"Undermine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lectures in his room, by which he has caught several young men. Lord Holland spoke of George III.'s letters to Lord North; the King liked Lord North, hated the Duke of Richmond. Amongst the few people he liked were Lord Loughborough and Lord Thurlow. Thurlow was always 'endeavouring to undermine the Minister with whom he was acting, and intriguing underhand with his enemies.' Loughborough used to say, 'Do what you think right, and never think of what you are to say to excuse it beforehand'—a good maxim. The Duke of Richmond in 1763 or 1764, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... interesting and by no means satisfactory. As he left the awning and strolled away up the beach, he was resolving that incense and solitude should give way to snubbing. He would see more, much more of this taciturn young woman, force her to talk and, if possible, undermine her antipathy to himself. ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... Phil, his faith in her. Could she, who loved him so, destroy the one thing he still possessed simply in the hope to gain what she herself longed for? Could she deal him another blow, and that the hardest, bitterest of all—undermine what had been the very keystone of his life, the one really flawless element in the whole sad story? Her love—the strength of which she boasted—had been sullied by jealousy, dimmed by reservations, a paltry thing beside his; and yet, be that as it might, she knew it was all ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... Service—Examples of such Non-compliance in other States—Governments do not Know how to Treat Men who Refuse to Comply with their Demands on Christian Grounds—Such People, without Striking a Blow, Undermine the very Basis of Government from Within—To Punish them is Equivalent to Openly Renouncing Christianity, and Assisting in Diffusing the Very Principle by which these Men justify their Non-compliance—So Governments ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... rise of a super-civic philosophy, derived chiefly from the writings of Plato (see footnote 1, page 42), which held that certain men could be above the State and yet by their wisdom in part direct it. The two influences combined to undermine the resisting ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... siege of Exeter was when the followers of Perkin Warbeck surged in thousands round the city. Their assault was vigorous and determined; they tried to undermine the walls, burned the north gate, and, repulsed at this point, broke through the defences at the east gate. After a sharp struggle in the streets, the rebels were thrust back, and were forced to march northwards, leaving Exeter triumphant. Three weeks later ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... offering 'do-it-yourself' courses which pretend to instruct the public in the intricacies of foreign policy, but which actually mask clever propaganda operations designed to sell 'co-existence' to Americans. There are many of these propaganda outfits working to undermine Americans' faith in America, but none, in our opinion, is as slick or as smooth or as dangerous as the Foreign Policy Association ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... Oxford, and by the maintainers of the despotism not even of Pitt but of Castlereagh. It is already felt, however, that the poet whom these men were mainly instrumental in bringing into notice, will live in men's memories by exactly those of his writings most powerful to undermine and overthrow their dull and faded bigotries. Despite his own efforts, Wordsworth (as has been said of Napoleon) is the child and champion of Jacobinism. Though clothed in ecclesiastical formulas, his religion ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... desire to 'undermine the idea of the state,' he besieges king and government with petitions for money; and he will confess in a letter, 'I should very much like to write publicly about the mean behaviour of the government,' which, however, he refrains from doing. He gets sore and angry over party and parochial rights ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... involving the functions of the Crown? Oh, yes, Mr. Prime Minister, it is no use for you to shake your head. I contend that, without a word said, this bill does directly undermine my powers of initiative and independence. You deprive the Bishops of their right to vote on money bills; very well, that will include all royal grants, whether special or annual,—maintenance, annuities, and all that sort ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... sylvan ways, May laud the rose, and wish, from hour to hour, That he had petals like the empress-flower, And there could grow, unwing'd, and be a bud, With all his warblings ta'en at singing-flood And turned to vagaries of the wildest scent To undermine the ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... born. He reconciled more enemies in ten years than his predecessors had done in three hundred; and one of his manoeuvres in the peacemaking art was to make the quarrellers laugh at the cause of quarrel. So did he undermine the demon of discord. But independently of that, he really loved a harmless joke. He was a wonderful tamer of animals, squirrels, bares, fawns, etc. So half in jest a parishioner who had a mule supposed to be possessed with a devil ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... agricultural districts and from Ireland; the industrial epoch alone enables the owners of these cattle-sheds to rent them for high prices to human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to undermine the health of thousands, in order that they alone, the owners, may grow rich. In the industrial epoch alone has it become possible that the worker scarcely freed from feudal servitude could be used as mere material, a mere chattel; ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... Confederate agents here and in Canada, had been and were at work to undermine us by every means. Distress to us, however brought about, was their purpose. They sought to create in the minds of the masses the idea that the war was ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... including moves toward privatization and relaxation of government controls. Heavily dependent on cocoa, gold, and timber exports, economic growth is threatened by a poor cocoa harvest and higher oil prices in 1991. Rising inflation—unofficially estimated at 50%—could undermine Ghana's relationships with multilateral lenders. Civil service wage increases and the cost of peacekeeping forces sent to Liberia are boosting government expenditures and undercutting structural adjustment reforms. Ghana opened ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... that all the typical movements of our time are upon this road towards simplification. Each system seeks to be more fundamental than the other; each seeks, in the literal sense, to undermine the other. In art, for example, the old conception of man, classic as the Apollo Belvedere, has first been attacked by the realist, who asserts that man, as a fact of natural history, is a creature with colourless hair and a freckled face. Then comes the Impressionist, going yet deeper, ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... heaven, of frost, rain, vapour, and imperceptible atmospheric influences; and, as the worm devours the lineaments of his mortal beauty, so the lichens and the moss and the most insignificant plants shall feed upon his columns and his pyramids, and the most humble and insignificant insects shall undermine and sap the foundations of his colossal works, and make their habitations amongst the ruins of his palaces and the falling ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... the government of the United States, but still others have remained subjects of the Central Powers. They have organized plots either to destroy property, or to spread rumors intended to interfere with the prosecution of the war and to undermine confidence in ...
— A School History of the Great War • Albert E. McKinley, Charles A. Coulomb, and Armand J. Gerson
... pines and pines, she only frets within herself, she only grieves and is anxious about the fate of her children, her selfish, heartless children: grief and anguish, the nastiness and the wickedness of man slowly undermine her strength ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... had his principles not been enfeebled by the foolish praise of his family, nor his vanity inflated by their senseless appeals to it—it is possible, nay, almost certain, that he would, even at this stage of his life, have been completely free from the failings which are beginning even now to undermine the whole strength of ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... reception with their strong jaws. As many as ninety eggs have been taken from a single beetle. The grubs (Fig. 104, e; a, enlarged view of the head seen from above; b, the under view of the same: c, side view, and d, two rings of the body enlarged), hatched from these eggs, undermine the bark to the extent of six or eight inches, in sinuous channels, or penetrate the solid wood an equal distance. It is supposed that three years are required to mature the insect. Various expedients ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... matter of attention to Indian necessities, his efforts were unappreciated largely because of evil influences at work to undermine him and to advance Douglas H. Cooper. Steele had his points of vulnerability, his inability to check the Federal advance and his remoteness from the scene of action, his headquarters being at Fort Smith. Connected with the second point and charged against him were all the ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... Jack, dear, you'd best get the hang of it before Cynthia comes. You might tell me all about your divorce. That's a sympathetic subject. Were you able to undermine it? ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... only the more concentrated upon one object all the womanly and tender feelings denied every other and less sinful vent. But she felt her shame, though she sought to conceal it, and a yet more gnawing grief than even that of shame contributed to prey upon her spirits and undermine her health. Yet, withal, in Montreal's presence she was happy, even in regret; and in her declining health she had at least a consolation in the hope to die while his love was undiminished. Sometimes they made short excursions, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... She and her friends probably have been at work with pick and shovel, for months, trying to undermine his foundations. They are an insidious crew, Reed, totally insidious. If a man is the least bit nervous, their absent-treatment methods get in their work with a fatal effect sometimes. I've been watching them for years. They mine and countermine, until it isn't ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... the last winter almost completely served to undermine the small strength of constitution he had left; he was constantly harrassed by complaints in the organs of digestion; head ache deprived him of the power of application; his countenance assumed a sallow complexion; the eye which had beamed with animation, retired within its socket, ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... not place the use of tobacco in the same scale with that of ardent spirits. It does not make men maniacs and demons. But that it does undermine the health of thousands; that it creates a nervous irritability, and thus operates on the temper and moral character of men; that it often creates a thirst for spirituous liquors; that it allures to clubs, and grog-shops, and taverns, and thus helps to make idlers and spendthrifts; and ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... rise to, he began to be sensible that he had not eaten for many hours; and amidst many doubts and fears of a more heroic nature, he half entertained a lurking suspicion, that they meant to let hunger undermine his strength before they adventured into the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... imperturbable antagonist to another, now leaping clear over the head of one, only to dash itself into a cloud of spray against another, or pour like a cataract against its base in a persistent, endless struggle to undermine it; while over all tower the dark, shadowy rocks, grim witnesses of the battle. This spot is known by the appropriate name of "The Devil's Gate." Wherever the walls of the canon recede from the river's brink, and leave a space of cultivable land, there the industrious Mormons have built log ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all. Besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretence of religion to challenge the privilege ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... the blind," said Mr Lerew. "The pernicious principles of such men are calculated to produce the overthrow of our Holy Church, and to undermine all catholic doctrines." ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... and furnished his men with a portion of spirit daily. But after much attentive observation and mature reflection, he became deeply impressed with the conviction that the practice was not only useless, but hurtful. He became convinced that it tends to lead men to intemperance; to undermine their constitutions; and to sow the seeds of death, temporal and eternal. And he felt that he could not be justified in continuing to cultivate his farm by means of a practice which was ruining the bodies ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... speaks of in "The Custom House"; alluding to "old King Derby, old Billy Gray, old Simon Forrester, and many another magnate of his day; whose powdered head, however, was scarcely in the tomb, before his mountain-pile of wealth began to dwindle." But Nathaniel's family neither helped to undermine the heap, nor accumulated a rival one. However good the forecast that his immediate ancestors had made, as to the quickest and broadest road to wealth, they travelled long in the wake of success without ever winning ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... felt obligated to train their students in those patterns of speech which were appropriate to the most polite elements of society. Particularly as they addressed themselves to missionaries, they wished to warn them away from such illiteracies as might undermine their ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... had an unschooled aptitude for the science, and had practised it with profit on his competitors and employees before he knew a word of its technology. In Carrick's bare and lamp-lit study they had joined forces to bewilder and undermine the intelligence of the sly spaniel, and there had been sessions of hypnotism, with Mr. Newman rigid in trances, while Carrick groped, as it were, among the springs of his mind. The pair of them had incurred the indignation of European authorities, writing in obscure and ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... "vices" of the knave and the honest man, Mandeville could without serious risk of civil or ecclesiastical penalties make rigorism of any degree seem ridiculous and thus provide abundant amusement for himself and for like-minded readers; he could then proceed to undermine all the really important systems of morality of his time by applying more exacting standards than they could meet. Against a naturalistic and sentimental system, like Shaftesbury's, he could argue that it rested on an appraisal of human nature too optimistic to ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... our shores. Many appear to be fast asleep with regard to the sacred heritage we have received from our forefathers, and allow disturbers of our peace and faith, under various disguises, to intrude upon and undermine the safeguards of our sacred rights ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... on his return home, that the Vekeel's crimes far exceeded his worst fears. Obada's proceedings had begun to undermine that respect for Arab rule and Moslem justice which Amru had done his utmost to secure. It was only by a miracle that Orion had escaped his plots, for he had three times sent assassins to the prison, and it was entirely owing to the watchful care of pretty Emau's husband that the youth had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... crack through which the country outside could be seen. There being five feet of the logs in the ground, the wall was, of course, twenty feet high. This manner of enclosure was in some respects superior to a wall of masonry. It was equally unscalable, and much more difficult to undermine or batter down. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... author of a curious work entitled, "Proofs of the real Existence, and dangerous Tendency, of Illuminism." Charlestown, 1802. By "Illuminism" he means an organised attempt, or conspiracy, to undermine the foundations of Christian society and establish upon its ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... of Mines upon one of the licensing bodies, and here, too, a very appreciable result followed. During Mr. Esselen's term of office all went well as far as the public were concerned, but influences were soon at work to undermine the two reforming officials. It was represented to the President that Mr. Trimble had once been in the British army; that he was even then a subject of the Queen, and entitled to a pension from the Cape Government. The canteen interest on the goldfields, playing upon the prejudices of ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... from Rye, and not in a man of war. He told me in discourse that my Lord Chancellor is much envied, and that many great men, such as the Duke of Buckingham and my Lord of Bristoll, do endeavour to undermine him, and that he believes it will not be done; for that the King (though he loves him not in the way of a companion, as he do these young gallants that can answer him in his pleasures), yet cannot be without him, for his policy and service. From thence to the Wardrobe, where my wife met me, it ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... this refused to take any part in the proceedings, so that they alone remained at war, because they hoped to recover the territory of Messenia. Agesilaus was thought an obstinate and headlong man, and insatiable of war, because he took such pains to undermine the general peace, and to keep Sparta at war at a time when he was in such distress for money to carry it on, that he was obliged to borrow from his personal friends and to get up subscriptions among the citizens, and when he had much better have allowed ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... the assurance which myself and others have had, that because thou hast loved me thou wouldst love me to my end, and at my end. Open none of my doors, not of my heart, not of mine ears, not of my house, to any supplanter that would enter to undermine me in my religion to thee, in the time of my weakness, or to defame me, and magnify himself with false rumours of such a victory and surprisal of me, after I am dead. Be my salvation, and plead my salvation; work it and declare it; and as thy triumphant shall be, so let the militant church be ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... has misused its riches as England has. With a hypocritically virtuous air, the British Chauvinist has for years been labouring to undermine the German name, and few can have divined with what means he went to ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... said the man in black; "and if the rest of your church were like them we should quickly bid adieu to all hope of converting these regions, but we are thankful to be able to say that such folks are not numerous; there are, moreover, causes at work quite sufficient to undermine even their zeal. Their sons return at the vacations, from Oxford and Cambridge, puppies, full of the nonsense which they have imbibed from Platitude professors; and this nonsense they retail at home, where it fails not to make some impression, whilst the daughters scream—I beg ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... bottom could be reached. It was a struggle requiring the utmost activity. The water was so turbid that we could not perceive objects an inch below the surface. The current rushed with a velocity that threatened to carry everything before it. The worst effect was its perpetual tendency to undermine its banks. Often heavy portions of the banks plunged into the river, endangering boats and men. The banks consisted of dark alluvion ten to fifteen feet above the water, bearing a dense growth of trees and shrubbery. The plunging of these banks into the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... the Saviour in Matt. xxii. Jesus says "thou hast answered RIGHT, this do and thou shalt live." Is this a safe rule for us? Yes, if you can believe the Saviour. I ask if it could be so if any of the law should fail? No, that would undermine the foundation. Then I have not appealed to Jesus in vain. If all of this does not convince you, just hear the Prophets. "The good man's delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate day and night." Psl. i: 1, 2. "The law of the Lord is perfect, ...
— The Seventh Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign - 1847 edition • Joseph Bates
... claims but their impudence, to storm their fortress and to capture them. They will defend it in all lawful ways.-Bishop and Wolcott, and a thousand other mercenary hirelings may attempt to subdue or terrify them—a proud and haughty leader who under the guise of patriotism, is attempting to undermine the happiness of the best regulated and freest State in the Union, with a thousand sycophants, conspiring to bring us under the yoke of Virginia, may exhaust their ingenuity and malice, still Connecticut will remain unshaken. She will never crouch like Isachar to chains and fetters ...
— Count The Cost • Jonathan Steadfast
... antiquity, and point with affected pride to the historical period of the American colonial revolution against the taxation and tyranny of England, as the date of their origin. Whatever may be the facts as to the precise date of the existence, respectively, of these disreputable cables, laid to undermine the greatness and glory of the National Union, cemented as it is by the blood of the sires and sages of the Revolution, is unimportant to the purpose of the author, while the great living fact that they have been the ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... did much to undermine feudalism; and it almost regenerated the spirit of Christianity in the thirteenth century. "Man of the people," writes R. F. O'Connor, "he did more for the people than ever yet had been done by any one; whose vocation was to revive in the midst of a corrupting opulence the esteem and practice ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... ladders against the walls; or else to drive engines against the defenses, battering-rams which struck them with heavy beams, mangonels which launched stones, sows whose arched wooden backs protected troops of workmen who tried to undermine the wall, and moving towers consisting of a succession of stages or shelves, filled with soldiers, and with a bridge with iron hooks, capable of being launched from the highest story to the top of the battlements. The besieged could generally disconcert the battering-ram by hanging ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... instincts of the nation. But you will find it difficult to persuade me that in the present head of the dynasty we shall not find extreme ideas of personal influence, which in the long run will undermine and subvert the finest as ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... the father was the only child that I ever brought into the world. If my poor boy ever suffered any humiliating pangs on account of birth, he could not blame his mother, for God knows that she did not wish to give him life; he must blame the edicts of that society which deemed it no crime to undermine the virtue of girls in my ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... against the tendency, on the part of the Government, to resort to espionage and inquisitorial measures, in endeavouring to rid the Province of those obnoxious to the ruling faction, and in attempting to undermine the independence of the Legislature by scandalizing its members and awing them into political subserviency. The conviction was reiterated that there was no ground for the charge against Captain Matthews, the malignity and falsity of which was due to ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... by new ideals which are beginning to influence the young. The hopes or dreams of the generation just coming into the field of public life undermine the energy of a ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... which the freedom of all and each was secured to the uttermost degree, without one of those animosities which make freedom in the upper world depend on the perpetual strife of hostile parties. Here the corruption which debases democracies was as unknown as the discontents which undermine the thrones of monarchies. Equality here was not a name; it was a reality. Riches were not persecuted, because they were not envied. Here those problems connected with the labours of a working class, hitherto insoluble ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... society who can so ill afford to undermine the conscience of the community, or to set it loose from its moorings in the eternal sphere, as merchants who live upon confidence and credit. Anything which weakens or paralyzes this is taking beams from the foundations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... no intention of doing this. He was too much afraid of displeasing the King of Catholic England; and moreover were he once to admit that an inquisitor of the faith had pronounced a wrong sentence he would undermine all human authority. The French clerks submit and are silent. In the assemblies of the clergy no one dares ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... this end they decreed that Belgium and Holland should be one. But in doing this, the statesmen or politicians concerned failed to take into account certain factors and facts which must inevitably, in the course of time, undermine their arrangements. Nations cannot be arbitrarily manufactured to suit the convenience of others. There is a chemistry in nationalities which has laws of its own, and will not be ignored. Between the Hollanders and the Belgians there existed not merely a negative ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... always showed sympathy. Let news of a single wrong to a serf get through the hedges about the Russian majesty, and woe to the guilty master! Many of these wrongs came to Nicholas's notice; and he came to hate the system, and tried to undermine it. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... ineffective in insuring* truth and fidelity. So far as their educational influence is concerned, they tend, as we have seen, to undermine the reverence for truth in itself considered, which is the surest safeguard of individual veracity. Then too, so far as reliance is placed upon an oath, the attention of those concerned is directed ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... supported by us. On July 28th the Kaiser telegraphed to the Czar begging him to remember that it was Austria-Hungary's right and duty to stop the Greater-Serbian agitation, as this threatened to undermine Austria's existence. (Cries of indignation.) The Kaiser pointed out to the Czar the gulf between monarchical interests and the outrage at Serajewo; he begged him to give his personal support to the Kaiser's endeavour to smooth out the antithesis ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... lose among men. In a word, she had to acknowledge, the Dragon of the Valley was decidedly likable; and behind the genial front were the big hands that would crush; behind the plausible eyes, the craft that would undermine what the hands could not crush. Anaemic teachers and preachers might as well throw paper wads at a wall as attempt to dislodge this man with argument. Right was an empty term to him. Might he understood; ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... somewhat overhanging. The manner of their formation is now to be seen in the amphitheatre immediately contiguous to the village, although it appears to be very slow. It is thus, bodies of water falling from the edge of the table land, seem to undermine the sandstone below, producing land slips, which occur in this manner year after year. Since 1835, the edge of the Moosmai fall has receded at least 10 feet, and ample evidence remains of the recession to take place next rains. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... usurper's activity, energy, and vigour, his authority is liable to be soon disputed, or even set at nought It behoves him to give indications of strength and breadth of character, or of a wise, far-seeing policy, in order to deter rivals from attempting to undermine his power. Sheshonk early let it be seen that he possessed both caution and far-reaching views by his treatment of a refugee who, shortly after his accession, sought his court. This was Jeroboam, one of the ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... interpreting miracles. When Korah, Dathan and Abiram, with their fellow-unfortunates, were swallowed up, they only suffered what many others have done since,—destruction by a natural earthquake. This was the opinion of Michaelis. Others, more ingenious, thought that Moses had taken care to undermine privately the whole of the ground on which the tents of the sinners were; and, therefore, it was not surprising, either that they fell into the cavity, or that Moses should know this would be their fate. Eichhorn held that the three offenders, with their property, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... enemies to undermine Bourbon in the favor of the King led to the threatened loss of the Constable's dignities and lands, and provoked him to renounce the French service. After making a secret treaty with Charles V and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... reasonably demanded of me as a WHIG, and that my political catechism is full and complete. But whoever, under the shelter of that party denomination, and of many great professions of loyalty, would destroy, or undermine, or injure the Church established; I utterly disown him, and think he ought to choose another name of distinction for himself, and his adherents. I came into the cause upon other principles, which, by the grace of God, I mean to preserve as long as I live. Shall ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... vengeance upon a people who dared to wish to be free. The arrest of Louis XVI. at Varennes deranged this plan. Leopold, alarmed not only by the impending fate of his sister, but lest the principles of popular liberty, extending from France, should undermine his own throne, wrote as follows ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... to undermine the company. Dave's men finished building a bridge across a gulch late one day. It was blown up into kindling wood by dynamite that night. Wagons broke down unexpectedly. Shipments of supplies failed to arrive. Engines were ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... in spiritual powers or religion. It sold incredibly, and the effect of it on society was immense. This great edifice, "built half of marble, half of mud," as Voltaire himself said, had as its chief architects Diderot and D'Alembert. Nothing contributed more to undermine the foundations on which all institutions, and not least royalty, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... it would undermine the whole institution of marriage, let loose the flood-gates that at present hold immorality in check, doesn't appear to trouble you. That the law must be altered to press less heavily upon the woman—that the man must be made an equal sharer in the penalty—all that goes without ...
— The Master of Mrs. Chilvers • Jerome K. Jerome
... inhabitants of the neighbourhood, if these voracious creatures were suddenly deprived of their usual sustenance. It is well known, that the mischief which they occasion is not confined to what they eat; but they undermine houses, burrow through dams, destroy drains, and commit incalculable havoc, in every ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... least dangerous where he is most free to speak. Bolingbroke, who had always hated Walpole, even lately when he was professing regard and gratitude, hated him now more than ever, and set to work by all the means in his power to injure Walpole in the estimation of the country, and, if possible, to undermine his ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... complimented Major Pendennis, who until now had scarcely paid any attention to some hints which his Fairoaks correspondence threw out of "dear Arthur's constant and severe literary occupations, which I fear may undermine the poor boy's health," and had thought any notice of Mr. Pen and his newspaper connexions quite below his dignity as ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... marry a Rajput king is easier to understand if one recalls the sinister designs of Russian statecraft in the days when India and "warm sea-water" was the great objective. The oldest, and surely the easiest, means of a perplexed diplomacy has been to send a woman to undermine the policy of courts or steal the very consciences of kings. Delilah is a case in point. And in India, where the veil and the rustling curtain and religion hide woman's hand without in the least suppressing her, that was a plan too easy ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... bath every night, for the purpose of thoroughly cleaning the body, is highly necessary. To bathe a delicate infant of a few days or even weeks old in cold water with a view "to harden" the constitution (as it is called), is the most effectual way to undermine its health and entail future disease. By degrees, however, the water with which it is sponged in the morning should be made tepid, the evening bath being continued warm enough to be ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... we see, let us rejoice, In peace and loyalty, And still despise the factious noise Of those that vainly try To undermine our happiness, That they may by it get; Knavery has great increase When honesty ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... of Ormond was the next minister whom my Lady Castlemaine, in the strength of her evil influence, sought to undermine. By reason of an integrity rendering him too loyal to the king to pander to his majesty's mistress, he incurred her displeasure in many ways; but especially by refusing to gratify her cupidity. It happened she had obtained from his majesty a warrant granting her ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... the left foot unless you are instructed to the contrary. Remember always, when you hop, to land with the knees bent; otherwise, the landing of the body with stiff legs after the hops will be a shock to the nervous system which in time will undermine your health. ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... leaves on the mind. It is like a dictionary of obsolete English suffering from a severe fit of delirium tremens." A prominent literary periodical saw, in the attempt to foist Thompson on the public as a genuine poet, a sectarian effort to undermine the literary press of England. In the course of a year the sale of "Sister Songs" amounted to 349 copies. The "New Poems" fared worse; its sale, never large, practically ceased a few years after its appearance, ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... danger of straying from the strait and narrow way, and of the tortures of the afterworld led to self-consciousness, introspection, and morbidness. The idea that Satan was at all times seeking to undermine the Puritan church also made it easy to believe that anyone living outside of, or contrary to, that church was an agent of the devil, in short, bewitched. As it is only the useful that survives, it was essential that the army of devils be given ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... consort immediately reached her, and that two of these especially appeared more credible than the guilt of a noble, who could, apparently, reap no benefit from the commission of so foul and dangerous a crime. In the first place, the Spanish Cabinet had been long labouring to undermine the power of France, in which they had failed through the energy and wisdom of the late King, whose opposition to the alliance which they had proposed between the Dauphin and their own Infanta had, moreover, wounded their pride, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... This appears to be the object of the rules about food. And since the blood of the clan and of the caste is communicated by descent through the father under the patriarchal system, adultery on the part of a married woman would bring a stranger into the group and undermine its corporate existence and unity. Hence the severity of the punishment for the adultery of a married woman, which is a special feature of the patriarchal system. It has already been seen that under the rule of female descent, as shown by Mr. ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... any president, vice-president, professor, or office-bearer, in any of the new colleges shall be convicted before the board of trustees of attempting to undermine the faith or injure the morals of any student in those institutions, he shall be immediately removed from his office ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... generous order; but it was not suited to the majority; it was corrupted by her followers into a thousand basenesses. In vain do we make a law, if the general spirit is averse to the law. Constance could humble the great; could loosen the links of extrinsic rank; could undermine the power of titles; but that was all! She could abase the proud, but not elevate the general tone: for one slavery she only substituted another,—people hugged the chains of Fashion, as before they hugged those of ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fighter, was second only to that of the great Chief himself, had never aroused the Chief's jealousy. This for several reasons. He had always loyally supported the Chief's authority, instead of scheming to undermine it, and his influence had always made for tribal discipline. He was not so tall as the Chief, by perhaps half a handbreadth, and for all his huge muscles of arm and breast he was altogether of a slimmer build; wherefore the Chief, while vastly respecting his counsels, ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... further into the recesses of the episcopal, or even of the suffragan, mind. There are snowy peaks where we lay helpers should fear to tread. But it may be stated, without laying ourselves open to a suspicion of wishing to undermine the Church, that when the woman of forty in her turn acidly announces, as she not infrequently does, that all young men seem to her exactly alike, she is in a ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... lazy, a "blockhead" and good-for-nothing; that he will never amount to anything; that it is foolish for him to try to be much, because he has not the ability or physical stamina to enable him to accomplish what many others do. Such teaching would undermine the brightest intellect. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... and Sankum, and others who were combined with them, were continually endeavoring to undermine Temujin's influence with Vang Khan, and thus deprive him of his power. But he was too strong for them. His great success in all his military undertakings kept him up in spite of all that his rivals could do to pull him down. As for Vang Khan himself, he was in part pleased with him and proud ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... but let us not go to sleep at the switch! Just as busily as she is baking pottery opposite Coblenz, labelled "made in St. Louis," "made in Kansas City," her "army of spies" is at work here and everywhere to undermine those nations who have for the moment delayed her plans for world dominion. I think the number of Americans who know this has increased; but no American, wherever he lives, need travel far from home to meet fellow Americans who sing the song of ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... successes in the South excited the enthusiasm of the people; and when at last the Unionists, rousing from their midsummer languor, began to show their faith in the Republican candidate, the hopelessness of all efforts to undermine him became evident. ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... or any of the great roads and you will seldom meet any Germans touring in their motors for pleasure. Only Americans—English. The Germans are spoiling little time by such matters. They are busy—busy working for their Empire—busy like moles boring away to undermine the ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... virtuous, and an intelligent people. Our country abounds in the necessaries, the arts, and the comforts of life. A general prosperity is visible in the public countenance. The means employed by the British cabinet to undermine it have recoiled on themselves; have given to our national faculties a more rapid development, and, draining or diverting the precious metals from British circulation and British vaults, have poured them into those of the United States. It is a propitious ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... is generally supposed. It is even possible that its too exclusive culture may effeminate rather than strengthen the character, by laying it more open to the temptations of the senses. "It is the nature of the imaginative temperament cultivated by the arts," says Sir Henry Taylor, "to undermine the courage, and, by abating strength of character, to render men more easily subservient—SEQUACES, CEREOS, ET AD MANDATA DUCTILES." [1817] The gift of the artist greatly differs from that of the thinker; his highest idea is to mould his subject—whether ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... ferreting down in my part o' the country. You, or Eccles—I don't care who 'tis—you've been at my servants to get at my secrets. Some of you have. You've declared war. You've been trying to undermine me. That's a breach, I call it. Anyhow, I've come for my wife. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... an eminence near the gardens east of Jaffa. Orders were given directly to undermine the fortifications and, blow them up; and on the 27th of May, upon the signaling given, the town was in a moment laid bare. An hour afterwards the General-in-Chief left his tent and repaired to the town, accompanied by Berthier, some physicians and surgeons, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Almagro and Luque were very much chagrined at the meagre reward that had fallen to them, and Almagro looked with deep antagonism upon the advent of the Pizarros, who, he realized instinctively, would undermine his influence with his partner. This hatred the new Pizarros repaid in kind. Some sort of peace, however, was patched up between them, and in January, 1531, with three small ships and one hundred and eighty-three men, including thirty-seven ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... of the Leeds Times newspaper, with a salary of L100. The politics of this journal were Radical, and to the exposition and advocacy of these opinions he devoted himself with equal ardour and success. But the unremitting labour of conducting a public journal soon began materially to undermine the energies of a constitution which, never robust, had been already impaired by a course of untiring literary occupation. The excitement of a political contest at Leeds, during a general parliamentary election, completed the physical prostration of the poet; he removed from Leeds to Knaresborough, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... their salaries and mileages for services supposed to be performed for the benefit of the very Government they were conspiring to injure, and swearing anew the sacred oath to support and defend the very Constitution which they were moving heaven and earth to undermine and destroy! ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... began, and in 1891 and 1892, as many as fourteen actions were brought against the adepts of the Great Candle, and numbers of them were sentenced to imprisonment and to the confiscation of their goods. All this in spite of the fact that their beliefs did not in any way threaten to undermine the foundations ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... "It may be that everybody on board will be saved." Another added: "Our duty is to the living. You women owe it to your relatives and friends not to allow this thing to wreck your reason or undermine your health." And they took pains to see that all the women who were on the life-boat had plenty of covering to keep them from the icy blasts of ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... more." Said Aunt M'riar:—"It's been stood up against the wall ever since I remembered it, and Mr. Bartlett's men assured me every care was took in moving." A murmur of testimony to Mr. Bartlett's unvarying sobriety and that of his men threatened to undermine the coherency of the conversation, but the position was saved by Uncle Mo, who seemed less infatuated than others about them. "Bartlett's ain't neither here or there," said he. "What I look at's like this,—the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... If traitors can, the basis is but frail. I mean such traitors as the vacant world Echoes most stunningly: not fur-robed knaves Whose whispers raise the dreaming bloodhound's ear Against benighted famished wanderers; While with remorseless guilt they undermine Palace and shed, their very father's house, O blind! their own, their children's heritage, To leave more ample space for fearful wealth. Plunder in some most harmless guise they swathe, Call it some very meek and hallowed name, Some known and borne by their good forefathers, And ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... more decided reaction. Jefferson, now in retirement, had long since nursed his antipathy for the Federal Judiciary to the point of monomania. It was in his eyes "a subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working underground to undermine our confederated fabric"; and this latest assault upon the rights of the States seemed to him, though perpetrated in the usual way, the most outrageous of all: "An opinion is huddled up in conclave, perhaps ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... a means to undermine the confidence which united Ovid and Carmina, and still calling on her invention in vain, Mrs. Gallilee had passed a sleepless night. Her maid, entering the room at the usual hour, was ordered to ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... of a pliant Size, And Spreads a subtle Net to catch her Prize, With greater ease to drive him in the same, She first obtains his Residence, and Name, Two useful Perquisites for her design; The Shallow Easie Fop to undermine; A Mesiage next she sends to let him know, Convey'd by some such useful Rogue as R——w; That she's with Child—and by the Love she bore, It must be him—for she was never so before. Which he with wonderful Surprize receives, And for the present some few Guineas gives, Thus he's impos'd ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses from Men • Various
... as we have seen, who first suggested this most excellent method of reconciling conscience with treachery to the Constitution. Though he professes the most profound respect for that instrument, he deliberately sets to work to undermine one of its most clear and unequivocal mandates. He does not, like Mr. Seward, openly smite the Constitution with his hand, or contemptuously kick it with his foot. He betrays it with ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... of their ravages and slaughters. It is a tedious catalogue of blood—how one prince put to fire and sword the whole town of Courthezon; how another was stabbed in prison by his wife; how a third besieged the castle of his niece, and sought to undermine her chamber, knowing her the while to be in childbed; how a fourth was flayed alive outside the walls of Avignon. There is nothing terrible, splendid, and savage, belonging to feudal history, of which an example ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... England. For my main theme, your ingratitude, you have in part acknowledged it, by your laughing at our easy delivery of your cautionary towns: The best is, we are used by you as well as your own princes of the house of Orange: We and they have set you up, and you undermine their power, and circumvent ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... assassination of a presidential candidate, several high profile kidnappings, the killing of a second high-level political figure, and renewed threats from the Chiapas rebels - combined with rising international interest rates and concerns of a devaluation to undermine investor confidence and prompt massive outflows of capital. The dwindling of foreign exchange reserves, which the central bank had been using to defend the currency, forced the new administration to change the exchange rate policy and ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... first place, my frame was enfeebled by the uneasy postures I was required to keep for so long a time during prayers. This alone I thought was sufficient to undermine my health and destroy my life. An hour and a half every morning I had to sit on the floor of the community-room, with my feet under me, my body bent forward, and my head hanging on one side —in a ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... of dissension among the foe; but, placing the most sanguine confidence in a wisdom never to be deceived, it is clear that we should relax no energy within our means, but fight while we plot, and seek to conquer, while we do not neglect to undermine." ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Hampshire. I leave every man to decide whether the result of any one of these experiments can be said to countenance a suspicion, that a diffusive mode of choosing representatives of the people tends to elevate traitors and to undermine ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... contemptible; you are Scarabee's that batten in her dung, and have no palats to taste her curious Viands; and like Owles, can only see her night deformities, but with the glorious splendor of her beauties, you are struck blind as Moles, that undermine the sumptuous Building that allow'd you shelter: you stick like running ulcers on her face, and taint the pureness of her native candor, and being bad Servants, cause your Masters goodness to be disputed of; you make the Court, that is the abstract ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... reference to her own distempered fancies and visions, but by reference to actual evidence and actual fact—whether Mr. Aldersley is, or is not, a living man; and there will be an end of the hysterical delusions which now threaten to fatally undermine her health. Even taking matters at their worst—even assuming that Mr. Aldersley has died in the Arctic seas—it will be less injurious to her to discover this positively, than to leave her mind to feed on its own morbid superstitions and speculations, for weeks and weeks together, while ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... of the marriage Deaves, who up to that time had only been a money-lender, had succeeded in entering the realms of high finance. No sooner was his own position secure, so the story went, than Simeon Deaves set himself to work to undermine Warrender, and in the end ousted him from his railway and ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... was not likely to undermine the public feeling in favour of the religious celebration of marriage; and we believe that it has not done so. But the Bill now proposed for Scotland is framed on a very different principle, and would in all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... tell, if a digger steal away, prospecting for this true gold, into the unexplored solitudes around us, there is no danger that any will dog his steps, and endeavor to supplant him. He may claim and undermine the whole valley even, both the cultivated and the uncultivated portions, his whole life long in peace, for no one will ever dispute his claim. They will not mind his cradles or his toms. He is not confined to a claim twelve feet square, as at Ballarat, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... although he was only forty-seven years of age he was in some respects already an old man. He had entered, although happily he did not know it, on the last decade of his life; and was already beginning to suffer from the two diseases, gout and ophthalmia, which were soon to undermine his strength and endurance. Religion of a mystical fifteenth-century sort was deepening in him; he had undertaken this voyage in the name of the Holy Trinity; and to that theological entity he had resolved to dedicate the first new land ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... relations between the two powers, the Austrian Ambassador in Paris had been Prince Charles of Schwarzenberg, the warrior and statesman who later, as commander-in-chief of the Austrian forces, was to deal such heavy blows to France. In 1810 he was all for peace, and his sole aim was to undermine, for the good of his country, the influence of his Russian colleague, Prince Kourakine. The Austrian Ambassador was very anxious that the Archduchess Marie Louise should become Empress of the French; for he was convinced that such an event would be of as much benefit to him as to his country. ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... had recovered a little, he told them the trick the gipsy woman had played him; and yet for all that, he dug a hole, more than a fathom deep, in the place pointed out to him, in spite of all his neighbours could say; and had he not been forcibly prevented by one of them, when he was beginning to undermine the foundations of the house, he would have brought the whole of it down about his ears. The story spread all over the city; so that the little boys in the streets used to point their fingers at him, and shout in ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the great champagne manufacturers of Reims are scattered in all directions over the historical old city. They undermine its narrowest and most insignificant streets, its broad and handsome boulevards, and on the eastern side extend to its more distant outskirts. Messrs. Werl and Co., the successors of the famous ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... is inseparable from matter, this cannot be. Do the billiard-balls when so grouped as to represent consciousness generate some second motive power distinct from, at variance with, and often stronger than, the original impetus? Clearly no scientific thinker can admit this. To do so would be to undermine the entire fabric of science, to contradict what is its first axiom and its last conclusion. If then the motion of our six billiard balls has anything, when it corresponds to consciousness, distinct in kind from what it always had, it ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... scarce complete. There was one influence she feared for the child and still secretly combated; that was my lord's; and half unconsciously, half in a wilful blindness, she continued to undermine her husband with his son. As long as Archie remained silent, she did so ruthlessly, with a single eye to heaven and the child's salvation; but the day came when Archie spoke. It was 1801, and Archie was seven, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... favourite with the majority of the nation. He had however many enemies, one of the chief of whom was Henry Beaufort, great-uncle to the king, and cardinal of Winchester. One of the means employed by this prelate to undermine the power of Humphrey, consisted in a charge of witchcraft brought against Eleanor Cobham, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... set forth limit the omnipotence of God. Section III. The foregoing scheme, it may be said, presents a gloomy view of the universe. Section IV. It may be alleged, that in refusing to subject the volitions of men to the power and control of God, we undermine the sentiments of humility and submission. Section V. The foregoing treatise may be deemed inconsistent with gratitude to God. Section VI. It may be contended, that it is unfair to urge the preceding difficulties against the scheme of necessity; inasmuch as the same, or as great, difficulties ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... and Conari, men who had established the fame of Venice on so firm a basis that it would require centuries to undermine it; men in whose society one seemed to be withdrawn from the circle of ordinary mortals, and honoured by the intercourse of superior beings, men who now graciously received the Florentine stranger into their intimacy, and resolved to spare no pains in forming ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... put it in an attitude of questioning many of the things which have always beforehand been taken for granted as correct and true. Along with this goes the fact that much of the literature of to-day, (including newspaper editorials and many magazine articles), has a tendency to undermine Christian faith rather than help it. Much of it comes from brains well saturated with Pagan philosophy rather than the principles laid down in the Holy Book. The swing away from Puritanism to what is called liberty has the effect of loosening many of the well-fixed ...
— The Demand and the Supply of Increased Efficiency in the Negro Ministry - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 13 • Jesse E. Moorland
... principles, which hostile critics will in vain endeavor to undermine, she laid her hand upon what seemed a rude stable door. Such it proved. There was an empty cart inside, certainly there was, but you couldn't take that away in your pocket; and there were five loads of straw, but then of those a lady could take no more than ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... sort Thou shouldst abuse our kingly courtesies, Which we too long in favour have bestow'd Upon thy false, dissembling heart with us? What grief thou therewithal hast thrown on us, What shame upon our house, what dire distress Our soul endures, cannot be uttered. And durst thou, villain, dare to undermine Our daughter's chamber? durst thy shameless face Be bold to kiss her? th'rest we will conceal. Sufficeth that thou know'st I too well know All thy proceedings in thy private shames. Herein what hast thou won? thine own content, With the displeasure of thy lord and king; The thought ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... insidious statement that Jesus lays no claim to divinity in the three Synoptic Gospels, and that these were not written by the apostles themselves, but by Greeks sixty, seventy, or perhaps eighty years after his death. I do not say he will try to undermine your faith, but how can he do otherwise if he believe in what he writes? However careful he may be to avoid blasphemy in your presence, the fact remains that you are living in an essentially unchristian atmosphere, and little by little ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretext. One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system; and thus to undermine what can not be directly overthrown. In all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments, as of other human ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... last favourable date for attacking France would have been in 1887. Bismarck sinned beyond forgiveness in not provoking a war at that time. More than that, his manoeuvres to undermine the credit of Russia and his policy of intimidation towards France, by exciting the hatred of both countries against Germany, ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... and prudent men, whose wars were fought with words and craft, not with swords. The wives of the two great earls were as different as their lords. The Lady Gytha, Godwin's wife, of the royal Danish race, was fierce and haughty, a fit helpmeet for the ambitious earl who was to undermine the strength of England by his efforts to win kingly power for his children. But the Lady Godiva, Leofric's beloved wife, was a gentle, pious, loving woman, who had already won an almost saintly reputation for sympathy and pity by ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... certain topics of reproach, liberally bestowed for some years past, by the Whigs and Tories, upon each other. We charge the former with a design of destroying the established Church, and introducing fanaticism and freethinking in its stead. We accuse them as enemies to monarchy; as endeavouring to undermine the present form of government, and to build a commonwealth, or some new scheme of their own, upon its ruins. On the other side, their clamours against us, may be summed up in those three formidable words, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... the country in which the baby was to grow up. Socialistic agitations, which a dispassionate bachelor could afford to regard with philosophic indifference, now presented themselves as diabolical plots to undermine the baby's happiness, and deprive her of whatever earthly goods Providence might see fit to bestow upon her, and so on, ad infinitum. From a radical, with revolutionary sympathies, my friend in the course of a year blossomed out into a conservative Philistine with a decided ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... side to side, or rock back and forth on your heels when you are talking to a man whom you want to impress with your stability of character, you will undermine everything you say by what you do. Of course you should not stand stiffly. Your leg posts are designed to serve as a flexible pedestal for your body. Your ability to shift your weight from one foot to the other easily without losing your balance suggests associated capability ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... next convention, and while there were enough women present to carry the resolution, most of them voted against it, listening instead to the emotional arguments of a group of conservative men who prophesied that coeducation would coarsen women and undermine marriage. Nor did she forget the Negro at these conventions, but brought much criticism upon herself by offering resolutions protesting the exclusion of Negroes from public ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... Christian Church, old sects and schisms, the Councils, affairs of Papal policy—these things had a very genuine interest for her; circumstances favouring, she might have become an erudite woman; But the conditions were so far from favourable that all she succeeded in doing was to undermine her health. Upon a sudden breakdown there followed mental lassitude, from which she never recovered. It being subsequently her duty to read novels aloud for the lady whom she 'companioned,' new novels at the rate of a volume a day, she lost all power of giving her mind to ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... other periods low and feeble; different tributaries, also, draining peculiar countries and soils, and therefore charged with peculiar sediment, are swollen at distinct periods. It was also shown that the waves of the sea and currents undermine the cliffs during wintry storms, and sweep away the materials into the deep, after which a season of tranquillity succeeds, when nothing but the finest mud is spread by the movements of the ocean over the same ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... admitted of course by old John, the porter. Upon his Lordship's entering the Baronet's room, he communicated his plan for the defence of the castle, in case any attempt should be made to effect a violent entry. He very deliberately proposed to undermine the foundation of the front wall, and deposit there a cask of gun-powder, which he had brought with him for the purpose, so that he might blow the invaders to the devil, in case they should attempt anything like a forcible entry. At this proposal, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... this fact, which forms the central idea of the geological part of the book, he was indebted to his uncle Josiah Wedgwood, who suggested that worms, by bringing earth to the surface in their castings, must undermine any objects lying on the surface ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... was to undermine settled fallacies, and to scatter doubt among conventional certitudes; and this loosening of foundations prepared the way for a bolder political projector, who delivered his frontal attack in disdain of the philosopher's warnings. Political projectors, says the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall |
