"Degeneracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brought about increased expenditure, principally in matters of dress, and the women in particular seem to have made the most of this opportunity. Vanity and frivolity multiplied on every hand as a natural consequence; the Church was growing daily less able to cope with the moral degeneracy of the time on account of its own immoral condition; thus, the foundations were being laid for those centuries of corruption and national weakness which were ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Peveril, "why will you distress yourself with fixing your eye on deficiencies which arise rather from a change of times and manners, than any degeneracy of my noble friend? Let him be once engaged in his duty, whether in peace or war, and let me pay the penalty if he acquits not himself ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... I'm in dead earnest. You want to put on the brakes. You've struck the down grade. Socialism takes the temper out of the steel fiber of character. It makes a man flabby. It is the earmark of racial degeneracy. The man of letters who is poisoned by it never writes another line worth reading; the preacher who tampers with it ends a materialist or atheist; the philanthropist bitten by it, from just a plain fool, develops ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... nothing but an artificial collection of letters relating only indirectly to the main story. Joseph takes us with him through the Western lands, and then to Russia, whither he returns. In France and in England, he deplores the degeneracy of Judaism, attributing it to the ascendency of the Mendelssohnian school, and he foresees the approach of anti-Semitism. In Russia, he notes the prevalence of economic misery in frightful proportions, especially in the small rural towns, while in the large centres he regrets ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... whatever? No. It would be absurd to believe that these things were the promptings responsible for his present actions. Some hideous psychological twist was driving him. Some passion swayed him over which he had no control whatever. Some degeneracy was upsetting his mental balance, and forcing him against his better instincts. But, even so, his whole attitude was that of a man of clear, alert mind, of iron ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... blood of any other known to man. From it, any other type can be created. Once a type has been created, it must be sustained in itself by close breeding, which can be continued for quite a number of years without degeneracy. For invigoration or revitalizing, resort must be made to its primitive blood cause. To go out of the family to colder or even warmer creations of man means greater mongrelization of both blood and instinct, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... have never heard of his theological writings. At one time the famous Canon of Notre Dame at Paris had an enthusiastic following; thousands flocked to his lectures from every country; his popularity was enormous. He combated the abuses of the age and the degeneracy of some of the clergy, and astonished and enraged many by the boldness of his speech and the novelty of his opinions. His views with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity expressed in his Introductio (Traite de la Trinite) were made the subject of a charge against him, ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... simpler, and so stronger than the Assyrians that the Medes were able to dispossess them of their sovereignty over western Asia. But in this, as in most other cases of conquest throughout the East, success was followed almost immediately by degeneracy. As captive Greece captured her fierce conqueror, so the subdued Assyrians began at once to corrupt their subduers. Without condescending to a close imitation of Assyrian manners and customs, the Medes proceeded directly after ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... is so corrupt that you cannot conceive of an honest friendship, even between near relations. You fill me with repulsion—I measured the depth of your degeneracy at Pisa. That is why I left you. I wanted to breathe in an uninfected atmosphere. My cousin is a person of remarkable intellectual powers, of chivalrous ideals, and of superior character. He has had great troubles. He is far from well. I am watching ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... allowed to attend them until they are old enough to sit at table and get drunk. Moreover, to be humorous the comedian must necessarily have exceeded the bounds of ordinary usage. Aristophanes occasionally deplores the degeneracy of his times,—the youth of the period making "rude jests," but his own writings are the principal evidence of this depravity. His allusions are not excusable on the ground of ignorance; they are intentionally impure. There was once an age of innocence—still reflected ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... disease among mountainous people who drink largely of lime water, and is characterized by a condition of physical, physiologic, and mental degeneracy and nondevelopment, and possibly goiter. The subjects of this disease seldom reach five feet in height, and usually not more than four. The word cretin is derived from the Latin creatura. They are found all over the world. In Switzerland it is estimated that in some cantons ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... and, by their agency, levied aids and benevolences upon the different travellers on the king's highway. A letter of the old lord, his father, which, by the by, is not the letter of an illiterate man, is still extant, in which he complains in very moving terms of his son's degeneracy and misconduct. The young scapegrace, wishing to make his father know from experience the inconvenience of being scantily supplied with money, enjoined his tenantry in Craven not to pay their rents, and beat ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... remembered that faults and blemishes are inherited as well as merits, and that the faults have a way of asserting themselves with annoying persistency. Furthermore, breeding between animals closely allied in parentage is prone to lead to degeneracy, physical weakness, and mental stupidity, while impotence and sterility are frequent concomitants, and none but experienced breeders should attempt so hazardous an experiment. Observation has proved that the union of father with daughter and mother with son ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... called 'Critias,' in which he describes, partly from real tradition, partly in ideal dream, the early state of Athens; and the genesis, and order, and religion, of the fabled isle of Atlantis; in which genesis he conceives the same first perfection and final degeneracy of man, which in our own Scriptural tradition is expressed by saying that the Sons of God intermarried with the daughters of men, for he supposes the earliest race to have been indeed the children of God; and to have corrupted themselves, until 'their spot was not the spot of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... been paying special attentions to any one in the family, she would have suggested with perfect naivete that it was herself. For he had been to her the very pink of courtesy and consideration, and she was of opinion that 'poor Richard's views' of the degeneracy of Oxford men would have been modified could he have seen ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... became degenerate and subject to death. Adam realized the disparity that had been brought between him and his companion, and with some measure of understanding followed her course, thus becoming her partner in bodily degeneracy. Note in this matter the words of Paul the apostle: "Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... soul is left in silent harmony to enjoy the change. The passage of the Highlands is most delightful. Figure to yourself, my Julia, the rushing waters, lessening from their expanded width to the degeneracy of the stagnant pool—rocks rise on rocks in overhanging mountains, until the weary eye, refusing its natural office, yields to the fancy what its feeble powers can never conquer. Clouds impend over their summits, and the thoughts pierce the vast abyss. Ah! Julia, these are moments ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... realized that in losing his former case he had found one even more interesting. She was apathetic, indeed, in a certain degree, and did not appear to understand everything that was said to her, but this was the only sign of any degeneracy. She never again addressed by name either the professor or her maid, and never spoke except to express her wants, which she did in few words, and very concisely and correctly. Nothing would induce her, in conversation, to make ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... for the statement that the sifting of the country community in recent years has on the whole improved it. Wilbert L. Anderson says, "If this emigration of the best were the whole story, it would be impossible to refute the charge of degeneracy. There is, however, another aspect of the matter. The industrial revolution has put a pressure upon rural life that is more important even than the attraction of cities. That pressure has aggravated ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... the curious care he bestowed on making his works conformable to the faith that was in him; for, partly by inheritance and partly by industrious pains, his old house was undermined by a cellar of wine such as is seldom seen in these days of modern degeneracy. He is the last gentleman, that I know of, of that old school that used to import their own wine and lay it down annually themselves,—their bins forming a kind of vinous calendar suggestive of great events. Their degenerate sons are content to be furnished, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... command, new morality, new wisdom, predicate of the Future by the Past? In ancient States, the mass were slaves; civilization and freedom rested with oligarchies; in Athens twenty thousand citizens, four hundred thousand slaves! How easy decline, degeneracy, overthrow in such States,—a handful of soldiers and philosophers without a People! Now we have no longer barriers to the circulation of the blood of States. The absence of slavery, the existence of the Press; the healthful proportions of kingdoms, neither too confined nor too vast, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Paris. From this final visit I carried away a depressing sense of the enervation, both moral and aesthetic, which had overcome one of the last great French musicians, while, on the other hand, I could not help feeling that a tendency to a hypocritical or frankly impudent exploitation of the universal degeneracy marked all who could ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... nothing could be more slothful or slow, more given up to a life of ease and degeneracy, than the "reef-building polypifer"—to give him his scientific name. He is the hobo of the animal world, but, unlike the hobo, he does not even tramp for a living. He exists as a sluggish and gelatinous worm; he attracts to ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... used particularly as a charm against barrenness in women. A sign which could be made by the hand, the phallic hand, was used as a protection against the evil eye. Ancient representations of Priapus have been found with the hand in this attitude. As further evidence to show the total degeneracy of these beliefs, it may be said that the phallic hand was adopted as ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... born in Puente Genil. Like page 279 Bartrina, Reina is an imitator of Nunez de Arce, in that he sings of the degeneracy of mankind. He undertook, with but little success, to revive the eleven-syllable romance of the neo-classic Spanish ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... who had been convicted before a civil tribunal, or to the innocent who voluntarily chose to die. Human sacrifices of a different description run counter to the fundamental idea of a sacrificial act, and, wherever they occur among the Indo-Germanic stocks at least, are based on later degeneracy and barbarism. They never gained admission among the Romans; hardly in a single instance were superstition and despair induced, even in times of extreme distress, to seek an extraordinary deliverance through means so revolting. Of belief in ghosts, fear of enchantments, or dealing in mysteries, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... insignificant minority, is recruited from that refuse of humanity infesting all capitals, amongst the epileptic and scrofulous rabble which, heirs of vitiated blood and, further degrading this by its misconduct, introduces into civilization the degeneracy, imbecility, and infatuations of shattered temperaments, retrograde instincts, and deformed brains.[34171] What it did with the powers of the State is narrated by three or four contemporary witnesses; we see it face to face, in itself, and in its chiefs, we contemplate ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... subjects were needed. Brutes, beasts of the field? Not so: that were easy to achieve. Human beings, two living, healthy men, one white, one black, were the requirements. Impossible! The experiment could never be performed: its requirements were unattainable. O tempora! O mores! Alas, for the degeneracy of the age! In the days of the Roman emperors men were fed, literally fed, to wild beasts in the arena—Gauls, Scythians, Nubians, even Roman freedmen when barbarians were scarce. This to amuse the populace alone. Frightful ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... illiterate savage, scarce qualified, in point of understanding, to act as a country justice of peace, a man who has scarce ever travelled beyond the excursion of a fox-chase, whose conversation never rambles farther than his stable, his kennel, and the barnyard; who rejects decorum as degeneracy, mistakes rusticity for independence, ascertains his courage by leaping over gates and ditches, and founds his triumph on feats of drinking; who holds his estate by a factious tenure, professes himself the blind slave of a ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... of such triumphs, and the famous reign of good Queen Anne, had ensued forty years of peace, broken only by one inglorious war. The peace did its work: it settled the dynasty, and filled the purse; but men, considering it, whispered of effeminacy and degeneracy, and the like, as men will to the end of time. And when the clouds, long sighted on the political horizon, began to roll up, they looked fearfully abroad and doubted and trembled; and doubted and trembled the more because in home affairs all patriotism, all party-spirit, ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... Hereditary Degeneracy: Juke Family; Kallikak Family; New Zealand Cases cited; Sir Robert ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... regarded it in, his letters leave no room to doubt. Neither was the impression he had early received of the Greeks themselves at all improved by the present renewal of his acquaintance with them. Though making full allowance for the causes that had produced their degeneracy, he still saw that they were grossly degenerate, and must be dealt with and counted upon accordingly. "I am of St. Paul's opinion," said he, "that there is no difference between Jews and Greeks,—the character ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... book, although they were his prop in how many a play back in the golden Nineties!—the golden, promise-laden, contradictory Nineties, that fin-de-siecle decade when Max Nordau thundered that we were going to the dogs of degeneracy, and we youngsters knew that we were headed not alone for a new heaven, but what is much more important, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... women of the cattle camps, and swarthy cigarette-smoking women of Old Mexico. These, in turn, were crowded out by Japanese women, doll-like, stepping mincingly on wooden clogs; by Eurasians, delicate featured, stamped with degeneracy; by full-bodied South-Sea-Island women, flower-crowned and brown-skinned. All these were blotted out by a grotesque and terrible nightmare brood—frowsy, shuffling creatures from the pavements of ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... the plans of the wise being employed in advancing the national welfare; but when the author of the Annals lived, everybody despaired; private profligacy was as rampant as public misery, and, amid the universal degeneracy, scheming politicians disregarded the good and greatness of their country to be intriguers at court for ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... into the desert and to exist upon a lower plane of life. The physique of such peoples betrays the hardships which they have suffered. Men also flee from an unfavorable environment, thus escaping death or degeneracy, if the way into a more favorable locality lies open to them. Much of migration and colonization comes under this alternative."[5] This topic is well illustrated by those farms of New England which ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... Revolution, one need only refer to the speeches of Mr. Pitt, and especially to those of that profound statesman and most instructed man, Lord Shelburne, to find that we can boast no remarkable superiority either in political justice or in political economy. One must attribute this degeneracy, therefore, to the long war and our insular position, acting upon men naturally of inferior abilities, and unfortunately, in addition, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... fashion nowadays to harp upon the degeneracy of humanity; to insist that taste is corrupted, and that the faculty of appreciation is dead. We seem incapable of realizing that this is the golden age of authors, if not the golden ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... we found a large quantity of tobacco-pipes of a angular construction, with some very antique earthen ware, but no coin; also loads of broken bottles, which refutes the complaint of our pulpits against modern degeneracy, and indicates, the vociferous arts of getting drunk and breaking glass, were well understood by ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... necessary, as the hind legs of a whale, for instance, natural selection no longer keeps it at the point of perfection. Variation, however, continues to occur in it. Since the organ is now useless, natural selection will no longer restrain variation in such an organ, and degeneracy will naturally follow, for of all the variations that occur in the organ, those tending to loss are more numerous than those tending to addition. If the embryonic development of a whale's hind leg be compared ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... Limited, landed from their three keels in the Isle of Thanet. Gildas is the oldest historian of these islands, and his work consists entirely of a good old Tory lament in the Ashmead-Bartlett strain upon the degeneracy of the times and the proximate ruin of the British people. Gildas wrote some fourteen hundred years ago or thereabouts—and the country is not yet quite visibly ruined. On the contrary, it seems to the impartial ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... which indicated such rare sagacity, which in many other respects were calculated to build up the very highest civilization, and which, at the same time, failed to foresee that this oppression of woman must result in the inevitable degeneracy of succeeding generations of men, ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... countrymen on the subject of negro equality. He not alone professes to show the humanity of the project, but its policy—its even necessity. He declares to the whites, "You want these people; without them you will sink lower and lower into that effete degeneracy into which years of licentiousness have sunk you. These gorillas—black men, I mean—are virtuous; they are abstemious; they have a little smell, but no sensuality; they will make admirable wives for your warriors; ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... without these the happiness of man in every stage, and even his obedience to my laws, and my power to dispense with punishments, would be greatly impaired. For I had observed that the sufferings and degeneracy of the man would make him discontented, restless, and miserable, notwithstanding the blessings with ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... Mrs Gowan, after the degeneracy of the times had been fully ascertained, 'if John Barnacle had but abandoned his most unfortunate idea of conciliating the mob, all would have been well, and I think the country would have been preserved.' The old lady with the high nose assented; but added that if Augustus Stiltstalking ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... the choice of public officers. Whenever riches shall be deemed a necessary qualification, ambition as well as avarice will prompt men most earnestly to thirst for them, and it will be commonly said, as in ancient times of degeneracy, ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... I ever remember seeing a sight more pathetic in its way than that of this beautiful and high-spirited young woman weeping in the presence of her Council over the utter degeneracy of the race she was called upon to rule. Being old and accustomed to these Eastern expressions of emotion, I remained silent, however; but Oliver was so deeply affected that I feared lest he should do something foolish. He went red, ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... gift of lucid exposition. But his perpetual and conscious struggle with his heritage makes him nervous and ill-balanced. He conceives the idea, fostered both by observation and by the study of his own family history, that unchastity is the chief curse of humanity, and the primal cause of the degeneracy of races. He believes that the false modesty which leaves young people in ignorance of one of the most important natural functions is largely responsible for the prevailing immorality, and he advocates, as a remedy, fearless and searching physiological study. His inaugural address as superintendent ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... that have long subsisted arises therefore not from any credulous confidence in the superior wisdom of past ages, or gloomy persuasion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the consequence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... square on the end of his nose. The two peas were fired by his second son John, who had been delivering this invisible artillery all the evening from the other end of the identical pew in which the Rev. Dr. was seated. He groaned in the spirit, and muttered something to Mrs. Rev. Dr. A—— about the degeneracy of other people's children, which made that lady chuckle low, under cover of the night; for she knew that her second son John was the pea-shooter, and had made vain efforts to stop him, by pinching his leg, though the good matron ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... to what Guido del Duca had said in the thirteenth Canto, concerning the degeneracy of ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... other public places, gladiators were introduced at feasts, and tore each other to pieces amidst the supper tables, to the great delight and applause of the guests. Yet Lipsius permits himself to suppose the loss of courage, and the evident degeneracy of mankind, to be nearly connected with the abolition of these ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... degeneracy of the moderns, as if men now-a-days were in every respect inferior to their 99ancestors; but I maintain, and challenge contradiction, that there are many stout rubicund gentlemen in this metropolis that ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... abruptly to return to work. The boy's diseased mind nauseated him. His heart revolted with each fresh revelation of the terrible degeneracy that ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... no less than other reasons. An infant, he says, naturally has a disrelish for animal food. He says that, in all probability, animal food was not permitted, though used, before the flood; and that its use, contrary to the wish of the Creator, was probably one cause of human degeneracy. Animal food, he says, is apt to produce diseases of the skin—makes people passionate and violent—excites the nervous system too much—renders the senses and faculties more dull—and favors the accumulation of what ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... downright madness, and he hastily begged his friend to defer the volcanic question until after luncheon. Merton's language surprised him, it seemed so wildly irrational, and uttered with so much seriousness. In his appearance also there were signs of degeneracy: he was thin and pale and rather shabbily dressed, and wore a broad-brimmed rusty black felt hat, which he frequently pulled off only to twist it into some new disreputable shape and thrust it on again. Over a black half-unbuttoned waistcoat ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first. Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to all back-woodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as Poor Whites ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... plain Fact, these people, and were in that advanced state of degeneracy on the subject, that instead of being impressed by the speaker's strong common sense, they took it in extraordinary dudgeon. The men muttered 'Shame!' and the women 'Brute!' and Sleary, in some haste, communicated the following ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... describe to you what I have experienced or seen of the dispositions and feelings that will aid every other cause of danger, and tend to lay the mind open to the infection of all those falsehoods in opinion and sentiment, which constitute the degeneracy of the age. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... degeneracy, and thrice shame!" said the young Cimon, sternly. "I love the Spartans so well, that I blush for whatever degrades them. And all Sparta is dwarfed by the effeminacy ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... In the Second Isthmian Ode, we find an elaborate justification of his practice of praising for pay,—a practice, he admits, unknown to primitive poets, but rendered inevitable, in his time, by the poverty of the craft, and the degeneracy of the many, with whom, in the language of the Spartan sage, "money made the man." With this Pindaric precedent, therefore, for selling Pindaric verses, it is no wonder, if the children of the Muse, in an age still more degenerate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... it was only four o'clock. It was just an hour since she had entered the cavern-like doorway of the tenement. But in that hour she had come, for the first time, against life in the rough. She had seen degeneracy, and poverty, and—she was thinking of the expression in Jim's eyes—a menace that she did not at all understand. She had seen the waste of broken middle age and the pity of blighted childhood. She had seen ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... gladiatorial combats—the gangrene of the later Rome and of the last epoch of antiquity generally—first came into vogue among the Etruscans. At any rate on the whole they leave no doubt as to the deep degeneracy of the nation. It pervaded even its political condition. As far as our scanty information reaches, we find aristocratic tendencies prevailing, in the same way as they did at the same period in Rome, but more harshly and more perniciously. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... held in New York last fall, Professor Davenport expressed the opinion that the human race will ultimately perish, and Major Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, one of the world's leading economists, gave expression to similar views. We are evidently traveling a downhill road and the tide of degeneracy is rising so fast it will certainly sweep us on to race extinction unless we return to sane and biologic living. We are primates, not carnivores like the dog, nor omnivores like the hog. The primates are fruit and nut eaters in whatever ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... brought him taunts and reproaches, as well as a temporary loss of popularity. It was always characteristic of Lord John to speak his mind, and he sometimes did it not wisely but too well. Grote wrote in February 1838: 'The degeneracy of the Liberal party, and their passive acquiescence in everything, good or bad, which emanates from the present Ministry, puts the accomplishment of any political good out of the question; and it is not worth ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... significance that this degeneracy of the feet goes with a decline in the brain, whether as cause or effect I will not pretend to know. These hoofed beasts have shallow natures and live shallow lives. They eat what is spread by Nature before their noses, have no homes, and do nothing but feed and fight ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... of children is partly deter parents at the time of conception and birth. Most deaths of newborn infants are due to prenatal influences. Overstrain, malnutrition, alcoholism, and all physical excesses tend to cause physical degeneracy in the offspring. It is obviously the duty of prospective parents- and that means practically all healthy young people-to keep themselves well and strong, so as to give a good endowment of health to ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... hand, so coarse and clumsy, as to be fitter for the cart than the race. Shall we then wonder these cannot race, or shall we doubt that degrees of imperfection in the mechanism, will produce degrees of imperfection in racing! and when we find such deficient, shall we ridiculously impute it to a degeneracy of that blood, which once was in the highest esteem, or to the want of judgment in him who did not properly adapt the ...
— A Dissertation on Horses • William Osmer
... coats do the Monument. You complain of our masculine appearance in our riding habits, and indeed we think it is but reasonable that we should make reprisals upon you for the invasion of our dress and figure, and the advances you make in effeminency, and your degeneracy from the figure of man. Can there be a more ridiculous appearance than to see a smart fellow within the compass of five feet immersed in a huge long coat to his heels with cuffs to the arm pits, the shoulders and breast fenced against ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... the pure and lofty and highly ennobling sentiments, the spiritually beautiful inspiration which characterizes that book of his—that deft little dip into degeneracy—something about a frozen wedding! Oh, slush! ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... at all one must have seen far under the surface of that bland and factitious normality which he maintained before his fellows. In his veins ran a mongrelized strain of tendencies and vices which had hardened into a cruel and monstrous summary of vicious degeneracy. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... accademia, or school of painting, at Bologna, which restored the art in the last stage of degeneracy, originated in the profound meditations of Lodovico. There was a happy boldness in the idea; but its great singularity was that of discovering those men of genius, who alone could realise his ideal conception, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... beliefs. Mingled with all these were the ancient legends of gods and heroes, accepted as inspired scripture by the people, and by philosophers in part explained away by an allegorical exegesis and in part felt increasingly as a burden to the intelligence. In this period of degeneracy there were none the less an awakening to religious needs and a profound longing for a new revelation of truth, which should satisfy at once the intellect and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... ad hoc. One of the curses of the XIXth century is the increased skill of the midwife and physician, who are now able to preserve worthless lives and to bring up semi-abortions whose only effect upon the breed is increased degeneracy. Amongst the Greeks and ancient Arabs the Malthusian practice was carried to excess. Poseidippus declares ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... do my best to say it again—that the craving for drink and narcotics, especially that engendered in our great cities, is not a disease, but a symptom of disease; of a far deeper disease than any which drunkenness can produce; namely, of the growing degeneracy of a population striving in vain by stimulants and narcotics to fight against those slow poisons with which our greedy barbarism, miscalled civilisation, has surrounded them from the cradle to the grave. I may be answered that the old German, Angle, Dane, drank heavily. ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Golden Age to the Iron Age the growth and ascent of Heywood's dramatic power may fairly be said to correspond in a reversed order with the degeneracy and decline of human heroism and happiness in the legendary gradation or degradation of the classical four ages. "The Golden Age" is a delightful example of dramatic poetry in its simplest and most primary stage; in "The Silver Age" the process of evolution is already ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... solemnity; and the expression of the two faces, while they continued in this attitude, would be no bad subject for a pencil like that of the incomparable Hogarth, if any such should ever appear again, in these times of dullness and degeneracy. ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... property;" a time when, as the chants of the Delaware Indians stated it (page 109, ante), "all were willingly pleased, all were well-happified." While the description given by Murray in the above extract of the degeneracy of mankind in the land of the gods, "a period of constant quarrelling and deeds of violence, when might was right," agrees with Plato's account of the Atlanteans, when they became "aggressive," "unable to ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... thoughts and feelings of a well-informed man of thirty; the same thoughts and feelings being clothed in 2the semi-poetic prose of a fashionable novel-writer. Deeply grieved, therefore, am I at being forced both to set at nought so laudable an established precedent, and to expose my own degeneracy. But the truth must be told at all hazards. The only feeling I experienced, beyond a vague sense of loneliness and desolation, was one of great personal discomfort. It rained hard, so that a small stream of water, which descended from the roof of the ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... inquired for Philip, his eldest son and his favorite; and on learning that he, the only person who, as he believed, could understand him, would not come to see him this day above all others, he again broke out in wrath, abusing the degeneracy of the age and the ingratitude of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... refinement, and that of a life of simple manners and unperverted instincts. That he depicted this as the real life of a primitive epoch only gave greater pungency to the contrast. The eighteenth century, aroused to the consciousness of its own degeneracy, its false and artificial existence, readily accepted an idealized Geneva, an idealized Sparta, as the type of a primitive community, the model on which society was to be refashioned. What the "pure word of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... was theirs; and their outstretched wings, too, were white. He realized confusedly that they were like the black demons—like them and yet entirely unlike. For, where the black-winged ones had been ugly of feature, with every mark of degeneracy, these were the ultimate of loveliness in face and form. Figures of men he saw, stalwart and strong, yet perfectly proportioned; and the others—the women and girls—were ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... chiefly devoted to arms and agriculture, and consequently not cultivated by the criticisms of men of taste and learning, is by no means exposed to the vicissitudes of those that are polished by refined nations;[AF] and that, however paradoxical it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that the degeneracy of a language is more frequently to be attributed to an extravagant refinement than to the neglect of an illiterate people, unless indeed external causes interfere. May we not hence conclude, that as the Romansh has never been used in any regular composition in writing till the sixteenth century, ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... which Mr. Carlyle has said, 'that genius is only an infinite capacity of taking pains,' and we can understand somewhat of the causes which produced those statues, human and divine, which awe and shame the artificiality and degeneracy of our modern so-called civilisation—we can understand somewhat of the reverence for the human form, of the careful study of every line, the storing up for use each scattered fragment of beauty ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... of the Government, and decay of the nation.] Everywhere Rome was failing in her duties as mistress of the civilised world. Her own internal degeneracy was faithfully reflected in the abnegation of her imperial duties. When in any country the small-farmer class is being squeezed off the land; when its labourers are slaves or serfs; when huge tracts are kept ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... by the misshapen bodies, by marks of degeneracy, recognizable to your practised eyes everywhere on the streets, by the agony of the mother who bore you, and later wept over you, I conjure you men to live up to your high and holy privilege, and tell all men that they can be clean, ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... any man or body of men that had not brains, education, and a developed reasoning capacity. He was a Republican but not a Democrat. He recognized, long before the rival party saw their mistake in nomenclature, that this Jefferson school marked the degeneracy of republicanism into democracy. Knowing how absurd and unfounded was all the hysterical talk about monarchism, and that time would vindicate the first Administration and its party as Republican in its very essence, he watched with deep, and often with impersonal, uneasiness ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... should be on the side of the 'common-sense' party. In one of his letters to Mr. James Burness, Montrose, wherein he describes the strange doings of a strange sect called the Buchanites,—surely in itself a convincing proof of the degeneracy of the times in the matter of religion,—we have an interesting reflection which gives us some insight into the poet's mind. 'This, my dear Sir, is one of the many instances of the folly in leaving the guidance of sound reason and common sense in matters ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... square one, being fretted on every stone with florid carving, and grotesque devices: but what shall I say of Probus tower, which from top to bottom is covered with delicate tracery cut in granite? it rises above the miserable surrounding village, a satire upon neighbouring degeneracy in things religious: you must often have seen drawings of Probus at the Watercolour Exhibition, as it is a regular artists' lion. At about half-past six we got into Truro, a clean wide flourishing town with London shops, a commemorative column, a fine spired church, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... must assume a type-species. This will be that kind which has the class-properties in their greatest intensity (and, therefore, most easily studied with all their effects); and we must conceive the other varieties as instances of degeneracy from that type. ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... sin and misery entered into the world. The poets in their fables, most of which, however extravagant they may seem, had their origin in truth, speak the same language. Some of these represent the first condition of man by the figure of the golden, and his subsequent degeneracy and subjection to suffering by that of the silver, and afterwards of the iron age. Others tell us that the first female was made of clay; that she was called Pandora, because every necessary gift, qualification, or endowment, was given to her by the gods, but that she received ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... centre of the spirit, gives that assurance of a Reality, a calmer and more valid life attainable by us, which supports the stress and pain of self-simplification and permits us to hope on, even in the teeth of the world's cruelty, indifference, degeneracy; whilst diligent character-building alone, with its perpetual untiring efforts at self-adjustment, its bracing, purging discipline, checks the human tendency to relapse into and react to the obvious, and makes possible the further development ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... minds, and deformities of the corrupted. It is a degree towards the life of angels, when we enjoy conversation wherein there is nothing present but in its excellence; and a degree towards that of demons, wherein nothing is shewn but in its degeneracy. ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... stimulated the natives to concur in enterprises, which both promised revenge on the haughty conqueror, and afforded subsistence to those numerous inhabitants with which the northern countries were now overburdened [g]. They invaded the provinces of France, which were exposed by the degeneracy and dissensions of Charlemagne's posterity; and being there known under the general name of Normans, which they received from their northern situation, they became the terror of all the maritime and even of the ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... Intellectual Greatness Spiritual Wonders—Slater's Tests; Spirit Pictures; Telegraphy; Music; Slate Writing; Fire Test MISCELLANEOUS INTELLIGENCE—Erratum; Co-operation; Emancipation; Inventors; Important Discovery; Saccharine; Sugar; Artificial Ivory; Paper Pianos; Social Degeneracy; Prevention of Cruelty; Value of Birds; House Plants; Largest Tunnel; Westward Empire Structure of the Brain Chapter III. Genesis of the Brain To the Readers of the Journal—College of Therapeutics Journal of Man—Language of Press ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... leprosy or a condition resembling it. Thus would arise the confusion between Christians and Cretins. To-day their descendants are not more subject to goitre and cretinism than those dwelling around them, and are recognized by tradition and not by features or physical degeneracy. It was not until the French Revolution that any steps were taken to ameliorate their lot, but to-day they no longer form a class, but have been practically lost sight ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the smartness of those second-rate decadents, French and English, who so gloried in their own degeneracy—as though one were to glory in scrofula or rickets; those unpleasant little anthropoids with the sexless little muse and the dirty little Eros, who would ride their angry, jealous little tilt at him ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... preventing women from establishing social conditions suitable for their own best development and that of their children but has thrown over the home the dark shadow of commercialized prostitution with its cloud of evil thought, physical degeneracy and defrauded childhood. ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... Gammidge, in retirement, are superintending the education of their children in Bedford, where it is cheap and practical. They converse when they meet about the iniquitous prices of dressmakers and the degeneracy of the kind of cook obtainable in England at eighteen pounds a year. Mrs. Gammidge has grown rather portly and very ritualistic. They seldom speak of Simla, and when they do, if too reminiscent a ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... given wings with the rumor that Elliott University was to pay him the unheard of amount of $50,000 for a yearns services although, it was grudgingly admitted, if John Brown could bring Elliott out of the slough of athletic degeneracy, he would probably be worth every ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... their primordial attraction,—but, left again to themselves, they will go back to the original type; that is, their offspring will again infest the jungles and roam their native hunting-grounds. The process here is the very reverse of the Darwinian theory. Reversion, as a rule, follows the degeneracy of types, instead of there being any favorable homogeneous result, springing from a new centre of attraction. The Indian makes a splendid savage, but a very poor white man. Think of Red Jacket taking ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... might have bent down in a kindred gracefulness to shed their benedictions on her graceful head; old love-letters, shut up in iron boxes in the neighbouring offices, and made of no account among the heaps of family papers into which they had strayed, and of which in their degeneracy they formed a part, might have stirred and fluttered with a moment's recollection of their ancient tenderness, as she went lightly by. Anything might have happened that did not happen, and never will, for the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... going into one wigwam when a surly old man opposed our entrance, holding out a calabash, vociferous voices from the interior calling out, "Ninepence, ninepence!" The memory of Uncas and Magua rose before me, and I sighed over the degeneracy of the race. These people are mendicant and loquacious. When you go in, they begin a list of things which they want—blankets, powder, tobacco, &c.; always concluding with, "Tea, for God's sake!" for they have renounced the ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... Rome declined, the Adriatic, by a strange fatality, began to desert the fortress whose defence it had hitherto secured. Coeval with the gradual degeneracy of the people was the gradual withdrawal of the ocean from the city walls; until, at the beginning of the sixth century, a grove of pines already appeared where the ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Christianity without the attribute of development and the faculty of improving society as well as souls. But the idea was acquired slowly. Under the burden of sin, men accustomed themselves to the consciousness of degeneracy; each generation confessed that they were unworthy children of their parents, and awaited with impatience the approaching end. From Lucretius and Seneca to Pascal and Leibniz we encounter a few dispersed and unsupported passages, suggesting advance towards ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... periodically facts as to the physique of the nation. In the course of the commission's exhaustive investigation there was found no evidence that any progressive deterioration was going on in any function of the body except the teeth. "There are happily no grounds for associating dental degeneracy with progressive physical deterioration." The increase in optical defects is attributed not to the deterioration of the eye, but to greater knowledge, more treatment, and better understanding of the connection ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... portion of its portico is hidden by the brickwork of the mosque of Abu'l Haggag: the part brought to light in the course of the excavations contains between each row of columns a colossal statue of Ramses II. We are accustomed to hear on all sides of the degeneracy of the sculptor's art at this time, and of its having fallen into irreparable neglect. Nothing can be further from the truth than this sweeping statement. There are doubtless many statues and bas-reliefs of this epoch which shock us by their ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... nobility have anything to complain of in this long history of manners and customs. Those great and magnificent social necessities have been well represented; but we ought surely to renounce the noble title of historian if we are not impartial, if we do not here depict the present degeneracy of the race of nobles, although we have already done so elsewhere,—in the character of the Comte de Mortsauf (in "The Lily of the Valley"), in the "Duchesse de Langeais," and the very nobleness of the nobility ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... and apprehension, that pockets are gradually falling into disuse. To use the flippant idiom of the day, they are going out! This is an alarming, as well as a lamentable fact; and one, too, strikingly illustrative of the degeneracy of modern fashions. Whether we ascribe the change to a contemptuous neglect of ancestral institutions, or to an increasing difficulty in furnishing the indispensable attributes of the pocket, it is alike ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... draft upon both the physical and mental powers of that which succeeds. A race of overwrought brains in enfeebled bodies must be recruited from a more healthful stock, or their posterity will, in time, decline into idiocy or cease from the earth. The process of degeneracy, by an infallible law, will pass from the body to the intellect; and the descendant of a Luther or a Bacon go down to the level of the most stupid boor that drives his oxen over the ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... degeneracy. When the sons of heaven married the daughters of men, their offspring were giants and men of renown. Now the sons of men marry the daughters of heaven, and the offspring is Wiggle, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... receiver-general," and, after lighting his tenth cigar as a tribute, presumably, to the lung power of the combatants, will indulge in some moody reflections on the decay of British valour and the general degeneracy of Englishmen. He will then drink liqueur brandy out of a claret glass, and, having slapped a sporting solicitor on the back and dug in the ribs a gentleman jockey who has been warned off the course, he will tread ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... astonished with the sight of these things, that I entertained no notions of any danger to myself from it for a long while: all my apprehensions were buried in the thoughts of such a pitch of inhuman, hellish brutality, and the horror of the degeneracy of human nature, which, though I had heard of it often, yet I never had so near a view of before; in short, I turned away my face from the horrid spectacle; my stomach grew sick, and I was just at the point of fainting, when nature discharged ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... was, a preacher of morality; an expounder of that divine doctrine which inculcates the precept, 'Do unto others, as you would have others do unto you;' he is a gentleman, who, beholding with horror the degeneracy of the times, and believing, no doubt, it required some extraordinary exertions to recall us unto virtue, has voluntarily, for no idea of gain, or means of livelihood, publicly devoted his talents to the pulpit. Such conduct, if we had ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... freeman, who knew no superior but God, and the law. Now, he had sunk into the mere "villein," bound to follow his lord to the field, to give him his personal service, and to look to him alone for justice. With the decline of the freeman (or of popular government) came Anglo-Saxon degeneracy, which made him an easy prey to ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... gaining a harem of their own: and thus the wager of battle tells in the end for the advantage of the race, by eliminating the maimed, the ugly, and the cowardly, and encouraging the strong, the handsome, the enterprising, and the valiant. This is nature's way of preventing degeneracy. ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... believe that I was on the point of cheating myself," he said, soberly. "That argues a shameful flabbiness of the moral fibre, doesn't it? A 'brace' game of solitaire! What a hideous picture of degeneracy!" ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... not see phantoms, too? The learned say now that genius is allied to madness. My friend, healthy and normal people are only the common herd. Reflections upon the neurasthenia of the age, nervous exhaustion and degeneracy, et cetera, can only seriously agitate those who place the object of life in the present—that is, ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... other sorts of writing. There is perhaps no better weapon for the scourging of vice and folly than this potent literary embodiment of wit and irony, and certainly no author ever wielded that weapon more nobly than Lucilius. His aera was characterised by great degeneracy, due to Greek influences, and the manner in which he upheld failing Virtue won him the unmeasured regard of his contemporaries and successors. Horace, Persius, and Juvenal all owe much to him, and it is melancholy to reflect that all his work, save a fragment ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... inevitable and characteristic expression of the American spirit. It is only natural for the sons and grandsons of the men who settled this country to take an interest in wholesome and vigorous sports; in fact it would be a sad commentary on the degeneracy of the modern generation if such an expression of their inheritance were not evident. But a distinctively American attitude towards sport is also manifested in the intense personal and university rivalries developed, the ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... where an everlasting summer and fertile land yield a harvest of fruits and grain all the year round where it is not even necessary "to tickle the ground with a hoe to make it laugh with a harvest." But thinking over the cause of the degeneracy of the Spaniards and Indians, I am led to believe that in climes where man has to battle with nature for his food, not to receive it from her hands as a gift; where he is a worker, and not an idler; where hard winters kill off the weak and brace up the strong; there ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... external occurrences. (g) Nearly all of Risch's cases were burdened with bad inheritance. He maintains that, above all, these cases show instability and psychic excitability. The entire symptom complex arises upon a basis of degeneracy. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... look over the morning papers, and chat about the news, the stocks, and the degeneracy of the times. What a club is to an idle man of fashion,—what a sewing-society is to a scandal-loving woman,—what a billiard-room is to a man about town,—what the Athenaeum is to the sober and steadfast bibliolater,—that is the Insurance Office to the retired merchant, bald and spectacled, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... impostor who dares to claim nobility or precedency, and cannot show his family name in the history of his country. Even he who can show it, and who cannot write his own under it in the same or as goodly characters, must submit to the imputation of degeneracy, from which the lowly and obscure are exempt." Good old Penn, too, is made a lay figure upon which Landor dressed his thoughts, when the Quaker tells Lord Peterborough: "Of all pride, however, and all folly, the grossest is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... set of men, shamefully illiterate and stupid, ignorant, more especially in religious matters, equally enslaved to sensuality and superstition, and capable of the most abominable and flagitious deeds. This dismal degeneracy of the sacred order was, according to the most credible accounts, principally owing to the pretended chiefs and rulers of the universal Church, who indulged themselves in the commission of the most odious crimes, and abandoned themselves to the lawless impulse of the ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... period at Oxford had been rather a period of obscure conflict than of mere idleness and degeneracy, as it had seemed to be. But it might easily have ended in physical and moral ruin, and, as it was—thanks to Courtenay—Delafield went out to the business of life, a man singularly master of himself, determined to live his own life for ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... supported his argument with a hundred ingeniously chosen facts. He was sure that America would never show the smallest sign of decadence until she was tired of making money. The love of money was the best defence against degeneracy of every kind, and he gasped with simple-hearted pride when he thought of the millions of dollars which his healthy, primitive compatriots were amassing. But, he allowed, the weariness of satiety might overtake them; there might come a time when ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... of a sameness in them all, rather heavy and tasteless, but serving the ends that such things should be meant to serve, and never flamboyant. Of these relics of a simpler day not many survive to us, save in the shameful degeneracy of boarding-houses. But in such as are left, we may confidently expect to find the traditions of that more dignified time kept unsullied;—to find, indeed, as we find in the house of Milbrey, a settled air of gloom that ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... as to incline it to good instead of evil. God is infinitely blessed and happy, because he is infinitely just and good. Man is unblessed and unhappy, because he is unholy and evil. One of the clearest proofs of man's degeneracy is found in his willingness to remain in his sinful and unhappy state. Like the man among the tombs, he is ready to cry out, in thought if not otherwise, "Let us alone! what have we to do with thee? Art thou come to torment us before ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... suggested a thought that had been often in his mind. He could not but shudder in himself, when he thought of that bright little brother of his being initiated in the mysteries of evil which he himself had learnt, and sinking like himself into slow degeneracy of heart and life. It often puzzled and perplexed him, and at last he determined to open his heart, partially at least, in a letter to Mr Rose. The master fully understood his doubts, and wrote him the ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... condition of women. The matrons had often a considerable influence on the decisions of the councils. Lafitau, whose book appeared in 1724, says that the nation was corrupt in his time, but that this was a degeneracy from their ancient manners. La Potherie and Charlevoix make a similar statement. Megapolensis, however, in 1644, says that they were then exceedingly debauched; and Greenhalgh, in 1677, gives ample evidence of a shameless license. One of their most earnest advocates ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... was Tarquin, though a tyrannical prince in peace, a despicable general in war; nay, he would have equalled his predecessors in that art, had not his [62]degeneracy in other respects likewise detracted from his merit here. He began the war against the Volsci, which lasted two hundred years after his time, and took from them Suessa Pometia by storm; and when by the sale of the spoils he had amassed ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... This whole story abounds in evidences of the prejudice and moral degeneracy of the Jewish leaders. They hated Roman rule past all words to tell and yet would pretend loyalty to Caesar to carry out their wicked purpose. By this means they put Pilate in a position that to release Jesus would make him appear to be untrue to Caesar ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... hope to escape a royal marriage, her father looked toward Galavia. There at least the strain was clean ... untouched by degeneracy and untainted with libertinism. Karyl is as decent a chap as yourself. He loves her, and though he knows she accepts him only from compulsion, he believes he can eventually win her love as well as her mere acquiescence. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... punishment, also, is visibly from the physician, who illustrates man's individual way of dealing with sin in another; but it is not the minister's suffering under the hand of revenge working subtly in secret that arrests our attention; it is the physician's own degeneracy into a devil of hate through enjoyment of the sight and presence of this punishment, that stamps him into the reader's mind as a type of the failure of such a revenge. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord" is the text here blazed forth. In the sphere of the soul human law and private ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... encroachment upon the rights of suffering humanity, they engage in a rebellious outbreak against a God-given Government, we will not let them alone in an idolatry that desolates the fair face of nature and causes such shameful degeneracy of the human race. Justice! slow, but still sure and retributive justice! How sublimely grand in her manifestations! After years of patient endurance of the proud contumely of South Carolina, New England granite blocks up the harbor of Charleston—Massachusetts volunteers ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... against the practice of breeding from any near relatives; it being usually found that degeneracy follows, and often to a serious degree; but it is not proved that this degeneracy, although very common and even usual, is yet a necessary consequence. That ill effects follow, in a majority of cases, is not to be doubted; but this ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... being somewhat soft and leathery in aspect, owing to the want of angles in their outline. By great men like Titian, this somewhat conventional structure was only given in haste to distant masses; and their exquisite delineation of the foreground, kept their conventionalism from degeneracy: but in the drawings of the Carracci and other derivative masters, the conventionalism prevails everywhere, and sinks gradually into scrawled work, like Fig. 28, about the worst which it is possible to get into the habit of using, though ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... and arrested the genius of the people. The Spanish viceroys ruled with an iron hand over Milan, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia. Poverty and superstition wasted and darkened the minds of the people, and indolence and love of pleasure introduced almost universal degeneracy. But the Spanish yoke, which weighed so heavily at both extremities of the Peninsula, did not extend to the republic of Venice, or to the duchy of Tuscany; and the heroic character of the princes of Savoy alone would have served to throw a ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... enacted and enforced by our New England fathers more than two hundred years ago, which history informs us were attended with the most beneficial results.[76] Although their descendants of the present generation should blush for their degeneracy, still we should be encouraged from an increasing disposition of late to return to these salutary restraints and needful checks upon ignorance and crime. Said the Honorable Josiah Quincy, Jr., late mayor of the city of Boston, in his inaugural address, ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... an old Norman family which had been long settled in Leinster, which had there sunk into degeneracy, which had adopted the manners of the Celts, which had, like the Celts, adhered to the old religion, and which had taken part with the Celts in the rebellion of 1641. In his youth he had been one of the most noted sharpers and bullies of London. He had been introduced ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Normans, some years afterwards, in the same spirit of emigration, and thirsting, perhaps, to avenge their injured ancestors, burst into the provinces of France, which the degeneracy of Charlemagne's posterity, and the dissensions which prevailed there, rendered an affair of no great difficulty. Louis le Debonnaire had taken every means of keeping on good terms with them; annually persuading some to become Christians, and then sending them home so loaded with presents, ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... showed, toward the end of the Empire, a tactical degeneracy resulting from the wearing down of their elements and the consequent lowering of standards of morale and training. But since the allies had recognized and adopted our methods, Napoleon really had a reason for trying something so old that it was new to secure that ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... of the Greek civilization is not a pleasant one. 'The glory that was Greece' fades out of the world and leaves it grey and dull, and there was worse than this; there was also decay and degeneracy and corruption. To dwell upon it is as the sin of Ham. Nevertheless what took place was not a mere relapse towards barbarism, but on the contrary the supersession of a form of civilization which had done its work by another form less attractive, but more sound and solid. The Romans ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... throughout the land. To this idea, the Reformed Church of England with its marriable and married Clergy would have approximated, if the revenues of the Church, as they existed at the death of Henry VII., had been rightly transferred by his successor;—transferred, I mean, from reservoirs, which had by degeneracy on the one hand, and progressive improvement on the other, fallen into ruin, and in which those revenues had stagnated into contagion or uselessness,—transferred from what had become public evils to their original and inherent ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... dinner, some day to favour me with your company at my little country cottage I have a wine there—the fellow to that—I think you would, I do think you would"—Mr. Thompson meant to say, he thought his client would arrive at something of a similar jocund contemplation of his fellows in their degeneracy that inspirited lawyers after potation, but condensed the sensual ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Providence. It has not the signs of the Lord's blessing. It is a fanaticism which puts forth no good fruit; instead of blessing, it has brought forth cursing; instead of love, hatred, instead of life, death—bitterness and sorrow, and pain; and infidelity and moral degeneracy follow its labours." There is no shirking of the question here. Slavery is proclaimed to be the GOD-appointed means for the regeneration of the African race, and those who seek to bring about the emancipation ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... Horticultural Society's garden Machine tools Manures, concentrated —— liquid, by Mr. Bardwell Marvel of Peru Mechi's (Mr.) gathering Mirabilis Jalapa New Forest Plant, hybrid Potatoes, Bahama Potato disease —— origin of Poultry, metropolitan show of Races, degeneracy of Roses, Tea —— from cuttings Soil and its uses, by Mr. Morton Strawberry, Nimrod, by Mr. Spencer Truffles, Irish Vegetables, lists of Violet, Neapolitan Waggons and carts Wax insects ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... addressed the king, that the money might be appropriated to the maintenance of Greenwich hospital. The house having taken cognizance of this affair, and made some new regulations in the prosecution of the African trade, presented a solemn address to the king, representing the general degeneracy and corruption of the age, and beseeching his majesty to command all his judges, justices, and magistrates, to put the laws in execution against profaneness and immorality. The king professed himself ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... in connection with the occasional attempts to end the discord between production and distribution by diminishing the former. It is impossible not to see that in this way morality also would be preserved from a degeneracy the real cause of which this sort of reformers certainly did not understand, but which hovered before their mind's eye as an indistinct presentiment. And now, having noticed seriatim the three conceivable forms of evolution—namely, (1) the adaptation of social rights to the new and higher ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... prosperity living "without God in the world," and in seasons of distress or danger betaking themselves for relief to the rites of a superstitious worship. The apostle describes at once the secret cause and the successive steps of this sad degeneracy, when, speaking of the Gentiles, he says that "when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened; professing themselves ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan |
