"Debasing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with foreign governments during the Civil War were uniformly serious and sometimes perilous. The duties of the Secretary of State were exacting and delicate. Seward, by his tact and discretion, as well as his courage and wisdom, kept peace with the world, without debasing the honor or forfeiting the rights of the republic. One of the most intricate issues arose in the first year of the war. It is known as the Trent case. Mason and Slidell, Confederate envoys to England and France respectively, were forcibly ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... him and his master, and ultimately prove profitable to both. But where Christianity, used by irreligious persons, whose very acts destroy the vitality of the means, is made the medium of enforcing superstition, and of debasing the mind of the person it degrades into submission, its application becomes nothing less than criminal. It is criminal because it brings true religion into contempt, perverts Christianity-makes it a mockery, and gives to the degraded whites of the South a plea for discarding its precepts. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... critical, not lyric, so that his importance here is a negative one. In laying down the limits of poetry and painting in Laocoon, he attacked the error of his day which used poetry for pictures, debasing it to mere descriptions of seasons, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... drunk deep of the heaven- made perfume of a baby's breath. And the impulse that babies give to life, the challenge that they make to the father is always a noble one. It is not so as to women; less, as to ourselves. We are urged to courses that are petty, unworthy, selfish, debasing, supine, and brutal by our own natures or those of our mates. But for the child we act nobly, its call to us is always to our finer side, and so gradually we are lifted higher. Did any man in history ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... legacy under their wills. "Later, childlessness conferred advantages in the shape of the greatest authority and Lower; undue influence became very insidious in its quest of wealth, and in grasping the joyous things alone, debasing the true rewards of life; and all the liberal arts operating for the greatest good were turned to the opposite purpose, and commenced to profit by sycophantic ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... our own, in the land of our forefathers, having the commerce and soil and resources of the country at our disposal; we know nothing of that debasing inferiority, with which our very colour stamped us in America. There is nothing here to create the feeling on our part—nothing to cherish the feeling of superiority in the minds of foreigners who visit us. It is this moral emancipation—this liberation ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... pious frauds, those socialistic schemes which are so often undertaken in this country ostensibly in the name of religion and morality, but which, in reality, are subversive of morality and order, which are the offspring of fanaticism, and serve as a mask to hide the most debasing passions. Neither Mormons nor Millerites, nor the advocates of free love or of women's rights, so called, find any recruits in the Catholic Church. She will never suffer her children to be ensnared by these impostures, how specious soever ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... parliament and sustain government at this critical moment, his origin would be overlooked, and you would have pride in looking back on his acts. As it is, I fear his whole soul is occupied with the unworthy and debasing passion of mere gain. Money is a necessary auxiliary to rank, and without rank there can be no order, and without order no liberty; but when the love of money gets to occupy the place of respect ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... not," interrupted Jemima, "lead your imagination into all the scenes of wretchedness and depravity, which I was condemned to view; or mark the different stages of my debasing misery. Fate dragged me through the very kennels of society; I was still a slave, a bastard, a common property. Become familiar with vice, for I wish to conceal nothing from you, I picked the pockets of the drunkards ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... of music and other harmonics which may come to us through the sense of hearing. But the sense of taste and was given us to distinguish between wholesome and unwholesome foods, and cannot be used for merely sensuous gratification, without debasing and making of it a gross thing. An education which demands special enjoyment or pleasure through the sense of taste, is wholly artificial; it is coming down to the animal plane, or below it rather; for the instinct of the brute creation teaches it ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... atmosphere, the people it attracts, the harm it does—your father, as you know, has never been within a theatre in his life; is it likely that he can look with calmness upon his daughter marrying a man whose livelihood is to be gained in a scandalous and debasing profession?" ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... has been shown to be dangerous to rest morality on the doctrine of a future life; for apart from the small effect the terrors of a hereafter have on many sinners, as that doctrine is frequently rejected, social interests suffer. And, finally, it is debasing and hurtful to religion to make it a substitute for ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... population equal to one-sixth of all the inhabitants of the country, as the census reports will show. Four millions of the population so to be amalgamated have been just set free from a servitude, the debasing influences of which have many a time been vividly depicted in the anti-slavery speeches of the very men who are the most prominent champions of this ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... stubborn refusal to worship the male energy as the Creator. During the later ages of their history, at a time when their religion had degenerated into a licensed system of vice and corruption, and after their temples had become brothels in which, in the name of religion, were practiced the most debasing ceremonies, the Greeks became ashamed of their ancient worship, and, like the Jews, ashamed also of ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... boy. First of all, he is no longer frank and open. He becomes shifty and suspicious and will not look you squarely in the face. A boy cannot become a slave to this habit without it affecting his mind. He invites debasing thoughts,—the old pure and clean method of thought and living no longer satisfy. His imagination even becomes corrupt and his moral nature and moral sense is perverted until he no longer seems to be able to tell the difference between right ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... in the chief concerns of life."