|
|
|
More "Degradation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... employment on equal terms with the whites, and wherever they go a sneer is passed upon them, as if this sportive inhumanity were an act of merit.... Thus, though their legal rights are the same as those of the whites, their condition is one of degradation and dependence." In spite of the vigorous agitation for the rights of the Negro which stirred New England and the entire nation at this time, the writer says "the prejudices which are now felt in this Commonwealth against the people of color and the disadvantages under which they labor ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... upbraiding eye softened into an expression of the deepest sorrow, not unmingled with contempt, on beholding the degradation of this splendidly endowed young man. He reminded him of a fallen angel, with his glorious plumage all soiled and polluted with the mire and corruption of earth. He never had had faith in his integrity; be believed him to be the ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... night, recalling the naturalistic assertions he had made so glibly, asking myself again and again how it was that the religion to which I so vainly clung had no greater effect on my actions and on my will, had not prevented me from lapses into degradation. And I hated myself for having argued upon a subject that was still sacred. I believed in Christ, which is to say that I believed that in some inscrutable manner he existed, continued to dominate the world and had suffered ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was trained for the work by a medical man—my friend Mr. James Hinton—first in his own branch of the London profession, and a most original thinker. To him the degradation of women, which most men accept with such blank indifference, was a source of unspeakable distress. He used to wander about the Haymarket and Piccadilly in London at night, and break his heart over the sights he saw and the tales ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... you, and now you dismiss me at a moment's notice, as if I had played them indifferently, whereas the most fastidious audience would have been ravished with my performance. This morning I was the reeve of the forest, and as such obliged to assume the shape of a rascally attorney. I felt it a degradation, I assure you. Nor was I better pleased when you compelled me to put on the likeness of old Roger Nowell; for, whatever you may think, I am not so entirely destitute of personal vanity as to prefer either of their figures to my own. However, I showed no disinclination to oblige ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... our face against gambling.—Gambling is one of the curses of our time. It is the endeavor to get money by dispensing with labor, to make it without honestly working for it. It entails widespread ruin and degradation. Its consequences are often of the most appalling character. When the gambling spirit is once aroused, like drunkenness, it becomes an overpowering appetite, which the victim becomes almost powerless to resist. Gambling is in itself evil, apart from its deadly effects. (a) It proposes to confer ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... Argus, December 16) informs us that observation and the remarks he has heard made by factory girls have led him to think that there are three serious objections which the seamstresses have to domestic service. One of these is—"The idea of degradation, attached to the position of a 'slavey' in the minds of the lower classes themselves." As we have seen that there is nothing degrading in the work itself which servants are called upon to do, how comes it that its ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... you may do by a government. but if you will take my advice, don't accept a ministerial place when you cease to be a minister. The former is a reward due to your profession and services; the latter is a degradation. You know the haughtiness of my spirit; I give you no advice ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... amount, from the Nabob to individuals"; and then, highly aggravating their crimes, they add,—"We order and direct that you do examine, in the most impartial manner, all the above-mentioned transactions, and that you punish, by suspension, degradation, dismission, or otherwise, as to you shall seem meet, all and every such servant or servants of the Company who may by you be found guilty of any of the above offences." "We had" (say the Directors) "the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 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 him; her own conscious desolation, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... concourse. There was no sound to go by, and the light afforded me no definite forms; the luminous haze was blurred; but certainly people were there, a multitude of people. I was surprised, but not alarmed. Save for an occasional wastrel of civilisation, incapable of degradation and concerned only for sleep, the park is wont to be a desert at that hour; but the hum of the traffic, the flashing cab lamps, never quite out of sight, prevent fear. Far from being afraid I was highly interested, and hastening my steps ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... 13.—Oxford 1-5. We were in the theatre. Ward was like himself, honest to a fault, as little like an advocate in his line of argument as well could he, and strained his theology even a point further than before. The forms are venerable, the sight imposing; the act is fearful [the degradation of Ward], if it did not leave strong hope of its revisal ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... staring vacantly at the floor; with a lustreless and stupid smile. A spectacle of such deep degradation, of such abject hopelessness, of such a miserable downfall, that she put her hands before her face and turned away, lest he should see how much it ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... once the curtain is down, and the witness stands out with a terrible pointing finger, the laughter of the world dies into silence, and the testimony of the preacher that vice is provided with unearthly beauty becomes a false statement, and man is conscious only of the degradation of ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... knowledge, had aught to do with the outrage upon De Bury and the Countess. It would be most humiliating to have been under even an instant's suspicion of such a crime, but to be arrested and arraigned before one's King. . . Bah! it is deeper degradation than words can sound," and he folded his arms and stared, vacantly and with drawn ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... after Max Schurz's affair, he felt he had already touched the lowest depths of degradation. He knew now that he had touched a still lower one. Oh! horrible abyss of self-abasement!—he had taken the blood-money. And yet, it was to save Dot's life! Herbert was right, after all: quite right. Yes, yes, all hope was gone: the environment ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... What gives force to the socialistic movement which is now stirring European society to its depths, but a determination on the part of the naturally able men among the proletariat, to put an end, somehow or other, to the misery and degradation in which a large proportion of their fellows are steeped? The question, whether the means by which they purpose to achieve this end are adequate or not, is at this moment the most important of all political questions—and it is beside my present ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... spite of the degradation indicated by the above customs, the Kroo-women are rather superior to other native females, and seem to occupy a higher social position. The wife first married holds the purse, directs the household affairs, and rules the other women, who labor diligently for the benefit of their ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... urban population expanding; deforestation results from logging and the clearing of land for agricultural purposes; further land degradation and soil erosion hastened by uncontrolled development and improper land use practices such as farming of marginal lands; mining activities polluting Lago de Yojoa (the country's largest source of freshwater) with heavy ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... European dominions, but endeavouring to extend its Colossean empire across the Atlantic, every passion is roused; our souls are fired with indignation. We see that their object is universal domination; we see that nothing less than the whole world, nothing less than the universal degradation of man, will satisfy these merciless destroyers. But be assured, Sir, we will oppose them with all our youthful energy and risk our lives in defence of ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... from the last degree of actual crime in each case by the good taste of the author, feeling that such chapters had better not be written voluntarily in fiction, or perchance by his love for his proud maidens, whom he cannot taint with degradation in act, even if the sin upon their souls be wellnigh as black in the eyes of a strict judge, arbiter alike of the seen and the unseen. Such are hardly the conceptions wherewith the brain of a cultivated woman would teem. It ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... provided I can only get my hands upon them; and, since life seems to be a sort of snatch-and-hold game, quick keen eyes and nimble fingers decide the question. I have never trodden on the world's tender toes, nor smitten its pet follies, nor set myself aloft to gaze pityingly on its degradation, therefore, the world honors me with no special grudge. But one thing is mournfully certain,—my path is not strewn with loaves and fishes ready baked and broiled, and I must even go gleaning and fishing for myself. Almost everybody ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... sure you never will, professor; though mind! I do not believe it to be any degradation to live by charity when one cannot live in any other way. For if all men are brethren should not the able brother help the disabled brother, and ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... poet can only repeat that this is false, and that a resume of history proves it. Shelley traces the rise and decadence of poetry during periods of freedom and slavery. He points out, "The period in our history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II, when all the forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue." Gray, in The Progress of Poesy, draws the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Compare the degradation portrayed in that picture with this prophecy of Balaam's, and then consider—What, in less than two generations, had so transformed those ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... crisis of Benjamin's life, he appeared to be on the highway to ruin. There is scarcely one similar case in ten, where the runaway escapes the vortex of degradation. Benjamin would have been no exception, but for his early religious training and ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... feeling, full of trust and faith, combined with prudence and forecast. These peculiarities lay so deeply imbedded in the inmost nature of the Greeks that no revolutions of time and circumstances have yet been able to destroy them; nay, it may be asserted that even now, after centuries of degradation, they have not been wholly extinguished in the inhabitants of ancient Hellas."—"Education of the Moral Sentiment amongst the Ancient Greeks." ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... herself off from society, if these had been her standards? "Mesalliance!" Had the male animal no instinct, telling it when it was loved with all a woman's being, so that any other union would be her degradation. ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... pretence that the climate of the South is too hot for white men to labor in the fields, the degradation involved in field-labor in a Slave State excludes intelligent cultivators from the cotton-fields, a very large portion of which have a climate less hot and less unsuitable for white men than that of Philadelphia, while there is not a river-bottom ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... you have the eye to see and the mind to appreciate, you will behold an illuminated canvas whereon is depicted, within the limited area of your vision, everything that a great city holds of wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness, joy and sorrow, luxury and squalor, purity and degradation, truth and falsehood. It is all there, in this narrow environment, with the lights and the shadows meeting and blending, as the noise from below merges ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... in the negro population, a large portion of which is unfitted for a republican government by ignorance and social debasement, but fortunately free from the violence and turbulence of the lower class of immigrants. This degradation is fast being removed by education and the ambition inspired by freedom. The latter is shown by the formation of the Afro-American League for the protection of the blacks, especially in the Southern States, and the advancement of their interests and influence. This idea ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... "but the Earth man shall suffer for the indignities he has put upon the holy of holies, nor shall any vileness be too vile to inflict upon his princess. Would that it were in my power to force him to witness the humiliation and degradation of the ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... high to the girl's white brow, and her proud mouth quivered. Never had she so felt the degradation of her poverty! Now it seemed more than she could bear. But she looked straight into her uncle's unlovely countenance, and made answer, with ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... and that, under institutions from which we have derived inestimable benefits, we are more discontented than the slaves of the Dey of Tripoli. Sir, if we had been slaves of the Dey of Tripoli, we should have been too much sunk in intellectual and moral degradation to be capable of the rational and manly discontent of freemen. It is precisely because our institutions are so good that we are not perfectly contended with them; for they have educated us into a capacity for enjoying still better institutions. That the English Government has generally ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... moreover, was of more ancient and honourable descent than his rival, uniting in his person the representation of the Fitz-Walters, as well as of the Ratcliffes; while the scutcheon of Leicester was stained by the degradation of his grandfather, the oppressive minister of Henry VII., and scarce improved by that of his father, the unhappy Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, executed on Tower Hill, August 22, 1553. But in person, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... immemorial isolation of the land of the Shoguns and the Samurai. Only the Dutch had been permitted to hold any foreign intercourse whatever with this hermit nation and for two centuries they had maintained their singular commercial monopoly at a price measured in terms of the deepest degradation of dignity and respect. The few Dutch merchants suffered to reside in Japan were restricted to a small island in Nagasaki harbor, leaving it only once in four years when the Resident, or chief agent, journeyed to Yeddo to offer gifts ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... steps in its rise from this degradation are measured by the increased application of pit-coal and the diminished use ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... goes not to the ingenuity of the programme or the clearness with which its suggestions have been carried out, but to the beauty of the music itself irrespective of the verbal commentary accompanying it. This rule must be maintained in order to prevent a degradation of the object of musical expression. The vile, the ugly, the painful are not fit subjects for music; music renounces, contravenes, negatives itself ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... legally accountable, and probably will resent and refuse constructive discipline, and return to a satin-upholstered life—his cigarettes, his wine-dinners, his liquors, and his "rotten feeling" mornings after—then to his morphin and to his certain degradation. And why should this be? Time must turn back the hands on her dial thirty-three ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... I the wife of a drunken man I do not think there is any depth of degradation that I would not fathom with my love and pity in trying to save him. I believe I would cling to him, if even his own mother shrank from him. But I never would consent to [marry any man?], whom I knew to be un[?]steady in his principles and a moderate ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... and enchained by the fire of passionate attachment which aroused it: and she was conscious that she had but shown obedience to his wishes throughout the day, not sympathy with his feelings. Under cover of a patient desire to please she had nursed irritation and jealousy; the degradation of the sense of jealousy increasing the irritation. Having consented to the ride to Dr. Shrapnel, should she not, to be consistent, have dismounted there? O half heart! A whole one, though it be an erring, like that of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to write it, it is to the preaching of hell that we must return—the hell of degradation and of loss and of sure retribution. That hell is the latter state to which every path of wrong-doing leads with the inevitability of eternal law. Sin is hell in the making. Hell is sin found out, ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... Martin Guerre, the Russian Demetrius, Perkin Warbeck, and all the other wonderful cases of mistaken or counterfeited identity. Thus he and his associates pleaded for the continuance in bondage of a woman whom their own fellow-citizens were willing to take into their houses after twenty years of degradation and infamy, make their oath to her identity, and pledge their fortunes to ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... of ancient origin, shrouding itself in the mask of patriotic wrath; the tiger glare of just vengeance, fresh from intolerable wrongs and the never-to-be-forgotten ignominy of stripes and personal degradation; panic, self-palsied by its own excess; flight, eager or stealthy, according to the temper and the means; volleying pursuit; the very frenzy of agitation, under every mode of excitement; and here and there, towering aloft, the desperation of maternal love, victorious and ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... missionaries of religion, or agents of abolition; in vain you contract treaties with the Princes of Africa. It is humiliating to think, equally a disgrace to our religion as to our civilization, that our connexion with Africa has only served to plunge her into deeper misery and profounder degradation. With truth we here may apply the strong censure of a Chinese Emperor, "That the march of Christians is whitened with human bones." Wherever we have touched her western shores there our footsteps have been marked with blood and devastation. We ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... ferocity so far, as to disturb by their clamorous and infamous raillery the last moments of the unhappy victims about to be struck by the sword of the law. The more humiliating this picture of the degradation of the human species may be, the more we should beware of overcharging the colouring. With few exceptions, the historians of Bailly's last agony appear to me to have forgotten this duty. Was the truth, the strict truth, ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... me, papa, but, it did seem to me a sort of degradation to have to ask pardon of a—a woman who has to work for her living like Alma," she said with some hesitation, blushing and hanging her ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... men. Lord Christ! not alone from the pains of hell, or of conscience—not alone from the outer darkness of self and all that is mean and poor and low, do we fly to thee; but from the anger that arises within us at the wretched words spoken in thy name, at the degradation of thee and of thy Father in the mouths of those that claim especially to have found thee, do we seek thy feet. Pray thou for them also, for they know not ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... 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 illustrious ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... currency, is a luxury indulged at the expense of the public, and he ought to be held liable for all that it may cost. Finally, and above all, the slanderer becomes a nuisance to the community, not only by his reports of real or imagined wrong and evil, but by the degradation of his own character, which can hardly remain above the level of ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... proved, by a number of facts, the folly of the argument, that the Africans laboured under such a total degradation of mental and moral faculties, that they ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... deceived me," he cried aloud, "this time I will have no mercy! She shall taste her degradation to the very dregs; there is no depth of shame through which I will not drag her, though I ruin my own soul in doing it! But it can't be! it can't be! It were death to believe ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... understand this feeling in Curran. The man's degradation seemed so complete to him that not even sacrilege could intensify it; yet clearly the hardened sinner saw some depths below his own which excited his ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... chorus of shrieks and yells. That could not be done again; it was too painful in result Mahomet undertook to distribute the remainder of our stock through an inlet in the wall, and we drew away sick in head and heart from that den of repulsive degradation, greed, brutality, cruelty, selfishness, and all infuriate and debased passion—that damnable magazine of disease physical and moral. It is undeniable that there were many there whose faces were passport to the Court of Lucifer—murderers, and dire malefactors; ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed 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
... had hardly touched the moral nature of man, and it brought little relief from the despotism of rulers. One can hardly read the horrible records of the Medici or the Borgias, or the political observations of Machiavelli, without marveling at the moral and political degradation of a cultured nation. In the North, especially among the German and English peoples, the Renaissance was accompanied by a moral awakening, and it is precisely that awakening in England, "that greatest moral and political reform which ever swept over a nation in the short space of half ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... this new figure was a thing of the utmost horror. He had known how to brace himself for that other authority—there had, at any rate, been consistency and even a kind of chiselled magnificence in that stiff brutality—now there was degradation, crawling ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... man who has indulged in habits of indolence from his childhood, and see what it has brought him to. He has been in the habit of lounging about the streets unemployed, or perhaps watching for opportunities for mischief; step by step he descends in his moral degradation; vice succeeds folly, till a dark catalogue of crimes brings him to a drunkard's grave. State prison, or the gallows. While, on the other hand, take a man who has been accustomed to labor and toil for his daily ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... feeling that somehow she must have experienced every exaltation and every degradation in the calendar. Tenderness and passion and the gift of murder itself were ever the mixed language of the street. He remembered the gesture he first had made to her almost timid advances toward helping him. He ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... is a sad sight that of the high-mettled, noble animal, once the petted darling of wealth, caressed by ladies and children, and guarded so that even the winds of heaven might not visit him too roughly, fallen through the successive grades of equine degradation, until at last he hobbles before a clam-wagon or a swill-cart—a ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... 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 ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... and of such sullen disposition that when a better man was offered, in the person of Dick Peveril, the boss was only too glad to return him to his hated task of car-pushing and accept the new-comer in his place. His sentence of degradation, pronounced only the day before, had been received as a personal affront by every wild-eyed car-pusher of the mine. All knew that some one must fill the place from which their leader had been ousted, and all were ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... for themselves. They often take their dinners with 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, and the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... poetical licences in his time. His licence in this matter appears neither poetical nor reasonable. It is to be hoped that he will not take it into his royal head to make his subjects shave theirs; nothing but that is wanting to complete their degradation. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Happily, the hollowness of much of his advice came to be recognised, and he who deemed cards and dice a necessary step towards fashionable perfection, and ordained that Fiddlers were to be paid to play for you as substitutes for your own personal degradation, came to be remembered, possibly, more on account of the laxity of his precepts than for any ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... they were appointed either by the governor or by the legislature. It was Georgia that in 1812 first set the pernicious example of electing judges for short terms by the people,[1]—a practice which is responsible for much of the degradation that the courts have suffered in many of our states, and which will have to be abandoned before a proper administration of justice can ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... mind that can trade in corruption, and can deliberately pollute itself with ideal wickedness, for the sake of spreading the contagion in society, I wish not to conceal or excuse the depravity. Such degradation of the dignity of genius, such abuse of superlative abilities, cannot be contemplated but with grief and indignation. What consolation can be had, Dryden has afforded, by living to repent, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... see a good specimen of the Highlander, you will have to go to Canada. Sooner or later, and the sooner the better, the vigorous action of Government will be demanded to remedy the present iniquities of land-tenure, and to put a stop to the compulsory degradation of ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... You will redeem us! You will not permit Poland to be dismembered. Oh, sire, Poland puts her trust in the redeemer of nations! Poland puts her trust in Napoleon the Great, who will raise her from her degradation!" ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... breath. "It is inevitable," he said; and, taking a book from the altar, he read the awful service of the degradation: ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... applause, endless egotism, grudging praise—all are there; not perhaps in the tropical luxuriance they have attained elsewhere, but plain enough. But do we not also find, deeply engrained and constant, a sense of degradation, a longing to escape from the ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... the northern and western ocean, their utmost limit. Many branches of that bold race—audax Japeti genus—fell into a state of barbarism, but a barbarism very different from that of the tribes of Oriental or Southern origin. With them degradation was not final, as it seems to have been with some branches at least of the other stems. They were always reclaimable, always apt to receive education, and, after having existed for centuries in an almost savage state, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... money for inadequate objects are very rare, and are rather designated as foolish than wrong. With regard to all the failings and offences which fall under this head, it may be remarked that, from their false show of generosity, society is apt to treat them too venially, except where they entail degradation or disgrace. If it be asked how actions of this kind, seeing that they are done out of some regard to others, can be described as involving self-indulgence, or the resistance to them can be looked on in the light of sacrifice, it may be replied that the conflict ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... 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 may not ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... after all this," exclaimed Graydon, springing to his feet, his hands clenched in despair. "To be pointed out and talked about! To be pitied and scorned! To see the degradation of my own father! I'll go—anywhere, just so it ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... found? I know not. In this age of degradation who knows the height of virtue to which man's soul may attain? But let us assume that this prodigy has been discovered. We shall learn what he should be from the consideration of his duties. I fancy the father who realises the value of a good ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... we've found Home Rule All Round the only panacea, The Welsh perhaps will all be Aps—the Scotchmen Macs as we are— While Englishmen will sorrow then, in shame and degradation, To think they've not the titles got which ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... unconscious a little while," she said, in explanation. "I thought I never should sleep again. Oh, what a disgrace! My father a forger! Liable to go to prison with common criminals, to wear the stripes of a convict! It seems as if my degradation could ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... understood that, low though they might be in scale of evolution, there was yet absent from them the touch of that deteriorating something which civilization painted into those other countenances. But whether the word he sought was degradation or whether it was shame, he could not tell. In all they did, the way they moved, their dignity and independence, there was this something, he felt, that bordered on being impressive. Their wants were few, their worldly possessions in a bundle, yet they had this thing ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... Jehovah's experience with Israel. Gomer bore him three children, to whom he gave names symbolic of the impending fate[1] of Israel, i. 1-9. The faithless Gomer abandons Hosea for a paramour, but he is moved by his love for her to buy her out of the degradation into which she has fallen, and takes earnest measures to wean her to a better mind. All this Hosea learns to interpret as symbolic of the divine love for Israel, which refuses to be defeated, but will seek to recover the people, though it be through the stern discipline of exile (iii.). ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... any other people. From the days of the second Henry down to those of the last of the Georges, every device that human ingenuity could encompass or the most diabolical spirit entertain, was brought to bear upon them, not only with a view to insuring their speedy degradation, but with the further design of accomplishing ultimately the utter extinction of their race. Yet notwithstanding that confiscation, exile and death, have been their bitter portion for ages—notwithstanding that their altars, their literature and their flag have ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... the lighter, where half-naked negroes and mulattos were at work amid a cloud of nauseating dust, understood the social degradation the other felt. ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... however, were poor; but where all were poor, this was no degradation. The concomitants of poverty in densely populated communities—where great wealth confers social distinction and frowns from its association the poor, making poverty humility, however elevated its virtues—were ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... frankness of Pickering, the kindly nature and refinement of McHenry, the warm-heartedness and bonhommie of Wolcott, all won upon his regard. On their part there was a no less sincere love for their chief. There are those devotion to whom is no degradation. Washington was such a one, and to him it was rendered in the spirit of men who respected themselves. Among all connected with him, either in military or civil life, this sentiment was retained. His death hallowed his memory in ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... toward a lower and less influential level. Mr. Churton Collins in his pessimistic discussion of "The Present Functions of Criticism" deplores the spirit of tolerance and charity manifested toward the mediocre productions of contemporary writers; he attributes the degradation of criticism to the lack of critical standards and principles, and indirectly to the neglect of the study of literature at the English Universities. The plea for an English Academy has been made at different times and with different ends in view, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... such a creation is peculiar only to man. But as soon as we assume the co-operation of an invisible author of the temptation, by whom the serpent was animated, everything which is here threatened against the visible instrument acquires a symbolical meaning. The degradation inflicted upon the latter,—the announcement of the defeat which it is to sustain in the warfare with man,—represent in a figure the fate of the real tempter only. The instrument used by him in the temptation is ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... common thief! I am as innocent as any angel beside the throne of Christ! Save me at least from the degradation of being searched. Here is my basket, and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... absolute goods in themselves, though we think them so,— create for us such a multitude of miserable, sunken, and ignorant human beings, that to carry them all along with us is impossible, and perforce they must for the most part be left by us in their degradation and wretchedness. But evidently the conception of free- trade, on which our Liberal friends vaunt themselves, and in which they think they have found the secret of national prosperity,— evidently, I say, the mere unfettered pursuit of the production of wealth, and the mere mechanical ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... 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 with ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... of forming an opinion of Africans who have never been debased by slavery, will rank them very much higher in the scale of intelligence, industry, and manhood, than others who know them only in a state of degradation. ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... of these partnership vessels, there is commonly a man on board who is every way competent to assert the authority given him by the laws, as well as by his contract. Macy was sent for, rebuked, and menaced with degradation from his station, should he again presume to violate his orders. As commonly happens in cases of this nature, regrets were expressed by the offender, and ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... of free negroes from going to Liberia; and thereby the abolitionists have made them consumers of slave-products to the extension of the slave-power. And, by thus keeping them in America, the abolitionists have so increased their degradation as to prove all the more the utter folly of ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... think he knew old Mr. Beauchamp. He may be a trustee, but that's not likely; Mark Wylder was not the person for any such office. I hope Stanley does not intend trying to extract money from him; anything rather than that degradation—than that villainy. Stanley was always impracticable, perverse, deceitful, and so foolish with all his cunning and suspicion—so very foolish. Poor Stanley. He's so unscrupulous; I don't know what to think. He said he could force Mark ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... real! my errors have been the fruits of an unbridled education. Ambition dazzled me, and wealth was my idol. I have acted like a villain, and as my conduct has deserved no forgiveness, so will my degradation be seen without compassion; but this weight of guilt removed, I will seek happiness and virtue in the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... it is not difficult to understand how the large class of poor whites in the South could be urged into a contest in which every blow struck by them was in support of a system to whose baleful influence they owed their own ignorance, their social degradation, their pitiable poverty. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... day the same evil passions the enemy has stirred up in so many of our Irish people will play havoc with his own hopes, and make more bitter and deadly the cup of his degradation ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... represent it; to engage, if possible, all the generous and good-hearted to love and esteem each other, to become incapable of hating any one; to feel irreconcilable hatred only towards low, base falsehood; cowardice, perfidy, and every kind of moral degradation. It is my object to impress on all that well- known but too often forgotten truth, namely, that both religion and philosophy require calmness of judgment combined with energy of will, and that without such a union, there can be ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... tartan, or the exquisitely fancied involutions of the Cashmere, fold habitually over the noblest hearts? We have had our answer. Since the race of man began its course of sin on this earth, nothing has ever been done by it so significative of all bestial, and lower than bestial degradation, as the acts the Indian race in the year that has just passed by. Cruelty as fierce may indeed have been wreaked, and brutality as abominable been practised before, but never under like circumstances; rage ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... although I have discussed the question on the spot. The disadvantage of this pompous distinction to the town arose from the ridiculous popular notion that whereas Spaniards in Spain are all cavaliers, they too, as Spaniards of the first water, ought to regard work as a degradation. Hence they are a remarkably indolent and effete community, and on landing from a ship there is seldom a porter to be seen to carry one's luggage. Their speech is a dialect called Chabucano—a mixture of very ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... on his favourite steed, surrounded by his dogs, and with a hawk on his wrist, Sir Isumbras cast his eyes on the sky, and discovered an angel, who, hovering over him, reproached him with his pride, and announced the punishment of instant and complete degradation. The terrified knight immediately fell on his knees; acknowledged the justice of his sentence; returned thanks to Heaven for deigning to visit him with adversity while the possession of youth and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... reason that we lament, as a serious social and national evil, the long interregnum in dramatic excellence in our writers, and the woful degradation in the direction of dramatic representations at our metropolitan theatres. Immense is the influence of lofty and ennobling dramatic pieces when supported by able and impassioned actors. As deleterious is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... for a moment that he was at all degrading himself by the method he adopted for attaining this end. The degradation, in his conception of the matter, would be all with the party robbed. He had, however, in his anger, forgotten one thing, which, according even to the notions of the New Zealanders, it was most material ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... incident had come back to him. It had been, perhaps, the most powerful factor in his patience with her airs and condescensions. He felt that it, the lowest dip of his degradation in snobism, had given her the right to keep him in his place. It seemed to him one of those frightful crimes against self-respect which can never be atoned, and, bad as he thought it from the standpoint of good sense as to the way to get on with her, he suffered far more because ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... desolation it is hard to imagine. Yet the unhappy beings sank into a still deeper horror. Unable to relieve the pangs of hunger, they turned cannibal and fed upon each other. Thus the last depths of degradation were sounded, the last horrors of the Starving ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... lives to prove it." There will be a typhus fever in this land infinitely worse than any pestilence that kills the body unless this deadly germ be killed by putting education where there is ignorance, and putting honor and truth where there is degradation to-day. "Look out for No. 1?" Aye, it is our business to look out for ourselves. May God Almighty help us that we fail not to attend to it. There is just one way to save ourselves. We learned that long ago at the feet of Him who said: "He that loseth his life shall ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 1, January, 1890 • Various
... remember always {143} that in 400 B.C., just a year before the death of Socrates at Athens, this family of Stolid persons manifested themselves at Rome, shooting up from plebeian roots into places where they had no business; and preparing the way for the degradation of the entire Roman race under the Empire; their success being owed, remember also, to the faults of the patricians, for one of the laws passed by Calvus Stolo was that the Sibylline books should be in custody of ten men, of whom five should be plebeian, "that no falsifications might ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... would listen to no word of accompanying his family in their exile. He declared his only desire was either to procure for his country even justice, and freedom from neglect and oppression, or for himself a grave, and oblivion of her people's sufferings and degradation. ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... was used there with very little variation all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and indeed into the eighteenth. Most of Caxton's own types are of an earlier character, though they also much resemble Flemish or Cologne letter. After the end of the fifteenth century the degradation of printing, especially in Germany and Italy, went on apace; and by the end of the sixteenth century there was no really beautiful printing done: the best, mostly French or Low-Country, was neat and clear, but without ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... Jewess," replied the Templar, well aware of the truth of what she spoke, and that the rules of his Order condemned in the most positive manner, and under high penalties, such intrigues as he now prosecuted, and that, in some instances, even degradation had followed upon it—"thou art sharp-witted," he said; "but loud must be thy voice of complaint, if it is heard beyond the iron walls of this castle; within these, murmurs, laments, appeals to justice, and screams for help, die alike silent away. One thing only can save thee, Rebecca. Submit to ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... the prosperity of a pardon still Secure thy railing rhymes, infamous Gill, At libelling? shall no star chamber peers, Pillory, nor whip, nor want of ears, All which thou hast incurred deservedly, Nor degradation from the ministry To be the Denis of thy father's school, Keep in thy bawling wit, thou bawling fool. Thinking to stir me, thou hast lost thy end, I'll laugh at thee, poor wretched Tyke, go send Thy boltant muse abroad, and teach it rather A tune to drown the ballads of thy father. For thou ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... with sobs. Fielding and Dicky were uncomfortable, for these were not the sobs of a driveller or a drunkard. Behind them was the blank failure of a life—fifteen years of miserable torture, of degradation, of a daily descent lower into the pit, of the servitude of shame. When at last he raised his streaming eyes, Fielding and Dicky could see the haunting terror of the soul, at whose elbow, as it were, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... getting in a rut. Besides, I'm getting tired of Burrus. Narrow-minded scoundrel! He throws out hints about Zeke bringing me my whiskey over from Fillmore. As if it were any of his business!" He subsided and silently contemplated the depths of Burrus' degradation. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... of an egg is composed of albumen, which can be coagulated or hardened by alcohol. As albumen enters so largely into the composition of the brain, is not the impaired intellect and moral degradation of the inebriate attributable to the effect of alcohol in hardening the ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... 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 in hero-worship, despite Carlyle's grandiosities, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... to be in such "a raging heat" that he appeared "as one clean void of humanity," we read on, expecting to find some brutal and heartless words whereby he crushed the meek spirit of the martyr before him. The scene was Cranmer's degradation at Oxford, with which solemn and painful act Bonner was charged; but the strongest words used by the bishop in answer to Cranmer's continued protests and recriminations were, according to Foxe himself, merely that " for his inordinate ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... lapse of time to determine which was the original form of the violin in Europe. Very early we find the crwth in the hands of the Celtic players, as noticed in chapter VI. The form given in Fig. 22 (p. 107) is rather late, most likely, and somewhat of a degradation, since many of the elements of the violin are wanting in it. The clumsy resonance body is of the same width all the way, preventing the depression of one end of the bow in order to avoid sounding adjacent strings. As the bridge of ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... always the master, even in his weaker and most abandoned state; but in his weakness and degradation he is the foolish master who misgoverns his "household." When he begins to reflect upon his condition, and to search diligently for the Law upon which his being is established, he then becomes the wise master, directing his energies with intelligence, and ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen
... of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... whose waters were then very high. It was an awful instance of the instability of fortune, to see so wealthy a man, possessing the utmost earthly felicity, brought down to such a depth of misery, such utter ruin and extreme degradation. It is said he had vices, among which were gaming and profane swearing, to which he was very much addicted; but these seem more than balanced by his numerous charities, for he relieved many in distress, and bestowed much money for pious uses. It may ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... 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 angels did ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... The great majority of the women enlisted in this movement—many of them, it is needless to say, very worthy persons as individuals—are little aware of all the perils into which some of their most zealous male allies would lead them. Degradation for the sex, and not true and lasting elevation, appear to most of us likely to be the end to which this movement must necessarily tend, unless it be checked by the latent good sense, the true wisdom, and the religious principle ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... humiliation I was now swallowing to be gilded thus? No, no—a thousand times, no! He was not the man with whom to make such conditions—the man I loved—nay worshiped almost. He was of the old heroic mould, that would have preferred any certainty to suspense, and death itself to an instant's degradation. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... the extreme depth of the wretched man's degradation. In this manner they continued to live for three or four months, when, new quarrels breaking out, they separated once more. This time their separation was final. Kelly, taking the elixir which he had found ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... this to you? The very animals have more soul than a man who commits suicide. The beasts of prey slay each other for hunger or in self-defence, but they do not slay themselves. That is a brutality left to man alone, with its companion degradation, drunkenness." ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... said George, as he rose in the gondola to catch a last glimpse of the Piazzetta, "sea girt city! decayed memorial of patrician splendour, and plebeian debasement! of national glory, blended with individual degradation!—fallen art thou, but fair! It was not with freshness of heart, I reached thee:—I dwelt not in thee, with that jocund spirit, whose every working or gives the lip a smile, or moistens the eye ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... observance; but the most accursed ignorance is that which has no observance—sunk to the cunning greed of the fox, to which all law is no more than a trap or the cry of the worrying hound. There is a degradation deep down below the memory that has withered into superstition. In the multitudes of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the divine Unity, the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive the organic centre: let the unity of ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... presence. Speech was given us to make known our needs, and for imprecation, expostulation, and entreaty. This pitiful necessity we are under, upon social occasions, to say something—however inconsequent—is, I am assured, the very degradation ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... permanent—the specific musical emotion of music can become subservient to the mere awakening of our latent emotional possibilities, to the stimulating of emotions often undesirable in themselves, and always unable, at the moment, to find their legitimate channel, whence enervation and perhaps degradation of the soul. There are kinds of music which add the immense charm, the subduing, victorious quality of art, to the power of mere emotion as such; and in these cases we are pushed, by the delightfulness of ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... of the Greek school—Pindar's summary of it, "[Greek: ti de tis; ti d'ou tis];"[15]—a sorrowful and degrading lesson. See at least, then, that you reach the level of such degradation. See that your lives be in nothing worse than a boy's climbing for his entangled kite. It will be well for you if you join not with those who instead of kites fly falcons; who instead of obeying the last words of the great Cloud-Shepherd—to feed his ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... gloominess of Zola, over whom he claims one great advantage, that of possessing a rich sense of humor, and a large share of the old Gallic wit. His pessimism, indeed, is inexorable, and he pushes the misfortune, or more often the degradation, of his characters to its extreme logical conclusion. Yet, even in his saddest stories, the general design is rarely sordid. For a long while he was almost exclusively concerned with impressions of Normandy; ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... representation of the human heart, than is the living drama of action as it evolves around us. There is more of good and more of evil in it; more redeeming points of the bad and more errors of the virtuous; higher upsoarings, and baser degradation of the soul; in short, a more perplexing amalgamation of vice and virtue than we witness in the outward world. Decency and external conscience often produce a far fairer outside than is warranted by the stains within. ...
— The Intelligence Office (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... strength and patient resolution. But it broke the spirit of a man in him to see his young wife's despair. Poverty frightened and quelled her. The deep-rooted security of her old home was something she missed every day of her makeshift existence. It was degradation to live in "rooms," or a room; to move for want of means to pay the rent. She pined for the good food she had been used to. Her health suffered through anxiety and hard work. She was too proud to complain, but the sight of her dumb unacceptance of what had ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... not without a humorous outlook on his own degradation). I am uncommonly flattered, Alice, to hear that you have sent for me. ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie
... altogether without satisfaction. It was during this sojourn that he gained the little knowledge of life and human nature he possessed; and the creed and solemn manners of the land harmonised with his faith and habits. Among these strangers, too, the proud young Englishman felt not so keenly the degradation of his house; and sometimes, though his was not the fatal gift of imagination, sometimes he indulged in day dreams of its rise. Unpractised in business, and not gifted with that intuitive quickness which supplies experience and often baffles it, Ratcliffe Armine, who had not quitted ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... sufferer with his calamities imposed upon him by his erring sire. He was ready to receive his punishment. Oh, would that at any cost—at any expense of bodily and mental suffering, he could secure his child from further sorrow and from deeper degradation! To such a heart and mind, Michael might well carry his complaints with some expectation of sympathy and reimbursement. Aggrieved as he was, he did not fail to paint his disappointment and sense of injury in the strongest colours; but blacker than all—and he was capable of such ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... their own people in order to serve the Emperor of France. It was a terrible, heart-rending spectacle presented by Germany during these last years, and which could not but fill the heart of every patriot with shame and despair. And yet this period of degradation was necessary and even salutary, for it blinded Napoleon by the glaring sunshine of his power; it rendered him overbearing and reckless; he dared every thing, because he believed he would succeed in every thing, and that the world had utterly succumbed to ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... credible. By a stroke of his pen, he stripped McClellan of the office of Commanding General, reduced him to the rank of mere head of a local army, the army of the Potomac; furthermore, he permitted him to hear of his degradation through the heartless medium of the daily papers.(15) The functions of Commanding General were added to the duties of the Secretary of War. Stanton, now utterly merciless toward McClellan, instantly took possession ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... destructive of spiritual exaltation, and he told her that exaltation was the gospel according to Blake. We must seek to exalt ourselves, to live in the idea; sexual passion was a merely inferior state, but mean content was the true degradation. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... mi-cote, et entre les rochers, des forets de sapins. Avant d'arriver a Silenen, on appercoit le glacier de Tittlis; il est sur le territoire d'Engelberg, et on trouve encore quelques hetres; derriere les montagnes boisees il s'en eleve d'autre nues et arides. Des points et des vues admirables par la degradation des montagnes et pour le sauvage, s'offrent de toutes parts. Des chalets, des habitations isolees, sont situes au pied des plus affreux rochers qui les menacent d'une ruine prochaine. L'habitant y vit sans crainte, entoure de son pre et de son petit bien dont ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... can be little hopes of this or any other Nation, being made completely easy or happy. Men of larger Fortunes, shou'd shew they have larger Hearts than others, or they ought like the old Romans to suffer a voluntary Degradation, and descend from their State and mix with the meanest Plebeians. If they Act so as to do Honour to their Ancestors, and give shining Proofs of Truth, Piety, Worth and Benevolence; Numbers will Copy ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... model plantation, and this was probably not a hard master, as masters go. "These are the conditions which can only be known to one who lives among them. Flagrant acts of cruelty may be rare, but this ineffable state of utter degradation, this really beastly existence, is the normal condition of these men and women; and of that no one seems to take heed, nor had I ever heard it described so as to form any adequate conception of it, till I found myself plunged into it.... ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... their own imperfect and corrupt lives. The divine character, as revealed in the revelation of Christ, and presented to us as God manifest in the flesh, is at once the very opposite of the characters given in the myths. The distance between the two is the distance between the lowest degradation of God-like power exercised in the lowest passions, and the sublimity of Heaven's own spotless life. I love the religion of the Scriptures, because it restores to the race the lost knowledge of God and the additional life of Jesus—the only perfect model known in the history of the race. ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... coarse, brutal companion, Giulio Wanzer, who makes him an abject slave, until a detected forgery compels Wanzer to flee the country. Episcopo then marries Ginevra, the pretty but unprincipled waitress at his pension, who speedily drags him down to the lowest depths of degradation, making him a mere nonentity in his own household, willing to live on the proceeds of her infamy. They have one child, a boy, Ciro, on whom Giovanni lavishes all his suppressed tenderness. After ten years of this martyrdom, the hated Wanzer reappears ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... scattered that bilious humour which had occasioned this very occupation." Our author's character in his works was the very opposite to the one in which he appeared to these low people. Feeling his degradation among them, for they treated his simplicity as utter silliness, his personal timidity assumed a tone of boldness and originality in his writings, while a strong personal sense of shame heightened his causticity, and he delighted to contemn that urbanity in which he had never shared, and which ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... intelligible. He was ordered to retire into the next room and write out his statement. His written narrative proved more obscure than his spoken words. In spite of his prayers that he might be spared the degradation of being arrested while still clad in his pontifical habits, he was at once sent to the Bastile. A day or two afterward Madame La Mothe was apprehended in the provinces, and Louis directed that a prosecution should be instantly commenced against all who had ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... homes and gathered together so many families in innocence and repose, was to her blacker than its own blackness in misery and turpitude; the morning, that radiated gladness over the face of the world, revealed the extent and exaggerated the sense of her own degradation. But the vision of Jesus had alighted upon her; she had seen him speeding on his errands of mercy; she hung about the crowd that followed his steps; his tender look of pity may have sometimes gleamed into her soul. Stricken, smitten, confounded, her yearnings for peace ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... breach, coupling the information with a look which was calculated to convey somewhat more than I knew myself; for, in truth, when I began to recollect that a few minutes before had seen me retiring from the breach, under a fanciful overload of degradation, I thought that I had now as good a right as any man to be astonished at finding myself lording it over the officers of a French battalion; nor was I much wiser than they were, as to the manner of its accomplishment. They were all very much dejected, excepting their major, who was ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... the human being demands that altruistic ideas should also be cultivated. We see that in China an aristocracy of letters—for it is through passing difficult examinations in old literature that the ruling classes are appointed—is no protection to the poor and ignorant from oppression or degradation. It is true that the classics in China are very old, but so are the literatures of Greece and Rome, on which so many university degrees are founded; and it ought to be impressed upon all seekers after academic ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... Angelina Grimke reflected upon the sorry position to which men had assigned women in Church and State the more keenly did they feel its injustice and degradation. They beat with their revolutionary idea of equality against the iron bars of the cage-like sphere in which they were born, and within which they were doomed to live and die by the law of masculine might. At heart ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... arbitration. Never, never any great nation or any self-respecting government, accepted or submitted to any similar foreign interference. Of the peoples, nations and governments, which allowed such interference, some collapsed into degradation for a long time, only slowly recovering, like Spain; others, like Poland, disappeared. Those who advocate such mediation unveil their weakness, their thorough ignorance of the world's history and of the historic and political bearings of the words, mediation, ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... knew thee in thy better days, might have easily divined this consequence. I foresaw thy poverty and degradation in the same hour that I left thy roof. My soul drooped at the prospect, but I said, It cannot be prevented, and this reflection was an antidote to grief; but, now that thy ruin is complete, it seems as if some of it were ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
Copyright © 2025 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
