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More "Degrade" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appear to have been elected. There were also recognised in the Spartan constitution two distinct classes—the Equals and the Inferiors. Though these were hereditary divisions, merit might promote a member of the last—demerit degrade a member of the first. The Inferiors, though not boasting the nobility of the Equals, often possessed men equally honoured and powerful: as among the commoners of England are sometimes found persons of higher birth and more important station ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from intoxicating drinks! These degrade women and she degrades men. "Rise up ye women who are at ease in Zion!" The drinking places in the cities, especially in New York, by every device get women in their dens that they ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... centre of a whole system of myths. The Poema del Cid, written in the latter half of the 12th century, has scarcely any trace of a historical character. Already the Cid had reached his apotheosis, and Castilian loyalty could not consent to degrade him when ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... reflected upon the words, the more of artifice, of duplicity, of ingratitude, of insult, of meanness she discovered in them. In her cold fits of ill-humour, this lady was prone to degrade, as monsters below the standard of humanity, those whom, in the warmth of her enthusiasm, she had exalted to the state of angelic perfection. Emilie, though aware that she had unwittingly offended, was not aware how ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... be perhaps, who will dispute his claim to the title of an Epic Poet; and will endeavour to degrade him even to the rank of a ballad-monger. But I, as his Commentator, will contend for the dignity of my Author; and will plainly demonstrate his Poem to be an Epic Poem, agreeable to the example of all Poets, and the ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... feelings, or whatever the occasion for them, you degrade yourself by such an exhibition ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... daughter, our dear mutual pledge, "As yours, so mine, demands our mutual care. "But rightly still affairs if we design, "What you lament will no injustice prove; "Love only. Sure, a son-in-law like him, "Can ne'er degrade, will you consent but yield. "Grant nought beyond,—'tis no such trivial boast, "Jove's brother to be call'd! How then, if more "I claim pre-eminence from chance alone! "Still, if so obstinate your wish remains "For separation, go,—let ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... Paine to deter others. The church used painting, music, and architecture simply to degrade mankind. But there are men that nothing can awe. There have been at all times brave spirits that dared even the gods. Some proud head has always been above the waves. Old Diogenes, with his mantle upon him, stiff ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... trust always to be. But that is only my calling, not me. I—John Halifax—am just the same, whether in the tan-yard or Dr. Jessop's drawing-room. The one position cannot degrade, nor the other elevate, me. I should not 'respect myself' if I ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... places were taken by a number of courtiers and the ladies, if I can so describe them of the royal household, but for obvious reasons I will not describe the style of their dancing. It was barbarism run mad, and our chief feeling was disgust that human beings should so degrade themselves. ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... the last numbers of the Sangamon Journal, articles of the most personal nature and calculated to degrade me have made their appearance. On inquiring, I was informed by the editor of that paper, through the medium of my friend General Whitesides, that you are the author of those articles. This information satisfies me that I have become ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... and as he had imagined, a certain resource, he had promised the price of his ransom should be paid by the first of his countrymen that he might meet with, on the best of all securities, to be thus refused and dishonoured by him, would, he knew, degrade them sadly in the opinion of the natives, if it did not ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Guiccioli, the wife of one of the richest nobles of Italy,—young, beautiful, and interesting. This love seems to have been disinterested and lasting; and while it was a violation of all the rules of morality, and would not have been allowed in any other country than Italy, it did not further degrade him. It was pretty much such a love as Voltaire had for Madame de Chatelet; and with it he was at last content. There is no evidence that Byron ever afterward loved any other woman; and what is very singular about the affair ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... any higher idea of happiness than a drunken debauch. While as for fashionable morality the less you say about it the better. And the worst of the lot are among the canting ones. The Strongs and their set at least are decent people. Wealth and poverty both seem to degrade most of us." ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... because they don't know what real amusement is! Laughter and prayer are the two noblest habits of man; they mark us off from the brutes. To laugh at cheap jests is as base as to pray to cheap gods. To laugh at Fatty Arbuckle is to degrade the ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... shun that one; to deny yourself the necessities of life, and your friends those poor little pleasures that you are yearning to bestow upon them—is it not a mental malady, a fever; is it not damnation itself? The thousand meannesses: how they degrade you; how they suck away your strength, your ambition, your faith! To see no openings before you, save ever darker gulfs of despair! I cannot hope to make you conceive such a hell: one must have been there ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... chapter of His Gospel, where we read, "Jesus, knowing that He came from God, and went to God, riseth from supper and began to wash the disciples' feet." It was because He knew His high dignity and His high destiny that He could stoop to the lowest place and that place could not degrade Him. ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... of a beast of burden, man, her companion, must continue barbarous—Not a tyrant, for terrible as are the evils of irresponsible authority, with whomsoever it may be vested, in her hands it becomes the most tremendous instrument that Providence in its indignation can employ to crush, degrade, and utterly to paralyze the nations within its reach. The former position will readily be conceded; and the history of Rome under the Emperors, or of France during the last century, affords but too striking ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... those who do not believe that to give to women common rights and privileges will degrade them, but on the contrary I believe it will ennoble them; and I believe further that to put them on an equality in the matter of rights and privileges with men will enhance their charms and not lessen ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... gipsy tent mending my camp stool, I invited him to take a seat on the grass beside me. This was peremptorily refused: "he had never sat on the ground during the late chief's reign, and he was not going to degrade himself now." One of my men handed him a log of wood taken from the fire, and helped him out of the difficulty. When I offered him some cooked meat on a plate, he would not touch that either, but would ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... official suicide: whether the theory of the responsibility of provincial Ministers to the provincial Parliament, and of the consequent duty of the Governor to remain absolutely neutral in the strife of political parties, had not a necessary tendency to degrade his office into that of a mere Roi faineant. He had in 1849, as Sir C. Adderley expresses it, 'maintained the principle of responsible Government at the risk of his life.' Was the result of his hard-won victory only to empty himself ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... and his colleagues, and paying back with usury all that Ewing had said, when everybody thought and believed that he was digging his own grave; for it was known that Ewing would not quietly pocket any insinuations that would degrade him personally. I recollect his reply to Lincoln well. After addressing the Speaker, he turned to the Sangamon delegation, who all sat in the same portion of the house, and said: 'Gentlemen, have you no other champion than this coarse and vulgar fellow to bring ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... with his own eyes monarchy compelled to degrade itself, and to inflict its death-wound with its own hand; he saw the throne that base courtiers had dragged through the mire defiled by the grip of parricidal hands, and buried, fathoms deep, beneath a sea of blood; ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... hundred young girls, mixed up with as many rough coarse men, carrying baskets of earth, some fifty rods, upon their head, for the purpose of filling up an embankment or road." "Heathenism, and paganized Christianity," he remarks, "degrade woman to a level with the slave." "In none of the slave States which I have visited," says Professor Stowe, "have I ever seen negro women drudging in such toilsome out of door labors, as fall to the lot of the laboring ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... deeply, against Mr Gresham, who had ever been so kind to her? Could she hope, was it possible, that a boy like Frank should be true to his first love? And, if he were true, if he were ready to go to the altar with her to-morrow, ought she to allow him to degrade himself by such ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... hills assume more rounded forms, and from the general obscurity, the palms, a tree made for moonlight, stand out in soft distinctness. At such a time we forget the foul crimes which disfigure the past, and the vices which degrade the present of this fair land, and can easily imagine ourselves in the garden where the yet unfallen progenitors of mankind walked under a firmament 'glowing with living sapphires,' and together hymned the praises ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... authority of these writers, we should conclude that the native was not a savage, at all, until the landing of the whites; and, instead of ascribing his atrocities to the state of barbarism in which he lived—thus indicating their only valid apology—we should degrade both the white and the red men, by attributing to the former all imaginable vices, and, to the latter, a peculiar aptitude in acquiring them. These mistakes are natural and excusable—as the man who kills another in self-defence is justifiable; but the Indian character is not the less ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... took the place of the five Directors and found his political career at an end. He had amassed a large fortune and spent his later years in voluptuous ease. Among the men of the Revolution few did more than Barras to degrade that movement. His immorality in both public and private life was notorious and contributed in no small degree to the downfall of the Directory, and with it of the first French Republic. Despite his profession ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... contempt applied to peers of low birth. The phrase arose in the reign of Charles VII., of France, when his son Louis (afterwards Louis XI.) created a host of riff-raff peers, such as tradesmen, farmers, and mechanics, in order to degrade the aristocracy, and thus weaken its influence in ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... breathing-time, but a pause in the roar of the bloody tempest, let us improve it to remedy all wrongs at home; to educate our ignorant and neglected masses; to eradicate the vices that disgrace and degrade our nation; to build up the Church wherever it lies in ruins; to extend not so much Britain's empire as Christ's kingdom abroad, and so hasten forward the happy time when the Song of the Angels shall be echoed from every land, and the voices of the skies of Bethlehem shall be lost in the ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... carried on. By this time the French and British detectives had usurped the powers and inverted the functions of the police organs;[10] and the French and {128} British agents, after fomenting those fatal differences which divide and degrade a people, had developed into directors of ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... theory may be illustrated by the following extract: "Perception, consciousness, cognition, we continue to be told, are qualities which cannot appertain to matter; there must hence be a thinking and an immaterial principle; and man must still be a compound being. Yet, why thus degrade matter, the plastic and prolific creature of the Deity, beyond what we are authorized to do? Why may it not perceive, why not think, why not become conscious? What eternal and necessary impediment prevents? or what self-contradiction and absurdity is hereby implied? ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... then, in a freak, ostracized a man whom all admitted to be the meanest man in Athens. This was regarded as such a degradation of the institution, as well as such an honor to the mean man, that never thereafter did the Athenians degrade a good man, or honor a bad one, by a ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... is cheap because a low price is asked for it.—To say that a man is charitable because he subscribes to an hospital.—To keep a dog or a cat on short allowance, and complain of its being a thief.—To degrade human nature in the hope of improving it.—To praise the beauty of a woman's hair before you know whether it did not once belong to somebody else.—To expect that your tradespeople will give you long credit ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... faithful to his purpose: he made use of his residence in Prussia and the favor of the king to increase his fortune, and to injure and degrade, as far as possible, all those for whom the king manifested the slightest partiality. He not only added to his riches by the most abject niggardliness in his mode of life, thereby adding his pension to his capital, but by speculation in Saxon bonds, for which, in the beginning, he employed the ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... kindlier sentiments here seem playing out in a sort of jubilee. Untied from set purposes and definite aims, the persons come forth with their hearts already tuned, and so have but to let off their redundant music. Envy, jealousy, avarice, revenge, all the passions that afflict and degrade society, they have left in the city behind them. And they have brought the intelligence and refinement of the Court without its vanities and vexations; so that the graces of art and the simplicities of nature meet together in joyous, loving sisterhood. A serene and mellow atmosphere of thought ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... up his pale face, twitching with nervousness, "I don't want to get free by playing tricks on a court of law. I know that fifteen or twenty years in prison would not leave me much worth living for, but I will not degrade myself by evading justice with delays and false affidavits. If you can do anything for me fairly and squarely, I should like to have ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... his marriage, learning of his financial troubles, she had offered to pay him well for a composition. He had said he could not conscientiously degrade his art for a price. So she paid his debts to the extent of three thousand roubles. This he could accept. These ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... altogether in favour of Shakespeare;—even the letters of women of high rank in his age were often coarser than his writings. If he occasionally disgusts a keen sense of delicacy, he never injures the mind; he neither excites, nor flatters, passion, in order to degrade the subject of it; he does not use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carries on warfare against virtue, by causing wickedness to appear as no wickedness, through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate. In Shakespeare vice never walks as in twilight; nothing ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... with your abominable hair-splitting and sophistry! Truth is truth; and never will I degrade it by identifying it with low pragmatic particulars ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... which they stand. When we try to express perfect joy, a noble, spiritual ecstasy, a profound, everlasting love, our words can only compare them with animal passion, with drunkenness, brutal and coarse desire. And not only do they thus degrade the noblest triumphs of the soul of man by likening them to primitive instincts, but they incite us to believe, in spite of ourselves, that the object or feeling compared is less real, less true or substantial, than the type to which it is referred. ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... satire. His "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is dogmatical and insolent, but without refinement or point. He calls people names, and tries to transfix a character with an epithet, which does not stick, because it has no other foundation than his own petulance and spite; or he endeavours to degrade by alluding to some circumstance of external situation. He says of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, that "it is his aversion." That may be: but whose fault is it? This is the satire of a lord, who is accustomed ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... creature who went out of Dalton with one hope, and only one,—that the first day's engagement might see him lying among the unnamed and unknown dead. But if the neighbors and his wife exposed to him relations which he swore he would not degrade himself so far as to resume, what was to become of his daughter? That was more easily managed. He could send her away from home to school, if he could find a lady in the land who would compassionate that neglected ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... speech: Behold the concubine Of Aias, first of all the Greeks for might, How envied once, worn with what service now! So will they speak; and while my quailing heart Shall sink beneath its burden, clouds of shame Will dim thy glory and degrade thy race. Oh! think but of thy father, left to pine In doleful age, and let thy mother's grief— Who, long bowed down with many a careful year, Prays oftentimes thou may'st return alive— O'er awe thee. Yea, ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... infinitesimally what the government, but for your opposition, might do universally. Your true creed is the survival of the fittest. You grind these people down into what is really an economic slavery and dependence, and then you insult and degrade them by inviting them to exercise and read books and sing hymns in your settlement house, and give their children crackers and milk and kindergartens and sunlight! I don't blame them for not becoming ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... afraid," he said; "it is impossible that I can degrade myself by quarrelling with Mr. Vimpany. I only wait here to know what you propose to do. You have ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... yet peaceful seat From learning's labour is the blest retreat. POMPOSUS fills his magisterial chair; POMPOSUS governs,—but, my Muse, forbear: Contempt, in silence, be the pedant's lot, [vi] His name and precepts be alike forgot; No more his mention shall my verse degrade,— To him my tribute is already paid. ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... undeveloped and unprogressive. She will continue rightly to agitate for Home Rule, and this agitation will always be baneful both to her and to us. It will distract her energies from her own economic and social problems. It will embitter and degrade our politics, and dislocate our Parliamentary institutions. She must suffer, we must suffer, the Empire must suffer. It is ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... this sublime display of hypocrisy, Fouche pronounces gold and silver to have been the causes of all the calamities of the republic. "I know not," says he, "by what weak compliance those metals are suffered to remain in the hands of suspected persons. Let us degrade and vilify gold and silver, let us fling those deities of monarchy in the dirt, and establish the worship of the austere virtues of the republic," adding, by way of exemplification of his virtuous abhorrence, "I send you seventeen chests filled with gold, silver, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... strict teetotaller) teetotum - The Queen exclaimed, "How terrible, very! It's perfectly clear to all the throng Peter's been at the old brown sherry. Old brown sherry is much too strong - Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. Of all who thus themselves degrade, A stern example must be made, To Coventry go, you tipsy bee!" So off to Coventry town went he. Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. There, classed with all who misbehave, Both plausible rogue and noisome knave, In dismal dumps he lived to own The folly of ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... streets those traps of hell Into whose gilded snares I fell. Oh! freemen, from these foul decoys Arise, and vote to save the boys. Oh, ye who license men to trade In draughts that charm and then degrade, Before ye hear the cry, Too late, Oh, save the boys from ...
— Poems • Frances E. W. Harper
... extraordinary. Immediately they took from him the cowl, and left them with only some short cassocks such as are worn by clergymen. They delivered them to the bishop, who was already prepared for the degradation. He immediately began to degrade them, and then delivered them over to the secular arm. They were taken to jail by the strong guard of soldiers that had been in the church ever since the criminals had been removed from the prisons to hear the sentence. But it was possible to execute this sentence ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... was most undesirable if Dumouriez really intended to treat for peace. Pitt afterwards assured the House of Commons that Maret had not made the smallest communication to Ministers.[189] Evidently they looked on him as an unofficial emissary, to which level Chauvelin had persistently endeavoured to degrade him. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... been made,—in Mississippi, for example,—with the "understanding" clause, hold out a temptation for the election officer to perjure and degrade himself by too often deciding that the ignorant white man does understand the Constitution when it is read to him, and that the ignorant black man does not. By such a law, the state not only commits ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... subject which never tires, at least never tires me, however varied, repeated, multiplied. A subject so lovely in itself that the most eminent painter cannot easily embellish it, or the meanest degrade it; a subject which comes home to our own bosoms and dearest feelings; and in which we may "lose ourselves in all delightfulness," and indulge unreproved pleasure. I mean the Virgin and Child, or in other words, the abstract personification of what is loveliest, purest, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... enough wealth to pay his funeral expenses. He did not love bloodshed, even to gain liberty. He had objected to the conspiracy, since freedom was to be gained through murder. Yet this was the man who was to save Thebes and degrade her great ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... retribution overtook the Bulletin, for it also published a review of an opera which was not sung, but I meanly passed the occurrence by without comment. When a man hits you, it is far more generous, manly, and fraternal to hit him back a good blow than to degrade ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... their common Guyhood. They might have come down in the world, but hitherto, whatever might be said of them, they had, at least, never rendered themselves publicly ridiculous. Now they were asked to degrade themselves by accepting the ignominious position of London Statues! Was there a Guy who would ever hold up his head again, after such an infamous surrender of his self-respect and independence? He ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 5, 1892 • Various
... craftsmen for the motive of his work. Again, there are pictures by men who, equipped with adequate technical skill, have caught the manner of a master, and mistaking the manner for the message it was simply intended to express, they degrade it into a mannerism and turn out a product which people do not distinguish from the authentic utterances of the master. The artist is a seer and prophet, the channel of divine influences: the individual painter, sculptor, writer, is a very ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... signature was a royal decree deposing the Queen, "who for 33 years has dulled our senses, sold offices and titles," etc., etc. "Since she will not give up her wickedness and is hiding and plotting with low fellows, we hereby depose her and degrade her to the lowest rank." The King declared he would have both his hands cut off before he would sign this infamous paper, which did not prevent its ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... a lad like you should show such early symptoms of depravity; still more so, that he should not have the grace which even the most hardened are not wholly destitute of—I mean to practise immorality in secret, and not degrade themselves and insult their captain by unblushingly avowing (I may say glorying in) their iniquity, by exposing it in broad day, and in the most frequented ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... very frequently obliged to put up with rough and dirty accommodation, because the better sort of houses were of this class. If there are few sights which shock the traveller, there is much even on the surface to indicate vices which degrade and ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... of the country. Old prejudices, a barbarous law, a sense of insecurity in the possessions they know were obtained by plunder, combine to sink them into the mischievous and unholy belief that it is their interest as well as their duty to degrade, and wrong, and beggar the ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... responsibility. He sees that it really cannot be made to answer such a purpose. He also sees, that the doctrine of necessity, as usually maintained, is liable to the objections urged against it, that "it tends to degrade the moral nature of man, and to paralyze our desire of excellence."(50) In making this concession to the advocates of liberty, he speaks from his own "personal experience." The only way to escape these pernicious consequences, he says, is to keep constantly before the mind a clear ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... the ears of his daughters. Is it not an absolute damnation of certain evil principles, that many men would be flayed alive rather than let those they love know that they hold them? But see the selfishness of such men: each looks with scorn on the woman he has done his part to degrade, but not an impure breath must reach the ears of HIS children! Another man's he ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... word that the subject had engaged his attention, and he had laid the case before the law officers, who had reported to him that there were no grounds for any legal proceedings against them. 'How, therefore,' said the Lord-Lieutenant, 'could I degrade men against whom my law officers advised me that no charge could be brought?' This was one offence; and another, that he had countenanced Lord Cloncurry, who, being a member of the Association, was unworthy to receive the King's representative and the Chancellor. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... "I am sorry to degrade into Grig-street;" whether it alludes to the little vivacious eel, or to the merry character of its tenants, he does ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Faculty in us which discovers, by the intervention of intermediate Ideas, what Connection Those in the Proposition have one with another: Whether certain; probable; or none at all; according whereunto, we ought to regulate our Assent. If we do not so, we degrade our selves from being Rational Creatures; and deprive our selves of the only Guide God has given us for our Conduct in ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... either to glorify or degrade the body. If we worship it or pamper it, when it fails us, we are engulfed and buried in its ruins; if we misuse it, and we can misuse it alike by obeying it and disregarding it, it becomes our master and tyrant, or it fails us as an instrument. We must regard it rather as our ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... significance. There has been moreover a tendency on the part of some to associate themselves with a political party, and to claim for the Church the office of judge and arbitrator in industrial strife. But surely it is one thing to degrade the Church to the level of a secular society, and another, by witness and by effort, to make the law of Christ dominant over all the relationships of life. Men are impatiently asking, 'Has the Church no message to the new demands of the age? Are Christians to stand apart ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... in all sufferings and calamities but that of reason only. If you wish for my affection, you will not speak of such things again, but will endeavor to purify yourself from a mental vice, which may sometimes, in periods of suffering, give you a false comfort for a brief season, only to degrade you, and sink you later in a deeper misery. ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... before La Patti left us, to degrade herself by warbling her wood-notes in the ignorant ears of the Opera public whom Mr. Gye is about to assemble, and on whom the leadership of Costa is thrown away, an unfortunate incident happened at the Italiens. Patti had been announced, and Mdlle. ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... never so utterly degrade myself. I could neither lower my standard, nor sacrifice my ideal," said Leo, with a touch of scorn in ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... obstinate, good father. Have you not offered me what is to me beyond all price, that I should again be in the arms of my husband? Can I degrade myself to a lie?—not for life, or liberty, ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... rhyme, who, seated in his corner of selfish complacency, regards the eating of his pie as a virtuous action, enjoys the contemplation of it, and thinks what a pleasant object he thus makes of himself to his parents? Shall I, to take a step farther, degrade the sanctity of the closet, hallowed in the words of Jesus, by shutting its door in the vain fancy of there doing something that God requires of me as a sacred OBSERVANCE? Shall I foolishly imagine that to put in exercise the highest and loveliest, the most entrancing ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... natural composition to make the safest, shrewdest, and most calculating merchant; if I were called to pass judgment on the man most qualified to sustain the spirit and characteristics of the American nation abroad—one who would never betray our national energy, nor degrade his profession, nor fail to seek that which might promote the interests of those who reposed trust in him, at the same time never forgetting his own—if I were about forming an expedition, and would provide myself with that character of man upon whom the issue of its success most depends; if, I say, ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... promise—now whilst we are the only ones awake in the house. We are husband and wife, Clara, and we must be kind to each other. We are not going to be like the poor creatures who let their misery degrade them. We are both too proud for that—what? We can think and express our thoughts; we can speak to each other's minds and hearts. ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... hopeless poor and of degraded men, I had in my mind only the feeble or detestable adults who degrade our civilisation; but I have by no means forgotten the unhappy little souls who develop into wastrels unless they are taken away from hideous surroundings which cramp vitality, destroy all childish happiness, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... not used to it, nor can myself degrade So far, as in my hand to take the spade. This narrow life would ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... their own dishwashing, sweeping and bed-making. Once three boys about fourteen years old went on strike because the proctor asked them to scrub the dining-room floor on their knees. They thought this work would degrade them, and they started toward the superintendent's office. On the way they met me and told ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... charge is that they have acted as though they possessed unlimited power, and, without any warrant whatever in the resolution under which they were appointed, have pursued a course not merely at war with the constitutional rights of the Executive, but tending to degrade the Presidential office itself to such a degree as to render it unworthy of the acceptance of any ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... condition we are in now, and in which without great and immediate effort we are likely to remain, we degrade our patriotism. That we should have to tremble lest we be starved is a miserable, a humiliating thought. To have had so little pride and independence of spirit as to have come to this, to have been such gobblers at wealth—who dare defend it? We have made our bed; let us, now, refuse ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... way to put upon this outlandish Eastern cult the stamp of Rome's nationality, that stamp which no nation ever successfully and permanently resisted; and thus the reception of the cult on the part of the state was not only a disgraceful thing, tending to degrade true religion and spread the contagion of Orientalism, but it also made those whose appetite had been aroused eager for other deities, whose cult would have the great additional charm of being unlicensed by the state, and hence ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... fact that when a woman is on the throne the country is ruled by men, and therefore ruled badly; whereas when a man is on the throne, the country is ruled by women, and therefore ruled well. The suffragets would degrade women from being rulers to being voters, mere politicians, the drudges of the caucus and the polling booth. We should lose our influence completely under such a state of affairs. The New Zealand women have the vote. What is the result? No poet ever makes a New Zealand woman ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... labour, we may think, had filled a gap, created by abnormal circumstances, and did not oust free labour entirely; but it tended constantly to cramp it, and doubtless started notions of work in general which helped to degrade it[334]. Those immense familiae urbanae, of which the historian of slavery has given a detailed account in his second volume[335], belong rather to the early Empire than to the last years of the Republic—the evidence for them is drawn chiefly ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... what he will do. Why else should he want to have her there? With his ideas he would think it the best thing he could do utterly to degrade us all. He has no idea of the honour of his brothers. How should he, when he is so anxious to sacrifice his own sister? As for me, of course, he would do anything to break my heart. He knows that I am anxious for his father's name, and, therefore, ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... for redress of wrongs claimed to have been inflicted upon them by the military. They were free to apply, and did apply, to tribunals outside of and independent of the executive. They and such as they should be the most unwilling to degrade the courts or lessen their power. A similar instance is that of the striking miners in Colorado who so loudly complained of the acts of the militia. They were not obliged to appeal to military or executive officers for redress. The Judicial Courts ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... secret but universal decay was felt in every part of the public administration, and the emperor himself, though he still retained the obedience, gradually lost the esteem, of his subjects. The dress and manners, which, towards the decline of life, he chose to affect, served only to degrade him in the eyes of mankind. The Asiatic pomp, which had been adopted by the pride of Diocletian, assumed an air of softness and effeminacy in the person of Constantine. He is represented with false hair of various ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... spirit of individualism. It must champion the human soul in its God-given right to exercise freely the faculties of mind and body. We must defend the right to work against those who would either destroy or degrade it. We must defend the right of every man, not only to join with others in protecting his interests, whether he is a brain worker or a hand worker—for without the right of combination the individual ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... embrace a single series of phenomena, and they consequently must fail when extended to the whole of Nature. Water by its common operation, as poured down from the atmosphere in rain and torrents, tends to level and degrade the surface, and carries the material of the land into the bosom of the ocean. Fire, on the contrary, in volcanic eruptions usually raises mountains, exalts the surface, and creates islands even in the midst of the sea. But these laws are not invariable, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... eventually found their advantage in the democratic movement. Cobbett fought for the cause of the agricultural labourer, trodden under foot by squires and parsons. Owen believed that the grasping capitalist, with his steam machinery, would further degrade and impoverish the working classes. Godwin, who is merely mentioned by Mr. Stephen, was a peaceful anarchist, who proposed 'to abolish the whole craft and mystery of government,' to abandon coercion and rely upon just reasoning, upon the enlightened assent of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... be your bridesmaid. I could never co-operate in the unhallowed scheme of wedding a man whom you despise. Oh, Olga! do not degrade yourself ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... to have the same were-gild (the lower, of course, the intent being to degrade all the conquered to one level, and to allow only the lowest were-gild of a freedman, fifty ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... humanly conventional; both are completely independent of the arbitrary will of men. The political legislator may place their empire under an interdict, but he cannot reign there. He can proscribe the friend of truth, but truth subsists; he can degrade the artist, but he cannot change art. No doubt, nothing is more common than to see science and art bend before the spirit of the age, and creative taste receive its law from critical taste. When the character becomes ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... garbage. If one rule, and another be ruled, and if the domination be open, frank, and vigorous, you seem to feast on the fact, be this domination as selfish in its nature and as brutal in its form as it may. Whether its aim be to uplift or to degrade its subjects, whether it be clean or filthy, of heaven or of hell, a stress of generous purpose or a mere emphasis of egotism,—what pause do you make to inquire concerning this? The appearance is, that any sovereignty, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... idea of the immortality of the soul and of a happier life has a tendency to lift up the heart of man and to sustain him in the midst of the adversities with which he is assailed in this life. Materialism, on the contrary, is, we are told, an afflicting system, tending to degrade man, which ranks him among brutes; which destroys his courage, whose only hope is complete annihilation, tending to lead him to despair, and inducing him to commit suicide as soon as he suffers in this world. The grand policy of theologians is to blow hot and to blow cold, to afflict ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science; and to visit, with such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralysed hands can hurl, those who refuse to degrade Nature to the level ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... replies, "No," explaining that their enemies had received the paper at a discount, and that, to receive it at par from them, would "give them voluntarily and with one eye open just that advantage over us to oppress, degrade and depress us." This combined financial and spiritual adviser closes his article by urging the brethren to set apart a portion of their time to the service of God, and a portion to "the study of the science of our government and the news ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... legitimate way, is worth all that it has cost us. We needed a severe lesson, and we have had it. It falls heavily upon some who are innocent. Let us, in kindness to these, find a balm for our own trials. And, now, let us not degrade ourselves by hot words and impotent resentments. They can do no good. Let us be men—Christian men, with detestation of the rascality from which we suffer, but with pity for the guilty man, who, sooner or later, will certainly meet the punishment he so richly deserves. 'Vengeance is ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... or a proper sense of what is due to one's self, in society and the common intercourse of life. This vice constitutes what we properly call MEANNESS; when a man can submit to the basest slavery, in order to gain his ends; fawn upon those who abuse him; and degrade himself by intimacies and familiarities with undeserving inferiors. A certain degree of generous pride or self-value is so requisite, that the absence of it in the mind displeases, after the same manner as the want of ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... empire. But, after the death of Crassus, my glorious achievements in subduing the Gauls raised such a jealousy in him that he could no longer endure me as a partner in his power, nor could I submit to degrade myself into his subject. ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... the Prussia of 1917 "is built with blood and mud." Even more than in 1807 the chastisement of Prussia is demanded by "eternal justice." The whole civilized world will breathe more freely when the sinister and diabolical power will be broken for ever and will oppress and degrade humanity ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... extreme readiness to exhibit, indeed, has given rise to some ill-natured reflections; it having been objected that by exhibiting gratuitously through the country when the theatre is closed, they reduce themselves to the level of mountebanks, and thereby tend to degrade the respectability of the profession. Certainly Grimaldi never did this sort of thing; and though Brown, King, and Gibson have gone to the Surrey in vacation time, and Mr. C. J. Smith has ruralised at Sadler's ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... mother? This I certainly do not comprehend, that a son of Petrus and of mine should have thrown all the teaching and the example of his parents so utterly to the wind. But what you are aiming at with this statue, it seems to me is not hard to guess. As the forbidden-fruit hangs too high for you, you degrade your art, and make to yourself an image that resembles her according to your taste. Simply and plainly it comes to this; as you can no longer see the Gaul's wife in her own person, and yet cannot exist without the sweet presence of the fair one, you make a portrait ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... admires the girl who respects herself too much to permit him to tell her questionable stories, so will he reverence the wife who refuses to allow him to degrade himself in her presence either by speech or conduct. Love would not so often fail if wives knew the secret of retaining it, and that is not by sacrifice of principle, nor by tearful reproaches and upbraidings, but by ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... diabetes, and the plague. Of those books, if I had read them, it could nor be expected that I should be able to give a critical account. I have been told that there is something in them of vexation and discontent, discovered by a perpetual attempt to degrade physic from its sublimity, and to represent it as attainable without much previous or concomitant learning. By the transient glances which I have thrown upon them I have observed an affected contempt of the ancients, and a supercilious derision of transmitted knowledge. ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... creditable to him, but he had neither the Age nor the rank to justify the granting him a triumph. To bestow such an honor upon one so young and in such a station, would only bring the honor itself, he said, into disrepute, and degrade, also, his ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... and of course more generally read, than any other." September 2, 1843, Hone records that: "Bennett, the editor of the Herald, is on a tour through Great Britain, whence he furnishes lies and scandal for the infamous paper which has contributed so much to corrupt the morals and degrade the taste of the people of New York." In one of the last entries of the Diary, a few months before Hone's death, allusion is made to a personal attack on the editor by the defeated candidate of the Locofoco ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... opposition. The man is acting but in his own justification. I will wait for mine. To resist would be to degrade us with a bully's brawl; they have the law with them. Let it take ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... depends upon the character of those who are in its ranks. If the individual is low or mean, no occupation can confer upon him respectability or regard. On the other hand, no useful employment, however trivial, in the social state, can degrade him who faithfully performs its duties. It is not always the men of genius, those gifted with extraordinary natural endowments, who are the greatest benefactors of our race, or who enjoy in a greater ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... safety. I could have had an escort of 3000 men, which I refused, preferring to trust myself to French honour. I have not had reason to complain of that confidence from Fontainbleau to Avignon; but between that town and this, I have been insulted, and have been in great danger. The Provencals degrade themselves. Since I have been in France, I have not had a good regiment of Provencals under my orders. They are good for nothing but to make a noise. The Gascons are boasters, but at least they are brave."—At these words, one of the ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... further with results that would be advantageous as well as curious. We degrade and finally vitiate our conscience if we do not respect its behests. Conscience then itself becomes small and timid and humble, shamefaced, and at length a mere whisper. Absolutely silent it can never ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... Hard a starboard! Steady! Port! Port! you may!—and we flew past some huge mass, over which the green seas were fruitlessly trying to dash themselves. Coleridge describes the scene around us too well for me to degrade it with my prose. I will give ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... been long tried on a large scale with a dreadful success, affording the demonstration that if, from early infancy, you allow human beings to live like brutes, you can degrade them down to their level, leaving them scarcely more intellect, and no feelings and affections proper to ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... explanation with my son. She made a sententious speech, just as if she had been on the stage; she asked how he could think that the answer to Fitz-Morris's book should have proceeded from her, or that a Princess of the blood would degrade herself by composing libels? She told him, too, that the Cardinal de Polignac was engaged in affairs of too much importance to busy himself in trifles like this, and M. de Malezieux was too much a philosopher to think of anything but the sciences. For her own part, she said ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... fellow-men, then indeed the evil may become a blessing in disguise. But if you lay the blame of your misfortunes to God alone, and believe that He inflicts His creatures with disease because He is angry with the world, you degrade the Lord into an angry, revengeful Being of human type, instead of the grand and supreme Adonai Echod whom our ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... of working. For the grand moving power we have an undefined, and consequently unintelligible doctrine of Ideas, of supposed spiritual and directing agency; the admission of which would destroy the responsibility of a human being both here and hereafter, and degrade his ennobled condition to the instinct of the speechless brute. To endow these insubstantial and reflected phantasms with some activity and mimic play, a theory of the association of Ideas has been erected, without having previously established ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... support in all this tissue of fables.... And, in fact, pride, after rejecting the Creator of all things and proclaiming man independent, wishing him to be his own king, his own priest, and his own God—pride goes so far as to degrade man himself to the level of the unreasoning brutes, perhaps even of lifeless matter, thus unconsciously confirming the Divine declaration, WHEN PRIDE COMETH, THEN COMETH SHAME. But the corruption of this age, the machinations of the perverse, the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... style uses every ornament that can beautify and avoids every excess which would degrade. Macaulay and Addison have been enthroned as the kings of this style. To them all writers bend the knee ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... made an address in which he announced that "a nation may be too proud to fight." The country gasped for breath when it read those words, which seemed to be the official statement of the President of the United States that foreign nations might out rage, insult, and degrade this nation with impunity, because, as the rabbit retires into its hole, so we would burrow deep into our pride and show neither resentment nor sense of honor. As soon as possible, word came from the White House that, as the President's ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... the deepest depth of the fall. The same record announces that "three days afterwards his Majesty was pleased to create him Earl of Orford, Viscount Walpole, and Baron of Houghton." "Posterity," says Macaulay, "has obstinately refused to degrade Francis Bacon into Viscount St. Albans." Posterity has in like manner obstinately refused to degrade Robert Walpole into the Earl of Orford. He will be known {191} as Robert Walpole so long as ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... may be, I have no fear of failing to make you "all the world to me", provided only that I am not false to my ideal. You must know from what I have written before that I can love, that I do know what love is, and that you may trust me. I am not trying to degrade passion—I simply see how passion throws the burden on the woman, and therefore it is utterly a crime with us—the least thought of it! I ought to consider you as a school-girl, really just that; and instead of that ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Steele, he deems it humanity to laugh at an indifferent jest, and he has thereby earned for himself the reputation of being readily diverted. If he lacks the urbanities which embellish conversation, he is correspondingly free from the brutalities which degrade it. If his instinct does not prompt him to say something agreeable, it saves him from being wantonly unkind. Plain truths may be salutary; but unworthy truths are those which are destitute of any spiritual ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... theft with impunity it was first of all necessary to degrade the great national hero and saint and expose his memory to ridicule. In November 1538 St Thomas was declared a traitor, every representation of him was ordered to be destroyed, and his name was erased ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... 'children.' If men do not suffer their children and kinsmen to be attacked with impunity, how much less will God sit by quiet when Israel is assailed God the Ruler over all things, over the powers in heaven above and on earth beneath, over the spirits and the souls God with whom it lies to exalt and to degrade, ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... did nothing so very much amiss;—did you?" Then there came across her mind an idea that she would lie to him, and degrade herself with a double disgrace. But she hesitated, and was not actress enough to carry on the part. He winked at her as he continued to speak. "I know," he said. "It was just a foolish business, but no ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... doubt, may take a second wife; but he cannot procure for his children a second mother. Indeed, it is a palpable insult to the whole relation of husband and wife when one compares it, even in a financial light, to that of business partners. It is only because a constant effort is made to degrade the practical position of woman below even this standard of comparison, that it becomes her duty to claim for herself at ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... groups of Yemen, or the knots of delighted faces which surround the Polchinello of Naples, and you will see how universal is the passions in mankind for theatrical representations. But though we cannot eradicate the desire for this gratification, we may degrade its tendency, and corrupt its effects. We may substitute stimulants to the senses for elevation to the principle, or softening of the heart. By abandoning its direction to the most volatile and licentious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... 2: "The experiment has been long tried on a large scale, with a dreadful success, affording the demonstration that if, from early infancy, you allow human beings to live like brutes, you can degrade them down to their level, leaving them scarcely more intellect, and no feelings and affections proper to human hearts."—Report on the Health of ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... if they were galling to men accustomed only to the simpler manners of a provincial town; and who, proud of their new position and deeply impressed with its importance, fancied they saw in them a settled intention to degrade both them and their constituents by thus stamping them with a badge of inferiority before ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... now decidedly out of date. It is a silly and displeasing thing, when it becomes a habit. Some one has called it the wit of fools. It is within the reach of the most trifling, and is often used by them to puzzle and degrade the wise. Whatever may be its merits, it is ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... man whom she had hitherto liked, and whom she had unconsciously respected for a certain dignity he seemed to have, degrade himself—and for money's sake, as she rightly judged—to the playing of a pitiful comedy. As the whole scene came back to her in all distinctness, she traced the deception from first to last with amazing ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... of that league we three governed the empire. But, after the death of Crassus, my glorious achievements in subduing the Gauls raised such a jealousy in him that he could no longer endure me as a partner in his power, nor could I submit to degrade myself ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... that I deeply degrade the position which such a myth as that just referred to occupied in the Greek mind, by comparing it (for fear of offending you) to our story of St. George and the Dragon. Still, the analogy is perfect in minor respects; and though it fails to give you ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... rascals," he shouted, "you have been off plundering houses, have you, in place of being with your company. I'll stop this sort of thing mighty sudden. This regiment shall not degrade itself by plundering and robbing, if I have to shoot every man in it. Captain, arrest those men, and keep thim in close confinement until I can have them tried ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... any extreme and irrational habit. Too much attention to food, too much attention to the care of the body and exercise will degrade even character. The morning exercises which are here recommended should be taken even as one washes his hands, as a matter of course. Man is spiritual, and character is developed spiritually, and mere attention to the body does not secure health ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... much noise out of the clouds as any predecessor of mine in the theatre that ever bore that character, but have also descended, and spoke on the stage as the Bold Thunderer in 'The Rehearsal.' When they got me down thus low, they thought fit to degrade me further, and make me a ghost. I was contented with this for these last two winters; but they carry their tyranny still further, and not satisfied that I am banished from above ground, they have given me to ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... her that, by marrying Sir William, she allies herself with an unhappy gentleman in the power of a criminal son who makes his life a burden to him by perpetual demands upon his purse; who will increase those demands with his accession to wealth, threaten to degrade her by exposing her husband's antecedents if she opposes his extortions, and who will make her miserable by letting her know that her old lover was shamefully victimized by a youth she is bound to screen out of respect to her husband's feelings. Now a man does not care to let his own flesh ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... "and nothing but deer. Were they horses it would be right to harness them like horses. But no one harnesses deer because they are free, wild creatures, owing no service of any sort to mankind. It would degrade my deer to labor for Claus, who is only a man in spite of the friendship lavished on him ...
— The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum
... supply with the common necessaries of life: what are we to do? Let us have recourse to this contrivance.' Then, gentlemen, you should consider whether that particular course of proceeding is inconsistent with morality, whether it would have a tendency to degrade and deprave the man or woman. The Solicitor-General, while doubtless admitting the evils and mischiefs of excessive population, argues that the checks proposed are demoralising in their effects, and that it is better to bear the ills we have than have recourse to remedies having such demoralising ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... the words, the more of artifice, of duplicity, of ingratitude, of insult, of meanness she discovered in them. In her cold fits of ill-humour, this lady was prone to degrade, as monsters below the standard of humanity, those whom, in the warmth of her enthusiasm, she had exalted to the state of angelic perfection. Emilie, though aware that she had unwittingly offended, was not aware how low she had sunk in her friend's opinion: she endeavoured, by playful ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... menace your institutions, you find the once loyal Hebrew invariably arrayed in the same ranks as the leveller, and the latitudinarian, and prepared to support the policy which may even endanger his life and property, rather than tamely continue under a system which seeks to degrade him. The Tories lose an important election at a critical moment; 'tis the Jews come forward to vote against them. The Church is alarmed at the scheme of a latitudinarian university, and learns with relief that funds are not forthcoming for its establishment; a Jew immediately advances ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... Queen, notwithstanding the slight at which she at one time had reason to feel piqued, is one of the strongest evidences against the slanderers of Her Majesty. The moral conduct of the Princess has never been called in question. Amid the millions of infamous falsehoods invented to vilify and degrade every other individual connected with the Court, no imputation, from the moment of her arrival in France, up to the fatal one of her massacre, ever tarnished her character. To her opinion, then, the most prejudiced might look with confidence. Certainly no one had a greater ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... Desertion became easy from the extension of the French dominion and from the circumstance of so many belligerent powers around requiring good soldiers; and no odium attended desertion, where everything was done to degrade, and nothing to exalt the soldier in his own esteem and that ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... to be. But that is only my calling, not me. I—John Halifax—am just the same, whether in the tan-yard or Dr. Jessop's drawing-room. The one position cannot degrade, nor the other elevate, me. I should not 'respect myself' if ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... imagined he could hear the sheriff read the sentence, see the priest present the cross to the condemned men, and Froloff, before putting on the black caps, degrade the gentlemen by breaking their ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... their escutcheons, the Orsinis, the Colonnas, the Odeschalchis, the Borgheses, the Rospigliosis, not combine to prevent this monstrosity? Nobility is like love, those who buy those sacred things degrade them in paying for them, and those to whom they are given are no better than mire.... Princess d'Ardea! That creature! Ah, what a disgrace!.... But we must remember our engagement relative to that brave young ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... stands upon eleven Arches, under every one of which there are Shops, which degrade it to a meer Exchange. Nevertheless, the Stairs by which you ascend up to the Guard Room (which is very spacious too) are stately, large, and curious. So soon as you have pass'd the Guard Room, you enter into a long and noble Gallery, the right Hand whereof leads to the King's ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... some great work, thy glory, 680 And peoples safety, which in part they effect: Yet toward these thus dignifi'd, thou oft Amidst thir highth of noon, Changest thy countenance, and thy hand with no regard Of highest favours past From thee on them, or them to thee of service. Nor only dost degrade them, or remit To life obscur'd, which were a fair dismission, But throw'st them lower then thou didst exalt them high, Unseemly falls in human eie, 690 Too grievous for the trespass or omission, Oft leav'st them to the hostile sword Of Heathen ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... into question with them, and every alleged method of help and hope into doubt. Indignation, without any calming faith in justice, and self-contempt, without any curative self-reproach, dull the intelligence, and degrade the conscience, into sullen incredulity of all sunshine outside the dunghill, or breeze beyond the wafting of its impurity; and at last a philosophy develops itself, partly satiric, partly consolatory, concerned only with the regenerative vigor of manure, and ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... mesalliances among such?" Guy asked, at length. "Yes, you are right; but I know a case where 'a man's being balked in his intention to degrade himself' ruined him for life. Ralph Mohun told me of it. It was a nine-days' wonder in Vienna soon after he joined the Imperial Cuirassiers. A Bohemian count flourished there then—a great favorite with every one, for ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... falsehood, or else a mere invention of the traitor Hall's, our father's murderer!' said Jean, with flashing eyes. 'I would have you to know, both of you, my Lords, that were we betrayed and forsaken by every kinsman we have, I will not degrade the blood royal of Scotland by mating it with a rude and petty freebooter. You may keep us captives as you will, but you will ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tend to degrade the character of the United States in the opinion of the civilized world and are ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... hope, and only one,—that the first day's engagement might see him lying among the unnamed and unknown dead. But if the neighbors and his wife exposed to him relations which he swore he would not degrade himself so far as to resume, what was to become of his daughter? That was more easily managed. He could send her away from home to school, if he could find a lady in the land who would compassionate that neglected little girl, and teach her, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... governed by chance, without a wise overruling Providence: for they all formerly believed that there was a state of rewards and punishments to the good and bad after this life; and they now look on those that think otherwise as scarce fit to be counted men, since they degrade so noble a being as the soul, and reckon it no better than a beast's: thus they are far from looking on such men as fit for human society, or to be citizens of a well-ordered commonwealth; since a man of such principles must needs, as oft as he dares do it, despise ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... not at all ashamed of marrying a singing girl. It was the thing he would be sure to do. And he thought of some singing girls before his time, and of his time also, whom it would be an honour for such as him to marry. But he would degrade himself—so he felt—by the connection with an advanced Landleaguing Member of Parliament. He looked round the lot of them, and he assured himself that there was not one from whose loins an English nobleman could choose a wife without disgrace. It was ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... dying to redeeme, So dearly to redeem what Hellish hate 300 So easily destroy'd, and still destroyes In those who, when they may, accept not grace. Nor shalt thou by descending to assume Mans Nature, less'n or degrade thine owne. Because thou hast, though Thron'd in highest bliss Equal to God, and equally enjoying God-like fruition, quitted all to save A World from utter loss, and hast been found By Merit more then Birthright Son of God, Found worthiest to be so by being Good, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... occupation on an amiable, almost a sentimental side, rather than in its own proper deformity. [Footnote: This tendency of men to throw the mantle of an honourable word over a dishonourable thing, or, vice versa, to degrade an honourable thing, when they do not love it, by a dishonourable appellation, has in Greek a word to describe it, [Greek: hypokorizesthai], itself a word with an interesting history; while the great ethical teachers of Greece frequently occupy themselves ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... tried to degrade me, to make a coward of me, to force me to put personal interests before my most ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... other into serenity for the time. Their married life had been so broken up that it was natural that much of the enthusiasm of lovers should remain—even in their old difficulties there had been none of the common-place quarrels which degrade love, and wear it out much more quickly than a trouble which strikes deeper ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... habitual liars, and nowhere are there so many oaths. Every traveller there knows that, and sees how true is Christ's filiation of the custom of swearing from the custom of falsehood. But these poisonous weeds of speech not only tended to degrade plain veracity in the popular mind, but were themselves parents of immoral evasions, for it was the teaching of some Rabbis, at all events, that an oath 'by heaven' or 'by earth' or 'by Jerusalem' or 'by ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... follow the possession of romantic feelings and enthusiasm without common-sense to guide and control them. On the other hand, and that is the priceless lesson of the book, his man, Sancho Panza, shows what the mere worship of ease and vulgar prudence will degrade a man to. If the enthusiasm and mad exaltation of Don Quixote could have been combined with a little of the vulgar self-love of Sancho, one extreme might have corrected the other, and we might have had a wise gentleman instead of a maniac ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... class, whether in an aristocracy or an aristocratic monarchy, is to assume to themselves an endless variety of unjust privileges, sometimes benefiting their pockets at the expense of the people, sometimes merely tending to exalt them above others, or, what is the same thing in different words, to degrade others below themselves. If the people are disaffected, which under such a government they are very likely to be, it is the interest of the king or aristocracy to keep them at a low level of intelligence and education, foment dissensions among them, and even prevent ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... Stover called, loudly, as he came within speaking distance. "Here we come en massay, and with ladies, to further embarrass and degrade you in the hour ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... he answered lowly, As a youth should sneak a maid; "Like thyself, thy word is holy; Love is hate, if it degrade. ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... that I trembled. I knew well that the King, particular in courtesies, never forgot to call his servants by their titles save in two cases: when he indicated by the error, as once in Marshal Biron's affair, his intention to promote or degrade; or when he was moved to the depths of his nature and fell into an old habit. I did not dare to reply, but I listened ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... to commit no outrages; if slavery have not depraved him, it has done him little harm. If it be the normal tendency of bondage to produce saints like Uncle Tom, let us all offer ourselves at auction immediately. It is Cassy and Dred who are the normal protest of human nature against systems which degrade it. Accordingly, these poor, ignorant Maroons, who had seen their brothers and sisters flogged, burned, mutilated, hanged on iron hooks, broken on the wheel, and had been all the while solemnly assured that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... you. I write it with pain—your demand seems extremely selfish. I fear it is not of me but of yourself you are thinking, when you ask me to sever, at once and for ever, my connection with a people who, you say, can only degrade me. Yet how much happier am I, sharing their degradation, than you appear to be! Is it regard for me that induces the desire that I should share the life of constant dread that I cannot but feel you endure—or do you fear that my present connections will interfere with ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... incomplete observations and inductions are prejudicial enough to physical science, but when their effect is to degrade untruthfully our common humanity, there is an additional motive to regret them. A hurried visit to a tribe, whose language, traditions and customs are unknown, is sometimes deemed sufficient for "smart" remarks as to "ape characters," ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... inspiration for the Old and New Testaments containing most contradictory records of the same events, of miracles opposed to all known laws, of customs that degrade the female sex of all human and animal life, stated in most questionable language that could not be read in a promiscuous assembly, and call all this ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... adaptation (A.D. 1704), in no wise represent the eastern original. The best and latest, the Rev. Mr. Foster's, which is diffuse and verbose, and Mr. G. Moir Bussey's, which is a re- correction, abound in gallicisms of style and idiom; and one and all degrade a chef d'oeuvre of the highest anthropological and ethnographical interest and importance to a mere fairy book, a nice present ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... magnitude, naturally fitted to create horror, and that loudly call for punishment, that have yet no idea of turpitude annexed to them; but unclean hands, bribery, venality, and peculation are offences of turpitude, such as, in a governor, at once debase the person and degrade the government itself, making it not only horrible, but vile and contemptible in the eyes of all mankind. In this humiliation and abjectness of guilt, he comes here not as a criminal on his defence, but as a vast fertile genius who has made astonishing discoveries ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... a breathing-time, but a pause in the roar of the bloody tempest, let us improve it to remedy all wrongs at home; to educate our ignorant and neglected masses; to eradicate the vices that disgrace and degrade our nation; to build up the Church wherever it lies in ruins; to extend not so much Britain's empire as Christ's kingdom abroad, and so hasten forward the happy time when the Song of the Angels shall be echoed from every land, and the voices ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... a blaze. "Are you aware, papa, that you insult and degrade your daughter, by applying such a term to him? If you will not spare him, sir, spare me; for I assure you that I feel anything said against him with ten times more emotion than if ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... to entertain doubts about Columbus, and the sovereigns decided to send out Don Francisco del Bobadilla to investigate his conduct. This officer appears to have been needy, passionate, and ambitious. He acted as if he had been sent out to degrade the admiral, not to inquire into his conduct. He threw Columbus into irons, and seized his arms, gold, jewels, books, and most secret manuscripts. Columbus conducted himself with characteristic magnanimity, and bore all indignities in silence. Bobadilla ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest' was Mr. Badman's common rule in business. According to modern political economy, it is the cardinal principle of wholesome trade. In Bunyan's opinion it was knavery in disguise, and certain to degrade and demoralise everyone who acted upon it. Bunyan had evidently thought on the subject. Mr. Attentive is made ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... her. She stood up over her anchors like a piece of architecture, poising like a tower; the sailor in him paid tribute to the builders who had conceived her beauty. They had devised a ship: it needed Mr. Fant and his colleagues to degrade her into a sea-going prophet and give aptness to her by-name of "Hell-packet." He was clear of her now; he might fail to reach the shore and drown, but at least the grey woman aft would never see his humiliation and defeat. He turned over, setting his face to the waterside lights ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... than make one day's work a week for a working man; but Mr Vavasor had been appointed an assistant commissioner, and with every Lord Chancellor he argued that all Westminster Hall, and Lincoln's Inn to boot, had no right to call upon him to degrade himself by signing his name to accounts. In answer to every memorial he was offered the alternative of freedom with half his income; and ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... Street drawing-room; and thrifty Mrs. Hitchcock had not sufficiently readjusted herself to the new state to banish it to the floor above, where it belonged with some ugly, solid brass andirons. In the same way, faithful Mr. Hitchcock had seen no good reason why he should degrade the huge steel engraving of the Aurora, which hung prominently at the foot of the stairs, in spite of its light oak frame, which was in shocking contrast with the mahogany panels of the walls. Flanking the staircase were other engravings,—Landseer's stags and the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... managed in some unaccountable way to put upon this outlandish Eastern cult the stamp of Rome's nationality, that stamp which no nation ever successfully and permanently resisted; and thus the reception of the cult on the part of the state was not only a disgraceful thing, tending to degrade true religion and spread the contagion of Orientalism, but it also made those whose appetite had been aroused eager for other deities, whose cult would have the great additional charm of being unlicensed by the state, and hence savouring ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... supra p.5, we find the orthodox Moslem doctrine that "a single mortal is better in Allah's sight than a thousand Jinns." For, I repeat, Al-Islam systematically exalts human nature which Christianity takes infinite trouble to degrade and debase. The results of its ignoble teaching are only too evident in the East: the Christians of the so-called (and miscalled) "Holy Land" are a disgrace to the faith and the idiomatic Persian term for a Nazarene ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... veil of historic images and scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to announce; and Beatrice, in all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of the jargon and slang of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in which it is hard to say ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... himself in the infinite, and out of his efforts there arose the dreary doctrine that he was not related to the Earth, that she was but a temporary resting place for his scornful feet and that she held nothing for him but temptation to degrade himself. Interpreters and prophets of the infinite sprang into being, creating the "Great Beyond" and proclaiming Heaven and Hell, between which stood the poor, trembling human being, tormented by ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... in one of these. "Remember what you suffered during a seven-years' war with the satellites of George the Third (and I hope the last). Recollect the services rendered by your allies, now contending for liberty. Blush to think that America should degrade herself so much as to enter into any kind of treaty with a power, now tottering on the brink of ruin, whose principles are directly contrary to ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... Voltaire). "We have had Milord Baltimore and Algarotti here, who are going back to England. This Milord is a very sensible man (HOMME TRESSENSE); who possesses a great deal of knowledge, and thinks, like us, that sciences can be no disparagement to nobility, nor degrade an illustrious rank. I admired the genius of this ANGLAIS, as one does a fine face through a crape veil. He speaks French very ill, yet one likes to hear him speak it; and as for his English, he pronounces it so quick, there is no possibility ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... his fist heavily down upon the table, making it tremble and shake, "the tool does not degrade the man, it ennobles him. The tool is the regenerator of mankind. Christ handled a plane when he was ten ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... contentedly poor till the end of his days, not leaving enough wealth to pay his funeral expenses. He did not love bloodshed, even to gain liberty. He had objected to the conspiracy, since freedom was to be gained through murder. Yet this was the man who was to save Thebes and degrade her great enemy, Sparta. ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... woman who is possessed by a husband. If he has long adored her, and known himself to be preferred by her in innocency of heart; if he has solved the problem of being her bosom's lord, without basely seeking to degrade her to being his mistress; the epithets to characterise him in our vernacular will probably be all the less flattering. Politically we are the most self-conscious people upon earth, and socially the frankest animals. The terrorism of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... among women from intoxicating drinks! These degrade women and she degrades men. "Rise up ye women who are at ease in Zion!" The drinking places in the cities, especially in New York, by every device get women in their dens that ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... of Raphael and Domenichino, by what law of classification are we bound to assign them to belong to the great style in painting, and to degrade into an inferior class the Rake of Hogarth when he is the Madman in the Bedlam scene? I am sure he is far more impressive than either. It is a face which no one that has seen can easily forget. There is the stretch of human suffering to the ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... claret, and that you'll dine with any, provided you get a stalled ox to feed on? You call me a Cynic—why, what a monstrous Cynicism it is, which you and the rest of you men of the world admit! I'd rather live upon raw turnips and sleep in a hollow tree, or turn backwoodsman or savage, than degrade myself to this civilisation, and own that a French cook was the thing in life ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cruelty committed on the English side have been by Rangers not belonging to the regular army, and those only upon Indians or those degraded Canadians who go about with them, painted and disguised to resemble their dusky allies. For my part, I think that men who thus degrade themselves deserve ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... was thus making on the ground was the accepted symbol of the Christian faith. Still, the words occurred to her, "Rend your hearts, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God." Could the God of all love and mercy and gentleness be pleased by such an act? It might degrade her in her own sight; but could it make her heart more truly humble, more anxious to serve Him who said, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... schemes, and to compel us to fight at her side for foreign interests; from Austria, the hereditary foe of our house and of our independence, who is just now going to make another attempt to devour Bavaria, and degrade her to the position of an Austrian province. But the Emperor of the French, Bavaria's natural ally, hastened to the rescue with his brave warriors, in order to avenge you; your sons will soon fight at the side of ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... enemies. The employer is not your enemy, capital is not your enemy, but the saloonkeeper is,—and the most deadly enemy you can possibly have. In that fringe of shanties over yonder live the powers that keep you down; there are the foes that degrade you and your families, forcing you to live little better than wild beasts. Your food is poor, your clothing is in rags, your children are without shoes, your homes are desolate, there are no schools and no social life. Year follows year in dreary monotone, and you finally die, and ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... sense of shame was vivid; and she tried hard not to let her father see how deeply she loved the man who had gone from her to Miss Somerset. Besides, he had ordered her to fight against a love that now could only degrade her; he had ordered, and it was ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... retorted the old woman, "that can degrade Rameses in their sight. Ani, do you hear, need not write me a new license, but only renew the old one granted to me by Rameses when I cured his favorite horse. They burnt it with my other possessions, when they plundered my house, and denounced ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... which surrounded one whom custom regarded as little above a mountebank, and the illiberal law as a vagabond. The same degrading appreciation attached both to the actor in plays and to their author. The contemptuous appellation of "play-book," served as readily to degrade the mighty volume which contained Lear and Hamlet, as that of "play-actor," or "player-man," has always served with the illiberal or the fanatical to dishonor the persons of Roscius or of Garrick, of Talma or of Siddons. Nobody, indeed, was better ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... anthropomorphized, and is fitted out with a sheaf of legends which describe his earthly acts.[87] And so with Krishna. As the chief god, identified with the All-god, he is later made the object of encomiums which degrade while they are meant to exalt him. He becomes a cow-boy and acts like one, a god in a mask. But in the epic he is the invading tribe's chief god, in process of becoming identified with that god in the Brahmanic pantheon who most resembles him. For this tribe, the ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... sudden dismay. She was expected to do nothing less than exhibit herself for sale, put herself up at auction for the highest bidder, set out her charms as a bait. And when the bait drew, and the bidders offered, and the buyer awaited—what then? She would never, her pride alone would never let her, degrade herself to a position at the very thought of which she caught her breath with horror. Come what may, the man who purchased her must put the transaction into the form of marriage. True, she was already married, in the ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... there is not a line in them that I cannot guarantee on my credit as a man of business. You can look over them at your leisure, or not, as you please. I think you must know that I always had an independent spirit, and would be the last of mankind to degrade myself by any servile attempt to alter your line of conduct ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... lifts a people is within that people, so also the forces that degrade them. You cannot change public opinion by drifting with its current. You cannot present yourself in a slavish attitude and then demand a free man's portion. In that attitude you are neither feared nor loved, but tolerated. You ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Intelligence, how remote the creative conception is from all scholastic and ethical formulae, I am led to think that a healthy mind ought to change its mood from time to time, and come down from its noblest condition,—never, of course, to degrade itself by dwelling upon what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a chance to air and exercise themselves. After the first and second floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their holiday, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... of atheistic disregard for sin poison article after article, and infuse its bitter principle into many a young man's heart; and worse than this—adopted as it is by writers whom some consider to be mighty in intellect and leaders of opinion, I have seen it corrode the consciences and degrade the philosophy of far ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... am ashamed of myself; no, never will I degrade myself by making a trade of a profession. If I cannot live a gentleman, I will starve a gentleman. But I will dismiss this unpleasant subject, the particulars of which I can better relate to you than write. Suffice it to say that my ill-treatment does not prey ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... ground, the marching host, and the pillar of cloud and of fire. I look over upon the Niger, black with death to the white man, instinct with life to the children of Ham. There is the black man's home. Oh, how strange that you of the North see not how you degrade him when you keep him here! You will not let him vote; you will not let him rise to honors or social equality; you will not let him hold a pew in your churches. Send him away, then; tell him, begone. Be urgent, like the Egyptians: send him out of ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... suffering fellow-men, then indeed the evil may become a blessing in disguise. But if you lay the blame of your misfortunes to God alone, and believe that He inflicts His creatures with disease because He is angry with the world, you degrade the Lord into an angry, revengeful Being of human type, instead of the grand and supreme Adonai Echod whom ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... Elihu Burrit that "you may take a man and yoke him to your labor as you yoke the ox that worketh to live, and liveth to work; you may surround him with ignorance and cloud him over with artificial night. You may do this and all else that will degrade him as a man, without injuring his value as a slave; yet the idea that he was born to be free will survive it all. 'Tis allied to his hope of immortality—the ethereal part of his nature which oppression cannot ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... of Garrick in the character of Lusignan. He was a man saturnine, silent, and slow in his proceedings, and would never open the PORTE COCHERE to a hackney coach, indicating the wicket with his finger as the proper passage for all who came in that obscure vehicle, which was not permitted to degrade with its ticketed presence the dignity of Baliol's Lodging. I do not think this peculiarity would have met with his lady's approbation, any more than the occasional partiality of Lusignan, or, as mortals called ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... going on to-day; the deceptions into which everyone is driven who is unfortunate enough to have to seek relief, under the present disgraceful divorce laws, from a marriage that has failed. There are conditions which degrade and embitter and ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... to meet such exigencies as may arise; for I foresee that all the faithful servants of the late King who may refuse to defer to the authority of the Marquis d'Ancre, will have enough upon their hands. As for me," he pursued vehemently, "I would rather die than degrade myself by the slightest concession to this wretched, low-born Italian, who is the greatest rascal of all those concerned in the murder of the King." "Which," adds Rambure for himself, "he ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... North. He was a man of admirable parts, of general knowledge, of a versatile understanding fitted for every sort of business, of infinite wit and pleasantry, of a delightful temper, and with a mind most perfectly disinterested. But it would be only to degrade myself by a weak adulation, and not to honor the memory of a great man, to deny that he wanted something of the vigilance and spirit of command that the time required. Indeed, a darkness next to the fog of this awful day lowered over the whole region. For ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... sentiments here seem playing out in a sort of jubilee. Untied from set purposes and definite aims, the persons come forth with their hearts already tuned, and so have but to let off their redundant music. Envy, jealousy, avarice, revenge, all the passions that afflict and degrade society, they have left in the city behind them. And they have brought the intelligence and refinement of the Court without its vanities and vexations; so that the graces of art and the simplicities of nature meet together in joyous, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... result of this great expedition, the first attempt of the grasping and ambitious Romans, not so much to conquer Parthia, as to strike terror into the heart of her people, and to degrade them to the condition of obsequious dependants on the will and pleasure of the "world's lords." The expedition failed so utterly, not from any want of bravery on the part of the soldiers employed in it, nor from any absolute superiority of the Parthian over ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... being in his possession, and with the place in which it was deposited?—and who are these but his own messmates, or those in whom he most confided? After positive conviction, no punishment can be too severe for a crime that produces such mischief; but to degrade a man by corporal punishment, to ruin his character, and render him an object of abhorrence and contempt, in the absence of even bare presumptive evidence, was an act of cruelty and injustice, which could excite but one feeling; and, from that day, the man who would have gloried in dying for his ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... "traitor" is in any way applicable to those who refuse submission to a Tyrannical Usurpation, whether in Kansas or elsewhere, then must some new word, of deeper color, be invented, to designate those mad spirits who could endanger and degrade the Republic, while they betray all the cherished sentiments of the fathers and the spirit of the Constitution, in order to give new spread to Slavery. Let the Senator proceed. It will not be the first time in history, that a scaffold erected for punishment has become a pedestal of ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... rose from his seat by the fire and approached the window. "What a disgusting appearance he presents!" said he, gazing on the slowly-receding figure. "It angers me to see a man degrade himself by such ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... face to face; to denounce her before Olivo, Amalia, the Marchese, the Abbate, the servants, as nothing better than a lustful little whore. As if for practice, he recounted to himself in detail what he had just witnessed, delighting in the invention of incidents which would degrade her yet further. He would say that she had stood naked at the window; that she had permitted the unchaste caresses of her lover while the morning wind played upon ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... writers of the Bible, the commentators would cover him with contempt. (75) If it be blasphemy to assert that there are any errors in Scripture, what name shall we apply to those who foist into it their own fancies, who degrade the sacred writers till they seem to write confused nonsense, and who deny the plainest and most evident meanings? (76) What in the whole Bible can be plainer than the fact that Ezra and his companions, in the second ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... their Parliament lawfully meeting in open day, and their delegates from the whole realm declaring their grievances in language which would not disgrace the conquering race which has in vain endeavoured to degrade them. When I heard my father speak the other night, my heart glowed with emotion; my eyes were suffused with tears; I was proud to be his daughter; and I gloried in a race of forefathers who belonged to the oppressed and not to ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... was the very worst that Fate had in store for us—but die in the body! How infinitely worse that the soul should perish through the selfish sensuousness of cannibalism, which would degrade life itself below dissolution, even if preserved by ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... private interview with Ashton and told him, in language we will not repeat, for it was more energetic than select, that it was a shame for a man with his intelligence and refinement to so degrade himself, and then he added: "You are killing your wife, and if you do not desist from drinking it is very little ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... countries know little or nothing about simple amusements which are so popular in the United States, and acquire from their elders their knowledge of betting and taking part in games of chance, two evils which unquestionably have done much to degrade the ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... to the body, what sweetness is to the lark's song, what perfume is to the rose, that morality is to culture and character. Drunkenness and gluttony have not more power to blear the eye than immorality to degrade the soul. When Homer tells us that Ulysses escaped unharmed from the enchanted palace, but suffered injury from his unfaithfulness to a friend, the poet wishes us to know that it is easier to recover from the poison of Circe's cup ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... incessant broils of a corrupt court, from the courtesans that usurped the place of the wife, from the insolence and selfishness of men who scorned even the appearance of virtue and did not hesitate to degrade even their wives and sisters. She would disprove the biting sarcasm ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... people who are wildly, earnestly seeking for the truth, when they have it at home—some on their domestic hearth, and others next door waiting for them—it can only act as a decoy to a crowd of sensation-seekers, who yearn to see a ghost as they would go to a pantomime; and this can only weaken and degrade it, and distract attention from its possible true object—science. Used vulgarly, as we have all sometimes seen it used, after misleading and crazing a small portion of sensitive persons, it must fall to ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... Youth) I thought you had a better opinion of me, than to imagine I would so abjectly degrade myself as to consider my Father's Concurrence in any of my affairs, either of Consequence or concern to me. Tell me Augusta with sincerity; did you ever know me consult his inclinations or follow his Advice in the least trifling Particular since ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... that the controlling force in this country shall be a moral force?—that it shall conspire with the great idea of Liberty, and not degrade and destroy it? The theory of our institutions is our pride. But it is a pitiful truth that our public life has become synonymous with knavery. If a politician is introduced, you feel of your pockets. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... bill Mr. Wilson declared that he had "no desire to say harsh things of the South nor of the men who have been engaged in the Rebellion. I do not ask their property or their blood; I do not wish to disgrace or degrade them; but I do wish that they shall not be permitted to disgrace, degrade or oppress anybody else. I offer this bill as a measure of humanity, as a measure that the needs of that section of the country imperatively demand at our hands. I believe that if it should pass it will receive the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the conquests they have made by deeds of unparalleled bravery, and at the expense of so much blood and treasure, in a just war on our part, and one which, by the act of the enemy, we could not honorably have avoided, would be to degrade the nation in its own estimation and in that of the world. To retire to a line and simply hold and defend it would not terminate the war. On the contrary, it would encourage Mexico to persevere and tend to protract ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... suffer that a single one Of His own creatures, in His image made, Should die, and in irrevocable shade Lie evermore—neglected and undone. It is not thus a father treats his son, And those whose folly credits it, degrade God's love and fatherhood, that never fade, By lies as base as devils ever spun. Man's love is but a pale reflex of God's, And God is love, and never will condemn Beyond remission—though He school with rods— His children, but will one day comfort them. Dives will have his drink at last, and ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... where it eludes the research of all the senses; where the conditions of its existence are various and variously combined; where the effects of those which are present or absent bid defiance to calculation; let me all too, as a circumstance of great tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them. To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... in the world," said he,—"that is, in our country, that the one great difference is between gentlemen and ladies, and those who are not gentlemen or ladies. A lady does not degrade herself if she marry a gentleman, even though that gentleman's rank be less ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... protection the conspiracy was carried on. By this time the French and British detectives had usurped the powers and inverted the functions of the police organs;[10] and the French and {128} British agents, after fomenting those fatal differences which divide and degrade a people, had developed into directors of ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... too much! To be passed on to a girl who was learning Latin herself, and for her to score about my exercises! It was a conspiracy to degrade me in the eyes of myself and ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... little beyond such sense impressions, whereas the highly developed scientific conception of nature that obtains to-day is far beyond a mere collection of sense impressions. Nature, indeed, is subdued and mastered by man; why then degrade man to the level of a universe he has mastered? To produce from the phenomena of nature a scientific conception of nature demands the activity of an independent, originative power of thought, which, though it may be conditioned by, and must be related to, sense impressions, is ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... Elizabeth might regret his absence, as depriving her of the personal attentions of a powerful protector; but late events had so firmly established her as next heir to the crown, that she was now perfectly secure against the recurrence of any attempt to degrade her from her proper station; and her reconciliation with the queen, whether cordial or not, obtained for her occasional admission ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... hundred horses, and if all the horses of France and of Navarre could enter into one great solemn competition, it would be fine; but you buy animals as the managers of theatres trade in artists; you degrade an institution to a gambling game; you make a Bourse of legs, as you make a Bourse of stocks. It is unworthy. Don't you spend sixty thousand francs sometimes merely to read in the newspapers: 'Lelia, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... the idea must be resisted that women shall be educated for physicians by separate courses of study, i. e., separated from the male students,—a plan that Frau Mathilde Weber of Tuebingen has declared herself satisfied with.[147] If the purpose be to degrade the female physicians, from the start, to the level of physicians of second or third rank, and to lower them in the eyes of their male colleagues, then, indeed, that is the best method. If it is no violation of "ethics" and "morality" that female nurses assist ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... would have scorned to ask you to wed him. Now he would degrade the heiress of my wealth by seeking to ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... hackney-coach, the hired gig, or the taxed cart, cannot possibly be 'necessary' to the working-man on Sunday, for he has it not at other times. The sumptuous dinner and the rich wines, are 'necessaries' to a great man in his own mansion: but the pint of beer and the plate of meat, degrade the national ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... disguise, I am not what I seem. I do not need to blush for my birth—rather I may glory in it. If I dared to betray the secrecy imposed upon me, for reasons of state, I could prove to you that most illustrious blood runs in my veins. Whoever may love me, noble though she be, will not degrade herself. But I have already said too much—my lips are sealed. I shall never be other than the humblest, most devoted of your slaves; even though, by one of those strange coincidences that happen sometimes in real life, I should come to be recognised ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... integrity which is no stranger to the uncultivated bosom, and which is found in the lowest abodes in as great strength as in the halls of nobles and the palaces of kings. Mr. Dickens is also a satirist. He satirizes human life, but he does not satirize it to degrade it. He does not wish to pull down what is high into the neighborhood of what is low. He does not seek to represent all virtue as a hollow thing, in which no confidence can be placed. He satirizes only the selfish, and the hard-hearted, and the cruel. Our ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... more than shocked to see the Prince of the Republic so degrade himself, to see him exhibit the acme of the craze for devising unimaginably fantastic ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... the motive of his work. Again, there are pictures by men who, equipped with adequate technical skill, have caught the manner of a master, and mistaking the manner for the message it was simply intended to express, they degrade it into a mannerism and turn out a product which people do not distinguish from the authentic utterances of the master. The artist is a seer and prophet, the channel of divine influences: the individual painter, sculptor, writer, ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... effect of the bounty is not so much to raise the real value of corn, as to degrade the real value of silver; or to make an equal quantity of it exchange for a smaller quantity, not only of corn, but of all other home made commodities; for the money price of corn regulates that of all ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... a Mr. Sherwin I once knew," I said, forging in those words the first link in the long chain of deceit which was afterwards to fetter and degrade me—"a Mr. Sherwin who is now, as I have heard, living somewhere in the Hollyoake Square neighbourhood. He was a bachelor—I don't know whether my friend and your master are ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... Alexandria, from the time that the 150 fathers at Constantinople, in 381, had attempted to make Constantinople the second see, because it was Nova Roma, the see of St. Mark bore a grudge against the upstart which sought to degrade it. In spite of the unequalled renown of its two great patriarchs, St. Athanasius and St. Cyril, it was sinking. And now heresy, schism, and imperial favour seemed to have joined together to exhibit Acacius as not only the first ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... susceptible than practical men, seem to live a life of perpetual wrangle. The history of these petty feuds is not healthy intellectual food, it is at best amusing scandal. But these quarrels of authors do not degrade the authors in our eyes, they only show them to be, what we knew, as vain, irritable, and opinionative as other men. Ben Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Voltaire, Rousseau, belabour their enemies, and we see nothing incongruous ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... passions; which seek to aggrandize what excites admiration and to heap contempt on misery, to raise power into tyranny, and to make tyranny absolute; to thrust down that which is low still lower, and to make wretches desperate: to exalt magistrates into kings, kings into gods; to degrade subjects to the rank of slaves, and slaves to the condition of brutes. The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE; it is a noble ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... and fell, chanting out her words. The deadness of her singing seemed subtle mockery, as though she would not degrade true passion to the service of this sham, as though the words were enough for such a marriage, and the spirit scorned to sanction it. Elsa's eyes were on her now, and the Countess leaned forward, gazing at her. The last verse came, and Coralie, with a low bow and a smile, sang ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... illustrated by the following extract: "Perception, consciousness, cognition, we continue to be told, are qualities which cannot appertain to matter; there must hence be a thinking and an immaterial principle; and man must still be a compound being. Yet, why thus degrade matter, the plastic and prolific creature of the Deity, beyond what we are authorized to do? Why may it not perceive, why not think, why not become conscious? What eternal and necessary impediment prevents? or what self-contradiction and absurdity is hereby implied? ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... the sake of that coming Demos which she is to bring into the world; a Demos which, if we can only keep it healthy in body and brain, has before it so splendid a future: but which, if body and brain degrade beneath the influence of modern barbarism, is but too likely to follow the Demos of ancient Byzantium, or ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... impeaching any person before them; and he appears to have limited the right of intercession to their giving protection to private persons against the unjust decisions of magistrates, as, for instance, in the enlisting of soldiers. To degrade the Tribunate still lower, Sulla enacted that whoever had held this office forfeited thereby all right to become a candidate for any of the higher curule offices, in order that all persons of rank, talent, and wealth might ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... questions that are addressed to mankind. There are for every man two ways of doing work, of reading a book, of loving a woman. He who keeps his spiritual life pure and high finds that in all these things there is a noble path. He who yields to his lower self will prostitute and degrade them all, and the tragedy that leads on to the mad scene at the close, where the cries of Margaret have no parallel in literature except those of Lady Macbeth, is the inevitable result of choosing the pagan and refusing the ideal. The Blocksberg is ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... said that (1) there must be some one authority in a household and that this should be the man; (2) woman will neglect the home if she is left free to enter politics or a profession; (3) politics will degrade her; (4) when independent and self-asserting she will lose her influence over man; and (5) most women do not want to vote or ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... It is not death that matters, but the fear of death. It is not killing and dying that degrade us, but base living, and accepting the wages and profits of degradation. Better ten dead men than one live slave or his master. Men shall yet rise up, father against son and brother against brother, and kill one another for the great Catholic ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... to differ from the author. Thus the voice of morality is confounded with that of tyrannical petulance and self-love. Not only is Scott not personal, but we cannot conceive his being so. We cannot think it possible that he should degrade his art by the indulgence of egotism, or crotchets, or petty piques. Least of all can we think it possible that his high and gallant nature should use art as a cover ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... been shown in preceding chapters. The point to be appreciated is that in this matter we are not dealing with the immigration of individual paupers and cheap workingmen, but with the influx of whole classes that threaten to degrade our material civilization. There are in America entire communities which live on a different plane, and form colonies as foreign to American ideas and life as anything in Europe can show. They have organized their own social life and fixed their own standards, instead of rising to ours. ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... after the establishment of a public library, depends, in a great degree, upon the selection of books for its shelves. Two dangers are to be avoided. The first, and greatest, is the selection of books calculated to degrade the morals or intellect of the reader. This danger is apparent, and to be shunned needs but to be seen. Books, of more or less intrinsic value, are so abundant and cheap, that common men must go out of their way to gather a large collection that shall not contain works of real merit. But the ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... qualities I don't like about you are the surface qualities that have been plated on in these surroundings. And if I thought it was anything but just you that I was marrying, I'd lose no time about leaving you. I'd not let myself degrade myself." ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... "Frequent reproaching the [132] Animadverter with the Character of a Wit, tho join'd with such ill-favour'd Epithets, as his witless Malice has thought fit to degrade it with, as that he is a spiteful Wit, a wrangling Wit, a satirical Wit, and the WITTY, subtle, good-natur'd Animadverter, &c. the Dr. says, that tho there be but little Wit shewn in making such Charges; yet if Wit be a Reproach ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... Professor Noria is passionately fond of studying heraldry, has all kinds of chivalrous and courtly ceremonials, from the days of King Nimrod down to the present, at his fingers' ends, but has always been too proud to degrade his knowledge by selling it for filthy lucre. Being an enthusiast in the cause of equality and freedom he came to Freeland, where for a few hours at morn and eve he works at gardening, and thereby comfortably supports himself and his wife—children they have none; but through the day he labours ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... has been moreover a tendency on the part of some to associate themselves with a political party, and to claim for the Church the office of judge and arbitrator in industrial strife. But surely it is one thing to degrade the Church to the level of a secular society, and another, by witness and by effort, to make the law of Christ dominant over all the relationships of life. Men are impatiently asking, 'Has the Church no message to the new demands of the age? Are Christians to stand apart from the ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... fostering of Loyal Leagues, the abrogation of our civil laws, the habitual violation of our national Constitution, and a persistent prostitution of all government, all resources and all powers, to degrade the white man by ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... self-regard as the motive of our best action," she went on, giving out her words in short sentences, "so there must be a self-regard which is good—too good to degrade itself to worldly ends; too good even to be a part of that amalgam—the gold of unselfishness and the alloy of selfishness—which makes the ordinary motive of ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... woman charming as a woman. In this, I think, the world is harder to women than to men; that a woman often loses much by the chance of adverse circumstances which a man only loses by his own misconduct. That there are women whom no calamity can degrade is true enough and so it is true that there are some men who are heroes; but such are exceptions both among men and women. Not such a one had Mrs Askerton been. Calamity had come upon her partly, indeed, by her own fault, though that might have been pardoned but the ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... Arthur,' I replied, speedily drying my tears; and starting up, I threw myself on my knees before him, and clasping his nerveless hand between my own, continued: 'Don't you know that you are a part of myself? And do you think you can injure and degrade yourself, and I ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... would you part from her?"—"Does not her conduct justify me in so doing?"—"I do not know; but is this the time to think of such a thing, when the eyes of all France are fixed upon you? These domestic squabbles will degrade you in the eyes of the people, who expect you to be wholly devoted to their interests; and you will be laughed at, like one of Moliere's husbands, if you are displeased with your wife's conduct you can call her to account when you have nothing better to do. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... easier to conceive," says Count Gamba, "than to relate the various means employed to engage him in one faction or the other: letters, messengers, intrigues, and recriminations,—nay, each faction had its agents exerting every art to degrade its opponent." He then adds a circumstance strongly illustrative of a peculiar feature in the noble poet's character:—"He occupied himself in discovering the truth, hidden as it was under these intrigues, and amused himself ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... to the contrary, they will become a little more intelligent; this excites a peculiar jealousy and hatred in the white population, of which it is impossible to enumerate all the hardships. Even in the laws, slaves are always mentioned before free people of color; so desirous are they to degrade the latter class below the level of the former. To complete the wrong, this unhappy class are despised in consequence of the very evils we ourselves have induced—for as slavery inevitably makes its victims servile and vicious, and as none ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... to-day—London, Paris, New York, Chicago. There was the same over-crowding of population, the same intense commercial activity, the same almost insane thirst for amusement and excitement, the same degeneracy of moral fibre. The sins that sapped the life of Ephesus are the same that degrade contemporary life. In some ways Ephesus was, possibly, more frankly corrupt; but on the other hand it had no daily press to advertise and promote sin and social corruption. There is more of Christianity and of Christian influence in the modern city, but even here there is a ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... Charlton, lifting up his pale face, twitching with nervousness, "I don't want to get free by playing tricks on a court of law. I know that fifteen or twenty years in prison would not leave me much worth living for, but I will not degrade myself by evading justice with delays and false affidavits. If you can do anything for me fairly and squarely, I should like to ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... threw a sombre shade over every object that presented itself. Having early imbibed the vulgar prejudice that one Englishman was a match for four Frenchmen, he thought it would be doing his country a service to prove the position. How far it is either useful or politic to depreciate the power, or degrade the character of that people with whom we are to contend, is a question which does not come within the plan of this work. In some cases it may create confidence, but in others lead to the indulgence of that negligent security by which armies have been slaughtered, provinces ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... which he exalts, and serenely dwelling in a glorious existence with the images born of his imagination,—in looking round for some such man, my thoughts rested upon you. Afar from our turbulent cabals; from the ignoble jealousy and the sordid strife which degrade and acerbate the ambition of Genius,—in your Roman Home, you have lived amidst all that is loveliest and least perishable in the past, and contributed with the noblest aims, and in the purest spirit, to the mighty heirlooms of the future. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... instance, is made unlawful; also why the government had the right to make lotteries unlawful; also why some states (for instance New York) have passed laws making book-making at race tracks unlawful. For all of these things degrade and do not upbuild mankind. It is for every one then, to apply this principle to the town, village or city in which he lives, and determine just what stand he will take as to endorsing and protecting ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... "They degrade the nature they have touched. Their squat little town is a caricature like themselves. Everything they touch they belittle. Here they sit while side-walks rot and teams mire in ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... "An honest fear is sometimes expressed 'that women would degrade politics, and politics would degrade women,'" and the writers answer: "As the influence of woman has been uniformly elevating in new civilizations, in missionary work in heathen lands, in schools, colleges, ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... a brig for trespassers; a bar by our main-mast, at which they are arraigned; a cat-o'-nine-tails and a gangway, to degrade them in their own eyes and in ours. These are not always employed to convert Sin to Virtue, but to divide them, and protect Virtue and legalised Sin from ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... they have obtained a following only for a time and their precepts have fallen into neglect. It has been well said that no race of men live up to their religion, however imperfect it may be. They first disregard it, and then at length degrade it, to suit their ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... in my mood; We have so many petty talents, clever To mimic Nature's surface. I name not The servile copyists of the greater masters, Or of th' archangels, Raphael and Michael; But such as paint our cheap and daily marvels. Sometimes I fear lest they degrade our art To a nice craft for plodding artisans— Mere realism, which they mistake for truth. My soul rejects such limits. The true artist Gives Nature's best effects with far less means. Plain black and white suffice him to ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... talked to that young girl, that gypsy singer, was absolutely unjust. She's as pure as your own mother. My relations with her are simply friendly ones. Possibly there is a ray of poetry in them, but that could hardly degrade her. However, what ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... Central and South America. The letter also foreshadows the decisive conflict which is here to be waged between the elements of freedom and slavery, between social and political systems that will rescue and exalt humanity, and those which depress and degrade it. In the phraseology of that age, it was to be determined whether—the Old World, in the language of Twiss, "being almost at an end"—a "light" should be "set up" here to usher in the "kingdom ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... polygamy are crimes by the laws of all civilized and Christian countries. They are crimes by the laws of the United States, and they are crimes by the laws of Idaho. They tend to destroy the purity of the marriage relation, to disturb the peace of families, to degrade woman and to debase man. Few crimes are more pernicious to the best interests of society and receive more general or more deserved punishment. To extend exemption from punishment for such crimes would be to shock the moral judgment of the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... of the author'? Leave that to some neutral writer, who neither loves nor hates. And whilst crowds of men need better biographical records whom it is easy to love and not difficult to honour, do not you degrade your own heart or disgust your readers by selecting for your exemplification not a model to be imitated, but a wild beast to be baited or a criminal to be tortured? We privately hate Mr. Thomas Hobbes, of Malmsbury; we know much evil of him, and we could expose ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... degrade myself, Mrs. Bingham, by any expostulations with her. I would have nothing more to do with her. Could you not relieve her of the unfinished gown? Mrs. Swanley, I am sure, under the circumstances would be only too happy to ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... centre-point and its loftiest conception of the divine nature in the thought of His absolute righteousness made strong, if it made somewhat stern, men. And now we see renderings of the truth that God is love which degrade the lofty, noble, sovereign conception of the righteous God that loveth, into mere Indulgence on the throne of the universe. And what is the consequence? All the stern teachings of Scripture men recoil from, and try to explain away. The ill desert ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... work—that is ready to support a serious attempt at playwriting. I claim that a play may do something more than amuse—it may interest. There is a wide difference, you will see. To be an amusement merely is to degrade our stage to the level of a Punch-and-Judy show. I am sorry for tired men and weary women, but as a dramatist I can't afford to take their troubles into account. I am writing for those who are mentally alert and willing to support plays that have at least the dignity of intention which lies ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... vain, Proud of my fate, exulting in my pain, Tho' on thy hills the plenteous Herd should feed, And rich Pactolus roll along thy mead; For thee tho' Science ope the varied store, And Beauty on thy form its graces pour, Ere long shalt thou, while wrongs like these degrade, Droop with my woes, and with my rage upbraid; See on a Rival's brow thy garlands worn, And, with her falsehood, bear ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... despise them. The Seymours have the voice of the king in their favor; the Howards the voice of the whole country, and that is of more consequence. The king can exalt the Seymours, for they stand far beneath him. He cannot exalt the Howards, for they are his equals. Nor can he degrade them. Catharine died on the scaffold—the king became thereby only a hangman—our escutcheon was not ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... claimed his descent was sunk into mean circumstances, and transplanted into a remote province. It is difficult to form a just idea of his true character. Under the philosophic cloak of austerity, he stands accused of concealing most of the vices which degrade human nature. [17] But his accusers are those venal writers who adored the fortune of Severus, and trampled on the ashes of an unsuccessful rival. Virtue, or the appearances of virtue, recommended Albinus to the confidence and good opinion ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... who are going back to England. This Milord is a very sensible man (HOMME TRESSENSE); who possesses a great deal of knowledge, and thinks, like us, that sciences can be no disparagement to nobility, nor degrade an illustrious rank. I admired the genius of this ANGLAIS, as one does a fine face through a crape veil. He speaks French very ill, yet one likes to hear him speak it; and as for his English, he pronounces it so quick, there is no possibility of following him. He calls a Russian ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... together, whirling and capering about in an apartment fifteen feet square, which hardly gave them room to pass one another. Benson was the only person who entered his protest against the proceeding. He declared it was a shame that his countrywomen should degrade themselves so before foreigners; but his expostulations were only laughed at: nor could he even persuade his wife and sister-in-law to quit the place, though he stalked off himself in high dudgeon, and wrote a letter to the Episcopal ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... settlers, having more hard work to do than before, very frequently become slatterns; but the ladies, accustomed to a refined neatness, feel that they cannot degrade themselves by its absence, and struggle under every disadvantage to keep up the ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... because I shut my eyes. Now I have had enough of it. We do not die through the treacheries of a woman of your sort. When they become too monstrous we get out of the way. To inflict punishment on account of them would be only to degrade oneself." ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... and the helpless, protection of the helpless against the strong—if you forget the whole of that, and act as a brute even would not act, in cruelty and wickedness to men and animals alike, you will degrade the body you are trying to preserve, you will paralyse the body you are trying to save from disease, and you will go back into the savagery which is the nemesis of cruelty, and ruin these nobler bodies, the ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... silent energy of the Divine purpose presses his fortunes onward with a motion slow and inevitable as that of a glacier. The steadfast flow circles unchecked round, or rises victorious over all hindrances. Efforts to ruin, to degrade, to kill—one and all fail. Terror and hate, suspicion and jealousy, only bring him nearer the goal. A clause which comes in thrice in the course of one chapter, expresses this fated advance. In the first stage of his court life, we read, "David prospered" (1 ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... exigencies as may arise; for I foresee that all the faithful servants of the late King who may refuse to defer to the authority of the Marquis d'Ancre, will have enough upon their hands. As for me," he pursued vehemently, "I would rather die than degrade myself by the slightest concession to this wretched, low-born Italian, who is the greatest rascal of all those concerned in the murder of the King." "Which," adds Rambure for himself, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... has been rapidly on the increase of late years, and its tendency has been to lower and degrade the character of public men. Consciences have become more elastic. There is now one opinion for the chamber, and another for the platform. Prejudices are pandered to in public, which in private are despised. Pretended ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... cruel men, why did you stop in your frenzy of murder? It would have been better to drink that last drop of royal blood, than to mingle it with gall and venom and poison; it would have been better to smother the child, as was done by the emissaries of Richard III. in the Tower of London, than to degrade and sully his intellect by that slow method of assassination which killed the mind before it slew the body. He should have been struck a year or two before; his little feet should have been aided to mount the rude steps of the guillotine! Ah, ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... the deed. He had drawn his knife to stab his mother-in-law, she quickly placed her arms over her breast and chest and received the wounds, two strokes, in them, and thus saved her life. It was determined, as her life was saved, though the wounds were ghastly, to degrade the man in a public assemblage of all the Indians, the next day, by investing him with a petticoat, for so unmanly an act. The thing was, accordingly, done with great ceremony. The man then sneaked away ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... wrong" Than steely pride are yet more strong; That shame can strike a blow At comradeship more fatal far Than any chance of fateful war When faction howled with Cerberus throat, When falsehood struck a felon stroke, When forgery did its worst To pull its hated quarry down, To dim, disarm, degrade, discrown. Against the array accurst That ancient chief made gallant head, Dismayed not, nor disquieted At rancour's rude assault. He shared opprobrium undeserved, But not for that had courage swerved, Or loyalty made default. But now? The hand that reared hath razed; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... was to beg her pardon, confess himself to have done wrong, and allow her to return in triumph! That was the light in which he regarded his own position; but he promised to himself that let his own misery be what it might he would never so degrade him. The only person who had been true to him was Bozzle. Let them all look to it. If there were any further intercourse between his wife and Colonel Osborne, he would take the matter into open court, and put her away ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... past life. All that is dark, threatening, secret, and revengeful slips from me under her eye, and I dream of what is pure, true, satisfying, and ennobling. And this by the influence of her smile, rather than of her words. Have I been given an angel to degrade? Or am I so blind as to behold a saint where others (Felix, let us say) would see only a pretty woman ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... shows us a great ideal of goodness to which we ought to aspire, and discourages us by the very loftiness of the standard. It tells us in the same breath that we are sinners, and that we ought to be angels. It seems at the same time to elevate and degrade us. It elevates us by giving a great object to life, and making it serious and earnest; but it degrades us by making us constantly ashamed of ourselves, and keeping us in a perpetual state of humiliation. Now, one of the chief peculiarities of the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... to degrade me, pulled down my canopy of state, and since then my keeper has come to offer to write to their queen, saying this deed was not done by his order, but by the advice of some of the Council. I have shown them instead of my arms on the said canopy ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... chiefly for the approval of the God within. Right ideals must be provided: religion is "a continually advancing endeavour," and its reward must not be a material reward. We ought to lift and strengthen human nature, but we degrade and weaken it when we seek to lead it to good conduct by a bait, even if this bait beckons to a future world. The consciousness of having lived worthily should be our highest reward. Froebel goes so far ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... respectably on common topics, makes a man a critic among critics, or enables him to judge of literary merit. And if, by virtue of these qualifications alone, a man will become a grammarian or a connoisseur, he can hold the rank only by courtesy—a courtesy which is content to degrade the character, that his inferior pretensions may be accepted ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the two poor beings who were dependent on him and who suffered like himself. He became familiar with 'viae dolorosae' painted at reduced prices, with male and female saints at so much per gross, even with 'pounced' shop blinds—in short, all the ignoble jobs that degrade painting and make it so much idiotic delineation, lacking even the charm of naivete. He even suffered the humiliation of having portraits at five-and-twenty francs a-piece refused, because he failed to produce a likeness; and he reached the lowest ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... right or desire to interfere in the internal affairs of another country, and desiring that the most amicable relations between England and Russia should be preserved, feels it a duty to express its opinion that the laws of Russia relating to Jews tend to degrade them in the eyes of the Christian population, and expose Russian Jewish subjects to the ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... beast of burden, man, her companion, must continue barbarous—Not a tyrant, for terrible as are the evils of irresponsible authority, with whomsoever it may be vested, in her hands it becomes the most tremendous instrument that Providence in its indignation can employ to crush, degrade, and utterly to paralyze the nations within its reach. The former position will readily be conceded; and the history of Rome under the Emperors, or of France during the last century, affords but too striking an exemplification of the second. It is, then, of the last importance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... 3000 men, which I refused, preferring to trust myself to French honour. I have not had reason to complain of that confidence from Fontainbleau to Avignon; but between that town and this, I have been insulted, and have been in great danger. The Provencals degrade themselves. Since I have been in France, I have not had a good regiment of Provencals under my orders. They are good for nothing but to make a noise. The Gascons are boasters, but at least they are brave."—At these words, one of the party, who no ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... performance. Their places were taken by a number of courtiers and the ladies, if I can so describe them of the royal household, but for obvious reasons I will not describe the style of their dancing. It was barbarism run mad, and our chief feeling was disgust that human beings should so degrade themselves. ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... it without shame, for it is mine already—like the shirt upon your back; and I choose to stay until these gentlemen shall understand me better. Already they must spy the cloven hoof, since with all your pretended eagerness for the family honour, you take a pleasure to degrade ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the Ghibelline propaganda, designed, under the veil of historic images and scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous to announce; and Beatrice, in all her glory and sweetness, is but a specimen of the jargon and slang of Ghibelline freemasonry. When Italians write thus, they degrade the greatest name of their country to a depth of laborious imbecility, to which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... without doing good in our generation, but still in a way unnatural to our race and status. At first I thought I would let my daughter grow up in a state of complete ignorance, that she should be Nature's child. But as time went on, I saw the folly and the wickedness of my plan. I had no right to degrade her to the level of the savages around me, for if the fruit of the tree of knowledge is a bitter fruit, still it teaches good from evil. So I educated her as well as I was able, till in the end I knew that in mind, as in body, she was in no way inferior to her sisters, the children ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... that he was "very French, too French, even"; but he certainly was not "too English" to see and cleave to the main fact, the radical and central truth, of personal or national character, of typical history or tradition, without seeking to embellish, to degrade, in either or in any way to falsify it. From king to king, from cardinal to cardinal, from the earliest in date of subject to the latest of his histories, we find the same thread running, the same link of honourable and righteous judgment, of equitable ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... public opinion of Europe, and that they pushed on their claims by means which appealed with overpowering force to the dominant motive of orientals—fear. But their action was based on another consideration. Relying on Mr. Gladstone's well-known love of peace, they sought to degrade the British Government in the eyes of the Asiatic peoples. In some measure they succeeded. The prestige of Britain thenceforth paled before that of the Czar; and the ease and decisiveness of the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... earliest known mention of disputed words is a task capable of being finished, and might perhaps be attended, in many cases, with happy results. It would rid us probably of many puerilities which degrade our current dictionaries. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... splendors of the Spanish people there was left them but one thing of which they could be proud—their ancient name. De Lara, who belonged to one of the noblest and most distinguished families of the Iberian Peninsula, would never consent to degrade his line by allying his only daughter to a nobody, however worthy in other respects the ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... noisy and self-respecting, the proper remedy for which is a system of "Jim Crow Cars." Thus with the passing away of the Negro's right to vote, begins the reappearance of the odious system of Black Laws which are designed to degrade the womanhood and manhood of the Negro race. The whole trend of southern legislation is to fix what has been termed the "proper status of the Negro—subordination to the superior race." Not a single line has been written upon the statute books of a single southern state within the last decade in ...
— The Disfranchisement of the Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6 • John L. Love
... You shall not degrade yourself like this!" cried the admiral; and Miss Jerrold caught her ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... the above counties, I may safely say, I was flogged up; for where I should have received moral, mental, and religious instruction, I received stripes without number, the object of which was to degrade and keep me in subordination. I can truly say, that I drank deeply of the bitter cup of suffering and woe. I have been dragged down to the lowest depths of human degradation and wretchedness, ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... system of myths. The Poema del Cid, written in the latter half of the 12th century, has scarcely any trace of a historical character. Already the Cid had reached his apotheosis, and Castilian loyalty could not consent to degrade him when ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... his attitude remained exactly what it had been in 1909, when at the Manchester Martyr celebration he had appealed to his audience never to degrade themselves by entering the British Army, telling them that if ever they wished to fight they ought to wait for the prospect of ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... and uses the word "degeneration" in the same sense as Buffon used it many years earlier, that is to say, as "descent with modification," without any reference to whether the offspring was, as Buffon says, "perfectionne ou degrade." He cannot claim, any more than Goethe, to rank as a principal figure ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... girl who respects herself too much to permit him to tell her questionable stories, so will he reverence the wife who refuses to allow him to degrade himself in her presence either by speech or conduct. Love would not so often fail if wives knew the secret of retaining it, and that is not by sacrifice of principle, nor by tearful reproaches and upbraidings, but by being true to the highest impulses, and while having the good common ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... Alfred!" she began, gently. "I cannot consent, in justice to you, to shelter myself behind your name. It is the name of your family; and they have a right to expect that you will not degrade it—" ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... York, Chicago. There was the same over-crowding of population, the same intense commercial activity, the same almost insane thirst for amusement and excitement, the same degeneracy of moral fibre. The sins that sapped the life of Ephesus are the same that degrade contemporary life. In some ways Ephesus was, possibly, more frankly corrupt; but on the other hand it had no daily press to advertise and promote sin and social corruption. There is more of Christianity and of Christian influence in the modern city, but even here there is a curious ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... many delicate compliments may be paid to those we love or revere, by polite attentions to them, and so necessary, indeed, have these become to our notion of a satisfactory repast, that to banish such amiable usages from our tables would be not only to degrade us to the level of the brute, but would deprive us of a most humanising and refining means of enjoyment. How beautiful and necessary, then, is the arrangement by which, morning, noon, and night, (I pity folks who only eat twice a day,) the members of the household are brought together ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... the ocean;" and threatened to dash her skull against the first rock in her path, if they attempted to carry her further. The stanch refusal embarrassed her Mahometan conductor, inasmuch as his country's law forbade him to use extraordinary compulsion, or degrade the maiden ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... a picture of one whom vagrancy assuredly did not degrade:—"I had not the least care for the future, and I awaited the answer [as to the return of Madame de Warens to Savoy], lying out in the open air, sleeping stretched out on the ground or on some wooden bench, as tranquilly as on a bed of roses. I remember passing one delicious night outside ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... with each flatter'd face, Abused his art, till Nature, with a blush, Saw cits grow centaurs underneath his brush? Or should some limner join, for show or sale, A maid of honour to a mermaid's tail? Or low Dubost (as once the world has seen) Degrade God's creatures in his graphic spleen? Not all that forced politeness, which defends Fools in their faults, could gag his grinning friends. Believe me, Moschus, like that picture seems The book, which, sillier than a sick man's dreams, Displays ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... all, none ought to know so well as my countrymen, or to vindicate myself against suspicions which, if without foundation, they ought not to entertain. I cannot, therefore, humiliate myself, or degrade my friends, so far as, at this time of day, and under the circumstances in which I am placed, to furnish you or any other with a confession of my political faith, to be read either in the Richmond church or elsewhere, to the end that I may propitiate its tutelary deity or his ministering ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... on this valuable product spoke truly when he remarked: "All the American travellers have written such panegyricks, that I should degrade this royal liquor if I should offer any; yet several of these curious travellers and physicians do agree in this, that the cocoa has a wonderful faculty of quenching thirst, allaying hectick heats, of nourishing ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... forbid you to speak in that tone! There are bounds even to confession. If you think well to degrade yourself by such allusions, do not degrade me by forcing me to listen to you. This is a subject too sacred to be discussed in its mercenary bearings; settle that question with yourself as you will, but let me hear no more ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... president.... Don't you vote for any human being but Mrs. Stanton.... When the division was made 22 years ago it was because our platform was too broad, because Mrs. Stanton was too radical.... And now ... if Mrs. Stanton shall be deposed ... you virtually degrade her.... I want our platform to be kept broad enough for the infidel, the atheist, the Mohammedan, or the Christian.... These are the broad principles I want ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... prey. Loud voices sang lusty English choruses and French chansonnettes, and Neapolitan songs tried to assert themselves whenever the uproar ceased for a moment. Every one talked his, or her, own tongue, and gesture filled in the gaps when words were wanting. All seemed determined to degrade themselves as much as possible, and nearly every one seemed ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... motive of his work. Again, there are pictures by men who, equipped with adequate technical skill, have caught the manner of a master, and mistaking the manner for the message it was simply intended to express, they degrade it into a mannerism and turn out a product which people do not distinguish from the authentic utterances of the master. The artist is a seer and prophet, the channel of divine influences: the individual painter, sculptor, writer, is a ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... whose protection the conspiracy was carried on. By this time the French and British detectives had usurped the powers and inverted the functions of the police organs;[10] and the French and {128} British agents, after fomenting those fatal differences which divide and degrade a people, had developed into directors of plots ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... you make me seem so hard, my child? There is really no need to talk of these things. They will not occur. How can I have any desire to degrade you since I must degrade myself at the same time? I have no wish to tell any one the secret which belongs only to you and me. In that matter you were not to blame either. It was all my doing. I was sweltering under the shameful law which tied me to a dead body, and I tried to attach you to ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... illustration of the axiom which has so often been laid down,—that, of all the means that ever were devised to degrade religion in the persons of its teachers, the compulsory celibacy of the clergy is the most effectual. In Hernskrietchen and Auffenberg, it is very true, that no such lamentable results have followed; but what then? At the former place a most ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... be tempted into controversial paths now, for my purpose is a very different one, but I cannot help just a word about the former of these two answers. 'Given in baptism,' say our friends, and I venture to think that they thereby degrade Christianity into a system of magic, bringing together two entirely disparate things, an external physical act and a spiritual change. I do not say anything about the disastrous effects that have followed from such a conception of the medium by which this greatest of all Christian gifts ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... Cathedral, were summarily garroted, along with the renegade Spanish officer who had participated in the mutiny. No record of any trial of these priests has ever been brought to light. The Archbishop, himself a secular [5] clergyman, stoutly refused to degrade them from their holy office, and they wore their sacerdotal robes at the execution, which was conducted in a hurried, fearful manner. At the same time a number of young Manilans who had taken conspicuous part in the "liberal" demonstrations ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... chance is left you. I have killed some salmon and plenty of sea trout, though after much apparently hopeless toil, against all the rules as to sun, wind, and cloud. I was recalling examples when the rod was made to quiver again, and this time it was a sea trout of over 1 1/2 lb. I would not degrade D. by allowing him to interfere, but walked back and hauled the fish up a sandy spit, extracted the hook, and weighed him myself, as I generally do. In the next quarter of an hour I got three sea trout of the smaller size, and weighed them en bloc, tied together, at 5 lb. the ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... make you "all the world to me", provided only that I am not false to my ideal. You must know from what I have written before that I can love, that I do know what love is, and that you may trust me. I am not trying to degrade passion—I simply see how passion throws the burden on the woman, and therefore it is utterly a crime with us—the least thought of it! I ought to consider you as a school-girl, really just that; and instead of that I ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... talk after her; gossip is liable to degenerate into evil speaking and then I think it tends to degrade and belittle the mind to dwell on the defects and imperfections of our neighbors. Learn to dwell on the things that are just and true and of good report, but I am ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... peace. Pitt afterwards assured the House of Commons that Maret had not made the smallest communication to Ministers.[189] Evidently they looked on him as an unofficial emissary, to which level Chauvelin had persistently endeavoured to degrade him. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... absence of Cambyses, to act as an autonomous sovereign, displayed little zeal in accommodating himself to the new order of things. There was so much uncertainty as to the leanings of the Persian guard of Orcetes, that Darius did not venture to degrade the satrap officially, but despatched Bagseus to Sardes with precise instructions, which enabled him to accomplish his mission by degrees, so as not to risk a Lydian revolt. His first act was to ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... propriety be said to have reached almost the last stage of national humiliation. There is scarcely anything that can wound the pride, or degrade the character of an independent people which we do not experience. Are there engagements, to the performance of which we are held by every tie respectable among men? These are the subjects of constant and unblushing violation. Do we owe debts ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... matters of course, and, as such, unworthy of notice, it can hardly be wondered at if they were galling to men accustomed only to the simpler manners of a provincial town; and who, proud of their new position and deeply impressed with its importance, fancied they saw in them a settled intention to degrade both them and their constituents by thus stamping them with a badge of ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... get little beyond such sense impressions, whereas the highly developed scientific conception of nature that obtains to-day is far beyond a mere collection of sense impressions. Nature, indeed, is subdued and mastered by man; why then degrade man to the level of a universe he has mastered? To produce from the phenomena of nature a scientific conception of nature demands the activity of an independent, originative power of thought, which, though it may be ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... tone of voice which would be appropriate if this was a new book not bound in leather. Read it for pleasure as one would read a literary masterpiece—not because opinion might frown on you if you had not read the classic. Does someone object that that would be to degrade the Bible to the level of secular writings? You cannot degrade a literature; it makes its own level and our labels do not affect it. Certain it is that a pious tone of voice will not protect the Bible from the secular level. ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... more right than anyone else, except in an emergency of danger to himself or others," replied Sergeant Brimmer. "But there's this difference: I've been in the Army fourteen years, and I never knew an officer to degrade himself in that fashion. But occasionally a non-commissioned officer will so disgrace himself. Either the officer or non-commissioned officer who swears at or strikes an enlisted man may be court-martialed, and, ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... and a good deal more. He is quite an ogre, and lives in a miserable hovel. How Katherine can degrade herself by grovelling there with him for the sake of what she can get ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... destroyed by a harsh discord. For some time he bore his misery in silence and with resignation, but at last the situation became unendurable; his mistress's fiery kisses seemed to mock him, and the pleasure which she gave him to degrade him, so at last he summoned up courage, and in his open way, he came straight to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... eyes monarchy compelled to degrade itself, and to inflict its death-wound with its own hand; he saw the throne that base courtiers had dragged through the mire defiled by the grip of parricidal hands, and buried, fathoms deep, beneath ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... presence and under the influence of these effective natural objects, and linked to them by many associations. The close connexion of man with natural objects, the habitual association of his thoughts and feelings with a particular spot of earth, has sometimes seemed to [49] degrade those who are subject to its influence, as if it did but reinforce that physical connexion of our nature with the actual lime and clay of the soil, which is always drawing us nearer to our end. But for Wordsworth, these influences tended to the dignity of human nature, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... "Yes,—misfortune can degrade, and poverty. A man is degraded when the cares of the world press so heavily upon him that he cannot rouse himself. They have come to look at me as though I ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... foot; slung on a pole put through between the hands and feet, carried and laid down before the parties they have injured, like a pig about to be killed and cooked. So deeply humiliating is this act considered that the culprit who consents to degrade himself so far is almost sure ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... represent the eastern original. The best and latest, the Rev. Mr. Foster's, which is diffuse and verbose, and Mr. G. Moir Bussey's, which is a re- correction, abound in gallicisms of style and idiom; and one and all degrade a chef d'oeuvre of the highest anthropological and ethnographical interest and importance to a mere fairy book, a nice ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... head of Dr. now Sir —— Gibbs, of Bath, physician to the late Queen, who very fortunately had a thicker scull than boys in general, or he would in all probability have fractured it. It will therefore be seen that I did in no way exceed the truth, and, so far from wishing to degrade the clergy, I shall only reprobate those acts in which they degrade themselves. I have known many excellent clergymen, Mr. Carrington to wit, and I know many most worthy clergymen now; and I have also known some of the most ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... intimacy, which proves nothing. I do not intend to question you; I have suffered from it, I have confessed to you, and I have done you an irreparable wrong. But rather than consent to what you propose, I will throw it all in the fire. Ah! my friend, do not degrade me; do not attempt to justify yourself, do not punish me for suffering. How could I, in the bottom of my heart, suspect you of deceiving me? No, you are beautiful and you are true; a single glance of yours, Brigitte, tells me more than words could utter and I am ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... know of the facts of sex, the right and normal part sex activities play in life, and all that tends to abuse and degrade them, the better able we will be to make sex a factor for happiness in our own lives and that of our descendants. Mankind, for its own general good, must desire that reproduction—the real purpose of every sexual function—occur in such a way as ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... produce of the land is not conveyed through the labyrinths of traffick, but passes directly from the hand that gathers it to the mouth that eats it. The Laird has all those in his power that live upon his farms. Kings can, for the most part, only exalt or degrade. The Laird at pleasure can feed or starve, can give bread, or withold it. This inherent power was yet strengthened by the kindness of consanguinity, and the reverence of patriarchal authority. ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... their feet. They shake the full hand (I was reproved for offering the fingers only); and when politely disposed, the inferior wraps his fist in the hem of his garment. They have nothing corresponding with the European idea of manners: they degrade all ceremony by the epithet Shughl el banat, or "girls' work," and pique themselves upon downrightness of manner,—a favourite mask, by the by, for savage cunning to assume. But they are equally free from affectation, ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... room he took out his revolver and loaded every chamber. In the set of his lips was menace to the next employer who dared to insult and degrade him. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... months ago that the Congress enact mandatory fixed sentences for persons convicted of Federal crimes involving the sale of hard drugs. Hard drugs, we all know, degrade the spirit as they destroy the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... that he committed a grave mistake in listening to the solicitations of a 'professional spy' and of friends too easily alarmed, and frequently upbraided me for having aided him to degrade himself at the very moment in all his life when his behavior should have exhibited the utmost dignity ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... or rumour of the appearance of a new actor: 'a mouse that takes up its lodgings in a cat's ear'(2) has a mansion of peace to him: he dreads every hint of an objection, and least of all, can forgive praise mingled with censure: to doubt is to insult; to discriminate is to degrade: he dare hardly look into a criticism unless some one has tasted it for him, to see that there is no offence in it: if he does not draw crowded houses every night, he can neither eat nor sleep; or if all these terrible inflections are removed, and he ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... these instances and others that might be mentioned, is wholly inconsistent with the doctrine of the Redeemer's Headship in its legitimate application, and is the source of many of the evils that in our day corrupt and degrade the Church of England, and that prevent the developement and prevalence of genuine Protestantism throughout the nation. The Presbyterian Churches that claim descent from the covenanting reformers and martyrs, should seriously consider whether they do not compromise a faithful testimony, ...
— The Life of James Renwick • Thomas Houston
... to accomplish her wish by working on the heart-hunger he most probably felt, owing to the loss of Agnes Pine. If he loved that lady in a chivalrous fashion—and Miss Greeby believed that he did—she was absolutely lost to him as the wife of another man. Lambert would never degrade her into a divorce court appearance. And perhaps, after all, as Miss Greeby thought hopefully, his love for Sir Hubert's wife might have turned to scorn that she had preferred money to true love. But then, again, as Miss Greeby remembered, with a darkening face, ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... body, senses, with his noblest and finest aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage appetites, without the preponderance of any dominant passion to cast him altogether in one direction, to exalt or degrade him. He has not become rigid as he will under Puritanism. He is not uncrowned as in the Restoration." He has entered like a young man into all the lusty experiences of life, every allurement is known, the sweetness and novelty of things are strong with him. He plunges ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... that words evoke are for ever betraying the thoughts for which they stand. When we try to express perfect joy, a noble, spiritual ecstasy, a profound, everlasting love, our words can only compare them with animal passion, with drunkenness, brutal and coarse desire. And not only do they thus degrade the noblest triumphs of the soul of man by likening them to primitive instincts, but they incite us to believe, in spite of ourselves, that the object or feeling compared is less real, less true or substantial, ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... door of his master, or in filth on the floor of his cabin; whether he gave us cold, stupid stories of his wrongs, or flippant details of his joys; whether he blessed his master or cursed him—we have wondered at the power which a serf system has to degrade and imbrute the image ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... courage, dear Walter; and it was all the greater and nobler because it was exercised in such humble elements, as it were—I mean under circumstances where there was everything to degrade and nothing to elevate the poor boy in ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... to our several stations, and not degrade ourselves by learning the evil and discontented habits of human beings, each one of whom thinks ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... Oh, no; Not sued for that—he knows it were in vain. But so much of the anti-papal leaven Works in him yet, he hath pray'd me not to sully Mine own prerogative, and degrade the realm By seeking justice at a stranger's hand Against my natural subject. King and Queen, To whom he owes his loyalty after God, Shall these accuse him to a foreign prince? Death would not grieve him more. ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... that historical and philological science should push her dominion into every recess of human action and human speech, but we must utter some protest when the very heights of Parnassus are invaded by a spirit which surely is not science, but her unmeaning shadow; a spirit which would degrade every masterpiece of human genius into the mere pabulum of hungry professors, and which values a poet's text only as a field for the rivalries of sterile pedantry and ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... the old Twentieth Street drawing-room; and thrifty Mrs. Hitchcock had not sufficiently readjusted herself to the new state to banish it to the floor above, where it belonged with some ugly, solid brass andirons. In the same way, faithful Mr. Hitchcock had seen no good reason why he should degrade the huge steel engraving of the Aurora, which hung prominently at the foot of the stairs, in spite of its light oak frame, which was in shocking contrast with the mahogany panels of the walls. Flanking the staircase were other engravings,—Landseer's ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the consulting-room. A sudden revulsion of feeling swept over his mind. Had the woman left an infection of wickedness in the house, and had he caught it? What devil had possessed him to degrade himself in the eyes of his own servant? He had behaved infamously—he had asked an honest man, a man who had served him faithfully for years, to turn spy! Stung by the bare thought of it, he ran out into the hall again, and opened the door. The servant had disappeared; it was too late to call ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... who annually acquire the rights of citizenship, without any other qualification for the franchise than their inability to use it aright, by their ignorance, turbulence, and often by their viciousness, tend still further to degrade the popular assemblies. It is useless to speculate upon the position in which America would be without the introduction of this terrible foreign element; it may be admitted that the republican form of government has not had a fair trial; its present state ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... error either to glorify or degrade the body. If we worship it or pamper it, when it fails us, we are engulfed and buried in its ruins; if we misuse it, and we can misuse it alike by obeying it and disregarding it, it becomes our master and tyrant, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 1568] but her troops were defeated and she fled to England. Throwing herself on Elizabeth's mercy she found prison and finally, after nineteen years, the scaffold. An inquiry was held concerning her case, but no verdict was rendered because it did not suit Elizabeth to degrade her sister sovereign more than was necessary. Not for the murder of her husband, but for complicity in a plot against Elizabeth, was Mary finally condemned to die. In spite of the fact that she did everything possible to disgrace herself more deeply than ever, such as ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... taste, and the comfort of your home. It would have been news certainly to myself, had any one told me that afternoon that I should live to drag such matter into print. But you see, sir, how you degrade better men to your own level; and it is needful that those who are to judge betwixt you and me, betwixt Damien and the devil's advocate, should understand your letter to have been penned in a house which could raise, and that very justly, the envy and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that long talk we had last winter, after the annual meeting of the Feathered Friends' League, and how we agreed that those sporadic doles could do no real good—must even degrade the birds who received them—and that we had no right to meddle in what ought to be done by ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... to offend you,) than perhaps you will approve in yourself when I am far removed from Italy. For have you not a noble mind? And are you not a son of the Marquis della Porretta? Permit me to observe, that passion will make a man exalt himself, and degrade another; and the just medium will be then forgot. I am afraid I have been thought more lightly of, than I ought to be, either in justice, or for the honour of a person who is dear to every one present. My country was once mentioned with disdain: think not my ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... Panhandle Smith?" she interrupted, looking up at him with eyes like dark stars. "No! No! No! I wouldn't degrade ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... article of thy gentry. The punishment of a recreant or undeserving knight, was to hack off his spurs: the meaning therefore is; it is not worth the while of a gentlewoman to be made a knight, for we'll degrade all these knights in a little time, by the usual form of hacking off their spurs, and thou, if thou art knighted, shalt be ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... him? Shame after shame, threat upon threat. Marry me, or you are dishonoured; marry me, or your brother dies: and this is man's honour! But my honour and my pride are different. I will encounter all misfortune sooner than degrade myself by an unfaithful marriage. How should I kneel before the altar, and vow to reverence as my husband you, you who deceived me ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was she going? What was to become of her? Out in the world where he came from, were they ever to reach it, she would be nothing. Her station in life was beneath his so far that the only recognition she could have would be one which would degrade her. This solitary journey they were taking, how the world would lift up its hands in horror at it! A girl without a chaperon! She was impossible! And yet it all seemed right and good, and the girl was evidently recognized by the angels; ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... her."—"What, would you part from her?"—"Does not her conduct justify me in so doing?"—"I do not know; but is this the time to think of such a thing, when the eyes of all France are fixed upon you? These domestic squabbles will degrade you in the eyes of the people, who expect you to be wholly devoted to their interests; and you will be laughed at, like one of Moliere's husbands, if you are displeased with your wife's conduct you can call her to account when you have nothing ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... true princess," answered Arnold, "feels the peas under ever so many mattresses. She would not fall in love with a false lord, or degrade herself by marrying her scullion. But if she is a true princess, she sees what is lordly in her subject. If she loves him, already he is above her in station,—she looks up to him as her ideal. Whatever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... thought that to be whimsical, moody, or self-indulgent best fits a man both to create and appraise works of art, whereas to become so really is the only way in which a man capable of such high tasks can with certainty ruin and degrade his faculties. Precious, surpassingly precious indeed, must every manifestation of such faculty before its final extinction remain, since the race produces comparatively few endowed after ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... a folly," replied the nephew, "to degrade such a creature as that;" and he attempted to kiss the baby; but, swift as thought, she had turned her face away, and ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... Central Intelligence, how remote the creative conception is from all scholastic and ethical formulae, I am led to think that a healthy mind ought to change its mood from time to time, and come down from its noblest condition,—never, of course, to degrade itself by dwelling upon what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a chance to air and exercise themselves. After the first and second floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their splendors, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... into contact with the rude things of this world, where the delicacy of her senses and sensibilities would be constantly wounded by the attrition with bad and desperate and foul politicians and men. Such is not her function and is not her office; and if we degrade her from the high station that God has placed her in to put her at the ballot-box, at political or other elections, we unman ourselves and refuse to do the duties that God has ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... V.," and Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade the humour: into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... belong to a splendid brotherhood—a grand army—and they should be proud of each other. We can be just as true and loyal to our own, and yet have wide feelings. Esprit de corps—loyalty to our body—is a very splendid thing, and we degrade it when we turn it into mere clannishness; it ought to bring out our love for all that is good, just as love for home ought to make us ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... at Athens, to secure the State from dangerous rivalries. In other words, they were commonly not men of character and distinction, but just the reverse—persons whose conduct was so destitute of honour as to degrade them, in the eyes of the community, to the level of the worst sort of vermin. And they were treated accordingly. They were held to be unfit to exist as an integral part of the body politic, and either destroyed or, as an alternative, constrained to abjure the realm. The head ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... course of a legislative proceeding. This was followed, on the 6th of July, by a motion in the lords, moved by the Earl of Liverpool, for a bill of pains and penalties; or an act which, according to precedents in former ages, might pronounce the queen guilty of an adulterous intercourse; degrade her from her exalted station; and dissolve the marriage between her and the king. This bill was read a first time as a preliminary step to the introduction of evidence, and then a copy of it was sent to her majesty by the usher of the black rod. The day fixed for the second reading ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... I had read them, it could not be expected that I should be able to give a critical account. I have been told that there is something in them of vexation and discontent, discovered by a perpetual attempt to degrade physick from its sublimity, and to represent it as attainable without much previous or concomitant learning. By the transient glances which I have thrown upon them, I have observed an affected contempt ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... wig, and represent him with a bald head, the likeness being otherwise perfect. The Cardinal was much grieved, and begged the artist to restore his wig, but received from David a formal refusal. "Never," said he, "will I degrade my pencil so far as to paint a wig." His Eminence went away very angry, and complained to M. de Talleyrand, who was at this time Minister of Foreign Affairs, giving, among other reasons, this, which seemed to him unanswerable, that, as no Pope had ever worn a wig, they ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... grave, we may be reformers; but it cannot be in the destructive spirit displayed by some who, in the prophet's language, amid darkness on the earth, "fret themselves, and curse their King and their God, and look upward." Poverty cannot degrade, nor ignorance bedwarf, nor persecution crush, nor dungeon enthral the free, glad spirit of a child of God, erect in its regenerate strength, and rich in its eternal hopes and heritage. And this hopeful ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... doubtful whether she was not even then affianced to Sir Arthur Plantagenet (afterwards Lord Lisle), whose first wife she eventually became; but Henry Tudor would have violated all the traditions of his house, had he hesitated to degrade the estate, or grieve the heart, of a son of the House of York. This ill-matched pair—the covetous Edmund and the gentle Elizabeth— were the parents of four children: the first being John Dudley, who was born in 1502. It is of him I am ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... anything—anything in the world to save the poor man. Indeed, she had intended to appropriate part of the two hundred pound bill to that purpose. She forgot her first statement, that she wanted the money to go out of town. Without interrupting, I let her go on and degrade herself by a simulated passion of repentance, regret, and thankfulness to me, under which she hid her fear and her mortification at being detected. I at length put an end to a scene of admirable ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... ignorant of that law; but I know that the king will make an exception—that he will pay the money I lent to his successor. It is possible I may feel his crutch upon my back, but blows will not degrade me. The Jew is accustomed to blows and kicks—to be daily trodden under foot. Even if the king beats me, he will give me back my honor, for he will ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... ornament that can beautify and avoids every excess which would degrade. Macaulay and Addison have been enthroned as the kings of this style. To them all writers bend the knee ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... with young Robespierre. Some of his injudicious admirers, in trying to disprove his complicity with the terrorists, impale themselves on this horn of the dilemma. In seeking to clear him from the charge of Terrorism, they stain him with the charge of truckling to the terrorists. They degrade him from the level of St. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... opinion of the land. There is the dictum here for a man who adores a woman who is possessed by a husband. If he has long adored her, and known himself to be preferred by her in innocency of heart; if he has solved the problem of being her bosom's lord, without basely seeking to degrade her to being his mistress; the epithets to characterise him in our vernacular will probably be all the less flattering. Politically we are the most self-conscious people upon earth, and socially the frankest animals. The terrorism of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dart their hissing tongues high up the sand: In hearing of the ocean, and in sight Of those ribbed wind-streaks running into white. If I the death of Love had deeply planned, I never could have made it half so sure, As by the unblest kisses which upbraid The full-waked sense; or failing that, degrade? 'Tis morning: but no morning can restore What we have forfeited. I see no sin: The wrong is mixed. In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... way applicable to those who refuse submission to a Tyrannical Usurpation, whether in Kansas or elsewhere, then must some new word, of deeper color, be invented, to designate those mad spirits who could endanger and degrade the Republic, while they betray all the cherished sentiments of the fathers and the spirit of the Constitution, in order to give new spread to Slavery. Let the Senator proceed. It will not be the first time in history, that ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... Anglo-Saxon race, after centuries of such an experience as these people have had, would be very much superior to them. And one's indignation increases against those who, North as well as South, taunt the colored race with inferiority while they themselves use every means in their power to crush and degrade them, denying them every right and privilege, closing against them every avenue of elevation and improvement. Were they, under such circumstances, intellectual and refined, they would certainly be vastly superior to any other ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... approach daily nearer and nearer to perfection. The thoughts are completely under our own guidance and must never be allowed to wander idly or sinfully; they should be encouraged to dwell on subjects which elevate the mind and shield it from the petty trivialities which irritate and degrade it. ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore
... like applying inches to measuring weight. As a matter or fact, we cannot raise one class to a higher class, unless we add an entirely new function to the former; we can only improve their lower status; but if we apply the reverse method, we can degrade human standards to ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... war? Because of the evil in the hearts of men—the envy aroused by the political and commercial greatness of Athens in the governing classes of Sparta and Corinth; and the covetousness aroused by sudden greatness in the Athenians, tempting their statesmen to degrade the presidency of a free confederacy into a dominion of Athens over Greece, and tempting the Athenian proletariat, and the proletariat in the confederate states, to misuse democracy for the exploitation of the rich by the poor. Envy and covetousness ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Slave-Trade Laws. It was not altogether a mistaken judgment that led the constitutional fathers to consider the slave-trade as the backbone of slavery. An economic system based on slave labor will find, sooner or later, that the demand for the cheapest slave labor cannot long be withstood. Once degrade the laborer so that he cannot assert his own rights, and there is but one limit below which his price cannot be reduced. That limit is not his physical well-being, for it may be, and in the Gulf States it was, ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... God's name have I if I haven't hope? Take that from me and what would I be? Why, the very fate I have been fighting off with tooth and nail would overwhelm me. I'd sink into unimportance—my unparalleled misfortunes would degrade me to a level with the commonest! No, sir, I've never been without hope, and though I've fallen I've always got up. What Fentress has is based on money he stole from me. By God, the days of his profit-taking are at an end! I am going to strip him. And even if I don't live to enjoy ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... conceived that I mean to degrade or vilify the literary character, when I would only separate the Author from those polluters of the press who have turned a vestal into a prostitute; a grotesque race of famished buffoons or laughing assassins; or that populace of unhappy beings, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... distinguish more readily and more certainly between the cases where the distance has degraded the size, and the cases where the size being really less, has caused an exaggeration of the distance: or again, where the size being really less, yet co-operating with a distance really greater, may degrade the estimate, (though travelling in a right direction,) below the truth; or again where the size being really less, yet counteracted by a distance also less, may equally disturb the truth of human ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... nation. It is in itself the incontrovertible proof that the race lives: a dead people does not produce men of genius. Whatever awakes one part of the intelligence reacts on all its parts. You cannot lift, any more than you can degrade, the heart of man piecemeal. In this sense not literature only but also music helped, who can say how effectually, to bring Italy back to life. The land was refreshed by a flood of purely national song, ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... the one aim which held them together—the undermining of Clarendon's power. For this object they were all alike prepared to support the pretensions, and flatter the vanity, of the shameless and grasping courtesan, to ruin the happiness of the wife, to degrade the honour, and send to slumber the scruples, of the King, and to besmirch that Crown, which a flood of unselfish loyalty had restored, only two years before, to the love and reverence of ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
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