"Unprincipled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... judgment. This high court, this supreme court of appeal from all the courts of the kingdom, this highest court of criminal jurisdiction, exercised upon the requisition of the House of Commons, if left without a rule, would be as lawless as the wild savage, and as unprincipled as the prisoner that stands at your bar. Our whole issue is upon principles, and what I shall say to you will be in perpetual reference to them; because it is better to have no principles at all than to have false principles of government and of morality. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... This statute, even more objectionable than the law of Poynings, continued unrepealed till 1782, notwithstanding all the arguments and all the protests of the Irish patriot party. The Lords of Ireland, unsupported by the bigoted and unprincipled oligarchy in the Commons, were shorn of their appellate jurisdiction, and their journals for many years contain few entries of business done, beyond servile addresses to successive Viceroys, and motions ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... gone. And moody misgivings heaved within her, precursors of vain remorse. Gerard and Margaret were before their age. This was your true mediaeval. Proud, amorous, vindictive, generous, foolish, cunning, impulsive, unprincipled: and ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... his interest was utterly unselfish. That she was nothing to him but a friend and never would be, and that while it might be hard to see her belong to some fine man and know he never might be more than a passing friend, still it would not be like seeing her tied to a rotten unprincipled fellow like Wainwright. The queer part of it was that the word "rotten" in connection with his enemy played a great part in his thoughts ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... groaned under the actual pressure of heavier wrongs than those threatened ones which brought on the Revolution. James II, the bigoted successor of Charles the Voluptuous, had annulled the charters of all the colonies, and sent a harsh and unprincipled soldier to take away our liberites and endanger our religion. The administration of Sir Edmund Andros lacked scarcely a single characteristic of tyranny: a Governor and Council, holding office from the King, and wholly independent of the country; laws made and ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... may compare the following extract from a letter, addressed in May 1544 to Titian, by one of the most unprincipled of literary bandits who have ever disgraced humanity, but who nevertheless was solemnised to the spirit of true poetry by the grandiose aspect of nature as it appeared to him in Venice. That Pietro Aretino ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... not wholly unlovable; he may be unsound or even unprincipled, he may be deficient in qualities that go to make men respected and satisfied with the world in general, but he possesses, I think, certain citizen-virtues unintelligible to the self-centred, rustic type of mind. He could be stirred to acts of unworldly enthusiasm; he would share ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... the play, though in general properly sustained, are not sufficiently remarkable to claim much of our attention. Wurm, the chief counsellor and agent of the unprincipled, calculating Father, is wicked enough; but there is no great singularity in his wickedness. He is little more than the dry, cool, and now somewhat vulgar miscreant, the villanous Attorney of modern novels. Kalb also is but a worthless subject, and what ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Gogol, he was born not far from the latter's beloved Ukraine. He came honestly by the patrician quality that unconsciously animated all his books, for his family was both ancient and noble. His mother was wealthy, and in 1817 was married to a handsome, unprincipled military officer six years younger than herself. Their life together was an excellent example of the exact opposite of domestic bliss, and in treating the boy like a culprit, they transformed him—as always happens in similar cases—into ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... the end of a talk on one November evening, about three weeks after I had returned to Paris. I had dined at home with Blanquette, and was in the midst of a drawing which I blush to say I was doing for Le Fou Rire, an unprincipled comic paper fortunately long since defunct—(fortunately? Tartuffe that I am. Many a welcome louis did I get from it in those necessitous days)—when she looked up from her sewing and asked when the Master was coming back. The question ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... spending it on utterly worthless purposes. This social duel—that's just what it is—between you and Mrs. Allistair, besides being nonsense, will be absolutely ruinous if you keep it up. Mrs. Allistair is as unprincipled in a social way as her husband has been in a business way; her ambition will hesitate to use no means, you know that—and, don't forget this, she can spend fifty dollars ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... "An unprincipled scoundrel," she answered evenly, "who's as loathsome as an ape. And I shan't be married to that kind of thing, or any one else. You've had my warning. If you, or he, or any of your beastly men come to this island, you'll get only my dead body. And Echochee, dear soul, is going with me. What's ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... quickly. "I have not heard that, indeed! But you will pardon me, Mr. Denton, I did think you were unprincipled, else why should you come in the store and try to make fools ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... first rumors of the plot. Several white men, said to be of low and unprincipled character, at once began to make interest with the supposed leaders among the slaves, either from genuine sympathy, or with the intention of betraying them for money, or of profiting by the insurrection, should it succeed. Four of these were brought to trial; but the official ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... We had been there only a few days, when the officers, who came to meet us, and who were very friendly disposed, were thrown into great trouble by the arrival of the princess, Rana Bahadur’s wife. The unprincipled chief had connected himself with one of these frail but pure beauties, (Gandharbin,) with which the holy city abounds, had stript his wife of her jewels to bestow them on this wanton companion, and finally had turned his wife out of doors. As the slave regent had the meanness ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... is at first only vague, capricious, and unprincipled. It grows by becoming definite, self-controlled, and conscientious; that is, more regardful both of its own higher self and of others. It thus develops into moral character, which we call personality. Personality is the final outcome of social selection. When once ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... you waste at school years in improving talents, without having ever spent an hour in discovering them; one promiscuous line of instruction is followed, without regard to genius, capacity, or probable situation in the commonwealth. From this bear-garden of the pedagogue, a raw, unprincipled boy is turned loose upon the world to travel; without any ideas but those of improving his dress at Paris, or starting into taste by gazing on some paintings at Rome. Ask him of the manners of the people, and he will tell you that the skirt is worn ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... of the series, entitled "Tom Swift and His Motor-Boat," there was related the incidents following a pursuit after a gang of unprincipled men, who sought to get Possession of some of Mr. Swift's patents, and it was while in this boat that Tom, his father, and a friend, Ned Newton, rescued from Lake Carlopa a Mr. John Sharp, who fell from his burning balloon. Mr. Sharp was a skilled aeronaut, and after his recovery he joined Tom ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... at the moment of his appearance upon the stage of public life, imagine what an impression such a phenomenon must have made upon a people so lost in profligacy and sensuality of all sorts. What wonder that the unprincipled though gifted Demades, the very personification of the witty and reckless libertinism of the age, should deride and scoff at this strange man, living as nobody else lived, thinking as nobody else thought; a prophet, crying from his solitude of great troubles at hand; the apostle of the past; ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... Mewati plunderers should not rob within his own estate; but he not only gave them free permission to rob over the surrounding districts of our territory, but encouraged them to do so, that he might share in their booty.[3] He was a handsome young man, and an extremely agreeable companion; but a most unprincipled and licentious character. No man who was reputed to have a handsome wife or daughter was for a moment safe within his territories. The following account of Mr. William Fraser's assassination by this Nawab may, I think, be ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... acquires some knowledge of one or two foreign languages; a knowledge, however, which is seldom sufficient to enable him either to speak or write them with propriety. In other respects, he commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of my serious application, either to study or to business, than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home. By travelling so very young, by spending in the most frivolous dissipation the most previous ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... Baxter and Mumps almost carried her to the river. Here the Flyaway was in waiting. Bill Goss had gone on ahead and notified his wife that she was wanted. It may as well be added here that Mrs. Goss was as coarse and unprincipled as her husband. ...
— The Rover Boys on the Ocean • Arthur M. Winfield
... from New York [Mr. Birdsall] the other day expressly admitted, for availability—that same "general availability" which you charge upon us, and daily chew over here, as something exceedingly odious and unprincipled. But the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Iverson] gave us a second speech yesterday, all well considered and put down in writing, in which Van Buren was scathed and withered a "few" for his present position and movements. I cannot remember the gentleman's precise language; but I ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... they had not a conception. My friend Colonel Hallo-well, of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, told me that he had among his men some of the worst reprobates of Northern cities. While I had some men who were unprincipled and troublesome, there was not one whom I could call a hardened villain. I was constantly expecting to find male Topsies, with no notions of good and plenty of evil. But I never found one. Among the most ignorant there was very often a childlike ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... realized what he had come for,—it was solely to see and talk to the twins. He must have noticed them at the Cosmopolitan, and come out just for them. Just for that. "Unprincipled old scoundrel," said Mr. Twist under his breath, his ears flaming. Aloud he said, "As I was telling you—" and went on distractedly with ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... by the timely arrival of a huge sheep-dog. He growled with anger, showed his teeth for an instant, then slunk away with his tail between his legs. He was a spiteful, malevolent creature, cunning, unprincipled, and tainted with cowardice. He had pluck of the wolfish sort, and could fight desperately if cornered; but he shunned the open unless hard pressed, and preferred snapping at an opponent's heels to flying in his face. He was a dangerous foe, and pretty Dorothy had gone ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... magnificence, or of modern taste, which it contained. All that the vanity or patriotism of a long series of Sovereigns could effect for the embellishment of the capital in which they resided; all that the conquests of an ambitious and unprincipled Army could accumulate from the spoils of the nations whom they had subdued, were there presented to the eye of the stranger with a profusion which obliterated every former prejudice, and stifled the feelings of national emulation in exultation at ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... men whispered together again, and laid their plans, which were quite as deep, and quite as wicked, as the most unprincipled ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... Macbeth and his wife the dramatist has drawn a subtle but vital distinction. Macbeth is an unprincipled but imaginative man, with a strong tincture of reverence and awe. Hitherto he has been restrained in the straight path of an upright life by his respect for conventions. When once that barrier is broken down, he has no purely moral check in his own nature to replace it, and rushes like a flood, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... unfolding life. Without intending it, Mrs. Harcourt had struck a blow at the child's self-respect; one of the things which she should have strengthened, even if it was "ready to die." Annette had entered life sadly handicapped. She was the deserted child of a selfish and unprincipled man and a young mother whose giddiness and lack of self-control had caused her to trail the robes of her womanhood in the dust. With such an ante-natal history how much she needed judicious, but tender, loving guidance. In that restless, sensitive and ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... who was the torturer? What being in that house had him so much in her power? Madame I believed to be in her chamber; the room whence he had stepped was dedicated to the portress's sole use; and she, Rosine Matou, an unprincipled though pretty little French grisette, airy, fickle, dressy, vain, and mercenary—it was not, surely, to her hand he owed the ordeal through which he seemed ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... had exhibited some little confusion when he had spoken to her a day or two previously concerning her jewels: and now it was clear that they had been used as the means to supply the extravagances of an unprincipled spendthrift. How could he any longer cling to the hope that Giulia was imprudent only, and not guilty? Must she not be guilty, to have made so large a sacrifice and run so great a risk for the sake of the Marquis ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... was tall and manly, and the restless movements of his keen eyes and the readiness of his speech signified his intellectual powers. He was a strong, worldly man, ambitious of power, and sufficiently unprincipled; avaricious, too, like most ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... by the most unprincipled scoundrel I have ever met. He was a civilian speculator who saw the chance to fatten on the British prisoners. He fleeced us in two ways. Not only were his prices extortionate, but he gave a ridiculous exchange for British currency, especially gold. After considerable persuasion and ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... rather that my children should be the half-starved paupers of Ireland than to be the most pampered among the slaves of America. I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress. The felon's home in a penitentiary is preferable. He may repent, and turn from the error of his ways, and so find peace; but it is not so with a favorite slave. She is not allowed to have any pride ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... people, whose character knows no medium, is, with regard to government, a danger from anarchy; a danger of being led through an admiration of successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy. On the side of religion, the danger of their example is no longer from intolerance, but from atheism; a foul, unnatural vice, foe to all the dignity and consolation of mankind; which seems in France, for a long ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... s. of a distiller in London, was ed. at Leyden. Witty, resourceful, but unprincipled and profligate, he became from circumstances the representative and champion of important political principles, including that of free representation in Parliament. His writings have nothing of the brilliance and point of his social exhibitions, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... should be repaid to the account of the captors. This had not been done, and the officers and men were still losers to the amount, in addition to the non-adjudication of their prizes generally by the Portuguese tribunal at Rio de Janeiro, which, in unprincipled violation of the express decrees of His Imperial Majesty—asserted that "they knew nothing of prizes, and did not know that Brazil was at war with Portugal!" though, in the Imperial order of March 30th, 1823—given ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... advantage by the fringe of green boulevard along the river bank,—a fine enough setting for an architectural monument of whatever rank, be it new or old, consistent or conglomerate. As for the classification of the architectural style of the cathedral itself, it is an unprincipled mixture of components, but little related to each other. The southern influence is apparent, alike in the scanty remains of the Romanesque, and the restored Renaissance portions, while Gothic peeps out here and there, in no mean proportions, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... the year, and in former times no one who could possibly avoid it began any work, or entered on any undertaking on this anniversary. To marry on Childermas Day was specially inauspicious. It is said of the equally superstitious and unprincipled monarch, Louis XV., that he would never perform any business or enter into any discussion about his affairs on this day, and to make to him then any proposal of the kind was certain to exasperate him to the utmost. We are informed, too, that in England, on the occasion of the coronation of ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... Temujin had rescued him was passed, he began again to listen to the representations of Yemuka and Sankum, who still insisted that Temujin was a very dangerous man, and was by no means to be trusted. They said that he was ambitious and unprincipled, and that he was only waiting for a favorable opportunity to rebel himself against Vang Khan and depose him from his throne. They made a great many statements to the khan in confirmation of their opinion, some of which were true doubtless, but many were exaggerated, and others probably false. ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... eye of liberty, the freedom of the press, which pries into its secret recesses, discovering it in its lurking holes, and drags it forth to public detestation. If a tyrannically disposed prince, supported by an unprincipled, profligate minister, backed by a notoriously corrupt Parliament, were to cast about for means to secure such a triple tyranny, I know of no means he could devise so effectual for that purpose as the bill ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... told me, all smiling, that he had come down here to ask your cousin Mary to be his wife, I was almost minded to spurn him from the door. He can have no feeling himself of true attachment, and cannot know what it means in others. He is heartless,—and unprincipled." ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... escaping the poison or keeping it off, except by disinfectants, and by keeping the system regular, for it soon spread over all the land and the air was full of it. Remedies sold so high that many must have perished without the test of medicinal aid to cure their disease. A cry went up against unprincipled druggists who were over-charging for their drugs, but nothing more was done to check their greed. Camphor sold as high as four dollars a pound, and the druggist with a few hundred drops of laudanum and as much chlorodyne ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... Effingham," he said, appealing to Eve, of whom he stood habitually in awe, from the pure necessity of addressing her in his distress, or of addressing no one, "do me the favour to look into my room, and see the unprincipled manner in which I have been treated. Not a comb nor a razor left; not a garment to make myself decent in! I'm sure such conduct is quite a disgrace to the civilization of barbarians even, and I shall make it a point, to have the affair duly represented to his majesty's minister ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... about she should have written to ME. I am the oldest. Charlotte had no business to get a letter from Jane Roberts without consulting me. It's just like her underhanded ways. She got married the same way. Never said a word to me about it, but just sneaked off with that unprincipled ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... defended himself however under all these disadvantages, with surprising skill, boldness and presence of mind; and he retorted with becoming spirit the brutal taunts of the crown lawyers and judges, who disgraced themselves on the occasion by all the excesses of an unprincipled servility. Fortunately for Throgmorton, the additional clauses to the treason laws added under Henry VIII. had been abolished under his successor and were not yet re-enacted. Only the clear and equitable statute of Edward III. remained therefore in force; and the lawyers were reduced ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and not the genuine principle of democracy. It is not the genuine, virtual democracy which conspired against the republic, and which rebels, but an unprincipled, infamous oligarchy, risen in arms to destroy democracy. From Athens down to to-day, true democracies never betrayed any country, never leagued themselves with enemies. From the time of Hellas down to to-day, all over the world, and in all epochs, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... in assurance, because, in addition to being unprincipled, he was in a manner ordained by election and birthright to rule over Kensington. His father had been one of those strong-willed, clear-visioned, intelligent young Eastern divinity students who brought to a place of more voluptuous ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... though universally applauded for his military courage and energy, was known to all who had opportunities of becoming personally acquainted with him to be a bad man. He was unprincipled, hard-hearted, and reckless. This, however, did not detract from his military fame. Indeed, depravity of private character seldom diminishes much the applause which a nation bestows upon those ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... undertake to manage their whole business for them. A good dinner, provided in the back-shop, completes the illusion—and when once the Chinese has established his hold, he employs all the resources of a skilful and utterly unprincipled knavery. He keeps his victim in his house, eating, drinking, and smoking one day after another, until his subordinates have sold all the poor man's cattle, or whatever else he has to sell, and bought for ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... in this Hall of Independence that meetings of infuriated fanatics and unprincipled demagogues have been held to counsel a bloody resistance to the laws of the land. It is not in this city that conventions are held denouncing the Constitution, the Laws, and the Bible. It is not here that the pulpit ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... practices of experience, custom, and money-getting, but they are not rules of conscience. In truth, there is not a more painful scene than the ruin of a young man of family. There is so much vice and unprincipled waste opposed to indignant and rapacious clamour, often accompanied with idle jests. Here again is food for the vitiated appetites of scandalmongers, and that miserable but numerous portion of mankind, who rejoice at the fall of a superior. The name of debtor ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 277, October 13, 1827 • Various
... concur with us in condemning the conduct of France towards the Swiss Cantons. Indeed his concurrence is not singular; we know of no Friend to Liberty who is not of his opinion. What we most admire is the avowal of his sentiments, and public censure of the unprincipled and atrocious conduct of France. The Poem itself is written with great energy. The second, third, and fourth stanzas contain some of the most vigorous lines we have ever read. The ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and Mr. M'Fadden were not only rival bidders for this very desirable piece of preaching property, but, being near neighbours, had become inveterate enemies and fierce political opponents. The former, a reckless trader in men, women, and children, was a daring, unprincipled, and revengeful man, whose occupation seldom called him to his plantation; while the latter was notorious as a hard master and a cruel tyrant, who exacted a larger amount of labour from his negroes than his ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... got employed upon works so extensive, but the officials were too fond of founding general conclusions on isolated, or at least on an insufficient number of cases. The opposition to task work arose from more than one cause. Lazy unprincipled people were opposed to it, because they were lazy and unprincipled; a far larger class were opposed to it, because it was no secret that the works were carried on not for sake of their utility, but to keep the people from being idle. Had ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... by courtesy Lord Hervey, the second son of the Earl of Bristol, was one of the most prominent figures at the court of George II. He had been made vice-chamberlain of the royal household in 1730, and was the intimate friend and confidential adviser of Queen Caroline. Clever, affable, unprincipled, and cynical, he was a perfect type of the Georgian courtier to whom loyalty, patriotism, honesty, and honor were so many synonyms for folly. He was effeminate in habits and appearance, but notoriously licentious; he affected to scoff ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... I am not surprised. Unprincipled attacks are often made on me by political muckrakers. I sometimes think that I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... known as the "sailors' friend," died in England. Plimsoll was the originator of the famous "Plimsoll mark," and this is what caused him to be called the sailors' friend. Many years ago it was the custom of unprincipled ship-owners to send their vessels to sea very much overloaded; this was done to save the expense of a double voyage, for in those days there were few steam merchantmen, and sailing-vessels oftentimes took months for their voyages. The Plimsoll mark is painted on the vessel ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 24, June 16, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... ruin of the Missions steadily going on, their vast properties melting away, like dew before the sun, in the hands of dishonest administrators and politicians, the Church powerless to contend with the unprincipled greed in high places, her beloved Franciscan Fathers driven from the country or dying of starvation at their posts, she submitted herself to what, she was forced to admit, seemed to be the inscrutable will of God for the discipline and humiliation of the Church. In a sort of bewildered ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... me great injustice," he replied, "and what was never before done to any poet.... But even in 'Don Juan' I have been misunderstood. I take a vicious and unprincipled character, and lead him through those ranks of society whose high external accomplishments cover and cloak internal and secret vices, and I paint the natural effects of such characters, and certainly they are not so highly colored as we find them ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... attending the "consignment" of the three Miss Revels to India, Mrs Revel had consented to borrow money, insuring her life as a security to the parties who provided it. Her unprincipled husband took this opportunity of obtaining a sum which amounted to more than half her marriage settlement, as Mrs Revel signed the papers laid before her without examining their purport. When her dividends were become due, this treachery was discovered; and Mrs Revel found ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... are too apt treat the complaints of such patients lightly, making no effort to allay their anxiety—a course which often leads them to apply for aid in illegitimate quarters, and to become the victims of unprincipled men." ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... man; but the head of the family was, as we have seen, open to improvement in many respects, and Duncan junior was of that heart-breaking character which is known as ne'er-do-weel. Possibly, if differently treated by his father, he might have been a better man. As it was, he was unprincipled ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... educational reformer, Pestalozzi, and the high-principled and intellectual Hugh Miller, the Scotch geologist, with such as Danton, the terrible demagogue of the French revolution, and Mirabeau, the brilliant but unprincipled orator. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... and thankful should I be if one of them could have produced such effects. I tell you, madam, my dear friend, one of the most estimable and brilliant men of his day, was an utter wreck, both in mind and body, through the cruel machinations of an unprincipled woman. How much was to the actual injury from his wound, how much to grief and remorse, Heaven only knows, but the death of his brother, who alone had authority with him, left him thus to cut himself off entirely in this utter darkness ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... offences committed by those men can no more be alleged as a ground of general condemnation of the stage, than the works of lord Rochester can be set up as a reason for condemning Milton, Pope, Thomson, Goldsmith, and all our other poets, or the innumerable murders committed by unprincipled quacks, be alleged as a cause for abolishing ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... we were married. We soon removed to our own dwelling, which was a wedding gift to me, from my father. For a time he treated me with the utmost kindness and affection. But you may believe me, Miss Simmonds, when I inform you that he has been a dissipated, unprincipled man from his youth. His seemingly correct habits had merely been put on, for the purpose of gaining him an entrance into respectable society. When he began to treat me with indifference and neglect, for a long time I bore it in silence; but I was at length forced ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... if you had lived fifty years longer, you would have seen that paper constitutions, like the paper money you despised so justly, depend upon honesty and confidence for their value, and are at a sad discount in hard times of fraud and corruption. Unprincipled men find means of evading the written agreement upon their face by ingenious subterfuges or downright repudiation. An arbitrary majority will construe the partnership articles to suit their own interests, and stat pro ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... greater part of their lives. Thackeray styles this work "a novel without a hero." The whole action of the story, which is without plot or development, revolves about two women,—Amelia, a meek creature of the milk-and-water type, and Becky Sharp, a keen, unprincipled intriguer, who lets nothing stand in the way of her selfish desire to get the most out of the fools who largely constitute society. On the whole, it is the most powerful but not the most ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... and statesman Hume endeavoured to procure an inquiry into these acts of Oriental filibusterism; but the underhand influence of an unprincipled Administration, backed by an interested commercial clamour, was too strong for him; and the ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... of his many complaints and requests, the English had failed to punish unprincipled white men who had done wrong to ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... jealous thing, and led her poor husband such a life. In my opinion, killing was too good for her. Ladies, be merciful; the prisoner hangs upon your lips. Consider his eyes; consider his nose. Were I married to a woman who called me an unprincipled wretch, wouldn't I kill her? Wouldn't I? Ladies, be generous." And so forth. (Jury retire, but return immediately with a verdict of Not Guilty; Judge, Jury, Counsel, and all shed tears and kiss indiscriminately. They take up a collection for the prisoner, who, next day, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... points with the most reverential and tender regard to the laws, and pursuing with equal wisdom and success everything which could tend to the internal prosperity, and to the external honor and dignity of this country, had been all at once subverted, by an irruption of a sort of wild, licentious, unprincipled invaders, who wantonly, and with a barbarous rage, had defaced a thousand fair monuments of the constitutional and political skill of their predecessors. It is natural indeed that this author should have some dislike to the administration which was formed in 1765. Its views, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... such power there must always be, was intrusted to the Lairds of the country, to those whom the people considered as their natural judges. It cannot be supposed that a rugged proprietor of the rocks, unprincipled and unenlightened, was a nice resolver of entangled claims, or very exact in proportioning punishment to offences. But the more he indulged his own will, the more he held his vassals in dependence. Prudence and innocence, without ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... United States, that "we do not believe that such oppression is to be found in any other part of the world, civilized or uncivilized. We do not believe that such oppression ever existed before." Yet even this unprincipled writer has, in the very article containing this declaration, shown that he knows better. He has shown that he knows that the African has been elevated and improved by his servitude in the United States. We shall proceed to convict him out ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... generally copied little but their vices. Their unnatural attempt to be wiser than God, and to unsex themselves, had done little but disease their mind and heart. They resorted more and more to those arts which are the weapons of crafty, ambitious, and unprincipled women. They were too apt to be cunning, false, intriguing. They were personally cowardly, as their own chronicles declare; querulous, passionate, prone to unmanly tears; prone, as their writings abundantly testify, to scold, to ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... the idle and the visionary, who expect to eat without working; penniless demagogues, unprincipled adventurers, and the renegade outpourings of all Christendom; together with those who are enervated and demoralised by sickness and evil associates on board ship. I could not help thinking, as I saw many of the newly-arrived emigrants saunter helplessly into the groggeries, that, after ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... Senator Conkling, had quarrelled with the President over certain appointments unacceptable to the New York senator; Guiteau pretended to think the removal of Mr. Garfield necessary to the unity of the party and the salvation of the country. The prosecution showed that Guiteau had long been an unprincipled adventurer, greedy for notoriety; that he first conceived of killing the President after his hopes of office were finally destroyed; and that he had planned the murder several weeks in advance. Guiteau was found guilty, and executed at Washington ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... as much at sea in regard to the Stirling-sixth-ward incident, as had been the rank-and-file in the convention. Three took their views from Maguire, and called it "shameful treason," and the like. Two called it "unprincipled and contradictory conduct." One alone said that "Mr. Stirling seemed to be acting conscientiously, if erratically." Just what effect it had had on the candidates none of the papers agreed in. One said it had killed Porter. Another, that "it ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... be 'fashions' in marble, but of course it was fashion. Nothing else than the blindest of all blind guides could have led people into anything so hopelessly silly and unprincipled. I shall never enjoy this room again," she continued, "knowing, as well I know, that yonder stately piece of sculpture is a whited sepulchre, a delusion and a snare. I shall feel that I ought to unmask it the moment a visitor comes in, lest I should be asked to make a fire on the hearth ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought. O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are ...
— On the Duty of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... what he had calculated upon. He wanted a compound of roguery and folly as his tool and slave; Smith was a rogue and an unlettered man, but he was what Rigdon was not aware of—a man of bold conception, full of courage and mental energy, one of those unprincipled, yet lofty, aspiring beings, who, centuries past, would have succeeded as well as Mahomet, and who has, even in this more enlightened age, accomplished that which ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... ideas of what she could have loved, unless she be extremely careful and discreet. Now, I want to warn you, Helen, of these things, and to exhort you to be watchful and circumspect from the very commencement of your career, and not to suffer your heart to be stolen from you by the first foolish or unprincipled person that covets the possession of it.—You know, my dear, you are only just eighteen; there is plenty of time before you, and neither your uncle nor I are in any hurry to get you off our hands, and I may venture to say, there will be no lack of suitors; for you can boast a good family, a ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... they have been salted with the least possible amount of salt, and they are just a parcel of rubbish; but we have paid for them already by the advances we have made, and we must take them and make the best or the worst of them. Besides, in the case of an unprincipled man, he has got the thing in his own hands, because he is aware that he has already pledged all his fish to you. They are still his property, however; but while the fish are undelivered, it is very easy for him to slip some of them ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... father was born in the county. He's a typical American—a product of the great national melting-pot—but no patriot because he has no sympathy for any of the European nations at war, or even with the war aims of his native land. He's a selfish, scheming, unprincipled politician; an office-holder ever since he could vote; a man who would sacrifice all America to ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... family. They are nobody's aunts in particular, but aunts to human nature generally. The idea of restricting their usefulness to any one family, would strike dismay through a whole community. Nobody would be so unprincipled as to think of such a thing as having their services more than a week or two at most. Your country factotum knows better than anybody else ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the political ascendency of Nonconformists in the cities and towns. It required all public officials to take the Sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England, within twelve months of their appointment, and, whilst it excluded conscientious men, it proved no barrier to unprincipled hypocrites. The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts had been mooted from time to time, but the forces of prejudice and apathy had hitherto proved invincible. Fox espoused the cause of the Dissenters in 1790, and moved for a committee of the whole House to deal with the question. He urged that ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... unprincipled radical leaders were in control, the whites lived at times in fear of Negro uprisings. The Negroes were armed and insolent, and the whites were few and widely scattered. Here and there outbreaks ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... Her first youthful passion, her friendship for Fanny, had encountered many disappointments, and, in fine, a melancholy and premature catastrophe. Soon after these accumulated mortifications, she was engaged in a contest with a near relation, whom she regarded as unprincipled, respecting the wreck of her father's fortune. In this affair she suffered the double pain, which arises from moral indignation, and disappointed benevolence. Her exertions to assist almost every member of her family, were great ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... no reason why the two thus appealed to should heed the prayer, since each had suffered at the hands of the youth who was in extremity. Nevertheless, Mul-tal-la and George attacked Deerfoot, observing which, Victor was unprincipled enough to turn back and join the assailants. Thus the Shawanoe was forced to defend himself against three, every one of whom was a good thrower. Right bravely did the dusky youth do his work—never yielding an inch, but driving his missiles right and left, ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... two previous, of a shrunken old miser, clad in shrunken old moleskin, stretched out, an invalid, on a bare plank in the emigrants' quarters, eagerly clinging to life and lucre, though the one was gasping for outlet, and about the other he was in torment lest death, or some other unprincipled cut-purse, should be the means of his losing it; by like feeble tenure holding lungs and pouch, and yet knowing and desiring nothing beyond them; for his mind, never raised above mould, was now all but mouldered away. To such a degree, indeed, that he had no trust ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... I had before reason to expect, the danger of adhering to my own principles. The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow the one or the other is an unexpiable offence. The worst of these has the popular current in its favor, and uses its triumph with all the unprincipled fury of faction; while the other is waiting, with all the impatience of revenge, for the time when its turn may come to oppress and punish by the popular favor. But my choice is made. If I cannot hope to give satisfaction ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... cognizance might not be acknowledged as friendly by any other party whom they might chance to encounter. But more remote dangers pressed on her apprehension. The pursuit of the licentious Prince was rendered formidable by threats which his unprincipled counsellor, Ramorny, had not shunned to utter against her father, if she persevered in her coyness. These menaces, in such an age, and from such a character, were deep grounds for alarm; nor could ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... it that the licentious, the depraved, and the unprincipled are susceptible of virtue; and desirous of communicating happiness. The most ignorant only are the most inveterately brutal: but nothing less than idiotism, or madness, can absolutely deprive man of his ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... and I fear, unprincipled young man had never entered our household!" cried Mrs. Gleason; "and yet I would not judge him too harshly. Mittie's admiration, from the first, was only too manifest, and he must have seen before you arrived, the extraordinary defects of her temper. That he should prefer you, ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... worst days, and that after the tempest there will be sunshine and bright weather again. The people will look back with shame and regret upon the wild and stormy scenes to which they have allowed themselves to be drawn by unprincipled agitators; they will bow in love and obedience before the royal couple who, with so much confidence and devotion, leave their beautiful, retired home at Versailles, in order to comply with the wish of the people and come to Paris. Will your majesty have the goodness to ask the ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... on medicine. There cannot be a greater contrast, both in appearance and reality, than between him and Santa Anna. There is no lurking devil in his eye. All is frank, open, and unreserved. It is impossible to look in his face without believing him to be an honest and well-intentioned man. An unprincipled but clever writer has said of him, that he has no great capacity or superior genius; but that, whether from reflection or from slowness of comprehension, he is always extremely calm in his determinations: ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... the unfortunate experience of being deserted in the jungle," replied Tom. "He probably had Jacinto, or some of that unprincipled scoundrel's friends, show him a short route to Copan and he came ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... hypocrisy or base in craft with the name Pharisee, while really it was the most distinguished title among the Jews. Many of the Pharisees were hypocrites; not all of them. The name is significant of profession, not of character. He could not have been an unprincipled, villanous man, or he would never have tendered to Jesus the hospitalities of his house. Indeed, Christ allows him, in the sense of moral indebtedness, to owe but fifty pence. He was probably a rich man, which might appear from the generous entertainment he made. He was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Massachusetts, and others; but were more often sent over from England. Some of them, as Pownall of Massachusetts and Spotswood of Virginia, were men of marked ability. Some were honest gentlemen, who felt a real interest in the welfare of the people they came to help govern; some were unprincipled adventurers, who came to make money by fair means or foul. Their position was one of much dignity, and they behaved themselves like lesser kings. What with their crimson velvets and fine laces and stately coaches, they made much more of a show than any president of the United ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... wielding the whole power of the mightiest kingdom of the Continent, absorbing its revenues, directing its armies, and moving in the rank of princes among the proud hereditary sovereignties of the world. To the crowd of unprincipled men, engendered by the habits of European life, and their consciousness of abilities fully equal to those which had won such opulent enjoyments and lofty distinctions in France, the success of the Revolution was an universal summons to conspiracy. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... a younger brother of the Prince d'Horn, and related to the noble families of D'Aremberg, De Ligne, and De Montmorency, was a young man of dissipated character, extravagant to a degree, and unprincipled as he was extravagant. In connexion with two other young men as reckless as himself, named Mille, a Piedmontese captain, and one Destampes, or Lestang, a Fleming, he formed a design to rob a very rich broker, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Seleucia Pieria, the seaport of the capital, fell into his hands, in the neighbourhood of which he was still further gratified with the apprehension of the cruel Laodice, at whose instigation his sister and nephew lost their lives. The punishment of this unprincipled woman seems, however, to have completely satiated his resentment; for, instead of securing his conquests in Syria, and achieving the entire humiliation of Seleucus, he led his army on a plundering expedition into the remote provinces of Asia, whence, on the news of domestic ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... He was an unprincipled man, who wasted the nation's money, opposed reform, and was especially hated by the laboring classes. The times were critical. War had again broken out with both Scotland and France, the French fleet was raiding ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... investigating this subject, that every solid argument is against the extraordinary court, and that every one in its favor is specious only. It is a transfer from a judicature of learning and integrity, to one, the greatness of which is both illiterate and unprincipled. Yet such is the force of prejudice with some, and of the want of reflection in others, that many of our constitutions have copied this absurdity, without suspecting it to be one. I am glad to hear that our new Constitution is pretty sure of being accepted by States enough to ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... effect by the mouths of cannon. Fitness for war is often the strongest security for peace; and a nation whose wishes and interests both run in the direction of peace, may find no way of warning restless and unprincipled and ambitious neighbours that it is not to be touched with impunity, but by showing itself, thistle-like, all bristling over with bayonets. "Necessity," said Paul, "is laid on me to preach." It may be laid on a people to fight. Nor, when the sword has been drawn in a good cause, has God refused ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... custody were proved to be slaves, and the other seven were discharged. This decision greatly exasperated the Southerners, and they vented their anger in very violent expressions. The constables employed were unprincipled men, ready for any low business, provided it were profitable. The man-hunters had engaged to give them fifty dollars for each slave they were enabled to take back to Virginia; but they were to receive nothing for those who were ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... poverty—the bondmen of ignorance—who had no money with which to corrupt, no art with which to beguile, and no power with which to overawe these representatives of authority. For the first time in the history of mankind, the corrupt and unprincipled agents of undefined power became the servants, friends, protectors, agents, and promoters of the poor and weak and the oppressors of the rich, the strong, the learned, and ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... the evil, almost all the worst vices, the most unprincipled acts, and the darkest passions of the human mind, are bred out of poverty and distress. Satan, in the Book of Job, says to the Almighty, "Thou hast blessed the work of thy servant, and his substance is increased in the land. But put ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... declaration which is the basis of all their governments; the repudiation or non-payment of debts contracted for the purposes of public works, of which they are every day reaping the advantages; and the unprincipled invasion of our Canadian frontier by their citizens during the late disturbances in that colony. Within the last few months, more particularly, they have committed many and grievous offences against their own dignity, the peace of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... to help you at that job, Paul," cried Tom. "He's the most unprincipled scoundrel that ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... Comic Villain. "I love the unprincipled clerk; but there is a sick stranger up-stairs who pokes the fire in a way that I can hardly resist. Be firm, my heart. Shall I be untrue to my ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... breast as to accuse the Church, our Mother, of attempting to crush out of existence the Word of God. As well might you charge the patriotic statesman with attempting to destroy the constitution of his country, while he strove to protect it from being mutilated by unprincipled demagogues. ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... been persuaded, or rather forced, to accept the Crown, has given this erroneous impression of her disposition. It was the only point on which she was ever influenced against her own judgment; the instigator being Lord Guilford, who in his turn was urged by his ambitious, unprincipled father, and his equally ambitious and unprincipled mother, in whose hands his weak, affectionate, yielding temperament rendered him an easy tool. The probability is, that had Jane been firmly established as Queen, she ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... of blood-thirsty, unprincipled slave hunters rushing upon me armed with weapons of death, it was no use for me to undertake to fight my way through ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... their immediate expulsion from the State. What is known in Illinois history as the "Mormon war" followed closely in the wake of the events just mentioned. Innocent persons were, in many instances, the victims of the folly and of the crimes of unprincipled and brutal leaders. ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... some more sooner than I otherwise might have done, and you will also have to buy me a new watch and a knife." But then fancy the consternation which such an announcement would have occasioned! Fancy the scowl and flashing eyes of the infuriated Theobald! "You unprincipled young scoundrel," he would exclaim, "do you mean to vilify your own parents by implying that they have dealt harshly by one whose ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... and various other acts of violence were projected and supported by the Governor and a junto of unprincipled men, amongst whom it was well known and has since been proved, the notorious George Crossley, sent to this colony for perjury, was the principal person, and the one most confided in ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... energetic self; and Percival was less exacting and overbearing than he had been during the past week. He went back to London with a strong conviction that time would give him Elizabeth's heart as well as her hand; and that she would learn to forget the unprincipled scoundrel—so Percival termed him—who had dared to aspire ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... for making an honest livelihood; but such a course did not suit the taste of Delano. Several of his crew, brought up in the slave-trade, or as smugglers, were ill-disposed men; others were weak, ignorant, and unprincipled, and were easily gained by his persuasions to abet him in his evil designs. Finding, after they had been some time at sea together, that neither his mates nor his crew were likely to refuse joining in any project he might suggest, he boldly proposed to them to turn pirates; and ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... was the first to come round. Biggs is our greengrocer, and his chief talent lies in securing the services of the most abandoned and unprincipled errand-boys that civilisation has as yet produced. If anything more than usually villainous in the boy-line crops up in our neighbourhood, we know that it is Biggs's latest. I was told that, at the time of the Great Coram ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... Bishopriggs was employed in the clerks' room at my chambers. He is one of the most intelligent and most unscrupulous old vagabonds in Scotland; perfectly honest as to all average matters involving pounds, shillings, and pence; perfectly unprincipled in the pursuit of his own interests, where the violation of a trust lies on the boundary-line which marks the limit of the law. I made two unpleasant discoveries when I had him in my employment. I found that he had contrived to supply himself with a duplicate of my seal; and I had the ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... the Jacobins are denounced and held up to opprobrium; but when the jeopardy and the risk are well past, the sober- minded, cautious, conservative, and responsible statesmen walk off with the portfolios of place and privilege and pay under their honest arms. But these are the unprincipled papists and infidels of a mushroom republic; and, thank God, such spurious patriotism, and such sham and selfish statesmanship, have not yet shown their miserable heads among faithful, fearless, straightforward, and uncalculating Englishmen. At the same time, if ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... a thousand. Suppose he should be arrested and the story get into the papers? How his stepmother would exult in the record of his disgrace! He could anticipate what she would say. Peter, too, would rejoice, and between them both his father would be persuaded that he was thoroughly unprincipled. ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... management. There are pretty good records of what that corruption and management are, but there is no need to describe them here. Everybody will understand what sort of things I mean, and the kind of unprincipled members that are returned by them. Our new Parliament, therefore, would be made up of two sorts of representatives from the town lowest class, and one sort of representatives from the agricultural lowest class. ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... of which you have been advised has driven me into a sort of exile, and may terminate in an actual and permanent ostracism. Our most unprincipled Jacobins are the loudest in their lamentations for the death of General Hamilton, whom, for many years, they have uniformly represented as the most detestable and unprincipled of men—the motives are obvious. Every sort of persecution ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... prince would desert the emperor, who had so splendidly rewarded his services, and return to the rescue of those princes whom he had so basely betrayed? But who can thread the labyrinth of an intriguing and selfish heart? Who can calculate the movements of an unprincipled and restless politician? Maurice, at length, awoke to the perception of the real condition of his country. He saw its liberties being overturned by the most ambitious man whom ten centuries had produced. He saw the cause, which his convictions told him ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... education began, bad company finished, and Piedro's mind was completely ruined by the associates with whom he became connected during what he called his PROSPERITY. When his money was at an end, these unprincipled friends began to look cold upon him, and at last plainly told him—"If you mean to LIVE WITH US, you must LIVE AS WE ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... made the idea of a marriage between his daughter and Tregear intolerable to him, and which would operate as strongly in regard to any marriage which his son might contemplate. Lord Grex was not a man with whom he would wish to form any intimacy. He was, we may say, a wretched unprincipled old man, bad all round; and such the Duke knew him to be. But the blue blood and the rank were there; and as the girl was good herself, he would have been quite contented that his son should marry the daughter of Lord Grex. That one and the same man should have been in ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... at Brown Hall consisted of Jonas Brown, the father—an irritable, overbearing magistrate, a greedy landlord, and an unprincipled father—and his two sons, who had both been brought up to consider sport their only business; horses and dogs their only care; grooms and trainers the only persons worthy of attention, and the mysteries of the field and the stable the only pursuits ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... vicious prodigality. They bring with them the vices of their caste, whatever that caste may be. Youth is imitative, and seldom a clumsy copyist, of the faults of its elders, provided those faults are fashionable faults, however unprincipled. However this may be, I must protest against the universities being made answerable for these doings. Attempts have been made, and failed, in respect to manners and to credit; and have failed clearly because they were impracticable, and, more than that, better left alone. The university ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... relief in that insidious enemy of man, the intoxicating cup. Defeated in politics, forsaken in love by his wife, he seemed to have lost all principle of honour, and was ready to nerve himself up to any deed, no matter how unprincipled. Clotel's existence was now well known to Horatio's wife, and both her [sic] and her father demanded that the beautiful quadroon and her child should be sold and sent out of the state. To this proposition ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... and most strongly all for British rule, which they believed to be the best in the world, but whose judgment showed them that to proclaim that rule would be to defeat the very objects they honestly had in view, and who would have regarded the change of flag at the last moment as an unprincipled deception of those comrades who had been induced to co-operate for reform and not for annexation. It had been repeatedly and emphatically stated that the object was not to deprive the Boer of his independence or the State of its autonomy, but to alter the ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... despite of his opposition to John Effingham's sarcasms, that his native country had undergone many changes since he last resided in it, and that some of these changes were quite sensibly for the worse. The spirit of misrule was abroad, and the lawless and unprincipled held bold language, when it suited their purpose to intimidate. As he ran over in his mind, however, the facts of the case, and the nature of his right, he smiled to think that any one should contest it, and sat down to his writing, almost forgetting ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... down to two factors. One was the time element. The other was the temperament of James. A man may be unprincipled and yet draw the line at murder. He may be a seducer and still lack the courage and the cowardice for a cold-blooded killing. Kirby had studied his cousin, but the man was more or less of a sphinx to him. Behind those cold, calculating eyes ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... truest man in the whole world,—he did not see how they treated that noble man at his age, how rudely they addressed him, ... how they threatened him, and the threats they used to him!—only because he was a working man! That young officer, too, was no doubt just such an unprincipled, heartless wretch as I ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... accomplished character, and of unbounded ambition. When his father died, it was arranged that Artaxerxes, the older son, should succeed him. Cyrus was extremely unwilling to submit to this supremacy of his brother. His mother was an artful and unprincipled woman, and Cyrus, being the youngest of her children, was her favorite. She encouraged him in his ambitious designs; and so desperate was Cyrus himself in his determination to accomplish them, that it ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... notoriety of which I am so desirous, for you, dear, exquisitely hypocritical reader, will at once cry, "Shame! Could a man be so wicked as to attempt to force on a duel, so that he might make himself known through the medium of a legal murder?" You will tell your friends of this horribly unprincipled young man, and they will, of course, instantly want to ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... to denominations I have observed that Presbyterian clocks are apt to be more reliable than any other kind, although the truest clock I have ever come across is on a little Dutch Reformed Church in Orange County. One of the most unprincipled clocks I can think of is just outside my window. I use unprincipled with intention, for this clock is not vicious, but giddy. If it were consistently late or consistently early, one might get used to it. But to look out of the window at ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... economists and philosophers who sapped the foundations of the social system. An imperious and insolent hauteur and reckless prodigality were her most marked peculiarities,—just such as were to be expected in an unprincipled woman raised suddenly to high position. In spite of her power, she did not escape the malignant stings of envenomed rivals or anonymous satirists. "She was rallied on the baseness of her origin; she avenged herself by making ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... advantage of his popularity, which you know to be very great, and his material resources, which you know to be immense, as though they were my own. Nor do I think that I could in any other way have frustrated the plots of unprincipled persons against me, unless I had now combined with those protections, which I have always possessed, the goodwill also of the men in power. I should, to the best of my belief, have followed this same line of policy even if I had had you here. For I well know the ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... stage I learned to know Clement Blaine for a sweater of underpaid labour, a man as grossly self-indulgent as he was unprincipled, as much a charlatan as he was, in many ways, an ignoramus. Yet I see now, more clearly than then, that even Clement Blaine was not all bad. He was not even completely a charlatan. He believed he was justified in making all the money he could, in any way that ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... lady, "I think Mary has made a very good match. I heard her husband is one of the shrewdest and most unprincipled lawyers in the profession, and of course he can afford to gratify her ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... Sherwood, "this may be merely a scheme by unprincipled people to filch small sums of money from gullible people. The 'foreign legacy swindle' is worked in many different ways. There may be calls for money, by this man who names himself Andrew Blake, for preliminary ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... is suffering by his confinement, and the unprincipled society, which he is obliged to endure, is peculiarly disagreeable to ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... of their servants, being old hands or expiree convicts from New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, are thoroughly unprincipled men." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... truth. It has begun to find out that disarmament is practical wisdom; and now it is beginning to wonder whether counsels of perfection may not serve its domestic interests with a higher efficiency than the compromises effected by unprincipled politicians. It is in the mood to listen to a teacher who speaks with authority; but in no mood to listen to a ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... would almost be an outline of the respective peoples, polities, and problems. He was a higher type of man and politician than Cleon,—largely because the English aristocracy is not an unpatriotic and unprincipled clique like the Athenian, ready to use any weapon from murder down or to make their country a province of a foreign empire rather than give up their class monopoly of power; but like his prototype he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... what I claim. That accorded, no intervention of Russia can take place; the word of America will be respected, not out of consideration for your dignity, but because the Czar and the cabinet of Russia, atrocious and unprincipled as they are, are no fools, and will not risk their existence. Therefore ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... goes around wringing her hands. Honestly. I never saw anybody doing that outside a soap opera. Half the time she thinks you and Father are a pair of unprincipled scoundrels, and the other half she thinks you're going to let Merlin ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... when he had visited Paris, whereby for twenty years Spontini was made "director general" of the opera in Berlin. In this position he produced a number of other works, the best being "Nurmahal" (1822), "Alcidor" (1825) and "Agnes von Hohenstaufen" (1829). Spontini was a vigorous director, but unprincipled, vain and narrow. Nevertheless, at his concerts he produced the fifth and seventh symphonies of Beethoven for the first time in Berlin, as well as parts of the great Bach mass in B minor, and much other great music. Opposition to his tyranny culminated ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... allied armies had arrived at Balaklava, Saint-Arnaud was obliged by his fatal illness to yield up his command to Marshal Canrobert, and a few days later he died,—an unprincipled, but a brave ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... disturbed, and with good reason. Arnold Baxter had been an enemy to Mr. Rover for years, and this meant a good deal when the desperate character of the man was taken into consideration. He was a well-educated fellow, but cruel and unprincipled to the last degree, and one who would hesitate at nothing in ...
— The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes • Arthur M. Winfield
... extent as to preclude his sharing prominently in the diplomatic part of his mission; Colonel George Cartwright, a soldier, well-meaning but devoid of sympathy and ignorant of the conditions that confronted him; Sir Robert Carr, the worst of the four, unprincipled and profligate and without control either of his temper or his passions; and, lastly, Maverick himself, opposed to the existing order in Massachusetts and convinced of the necessity of radical changes in the constitution of the colony. ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... treacherous, false, vulgar, covetous, unprincipled. You cannot like her. You say she is ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... opposed to them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others because they are themselves sincere, and endeavour to secure the public good with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have no regard to anything but their own unprincipled ends, and stick at nothing to accomplish them. Cassius was better cut out for a conspirator. His heart prompted his head. His habitual jealousy made him fear the worst that might happen, and his irritability of temper ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... still greater danger than all these in the corruption which then, as always, followed a great war. Unprincipled and greedy men sought to get contracts and jobs from the Government by the aid of influential politicians. This aid they paid for sometimes, though I think rarely, in money, and in contributions to political campaigns, and in the various ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... always something requiring to be eaten up, that it may not be lost, which destroys the soothing and satisfactory symmetry of an unexceptionable dinner. We have detected the same duck through many unprincipled disguises, playing a different part in the farce of domestic economy, with a versatility hardly to have been expected in one of the most generally despised of the web-footed tribe. When travelling ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... it respects wealth, we would remark, that though it may communicate happiness by enabling us to relieve the wants of our fellow creatures, and afford us many joys in the indulgence of our benevolence, yet it cannot of itself communicate happiness, but virtue can. A wicked and unprincipled man is wretched, though he roll in all the wealth and splendors that earth can give. He feels in his bosom a burning flame, that all the streams of wealth can never quench, and a craving desire, that nought on earth can gratify. If his "great riches" afford him any enjoyments, ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... master of himself; and this is a term of praise: but when, owing to evil education or association, the better principle, which is also the smaller, is overwhelmed by the greater mass of the worse—in this case he is blamed and is called the slave of self and unprincipled. ...
— The Republic • Plato
... circumstances the whole force re-entered the town, driving the rebels before them, and, in the midst of great excitement, vowing vengeance. Then came the inevitable result: some good soldiers were carried away into acts of unwarrantable violence, and a few unprincipled scoundrels seized upon the opportunity to plunder, pilfer, and steal. But the mass of the forces entered the place under the impression (as appears from the testimony before the court-martial) that it ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... at the North, encouraged by the few Union men at the South, to regard secession as the work of a few ambitious and unprincipled leaders, who, by their threats, their violence, and their overbearing manner, forced the mass of the people of their respective States into secession against their convictions and their will. No doubt ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... "Of unprincipled fools, yes—of men who care for appearance more than sympathy. But you are not such a man! It is not as if we had been friends; it is not as if we had ever spoken. It is wicked to call such a foolish fancy by the name of love; ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... they felt how wrong they had been in too importunately seeking to withdraw the veil; but I had received them so condescendingly and so graciously, that they were sure I would forgive them. The whole affair was such capital amusement to the unprincipled Rascal, that he did his best to confirm the good people in their belief, while affecting to reprove them. He gave me a very comical account of the matter; and, seeing that I was amused by it, actually endeavored to make a merit of ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various |
