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More "Depravity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... predetermined, we can no more be capable of any obligation or choice, in regard to the end, than puppets which some unseen Harlequin moves by the terrible wires of primitive decree or transmitted depravity towards the genial or the tragic crisis. If the soul's fate there is to be heaven or hell according to the part enacted here, it must have free will and a fair opportunity to work the unmarred problem safely out. Otherwise ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... If my revered uncle[07] took a glimpse at these scenes, he did not see there any of our red brethren, as Mr. Jefferson kindly called them, who formed a considerable part of the gathering at the time of his graduation, forty-two years before; but he must have seen exhibitions of depravity which would disgust the most untutored savage. Near the close of the last century these outrages began to disappear, and lessened from year to year, until by public opinion, enforced by an efficient police, they were many years ago wholly suppressed, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... suspicion, he set this down as an attempt to disguise her hand. "So," said he, to himself, "this is the game. The old woman is to be drawn into it, too. She is to help to make Georges Dandin of me. I will go. I will baffle them all. I will expose this nest of depravity, all ceremony on the surface, and voluptuousness and treachery below. O God! who could believe that creature never loved me! They shall none of them see my weakness. Their benefactor shall be still their superior. They shall see me cold as ice, and ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... is punished for that particular act which he knows himself to have committed, he cannot feel the bitter sense of injustice and misunderstanding which a punishment inflicted for general reasons, and which attributes to him a depravity of motives and ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... Commons, Monday Night, Feb. 2.—"I do not," said OLD MORALITY, a cloud of disappointment settling on his massive brow, "know any case where, comparatively late in life, after a blameless career, depravity has so suddenly broken out in a man as it has with SYDNEY GEDGE. It is true, that upon occasion GEDGE has not given entire satisfaction to our friends opposite. They hold the opinion that his incursions in debate have been inopportune, and, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... ourselves. Such an event, therefore, will be neither pitiful nor terrible. There remains, then, the character between these two extremes,—that of a man who is not eminently good and just,-yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous,—a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... the wasp, duped by a very clumsy imitation of her garb, and the depravity of the fly, concealing her identity under a counterfeit presentment, exceed the limits of my credulity. The wasp is not so silly nor the Volucella so clever as we are assured. If the latter really meant to deceive the Wasp by her appearance, we must admit that her disguise is none too successful. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... do his duty for its own sake. The motive is not sufficient. You shall not find him refusing to do any mischief which tends to his own advantage. I grieve to say it, for I have leanings towards the dog-boy, but there is in him a vein of unsophisticated depravity, which issues from the rock of his nature like a clear spring that no stirrings of conscience or shame have rendered turbid. His face, it is simple and childlike, and he has the most innocent eye, but he tells any lie which the occasion demands ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... man and this woman!" I said; "they are two bottomless pits of daring and depravity. Mohun has escaped them heretofore, but now, when the enemy seem driving us, and sweeping every thing before them, will not Darke and madam attain their vengeance, and come ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... of depravity, to which the human mind is subject, by force of tradition, more than the unnatural and absurd notion of enhancing future bliss, by beholding fellow creatures of the nearest connexion in a state of indescribable misery, there ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... Americans first awakened to the universal corruption of our politics, we used to attribute it to the "ignorant foreign vote." Turn to Lecky's "Democracy and Liberty" and you will see how reformers twenty years ago explained our political depravity. But we probed deeper, and discovered that the purely American communities, such as Rhode Island, were the most corrupt of all. It dawned upon us that wherever there was a political boss paying bribes on election day, there was a captain ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... ambition, or love of power more justly laid to their charge than to other men, because, that would be to make religion itself, or at least the best constitution of Church-government, answerable for the errors and depravity of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... "is the depravity of this accomplished hypocrite, if such is the littleness of soul that a manner so noble disguises, shall he next, urged, perhaps, rather by prudence than preference, make me the object of his pursuit, and the food of his vain-glory? ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... his son as a fool, and condemned as a sinner. Noah was sole governor of the Church and State, and ruled his own household with tireless care and labor. He had doubtless therein offended the proud and haughty spirit of his son in many ways. But the depravity of his heart which now, that the father's sin had become manifest, leaped to the surface, had ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... became a power. Louis XII., having returned victorious to France, did not trouble himself much about the check received in Italy by Emperor Maximilian, for whom he had no love and but little esteem. Maximilian was personally brave and free from depravity or premeditated perfidy, but he was coarse, volatile, inconsistent, and not very able. Louis XII. had amongst his allies of Cambrai and in Italy a more serious and more skilful foe, who was preparing for him ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... having established these premises, they argue that the tendency of country people to move into cities shows a degeneracy on their part, or that the abnormal growth of cities is a sure token of the moral depravity which has taken hold of the people. This, however, is not true. There is as much iniquity in proportion in small communities as in large ones, and not unfrequently wickedness and viciousness are attributed ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... also been convenient and consistent, in support of the doctrine of man's depravity, to exploit this dark view so as to make him a fit subject for redemption. Somehow, the traditional "Fall" and procreation have been so associated in religious thinking that it has been practically impossible for the religious mind to entertain ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... connive at any depravity among themselves, but must duly rebuke it. Those who have acquired the respect of the believers, and would be exemplary Christians, must take heed lest they accustom themselves to flattery and luxury; they must ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... Ronquerolles would very likely have bidden him compromise the Duchess by responding to her show of friendliness by passionate demonstrations; but as it was, Armand de Montriveau came away from the ball, loathing human nature, and even then scarcely ready to believe in such complete depravity. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... all unmanned, many sobbing aloud, overwhelmed by emotions utterly uncontrollable. This scene stamps the impress of almost celestial greatness upon the soul of the tzar. He knew his son's weakness, incompetency and utter depravity, and even in that hour of agony his spirit did not bend, and he would not sacrifice the happiness of eighteen millions of people through parental tenderness for his ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... at hand, to administer a needful whipping. A really capable pedagogue can mean everything to a boy; but it is asking too much that a purchased slave should be an ideal companion.[*] Probably many pedagogues are responsible for their charges' idleness or downright depravity. It is a dubious system at ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... and has no more reason to be surprised by references to vice in some of them than by the language of virtue in many others. Confucius said, indeed, in his own enigmatical way, that the single sentence, 'Thought without depravity,' covered the whole 300 pieces[1]; and it may very well be allowed that they were collected and preserved for the promotion of good government and virtuous manners. The merit attaching to them is that they give ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... have found, if not original sin, at least vegetable total depravity in my garden; and it was there before I went into it. It is the bunch-, or joint-, or snake-grass,—whatever it is called. As I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his garden,—name things as I find them. This ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... killed and eaten; so death came into her world. She knew that the kid grew into a big goat, and became very wicked, for he ran at her one day, throwing her to the ground and hurting her severely; so sin came into her world. She saw innate depravity exemplified in the conduct of her innocent white pig, that would take to puddles and filth in spite of her gentle endeavors to restrain its wayward impulses. Her puppies too bit each other, would quarrel ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... of the press only; that sacred Palladium, which no influence, no power, no government, which nothing but the folly or the depravity, or the folly or the corruption, of a jury ever can destroy. And what calamities are the people saved from by having public communication kept open to them! I will tell you, gentlemen, what they are saved from; I will ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... had been enlightened by the Holy Spirit through the preaching of faith, something of their national trait of foolishness plus their original depravity clung to them. Let no man think that once he has received faith, he can presently be converted into a faultless creature. The leavings of old vices will stick to him, be he ever ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... said, she never once counted on Hurstwood. She could only approach that subject with a pang of sorrow and regret. For a truth, she was rather shocked and frightened by this evidence of human depravity. He would have tricked her without turning an eyelash. She would have been led into a newer and worse situation. And yet she could not keep out the pictures of his looks and manners. Only this one deed seemed strange and miserable. It contrasted sharply with all she felt ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... Illinois[236] the Court sustained an Illinois statute which makes it a crime to exhibit in a public place any publication which "portrays depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue of a class of citizens, of any race, color, creed or religion" or which "exposes the citizens of any race, color, creed or religion to contempt, derision, or obloquy." ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... the town, each of a doleful nature and each indicating an evident depravity in a citizen of Plainton, were related by Miss Shott, and then she ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... appreciate at its full within a day or two. He would have given a good deal to be present when they made a certain discovery. Would Moya smile when Verinder told her how the tables had been turned? Or would she think it merely another instance of his depravity? ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... this depravity in taste? for surely there are none so very mean and contemptible as to bring the pleasure of seeing a number of little wherries, gliding along after one another, in competition with what we enjoy in viewing a succession of ships, with all their sails expanded to the winds, bounding ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... wonderful! After all, there are people in the world, whose opinions and feelings are tainted by an habitual acquaintance with the evil side of society, though in action and intention they remain right; and who, without the real depravity of heart and malignity of intention of Iago, judge as he does of the character and productions ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... opportunity for many lively sallies from the gentlemen. I saw the same sort of thing repeated on different occasions at least a dozen times; e.g. a young lady is employed in making a shirt, (which it would be a symptom of absolute depravity to name), a gentleman enters, and presently begins the sprightly dialogue with "What ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... a good mother. So good she has ever appeared to me that I have often said that all I knew of her life seemed a striking contradiction of the doctrine of human depravity. In my youth I fully accepted that doctrine, and I do not deny it now; but my patient, self-sacrificing mother always appeared to be an exception ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... word, how changed am I myself! how fearfully, how dismally has the relation between us changed! It seems to me as though the very belief in the possibility of anything like what this man has believed possible of me, had cast a shade of vice and depravity over my whole life: for this noble being has hitherto been the mirror of my own worth, by looking at which I became conscious of my own well-meaning and integrity. Can everything, everything in our heart be thus transformed in a single moment? Yes, my dear, my fatherly ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... penniless upon the world. But there was a light in her eye and firmness in her step that told of a "will to do, a soul to dare." She had been educated in the customs of the village, and had been an aristocrat. Now she had another lesson to learn, a sad lesson speaking of the depravity of the human heart, and now she must learn all the cold heartlessness of that world that had heretofore shone so brightly upon her pathway. She did not once think in her grief that her change in fortune would make any change in friendship's tone, ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... this, I marvelled at his evil nature and his depravity and mischief-making and his ignoble birth and provenance and, turning upon him, I said, 'There is none on the face of the earth better or more righteous than the Barmecides, nor any baser nor more wrongous than thou; for they ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... faces, shifty and vapid faces, self-centered and morose faces, leech faces, pig faces, of well-tailored men—you watch them pass, you remember what you have seen at the tables, in near-by Monte Carlo, and the utter depravity of your race frightens you. Except clothes and jewels and the ability to get a check cashed, what is the difference between these people and the sailors from a hundred ships, making merry with their girls in the narrow streets back from the Vieux ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... hear nothing save what was lovely and ennobling. Whenever any debasing or evil influence approached him he would trample upon it with all the fierceness of a true Ueberhell; but such conflicts seldom occurred, for his nature was so exalted that it carried him unconscious through the depravity and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... enemies, or become enemies, because of their spleen; others because of their total depravity; and others still because they persist in standing upright when someone wants them to lie down and be stepped on. That is the meaning of backbone, in this world of human strife, and if, from time to time, it has ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... began to reflect more calmly on her present situation, for she had actually been rendered incapable of sober reflection, by the discovery of the act of atrocity of which she was the victim. She could not have imagined, that, in all the fermentation of civilized depravity, a similar plot could have entered a human mind. She had been stunned by an unexpected blow; yet life, however joyless, was not to be indolently resigned, or misery endured without exertion, and proudly termed patience. She had hitherto meditated only to point ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... ignorant, and therefore weak and wretched, since ignorance is the chief source of man's misery. "My people," says the prophet, "are destroyed for lack of knowledge." From ignorance rather than from depravity have sprung the most appalling crimes, the most pernicious vices. In darkness of mind men have worshiped senseless material things, have deified every cruel and carnal passion; at the dictate of unenlightened conscience they have oppressed, laid waste, and murdered; for lack of knowledge they have ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... thing for a stranger to do when he stands here is to make a pun on the name of this club, under the impression, of course, that he is the first man that that idea has occurred to. It is a credit to our human nature, not a blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all our depravity (and God knows and you know we are depraved enough) and all our sophistication, and untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ of innocence and simplicity still. When a stranger says to me, with a glow ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Powers, 'tis his own Fault, if he does not employ them aright; but how does it appear, that such a Power only, can render Man a whit better, or more a moral Agent, than he is, or would be, without it? If Inclination to Virtue, must precede every truly virtuous Action; and Man's Depravity under the Fall, be such as prevents his ever having such good Inclinations, his natural Ability to do Good, must needs be a mere Joke and a Cypher. Just the same as, on the other hand, would be, the strongest Inclinations to Virtue, ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... O'Conor's arrest in Kent, Sampson's in Carlisle, and the other arrests in Belfast and Dublin, proved too truly that treason was at work, and that the much-prized oath of secrecy was no protection whatever against the devices of the Castle and the depravity of its secret agents. The extent to which that treason extended, the number of associates who were in the pay of their deadly enemies, was never known to the United Irish leaders; time has, however, long since "revealed the secrets of the prison-house," and we know now, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... contaminated by the presence of one who has, further, deceived—and cruelly deceived—an honourable and venerable gentleman, and who wisely suppressed that deceit from me when he sought my protection. I weep for your depravity. I mourn over your corruption, but I cannot have a leper and a serpent for an inmate! Go forth," said Mr. Pecksniff, stretching out his hand, "go forth, young man! Like all who know you, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... parents were severe, exacting, imperious—not bad nor exactly cruel—simply "consistent." They believed that man was a worm of the dust, and stood by the traditions. They believed in the dogma of total depravity and lived ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... yield. Perhaps the worthy school-master knew his daughter; if so he was the only one. Never did so consummate a hypocrisy minister to so profound a perversity, and a depravity so inconceivable in a young and seemingly innocent girl. If, at the bottom of her heart, she thought herself the most wretched of women, there was nothing of it apparent—it was a well-kept secret. She knew ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... afterwards made an observation that I do not recollect, which pleased him much: he said with a good-humoured smile, 'That there should be so much excellence united with so much DEPRAVITY, is strange.' ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... words when he concludes that examination of his childhood memories which he undertook in order to prove the depravity of the soul from its first day on earth. He says: 'In the littleness of children didst Thou, our king, give us a symbol of humility when Thou didst say: Of such ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... He liked a bottle of wine and a good dinner, and having once been seen at the Cafe Royal with a lady who was very probably a near relation, was thenceforward supposed by generations of schoolboys to indulge in orgies the circumstantial details of which pointed to an unbounded belief in human depravity. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... and the papers?" said Ruth. "It was remembering that, that put it into our heads. I never thought of the cracks and—" with a little, low, excited laugh—"the 'total depravity of inanimate things,' ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... about Sabbath desecration. "I confess," observes this sage of ten, "when I look upon the present and past state of our public morals, and when I contrast our present luxury, dissipation, and depravity, with past frugality and virtue, I feel not merely a sensation of regret, but also of terror, for the result of the change." "The late Revolution in France," he adds, "has afforded us a remarkable lesson how necessary religion is ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... familiar with the pistols used in the duel. To convince the jury that he was not to be believed, the opposing counsel then told them that he had once pawned a watch belonging to somebody else. When the judge expressed himself shocked at such depravity, de Beauvallon, says a report, "hung his ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... thoughtfully; "I should have remembered that for a hundred years past the court of France has been so corrupt that unhappily the French nation have lost all faith in chastity and purity of heart. You, madame, must teach them to distinguish the innocence which has nothing to conceal, from the depravity which has lost all shame. But we must be cautious, and so conduct ourselves, that our actions may be ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... great French War, among other means resorted to in order to ease the English prisoners at Verdun of their loose cash, a gaming table was set up for their sole accommodation, and, as usual, led to scenes of great depravity and horror. For instance, a young man was enticed into this sink of iniquity, when he was tempted to throw on the table a five-franc piece; he won, and repeated the experiment several times successfully, until luck turned against him, and he lost everything he had. The manager ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... convictions, steeled by perils and endurance, calm, sagacious, resolute, grave even to severity, a valiant and redoubted soldier, Coligny looked abroad on the gathering storm and read its danger in advance. He saw a strange depravity of manners; bribery and violence overriding justice; discontented nobles, and peasants ground down with taxes. In the midst of this rottenness, the Calvinistic churches, patient and stern, were fast gathering ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Thaw was front-paged on the newspapers and gibbeted in the pulpits as the shocking example of youthful depravity. He seems never to have had a fighting chance to become a man. He seems to have been robbed of his birthright from the cradle. Yet the father of this boy who has cost America millions in court and detention expenses ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... people with money who wanted to educate their sons sent them out, at what seems to us a very tender age, to travel and tramp the earth alone. They were remittance-men who shifted from university to university, and took lessons in depravity, being ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... from us by the Parliament of Great Britain without our consent, and the men on whose opinions and decisions our properties liberties and lives, in a great measure depend, receive their support from the Revenues arising from these taxes, we cannot, when we think on the depravity of mankind, avoid looking with horror on the danger to which we are exposed? The British Parliament have shewn their wisdom in making the Judges there as independent as possible both on the Prince and People, both for place ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... wolverine, the marten, mink and weasel are all courageous, savage and merciless. To the wolverine Western trappers accord the evil distinction of being a veritable imp of darkness on four legs. To them he is the arch-fiend, beyond which animal cunning and depravity cannot go. Excepting the profane history of the pickings and stealings of this "mountain devil" as recorded by suffering trappers, I know little of it; but if its instincts are not supremely murderous, its reputation is no index ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... group consists of persons who, believing in the general truths of Evangelical religion, accommodate them to their passions, and are capable, by gradual increase in depravity, of any crime or violence. I am not going to include these in our present study. Trumbull ("Red Gauntlet"), Trusty Tomkyns ("Woodstock"), Burley ("Old Mortality"), are three of ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... a perfume swept over him like a breeze from the tropics. The tale turned him to stone. Sister Claire undoubtedly drew upon her imagination and her reading for the facts, since it rarely falls to the lot of one woman to sound all the depths of depravity. Louis had little nonsense in his character. At first his horror urged him to fly from the place, but whenever the tale aroused this feeling in him, the cunning creature broke forth into a strain of penitence so sweet and touching that he had not the heart to desert her. At the last she ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... Instances of depravity amongst animals are not altogether unknown, though they are rare. A case is mentioned in Blackwood's Magazine of October 1817, where a lady walking along a London street had her bag snatched from ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... the Holy House, he was bound by the unbreakable bonds of priestly dictum. Though one should swear by the altar of God, his oath could be annulled; but if he vowed by the corban gift or by the gold upon the altar,[1136] his obligation was imperative. To what depths of unreason and hopeless depravity had men fallen, how sinfully foolish and how wilfully blind were they, who saw not that the temple was greater than its gold, and the altar than the gift that lay upon it! In the Sermon on the Mount the Lord had said "Swear not at all";[1137] but upon ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... at all times to the state of your own mind both towards God and man: cultivate an intimate acquaintance with your own heart; labour to obtain a deep sense of your depravity and to trust always in Christ; be pure in heart, and meditate much upon the pure and holy character of God; live a life of prayer and devotedness to God; cherish every amiable and right disposition towards men; ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... rather remarkable that the men do not seem to object much to their brides having had a child or two by various fathers before marriage. The women do not lose reputation unless they become utterly depraved, but in that case they are condemned pretty strongly by public opinion. Depravity is, however, rare, for all require more or less to be wooed before they are won. I did not see (although I mixed pretty freely with the young people) any breach of propriety on the praias. The merry-makings were carried on near the ranchos, ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... one of those men to whom a blot in the 'scutcheon is only less terrible than the knowledge that such trust has been misplaced. He is stung to madness by what seems this crowning proof of his sister's depravity; and by the thought of him who has thus corrupted her. He surprises Mertoun on the way to the last stolen visit to his love; and, before there has been time for an explanation, challenges and ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... do cheerfully hope. But what a villain a man must be to blend together the beautiful language of love and the infernal phraseology of the law in one and the same sentence! I know but one of God's creatures who would be guilty of such depravity as this: I refer to the Unreliable. I believe the Unreliable to be the very lawyer's-cub who sat upon the solitary peak, all soaked in beer and sentiment, and concocted the insipid literary hash I am talking about. The handwriting closely ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... of succor or consideration at the hands of these murderers was idle. Unsatisfied with the mere acquisition of booty, these human devils, devoid of the last spark of compassion, would mete out to each member of the crew and the passengers the most unheard-of tortures which human depravity could invent, for the amusement of the captors. Some were tied to a windlass and pelted into insensibility, or perhaps more charitable death. Others were lashed with ropes and cast, almost dead, into the sea; or, spiked hand and ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... the Eastern land, he had nothing to say about the character of the man from China. But so soon as he felt the pressure of want because of his sloth, he began to find that the "yellow man" was vicious, and soon his depravity became a by-word. The Chinese were abused because of their virtues rather than their vices, for things for which all other nations are applauded— love of work and economy. It is the industry of our people that offends, because it competes with the half-done work of the white man, ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... bound by his former offers, should Clementina recover. The interested motives of Lady Sforza and Laurana for treating Clementina with cruelty. Remarks on Lady Olivia's conduct, and on female delicacy. Sir Charles recommends Miss Byron as a pattern for his ward, and laments the depravity of ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... public life was set up for an example of clemency and kindness, but his path all the way descended until at sixty-eight he became a suicide. If eight hundred years did not make antediluvians any better, but only made them worse, the ages of eternity could have no effect except prolongation of depravity. ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... been seen in Walden woods nearly as large as a crow and quite as black, he shook his head and looked up at the pine trees. That was not according to his idea of a woodpecker. Neither did he like to hear anything which tended to prove the depravity of human nature. Stories of fraud and corruption in commercial or political life were not pleasant to his ears; and if the perpetrators escaped punishment he was evidently much annoyed. He liked to tell the truth better than ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... husband of the Princess Elodie of—Hell! He refused to think of it! And again the horse he rode and the Park trees heard a bit of Paul Zalenska's English profanity that should have made them hide in shame over the depravity of youth. ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... which the vice is practiced by an individual is in some cases appalling. Three or four repetitions of the act daily are not uncommon; and the following from Dr. Copland is evidence of much deeper depravity:— ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... dear," answered the manly voice, now graver, and with a little sadness in its ring, "ignorance is not innocence, and depravity is vastly more general than any mode. Nevertheless, there are customs of which I would greatly prefer Prissy and Fiddy to remain unaware, like ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... a Demagogue or an Infidel? I am both. For while many professed Christians contrive to serve both God and Mammon, the depravity of my nature seems to ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... therefore, has a right to arbitrary power. But the thought which is suggested by the depravity of him who brings it forward is supported by a gross confusion of ideas and principles, which your Lordships well know how to discern and separate. It is manifest, that, in the Eastern governments, and the Western, and in all governments, the supreme power in the ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of his guilt and depravity thicken, on the 15th of June committed suicide by hanging himself to the bars of his cell with a handkerchief. He left letters to his father and brother, expressing in general terms the viciousness of his life, and his hopelessness of escape from punishment. When his associates in guilt ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... preached on Sundays, during my four years' course, in the pulpits of the surrounding towns, but it was not of the total depravity nor flaming brimstone; far grander themes engrossed my thoughts and speech; the true heroism of keeping ourselves unspotted from the world, the sublime possibilities of our natures if we would walk in the footsteps of the only perfect One ever seen ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... wide as the world, and common as God,"[48] has never produced a nation of Rationalists; a fact very unaccountable, if Rationalism be true; and one which might well lead these writers to acknowledge at least one kind of total depravity, namely, that inspired men should love the darkness of external revelations, and even of book revelations, and read Bibles, and Korans, and Vedas, and "Discourses Concerning Religion," and "Phases of Faith," while yet "everything ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the criminality of the men themselves. My experience is that there should be no toleration of any "tenderloin" or "red light" district, and that, above all, there should be the most relentless war on commercialized vice. The men who profit and make their living by the depravity and the awful misery of other human beings stand far below any ordinary criminals, and no measures taken against ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... of humble parents, in a remote county of England. Their occupations were such as usually fall to the lot of peasants, and they had no portion to give me, but an education free from the usual sources of depravity, and the inheritance, long since lost by their unfortunate progeny! of an honest fame. I was taught the rudiments of no science, except reading, writing, and arithmetic. But I had an inquisitive mind, and neglected no ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... anywhere discover. I did not in the least mind his entering my room when he pleased. I had there nothing of any value; he could take my life even, had he a mind to that.... The naive abysmal depths of his depravity interested me. He formed a kind of attachment to me. He told me that he would do anything for me. He had a strange tact which prevented him from intruding upon me when I was occupied. He was as quick as any ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... vainly would you cover up his guilt. Your love is blind to his depravity. But I have witness irreproachable: Tears have I seen, true tears, that may ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... depravity, improbity, unscrupulousness, iniquity, immorality, turpitude, knavishness, villainy, peccancy, baseness, profligacy, venality, licentiousness, obliquity, pravity, degeneracy, viciousness, wantonness, criminality, libertinism, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Islam, where thou shalt look upon many a lion-hearted prince and know who I am." His speech angered her and she said to him, "By the virtue of the Messiah, thou art keen of wit with me! But I see now what depravity is in thy heart and how thou allowest thyself to say a thing that proves thee a traitor. How should I do what thou sayest, when I know that, if I came to thy King Omar ben Ennuman, I should never win free of him? For he has not the ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... foil to this picture of the depravity of Zion, a foil also to the immediately succeeding description of her pride and idolatry, is the beautiful vision of Zion in the issue of the days, ii. 2-5, as the city to which all nations shall resort for religious instruction, and their obedience to the ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... Praetorian Guards, finding that vice was a short cut to such rewards of virtue. In these and other high offices he developed the vices of maturity, first cruelty, then greed. He corrupted Nero and introduced him to every kind of depravity; then ventured on some villainies behind his back, and finally deserted and betrayed him. Thus in his case, as in no other, those who hated Nero and those who wished him back agreed, though from different ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... was enjoyed under the emperors, and it was under their sanction that jurisprudence, in some of the most important departments of life, reached perfection. If injustice was suffered, it was not on account of the laws, but the depravity of men, the venality of the rich, and the tricks of lawyers. But the laws were wise and equal. The civil jurisprudence could be copied with safety by the most enlightened of European states. And, indeed, it is ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... a pre-existent state is not constantly supposed, that is, that mankind has existed in some state previous to the present, in which this guilt was incurred, and this depravity contracted, there can be no meaning at all or such a meaning as contradicts every principle of common sense, that guilt can be contracted without acting, or that we can act ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... vice, criminality, guilt, offense, viciousness, delinquency, ill-doing, transgression, wickedness, depravity, immorality, ungodliness, wrong, evil, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... have been very tall once, but it was stooped now, though the height was still well above medium. Hunted, haunted, ravaged and lost, was the face, and the long grey moustache, covering the chin almost, seemed to cover an immeasurable depravity. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 14.)(155) On the other hand, in over-cultivated ages, when decay begins, an over-estimation of material things is wont to become general.(156) The mere servants of mammon, whether as political economists or as private individuals, may see their depravity faithfully reflected in communism as in a mirror. We should not overlook the fact that it is with whole nations as with the individual man who amasses his own fortune. He reaches the culminating point of his wealth ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... pendant le 18me Siecle (Paris, 1819) i. 271.) but contents himself with partridges and grouse. Close-viewed, their industry and function is that of dressing gracefully and eating sumptuously. As for their debauchery and depravity, it is perhaps unexampled since the era of Tiberius and Commodus. Nevertheless, one has still partly a feeling with the lady Marechale: "Depend upon it, Sir, God thinks twice before damning a man of that quality." (Dulaure, vii. 261.) These people, of old, surely ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Jonson—and of these, only Spenser and Jonson died in their beds, and Ben had killed his man in a duel. The student of Elizabethan history and biography will find stranger contrasts than in the lives of these poets, for crime, meanness, and sexual depravity often appear in the closest juxtaposition with imaginative idealism, ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... deploring the depravity of the young woman, and the blindness of the unfortunate duke, a blindness which had, without doubt, endured till that ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... faint remembrance of seeing reference to such matters. Very self-denying, no doubt, and praiseworthy, though I must say that I doubt the use of preaching the gospel to such persons. From what I have seen of these lowest people I should think they were too deeply sunk in depravity to be capable of appreciating the lofty and ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... had gone, he had struck his brow, exclaiming: "Wretch that I am!—that great and good fellow, the fairest of the sons of men!...what a black depravity must be in this heart—" he had underlooked in the mirror, and cut a face; "but ah, Hogarth! this heart is in your net; and I loved the ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... by Europeans (generally Portuguese and Spaniards) and Americans, on some secluded part of the coast. And in no instances are the parents and relatives known to sell their own children or people into slavery, except, indeed, in cases of base depravity, and except such miserable despots as the kings of Dahomi and Ashantee; neither are the heads of countries known to sell their own people; but like the marauding kidnapper, obtain them by ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... 'because he abode not in the truth.' When he says that he abode not in the truth, he certainly implied that he had once been in it; and when he calls him the father of a lie, he precludes his imputing to God the depravity of his nature, which originated wholly from himself. Though these things are delivered in a brief and rather obscure manner, yet they are abundantly sufficient to vindicate the majesty of God from every calumny."(65) Thus, in order to show that God is not the author of sin, Calvin assumes ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... give testimony. But it is sufficient, instar omnium, to behold the great critic, Mr Dennis, sorely lamenting it, even from the Essay on Criticism to this day of the Dunciad! 'A most notorious instance,' quoth he, 'of the depravity of genius and taste, the approbation this essay meets with.'[182] 'I can safely affirm, that I never attacked any of these writings, unless they had success infinitely beyond their merit. This, though an empty, has been a popular scribbler. The epidemic madness of the times has given him ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... departed as unceremoniously as they entered our mind—then I grant that it would be hard to make us responsible for such visitors. If we had no power over our own mental operations, it would seem as unjust to punish us for our delinquencies in these particulars as to censure us for the depravity of a resident of Asia or Africa. But can you defend such a position as this? Have you no power to determine what themes shall and what shall not employ your meditations? Are you the mere slave ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... present day to choose battles for his favourite topic, merely because they were battles, merely because so many myriads of troops were arrayed in them, and so many hundreds or thousands of human beings stabbed, hewed, or shot each other to death during them, would argue strange weakness or depravity of mind. Yet it cannot be denied that a fearful and wonderful interest is attached to these scenes of carnage. There is undeniable greatness in the disciplined courage, and in the love of honour, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... obscene, husky, full-fronted and heavy-chested, with a malign eye, a cat-like grip on life, and a genius for trickery and evil. There was neither faith nor trust in her. Her treachery alone could be relied upon, and her wild- wood amours attested her general depravity. Much of evil and much of strength were there in these, Batard's progenitors, and, bone and flesh of their bone and flesh, he had inherited it all. And then came Black Leclere, to lay his heavy hand on the bit of pulsating ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... his dressing-down without a whimper. He was too angry to cry. This Miss Prime took as a mark of especial depravity. In fact, the boy had been unable to discover any difference between an instructive and a vindictive whipping. It was perfectly clear in his guardian's mind, no doubt, but a cherry switch knows ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... greedy guests. But it was not upon this overthrow we stopped to look. It was upon something that mingled with it, dominated it, and made of this chaos only a setting to awful death. Janet's face, in all its natural hideousness and depravity, looked up from the floor beside this heap; and farther on, lay the twisted figure of him they called Hector, with something more than the seams of greedy longing round his wide-staring eyes and icy temples. Two in this room! and on the threshold of the one beyond ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... objection to prefer prodigality to avarice, in some few instances; but I appeal to your observation if you have not met, and often met, with the same disingenuousness, the same hollow-hearted insincerity, and disintegritive depravity of principle, in the hackneyed victims of profusion, as in the unfeeling children of parsimony. I have every possible reverence for the much talked-of world beyond the grave, and I wish that which piety believes, and virtue deserves, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... purer world ascends, To share the fellowship of sainted friends, May this sweet vision of the blest be thine, To trace how widely, with a guide divine. Thy active mind, while resident below, In soften'd hearts taught piety to grow, Aiding benighted souls to view the day, And drive depravity's dark clouds away: What bliss, to welcome in those realms of light Young angels! owning thou hast helped their flight, And from the Saviour of the world to hear "Those, who befriended earth—to ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... Writers of a neighbouring Nation; which now shall have an Opportunity to receive English Bullion in Exchange for its own Dross, which has so long passed current among us in Pieces abounding with all the Levities of its volatile Inhabitants.} The reigning Depravity of the Times has yet left Virtue many Votaries. Of their Protection you need not despair. May every head-strong Libertine whose Hands you reach, be reclaimed; and every tempted Virgin who reads you, imitate the Virtue, ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... own; his ingenuity is infernal. Whoever tries to forestall or appease him might better be at work in Augean stables; because, after all, we must admit that the facts of life are on his side. It is not intended that we shall be very comfortable. There is a terrible amount of total depravity in animate and inanimate things. From morning till night there is not an hour without its cross to carry. The weather thwarts us; servants, landlords, drivers, washerwomen, and bosom friends misbehave; clothes don't fit; teeth ache; stomachs get out of order; ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... in the distance was silent, Ratcliffe for the first time addressed her, and it was in that cold sarcastic indifferent tone familiar to habitual depravity, whose crimes are instigated by custom rather than by passion. "This is a braw night for ye, dearie," he said, attempting to pass his arm across her shoulder, "to be on the green hill wi' your jo." Jeanie extricated herself from his grasp, but ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... little truer if she had won him, but as it is I am richly content with it. Perhaps I am the more content because in the case of Kitty Morrow I find a concession to reality more entire than the case of Mrs. Hunter. She is of the heredity from which you would expect her depravity; but Kitty Morrow, who lets herself go so recklessly, is, for all one knows, as well born and as well bred as those other Philadelphians. In my admiration of her, as a work of art, however, I must not fail of justice to the higher beauty of Mary Fairthorne's ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... any country, but most of all in a monarchical and in aristocratic one, such manners can exist in the higher ranks, without inducing a total depravity of general thought, and perversion of the power of mind. Talent, often the most venal of venal things, follows in the wake of corruption. Covetous of gain, thirsting for patronage, it fans, instead of lowering, the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Lynn, gives in his Journal a sad, sad disclosure of total depravity which was exposed by one of these sudden church-awakenings, and the story is best told in the ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... astonished at you!' said Gashford, with a kind of meek severity. 'This is a very sad picture of female depravity.' ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... Amongst his irregularities, it must be reckoned that he is sometimes moral, and moral in a very sublime strain. But the general spirit and tendency of his works is mischievous,—and the more mischievous for this mixture: for perfect depravity of sentiment is not reconcilable with eloquence; and the mind (though corruptible, not complexionally vicious) would reject and throw off with disgust a lesson of pure and unmixed evil. These writers make even virtue ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in his evening reflections was as to what was going on west of the range, for Callahan knew through cloudy experience that what happens on one side of a mountain chain is no evidence as to what is doing on the other—and by species of warm weather depravity that night something was happening west ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... many other devices in every danger, by which to avoid death, if a man dares to do and say every thing. But this is not difficult, O Athenians! to escape death; but it is much more difficult to avoid depravity, for it runs swifter than death. And now I, being slow and aged, am overtaken by the slower of the two; but my accusers, being strong and active, have been overtaken by the swifter, wickedness. And now I depart, condemned by you to ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... murky, sullen November day Murglebed exhibits unimagined horrors of scenic depravity. It snarls at you malignantly. It is like a bit of waste land in Gehenna. There is a lowering, soap-suddy thing a mile away from the more or less dry land which local ignorance and superstition call the sea. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... what virtue was by abandoning her empire for this Villiers de l'Ile Adam, whose servant she would rather be than reign of Christendom. The English cardinal remonstrated with the pope that this love for one, in the heart of a woman who was the joy of all, was an infamous depravity, and that he ought with a brief in partibus, to annul this marriage, which robbed the fashionable world of its principal attraction. But the love of this poor woman, who had confessed the miseries of her life, was so sweet a thing, and so moved the most dissipated ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... associated by pious antiquity. Indeed, the past would seem to have lived with special reference to the edification of the future. Chinamen were abnormally virtuous in those golden days, barring the few unfortunates whom fate needed as warning examples of depravity for succeeding ages. Except for the fact that instruction as to a future life forms no part of the curriculum, a far-eastern education may be said to consist of Sunday-school every day in the week. For no occasion is lost by the erudite authors, even in the most worldly ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... services. Considerable sums of money are collected and expended here, employment is found for the idle, strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distributed. At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre is a religious centre of great power. Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven, Hell, and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are laid by; and few indeed of the community have the hardihood to withstand conversion. Back of this more formal religion, the Church often stands as a real conserver of morals, ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the three delegates had gone, he had struck his brow, exclaiming: "Wretch that I am!—that great and good fellow, the fairest of the sons of men!...what a black depravity must be in this heart—" he had underlooked in the mirror, and cut a face; "but ah, Hogarth! this heart is in your net; and I loved the ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... oblivion must hide from the tender gaze of the young and the innocent the harrowing scenes that brought misery on his home, ruin on his financial condition, and a deeper hue to the moral depravity of his blighted character. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... accumulated the first paltry hundreds, the trickery that made them thousands, the heartless sacrifice of self-respect that doubled and trebled the swelling store, were gloated over with a grin of delight. Transactions imbued with a depravity that made me shudder, were narrated with a chuckle; chicaneries of a depth and maliciousness positively devilish, were touched with a smirk. For this he had lied and cheated; for this his wretched body grew lean for want of food; for this all the world loathed him. In his youth ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... fro; agitated people became apparently insane; timid people collapsed; strong people pushed, and weak folk gave way. If any man should be sceptical in regard to the doctrine of the thorough depravity of the human heart, he can have his unbelief removed by going into and observing the conduct ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... from the mere form in which this phrase is put, that such a thing is of very rare occurrence, and that the violence and depravity spoken of offer all the stronger contrast to the general purity of the whole class, and are merely the result of the open and unreserved character ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... eyes of the early Protestants the Reformation was a return to primitive Christianity and its principal cause was the corruption of the church. That there was great depravity in the church as elsewhere cannot be doubted, but there are several reasons for thinking that it could not have been an important cause for the loss of so many of her sons. In the first place there is no good ground for believing that the moral condition ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... hand, in over-cultivated ages, when decay begins, an over-estimation of material things is wont to become general.(156) The mere servants of mammon, whether as political economists or as private individuals, may see their depravity faithfully reflected in communism as in a mirror. We should not overlook the fact that it is with whole nations as with the individual man who amasses his own fortune. He reaches the culminating point of his wealth generally after he has passed the prime of life. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... contingency of an unpresentable person seldom arose, for the proletariat did not swarm at the gates of St. Cecilia's. Out of its liberal income the church maintained a "mission" upon the East Side, where young curates wrestled with the natural depravity of the lower classes—meantime cultivating a soul-stirring tone, and waiting until they should be promoted to a real church. Society was becoming deferential to its religious guides, and would have been quite shocked ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... one who has borne a louder testimony than Traherne to the divine inheritances and spiritual possibilities of the new-born child, or who has more emphatically denied the fiction of total depravity: "I speak it in the presence of God," he says, "and of our Lord Jesus Christ; in my pure primitive Virgin Light, while my apprehensions were natural and unmixed, I cannot remember but that I was ten ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... excellence which he really possessed; and that his character was not unblemished proved only that no exertions could preserve him from the vices that are inherent in wealth and rank, and which flow from the spectacle of universal depravity. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... more years must, I am afraid, elapse before we get rid of Wych Street. It is full of quaint old Tudor houses, with tall gables, carved porches, and lattice-casements; but the picturesque appearance of these tenements compensates but ill for their being mainly dens of vice and depravity, inhabited by the vilest offscourings of the enormous city. Next to Napoli senza sole, Wych Street, Drury Lane, is, morally and physically, about the shadiest street ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... I heard her say. "Be a good boy, and give my love to Little Brown-Eyes." Then, as if to prove the immortal saying that there is no such thing as ultimate total depravity in the human atom, she leaned over to whisper the parting word: "Make good with her if you can, and want to, Bertie: I didn't mean it when I said I'd spoil your chances. Good-night and good-by." And with that the train moved ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... away of a small annoyance in the road of that hour's great work. For the end was justified beforehand between him and Hall. It was not a matter of vengeance, but of justice. This man had once attempted to take away his life by the most diabolical cruelty that human depravity could devise. ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... Italy would be as wholly unredeemed and unredeemable as you pretend that some parts of it are now. But I will tell you, Conte Grandi, you cannot walk across the street, in my country, without meeting a dozen men who would tremble at the idea of such depravity as an elopement." ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... appeal into his voice; but a sly contradiction of it showed faintly in his face, a hint that he took a crafty pleasure in dragging into the light the depravity he had kept in ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... express nature in its greatest perfection, I shall not endeavour to explain. The meaning I take to be this: Brother, when his fortune is inlarged, will scorn brother; for this is the general depravity of human nature, which, besieged as it is by misery, admonished as it is of want and imperfection, when elevated by fortune, will despise beings of nature ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... generally exposed to the contagion of crime in youth, and as they advance they are immersed in this contagion in prisons, which are the moral pest-houses in which law maintains the intense contagion of criminal depravity. Napoleon was an admirable subject for such contamination, and when we learn how he was reared amid the lawlessness and general scoundrelism of Corsica, we do not wonder that he became an imperial brigand. The low ethical standard of mankind, generally, and especially of historians, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... the true object of their pursuit, and by acts of atonement and self-denial, of which the conscious stars of heaven are the only created witnesses. The worst operation of dissolute indulgences on genius is not, perhaps, in producing depravity of heart or habits, for its pure plumes have a virtue about them that is a preservative against pollution; but in wearing out the frame, ruffling the temper, and depressing the spirits, and thus embittering as well as shortening a career that, even when most peaceful and placid, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... manhood, motherhood, fatherhood, have called forth the profoundest thought and speculation. From the contemplation of these strange phenomena sprang the esoteric doctrines of Egypt and the East, with their horrible accompaniments of vice and depravity; the same thoughts, low and terrible, hovered before the devotees of Moloch and Cybele, when Carthage sent her innocent boys to the furnace, a sacrifice to the king of gods, and Asia Minor offered up the virginity of her fairest daughters to the first-comer at ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... life; and that if the punishment of the least wicked be fearful beyond conception, all words and descriptions must be so far true, that they must fall short of the punishment that awaits the transcendantly wicked. Had 305 Milton stated either his ideal of virtue, or of depravity, as an individual or individuals actually existing? Certainly not! Is this representation worded historically, or only hypothetically? Assuredly the latter! Does he express it as his own wish that after death they should suffer ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... help and according to His Word; when, in fact, he had no conception of the first principles of the doctrine of Christ, and knew not the real nature of a holy life, but thought all others to be as himself, except in the degree of depravity and iniquity. This young man had thus grown to manhood without having learned that rudimental truth that sinners and saints differ not in degree but in kind; that if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation; yet the hard heart of such ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... creature whom he had rescued in any light of comparison with the young lady who was one day to be his wife. And yet, try as he might to drive her out, Sally kept her place in his thoughts. There was, apparently, some innate depravity in him. If a looking-glass had been handed to him at that moment, he would have been ashamed to look himself in ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... was front-paged on the newspapers and gibbeted in the pulpits as the shocking example of youthful depravity. He seems never to have had a fighting chance to become a man. He seems to have been robbed of his birthright from the cradle. Yet the father of this boy who has cost America millions in court and detention expenses was one of the greatest business ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... humiliating to him who uttered it, and a fatal example to those who heard; but mankind soon grew used to the new fashion. I pass over the rude barbarian ages, whose gross and inartistic lying offers no claim to respectful and sympathetic interest, and no excuse but the lame one of selfish depravity, common to the race. But with the inroads of civilization Life became complex, and Truth was found too simple and rigid to fit with all its varied intricacies. That is, when Truth is simple. "Don't you think my baby beautiful?" demands a fond parent. "No, I don't: far from ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... Villiers de l'Ile Adam, whose servant she would rather be than reign of Christendom. The English cardinal remonstrated with the pope that this love for one, in the heart of a woman who was the joy of all, was an infamous depravity, and that he ought with a brief in partibus, to annul this marriage, which robbed the fashionable world of its principal attraction. But the love of this poor woman, who had confessed the miseries of her life, was so sweet a thing, and so moved the most dissipated heart, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... and took no serious step in state affairs without consulting Ahura-mazda or the other gods by their mediation. The classical writers maintain that the Magi often cloaked monstrous vices under their apparent strictness, and it is possible that this was the case in later days, but even then moral depravity was probably rather the exception than the rule among them:*** the majority of the Magi faithfully observed the rules of honest living and ceremonial purity enjoined on them in the books handed down ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... his convictions, steeled by perils and endurance, calm, sagacious, resolute, grave even to severity, a valiant and redoubted soldier, Coligny looked abroad on the gathering storm and read its danger in advance. He saw a strange depravity of manners; bribery and violence overriding justice; discontented nobles, and peasants ground down with taxes. In the midst of this rottenness, the Calvinistic churches, patient and stern, were fast gathering to themselves the better life of the nation. Among and around ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Church as one to be dealt with. The priest has ever put a premium on pretense and hypocrisy. Nothing recommended a man more than humility and the acknowledgment that he was a worm of the dust. The ability to do and dare was in itself considered a proof of depravity. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... and had no means of finding out for themselves. But I had. Accordingly I went poking about among the foul alleys and fouler tenements of the Bend when they slept in their filth, sometimes with the policeman on the beat, more often alone, sounding the misery and the depravity of it to their depth. I think a notion of the purpose of it all crept into the office, even while I was only half aware of it myself, for when, after a year's service at the police office, I was taken with a longing for the open, as it were, and ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... the LOSS which the Town has sustaind by the Death of Dr Eliot & Dr Greenleafe. In Times so degenerate as these are, it is much to be lamented that Men of such Exemplary Piety and Virtue are taken away. I hope the Depravity of Manners is not so great as to exclude all Hopes of Childrens rising up and serving God and their Country in the Room of their Fathers. May Heaven grant us a Time ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... the more ready I was to sink in it altogether. But the chief point was that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me, but as though it were bound to be so. It was as though it were my most normal condition, and not in the least disease or depravity, so that at last all desire in me to struggle against this depravity passed. It ended by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... Yard, being then Pemberton's Yard. How the name of London 'Prentice Street came to be given to the delectable thoroughfare is one of "those things no fellow can understand." At one time there was a schoolroom there, the boys being taught good manners upstairs, while they could learn lessons of depravity below. With the anxious desire of putting the best face on everything that characterises the present local "fathers of the people," the London 'Prentice has been sent to the right-about, and the nasty dirty stinking thoroughfare ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... remains? The liberty of the press only; that sacred Palladium, which no influence, no power, no government, which nothing but the folly or the depravity, or the folly or the corruption, of a jury ever can destroy. And what calamities are the people saved from by having public communication kept open to them! I will tell you, gentlemen, what they are saved ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... try the prisoner, and requested the whole court to act as jury. It was a very sad case of youthful depravity—the criminal had carefully kept this one book, 'Somebody's Arithmetic,' or 'Mangnall's Questions,' to gloat over in secret; and even now was not at all penitent, but declared, when asked what he had to say for himself, that ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... teaches formally that poverty, crime, and war are the inevitable conditions of our social state; necessary evils, against which it would be folly to revolt. So, call it NECESSITY OF EVIL or ORIGINAL DEPRAVITY, it is at bottom ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... characteristics and customs as a Russian and a Turk. Personal experience inclines me to regard the Siberian native as immeasurably superior to his Alaskan neighbours,[67] both from a moral and physical point of view, for the Eskimo is fully as vicious as the Tchuktchi, who frankly boasts of his depravity, while the former cloaks it beneath a mantle of hypocrisy not wholly unconnected with a knowledge of the white man and his methods. But every cloud has its silver lining, and it is comforting to think that even this rapacious and dissipated race can occasionally ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... very evident you are not equally generous in surrendering the amiability of Timon, along with the depravity of Iago, to the arsenal of feminine weapons. What corroding mildew of discontent has fallen from Mrs. Parkman's velvet dress, and rusted the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... impulse, after reading Mrs. Catherick's extraordinary narrative, was to destroy it. The hardened shameless depravity of the whole composition, from beginning to end—the atrocious perversity of mind which persistently associated me with a calamity for which I was in no sense answerable, and with a death which I had risked my life in trying to avert—so disgusted me, that I was on the point of ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... great part which war has played in human history, in art, in poetry, is not, as Rousseau maintains, an arraignment of the human heart, not necessarily the blazon of human depravity, but a testimony to man's limitless capacity for devotion to other ends than existence for existence' sake—his pursuit of ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... namely, Caesar and his spouse, their granddaughter, a jet-black damsel of twenty, and the boy before alluded to. The blacks were the remnants of a race of negroes which had been entailed on his estate from Mr. Wharton's maternal ancestors, who were descended from the early Dutch colonists. Time, depravity, and death had reduced them to this small number; and the boy, who was white, had been added by Miss Peyton to the establishment, as an assistant, to perform the ordinary services of a footman. Caesar, after first using the precaution to place himself under the ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... from England is so very inhuman, that some better and more benevolent measure ought to be adopted. The lives of these unfortunate victims of depravity ought surely to be regarded with as much care as those of any other class of his Majesty's subjects; the contrary of this has, however, been too frequently the case, and some of the masters of the transports who have been entrusted with these captives, have treated ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... in the Puranas and other books, and show from them that there was anything more than physical and social relief to men intended by them or accomplished through them. I have yet to find, in those narratives, the conception of human sin and moral depravity and of the purpose of the incarnation to break the fetters of sin and to bring spiritual light and moral beauty to those among whom it manifested itself. The gulf which thus stands between the Hindu ideal of incarnation and the real incarnations which are recorded in Hindu ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... lowest group consists of persons who, believing in the general truths of Evangelical religion, accommodate them to their passions, and are capable, by gradual increase in depravity, of any crime or violence. I am not going to include these in our present study. Trumbull ("Red Gauntlet"), Trusty Tomkyns ("Woodstock"), Burley ("Old Mortality"), are ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... profession, namely to contribute some work of permanent value to its literature." At that early period a discriminating critic bears testimony, "that his piety, pure, deep, tender, serene and warm, took hold of positive principles of light and beneficence, not the negative ones of darkness and depravity, and—himself a child of light—he preached the religion of ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... some time, and being just about to set off for Bucks, I received your letter of this morning, and am at a loss which to admire most, the depravity of your heart, or the weakness of your understanding. Your quoting General Arnold's testimony to vindicate your own falsehood is perfectly consistent. You shall hear further from me on my return from ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... savages as much harm as we might have done, it was not from timidity but from humanity, and in order not to shed human blood uselessly. For after all, what good would it have done us to have slaughtered some of these barbarians, whose crime was not the effect of depravity and wickedness, but of an ardent and irresistible desire to ameliorate their condition? It must be allowed also that the interest, well-understood, of the partners of the Northwest Company, was opposed to too strongly marked acts of hostility ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... been completely devoured, had not one of our Teachers come on the scene next day, and, unaided, dug a grave and buried her." And then the writer lets in the lurid light of the Nether Pit in this closing picture: "One instance of the disgusting depravity of the people shocked me much. A man, who even attends Service in the district where the above dreadful affair took place, on seeing the poor mutilated form of the woman, addressed it thus—'If only the Gospel had not reached my Village, how I would have enjoyed a ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... few were essentially "bad." When, however, they did happen to be "bad," they were very bad indeed. And these lead-pencil inscriptions they left behind them were the frightful testimony of their innate depravity. ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... educators, who constantly have on their tongues such words as evolution, individuality, and natural tendencies, but do not heed the new commandments in which they say they believe. They continue to educate as if they believed still in the natural depravity of man, in original sin, which may be bridled, tamed, suppressed, but not changed. The new belief is really equivalent to Goethe's thoughts given above, i.e., that almost every fault is but a hard shell enclosing the germ of virtue. Even men of modern times still follow in ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... "Fraternize not with the ignorant and wicked, for he will shame thee and not adorn thee,—nor with the liar, for if thou do good, he will hide it, and if evil, he will publish it;" and again, "There is help for everything but death: all may be mended, save natural depravity, and everything may be warded off, except Fate." As for the reward thou promisest me, I liken thee therein to the serpent that fled from the charmer. A man saw her affrighted and said to her, "What ails thee, O serpent?" Quoth she, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... progress. The savage and the barbarian are hopelessly ignorant, and therefore weak and wretched, since ignorance is the chief source of man's misery. "My people," says the prophet, "are destroyed for lack of knowledge." From ignorance rather than from depravity have sprung the most appalling crimes, the most pernicious vices. In darkness of mind men have worshiped senseless material things, have deified every cruel and carnal passion; at the dictate of unenlightened conscience they have oppressed, laid waste, and murdered; for lack of ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... sullies its weakness or debases its folly. I do not say the love is better for being thus solely the creature of imagination: I say only, so it is in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances of girlish infatuation. In later life, it is different: in the experienced woman, forwardness is always depravity. ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Emperor Charles VI. Many regretted that he was not taken, and made to suffer the penalty due for such a crime, and the melancholy incident became a pulpit theme over a great part of Scotland, being held up as a proper warning to youth to beware of such haunts of vice and depravity, the nurses of all that is precipitate, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... descended until at sixty-eight he became a suicide. If eight hundred years did not make antediluvians any better, but only made them worse, the ages of eternity could have no effect except prolongation of depravity. ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... gratitude for any so-called leniency of the North, no repentance for the war, no desire for humiliation, for sackcloth and ashes, and no confession of wrong. The insistence of the radicals upon obtaining a confession of depravity only made things much worse. Scarcely a measure of Congress during reconstruction was designed or ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... thrown a sinister shade upon all her previous life. Looking back upon the preliminaries which led to such wild confusion and misery, it was not unnatural that a man so absolute in judgment should perceive in the most innocent bygone details indications of depravity. It is one (whether good or bad we will not say) consequence of the use and practice of what may, to use a modern word, be called society, that men are less disposed to believe in the existence of monstrous and hideous evil, that ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... never had anything act like that before," cried Mollie irritably. "I'd like to give the person that wrote about the 'depravity of inanimate things' a medal. The old tire's got a mean ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... as necessary as address and ability. Though human nature is often degenerate, and corrupts itself by many inventions, yet it usually retains to the last an esteem for excellence. But even if we arrive at such an extreme degree of depravity as to have lost our native reverence for virtue, yet a regard to our own interest and safety will lead us to apply for aid, in all important transactions, to men whose integrity is unimpeached. When we choose an assistant or a partner, our ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... likely have bidden him compromise the Duchess by responding to her show of friendliness by passionate demonstrations; but as it was, Armand de Montriveau came away from the ball, loathing human nature, and even then scarcely ready to believe in such complete depravity. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... most communities, in killing the tap-root of the mystical tree of conversion—i.e., the tenet of total hereditary depravity, but the tree still stands erect, and men claim that a wonderful outpouring of the Spirit of God has, in many days and nights, resulted in 100 or 200 or 300 conversions. But what is conversion? It is lexically defined "to turn upon, to turn towards." In a moral sense, "to turn ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... myself, I would rather have written 'The Mad Mother' than all the works of all the Bolingbrokes and Sheridans, those brilliant meteors, that have been exhaled from the morasses of human depravity since the loss ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... fault, misdeed, vice, criminality, guilt, offense, viciousness, delinquency, ill-doing, transgression, wickedness, depravity, immorality, ungodliness, wrong, evil, iniquity, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... that there is a sad want of harmony in Lord Byron's verses. Is it not unnatural to be always connecting very great intellectual power with utter depravity? Does such a combination often really exist ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... their High Mightinesses the States-General. Moreover, it was raining pamphlets and libels against Barneveld and his supporters every day, and the stories which grave burghers and pious elders went about telling to each other, and to everybody who would listen to them, about the Advocate's depravity, were wonderful to hear. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... (afterwards viscount Kenmuir) was born about the year 1599. He received a reasonable measure of education, and yet, through the circumstance of his birth, the corruption of the age, but above all the depravity of nature, and want of restraining grace in his younger years, he became somewhat irreligious and profane, which, when he arrived at manhood, broke out into more gross acts of wickedness, and yet all the ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... "In this general depravity, when even the Pulpit has lost great part of its weight, and the Clergy are considered as a body of interested men, the Author thought he should be able to answer it to his own heart, be the success what it would, if he threw in his mite ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... and kindred in the far-distant States! Admirable exhibit of journalistic enterprise! The Hong Kong papers coming over in course of another week were full of it, and of appropriate comment on the remarkable depravity of the American race, and Chicago journals, notably the Palladium, bristled with editorial explosions over the oft-repeated acts of outrage and brutality on part of the American officer to the friendless ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... the lamentable state of things, we are surprised to find that Mime writing was practised by two men of vigorous talent and philosophic culture, whose fragments, so far from betraying any concession to the prevailing depravity, are above the ordinary tone of ancient comic morality. They are the knight D. LABERIUS (106-43 B.C.) and PUBLILIUS SYRUS (fl. 44 B.C.), an enfranchised Syrian slave. It is probable that Caesar lent his countenance to these writers in the hope of raising their art. His patronage was valuable; ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... are contentedly browsing, munching the dry, thorny herbage with a satisfaction that is evident a mile away. From casual observations along the route, I am inclined to think a camel not far behind a goat in the depravity of its appetite; a camel will wander uneasily about over a greensward of moist, succulent grass, scanning his surroundings in search of giant thistles, frost-bitten tumble-weeds, tough, spriggy camel thorns, and odds and ends of unpalatable vegetation ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... of any grade of desert in intellect or character, can climb to any public distinction, no matter what, in America, without first grovelling down upon the earth, and bending the knee before this monster of depravity; when any private excellence is safe from its attacks, and when any social confidence is left unbroken by it, or any tie of social decency and honor is held in the least regard; when any man in that free country has freedom of opinion, and presumes to think for himself, and speak ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... to get up the steps of the school-house. He was intending to show it to Tim Biggs and make him angry, and to the other scholars and make them laugh, and thus ferment a prejudice against Eloise, for no reason at all except the natural depravity ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... the promised confession; and both Mammy and Jane were rendered almost dumb by these dreadful instances of depravity. Such secret and unsuspected visits to the store-room pantry—such conspiracies against locks and bolts—such scaling of walls, and climbing in at windows, were never heard of before. I rather suspected Fred to have drawn upon his imagination for instances ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... alternate scarcity and comparative abundance of provisions;—the arrival or departure of ships from the harbour;—the commission of the first murder in the colony, and other sad accounts of human depravity and its punishment;—the gradual improvement and extension of the colony;—the first sale by auction of a farm of twenty-five acres for the sum of 13l.:—these and similar subjects occupy the history ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... singular habit of putting on mourning for every person summoned to such departure. On the contrary, a brave belief in death has been assuredly held by many not ignoble persons, and it is a sign of the last depravity in the Church itself, when it assumes that such a belief is inconsistent with either purity of character, or energy of hand. The shortness of life is not, to any rational person, a conclusive reason for wasting the space of it which may be granted him; ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... respect they are consistent with the circumstances of the case, like the tales of the Book of Sindibad, from which the frame of the Ten Wazirs was imitated, and in which the Wazirs relate stories showing the depravity and profligacy of women and that no reliance should be placed on their unsupported assertions, and to these the lady opposes equally cogent stories setting forth the wickedness and perfidy of men. Closely resembling the frame-story ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... abrogation, on the part of the superior body of citizens, of all responsibility for, and direct interest in, the affairs and comfort of the lower orders, has come Pauperism, Social Instability, and a degree of misery and depravity among the poorest of the masses, never before known in the history of the world, all things being taken into consideration. It is a well-known saying of Political Economists, that the rich are daily growing richer, and the poor poorer. It might be added ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... their Constitutions, they must of Consequence be often as opposite as the most absolute Contraries in Nature: A Knave loves and delights in Scandal, Detraction, Infamy, in blasting, ruining his Neighbour's Character, because these are consonant to the Depravity of humane Nature, and in themselves vile: Upon the very same Account an honest Man abominates them all, with ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... when Americans first awakened to the universal corruption of our politics, we used to attribute it to the "ignorant foreign vote." Turn to Lecky's "Democracy and Liberty" and you will see how reformers twenty years ago explained our political depravity. But we probed deeper, and discovered that the purely American communities, such as Rhode Island, were the most corrupt of all. It dawned upon us that wherever there was a political boss paying bribes on election day, there was a captain of industry furnishing the money for the bribes, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... attempted by means of charms and incantations to raise the devil. But throughout all this fearful period the delusion of the criminals was as great as that of the judges. Depraved persons who in ordinary times would have been thieves or murderers, added the desire of sorcery to their depravity, sometimes with the hope of acquiring power over their fellows, and sometimes with the hope of securing impunity in this world by the protection of Satan. One of the persons executed at the first burning, a prostitute, was heard repeating the exorcism which was supposed to have the power of raising ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... populated with souls bound on toward an eternity. This passion legitimately indulged to the glory of God is one of the most sacred, holy and pure. Since it is the highest and noblest of all the faculties of our being, its abuse must be the very lowest and unclean in the depravity of man. ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... Perhaps the worthy school-master knew his daughter; if so he was the only one. Never did so consummate a hypocrisy minister to so profound a perversity, and a depravity so inconceivable in a young and seemingly innocent girl. If, at the bottom of her heart, she thought herself the most wretched of women, there was nothing of it apparent—it was a well-kept secret. She knew how to show ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... the Critick, the latter is the more ridiculous Office: And by that Shakespeare suffers most. For the natural Veneration which we have for him, makes us apt to swallow whatever is given us as his, and set off with Encomiums; and hence we quit all suspicions of Depravity: On the contrary, the Censure of so divine an Author sets us upon his Defence; and this produces an exact Scrutiny and Examination, which ends in finding out and discriminating the true ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... workmanship in itself was not visible to him; and if he could have been made to understand it as a European understands, he would have remained none the less convinced that such application of genius to production signified social depravity. And gradually, in the luxurious life of the capital itself, he found proof for the belief suggested to him by the art and the literature of the period. He visited the pleasure-resorts, the theatres, the opera; he saw with the eyes of an ascetic and a soldier, and wondered ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... dissipation. Sex is like eating. Who would eat if he didn't have to? To say you enjoy a meal is carnal. To say that you derive some sense of ecstasy from paternal and maternal desires is a confession of depravity. Sex at the best ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... Falconer, with sunken head, walked out of the garret in the silence of despair. She went slowly down the steep stair, supporting herself against the wall, her round-toed shoes creaking solemnly as she went, took refuge in the ga'le-room, and burst into a violent fit of weeping. For such depravity she was not prepared. What a terrible curse hung over her family! Surely they were all reprobate from the womb, not one elected for salvation from the guilt of Adam's fall, and therefore abandoned ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... (heard by Mamma). After the Catechism, a hymn to be learnt. After the repetition of this hymn, arithmetic, caligraphy, the use of the globes. At noon, a decorous walk with Papa, who for their benefit discourses on the General Depravity of Mankind in all Countries after the Fall, occasionally pausing by the way to point for them some moral of Nature. After a silent dinner, the little girls sew, under the supervision of Mamma, or of ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... wholly destitute of just notions. Amongst his irregularities, it must be reckoned that he is sometimes moral, and moral in a very sublime strain. But the general spirit and tendency of his works is mischievous,—and the more mischievous for this mixture: for perfect depravity of sentiment is not reconcilable with eloquence; and the mind (though corruptible, not complexionally vicious) would reject and throw off with disgust a lesson of pure and unmixed evil. These writers make even virtue ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... times laud the Arcadian innocence of the inhabitants of Otaheite. In both these pictures the colouring is more vivid than true. When nations, wearied with mental enjoyments, behold nothing in the refinement of manners but the germ of depravity, they are pleased with the idea, that in some distant region, in the first dawn of civilization, infant society enjoys pure and perpetual felicity. To this sentiment Tacitus owed a part of his success, when he sketched for the Romans, subjects ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... and depravity of heart, of which Mr. Poe was generally accused, seem to us referable altogether to this reversed phase of his character. Under that degree of intoxication which only acted upon him by demonizing his sense of truth and right, he doubtless said and did much that was wholly ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... delay, the Irish began to break into 'torying' (plundering). 'The tories fly out and increase. What strange people, not to starve in peace.' To be inclined to plunder under such circumstances, with so gracious a Government, must be held to be a proof of great natural depravity, as well as of a peculiar incapacity to respect, or even to understand, the ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... the day before, with the fiendish depravity of a mischief-making child, had set the match to a fuse of gunpowder all ready for it down ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... had just left on the morning of this great wapinshaw, they were charged—awful picture of depravity!—with the theft of a silver spoon and a nightgown. Could it be expected that while the whole country swarmed with robbers of every description, such a rare opportunity for plunder should be lost by rogues—that among a thousand men, even though fighting for religion, there should not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Devil take it all! was he still dreaming? A subtle odour came wafting from the rustling silk of her attire, a breath of depravity, as though hailing from the corrupt life of some big city; a bewildering, insinuating atmosphere, that had of a sudden overpowered the delicious freshness of hay ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... an admirable companion in Alfred. The boy is not naturally like a beast, unable to restrain his passions, a bit more than the girl. To men as to women the power to control themselves comes of the determination. There are cases of natural depravity, of course, but they are not peculiar to either sex; and as the girl may inherit the father's vices, so may the boy have his mother to thank for his virtues. Depravity is oftener acquired than inherited. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... in Hindustan "it never seems to have entered the heads of the legislators, or people, that anything natural could be offensively obscene; a singularity which pervades all their writings and conversation, but is no proof of depravity in their morals" ("Asiatic Researches," vol. i., p. 255). Gross injustice is sometimes done to ancient creeds by contemplating them from a modern point of view; in those days every power of Nature ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... disposition, I am heartily sorry to find that his endeavours have not met with that successful issue which their good fortune in the beginning seemed to promise. Indeed, the circumstance of his espousing that cause was so uncommon and romantic and the depravity of the human heart so universal, that some people, unacquainted with his real character, imagined his views were altogether selfish; and some were not wanting, who affirmed he was a mere adventurer. Nevertheless, I must do him the justice to own, I have heard some of the most virulent of ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... benevolence, and many other virtues, which appear in their highest ravings, although after a wild incoherent manner; while others on the contrary, discover in every word and action the utmost baseness and depravity of human minds; which infallibly they possessed in the same degree, although perhaps under a better regulation, before ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... intoxicated through the lust of the eye; artists who desire to regain a lost sobriety of vision; journalists who find stuff for leader copy in the blue despatches that are posted here; Bohemians and loungers of every station, typical of every degree of sham dignity and equally sham depravity. They all intermingle in manicoloured waves. It is the mad ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... stolen and put on the market, and that after warm adherence to her brother-in-law, Ludovico il Moro, until he was ruined, she should have turned to court the victor.[2266] It is not strange that the age became marked by complete depravity of public and private morals, that the great men are enigmas as to character and purpose, and that they are demonic in action. The sack of Rome put an end to the epoch by a catastrophe which was great enough to ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... upon his acute conscience and his nice sense of honor. He felt that here was a chance to wreak vengeance upon Dumont—or rather, as he put it to himself, to bring Dumont to an accounting for his depravity. Just as Dumont maintained with himself a character of honesty by ignoring all the dubious acts which his agents were forced to do in carrying out his orders, so Herron kept peace with a far more sensitive conscience by never permitting ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... grieved and scandalized. He looks at you as a teetotal lady of the Anti-Gambling League would look at her nephew if he offered to toss her for whiskies. He follows you with his glare of outraged propriety till you shrink behind Church and sneak away, with an indescribable feeling of personal depravity previously unknown. Why should this pharisaical little bird make one feel a criminal? As a matter of fact, he is nothing but a raffish fly-by-night himself; and his pious horror is assumed, I believe, as much to keep his eyes ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... body of doctrine that might be called the Hindu creed. The only common measure of Hindus is that they employ brahmans in their religious ceremonies, and even that does not hold universally. A saying of their own is, "On two main points all sects agree—the sanctity of the cow and the depravity of women." In contrast to Hindus in this respect of the absence of a standard creed, Mahomedans call themselves kitabi or possessing a book, since in the Koran they do possess such a canon. In the words of Mahomed, Christians and Jews ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... threw themselves upon weaker, more moral, more peaceful races (perhaps trading or cattle-rearing communities), or upon old mellow civilizations in which the final vital force was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity. At the commencement, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical power—they were more COMPLETE men (which at every point also implies the ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of her attractions, such as they at present shone, she appealed to the decision of her minister, who consulted her own satisfaction and interest, by flattering the other's vanity and resentment; and so unaccountable did the depravity of our hero's judgment appear to this conceited dame, that she began to believe there was some mistake in the person, and to hope that Wilhelmina's gallant was not in reality her professed admirer, Mr. Fathom, but rather one of his fellow-lodgers, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... other topics they disputed with great acrimony. M. Fauvel, the French consul, who has passed thirty years at Athens, frequently declared in my hearing, that the Greeks do not deserve to be emancipated, reasoning on the ground of their national and individual depravity—while he forgot that such depravity is to be attributed to causes which can only be removed by the measures ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... always laughed at marriage as a dull depravity permitted to the respectable classes! I who always maintained that man's whole duty to woman—meaning his mistresses—that a man's duty to a woman is liberally discharged when he has made a settlement ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... that famous island[32]. About 500 years before the time of our Saviour, the heathen king of Tenacarii, who ruled over a great part of the east, banished his son and heir Vigia Rajah, for the wickedness and depravity of his conduct. The young man put to sea with 700 dissipated persons like himself, and landed at the port of Preature, between Trincomalee, and Jafnapatam, in the island of Ceylon, which was not then inhabited, but abounded ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... orthodox, who cannot break bread with the rest, for fear, though the food be kosher, the plates have been defiled. They brought their own to the feast, and sit at their own table, stern and justified. Did they but know what depravity is harbored in the impish mind of the girl yonder, who plans to hang her stocking overnight by the window! There is no fireplace in the tenement. Queer things happen over here, in the strife between the old and the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... condemned, and they were not executed. All those who were not tried in January, were discharged by order of the governor, "and never," says Mr. Hutchinson, "has such a jail delivery been known in New England. And never was there given a more melancholy proof of the degree of depravity of which man is capable when the public passions ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... club desired that the Swiss should be deprived of their arms and dismissed from the Quirinal; the Pope complied. The club then asked that Galletti should be named general of the carbineers; and he was appointed. "Such was the poltroonery or such the depravity of consciences that no journal would or dared denounce the murder. But why do I speak of denouncing? The murder was honored with illuminations and festivities in numerous cities, and not in these States only, but beyond ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... precipices. He that rushes in his sledge down the artificial ice-hills of St. Petersburgh, skims along not more swiftly than Jennings, from the altitude of infant innocence, had sheered into the depths of full-grown depravity; but even he can fall, and reach, with startling suddenness, a ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 'tis his own Fault, if he does not employ them aright; but how does it appear, that such a Power only, can render Man a whit better, or more a moral Agent, than he is, or would be, without it? If Inclination to Virtue, must precede every truly virtuous Action; and Man's Depravity under the Fall, be such as prevents his ever having such good Inclinations, his natural Ability to do Good, must needs be a mere Joke and a Cypher. Just the same as, on the other hand, would be, the strongest Inclinations to Virtue, and no natural Power of complying with ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... which, while it evinced the delicacy of the ladies, gave opportunity for many lively sallies from the gentlemen. I saw the same sort of thing repeated on different occasions at least a dozen times; e.g. a young lady is employed in making a shirt, (which it would be a symptom of absolute depravity to name), a gentleman enters, and presently begins the sprightly dialogue with "What are ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... many murderers in the mines. In fact, nearly all the life men are there. Some of them speak of their crimes with a bravado simply astonishing, showing their utter depravity. Others, admitting their guilt, say but little of details. The following will give the reader some idea of the stories that greeted my ears almost daily, and led me to conclude that the coal mines of the penitentiary are not inhabited exclusively by Sunday-school ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... incitements to the pursuit of excellence; there are no rivals to contend with; and therefore there is no improvement.... The heart may be more pure and uncorrupted in solitude than when exposed to the influences of the depravity of the world; but the benefit of virtuous examples is equal to the detriment of vicious ones, and both are equally lost." The "Domestic Intelligence" of this number is as follows: "The lady of Dr. Winthrop Brown, a son and Heir. Mrs. Hathorne's cat, Seven Kittens. We hear that both of ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... story of Eden, the creation of man and then immediately the fall of man and the resulting doctrine of total depravity, this has been taken away. That man was made in the image of God, and then, inside of a few days, fell into the hands of the Power of Evil, and that since that day he has been the legitimate subject here ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... and seemed quite oblivious to everything about him. New York, reflected Tom, with something like a shudder, must be a terribly wicked place! And then, while he was still striving to discern signs of depravity under the gentle and kindly exterior of the elderly confidence-man, a young woman, leading a little boy of some three or four years of age and bearing many bundles, hurried up to "Four-Fingered Phillips," spoke, helped him to his feet and guided him away toward the train-shed. Tom sighed. ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the dusky blight would remain, and their lives would be lives of misery. Here and there an individual, irritated beyond endurance, would throw it off in anger, plunging probably into what would be deemed deeper abysses of depravity. Hawthorne's way was the best, for he contrived, by an exquisite process, best known to himself, to transmute this heavy moral burden into the very substance of the imagination, to make it evaporate in the light and charming fumes of artistic production. But Hawthorne, of course, was exceptionally ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... prudence and wise precautions, it substituted superstitious forms and childish practices; it enervated the courage of the brave by apprehensions grounded on puns, and encouraged the wicked, by making them lay to the charge of a planet those evils which only proceeded from their own depravity. ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... enjoyment. It is the experienced impossibility of concealing the attractions of vice from the younger part of the poor in great cities which exposes them to so many causes of demoralisation. All this proceeds not from any unwonted or extraordinary depravity in the character of these victims of licentiousness, but from the almost irresistible nature of the temptations to which the poor are exposed. The rich, who censure their conduct, would in all probability yield as rapidly as they have done to the influence of similar causes. There is a certain degree ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... in water; people declared that in the middle of the night he would go and dig up the dead animals and strip them of their skin. His father, it was said, had gone as a boy to give his uncle a helping hand. As an example of the boy's depravity, it was said that when the rope would not tighten round the neck of a man who was being hung, he would climb up the gallows, drop down on to the unfortunate man's shoulder, and ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... that is scarcely to be wondered at, when so many of those who are called ladies of taste and fashion, strange as it may seem, like them the better for it;—but I hope, you and Mr. Loveyet are exceptions to such depravity. ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... infernal. Whoever tries to forestall or appease him might better be at work in Augean stables; because, after all, we must admit that the facts of life are on his side. It is not intended that we shall be very comfortable. There is a terrible amount of total depravity in animate and inanimate things. From morning till night there is not an hour without its cross to carry. The weather thwarts us; servants, landlords, drivers, washerwomen, and bosom friends misbehave; clothes don't fit; teeth ache; stomachs get out of order; newspapers ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Saviour. Its avowed hostility to definite doctrine, to what is denounced as dogma, the dreamy sentimentalism characteristic of the system, the ignoring to a great extent of the terrible facts of man's depravity and guilt, and the coquetting with Vedism, do little towards bringing its adherents to the feet of Jesus. The Brahmists used at one time to taunt us with our divisions, but for a long time they have had two separate Sumajes, composed respectively of Conservatives and Liberals. In consequence ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... endeavoured to give the ladies an opportunity of seeming to discard me; and that I never forsook a mistress for larger fortune, or brighter beauty, but because I discovered some irregularity in her conduct, or some depravity in her mind; not because I was charmed by another, but because I ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... said Hetty, lightly; but the lightness of tone had a certain something of constraint in it. This incident was one of those inexplicably perverse acts of Fate which make one almost believe sometimes in the depravity of spirits, if not in that of men. When Dr. Eben had left home that morning, Hetty had ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... of this king excites in the mind a sensation of horror;—and tho' it required the overwhelming evidence of human depravity furnished by the French revolution, to make the author of the "Historic Doubts," believe his crimes possible, the concurrent testimonies both of Lancastrian and Yorkist Chroniclers, too well demonstrate them. Tho' the latter may have endeavoured to soften the picture, and Shakespear may have ...
— A Walk through Leicester - being a Guide to Strangers • Susanna Watts
... passions had consumed themselves to dust, and to whom the relief of tears was denied, passes all calculation. This was not the worst. There was created in the minds of many of these enthusiasts a pernicious and absurd association between intellectual power and moral depravity. From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbour, and to love ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and to the natural depravity of flesh and blood is due the discord and disagreement of men in this world. Let one become conscious of personal superiority in point of uprightness, learning, skill or natural ability, or let him become aware of his ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... and, though you may not conquer at once, your labors will eventually be crowned with success." But another voice said: "The Marquis was your benefactor, the Marquise filled your mother's place. Had it not been for them you would have been reared in shame, in ignorance and in depravity. You would never have known parental tenderness, the happiness of a home or the comforts and luxuries that have surrounded you from your childhood. Is it too much to ask that you should silence the pleadings of your heart in order not to destroy their hopes?" The first voice retorted: ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... their heads and wrap it around as tightly as she could with a string, and then, catching hold of this "topknot," she would pull with all her might to bring up the palate. The unlucky little "nig" in the meanwhile kept up the most unearthly yells, for so great was the depravity among them that they had rather have their palates down than up. Keeping their "palate locks" tied was a source of great trouble ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... mind more restive; and the longer restrained, the more headlong is the wild gallop into which the chafed spirit at last breaks. He who trembled at a profane word, becomes an accomplished swearer; he whose modesty was most retiring is foremost to glory in early depravity; he whose hand was ever ready to relieve the poor, while his heart sympathized in their sorrows, becomes the wanton spoiler and marauder for the sake of a bold vaunt; he who shrunk from the approach of profligate misleaders, now volunteers to harden new comers in the ways of ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... the suggestion that he was familiar with the pistols used in the duel. To convince the jury that he was not to be believed, the opposing counsel then told them that he had once pawned a watch belonging to somebody else. When the judge expressed himself shocked at such depravity, de Beauvallon, says a report, "hung his head ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... melancholy enough before, but a slight compression of the lips indicated that she had received the full effect. Certain degrees of badness in jokes stamp the joker as a natural inferior in the eyes of even the most rabid of social levelers. Scarcely any possible exhibition of depravity gives quite the sickening sense of disappointment in the perpetrator imparted by a genuinely bad or stale joke. Two or more similar sensations coming near together are multiplied by mutual reverberations so as to be much more impressive than if they occurred ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... The room smelt close and unwholesome; the walls were dirt-discoloured; and the ceiling blackened. There was an old smoky bust over the mantel-shelf, and a dusty clock above the dock—the only thing present, that seemed to go on as it ought; for depravity, or poverty, or an habitual acquaintance with both, had left a taint on all the animate matter, hardly less unpleasant than the thick greasy scum on every inanimate object ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... with money who wanted to educate their sons sent them out, at what seems to us a very tender age, to travel and tramp the earth alone. They were remittance-men who shifted from university to university, and took lessons in depravity, being educated by ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... His eulogy of his mistress is loyal. Against it may be set the words of the Procureur de la Republique, M. Delegorgue: "Never has a more thorough-paced, a more hideous monster been seated in the dock of an assize court. This woman is the personification of falsehood, depravity, cowardice and treachery. She is worthy of the supreme penalty." The jury were not of this opinion. They preferred to regard Mme. Fenayrou as playing a secondary part to that of her husband. They accorded in both her case and that of Lucien extenuating circumstances. The woman ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... epistle, or by any sort of will, if ever he has been convicted of being a Manichaean, Phrygian, or Priscillianist, and in this case the same order is to be followed as in the grades above stated; and we do not permit sons to succeed as heirs unless they forsake the paternal depravity; for we grant forgiveness of the offence to those repenting. We will that slaves be without harm if, rejecting their sacrilegious master, they pass over to the Catholic Church by a more faithful service. Property on which a congregation of men of this sort assemble, in case the owner, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... "Every one," she ran on in the heat of her resentment, "every one, that is, who should decide, agrees it's magnificent. They were frightfully lucky to get it—Dodge's finest work." She wrote at once to Pleydon commanding his presence and expressing her contempt of such depravity of opinion. To her surprise he was undisturbed, apparently, by ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and merriment. The king endeavored to be merry; but the peculiar deep tone of that messenger of woe still sounded in his ears; and, with all his efforts, he could not forget it. In the midst of his depravity and wickedness, he still at times had some dread of that God whom he daily insulted. He sought to drown his unpleasant thoughts in mixed wines, but the King of Judah felt a presentiment of some awful calamity ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... back, acts upon the same principles, or falls into the same degeneracy. Many families carry with them all their decency of conduct, purity of morals, and respect of religion; but these are scarce, the power of example is sometimes irresistible. Even among these back-settlers, their depravity is greater or less, according to what nation or province they belong. Were I to adduce proofs of this, I might be accused of partiality. If there happens to be some rich intervals, some fertile bottoms, in those ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... is over and that progress towards recovery has begun, or the remembrance of a father's love is rekindled in the heart of the wanderer. And thus a man who has been roused to see his moral guilt, as well as moral depravity—to see his dread and terrible danger—may well find unutterable peace the very moment he believes that there is for him deliverance from the evil, and forgiveness with God, "that He may be feared"—or ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... who ruin and enslave their country in all forms of the law. But this is not all. Warning is, in ordinary cases, the principal end of punishment; but it is not the only end. To remove the offender, to preserve society from those dangers which are to be apprehended from his incorrigible depravity, is often one of the ends. In the case of such a knave as Wild, or such a ruffian as Thurtell, it is a very important end. In the case of a powerful and wicked statesman, it is infinitely more important; so important, as alone to justify the utmost severity, even though it were certain ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... misfortune of a man like ourselves. Such an event, therefore, will be neither pitiful nor terrible. There remains, then, the character between these two extremes,—that of a man who is not eminently good and just,-yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous,—a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... Trot, but without her cat, The Gossip was hunting all Tringham thorough, As if she meant to canvass the borough, Trumpet in hand, or up to the cavity;— And, sure, had the horn been one of those The wild Rhinoceros wears on his nose, It couldn't have ripped up more depravity! ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... confidential strain in which most of the conference had been carried—"between ourselves, my dear Frederic, I am never quite easy with these patterns to the rest of human-kind. I should even prefer a tiny vein of depravity ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... prostitutes in town; a heart, the best feelings of which will be entirely obliterated; a heart hardened by a long commerce with the most unworthy of the sex; and which will bring disgust, suspicion, coldness, and depravity of taste, to the ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... one survivor of these unfittest put it to me. It was a piece of scientific humbug that cost the age which listened to it dear. "Causes that operate sociologically" are the opportunity of the political and every other kind of scamp who trades upon the depravity and helplessness of the slum, and the refuge of the pessimist who is useless in the fight against them. We have not done yet paying the bills he ran up for us. Some time since we turned to, to pull the drowning man out, and ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... you, but it was best you should not stay and behold the depravity of your elders. It is ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... schoolmaster or his father is not at hand, to administer a needful whipping. A really capable pedagogue can mean everything to a boy; but it is asking too much that a purchased slave should be an ideal companion.[*] Probably many pedagogues are responsible for their charges' idleness or downright depravity. It is a ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
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