of guilt, and consequently ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... now coming upon you. Outward circumstances, the eyes and the thoughts of men, are below the notice of an immortal being about to stand the trial for eternity, before the Supreme Judge of heaven and earth. Be comforted: your crime, morally or religiously considered, has no very deep dye of turpitude. It corrupted no man's principles; it attacked no man's life. It involved only a temporary and reparable injury. Of this, and of all other sins, you are earnestly to repent; and may GOD, who knoweth our frailty, and desireth not our death, accept ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... only made my case worse by citing as an instance of German official turpitude the ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... recognized that there were uneasy mutterings and threats in many quarters. Yet, although the politician had by now virtually absorbed all the richest properties in the district and worked them through his hirelings, the people of Nome as a whole did not grasp the full turpitude of the scheme nor the system's ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... directed it in every way in which I could possibly employ it. I labored night and day. I labored in Parliament; I labored out of Parliament. If, therefore, the resolution of the House of Commons, refusing to commit this act of unmatched turpitude, be a crime, I am guilty among the foremost. But, indeed, whatever the faults of that House may have been, no one member was found hardy enough to propose so infamous a thing; and on full debate we passed the resolution against the petitions with ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... I don't at all fancy his edict.—What! marry a parcel of handsome, innocent, industrious girls to his great whiskered horse-guards, whether they will or no? It's a piece of moral turpitude—an insult ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... of mine (the bread and cheese was mere mortal infirmity, not moral turpitude) was wading in the pretty river that ran through Lord Clarendon's place, the Grove; the brown, clear, shallow, rapid water was as tempting as a highland brook, and I remember its bright, flashing stream and the fine old hawthorn ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... modern stock exchange is called "a good thing" to send agents into the rural districts in advance of the news to buy up government paper. "My soul rises indignant," exclaimed a member, "at the avaricious and moral turpitude which so vile a conduct displays." Nor on that point did anybody venture then ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... curious passage of Bk. XII. Chap. I. in which Gil disclaims paternity and resigns it to Marialva. This may have been prompted by a desire to lessen the turpitude of the go-between business; but it is a clumsy device, and makes Gil look a fool as ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Standing by the rail we took advantage of the liberty to speak together, which on a ship such propinquity sanctions. After we had exchanged a few remarks about the clumsiness of the disembarking arrangements I referred to the man of mystery and turpitude, and asked for particulars of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... course every effort should be made to protect life. Still, in measuring the character of the offender, in determining his possibilities as a useful citizen, homicide is probably one of the lesser crimes. Many times it implies no moral turpitude, even with those who believe in moral turpitude. It may imply very little lack of physical stability. Homicide practically never becomes an occupation. Most killings are accidental in the sense that they ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... these lads as he ought, and brought them up to their own, and made them Kelmscotts indeed, instead of nameless adventurers, they might never have fallen into such abysses of turpitude. But he had let them grow up in ignorance of their own origin, with the vague stain of a possible illegitimacy hanging over their heads; and what wonder if they forgot in the end how noblesse oblige, and sank at last into foul depths ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... novel. She had a general conviction that it would seem to Lewis closely allied to light conduct, and that only foreigners or frivolous people let down to this extent the bars of family life. Now that Mrs. Taylor had set her the example, she was less certain of the moral turpitude of such an act, but she concluded also that her husband would be in the way at table. What she desired was an opportunity for a long, interesting chat about ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... of stealing, or bartering for human flesh is pregnant with the most glaring turpitude, and the blackest barbarity of disposition.—For can any one say, that this is doing as he would be done by? Will such a practice stand the scrutiny of this great rule of moral government? Who can without the complicated emotions of anger and impatience, suppose ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... of him with calmness—is a man to be feared, Miss Sterling. Not that I would not be a match for him in all matters of open enmity; but in ways of secrecy and deep dealing, he is master, and all the more to be dreaded that he makes it impossible for one to understand him or measure the depths of turpitude to which he would descend. When, therefore I heard him say he should have that will back before it could pass into the hands of Mr. Nicholls, I trembled; and as the night passed and morning came without showing ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... from pillar to post, eventually left Munich for Switzerland, it was in the company of Auguste Papon, who, on the grounds of "moral turpitude," had already been given his marching-orders. He described himself as a "courier." His passport, however, bore the less exalted description of "cook." It was probably the more correct one. The faithful ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... anger, and confusion, without reply; and OMAR departed with the calm dignity of a benevolent and superior being, to whom the smiles and frowns of terrestrial tyranny were alike indifferent, and in whom abhorrence of the turpitude of vice was mingled with companion for ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... understood him too late!'... My prisoner spoke regretfully. His voice was soft and courteous, breaking at times into the altisonance of the tragic muse. He does not think that any act of his can be wrong; the mere fact that HE ran counter to accepted standards divests, in his mind, the act itself of turpitude. That seems to be the way he looked upon his former Eastern encrouchments. That's the way he justified his subterranean deals with the KAISER; and he even goes so far as to assert that 'if the Vyborg-Bjoerkesund treaty had not been denounced the present ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... rather as a form of the imagination which he selected for expressing his views on humanity;—to paint crime; to castigate tyranny; to vindicate honesty; to portray the abomination of corruption, the turpitude of debauchery and the baseness of servility;—to represent fortitude in its strength and grandeur, innocence in its grace and beauty, while standing forth the sturdy admirer of heroism and freedom; the tender friend ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... and scholars, forthwith denounced me to the higher powers. The proofs of my peculation were too glaring, and the amount too serious to be passed over; I was tried, convicted, condemned, sentenced, flogged, and dismissed in the course of half-an-hour; and such was the degree of turpitude attached to me on this occasion, that I was rendered for ever incapable of serving in that or any other employment connected with the garden or farm; I was placed at the bottom of the list, and declared to be the ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... went across Judea and down went its pride and its power. In 1861 God shaved our nation. We had allowed to grow Sabbath desecration, and oppression, and blasphemy, and fraud, and impurity, and all sorts of turpitude. The South had its sins, and the North its sins, and the East its sins, and the West its sins. We had been warned again and again, and we did not heed. At length the sword of war cut from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf, and from Atlantic seaboard to Pacific seaboard. The pride of the land, not the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... that Shakespeare evidently wishes, as much as possible, to spare the character of Laertes,—to break the extreme turpitude of his consent to become an agent and accomplice of the King's treachery;—and to this end he re-introduces Ophelia at the close of this scene to afford a probable stimulus of ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night; I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to me, even with tears of penitence, I cannot, even in memory, dwell on it without a start of horror. I will say but one thing, Utterson, and that (if you can bring your mind to credit it) will be more than enough. The creature who crept into my house ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... point of view, must strike us as an immense mass of evil on account of the criminality attached to it, as displayed in the various branches of it, which have already been examined. For, to take the counterpart of the evil in the first of these, can we say that no moral turpitude is to be placed to the account of those, who, living on the continent of Africa, give birth to the enormities, which take place in consequence of the prosecution of this trade? Is not that man made morally worse, who ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... relief she found it an easy task to face Hugh Johnstone, after that one reassuring glance. Her stern employer failed to pierce the muslin fortifications of her guilty bosom and discern the moral turpitude lurking there. She stole a last anxious glance at her still plump wrist where the diamond bracelet had softly clasped her flesh, and then softly sighed in relief ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... to the state bedchamber which I have mentioned. Thence we passed into the grand Presentation Saloon, on the ceiling of which Lebrun had painted a likeness of Louis XIV. A tri-coloured cockade placed on the forehead of the great King still bore witness of the imbecile turpitude of the Convention. Lastly came the hall of the Guards, in front of the grand staircase of the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... together, and effecting a reconciliation between them by means of the unexpected sight of their children. Moreover, when Waldburg rejects his friend's advice and entreaties that he will forgive his wife, it is hardly upon the ground of any deep moral turpitude involved in such a forgiveness, but upon the score of the insupportable humiliation of reappearing in the great world of German society to which they both belong with "his runaway wife on his arm," and the "whispering, pointing, jeering" of which their reconciliation ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... the pocket of his pantaloons. Him I was compelled to expel from my house, the Toe of my Boot aiding; and meeting him subsequently at a Coffee-house, and he not seeming sufficiently impressed with the turpitude of his Offence, but the rather inclined to regard it as a venial Prank or Whimsey, I did Batoon him within an inch of his life, and until there were more wheals on his Body than bars of silver-braid on his Jacket. This led to a serious misunderstanding between Justice and myself. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... of these poor natives of the Pacific Ocean, whose minds were overpowered with the glare of objects, equally new to them as they were captivating. Stealing, among the civilized nations of the world, may well be considered as denoting a character deeply stained with moral turpitude: with avarice, unrestrained by the known rules of right; and with profligacy, producing extreme indigence, and neglecting the means of relieving it. But at the Friendly and other islands which we visited, the thefts, so frequently committed by the natives, ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... courage in the public press—when all these stinking, suffocating, deleterious vapors shall be destroyed by the ever-living light of truth, then the grateful people will bless your names, which, pure and luminous, will shine high above the stupidity, conceit, heartlessness, turpitude, selfish ambition, indirect and direct treason darkening ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... whatever expert accompanied Higgs should be a married man. And yet, now when I came to think of it, that might not have bettered matters, and perhaps would only have added to the transaction a degree of moral turpitude which at present was lacking, since even married ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... primitive Slavic communal organization thus survived only on the royal domain, and there it exists till the present day. The census of Peter having thus fairly inaugurated chattelhood, it immediately began to develop itself in all its turpitude. The masters grew more reckless and cruel; they sold chattels separately from the lands; they brought them singly into market, disregarding all family-ties and social bonds. Estates were no more valued according to the area of land they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... external stamp and nobody distrusts them; but, so far as uncertainty, want of substantial foundation in their lives is concerned, they have nothing to wish for from those whom they call so disdainfully 'irregulars.' Ah! if we knew how much turpitude, what fantastic or abominable stories, a black evening-coat, the most correct of your hideous modern garments, can mask. Why, see, Jenkins, the other evening at your house I was amusing myself by counting them—all ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... at the demise of Sultan, the royal generosity of Madame Brandt, and the turpitude of his friend Saupiquet, brought tears to the little man's eyes. Monsieur ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... ontological absurdity. But granting, for the sake of argument, that archangels fall infinitely short of moral perfection, and I should only be able to see in the fact a hopeless aggravation of my previous difficulty. If it is hard to reconcile the supreme goodness of God with the moral turpitude of man, much more would it be hard to do so if his very angels are depraved. Therefore, if the reasonable question which I originally put "may be followed by a series of similar questions to which there is no end," the goodness of God must simply be pronounced a delusion. ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... temptation to be resisted—this is the sin to be avoided. The official who uses his position to secure a pecuniary advantage over the public is an embezzler of power—and an embezzler of power is as guilty of moral turpitude as the embezzler of money. There is no better motto for the public official than that given by Solomon: "A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favour rather than silver ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... tore his skin. His cries were heard by persons who were passing, and he was found after several hours of suffering, covered with blood, and dreadfully stung by the ants. This crime is perhaps without example in the history of human turpitude: it indicates a violence of passion less assignable to the climate than to the barbarism of manners prevailing among the lower class of ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... bit of it; the place that he went to and the only place that he went to was Slowburg; yes, covering up his tracks in his usual careful style, he made direct for the rival of Fastburg. What did he propose to do there? Oh, how can we reveal the whole duplicity and turpitude of Ananias Pullwool? The subject is too vast for a merely human pen; it requires the literary ability of a recording angel. Well, we must get our feeble lever under this boulder of wickedness as we can, and do our faint best to expose all the reptiles ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... been very deeply discussed between the rector and his wife. She had given it as her opinion that priest M'Carthy was pitch, pitch itself in its blackest turpitude, and as such could not be touched without defilement. Had not all the Protestant clergymen of Ireland in a body, or, at any rate, all those who were worth anything, who could with truth be called Protestant clergymen, had they not all refused to enter ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... an inordinate love of luxury and the insatiable desires of jaded senses had suggested as a means to satisfaction, until the treachery of his own accomplices had thrown the glaring light of publicity on a career of turpitude such as even these decadent times had ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... allowed to stand in the way of the nine seniors. The birth of twins is an evil portent to the Mpongwes, as it is