[97] The life of the community consists of the common activities of its people. There can be no community where there is no devotion to a common cause. The cause may be now one thing, now another, it may be worthy or debasing, but in so far as the people of a locality are acting together in the support of various common causes they are living as a community. Just as the character of an individual is determined by his life purposes and the degree ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... Gospel, and is now nearly self-supporting. There are three missions of the society in Labrador, the one at Nain being the chief and the residence of the director, but Hopedale is very important as it is the place where the debasing influence of the traders and fishermen is most felt by the Eskimo, and the work of the missionaries consequently made least welcome to them. However, they have persevered, in the German fashion, and seem to have a firm hold on the childlike people which ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... marred that face terribly. It seemed twice the former size; and all its bright expression was gone. The thickened and protruding eyelids half closed the leaden eyes, and the swollen lips and cheeks gave to his countenance a look of all predominating sensuality. True manliness had bowed itself in debasing submission to the bestial. He talked loudly, and with a pompous dogmatism—mainly on political subjects—but talked only from memory; for any one could see, that thought came into but feeble activity. And yet, derationalized, so to speak, as he was, through drink, he had been chosen a ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... spiritual advance of mankind. It is enough to say that, while the Church as an institution continues to exist, the belief in the supernatural and even in the spiritual has been supplanted in the souls of millions of men by a gross and debasing materialism. ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... fight, "I, a sixth-form fellow, have condescended to thrash that base coward there, whom all you miserable lower boys have been making an idol and hero of, and from whom you have been so readily learning every sort of blackguardly and debasing trick. But let me tell you and your hero, that if any of you dare to annoy or lift a finger at me again, you shall do it at your peril. I despise you all; there is hardly one gentlemanly or honourable fellow left among you since ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... the Bishopric of Cologne and the Setillers.[68] He had to know the value in English money of them all, as it was fixed for the time being by the Fellowship, and most of them were debased past all reason. Indeed, English money enjoyed an enviable good fame in this respect until Henry VIII began debasing the coinage for his own nefarious ends. The letters of the Celys are full of worried references to the exchange, and much we should pity Thomas Betson. But doubtless he was like Chaucer's bearded merchant: 'Wel koude he in exchaunge ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... referred to is doubtless not so much physical neatness as mental purity of thought—thought free from doubt and calumny and petty deceits and hypocrisy and selfishness and debasing perversions of the life forces; but during various stages of history we find that all teachings have their esoteric and their ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... cures them of all manner of diseases by touching them. Such is the strength and power that he has over their minds."[Footnote: Ibid., i. 110, Letter xxiv. Referring to the sale of offices and titles, to the habit of debasing the coinage, and to ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... forms. On one side you have the gentle, intelligent monk of Burma, and the kindly superstitious bonze of China. But that black travesty of Buddhism, Lamaism, seems to offer no redeeming feature; brutish in Ladakh, vicious and cruel in Tibet, it is debasing and weakening in its effects upon the Mongol, who comes of finer and stronger stock than either Ladakhi or Tibetan. But he sometimes succeeds in being a good fellow in spite ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... public-house melodies, and the excitement produced less mischievous than that due to gin. But the best that I can wish for its adherents is, that they should speedily reach a point at which they could perceive their doctrines to be debasing. I hope, indeed, that they do not realise their own meaning: but I could almost as soon join in some old pagan ceremonies, gash my body with knives, or swing myself from a hook, as indulge in this variety of ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... to learn my ABC to know quartz from feldspar before I indulge in such speculations. I lately got hold of a report on M. Dessalines D'Orbigny's labours in S. America (7/2. "Voyage dans l'Amerique Meridionale, etc." (A. Dessalines D'Orbigny).); I experienced rather a debasing degree of vexation to find he has described the Geology of the Pampas, and that I have had some hard riding for nothing, it was however gratifying that my conclusions are the same, as far as I can collect, with his results. It is also capital that the whole of Bolivia will be described. I hope ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... for whose destruction he has been liberally rewarded. Immediately upon the accomplishment of such an act he resumes his human form and thus escapes identification and detection. Such persons are termed by many "bad medicine men," and the practice of thus debasing the sacred teachings of the Mid[-e]wiwin is discountenanced by members of the society generally. Such pretensions are firmly believed in and acknowledged by the credulous and are practiced by that class of Shamans here designated ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... the characters of the actors were loose, exceedingly so; and if the audience could learn something of human nature there, it was only the debasing side of it. It is generally true that actors lend their influence to intemperance, licentiousness, and irreligion. They do not patronize Sabbath schools, churches, and other Christian institutions, but they ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... whole nation had gradually become bound by an iron system of caste. The country was split up into little sections, each governed by some petty despot, and harassed by internecine feuds. Religion had become a debasing ritualism, with charms and incantations, fear of the influence of the stars, and belief in dreams and omens. The idea of the existence of a soul was supplemented by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... upon others; and if the most common and approved way of growing rich is to gain by the ruin and loss of those who are in necessity, why should not a man be allowed as well to make himself appear great by debasing those that are below him? For insolence is no inconsiderable way of improving greatness and authority in the opinion of the world. If all men are born equally fit to govern, as some late philosophers affirm, he only has the advantage of all others who has the best ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... which the dogmatic system rests. It would beg the question to say that this would in itself have been undesirable; but the practical effect of it, as the world then stood, would have only been to make the educated into infidels, and to leave the multitude to a convenient but debasing superstition. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... also, which arises from confounding two very different things; namely, justification and final salvation. We have seen that the consequences of sin are twofold—external and internal. The inward consequence of sin is separation from God; the external is the weakening and debasing of the soul. The first consequence is removed by faith; the second, by obedience. Every act of sin pollutes, darkens, and ruins the soul; every act of obedience strengthens, elevates, and saves it. Obedience, persevered in to the end, insures the salvation of the soul. But, in order that we may ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... her. It was entirely natural that she shrank at the test of squalid suffering. A little money, and he could have rested secure in her love, for then he would have been able to keep ever before her the best qualities of his heart and brain. Upon him, too, penury had its debasing effect; as he now presented himself he was not a man to be admired or loved. It was all simple and intelligible enough—a situation that would be misread only ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... number of Gipsies sit as models, for which they get one shilling per hour. They are not in demand as perfect specimens of the human figure from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot; but few of them, owing to their low, debasing habits, have arrived at that state of perfection. I know one real, fine, old Gipsy woman who sits to artists for the back of her head only, on account of her black, frizzy, raven locks. One will sit for her eyes, another for the nose, another for the hands and feet, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... seized an opportunity, when the bishop was away in England, to set up a commune. On his return he was obliged to accept the situation and to recognise the commune in return for a substantial payment. But he further recouped himself by debasing the local currency, till it was practically worthless; and he gratified his spite against the citizens by an atrocious crime. Professing to have discovered a conspiracy against his life, he arrested the Mayor and caused the unhappy man ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... he shut the door between him and her father. He paused in the hall to dispel the vague, self-debasing discomfort—and listening to her voice as she sang helped wonderfully. There is no more trying test of a personality than to be estimated by the voice alone. That test produces many strange and startling results. Again and again it completely ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... meal,—an exorbitant sympathy with brute creation which owes its popularity to Yorick's ass. It is not necessary here to relate the whole story. Wilhelmine's excessive sentimentality estranges her from her husband, aweak brutish man, who has no comprehension of her feelings. He finds a refuge in the debasing affections of a French opera-singer, Pouilly, and gradually sinks to the very lowest level of degradation. This all is accomplished by the interposition and active concern of friends, by efforts at reunion managed by ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... with these vicious and miserable beings, destroying thereby all those exquisite and delicate sensibilities whose existence cold-hearted worldlings have denied; annihilating all genuine passion, and debasing that to a selfish feeling which is the excess of generosity and devotedness. Their body and mind alike crumble into a hideous wreck of humanity; idiocy and disease become perpetuated in their miserable ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... I justify God, for I was accustomed to oppose the preaching of the terrors of the gospel, and to represent it as debasing virtue, by the admixture of ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... receive as much as six thousand dollars a year, and the majority are paid from twelve hundred to three thousand a year. This does not make for independence. I am no believer in great wealth as an incentive to activity, but certainly solvency makes for emancipation from the more debasing forms of tyranny. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... him that since he persisted in dissipation we must separate; that I was going North, and that I should never live with him again, at least until I had good evidence of his reform. He was rapidly debasing himself, and although I was willing to work for him, I was not willing to share his degradation. Poor man; he had his faults, but over these faults death has drawn a veil. My husband is now sleeping in his grave, and in the silent grave I would bury ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... thinking, even in conflict with the whole world. Sincere thought, even if it does run counter to that of others, is still a service to mankind; for humanity demands that those who love her should oppose, or if necessary rebel against her. You will not serve her by flattery, by debasing your conscience and intelligence, but rather by defending their integrity from the abuse of power. For these are some of her voices, and if you betray yourself ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... countries where the male is entitled to but one female as his wife. Woman's highest sphere is not in the harem or zenana, but in that dignified state in which she is the sole connubial companion of but one man. It is debasing to her nature, and subversive of her dignity in the rank of humanity, to make her the equal only with others in the marital union with one male. She becomes only the true, noble and affectionate being when she is conscious of a superiority to others in the connubial companionship with her accepted ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... discrimination, to distinguish between the poverty of idleness, and that distress which arises from circumstances over which human foresight has no control, so as to relieve with propriety the pressure of want, without encouraging the degrading and debasing habit of depending upon alms, instead of labouring to provide the necessaries of life. He had no fine clothes to be spoiled by trudging down the filthiest lanes, and entering the meanest hovels to relieve suffering humanity. The poor—and that is the great class to whom the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... occupation, with its deliberate and filthy defilement of the houses, which defies words, and will leave a blot for all time on the records of the race so vile-minded as to have achieved it. The deliberate ingenuity of the nastiness is its most debasing feature. At Penchard, where the Germans only stayed twenty-four hours, many people were obliged to make bonfires of the bedding and all sorts of other things as the only and quickest way to purge the town of danger in such ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... religions there was nothing false, in the false religions there was nothing true. If any trace of truth was to be found in Polytheism, it was so mixed with error as to be practically only evil. As the doctrines of heathen religions were corrupt, so their worship was only a debasing superstition. Their influence was to make men worse, not better; their tendency was to produce sensuality, cruelty, and universal degradation. They did not proceed, in any sense, from God; they were not even the work of good men, but rather of deliberate imposition and ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... it of noble or ignoble work—of happy self-sacrifice or ruinous self-indulgence—the capacities in the right use of which it may rise to heights of beautiful virtue, in the abuse of which it may sink to the depths of debasing vice—make the crisis one of fear as well as of hope, of sadness as well ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... educational ideal presented. Rousseau's Emile presented a new ideal in education. According to his conception it was debasing that man should be educated to behave correctly in an artificial society, to follow blindly the doctrines of a faith, or to be an obedient subject of a king. Instead he conceived the function of education to be to evolve the natural powers, cultivate the human side, unfold the inborn ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... volumes of the Encyclopaedia. Here was the effective damage that the Encyclopaedia inflicted on the church as the organ of a stationary superstition. Some of the articles remind us on what a strange borderland France stood in those days, between debasing credulity and wholesome light. We are so sensible of the new air that breathes impalpably over the book, that when the old theological fancies appear for form's sake, and are solemnly marshalled in orthodox state, the contrast and the incongruity ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... ugh! No! Hold the basin for me again, Bob! No, Ishmael, you can do nothing for me! only do go away! I hate anyone to see me in this debasing sickness! for it is debasing, Ishmael! Ugh! the ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... Circassian Beauty, said very decidedly that she didn't want any Grandmother Crunchers on the platform with her, and what was the use of having a Brotherhood if you didn't stop such things, which was debasing as everybody knew, and made her blood just boil every time it happened for she couldn't stand having her rights took away and wasn't going to. These energetic remarks decided the Chair ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... has often proposed to abate this nuisance of erotic publication which is most debasing to public morals already perverted enough. But the "Empire of Opinion" cares very little for such matters and, in the matter of the "native press," generally seems to seek only a quiet life. In England if erotic literature were not forbidden by law, few would care to sell or to buy it, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... shall the warfare against White Slavery be waged to blot out this cloud upon civilization expeditiously?" Over two years ago I learned that there was a gigantic slave trade in women, and with a handful of people we began to fight the traders. That a system of slavery, debasing and vile, had grown to enormous proportions before our very doors seemed beyond belief, an impossibility, and even romantic. Most people were skeptical of the existence of a well defined and organized ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... have thought a rational person would have regarded as heinous. In his will he freed his slaves, not for the Abolitionist's reason, but because he regarded slavery as the most pernicious form of labor, debasing alike the slave and his master, uneconomic and ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... apparition, stealing around this dwelling often in the dark and rain, content with the ray of light your window threw upon the deserted street. Now I see that I was a weak dunce, whose passion nature lent no nerve of hers to convey even to your notice. Better for me that I had hugged the debasing reality of my gold, and lost my eyes ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... applying the abundant succours furnished by the zeal of the country. One trait of the times, however, it is essential to commemorate. Terror is perhaps the most merciless of all sentiments, and that which is least restrained either by shame or a sense of justice; and under this debasing influence some of the queen's advisers did not hesitate to suggest, that in a crisis so desperate, she ought to consult her own safety and that of the country, by seeking pretexts to take away the lives of some of the leading catholics. They cited in support of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... feeling which it excites, when that reward assumes the moral character, and is found to be the desire of pleasing the parent, and much more when it seeks the approbation of the Almighty? Every one will see how beneficial and elevating the effects of cherishing the one must be, and how debasing comparatively is the influence of the other. That children are capable of being acted upon by these higher motives, we have already seen; and, when we aim at securing the effects which they are calculated to produce, we are closely imitating Nature in one of ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... is not honest with him and makes no suitable provision for his developing nature, he will be better off in a quiet hour of family conversation and reading at home. That means the application of parents to this hour.[33] It banishes the monstrous Sunday supplement with its hideous, debasing pictures. It substitutes conversation in the whole group, reading aloud of stories and poems, biblical and otherwise, and songs, hymns, or at times the walk in the fields or parks. Fortunately the better type of Sunday school is more and more ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... passions which lay siege to us to-day, and make utter havoc and spoil of our lives. Are we not enslaved, nay, are not our careers completely shipwrecked, by love of gain, that fever which rages unappeased in us all, and love of pleasure?—one the most debasing, the other the most ignoble of the ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... in 1832 "to give equal advantages to whites and blacks, and to give education to women as well as to men." Other objects were "to establish universal liberty by the abolition of every form of sin" and "to avoid the debasing association of the heathen classics and make the Bible a text book in all departments of education." The traditions of Oberlin are strongly religious, and from Charles Grandison Finney, revivalist and president of the college from 1851 ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... and this mere thing being imaginary, no wonder that all their women are represented with the minds of strumpets, except a few irrational humourists, far less capable of exciting our sympathy than a Hindoo who has had a basin of cow-broth thrown over him;—for this, though a debasing superstition, is still real, and we might pity the poor wretch, though we cannot help despising him. But B. and F.'s Lucinas are clumsy fictions. It is too plain that the authors had no one idea of chastity as a virtue, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... extent has the evil gone, that we fear a large proportion of both boys and girls possess some of the articles, which they kindly (?) lend to each other. The natural result follows, and frequently the most debasing and revolting practises are indulged in. And the evil is not confined alone to Boston. Other cities suffer in the same way. It is but a few years since the second city in the Commonwealth was stirred almost to its foundations by the discovery of an association ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... irreverent feelings of mystery and shame that have been attached to the genital and excretory organs. The former have been regarded, like their corresponding mental passions, as something of a lower and baser nature, tending to degrade and carnalize man by their physical appetites. But we cannot take a debasing view of any part of our humanity without becoming degraded in ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... not to be expected that the colony would quietly submit. An address, signed by Meredith and several other magistrates, animadverted on the measure with just severity. They declared that the restrictions imposed were needless, unconstitutional, and debasing: that they were an insult to the colony; contrary to the implied engagements of the crown, when emigration was invited. The reply of Arthur asserted, that so long as this was a place for the reception of convicts, the press ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... of man and his duties leaves but little room for individualism or insolent self-assertion. No one can divorce himself from his fellow-men and their interests without lowering and debasing his own vocation in life, and becoming enfeebled and stunted in his own development. "The supreme object of the college," says President M. E. Gates, "is to give an education for power in social life." Every advancement in knowledge should tend ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... characteristic cult of modern society." In the Elizabethan Age of mighty glory, three hundred years before this was said, Ben Jonson had railed against money as "a thin membrane of honor," groaning: "How hath all true reputation fallen since money began to have any!" Now the very fact that the debasing effect of money on the social organism has been so constantly reprehended, from Scriptural days onward, proves the instinctive yearning of mankind for a system of life regulated by good taste, high intelligence and sound affections. But, it remains true that, in the succession ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... of alimentiveness, located directly in front of the ear, indicates the functional conditions of the stomach, which, when aroused by excessive hunger, exerts a debasing influence upon this and all of the adjacent organs, and is demoralizing to both body and mind. In obedience to the instinct of hunger, children will slyly plunder gardens and orchards, displaying profligate, if not reckless tendencies in the gratification ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... it must be remembered the object of punishment should be two-fold: (a) To prevent the commission of offenses, and (b) to reform the offender. Punishment should, therefore, in degree and character depend upon the nature of the offense. Punishment should not be debasing or illegal, and the penalty should be proportionate to the nature of the offense. If too great, it tends to arouse sympathy, and foster friends for the offender, thus encouraging a repetition of the offense. A distinction, therefore, should be made between the ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... In the debasing slang of the period, that had even found its way into the virgin cloisters of the Crammer Institute, Miss Kate, as she afterwards expressed ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... Perhaps she was debasing her talent; this kind of thing was rather a theatrical trick than music. For all that, it needed feeling, and she knew the old Border ballads and their almost forgotten airs. Jim was very still when she began to sing, for her voice and ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... other hand, a doubt that the age in which they were heroic was the most unheroic of all ages; that they were bred, lived, and died, under the most debasing of materialist tyrannies, with art, literature, philosophy, family and national life dying, or dead around them, and in cities the corruption of which cannot be told for very shame—cities, compared with which Paris is ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... despair which rise unceasingly to heaven from the hearts of tortured millions, in the famine of the operatives, the grinding poverty of the peasants, the desecration of their wives and daughters, the degradation of the race through unjust laws and debasing and brutal prejudices—from all this agony spring my new formulas, the creed which I am determined to establish: 'Man has a birthright of happiness.' These thoughts are my god, a god which will give bread, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and morality has not been at all so rapid as in wealth. The freed slave could not at once escape from the debasing influences of years of bondage, and the planters have deliberately set themselves against any system of popular education. Crimes against property, Sewell says, are rife, especially thieving; petty acts of anger and cruelty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... and statutes, never to be revoked, are in substance as follows: None are admitted within the walls of Zion, as they denominate their religious sphere, but by a confession to one or more incarnate witnesses of every debasing and immoral act perpetrated by the confessor within his remembrance; also every act which, though the laws of men may sanction, may be deemed sinful in the view of that new and sublimer divinity which he has adopted. The time, the place, the motive which produced and pervaded the act, the circumstances ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... and Rectories. The prisons of the country had been in a most disgraceful state; the fairs and waits were scenes of rude debauchery, and the theatres were—still, in this nineteenth century—whispered to be haunts of the most debasing immorality. I could not learn that any bishop had ever taken the lead in denouncing these iniquities; nor that when any man or class of men rose to denounce them, the Episcopal Order failed to throw itself into the breach to defend corruption ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... vain for a coquette to pretend to religion; its practice involves hypocrisy, falsehood, and deception—everything that is mean—everything that is debasing. In short, as it is bottomed on selfishness and pride, where it has once possessed the mind, it will only yield to the truth-displaying banners of the cross. This, and this only, can remove the evil; for without it she, whom the charms of youth and beauty have enabled to act the coquette, ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... drunk, but having once experienced the wretched consequences of drunkenness, it refuses to be drunk again. How different is its conduct to mine! I, after having experienced a hundred times the filthiness and misery of drunkenness, have still persisted in debasing myself below the condition of a beast. Oh, if I persist in this conduct what have I to expect but wretchedness and contempt in this world and eternal perdition in the next? But, thank God, it is not yet too late to amend; I ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... before. At the same time there came upon the lower classes, the terrible scourge of gin. Violent and ignorant as these classes were, the effects upon them of so cheap and maddening a drink were incalculably debasing. "The drunkenness of the common people," says an eye-witness, "was so universal by the retailing of a liquor called gin, with which they could get drunk for a groat, that the whole town of London, and many towns in the country swarmed with drunken people of ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... strongly when I see an old man with a young woman—disgust. To me it is a horrible sight, the lust of an old man. You can argue as long as you like, but that is one of my fixed eternal prejudices. I feel sick when I see an old man giving way to it. I feel that somehow or other he is debasing humanity. That was the real reason why I jumped up and ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... the mischief that is in them. A more innocent man could hardly be imagined or one more versed in the lore of evil. Persons who believe that what is called immoral literature has a debasing effect must overlook such men as Litton. He dwelt among those Greek and Roman authors who excelled in exploiting the basest emotions and made ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... destroys; it may diminish offences against property, but it augments offences against the person, and multiplies drunkenness to an alarming extent. While it is an undoubted fact that material wretchedness has a debasing effect both morally and physically, it is also equally true that the same results are sometimes found to flow from an increase of economic well-being. An interesting proof of this is to be found in the recent investigations of M. Chopinet, a French ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... worst elements of human character. In Iceland Christianity has performed its work of civilization, unobstructed by that commercial cupidity which has caused nations more favored in respect to soil and climate to lapse into an idolatry scarcely less debasing and cruel than that which preceded the introduction of the Gospel. Trial by combat was abolished in 1001, and the penalty of the imaginary crime of witchcraft was blotted from the statutes of the island nearly half a century before it ceased to disgrace those ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... notice, though they received no homage; habitual temperance was substituted in the room of superstitious fasting; and novices were instructed in the principles of true piety, instead of being initiated into the idle and debasing habits of monachism. By their conversation also abroad, and by the circulation of books, these zealous monks diffused the knowledge of the truth through the adjacent country, and imparted it to many individuals who resided in towns at ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... little to do with Jean-Marie; but the sympathy which had been established between them on the first night remained unbroken; they held occasional conversations, mostly on household matters; to the extreme disappointment of the Doctor, they occasionally sallied off together to that temple of debasing, superstition, the village church; madame and he, both in their Sunday's best, drove twice a month to Fontainebleau and returned laden with purchases; and in short, although the Doctor still continued to regard them as irreconcilably antipathetic, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... yet they cannot be remedied. The thing had seemed so obvious to him, in his sense of unspeakable masculine superiority, and in his fine contempt for what is only sanctioned by antiquity and common consent, he had imagined that, at the first hint, men would arise and shake off the debasing tyranny. He found himself wrong, and he showed that he could be moderate in his own fashion, and understood the spirit of true compromise. He came round to Calvin's position, in fact, but by a different way. And it derogates nothing from the merit of this wise attitude that it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of whites in Georgia and the Carolinas, except by some daily contact with them. The injustice done to three fourths of them was hardly less than that done to all the blacks. There were two kinds of slavery, and negro slavery was only more wicked and debasing than white slavery. Nine of every ten white men in South Carolina had almost as little to do with even State affairs as the negroes had. Men talk of plans of reconstruction;—that is the best plan which proposes to do most for the common people. Till civilization has been carried down into the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... and—unconsciously perhaps to herself—the woman of the World warps the facts in her narrative so as to save the personal dignity of the hero, who has captivated her interest, not from the moral odium of a great crime, but the debasing position of a prisoner at the bar. Allen Fenwick, no doubt, purposely omits to notice the discrepancy between these two statements, or to animadvert on the mistake which, in the eyes of a lawyer, would discredit Mrs. Poyntz's. It ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... events relating to the period of his father's career in arms against the British; some of these were of a thrilling character, and strongly depicted the miseries of war, presenting a lamentable picture of the debasing influence of sanguinary struggles on the human mind. The barbarous mode of harassing the British troops, by picking off stragglers, which the lower orders of Americans pursued, in most instances for the sake of the wretched clothing and ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... with them, and to share their beer or grog. Be it further known, that there is a great deal of decorum in a Lust Haus, particularly among the latter sex; and altogether it is infinitely more rational and less debasing than the low ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... passed his life, not in mere amusement, but in acquiring a knowledge of the world in prosecuting his own interests. It is true, his leisure hours might have been more innocently bestowed even in the most desultory pursuits, than in the debasing schemes and scandalous society in which his existence was passed: it is true, that in studying his own interests, he forgot his true interest, and failed lamentably; still, he had not been ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... does the female phalarope, whose maternal instincts are completely atrophied. Another illustration may be drawn from the debased position of the Athenian women, where the sharp separation between the sexes led, without doubt, not only to the debasing of the marriage relationship, but to the establishment of the hetairae, and also to the common ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... have been dissociated from the old pagan observances of the changes of the sun and seasons and the growth of vegetation. At the same time the religious sanction given to polygamy and slavery, and the sensual nature of the heaven promised to true believers after death, must be condemned as debasing features; and the divine authority and completeness ascribed to the Koran and the utterances of the Prophet, which were beyond criticism or question, as well as the hostility towards all other forms of religion and philosophy, have necessarily had a very narrowing influence on Muhammadan ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... morals, while it brought disgrace and ruin to private reputation and character. More money was lost by it than was spent to educate and Christianize the world, and it cost more precious lives than war and pestilence combined. Being a crime utterly selfish and debasing, as well as extremely tenacious of its hold upon the individual life, it was almost the greatest enemy to ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... life," argues Gigadibs, "nor in the judgment of the best men. You are debasing your standard by living for the many fools who cannot see through you, instead of the wiser few ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... angel, and archangel? These are rather philosophical problems. But in art, as at the realistic end of the scale, we admit the portraiture, as a part of life, of the bestial, the cruel, the unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at the idealistic end admit the representation of the celestial after human models, and feel it, even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it is a fear. ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... also a pleasure, he must still be watchful and humble, lest he fall. One would think this truth so obvious, from daily observation, as to be undeniable; but it is now the fashion to laud human nature, to paint flattering pictures only. Humility is thought debasing; but Truth alone is honourable, and Humility is Truth. You will find the actions of those who acknowledge this truth, more honourable to the human race, than the deeds of those who deny it. The true dignity of human nature consists, not in shutting our ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... parent, wiping their eyes, and half concealing their faces,—contrasted with the marked insensibility and jocular countenances of the spectators and purchasers,—furnished a striking commentary on the miseries of slavery, and its debasing effects upon the hearts of its abettors. While the woman was in this distressed situation she was asked, 'Can you feed sheep?' Her reply was so indistinct that it escaped me; but it was probably in the negative, for her purchaser rejoined, in a loud and harsh ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... (Cantos xxix. and xxx.) are found those who have been guilty of personation with criminal intent, or of bearing false witness, or of debasing the coinage or pretending to transmute metals. These suffer from leprosy, dropsy, raving madness, and other diseases. Before leaving the pit, a quarrel between two of the sinners attracts Dante's attention more than Virgil thinks seemly; ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... scientific advancement, cultural refinement, and the higher development of man. It is like the old devil returning and bringing with him seven other devils more powerful for evil than their original prototype, this prostitution of learning, intellect, and philosophy to the most debasing influences of ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... quarters in a large city. This was one of them. Let that suffice to the critical pedants who clamour for accuracy and local colour. Accuracy! pah! Shall the soaring soul of a three-volumer be restrained by the debasing fetters of a grovelling exactitude? Never! I will tell you what. If I choose, I who speak to you, moi qui vous parle, the Seine shall run red with the blood of murdered priests, and there shall be a tide in it where no tide ever was ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... some good angel sent To make me with a quiet life content. The question shall no more my bosom irk, To go to Washington or go to work. From Fame's debasing struggle I'll withdraw, And taking up the pen lay down the law. I'll leave this rogue, lest my example make An honest man of him—his heart would break. ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... refreshment provided aboard, and dropped at any hour long distances from home, were still regarded by employers in the old way, not as defenders of their country's life, but as a means to quick profits, against whom the usual debasing tricks of economy could be devised. A battleship in the north had been completed five months under contract time. Working girls, determined to make a record output of ammunition, persisted twenty-two hours at a stretch, topped their machines with Union Jacks, ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... organ of divine truth and persuasion. But if such be the common hazards of seeking inspiration from those potent fountains, it may easily be conceived what chance Mr. Wordsworth had of escaping their enchantment,—with his natural propensities to wordiness, and his unlucky habit of debasing pathos with vulgarity. The fact accordingly is, that in this production he is more obscure than a Pindaric poet of the seventeenth century; and more verbose "than even himself of yore"; while the wilfulness with which he persists in choosing his examples of intellectual ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the causes of the violent and inveterate prejudices which have arisen against art itself in the minds of many good men; and, were this view of beauty and art the true one, we could not deny that such prejudices or opinions would be but too well founded. To combat such debasing and false views of the aims of art, will be the chief object of the present volume. If art were to be degraded into the servant and minister of the senses, we would be among the first to condemn it. But all Beauty proceeds from the All Fair, who hath pronounced all 'good,' and 'loveth ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... desire. So long as I am in hatred to another, I am in bondage to my hatred; and if, for the sake of appearances, I do not act or speak from it, I am none the less at its mercy, and it will find an outlet wherever it can do so without debasing me in the eyes of other men more than I am willing to be debased. The control of appearances is merely outward repression, and a very common instance of this may be observed in the effort to control a laugh. If we repress it, it is apt to assert ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... her hand—if he ever did; but one could not help thinking, as he noted her dainty manner and delicate, somewhat distingue face, that she was hardly the girl to fancy a fellow who had personated a gorilla, even for her hand. I was afraid that Jack had made a mistake in thus debasing himself to the absurd passion of her cruel parent for the possession of a gorilla. Moreover, by debarring himself from her society for a greater portion of the time (Sundays only excepted), he left the field open for some more fortunate rival ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... the separation of families, the putting asunder whom God had joined, the selling Christian girls for Christian harems, and the thousand horrors of a system which can lessen the agonies it inflicts only by debasing the minds and souls of the race on which it inflicts them. Is your Christianity, then, he would say, a respecter of persons, and does it condone the sin because the sinner can contribute to your coffers? Was there ever a simony like ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... immigration has brought so deep a deposit of "saloons" and suburban "balls" that the very face of the land is changed, old lovers of that shore know it no more. Never were the environs of a city so wantonly and recklessly degraded. Municipalities have vied with millionaires in soiling and debasing the exquisite shores of our river, that, thirty years ago, were unrivalled the ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... influence of a frightful and disgraceful crime in debasing and destroying a character naturally high and noble, the guilty person being ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... has conceived the immortality of his verse. With the late Sir Henry Bishop he was associated in re-arranging a hundred of the choicest old English melodies. The music has been re-arranged; and many a lovely air, inadmissible to cultivated society from its being associated with vulgar or debasing words, has been re-admitted to the social circle, and is fast floating into public favour in union with the words composed ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... influence, Buddhism has failed, on the large scale, to raise its votaries to higher planes of ethical accomplishment. And hence the necessity of that new revelation which Jesus declared amid the moral ruins of a crumbling world, by which alone can the debasing superstitions of India and the godless materialism of China be replaced with a vital spirituality,—even as the elaborate mythology of Greece and Rome gave way before the fervent earnestness of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... perceived only the beautiful in the universe; and the beautiful and the true were one with him; so that he made others see and hear nothing save what was lovely and ennobling. Whenever any debasing or evil influence approached him he would trample upon it with all the fierceness of a true Ueberhell; but such conflicts seldom occurred, for his nature was so exalted that it carried him unconscious through the depravity and pollution of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... however addled, are our friends, our inferiors are our prey, and since the policeman had discovered Mary publicly washing out an alien hall his respect for her had withered and dropped to death almost in an instant; whence it appears that there is really only one grave and debasing vice in the world, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... doing all of these, and was keenly aware of it. Up to this time Shelley had been master of his nature, and it was a nature which was as beautiful and as nearly perfect as any merely human nature may be. But he was drunk now, with a debasing passion, and was not himself. There is nothing in his previous history that is in character with the Shelley of this letter. He had done boyish things, foolish things, even crazy things, but never a thing to be ashamed of. He had done things which one might laugh at, but the privilege ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... From this debasing inspection Raikes turned slowly to the washstand to remove the grime from his face, with an impersonal deliberation that was not only unnatural under the circumstances, but which awakened the eerie suggestion that he was expending his ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... well the kind of shock and disgust I felt in the certainty that I had surprised them at some, perhaps, debasing incantation—a suspicion of this Mr. Bryerly, of the ill-fitting black coat, and white choker—and a sort of fear came upon me, and I fancied he was asserting some kind of mastery over my father, which very ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... in comparison with that of Oriental nations, it must still be evident to us that the best phases of this life and the magnificent features of Greek learning have been emphasized much by writers, while the wretched and debasing conditions of the people of Greece have seldom ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... our infancy—trust, filial reverence, freshness, simplicity—are not qualities to be left behind, but the natural forecast of that religious spirit which is the highest growth of maturity, and our own safeguard against the hardening and debasing influences of the world and the flesh. And this was the Saviour's meaning when He said, "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in nowise enter therein." And if there is one thing more than ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... enormous accumulation of debt which had been incurred by the latter, with slavery, the penalty of default. He induced the creditors to accept the compromise of their debts: whether absolutely cancelling the amount, or merely reducing the interest and debasing the coin, is a matter of some dispute; the greater number of authorities incline to the former supposition, and Plutarch quotes the words of Solon himself in proof of the bolder hypothesis, although they by no means warrant such ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... And nothing is so mortal to thought and sentiment as that same derisive tew-tewing, disingenuous and non-committal! Day by day, and that is why I roll my rs, I must witness this debasing of language and ideals. It's enough to ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... come under her hands! "I often ask myself," says the heroine of "Mothering on Perilous," one of Miss Furman stories of the settlement school, "What other boys have such gifts to bring to their nation? Proud, self-reliant, the sons of heroes, bred in brave traditions, knowing nothing of the debasing greed for money, strengthened by a hand-to-hand struggle with nature from their very infancy (I have not known of one who did not begin at five or six to shoulder family responsibilities such as hoeing ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... seemed evident that certain Spanish officers charged with resistance yielded too easily; the idea of corruption was connected with the victory; it appears as though generals and not battles had been won, and the conquering soldier returned humiliated. A debasing war, in short, in which the Bank of France could be read in the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... comparing it with any narrative of sober travel, and if he happens to live in China, his own nose and eyes are a sufficient witness. . . . The writer takes the worst of our morals, the weakest of our religion, the most debasing of our industrial conditions, the most pernicious of our vices, and against them he sets not the best that China can show, but an exaggerated picture which is false to fact. This is not argument but trickery, because ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... England! look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids—envious, back-biting, wretched, because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage which to celibacy is denied. Fathers! cannot you alter these things? Perhaps not all at once; but consider the matter well when it is brought before you, receive it as a theme worthy of thought; do not dismiss it with an idle jest or ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... 'The Man,' is great and vigorous; he is by nature a poet. Belonging to the Future by the very essence of his being, he yet becomes disgusted by the debasing materialism into which its living exponents, the 'New Men, have fallen, he loses all hope in the possible progress of humanity, and is presented to us as the champion of the dying but poetic Past. But in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... escape exist here, and they begin agitating against them. Their business is to so mix the real wrongs of our social life with imaginary hardships, and to heighten the whole with illusory and often debasing theories, that discontent will be engendered. For it is by means of that only that they live. It requires usually a great deal of labor, of organization, of oratory to work up this discontent so that it is profitable. The solid workingmen of America who know the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... general, stood affairs at the opening of our story. Let us now take a nearer and more particular view. Let us approach, and enter the cheerless abode of the man who, to feed an evil and debasing appetite, could heartlessly turn away from his faithful wife and dependent little ones, and leave them ...
— Woman's Trials - or, Tales and Sketches from the Life around Us. • T. S. Arthur
... private; and laws disabling persons who had laid hands illegally on Roman citizens from holding office in the Commonwealth. There was a law, intended at last to be effective, to deal with judges who allowed themselves to be bribed. There were laws against defrauders of the revenue; laws against debasing the coin; laws against sacrilege; laws against corrupt State contracts; laws against bribery at elections. Finally, there was a law, carefully framed, De repetundis, to exact retribution from proconsuls or propraetors of the type of Verres who had plundered the provinces. All governors ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... swells and hardens amid mildewed hopes, O'erspreads and blackens whate'er most delights, And renders us haters of loveliness, The lowest of the fiends: ambition led The higher on, furious to dispossess, From admiration sprung and frenzied love. This disingenuous soul-debasing passion, Rising from abject and most sordid fear, Stings her own breast with bitter self-reproof, Consumes the vitals, pines, and never dies. Love, Honour, Justice, numberless the forms, Glorious and ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... and young females who were confessing their sins to me. These questions—you know it—are of such a nature that no prostitute would dare to put them to another. Those questions, and the answers they elicit, are so debasing that no man in London—you know it—except a priest of Rome, is sufficiently lost to every sense of shame as to ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... to the effect of her characters on the audiences that assembled night after night to hear her, and she began to be troubled by the thousands of young girls who flocked to her matinees. "Is it possible that what I call 'my art' is debasing to their bright young souls?" she asked herself. "Is Mr. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland |
