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Degradation   /dˌɛgrədˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Degradation

noun
1.
Changing to a lower state (a less respected state).  Synonym: debasement.
2.
A low or downcast state.  Synonyms: abasement, abjection.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Degradation" Quotes from Famous Books



... eighteenth century, although it could boast of no names in any way comparable with those of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, showed still a vast improvement on the degradation of the preceding century. Among the most famous writers of the times—Goldoni, Parini, Metastasio—none is so great or so famous as Vittorio Alfieri, the founder of Italian tragedy. The story of his life and of his literary activity, as told by himself in his memoirs, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... to apply the same principles to moral evil; indeed, he believes himself that moral evil becomes an evil through the physical evils that it causes or tends to cause. But somehow or other he thinks that it would be a degradation of God and men if they were to be made subject to reason; that thus they would all be rendered passive to it and would no longer be satisfied with themselves; in short that men would have nothing wherewith to oppose the misfortunes that come to them from without, if they had not ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... Muller's whole system of mythology is based on reasoning analogous to this example. His mot d'ordre, as Professor Tiele says, is 'a disease of language.' This theory implies universal human degradation. Man was once, for all we know, rational enough; but his mysterious habit of using gender-terminations, and his perpetual misconceptions of the meaning of old words in his own language, reduced him to the irrational and often (as we now ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang

... her? She was not in all the psalm, Hazel thought. Unlessyes, that might fit well enough: she might stand for "the wicked" in the eighth verse. For studying the shining words that went before, there had come to her a feeling of soil, a sense of degradation, all new, and ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner

... a powerful analysis of those elements which go to make up the strength and weakness of a man, which are at fierce warfare within the same breast: contending against each other, as it were, the one to raise him to fame and power, the other to drag him down to degradation and shame. Never in the whole range of literature have we seen the struggle between these forces for supremacy over the man more powerfully, more realistically delineated, than Mr. Caine pictures it."—Boston ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall

... restriction is extended to those who were originally in a servile condition, but who may have since acquired their liberty, seems to depend on the principle that birth, in a servile condition, is accompanied by a degradation of mind and abasement of spirit, which no subsequent disenthralment can so completely efface as to render the party qualified to perform his duties, as a Mason, with that "freedom, fervency, and zeal," which are said to have distinguished our ancient ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... Smithers! To think that I should ever live to say that I would care to be a beggarly author, who could not make a thousand a year if he wrote till his fingers fell off!—oh! oh!" and he fairly sobbed at the horror and degradation of the thought. ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard

... that's just my idea!" replied Y-ts'un; "I've not as yet let you know that after my degradation from office, I spent the last couple of years in travelling for pleasure all over each province, and that I also myself came across two extraordinary youths. This is why, when a short while back you alluded to this Pao-y, I at once conjectured, with a good deal of certainty, that he ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... praise. That to Cromwell is a proof how completely our poet maintained the erectness of his understanding and spirit in his intercourse with men in power. It is such a compliment as a poet might pay to a conqueror and head of the state without the possibility of self-degradation: ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... with virtuous inclinations and intentions, ashamed of the stains which had tarnished them in the struggle, almost invariably ended by confining themselves to the narrow circle of individual interests, and completed their degradation by no longer recognizing any other motive for their conduct than that of sordid selfishness. All care for the public weal became extinct; men's hearts were insensible to all generous sympathy; their minds dead to every elevating impulse—like ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies

... dear? Do you know that thin Malacca cane in the hall? Yes, you do. Well, my dear, the law says it is an assault to thrash a boy, and that he ought to be left to the law to punish, which means prison and degradation. I'm going to take that cane, my ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn

... that I should begin the work at Beren's River among the Saulteaux Indians who lived there, and in little bands scattered along the eastern shores of that great lake, and in the interior, most of them in extreme poverty and superstitious degradation. A few of them, as the result of acquaintance with our Christian Indians of other places, were groping after the great Light, and trying to lift ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young

... address. The great contribution of learning to the laborer is its power, under the lead of Christianity, to break down the unnatural distinctions of society, and to render labor of every sort, among all classes, acceptable and honorable. Ignorance is the degradation of labor, and when laborers, as a class, are ignorant, their vocation is necessarily shunned by some; and, being shunned by some, it is likely to be despised by others. Wherever the laboring population is in a condition of positive, or, by a broad distinction, ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell

... reading their filthy papers. There was a contrast between Christian congregations and infidel meetings. One had the appearance of purity and elevation; while the other had the stamp of pollution and degradation. Irreligion seemed the nurse of coarseness and barbarism. Some of the secularists actually argued against civilization, as Rousseau had done before them. One of them reprinted Burke's ironical ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker

... itself the demoralization was even more marked. There never was such a state of moral degradation in any Christian country as in South America. Three centuries have passed, and the low state of morals continues. Contrast Mexico and Peru with the United States, morally and intellectually. What ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord

... back to his Cornell days when he had been considered one of the richest boys in the university. His sudden degradation, the falling of his family air-castles, made him double his fists—and with his blow Scraggy ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White

... Anthony, with the foremost in the ranks of the Abolitionists, battled for the freedom and rights of the enslaved race. You have lived, with many compeers, to see the glorious result of your labors in redeeming from the infamy and degradation of chattelism 4,000,000 slaves. That done, your attention was turned to the greater question—in view of numbers—of woman's emancipation from ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... brood of Timbo, she was a bright and delicate type of the classes I described at the brook-side. Her limbs and features were stained by the dust of travel, and her expression was clouded with the grief of sensible degradation: still I would have risked more than I did, when I beheld the mute appeal of her face and form, to save her from the ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... itself so pernicious, or time it so effectually for the ruin of the British interests in India." Then turning to the object of the motion, he says, "I will ask, Who is Mr. Bristow, that a member of the administration should, at such a time, hold him forth, as an instrument for the degradation of the first executive member of this government? What are the professed objects of his appointment? What are the merits and services, or what the qualifications, which entitle him to such uncommon distinction? Is it for his superior integrity, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... contradiction, and kicked the Scotchman as he kneeled upon the floor. The man rose and left the apartment, saying, "I have always been faithful to your majesty, and have not deserved such treatment as this. I can not remain in your service under such a degradation. I shall never see you again." He left the ...
— Charles I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... of all moralists, the penalty should be such as to secure the reformation of the offender, and consequently free from everything that might cause his degradation. Far be it from me to combat this blessed tendency of minds and disparage attempts which would have been the glory of the greatest men of antiquity. Philanthropy, in spite of the ridicule which sometimes attaches to its name, will ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... vulgar—the two words are here synonymous—wholly neglect it, and too often even consider it as unnecessary, effeminate, and absurd. The consequences of the careless performance, or the neglect, of this really necessary personal duty are not long in being developed. Passing over the degradation of the other features, the offensiveness of the breath, often to a degree which renders the individual uncompanionable, and the unfavorable impression which, like other marks of uncleanliness, they convey of the taste ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous

... coldness or contempt. We may be assured, Gentlemen, that he who really loves the thing itself, loves its finest exhibitions. A true friend of his country loves her friends and benefactors, and thinks it no degradation to commend and commemorate them. The voluntary outpouring of the public feeling, made to-day, from the North to the South, and from the East to the West, proves this sentiment to be both just and natural. In the cities and in the villages, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... those who have power to extend to him the measure of justice, will be left in the full possession of all the complacency arising from the solemn assurance, that they are either the stupid or guilty authors of his degradation and misery. ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall

... our friend, whatever was the coat he wore; whereas, among the Colonel's own kinsfolk, dire was the dismay, and indignation even, which they expressed when they came to hear of this, what they were pleased to call degradation to their family. Clive's dear mother-in-law made outcries over the good old man as over a pauper, and inquired of Heaven, what she had done that her blessed child should have a mendicant for a father? And Mrs. Hobson, in subsequent confidential communication with the writer of these memoirs, improved ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... check account so often that the bank was compelled to ask him to desist, he sat in the barrooms with his cronies till all hours of the morning when he would be brought home in a condition of shocking intoxication. Happily Helen was spared the spectacle of the degradation of a man she once had loved with all the force of her virgin soul. Roberts, the butler, aided by the other servants, smuggled their intoxicated master up to his room, where he remained until sober, when he went back to his club only ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow

... this depth of degradation I was rescued by a philanthropist, who had me fed and clothed and educated. I had at his hands every chance of leading a respectable life, but I did not want to become smug and honest. My early training was too strong for that, ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume

... which was thought to be over and done with centuries ago. They are a danger too. For as everyone who takes vengeance does so in a degree greater than the damage suffered, if one supposes for a moment that the conquered of to-day may be the conquerors of to-morrow, to what lengths of violence, degradation and barbarism ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti

... dignity, her aristocracy, her pride, on the altar of sacrifice, and go among the despondent soldiers as a Sister of Gaiety. Perhaps Bill the Blackfaceman would be going over—if he had not stayed in Germany too long and been interned there. To return to the team with him, being the final degradation, would be the final atonement. She felt that she was called, called back. There could be nothing else she would hate more to do; therefore she would love to do that ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... looked a very degraded young person," he said, distantly. "And not interesting. The woman who is falling is interesting. The woman who has reached the bottom, who has completely arrived at degradation, is dull enough." ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... the people. The investigation was committed to the Censors [1], and it being discovered that upwards of 460 scholars had violated the prohibitions, they were all buried alive in pits [2], for a warning to the empire, while degradation and banishment were employed more strictly than before against all who fell under suspicion. The emperor's eldest son, Fu-su, remonstrated with him, saying that such measures against those who repeated ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge

... see again, I found that I was looking almost straight down into the upturned face of Larrabee Harman, and I cannot better express what this man had come to be, and what the degradation of his life had written upon him, than by saying that the dreadful thing I looked upon now was no more horrible a sight than the face I had seen, fresh from the valet and smiling in ugly pride at the starers, as he passed the terrace ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington

... I appear before the ryots in a dress I have temporarily and specially adopted in Champaran to produce an effect. The fact is that I wear the national dress because it is the most natural and the most becoming for an Indian. I believe that our copying of the European dress is a sign of our degradation, humiliation and our weakness, and that we are committing a national sin in discarding a dress which is best suited to the Indian climate and which, for its simplicity, art and cheapness, is not ...
— Third class in Indian railways • Mahatma Gandhi

... crowd was, there was something sinister in its composition. Half of them were foreigners. It was the first wave of the flood of degradation for our racial stock in the North—the racial stock of John Adams ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon

... Giuseppe Mazzini, the son of a clever physician in the town of Genoa. He was only a boy when he was accosted by a refugee, whose wild countenance told a story of cruelty and oppression. From that moment, he realized the degradation of Italy and chose the colour of mourning for his clothes; he began to study the heroic struggles which had made martyrs of his countrymen in late years, and he began to form visionary projects which ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead

... with thousands of beggars, hardly human in form and almost naked, though there was frozen snow upon the ground. A group, seeming even joyous, attracted attention. The cause of their happiness was a dead dog which they had found in one of the gutters. Even, however, in this degradation the politeness of these people struck our Frenchmen forcibly. The guests gathered about this fortuitous repast treated each other with a ceremonious deference strange enough in such surroundings. In a still lower stratum, however, among even a more degraded class, whose feasts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... had disappeared, and the blue stream and swelling hills, and green plains, and intrusive industry and increasing villages of the whites, but reminded them of present weakness and former power. But, the sensibility to degradation was blunted. They had, gradually, become assimilated to their condition; the river abounded in shell and other fish; they could maintain existence, scanty and mean though it was, and they preferred this certainty to the nobler, but more precarious life of ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... over public opinion and the judges. The trial had been a welcome opportunity to all to give free play to their revenge, their indignation, and their hate. The family of the cardinal, sorely touched by the degradation which had come upon them all in their head, would, at the least, see the queen compromised with the cardinal, and if the latter should really come out from the trial as the deceived and duped one, Marie Antoinette should, nevertheless, share in ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach

... was almost a note of loathing, and Dinah shuddered from head to foot. It was to her as if she had been rolled in pitch. She felt overwhelmed with the cruel degradation ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell

... them to the fields, frequently giving the lesser children a piece of bread each, and locking them up in their cottages till they return. This would be thought a hard life in England; but hard as it is, it is better than the degradation of agricultural laborers, in a dear country like England, with six or eight shillings a week, and no cow, no pig, no fruit for the market, no house, garden, or field of their own; but, on the contrary, constant anxiety, the fear of a master on whom they are constantly dependent, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... stop,—having received no farther authentick information of his fatigues and perils before he escaped to France. Kings and subjects may both take a lesson of moderation from the melancholy fate of the House of Stuart; that Kings may not suffer degradation and exile, and subjects may not be harassed by the evils of a ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... their soft leather bindings or fine illustrations with a true book-lover's enthusiasm. It was her pride to keep them in daintiest condition. Dog-ears or thumb-marks were in her opinion the depths of degradation. Ulyth had ambitions also, ambitions which she would not reveal to anybody. Some day she planned to write a book of her own. She had not yet fixed on a subject, but she had decided just what the cover was to be like, with her name on it in gilt letters. Perhaps ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil

... Fielding, Savage Chatterton Steele Goldsmith Byron Foote De Foe Scott Deeds, not words Denison, Edward, on providence on London poor on thrift on thrift in Guernsey Derby, Lord, on progress Derby Penny Bank De Retz, Cardinal Dirt, a degradation Dolland, industry of Donne, Dr., his charity and thrift Donough, J., tombstone of Dress, extravagance in Drill, the magic of Drink, money spent on the Great Sin and unhealthy homes Duncan, H., ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... occurrence, lieutenant," replied Butzow, "if you will promise not to harm his majesty, or offer him or the Princess von der Tann further humiliation. Their position is sufficiently unpleasant without our adding to the degradation of it." ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... before the commencement of the revolt, he had reached the prime of manhood, a slave, with a soul uncontaminated by the degradation which surrounded him. Living in a state of society where worse than polygamy was actually urged, we find him at this period faithful to one wife—the wife of his youth—and the father of an interesting family. Linked with such tender ties, and enlightened ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... straightforward. These have all arisen from the wild by a process of continuous loss. Everything was there in the beginning, and as the wild plant parted with factor after factor there came into being the long series of derived forms. Exquisite as are the results of civilization, it is by the degradation of the wild that they have been brought about. How far are we justified in regarding this as a picture of the manner in which ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett

... knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion over Nature which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of want, with its concomitant physical and moral degradation among the masses of the people, I should hail the advent of some kindly comet which would sweep the whole affair ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley

... the barbarous customs and sensuous refinements, the absence of artistic originality and the gift for regrouping borrowed motives, the patient and exquisite workmanship and the immediate neglect and degradation of the thing ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... them up with hard cast iron to prevent rutting. Speculum metal and steel have been tried for the cylinder faces, but only with moderate success. In some cases the brass gets into ruts; but the most prevalent affection is a degradation of the iron, owing to the action of the steam, and the face assuming a granular appearance, something like loaf sugar. This action shows itself only at particular spots, and chiefly about the angles of the port or valve face. At first the action is slow; but ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... history. He sees that her empire rests on a broad and natural foundation, which needs no support from venal pens; and, happily for his peace of mind, no less than for his character, he feels that the prosperity of the Republic is not to be sought in the degradation of surrounding nations. ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper

... it an utterance," I cried. "I would be sorry to breathe her name in such a degradation. Degradation indeed, and yet if I had the certainty that I was a not altogether hopeless suitor yonder, I would feel a conqueror ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro

... me," she said to herself, "when I was rich, that I lived on the flesh and blood of my fellow-creatures, that my virtue and ease and pleasure were bought by their degradation and toil and pain, I should not have believed it, and I should have been angry. If I had been told that the clothes I wore, the food I ate, the pen I wrote with, the ink I used, the paper I wrote on—all these, and everything I touched, from my soap to my match-box, ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley

... the Queen, darkly, "for degradation and slavery, if not death, await them if they do. Go. Let a proclamation be made to-day in the market-place. Let my people and the army know that I have resolved to extinguish Christianity. Tell those officers who have ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne

... fall to their lot and the more completely are they cut off from the privileges of their birthright. All that they have is in succession taken away from them—their amusements, their enjoyments, their possessions, their freedom—and all that they receive in return is obloquy, and contempt, and degradation, and oppression. [Note 44 ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... fairly expect to have other men's lives wasted in the work of watching them. But as society has not the courage to kill them, and, when it catches them, simply wreaks on them some superstitious expiatory rites of torture and degradation, and than lets them loose with heightened qualifications for mischief; it is just as well that they are at large in the Sierra, and in the hands of a chief who looks as if he might possibly, on provocation, order them ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... days of yore, the Self-born One created the four orders. Through the evil consequence of what acts cloth a Vaisya become a Sudra? Through what acts doth a Kshatriya become a Vaisya and a regenerate person (Brahmana) becomes a Kshatriya? By what means may such degradation of castes be prevented? Through what acts does a Brahmana take birth in his next life, in the Sudra order? Through what acts, O puissant deity, does a Kshatriya also descend to the status of Sudra? O sinless one, O lord of all created beings, do thou, O ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... walk!" Peachy repeated. "Julia, have you gone mad? We have always held out against this degradation. We must continue to do so." Again came that proud lift of her shoulders, the vibrant stir of wing-stumps. "That would lower us ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore

... The degradation of the Jewish rulers was even greater. With all their knowledge of the moral law, they who professed to be special representatives of God put to death his Son, and chose a murderer instead of the Saviour. To the tragedy of ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman

... creation? Is his the one existence framed by the Almighty that cannot follow his nature? Better then to be a beast of chase, darting mouse or blundering mole, than a man, if the more erect posture is to be the badge of a greater degradation. If the sole merit of two legs be that they take less hobbling, better far to go upon four. Needless to say that these were the mutinous reflections of the young Francis who suffered—not of him who now ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... message of the Prince of Peace stirs up the spirit of contention and animosity, of hate and murder. Could we but draw aside the curtain and, back of the tinsel and gold braid, see the crime, the hate, the moral degradation that war always brings, never again would a friend of humanity ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... to the neighbor boys, and felt so; but this feeling was curiously mingled with a sense of degradation. By every test of common life, he was a failure. His family history was a badge of failure. People despised a man who was so incontestably smarter than they, and yet could do no better with himself ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick

... of marriage is charm, either that of sentiment or that of the senses, and its sole object is the exchange of two fancies. As the oath of fidelity is either a stupidity or a degradation, can anything more opposed to common sense, and a more absolute ignorance of all that is noble and great, be imagined than the effort mankind is making, against all the chances of destruction by which he is surrounded, ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic

... quick. But still, even then I felt (was it an unreasonable pride?) that there was something that jarred, something that humbled, in the thought of holding all my fortunes as a dependency on the father of the woman I loved, but might not aspire to; something even of personal degradation in the mere feeling that I was thus to be repaid for a service, and recompensed for a loss. But these were not reasons I could advance; and, indeed, so for the time did Trevanion's generosity and eloquence overpower me that I could only falter out my thanks and my promise that I would consider ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... skins sold in London Foxes as bird destroyers Fruit, losses on France, bird plumage trade in song birds sold for food in, Frazer River Game Preserve Frick, Henry C. Fullerton, Samuel Fund, wild life endowment Funk Island Fur-bearing mammals killed in Louisiana Fur News Magazine Furs, degradation of fashions in Fur Seal Furs sold ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... him speak, and have looked upon his face. Reflect, reflect, before it is too late, on the mockery of plighting to him at the altar, faith in which your heart can have no share—of uttering solemn words, against which nature and reason must rebel—of the degradation of yourself in your own esteem, which must ensue, and must be aggravated every day, as his detested character opens upon you more and more. Shrink from the loathsome companionship of this wretch as you would from corruption and disease. Suffer toil and labour if you will, but ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... Ropes. "We will now pass on to charge Number Four, and be brief, for the tar is a-coolin'. Suthin' like eight days ago, when the afore-mentioned Dan Pepperill was in the waller of his degradation, some noble-souled sons of the sunny south"—the orator smiled with pleasant significance—"lifted him up, and hung him up to air, in the crotches of two trees, jest by the edge of the woods here, and went home to supper, intending to come back and finish the purifying process begun with ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge

... stick. There was a certain dramatic suggestion in this revelation of the sudden and hurried transition from a life of ostentatious luxury to one of hidden toil and privation, and a further significance in the slow and gradual distribution and degradation of these elegant souvenirs. A pair of silver boot-hooks had been used for raking the hearth and lifting the coffee kettle; the ivory of the brushes was stained with coffee; the cut-glass bottles had lost their stoppers, and had been utilized for vinegar and salt; a silver-framed ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... Chamber. It murmured, it fidgeted on its padded seats of red velvet, it raised a positive clamour. There were "Oh's" of amazement, eyes lifted in astonishment, brusque movements on the benches, as if in disgust at this spectacle of human degradation. And remark that the greater part of these deputies had used the same electoral methods, that these were the heroes of those famous orgies when whole oxen were carried in triumph, ribanded and decorated as at Gargantuan feasts. Just these men cried louder than others, turned furiously towards ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... animal body of the late Hans Kraut would contrive to get the better of the animating principle of Ronald Wyde; the refined nature would yield to the toper's brute-craving, with an awful sense of its deep degradation in so succumbing, and, before midnight, Hans was gloriously drunk, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various

... which had bound her. It was to her a star of promise, telling her that the strong chains of ignorance and superstition which bound her, should be broken asunder by the gentle influences of the religion of the lowly Jesus. It is Christianity which has raised her from the degradation which was once hers, and induced man to ...
— Our Gift • Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston

... dialects of one widespread language, were blended together. But the distinction between the two nations was by no means effaced, when an event took place which prostrated both, in common slavery and degradation, at the feet of a ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Rolleston is walking along a crowded London street with his face turned westward. A few moments ago and he was scarcely conscious of where he was or where he meant to go: he was walking on mechanically in a heavy stupor, through which there stole a haunting sense of degradation and despair that tortured him dully. And suddenly, as if by magic, this has vanished: he seems to himself to have waked from a miserable day dream to the buoyant consciousness of youth and hope. Temperaments which are subject to fits of heavy ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey

... hearts What virtues ye would yield for planted hate, Ribald contempt, forced, menial servitude, Slow centuries of vengeance for a crime Ye never did commit? Mercy for these! Who bear on back and breast the scathing brand Of scarlet degradation, who are clothed In ignominious livery, whose bowed necks Are broken with the yoke. Change these to men! That were a noble witchcraft simply wrought, God's alchemy transforming clods to gold. If there be one among them strong and wise, Whose lips anoint breathe poetry and love, Whose brain and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... ten years. I spent a year in Cairo, two more up by the banks of the Nile, among the ruins of ancient cities, where, in spite of the degradation that exists, there is still to be found those who have some of the wisdom of past ages. Four years did I live in India among the sages who hold fast to the teaching of Buddha. The three remaining years I have spent in ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking

... doomed to the degradation of bearing such a foolish appellation! A Girtham Girl! I suppose we have to thank that fiend of invention who is responsible for most of the titular foibles and follies of mankind—artful Alliteration. The two G's, people imagine, run so well together; and it is wonderful that they do ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson

... Messieurs d'Ombre, and other men more or less suspected of conspiring against the Empire. Even if this, perhaps deserved, had been all! but the Prefect knew very well that an enemy such as Ratoneau would not be satisfied without his own degradation. ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price

... in those notes. "Mountains and forests long, heaven and earth languish. Man, everything in the world, thirsts that you shall open your soul to the light. Then glory will spread over the earth, then the beasts will rise up from their degradation. ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof

... it—if you think of where they come from—the woods and copses, children playing, and all that—and of what they've come to—the gas-glare and drunken laughter and jeers. I would make them tell their own story—I would make them cry to Heaven for swift death and oblivion before the last degradation of being pinned on to the flaunting dress." And then again he said: "No, I don't suppose there's any thing in it; but I'll tell you what made me think of it. This morning, as we were coming back from Winstead church—you know how extraordinarily mild it has been of late, and the lane going ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... taken advantage of your loneliness here in this great cruel city, and dragged you down to poverty and misery such as I am bearing now. Janet, Janet dear, I feel sometimes as if I cannot bear this miserable degradation longer, and that all these troubles must be a punishment for my not telling my father ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn

... to leave it. Among those who offered their commissions to the Commander-in-chief, were many who, possessing a larger portion of military pride, and therefore feeling with peculiar sensibility the degradation connected with poverty and rags, afforded the fairest hopes of becoming the ornaments of the army. This general indifference about holding a commission; this general opinion that an obligation was conferred, not received by continuing in the service, could not fail to be unfavourable, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall

... fact, in this connection, is that while the law of Conservation is doubtless true, so far as it goes, there is also in operation another law, well known to physicists, called the law of the Degradation of Energy, which asserts that energies of a higher order are constantly being converted into energies of a lower order. This law maintains that energies of a lower order cannot be reconverted into energies of a higher order. All other energies ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... calculated mechanism; hated its utilitarian stability; hated its conventions, its greed, its blind cruelty, its huge hypocrisy, the foulness of its want and the insolence of its wealth. Morally, it was monstrous; conventionally, it was brutal. Depths of degradation unfathomable it had shown him, but no ideals equal to the ideals of his youth. It was all one great wolfish struggle;—and that so much real goodness as he had found in it could exist, seemed to him scarcely less than miraculous. The real sublimities of the Occident were intellectual ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... that is, not genuine respect. Their discipline was rigid and cold-bloodedly heartless. The most elaborate courtesies were demanded and accorded among equals and from inferiors to superiors, but such was the intelligence and moral degradation of this remarkable race, that every one of them recognized these courtesies for what they were; they must of necessity have been hollow mockeries. They took pleasure in forcing one another to go through with them, each trying to outdo the ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan

... delightful thought—especially for the mother. For as Kingsley says of St. Francis, "perfectly sure that he himself was a spiritual being, he thought it at least possible that birds might be spiritual beings likewise, incarnate like himself in mortal flesh; and saw no degradation to the dignity of human nature in claiming kindred lovingly, with creatures so beautiful, so wonderful, who praised God in the forest, even as ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming

... enemy, and the vigor of his resistance. The rage of the Bashaw demanded a sacrifice, and the luckless Mahomet Sons was led through the streets of Tripoli tied to a jackass. This in itself was the deepest degradation possible for a Mussulman, but the Bashaw supplemented it with five hundred bastinadoes well laid on. This severe punishment, together with the repeated assertions of the sailors of the defeated ship, that the dogs of Christians had fired enchanted ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... long hast thou learned to call thyself Hypatia's scholar, or to call it a degradation to visit the most sinful, if thou mightest thereby bring back a lost lamb to the Good Shepherd? Nevertheless, thou art too young for such employment—and she meant to ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley

... the theory of degradation in his study of political communities. [Footnote: Plato's philosophy of history. In the myth of the Statesman and the last Books of the Republic. The best elucidation of these difficult passages will be found in the ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... that unhappy event, that the brother of his Una—the most active and indefatigable of all those who had interested themselves for him—was announced as requiring an interview. Connor, although prepared for this, experienced on the occasion, as every high-minded person would do, a strong feeling of degradation and shame as the predominant sensation. That, indeed, was but natural, for it is undoubtedly true that we feel disgrace the more heavily upon us in the eyes of those we esteem, than we do under any other circumstances. This impression, ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... nothing you care for so much as that boy. You can't give him up! If you had to walk over red-hot ploughshares to come to him, you would do it; if you could win him a moment's happiness by a lifetime of poverty and misery and degradation, you would do it. And so would I, little wife. That is the tie which still unites us; that is the tie which is too strong ever to break. Come back to us, Patricia—to me and ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... which he allowed himself to inflict, notwithstanding that he admitted her claims to his deferential consideration to be unbroken. In this contrast, of the exaltation of the hero and the patriot with the degradation of the man, lie the tragedy and the misery of Nelson's story. And this, too, was incurred on behalf of a woman whose reputation and conduct were such that no shred of dignity could attach to an infatuation as doting as it was blamable. The ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... everything valuable in this life, for our power, our wisdom, our love; that in pain is symbolised the infinite possibility of perfection, the eternal unfolding of joy; and the man who loses all pleasure in accepting pain sinks down and down to the lowest depth of penury and degradation. It is only when we invoke the aid of pain for our self-gratification that she becomes evil and takes her vengeance for the insult done to her by hurling us into misery. For she is the vestal virgin consecrated ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore

... have guessed what was the secret he had refused to hear, haughty as he was, I do believe there is no earthly degradation to which he would not have abased himself ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence

... sensation when she heard him lock the door behind him. A prisoner, with such a jailer! With a quick movement of disgust, she rushed to the water-basin and washed her lips and her hands; but she felt that the stain was one no ablution could remove. The sense of degradation was so cruelly bitter, that it seemed to her as if she should die ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... obtrude the name of the old original superannuated obscure Jemmy Jackman, once (to his degradation) of Wozenham's, long (to his elevation) of Lirriper's. If I could be consciously guilty of that piece of bad taste, it would indeed be a work of supererogation, now that the name is borne by JEMMY ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings • Charles Dickens

... hopeless expression on his face and began to unpack his valise and distribute the contents about the room. Later he borrowed some of Zephania's hot water from the singing kettle and shaved himself. No matter to what depths of degradation a man may fall, shaving invariably raises him again to a fair level of self-respect. He ate luncheon with a good appetite, and then wandered down to Prout's Store, ostensibly to ask if his trunk had arrived, but in reality to satisfy a craving for human intercourse. The trunk had not come, ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour

... of all that is fearful, shall we go?" said his second sister. "Not back to Hamburgh—not to endure another season of such deep degradation—not to be exposed to the Oh brother, you saw we all submitted to our fate without a murmur, and laboured cheerfully on the fortifications, when compelled to do so, by that inhuman monster Davoust, amidst the ribaldry of a licentious soldiery, merely because poor Janette had helped to embroider ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... passed bearing the sacrament, and prostrating himself in the mud before the holy symbol.[138] In the same year the youth La Barre was first tortured, then beheaded, then burnt, for some presumed disrespect to the same holy symbol—then become the hateful ensign of human degradation, of fanatical cruelty, of rancorous superstition. Yet I should be sorry to be unjust. It is to be said that even in these bad days when religion meant cruelty and cabal, the one or two men who boldly withstood to ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... alone must be his masters; he must not alter or abate a jot by way of concession to the great cash question. When he has completed his work, then indeed he may sell it in the best market. But the least preliminary paltering with the spirit of commerce is a degradation. Does this seem an ideal demand? Let us remember, then, ideals are goads and goals, counsels of perfection. No one expects people to come quite up to them, but it is better for human nature that they should be there. For there is something ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... saintliness, will not have the desired effect, but will make the reader laugh as loud as Musset is said to have done when she upbraided him with his ungratefulness to her, who had been devoted to him to the utmost bounds of self-abnegation, to the sacrifice of her noblest impulses, to the degradation of her ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... not that intimacy with him, an intimacy which perhaps brought contempt, which the people in Espanola enjoyed; and in Spain, therefore, the contrast between his former grandeur and this condition of shame and degradation was the more striking. It was a fact that the people of Spain could not neglect. It touched their sense of the dramatic and picturesque, touched their hearts also perhaps—hearts quick to burn, quick to forget. They had forgotten him before, now they burned with indignation at the picture ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... his feet. The smart of his back and legs recalled him, after a few moments of bewilderment, to a mental torture he had scarcely yet had time to feel. He—David Grieve—had been beaten—thrashed like a dog—by Jim Wigson! The remembered fact brought with it a degradation of mind and body—a complete unstringing of the moral fibres, which made even revenge seem an impossible output of energy. A nature of this sort, with such capacities and ambitions, carries about with it a sense ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... before; for the most imaginary offence, and frequently for no offence at all, but just at the caprice of the master, he was treated to various applications of the lash, and restricted allowances of his miserable rations. His slavery was the most abject, his misery the most consummate, and his degradation the most venal and depraved: he was the image of the man without the mental spark; the human being in semblance, but the ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro

... errs usually by too much elevation. He violates the standard of reasonable expectation, by drawing too violently upon the nobilities of human nature. But, on the contrary, the Peace Societies would, if their power kept pace with their guilty purposes, work degradation for man by drawing upon his most effeminate and luxurious cravings for ease. Most heartily, and with my profoundest sympathy, do I go along with Wordsworth in his grand lyrical proclamation of a truth not less divine than it is mysterious, not less triumphant than it is sorrowful, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... her arrival at Oroomiah, the school had only day scholars, and the pupils were of course in habitual contact with the vice and degradation of their homes. She sought to make it a boarding-school; and after two years the prejudices of the people had been overcome, and the day scholars were all dropped. Her grand object was the salvation of her pupils, and of their relatives who visited the institution. After the first ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson

... live in greater comfort, and some of the cottages are by no means unattractive. But the Royal Commissioners say that the crofter's habitation is usually "of a character that would imply physical and moral degradation in the eyes of those who do not know how much decency, courtesy, virtue, and even refinement survive amidst the sordid surroundings of a Highland hovel." An Englishman who, on seeing these "sordid surroundings," was disposed to compare the social ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... Greek drama took up these traditional characters, and sometimes deepened, saddened, exalted the features—as Sophocles, for instance, does with his 'Ajax Flagellifer'—Ajax the knouter of sheep—where, by the way, the remorse and penitential grief of Ajax for his own self-degradation, and the depth of his affliction for the triumph which he had afforded to his enemies—taken in connection with the tender fears of his wife, Tecmessa, for the fate to which his gloomy despair was too manifestly driving ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... that these table-tops are the ancient level of the plains themselves; and that all around, and intervening between them, has either sunk or submitted to the degradation of water! ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... behave thus," thought I. "What does the fact mean? Is it their nature? Or is it, at last, the result of ages of compelled degradation? And, in either case, will it be ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... favourite subject with the "Little Bishop," and many are the quaint sayings which fell from his lips while dwelling on this interesting parable. The singular pictures which he drew of this young man in his degradation brought many a smile on the faces of the congregation. But his chief aim always was to get the youth back to his father's house again; here his emotions often overpowered him, and his joy was so great that he hardly knew what he was saying. Many of the ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell

... not think the negro can trace with certainty his origin back to any of the older civilizations, and here for more than two hundred years his history has been a record of blood and tears, of ignorance, degradation, and slavery. And when nominally free, prejudice has assigned him the lowest positions and the humblest situations. I have not much hope of their progress while they ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

... Nevertheless they themselves are kept in poverty, degradation, and slavery by the capitalists whom they nourish by their labour. "The landlord owns the raw material and can live in idleness. The capitalist owns the machinery and can live in idleness. The worker ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... not attempt to join the family, but went up stairs and groped his way to bed. Mrs. Hobart did not follow him to his chamber. Heartsick, she retired to another room, and there wept bitterly for more than an hour. She was hopeless. Up from the melancholy past arose images of degradation and suffering too dreadful to contemplate. She felt that she had not strength to suffer again as she had suffered through many, many years. From this state she was aroused by groans from the room where her husband lay. Alarmed by the sounds, she instantly ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur

... that things cannot degrade, that is, change downwards into lower forms, ask him, who told him that water-babies were lower than land-babies? But even if they were, does he know about the strange degradation of the common goose-barnacles, which one finds sticking on ships' bottoms; or the still stranger degradation of some cousins of theirs, of which one hardly likes to talk, so shocking and ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley

... slaves of custom, and they become proud of their slavery. At first they might have considered custom as a tyrant; but when they have obeyed her for a certain time, they do her voluntary homage ever after, as to a sovereign by divine right. To prevent this species of intellectual degradation, we must in education be careful to rank mere mechanical talents below the exercise of the mental powers. Thus the ambition of young people will be directed to high objects, and all inferiour qualifications ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... And that explains everything. Without desire there is no love, no courage, and no hope. By love alone can one create. And if love be restricted in its mission there is but failure. Yes, they lie and deceive, because they do not love. Then they suffer and lapse into moral and physical degradation. And at the end lies the collapse of our rotten society, which breaks up more and more each day before our eyes. That, then, is the truth I was seeking. It is desire and love that save. Whoever loves and creates ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... at the same time the most beneficent and poisonous productions, with the fresh luxuriant fulness of prolific nature. Here the occurrence of the monstrous and horrible did not necessarily indicate that degradation and corruption out of which alone, under the development of law and order, they could arise, and which, in such a state of things, make them fill us with sentiments of horror and aversion. The guilty beings of the fable are, if we may be allowed the expression, exempt from human jurisdiction, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... frequent among the citizens of the depredations and immoralities of riotous clercs, who lived by their wits or by their nimble fingers, or by reciting or singing licentious ballads:—the paouvres escolliers, whose miserable estate, temptations, debauchery, ignoble pleasures, remorse and degradation have been so pathetically sung by Francois Villon, master of arts, poet, bohemian, burglar and homicide. The richer scholars often indulged in excesses, and of the vast majority who were poor, some died of hunger. ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... another line of vendors, dressed in costumes like those from the Cabanal, but more miserable in appearance, if anything, and with more repulsive faces still. They were the women of Albufera, a strange concentration of poverty and degradation, housing in wretched shanties a people that lives among the reeds and mud of the lake marshes, fishing in the murky, shallow waters from black, bluff-bowed boats that look like coffins. On these ashen, weather-beaten features ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... wondering, too, what this kindly soul would think and feel when he realized how little he was changed from the contemptible creature his father had turned out of doors, and when he finally learned of the horrors of degradation ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum

... in scattering it into a dozen other forms. We hit slavery through a great civil war. Did we destroy it? No, we only changed it into hatred between sections of the country: in the South, into political corruption and chicanery, the degradation of the blacks through peonage, unjust laws, unfair and cruel treatment; and the degradation of the whites by their resorting to these practices, the paralyzation of the public conscience, and the ever over-hanging dread of what the future may bring. Modern civilization hit ignorance of the masses ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson

... guile she leaned towards him in an attitude so beautiful, so appealing that even now he was moved. But with this emotion came, too, a subtle if now fainter sense of degradation that he was susceptible to this dangerous fascination, with a painful consciousness of how wide a moral gulf had opened between them by the anger and vulgar jealousy which Ninitta displayed. It is not impossible, ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates

... Collet, he sayd with a loud voyce, take from me not onely your owne orders, but also your owne baptisme, meaning thereby, whatsoeuer is besides that which Christ hymselfe instituted, whereof there is a great rablement in Baptisme. Then after hys degradation, they condemned hym as an heretike equal with M. Patrike aforesaide: and so he suffred death for his faythfull testimony of the truth of Christ, and of hys Gospell, at the Northchurch stile of the Abbey church of S. ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... of impulse, even when self-imposed, is against the freedom of man, that as a consequence unbelievable orgies and indecencies take place, and that all restraint is at an end. The despatch states, futhermore[11], that the aristocrats remaining in Russia have lost all will and energy. They accept degradation or death with complete fatalism and do not even try to save ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... portrait of Mr. Winfield, occupying a place of honour on the wall, and to hear gray-headed men say of him that he was the best friend they ever had, and that but for him they might have remained in the degradation from which he assisted ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards

... that is so characteristic of Gogol: one of his best stories, "The Black Monk," might have been written by the author of "The Cloak" and "The Portrait." He is like Dostoevski in his uncompromising depiction of utter degradation; but he has little of Dostoevski's glowing sympathy and heartpower. He resembles Tolstoi least of all. The two chief features of Tolstoi's work—self-revelation and moral teaching—must have been abhorrent to Chekhov, for his stories tell us almost nothing ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... and I will answer it by saying that it would take a great deal more than the hon. member for Shipley will ever be able to pay." There the words stand—in the immensity of their vulgarity, in their unsurpassable degradation, let them lie. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... became the established punishment of Traitors in England—a punishment wholly without excuse, as being revolting, vile, and cruel, after its object is dead; and which has no sense in it, as its only real degradation (and that nothing can blot out) is to the country that permits on ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens

... at the miserable effects of this system on the condition of Africa, we will now follow the poor slave through his wretched wanderings, in order to give some idea of his physical suffering, his mental and moral degradation. ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child

... border countries so famous in song and ballad! It was a day that will stand out, like a mountain, I am sure, in my life. But I am returned (I have now been come home near three weeks; I was a month out), and you cannot conceive the degradation I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among mountains, and bathe in rivers {109} without being controlled by any one, to come home and work. I felt very little, I had been dreaming I was a very great man. ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... suffered a great wrong"—her contralto voice was quite unmoved as she made the assertion—"a very grievous injustice has been done to me; but now that the physical unpleasantness of the ordeal is over I don't feel as though I—my ego, my soul, if you like—had undergone any particular degradation." ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes



Words linked to "Degradation" :   constipation, dehumanisation, brutalisation, vulgarization, popularization, barbarization, bastardisation, debasement, popularisation, change of state, animalization, subversion, corruption, deadening, degeneracy, decadency, vulgarisation, degrade, animalisation, brutalization, demoralisation, decadence, demoralization, stultification, dehumanization, humiliation, impairment, barbarisation, depth, degeneration, bastardization, profanation



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