in many parts of Central Africa, and even in the New World; it also involves the idea of moral turpitude, as if the woman were one of the lower animals, capable of superfetation. There is no greater insult to a man, than to point at him with two fingers, meaning that he is a twin; of course he is not one, or he would ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... distinction, which lies at the basis of the ancient penitential discipline, was already beginning to vitiate the whole catholic theology. Some sins, it is true, are more heinous than others, but the comparative turpitude of transgressions depends much on the circumstances in which they are committed. The wages of every sin is death, [441:2] and it is absurd to attempt to give a stereotyped character to any one violation of God's ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... he demoralized not only France, but the world. Unquestionably part of this evil example was his falsehood to the Republic. Promise, pledge, honor, oath, were all violated in this monstrous treason. Never in history was greater turpitude. Unquestionably he could have saved the Republic, but he preferred his own exaltation. As I am a Republican, and believe republican institutions for the good of mankind, I cannot pardon the traitor. The people of France are ignorant; he did not care to have them educated, ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... for the thwarting of their plans. But when even one of the great men in England, who made these laws against free-trading, could tell his fellow-lawmakers that the mind of man never could conceive of it as at all equalling in turpitude those acts which are breaches of clear moral virtue—how should it be expected that the parties chiefly interested should take a stricter view of ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... who wishes to view his country with a cold impartiality, and to place its interests exactly on a par with the interests of other lands? Who, save the Chinaman himself, thinks it as important that a Chinaman should have enough to eat as that an American or an Englishman should? Was not the turpitude, that excluded the Chinaman from Australia, traced to the two deadly sins of undue diligence and sobriety? [Footnote: Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition, article, "Australia."] As for freedom, men of certain nations regard it as ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the character with moral turpitude; and I believe the facts related above show that said Senator is a coward; at all events he lacks moral courage, and is afraid of the Justices of the United States Supreme Court, whose judge the Senator-attorney of the court becomes in case of trial of any of ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... however, their indignation began to subside; their second thoughts, as usual, were more charitable than their first; they were not surprised to hear that the author was an honest, just, and able magistrate; they saw that the publication of such a book involved no moral turpitude; that it was merely meant as a jest on a subject on which jesting was permissible, and as a money speculation in a field of which men had a right to make money; while all which seemed offensive in it was merely the outcome, and as it were apotheosis, of that method of writing English history ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... resist doing what they desire him, why I wish he would teach me the gate of it. O Geordie, Jingling Geordie, it was grand to hear Baby Charles laying down the guilt of dissimulation, and Steenie lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence.' 'I am afraid,' said George Heriot, more hastily than prudently, 'I might have thought of the old proverb of Satan reproving sin.' 'Deil hae our saul, neighbour,' said the king, reddening, 'but ye are not blate! I gie ye licence ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... Turpitude of character must betray itself. Moral corruption can no more be hidden than physical corruption. Wickedness "will out," like murder or smallpox. A man's wife discovers it; his children shun him instead of clinging about his knees; his neighbors and acquaintances eye ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... one capable at once of the highest and of the lowest. Mingled with their hardness was a melting softness, with their cruelty a large benevolence, with their hate a pitying tenderness, with their spirituality a hellish turpitude. They were the eyes of two opposite men, and as I gazed into them they reconciled for me the conflicting accounts of Lord Clarenceux which I ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... his own family, and in that of a particular friend, there had been about this time two or three scandalous intrigues, followed by 'the public brand of shameful life.' One of these 'sad affairs,' as they are styled, was marked with premeditated treachery and turpitude. The lady had been, or had seemed to be, for years a pattern wife, the mother of several children; yet she had long betrayed, and at last abandoned, a most amiable and confiding husband, and went off with a man who did not love her, who ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... said. "But I'm not qualified to interpret the law. I'll arrest you and bring you to trial and then it's up to some judge to rule upon your purity and innocence of criminal intent, and freedom from moral taint or turpitude. Maybe take weeks, ...
— The Big Fix • George Oliver Smith
... acting under what they, and most of the members of the bar, thought to be the law established by the Supreme Court in the Knight sugar case. But the Supreme Court in its decree dissolving the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trusts, condemned them in the severest language for moral turpitude; and an even severer need of condemnation should be visited on ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... to fare as badly as the muddiest rascal of them all, if his side sank in defeat. And yet I cannot help believing that, in some cases at least, a man might have had a happier end if he had abstained from acts of political turpitude, which were as irrational in their conception as they were ruinous in their effect; acts, that is, which, in the existing circumstances, no sane man could have undertaken unless the mere doing of these rogueries had been a supreme and a necessary pleasure to him. There was poor CHARLES THE FIRST. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 6, 1892 • Various
... conceites that stirre vp any vehement passion in a man, doo it by some turpitude or euill and vndecency that is in them, as to make a man angry there must be some iniury or contempt offered, to make him enuy there must proceede some vndeserued prosperitie of his egall or inferiour, to ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... most concealed part of his garden, he was approaching his own mansion with the air of a man who returns home in the morning after having perpetrated some dreadful deed of turpitude ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... however, of his reign was such as by no means prognosticated its subsequent transition. The sudden change of his conduct, the astonishing mixture of imbecility and presumption, of moral turpitude and frantic extravagance, which he afterwards evinced; such as rolling himself over heaps of gold, his treatment of his horse Incitatus, and his design of making him consul, seem to justify a suspicion that his brain ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... and iniquitous as those you state, of our own citizens converting their property and personal exertions into the means of annoying our trade and injuring their fellow-citizens, deserve legal severity commensurate with their turpitude. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 4) of Volume 1: John Adams • Edited by James D. Richardson
... for sweet, and sweet for bitter. He openly threw aside the admission of any one moral obligation. Never did some of the Roslyn boys, to their dying day, forget the deep, intolerable, unfathomable flood of moral turpitude and iniquity which he bore with him; a flood, which seemed so irresistible, that the influence of such boys as Montagu and Owen to stay its onrush seemed as futile as the weight of a feather to bar the fury of a mountain stream. ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... against this unwieldy hypocrite and well-fed malefactor swept over the jester. The man's assumed heartiness, his manner of joviality and good-fellowship, were only the mask of moral turpitude and blackest purpose. But for the lawless scholar, the fool would probably have retired to his bed with full confidence in the probity and honesty of the ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... just where it had found us—our tempers rather than our views suffering in the conflict. Two or three times I was tempted to rattle out a volley of indignation at his amazing and unparalleled effrontery, and of calling him to account for his turpitude; but my better judgment withheld me, bidding me reserve my blows until they should fall unerringly and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... too well where his thoughts were hanging, and I loathed him anew; for, as he hinted, his was a passion, not a deep abiding love. His will was not stronger than the general turpitude of his nature. As if he had divined my thought, he said, "My will is stronger than any passion that I have; I can never plead weakness in the day of my judgment. I am deliberate. When I choose evil it is because I love it. I could be an ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... play the races, believes himself to be unfortunate only, and more sinned against than sinning. No matter how much of a scoundrel a man may be, his self-analysis brings him far short of the correct degree of turpitude. ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... of what she had done to him; of how she had lied to him about Gwenda; of the abominable thing that Alice had cried out to him in her agony. The thought of Mary's turpitude had consoled him mysteriously. Instead of putting it from him he had dwelt on it, he had wallowed in it; he had let it soak into him till he ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... Victoria with much to reflect upon. The glimpse she had accidentally given the old lady of Harriet's turpitude had startled her considerably. Mrs. Caldwell had always congratulated herself on having such a quiet respectable person in the house as Harriet to look after Beth, and now it appeared that the woman was disreputable both in her habits ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... "There is no doubt," says he, "that the prophet here expresses the impudence of the people, who in their hardihood, in their contempt of God, in their sinful superstitions, and in every kind of wickedness, had gone to such lengths, that they were like whores who do not conceal their turpitude, but publicly prostitute themselves, yea, try to exhibit the signs of their wickedness in their eyes, as well as in ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... man is a wretch without talent, jealous of merit as beggars are of the rich; if, pressed by the indigence as by the turpitude of his character he writes you some "News from Parnassus," some "Letters of Madame la Comtesse," some "Annees Litteraires," this animal displays an envy that is good for nothing, and for which Mandeville could never ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... a paltry, every-day affair, only he didn't seem to understand the difference. I'll back the doctor up for as good a memory as any man in the three kingdoms. I had forgotten that piece of moral turpitude, and might have been excused for imagining that the caning I got then had wiped out the offence. Hamilton," he added, with a faltering voice, laying his hand on Hamilton's shoulder—"you ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... you are very anxious for people to know how near you came to absolute turpitude. You may rest easy on that point. I shall speak to my father, of course, and we will agree to say ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... terrifies all who are about him. Yet, if he has companions, he plumes himself before them on his exploits, and here we may begin to notice the power of public opinion, for the approbation of his band serves to obliterate all consciousness of his turpitude, and even to make him proud of it. The warrior lives in a different atmosphere. The public opinion which would rebuke him is among the vanquished. He does not feel its influence. But the opinion of those by whom he is surrounded approves ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... everyone knows? Why dread to sound the abyss which can be measured by everyone? Why fear to bring into the light of day unmasked wickedness, even though it confronts the public gaze unblushingly? Extreme turpitude and extreme excellence are both in the schemes of Providence; and the poet has summed up eternal morality for all ages and nations in ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the empire with the religion of Constantine. The laws of Moses were received as the divine original of justice, and the Christian princes adapted their penal statutes to the degrees of moral and religious turpitude. Adultery was first declared to be a capital offence: the frailty of the sexes was assimilated to poison or assassination, to sorcery or parricide; the same penalties were inflicted on the passive and active guilt of pederasty, and all criminals of free ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... that the first are vain and systematical hypocrites, who have originally corrupted the minds of the people by visionary and insidious doctrines, and now maintain their superiority by artifice and intrigue: their opponents, equally wicked, and more daring, justify that turpitude which the others seek to disguise, and appear almost as bad as they are. The credulous people are duped by both; while the cunning of the one, and the vehemence of the other, alternately prevail.—But something too much ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... to hit the right mark where intellectual integrity and prudence, firmness and wise reserve, are in exact accord. When we come to declaring opinions that are, however foolishly and unreasonably, associated with pain and even a kind of turpitude in the minds of those who strongly object to them, then some of our most powerful sympathies are naturally engaged. We wonder whether duty to truth can possibly require us to inflict keen distress on those to whom we are bound by the tenderest ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... trial and desired no appeal. He had feared, throughout, the possible capture and conclusive testimony of Drann and Holvey, and, lest a worse thing befall him, he accepted a sentence of a long term in the penitentiary. In view of the turpitude of "lying in wait," though a matter of inference and not proof, he doubted the saving grace of that anomaly of the Tennessee law that in order to constitute murder in the first degree the victim of a premeditated slaughter must be the ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... he alleged had been promised for his collusion. In repeated trials Farley was unable to produce evidence satisfactory to the courts, which held that in any case his claim must be rejected because 'based on inherent turpitude.' ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... the career of several others of that body, the tracks would be through the sloughs and conduits of shame and turpitude, rascality and crime, and finally to self-murder. It was as bad—it could hardly have been worse, except in numbers, proportioned to the greater numerical force—in the Vigilance rank and file. It ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... directed against an alleged erroneous dogma and only incidentally affected personal morality. The reaction, therefore, was void of bitter resentment. Sumner's charges were directed against alleged moral turpitude, and the classic form and scrupulous regard for parliamentary rules which he observed only added to the feeling of personal resentment on the part of his opponents. Some of the defenders of slavery were themselves devoted students of the classics, but they ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... concerning the pamphlet on which I was then engaged. Consideration however did but seem to confirm me in my purpose. Let my defence be right or wrong, and I had by no means yet decided in the negative, still the turpitude of the bishop and my persecutors was no less flagitious. These incidents once more turned my thoughts toward Turl, whom I knew not whether to admire, love, or hate. I was not so entirely overwhelmed but that I ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... its original and proper sense, is the expression to an inferior of the will of a superior, which the inferior has it in his power to obey or to resist, but resistance to which entails a penalty more or less severe, in proportion to the moral turpitude, or the injurious consequences of the act of disobedience. In this its strict sense the law can only exist in connection with beings possessed of reason to understand it, of power to obey it, and of free will to determine whether they will obey it or not. When these three conditions are ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... though no unskilful writer, here wrote in vain; for what ingenuity can veil the turpitude of long and practised treachery? To keep up appearances, Sir Judas resorted more than usually to court; where, however, he was perpetually enduring rebuffs, or avoided, as one infected with the plague of treachery. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... said Mr. Boggs, slapping that portion of his frame as if he had a special grudge against it and would be glad if he could hit it hard enough to bring it to a realizing sense of its turpitude. "My figure had gone to the devil! It was not as large as it is now, but it was large enough to cook my gruel. My waist had increased so gradually that I had never noticed it. I got a tape and took its measure. Forty-two inches, sir! The jig was up. With a heart as young as ever, with a face as good ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... of a woman in full health, often in the middle of her friends and family, being roasted alive by combustibles fastened to her person, from which it is impossible to escape till her most sensitive parts have been reduced to a cinder! What crime ever perpetrated by human turpitude could have warranted a more dreadful fate! What demons, contriving mischief and torments, could have invented a combination of miseries so terrible and heart-rending? The decorations of beauty—the gratification of pride—even ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... overwhelmed with terror and confusion, not knowing whither to turn. The expression, "which hath opened its mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand," is, indeed, terrifying, but it portrays the turpitude of the fratricidal ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... supujo. Turf torfo. Turk Turko. Turkey Turkujo. Turkey (bird) meleagro. Turmoil bruego, tumulto. Turn turni. Turn (on a lathe) torni. Turn vico. Turner tornisto. Turnip napo. Turnscrew sxrauxbturnilo. Turnspit turnrostilo. Turnstile turnkruco. Turpentine terebinto. Turpitude hontindajxo. Turquoise turkiso. Turret tureto. Turtle-dove turto. Tusk dentego. Tutor guvernisto. Twain du. Tweezers prenileto. Twelve dekdu. Twig brancxeto. Twilight vespera krepusko. Twin dunaskito. Twine ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... on the pound, taking advantage of needy holders, who dwelt, many of them, in districts too remote from the centre of action to know what the Government was about. And even before this "signal instance of moral turpitude," the fact that so many old soldiers who had gone home with no other pay than government securities, to be exchanged for specie at the pleasure of a government which nobody had trusted, had sold out ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... slave-whip's poignant crack, The sound of avarice and turpitude, As hands unwilling plied their arduous task, Creating monuments to iron will, Human ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... defeat. But never, so he said, would he abandon the betrayed electors of Ballywhacket. Others might shuffle, and cheat and cozen, but he might be counted upon to remain firm, faithful, and incorruptible amidst the seething waves of political turpitude. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... Paradise is the abode of joy and delight, which could not be complete without the service of youths; but, as to the use of them for aught but service, it is Hell's putridity[FN248] and corruption and turpitude. How well saith ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... theatre, and of which Philadelphia and New-York have exhibited some striking instances. I mean the practice of certain meanspirited wretches, who bear malice towards particular performers, and make parties to hiss them off the stage. It is not easy to conceive of a greater degree of baseness, turpitude, and cowardice, than is manifested by this conduct. The object of their malice is unable to defend himself from their attacks. This, to a generous mind, would be an aegis, and protect the person who could make such a plea, as completely as her sex protects a woman. But with the persons here contemplated, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... if possible, to describe the sensation created by this amazing disclosure; and we may only add in conclusion, that the prisoner was convicted on other testimony; and after an earnest admonition from the justice, on the turpitude of crime and its dreadful miseries, Jared Sculpin was sentenced to give Simon Bogle one good day's work, and one good fleece of wool for his time lost in hunting the chain, and in bringing the offender to justice; to carry the chain on his back through the main travelled road, in open ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... soule, Devide not individium, be her and she thee, Keepe her from the Serpent, let her not Gad To everie Gossips congregation; For there is blushing modestie laide out And a free rayne to sensual turpitude Given out at length and lybidinous acts, Free chat, each giving counsell and sensure Capream maritum facere, such art thou Goate. Be not so secure. And you, my grand Cornutus, Thou Ram, thou seest thy shame, a pent-house To thy ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... Bridge, "Do you observe," continued he, "that extensive building? That is called the Penitentiary. It is a building designed for the punishment, employment, and reformation of offenders of secondary turpitude, usually punished by transportation for a term of years. It has been conceived since the commencement of the disputes which terminated in the separation of the American States. The plan of it is known to be partly that of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... people, exhibiting the free command of a pure and copious vocabulary, an inexhaustible fund of metaphors and similitudes, giving variety and grace to the most familiar topics, with an almost dramatic exposure of the folly and turpitude of vice, and a deep moral earnestness. His zeal as a bishop and eloquence as a preacher, however, gained him enemies both in the church and at the court. The ecclesiastics who were parted at his command from the lay-sisters (whom they kept ostensibly as servants), the thirteen bishops ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... date—a difficulty all the more difficult in that he only claims to be in his eighty-seventh year. It would be worthy of little attention, if the eager assailants of Dryden's moral character had not sought to see evidence of the deepest turpitude in this tart-eating with Mrs. Reeve and the ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... her mainmast and three topmasts.[410] By this means the British ship was to be enabled to sail for the attack on the American fleet, and by this only; for to drag spars of that weight up the rapids of the Richelieu, or over the rough intervening country, meant at least unendurable delay. "The turpitude of many of our citizens in this part of the country," wrote Macdonough, "furnishes the enemy with ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... with each generation and ended in the instincts of gorillas fermented in the brains of grooms and jockeys; or rather, as with the Choiseul-Praslins, Polignacs and Chevreuses, wallowed in the mud of lawsuits which made it equal the other classes in turpitude. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... birth,—the scrupulousness of modesty, for her history. The night, that consecrated so many homes and gathered together so many families in innocence and repose, was to her blacker than its own blackness in misery and turpitude; the morning, that radiated gladness over the face of the world, revealed the extent and exaggerated the sense of her own degradation. But the vision of Jesus had alighted upon her; she had seen him speeding on his errands of mercy; she hung about ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... is there, O Catiline, that can delight thee any longer in this city, in which there is not one man, without thy band of desperadoes, who does not fear, not one who does not hate thee?—What brand of domestic turpitude is not burnt in upon thy life? What shame of private bearing clings not to thee, for endless infamy? What scenes of impure lust, what deeds of daring crime, what horrible pollution attaches not to thy whole career?—To what young man, once entangled in ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... a spy. It seems that the Knight of the Golden Spur made a rather indifferent "agent;" not surely, as a French writer suggests, because the dirty work was too dirty for his fingers, but probably because he was getting old and stupid and out-of-date, and failed to keep in touch with new forms of turpitude. He left Venice again and paid a visit to Vienna, saw beloved Paris once more, and there met Count Wallenstein, or Waldstein. The conversation turned on magic and the occult sciences, in, which Casanova was an adept, as the reader of the Memoirs will remember, and the count took ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the eve of battle made no secret of their recompense, and strutted immodestly in the light of day, in the cynicism of riches and dignities; deserters from Ligny and Quatre-Bras, in the brazenness of their well-paid turpitude, exhibited their devotion to the monarchy in the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... with death or in any other way, when committed by one "cookee" on the property of another; and it is abundantly evident, from many things which are stated, that the natives themselves really do not consider the act as implying, in ordinary cases, that moral turpitude which we generally ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... Cromwell, King William, a few gentlemen who had the misfortune to be executed or exiled for high treason, and every dissenting minister that he has or can find occasion to notice, there are hardly any persons mentioned who are not stigmatized as knaves or fools, differing only in degrees of "turpitude" and "imbecility". Mr. Macaulay has almost realized the work that Alexander Chalmers's playful imagination had fancied, a Biographia Flagitiosa, or The Lives of Eminent Scoundrels. This is also an imitation of the Historical Novel, though rather in the track of Eugene Aram and Jack ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... new position he had so basely purchased. The odium of his injured countrymen spoke loudly throughout the land he had betrayed. He was burned in effigy countless times, and a growing generation was told with wrath and scorn the abhorrent tale of his turpitude. Meanwhile, as if by defiant self-assurance to wipe away the perfidy of former acts, he issued a proclamation to "the inhabitants of America," in which he strove to cleanse himself from blame. This ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... convictions, both mental and moral, imperiously requires its exercise. In such a case he has no alternative. He must either exert the negative power intrusted to him by the Constitution chiefly for its own preservation, protection, and defense or commit an act of gross moral turpitude. Mere regard to the will of a majority must not in a constitutional republic like ours control this sacred and solemn duty of a sworn officer. The Constitution itself I regard and cherish as the embodied and written will of the whole people ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson |
