"Infanticide" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... savages, where the degradation of women, infanticide, vice, famine, war, and disease are active instruments of decimation, it will be found that the average population, generally speaking, presses hard against the limits of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... is no denying that. If he had been proven guilty of theft, arson, licentiousness, infanticide, and defiling graves, I believe they would have suspended him ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... he, "has become of the child? Has it been destroyed? No; for the Widow Lerouge, an accomplice in an infanticide, would be no longer formidable. The child has been preserved, and confided to the care of our widow, by whom it has been reared. They have been able to take the infant away from her, but not the proofs of its ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... by universal practice, philosophy, political economy, and the latest reformers—may be summed up in the following list: masturbation, onanism, [19] sodomy, tribadie, polyandry, [20] prostitution, castration, continence, abortion, and infanticide. [21] ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Chinese, children are considered to be the absolute chattels of the parents, with whose treatment of their offspring neither public opinion nor the country's laws have any right of interference. Infanticide can be, and undoubtedly is to a certain extent, practised, while the father is even said to be legally entitled to punish ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... landing was that the crime of infanticide had not reached the islands of Keeling Cocos. "The children have all come to welcome you," explained Mr. Ross, as they mustered at the jetty by hundreds, of all ages and sizes. The people of this country ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... depending: but when the thoughtless entreaties of the mother or nurse are interposed, it makes his condition most distressing. Mothers, in such cases, ought to encourage rather than remonstrate. They who do not, are guilty of cruelty, and—perhaps—of infanticide.] ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... remedy to suggest, or only immediate and partial remedies, such, for example, as the forbidding of factory work to women who are about to be or have recently been mothers—an expedient which is bound to produce a plentiful crop of "concealment of birth" and infanticide convictions—the Socialist does proffer a general principle to guide the community in dealing not only with this particular hardship, but with all the kindred hardships which form a system with it. He declares that we are here in the presence of an ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... failed to obey the tribal law, and have then committed suicide. We can see how nature and necessity would institute a law requiring such conduct where a tribe must carry on almost incessant warfare and where the available food supplies would be enough for only the most efficient individuals. Infanticide also has been practised for reasons of biological utility, as among the Romans, who at first maintained their racial vigor by deliberately ordering the death of weak babes. But times have changed, and ethics has become very different with ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... months. It was his opinion, he said, that the bastardy clause, which threw all the burden on the mother, on whom the odium rested already, thus held out a premium to immorality and an inducement to infanticide; and the clauses which effected the law of settlement would of themselves justify the house in throwing out the bill. His great objection, however, was to the board of commissioners. The board was unnecessary, for the principal existing defect consisted in the ratepayers ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the youthful Schiller's poetry foretell that he will never be a great lyrist, but they promise well enough for the poetic tale. This promise is seen notably in the poem called 'The Infanticide'. It is a gruesome thing, with the pathos here and there overstrained, but what a power of vivid narration! What a gift for the portraiture of frenzied passion! For the rest, it should not go unrecorded that certain poems of the 'Anthology' went altogether too far in the defiance of conventional ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... doomed to die of tuberculosis. And in this same country ten thousand persons a year are directly murdered. In China, between three and six millions of infants are annually destroyed, while the total infanticide record of the whole world is appalling. In Africa, now, human beings are dying by millions ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... literal struggle for existence which characterizes primitive life, those tribes may alone be expected to survive whose customs do promote the welfare of their members. Persistence by a group in customs like infanticide or excessive restriction of population will result in their extinction. Customs are, for the most part, standards of action established in the light of the conceptions of well-being as understood at the time of their origin. ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... members of the gang arrested, but they always begin again. The promiscuity of living is something awful, girls and young men squatting and sleeping in the same room on heaps of dirty rags. There have been some arrests for infanticide, when a baby's appearance and disappearance was too flagrant, but the girls don't care. They do their time of prison, come out quite untamed by prison discipline, and begin again their wild, free life. One doesn't quite ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... nothing better than money to leave your children? If you have not, but send your daughters into the world with empty brain and unskilled hand, you are guilty of assassination, homicide, regicide, infanticide—compared with which that of poor Hester Vaughan was innocence. There are women toiling in our cities for three and four dollars per week, who were the daughters of merchant princes. These suffering ones ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... save millions of lives, etc. etc. etc., put out of the question, and its existence accepted as necessary and sacred, all theories to the contrary notwithstanding, whether by Calvin or Schopenhauer or Pasteur or the nearest person with a taste for infanticide. And this right to live includes, and in fact is, the right to be what the child likes and can, to do what it likes and can, to make what it likes and can, to think what it likes and can, to smash what it dislikes and can, and generally to behave in an altogether unaccountable manner within ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... conduct of the female peasantry in the eastern counties of England, who unblushingly avow their derelictions from the paths of virtue. The crime of infanticide, so common there, is almost unknown among the Irish. If the priest and the confessional are able to restrain the lower orders from the commission of gross crime, who shall say that they are without their use? ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... of infanticide, never reach the mountain at all, but are compelled to hover round the seats of their crimes, with branches of trees tied to their legs. The melancholy sounds, which are heard in the still summer evenings, and which the ignorance of the white people considers ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... themselves be the victims—such crimes, moreover, are the most dangerous for society—juries, on the contrary, are very indulgent in the case of breaches of the law whose motive is passion. They are rarely severe on infanticide by girl-mothers, or hard on the young woman who throws vitriol at the man who has seduced and deserted her, for the reason that they feel instinctively that society runs but slight danger from such ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... pleased with himself, and is honored by others, when he scalps a man of another tribe; and a Dyak cuts off the head of an unoffending person, and dries it as a trophy. The murder of infants has prevailed on the largest scale throughout the world, and has been met with no reproach; but infanticide, especially of females, has been thought to be good for the tribe, or at least not injurious. Suicide during former times was not generally considered as a crime, but rather, from the courage displayed, as an honorable act; and it is still practised by some semi-civilized and savage nations ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... Carolina, in 1826. In one of these a negro boy was acquitted of highway robbery after the jury's deliberation of several hours; in the other the jury on the case of a free negro woman charged with infanticide had been out for forty-six hours without reaching a verdict when the newspaper ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... greater joy of a future life. In a society built on a huge basis of slavery and filled with social classes, the Christians proclaimed the equality of all men before God. To a nation in which family life had become corrupt, infidelity and divorce common, and infanticide a prevailing practice, the Christians proclaimed the sacredness of the marriage tie and the family life, and the exposure of infants as simple murder. In place of the subjection of the individual to the State, the Christians demanded the subjection of the individual only to God. In place of a union ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... that inferior school in which Schiller's fiery youth formed itself for nobler grades—the school "of Storm and Pressure"—(Stuerm und Draeng—as the Germans have expressively described it.) If the reader will compare Schiller's poem of the 'Infanticide,' with the passages which represent a similar crime in the Medea, (and the author of 'Wallenstein' deserves comparison even with Euripides,) he will see the distinction between the art that seeks an elevated emotion, and the art which is satisfied with creating an intense one. In Euripides, the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... departed, after allowing the old bachelor to kiss her, which he did with an air that seemed to say, "It is a right which costs me dear; but it is better than being harried by a lawyer in the court of assizes as the seducer of a girl accused of infanticide." ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... Verses about, "When Willie Came to say Good Night." It was a Sad Effort. He made it almost as Salty as a Mother Song and filled it with Papa and Mamma and the Patter of Baby Feet. He used Love-Light and the Evening Prayer and the Heart-Strings and other venerable Paraphernalia. He had to commit Infanticide to make it Weepy enough for the last Stanza. The Author wrote this Stuff merely to Get Back at himself and see how Sloppy he could be. He did not intend to Print it, because he was not a Vendor of Death-Beds, and he shrank from making any violent Assault on the Sensibilities. So he ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... is, at the present time, a kind of infanticide, which, although it is not so well known, is even more dangerous, because done with impunity. There are parents who recoil with horror at the idea of destroying their offspring, although they would greatly desire to be disembarrassed of them, who yet place ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... prepossession of the African mind, curious and yet general, in a land where population is the one want, and where issue is held the greatest blessing, is the imaginary necessity of limiting the family. Perhaps this form of infanticide is a policy derived from ancestors who found it necessary. In the kingdom of Apollonia (Guinea) the tenth child was always buried alive; never a Decimus was allowed to stand in the way of the nine seniors. The birth of twins is an evil portent to the Mpongwes, as it is in ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... compare the Chinese to ourselves! Think of the state of degradation the people are in! Every crime is rife among them —infanticide is quite common!" ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... which have passed over them, with the exception of the short sharp crisis of the Mutiny, the population has greatly increased. Whenever an epidemic breaks out, means are at once employed to check it. There is a vaccination department for the purpose of preventing the ravages of small-pox. Female infanticide, which had prevailed to a frightful extent among certain castes, has been diminished, though not, it is feared, wholly suppressed. It is well known that famines have been sadly destructive of life, but there is evidence that previous ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... sinful than I? Through covetousness I caused Abhimanyu of tender years, that hero who resembled a lion born in the hills, to penetrate into the array that was protected by Drona himself. I am like one guilty of infanticide. Sinful as I am, I have not since then, been able to look Arjuna or the lotus-eyed Krishna in the face. I grieve also for Draupadi who is bereft of her five sons like the Earth bereft of her five mountains. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... from its effects on the texture and water-holding capacity of the soil. The newly set plant is not in need of outside nourishment; to put rank manure or strong commercial fertilizers about the roots of a young newly set vine is plant infanticide. ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... responsible for crimes committed against her, while the male criminal goes free; when from altars where she worships no woman may preach; when in the courts, where girls of tender age may be arraigned for the crime of infanticide, she may not plead for the most miserable of her sex; when colleges she is taxed to build and endow, deny her the right to share in their advantages; when she finds that which should be her glory—her possible motherhood—treated everywhere by man as a ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... for murder with malice aforethought is now penal servitude for life, other phases of homicide five to twenty years, in both cases mine labour. In cases of infanticide, if the offspring is illegitimate it ranks as manslaughter. The following is a condensed summary, with brief comments of our own in parenthesis, of a report on the prison system which was kindly furnished to us by the Roumanian Inspector of Prisons, a zealous, well-meaning, ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... these reservations, that such a comparison can be instituted, let us see to what extent murder, in the widest sense of the word, including wilful murder, manslaughter, and infanticide, prevails in the various countries of Europe. In ordinary circumstances this task would be a laborious one, entailing a minute and careful examination of the criminal statistics and procedure of many nations. ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... childhood.—The desire for children is strong. Hence voluntary abortion and infanticide are unknown. In case of involuntary abortion, which is comparatively frequent, the fetus is hung or buried under the house. When the child begins to quicken in the womb, the mother undergoes a process of massage at the beginning of ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... population, were registered at birth, died according to rule, were duly entered upon statistical tables and buried in consecrated ground: the other half were strangled by their mothers, flung into ditches, exposed to die, starved to death, assassinated in some manner. The crimes of foeticide and infanticide have become so common that there is scarcely a peasant-woman in Portugal not guilty of them, either as principal ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... the milk over Freddie's trousers, and when he had come back after changing his clothes he began to talk about what a much-maligned man King Herod was. The more he saw of Tootles, he said, the less he wondered at those impulsive views of his on infanticide. ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... Infanticide was also responsible for much destruction of life. Twin murder was practised with an even fiercer zeal than it had been in Calabar. Child life in ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... abiding interest we feel in the preservation of the morals of our country, constrains us to raise our voice against the daily increasing practice of infanticide, especially before birth. The notoriety that monstrous crime has obtained of late, and the hecatombs of infants that are annually sacrificed to Moloch, to gratify an unlawful passion, are a sufficient justification ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... observed, "to conceive a more frightful mass of crime than was here collected. The parricide, the fratricide, the infanticide, who had first fled from justice and turned mountain bandit, and then, by betraying his brother desperadoes, had bought a commutation of punishment, and the privilege of wallowing on the shore for an hour a day, with this wretched ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... many households, children instead of a blessing are a nuisance. It is card case versus child's primer, carriage versus cradle, social popularity versus domestic felicity. Hence infanticide and antenatal murder so common that all the physicians, allopathic, hydropathic, homoeopathic, and eclectic are crying out in horror, and it is time that the pulpits joined with the medical profession in echoing and re-echoing ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... life of his keeper, or from that old baboon who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs, as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions." We have but to add:—if only the coming forth from the creative hand of God, the creation in his own ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... in many things, childish in more, their laws are as much in advance of them as of their contemporaries,—were even singular for humanity in that age, and not always equaled in ours. We forget that there were contemporary nations which justified stealing, authorised infanticide, legalized the murder of aged parents, associated lust with worship. None of these blots can be traced on the Jewish escutcheon. By preventing imprisonment for debt, Moses anticipated the latest discovery of modern philanthropy. * * * Even the mercy of ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... what would my father have done to me if I had ever uttered in his hearing one of the flat, sickly things these "two-years-olds" say in print nowadays? In my opinion there would have been a case of infanticide in our family. ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... of habit, for the most able men will have succeeded best in defending and providing for their wives and offspring. Beards, beardlessness, voice, beauty are all related to sexual charm, and have been selectively developed. Early man, less licentious, not practising infanticide, was in several respects better calculated to carry out sexual selection than he is now; and thus we find the various races of men fully differentiated at the earliest date ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... afraid of her. He tried to understand, to make out things a little in the darkness, but she was right after all; he took these things too seriously in his way. With all her vulgar depravity, Barbro was not worth a single earnest thought. Infanticide meant nothing to her, there was nothing extraordinary in the killing of a child; she thought of it only with the looseness and moral nastiness that was to be expected of a servant-girl. It was plain, too, in the days that followed; never an hour did she give herself up to ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... shores! At the birth of a child, as Humboldt relates, a fire was kindled on the floor of the hut, and a vessel of water placed beside it; but not with the murderous intent of those savage tribes who practise infanticide, and, pressed by hunger, destroy their children to save their food. The infant here was first plunged into the water—buried, as we should say, in baptism; and afterwards swept rapidly and unharmed through the flaming fire. A very remarkable rite; and one that, as we read ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... interest we feel in the preservation of the morals of our country, constrains us to raise our voice against the daily increasing practice of {256} infanticide, especially before birth. The notoriety this monstrous crime has obtained of late, and the hecatombs of infants that are annually sacrificed to Moloch, to gratify an unlawful passion, are a sufficient justification ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... mullah from Stamboul denounced infanticide, I was one with him in sympathy, for my inclination is to cherish with love and care every female child ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... exile. I do not refer to their inclusion of lawyers among keepers of disorderly houses, and people of ill-fame. I refer to what every people, savage or civilized, has forbidden by law: murder, arson, adultery, infanticide, drunkenness, theft, rape, sodomy, and bestiality. The standard of sexual morality among the unmarried youth was lower in Puritan England than it ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... purpose of the visit soon became evident. The old Belgian priest stated the problem. He began by saying that God alone could take human life since God alone could give it. He urged that the sorrow of the young woman's present was as nothing in comparison to the loss of her soul should she be guilty of infanticide. It was the plea of a man who lived for the old ideals. His white hair, his gentle face, his pure disinterested spirit lent weight to his words. Then came the statement of the young Belgian woman. ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... China. The prevailing belief in Europe seems to be that the birth of a daughter is looked upon as a mournful event in the annals of a Chinese family, and that a large percentage of the girls born are victims of a wide-spread system of infanticide, a sufficient number, however, being spared to prevent the speedy depopulation of the Empire. It became our duty only the other day to correct a mistake, on the part of a reverend gentleman who has been ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... fide members of the tribe, but the same rights would not necessarily extend to an alien. And even within the community governed by such sanctions the weaker, and especially the weakest, did not rank as equals; among the most highly civilised nations of antiquity, the Greeks and Romans, infanticide and exposure flourished—indeed, as Lecky points out,[5] by the ideal legislations of Plato and Aristotle, and by the actual legislations of Lycurgus and Solon, infanticide was positively enjoined. Nothing can be more significant than to find in the Self-Tormentor of Terence the very character ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... education, so that I am inclined to think that that alone is obligatory which the positive laws and institutions of any society render binding." "So that" cried Harrington, "a man both may and ought to thieve in ancient Sparta, may expose his parents in Hindostan, and commit infanticide in China!" "It is a pity," archly whispered the Italian guest, "that this gentleman was not ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... branch of the Mbaya nation, who had been for many years the most formidable enemies of the Spaniards. Among the Lengua Indians of the Gran Chaco, the missionaries discovered what they describe as "a carefully planned system of racial suicide, by the practice of infanticide by abortion, and other methods." Nor is infanticide the only mode in which a savage tribe commits suicide. A lavish use of the poison ordeal may be equally effective. Some time ago a small tribe named Uwet came ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... with a wise-looking baby on her back, supported by a square piece of scarlet cloth embroidered in gold and blue silks. Not one of this river population has yet received Christianity. Very little indeed is known about them and their customs, but it is said that their morals are low, and that when infanticide was less discouraged than it is now, the river was the convenient grave of many of their newly-born female children. I spent most of one afternoon alone in one of these boats, diving into all canals and ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... all the necessary buildings for the town of Louisbourg, and had formed a road twenty-one miles in length and twenty-four feet in breadth. The Count had also done something towards civilising the people, and among other important measures had persuaded the women to give up their practice of infanticide, which had been terribly prevalent. They, however, refused to ratify the engagement without the presence of the Count's wife, who was residing at the Isle of France. She was accordingly sent for, and on her arrival the women of the different provinces, assembling ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... years and over, and for the total population. Sex ratio at birth has recently emerged as an indicator of certain kinds of sex discrimination in some countries. For instance, high sex ratios at birth in some Asian countries are now attributed to sex-selective abortion and infanticide due to a strong preference for sons. This will affect future marriage patterns and fertility patterns. Eventually it could cause unrest among young adult males who are unable to find partners. The sex ratio at birth for the ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of infanticide, such a state of things is far from incredible when we remember the extremely insanitary state of China, the superstitions that flourish unchecked, and the famines, floods, and pestilences that devastate the country. It would appear probable that when vital statistics ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... of Barbadoes. Improvement since Emancipation. (See Morals.) Indolence of Apprentices. " of Whites. Industry of Emancipated Slaves. Industry of Apprentices. Infanticide. Insolence. Insubordination. (See Subordination.) Insurrection in Barbadoes in 1816. Insurrection not feared in Antigua; nor in Barbadoes; nor in Jamaica. Intelligence of blacks, as compared with whites. Intemperance in Antigua. (See Temperance.) Intermixture. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and Andromache Amalia A Funeral Fantasie Fantasie—To Laura To Laura at the Harpsichord Group from Tartarus Rapture—To Laura To Laura (The Mystery of Reminiscence) Melancholy—To Laura The Infanticide The Greatness of the World Fortune and Wisdom Elegy on the Death of a Young Man The Battle Rousseau Friendship Elysium The Fugitive To Minna The Flowers The Triumph of Love (A Hymn) To a Moralist Count Eberhard, the Groaner of Wurtemburg To the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... infanticide, so extensively found in India, was the direct result of this difficulty. For instance, among the noble race of Rajputs in North India it was found, some years ago, that, in a community of 30,000, there was not a single girl! Every daughter that ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... hostile hatred. Never do they eat, never do they sleep with foes; and, although greatly inclined to sensuousness, they abstain from procreation with foreign women. Nevertheless they strive to increase their people. Infanticide is held a sin with them; and the souls of those who die in battle or by execution they consider immortal. Hence the love of procreation beside their contempt of death." Tacitus hated and abhorred the Jews, because, in contempt of the religion of ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... of sixty canoes was seen steering for Ulietea. The people on board them were Eareeoies, going to visit their brethren in the neighbouring islands. They formed a secret society, and seemed to have customs which they would not explain. Infanticide appeared to be almost universal among them, and they had many other practices of a most abominable character. Cava-drinking and acting plays seemed to be the principal amusements of the ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... They pass before us as empty shadows of their age, and we heap curses on their memory while we enjoy on the stage the very horror of their crimes. When morality is no more taught, religion no longer received, or laws exist, Medea would still terrify us with her infanticide. The sight of Lady Macbeth, while it makes us shudder, will also make us rejoice in a good conscience, when we see her, the sleep-walker, washing her hands and seeking to destroy the awful smell of murder. Sight is always more powerful to man than description; hence the stage acts more powerfully ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller |
