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Prostitution   Listen
noun
Prostitution  n.  
1.
The act or practice of prostituting or offering the body to an indiscriminate intercourse with men; common lewdness of a woman.
2.
The act of setting one's self to sale, or of devoting to infamous purposes what is in one's power; as, the prostitution of abilities; the prostitution of the press. "Mental prostitution."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Prostitution" Quotes from Famous Books



... solid wad of comfort. In a corner of Letchford's paper, the Critic, I found a letter which was one of the steepest pieces of invective I had ever met with. The writer gave tongue like a beagle pup about the prostitution, as he called it, of American republicanism to the vices of European aristocracies. He declared that Senator La Follette was a much-misunderstood patriot, seeing that he alone spoke for the toiling millions who had no other ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan

... young girls, who are driven by dire misery, by inability to earn a living, or by fear of starvation, to have recourse to a trade which most of them loathe, many regard with indifference, and some few follow in obedience to the laws of their constitution. But on the brink of the gulf of prostitution in Paris, the young girl of sixteen, beautiful and pure as the Madonna, had met with Castanier. The old dragoon was too rough and homely to make his way in society, and he was tired of tramping the ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac

... character of virility, that proportionately they show but little of the secondary characters of the other sex, and that they really look for real feminine psychic features in their sexual object. If that were not so it would be incomprehensible why masculine prostitution, in offering itself to inverts, copies in all its exterior, to-day as in antiquity, the dress and attitudes of woman. This imitation would otherwise be an insult to the ideal of the inverts. Among the Greeks, where the most manly men were found among inverts, it is quite obvious that ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud

... the holy soil. A fraction only of the host which in multitudes like the stars and desert sands invaded the east, assembled for the assault upon the Holy City. Famine, thirst and pestilence decimated the great armies upon which fell the united cohorts of the oriental powers. Blasphemy and prostitution, the refuge of despair, alternated in the camp of the Crusaders with fanatic visions of visiting archangels, of armed and shining knights descending the slopes of heaven in their defence. From such a phantasmagoria, surpassing in the historical records all the poetic imaginations of its famous ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven

... national idolatry. How contemptuously the historian enumerates the hard names of their gods and the rabble rout of them which each nation made! 'The men of Babylon made Succoth-benoth' (probably a deity, though the name may mean booths for purposes of prostitution) and the others 'made Nergal and Ashima and Nibhaz and Tartak.' What names, and what a pantheon! 'They feared the Lord and served their ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... replies, look at Paris thirty years later, not dancing, but red with blood. This kind of thing is often said, even now; but it is really time to abandon the prostitution of the name of Justice to a process which brings Lewis XVI. to the block, and consigns De Maistre to poverty and exile, because Lewis XIV., the Regent, and Lewis XV. had been profligate men or injudicious rulers. The reader may remember how the unhappy Emperor ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley

... concubine and treating her like a daughter—which is rare. The Nights abound in tales of concubines, but these are chiefly owned by the Caliphs and high officials who did much as they pleased. The only redeeming point in the system is that it obviated the necessity of prostitution which is, perhaps, the greatest evil known to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... was kindles to wrath by the unchaste action of Shechem. It was at the same time a warning to the tribe of Simeon, that committed whoredom at Shittim with the daughters of Moab, to be mindful of chastity, and like its stone, to suffer no prostitution. ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG

... mysteries of Life. We caution you that this Principle has no reference to the many base, pernicious and degrading lustful theories, teachings and practices, which are taught under fanciful titles, and which are a prostitution of the great natural principle of Gender. Such base revivals of the ancient infamous forms of Phallicism tend to ruin mind, body and soul, and the Hermetic Philosophy has ever sounded the warning note against these degraded teachings which tend toward ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates

... industry; the strict notions of female delicacy, instilled into their minds from their earliest infancy, never entirely forsake them. Even when one of these girls is decoyed from the peaceful dwelling of her parents, and left by her infamous seducer a prey to poverty and prostitution in a brothel at Philadelphia, her whole appearance is neat, and breathes an air of modesty: you see nothing in her dress, language, or behaviour, that could give you any reason to guess at her unfortunate situation; (how unlike her unhappy ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest

... we have asserted, there did afterwards arise spurious Mysteries, in names, forms, and pretensions partially resembling the genuine ones, under the control of the most unprincipled persons, and in which unquestionably the excesses of unbelief, drunkenness, and prostitution held riot. These depraved societies were foreign grafts from the sensual pantheism ever nourished in the voluptuous climes of the remote East. They established themselves late in Greece, but were developed at Rome in such unbridled enormities as compelled the Senate ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... there's no other standard. To make your pile, to strike ile—oh, how I shudder to hear these idioms! And can any one hear the word heiress without immediately thinking of matrimony? Phaugh! It's a prostitution." ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... villainy in Sydney are not surpassed by those in Melbourne; but, with regard to drunkenness and prostitution, the latter place is far worse than Sydney. The Theatre Royal contains within itself four separate drinking-bars. The Cafe de Paris, in the same building, has two bars. In the theatre itself there is a drinking ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... securities to those which, at the beginning of the century, had been thought sufficient for the Church of Scotland. A third reason which our great historical critic puts forward for the disfavor with which the Union was at the time regarded by many high-minded Scotchmen, he finds in "the gross prostitution with which a majority sold themselves to the surrender of their own legislative existence." That similar means were to some extent employed to win over opponents of the government in Ireland cannot, it must be confessed, be denied, ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... justice to interests vested under improvident legislation, make our Government what it ought to be, we can at least take a stand against all new grants of monopolies and exclusive privileges, against any prostitution of our Government to the advancement of the few at the expense of the many, and in favor of compromise and gradual reform in our code of laws and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson

... severities of the Old Testament Theocracy, in its wars of extermination against the Canaanites and Phoenicians, is to be found in a careful study of the foul and cruel types of heathenism which those nations carried with them wherever their colonies extended. A religion which enjoined universal prostitution, and led thus to sodomy and the burning of young children in the fires of Moloch, far exceeded the worst heathenism of Africa or the islands of the Pacific. The Phoenician settlements on the Mediterranean have ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... declared unconstitutional because of one word. It should have read, "the judge may"; instead, it read, "the judge must." Far more difficult to deal with is the opposition of the people who believe that the moral sense of the community would be jeopardized by any laws suggesting that prostitution is unavoidable. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells

... partition of the peoples by a Congress, a dismemberment by the downfall of a dynasty, a combat of two religions, meeting head to head, like two goats of darkness on the bridge of the Infinite: when they will no longer have to fear famine, spoliation, prostitution from distress, misery from lack of work, and all the brigandages of chance in the forest of events: when nations will gravitate about the Truth, like stars about the light, each in its own orbit, without ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor; Venezuelan women and girls are trafficked within the country for sexual exploitation, lured from the nation's interior to urban and tourist areas; child prostitution in urban areas and child sex tourism in resort destinations appear to be growing; Venezuelan women and girls are trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation to Western Europe, Mexico, and Caribbean destinations tier rating: Tier 2 Watch List - Venezuela is placed on the Tier ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... and intolerably bad; and, if he had never written any thing else, must have ranked him below Colley Cibber in genius, and above him in conceit and presumption. We have no toleration for this sort of perversity, or prostitution of great gifts; and do not think it necessary to qualify the expression of opinions which we have formed with as much positiveness as deliberation.—We earnestly wish he would resign his livery laurel to Lord Thurlow, and write no more odes on Court ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... Poison for dividends. Starve and freeze and maim for dividends. Drive parents to suicide, and sons and daughters to crime and prostitution—for dividends. Not fair competition, in which the stronger and better would survive, but cheating and swindling, lying and pilfering and bribing, so that the honest and the decent go down before the dishonest and the depraved. ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips

... find the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet on the other hand we cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine and does not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlers to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle and dinners at the best taverns. The ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... the great Frederic, and brought philosophy on its knees before the mistresses of Louis XV. Like the courtezan of Thebes, who built one of the pyramids of Egypt from the fruits of her debaucheries, Voltaire did not blush at any prostitution of genius, provided that the wages of his servility enabled him to purchase enemies against Christ. He enrolled them by millions throughout Europe, and especially in France. Kings were reminded of the middle ages, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... when men, more conformable to my taste, have made me feel—I despise all subterfuge!—that I was not dead to love. Neglected by you, I have resolutely stifled the enticing emotions, and respected the plighted faith you outraged. And you dare now to insult me, by selling me to prostitution!—Yes—equally lost to delicacy and principle—you dared sacrilegiously to barter the honour of the mother of ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... this glorious Commonwealth, a free an' equal member of a liberty-loving nation, a nation whose standard is, now and forever, 'Gimme liberty or gimme det', a nation that stands for all the conceivable benefits that mankind may enjoy, a nation that scintillates pyrotechnically over the prostitution of power—" ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford

... argument leads to no such conclusion. The worship of Jugernaut and Kalee is a curse to mankind. It is much better that people should be without any religion than that they should believe in a religion which enjoins prostitution, suicide, robbery, assassination. But will any Protestant deny that it is better that the Irish should be Roman Catholics than that they should live and die like the beasts of the field, indulge their appetites without any religious ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... prostitution. Near the camp there was a district with a bad name, and the girls of her organization were forbidden to so much as walk in that direction. It took her a long time to understand, and she suffered horribly when she did. There were depths of wickedness, then, and of abasement like that in the world. ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... want to hear it or not; that is, that I consider the bad pictorial literature of the day as most tremendous for ruin. There is no one who can like good pictures better than I do. But what shall I say to the prostitution of this art to purposes of iniquity? These death-warrants of the soul are at every street corner. They smite the vision of the young with pollution. Many a young man buying a copy has bought his eternal discomfiture. There may be enough ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... by vice, on the threshold of crime, and the reasons were plain—ignorance and indigence. Another showed the stamp of original goodness, obliterated by social pressure, and turned to hate. On the face of an old woman he saw starvation; on that of a girl, prostitution. The same fact, and although the girl had the resource of her youth, all the sadder for that! In the crowd were arms without tools; the workers asked only for work, but the work was wanting. Sometimes a soldier came and seated himself by the workmen, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... food provided by a goldsmith or a woman who has neither husband nor children it lessens the period of his life. The food provided by a usurer is equivalent to dirt, while that provided by a woman living by prostitution is equivalent to semen. The food also provided by persons that tolerate the unchastity of their wives, and by persons that are ruled by their spouses, is forbidden. The food provided by a person selected (for receiving gifts) at a certain ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... the house of prostitution shortly afterwards by a patriot without prejudice, who loved her for her brave act, and then, having loved her for herself, married her and made of her a lady as good as ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant

... that demands variety, excitement, pleasure at any cost. It does not pay to repress human nature too much, or to try to make out of a red-blooded young man or woman a mere machine. Gambling, drunkenness, prostitution, and all sorts of pathological vices flourish largely as a reaction from the dullness and monotony of the day's work. We are paying this heavy penalty for our increase of material efficiency at the expense ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... motive of utility, and consequently from a return of egoism; I deny, I say, labor for labor, just as I deny style for style, love for love, art for art. Style for style has produced in these days hasty literature and thoughtless improvisation; love for love leads to unnatural vice, onanism, and prostitution; art for art ends in Chinese knick-knacks, caricature, the worship of the ugly. When man no longer looks to labor for anything but the pleasure of exercise, he soon ceases to labor, he plays. History is full of facts which attest this degradation. The games of Greece, Isthmian, Olympic, Pythian, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... had, it seems, run away from him to a common brothel, in front of which it was the custom, not only for women but even for men, to sit down and offer themselves for prostitution. ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... being no jealously, as far as my observation goes, and few domestic broils. Polyandry is considered swinish, and concubinage is unknown. Divorce is not in accord with tribal customs. The same holds true of prostitution. ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... Algonquins of Gasp, where a lapse in this regard was counted a disgrace. (See Le Clerc, Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspsie, 417, where a contrast is drawn between the modesty of the girls of this region and the open prostitution practised among those of other tribes.) Among the Sioux, adultery on the part of a woman is punished ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman

... may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... his blessing, society receives them with open arms, and legalized prostitution is upheld by the majesty of the law and encircled by the sanctified robes ...
— Wise or Otherwise • Lydia Leavitt

... execution to the effective handling of these diabolical things, and their economic faculty for organization to the contriving of ruin and slaughter. For it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy that the very talents they were forced to prostitute made the prostitution not only effective, but even interesting; so that some of them were rapidly promoted, and found themselves actually becoming artists in wax, with a growing relish for it, like Napoleon and all the other scourges of mankind, in spite of themselves. For many of them there ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw

... every man worthy of the name of man has always felt, and thought, and acted. The worst of all possible and conceivable checks upon population is the vile one which Malthus glossed over as "the prudential," and which consists in substituting prostitution for marriage through ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen

... retreated a mile, and her old Roman light-house was left to overlook merely a long stretch of barren, sandy land. Owing to this stranded, inland position, she has escaped both the dignity of a modern sea-port and the prostitution of a Rivieran resort, and is a little dead city, the seat of an ancient Provencal "Cathedral of the Sea." This Cathedral is largely free from XVII and XVIII century disfigurements; and the pity is ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose

... not especially high, and in the reaction from Puritan control and strict religious observances the great mass of the people degenerated into positive irreligion and gross immorality. Drunkenness, rowdyism, robbery, blasphemy, brutality, lewdness, and prostitution became very common. This moral decline of the people the Church of ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... crept into certain gangs, and this it is which led to their discountenance by the goddess Davee, and the consequent downfall of the system. Davee, they say, allowed the British to punish them, because a certain gang had murdered the mothers to obtain their daughters to be sold to prostitution. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... saying that a society in which one sees such social inequalities as we see all about us, in which we see every day suicides caused by poverty, prostitution flaring at every street corner—a society whose principal monuments are barracks and prisons—such a society must be transformed as soon as possible, on pain of being eliminated, and that speedily, from the human race. Hail to him who labors, by no matter what means, for this ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... with it. You won't be able to do your share in the business, and we——" "Not do our share in the business? Why not? Of course we——" "Yes, yes, I know that; but you really must help us. One of those unintelligible masterpieces of yours all about prostitution of sea-power, and periscopes and that sort of poppy-cock with which you always know how to bluff the lubbers." "Well, we'll see what we can do"—and the extinguisher is dexterously and effectually applied. Co-operation between the two great fighting ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... with vessels: every one of which contains two or three tyrants, and from fifty to a thousand slaves, ignorant, gross, perverted, and active only in mischief. Ports resounding with life: in other words, with noise and drunkenness, the mingled din of avarice, intemperance, and prostitution. Profound researches, scientific inventions: to what end? To contract the sum of human wants? to teach the art of living on a little? to disseminate independence, liberty, and health? No; to multiply ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... that no woman can make more than nine a week, and the sum thus earned, after deducting rent, fuel, etc., leaves her just three and a half cents a day for bread. Is it a wonder that women are driven to prostitution? Female teachers in New York are paid fifty dollars a year, and for every such situation there are five hundred applicants. I know not what you believe of God, but I believe He gave yearnings and longings to be filled, and that He did not mean all our time should ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... sacrifice their hair had to give themselves up to strangers on a certain day of the festival, and the money which they thus earned was devoted to the goddess. A Greek inscription found at Tralles in Lydia proves that the practice of religious prostitution survived in that country as late as the second century of our era. It records of a certain woman, Aurelia Aemilia by name, not only that she herself served the god in the capacity of a harlot at his express command, but ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... enough, by the landlady, who ushered them into a large garret where twenty or thirty people of all ages and both sexes lay and dosed away the day, choosing the evening and night for their trades of beggary, thieving, or prostitution. ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... kind Design. Get me to see her; and sure no Woman, even possest with a new Passion, Grown confident even to Prostitution, But when she sees the Man to whom she's sworn so very—very much, will find Remorse ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn

... over, I went with them to the drinking-booth, which we often left intoxicated to spend the night in houses of ill-fame. When we happened to find those places already tenanted by other men, we forced them by violence to quit the premises, and defrauded the miserable victims of prostitution of the mean salary the law allows them, after compelling them to yield to our brutality. Our scandalous proceedings often exposed us to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... prostitution of the most honourable function which can be intrusted to a man is unexampled in the history of civilised nations. It will astonish and afflict Europe as an unheard of crime, which hitherto the most perverse ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... not yet been to purge this vast lazar-place, for prostitution long since made it its headquarters. It is, perhaps, a good thing for Paris that these alleys should be allowed to preserve their filthy aspect. Passing through them by day, it is impossible to imagine what they become by night; they are pervaded by strange ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... aestheticism!), and the "Festklange" sounded too confusedly noisy even to our friend Pohl! And then what has all this canaille to do with instruments of percussion, cymbals, triangle, and drum in the sacred domain of Symphony? It is, believe me, not only confusion and derangement of ideas, but also a prostitution ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated

... persecution, and suppression of free speech and freedom of the press, as much war, as much of the vilest excess of mutilation, rapine, and delirious indiscriminate slaughter of helpless non-combatants, old and young, as much prostitution of professional talent, literary and political, in defence of manifest wrong, as much cowardly sycophancy giving fine names to all this villainy or pretending that it is "greatly exaggerated," as we can find any record of from the days when the advocacy ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw

... calling instead for an amendment granting universal suffrage, or in other words, suffrage for women and Negroes. The Revolution also discussed in editorials by Mrs. Stanton other subjects of interest to women, such as marriage, divorce, prostitution, and infanticide, all of which Susan agreed needed frank thoughtful consideration, but which other ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... As to remuneration, you may think my songs either above or below price; for they shall be absolutely the one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, &c., would be downright prostitution of soul." ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... well, perhaps, for priests and publicists to cease launching foolish anathemas and useless statutes at prostitution long enough to inquire what is driving so many bright young women into dens of infamy,—for those good souls who are assiduously striving to drag their fallen sisters out of the depths, to study the causes of the disease before attempting ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... boldly to the front wherever Greeley seemed weak, the inequality of the fight was apparent. Tammany and old-time Democrats could not forget that the Tribune's editor had classed them with blacklegs, thieves, burglars, gamblers, and keepers of dens of prostitution.[1406] Moreover, only three Republican newspapers had declared for Greeley,[1407] while many leaders like Lyman Tremaine and James W. Husted, whose criticism of the President had encouraged the belief that they would favour the Cincinnati nominee, preferred ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... transition was made to the theme under consideration: "an increase of my salary." But it is needless to continue illustrations of the almost universal dearth of preaching. One hardly knows whether to laugh at its absurdity or weep over its prostitution. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... instincts, and therefore with their sure commercial success, could here escape the condemnation of police and decent public as they were covered by the pretence of social reform. How far the writers of the play of prostitution prostituted art in order to share the commercial profits in this wave of sexual ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... think about. But when it threatens a patient's life the patient should know the truth and the doctor should operate. Modern society is the patient, and death-dealing sex crimes are the cancerous growth, which must be operated upon. Whenever we allow a neighborhood to maintain houses of prostitution, thus regulating and in a way sanctioning the evil, we are granting a sort of corporation charter for an industry which is run upon business methods. And business, you know, is based upon filling the 'demand,' with the ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball

... through false promises of legitimate employment, only to be forced into commercial sexual exploitation, largely in Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, and Japan; women and children are trafficked to China from Mongolia, Burma, North Korea, Russia, and Vietnam for forced labor, marriage, and prostitution; some North Korean women and children seeking to leave their country voluntarily cross the border into China and are then sold into prostitution, marriage, or forced labor tier rating: Tier 2 Watch List - China is on the Tier ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... lost her honour, imagines that she cannot fall lower, and as for recovering her former station, it is impossible; no exertion can wash this stain away. Losing thus every spur, and having no other means of support, prostitution becomes her only refuge, and the character is quickly depraved by circumstances over which the poor wretch has little power, unless she possesses an uncommon portion of sense and loftiness of spirit. Necessity never makes prostitution the business of men's lives; though numberless ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]

... The prostitution of the melody of song, mentioned by Dr. Dwight, reminds me of another serious evil. Many persons, and even not a few intelligent parents, seem to think that a loose or immoral song cannot much injure their children, especially if they express their disapprobation ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott

... was engaged to meet were assembled in Fleet Street. He had walked some time along the Strand, amidst a crowd of those wretches who wait the uncertain wages of prostitution, with ideas of pity suitable to the scene around him and the feelings he possessed, and had got as far as Somerset House, when one of them laid hold of his arm, and, with a voice tremulous and faint, asked him for a pint of wine, in a ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie

... specialization in evil proceeded that there were places of prostitution which did a telephone-business exclusively, and would send a woman in a cab to any address; and there were high-class assignation-houses, which furnished exquisite apartments and the services of maids and valets. And in this world of vice the modern doctrine of the equality ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair

... dearest rights crushed to the earth! See your sons murdered, and your wives, mothers, and sisters, doomed to prostitution! In the name of the merciful God! and by all that life is worth, let it no longer be a debateable question, whether it is better to choose ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet

... was soon spread about the neighbourhood, and reached the inn, where both lovers, now as weary of their purchase as desirous of it before, advised her to go to London, with which she complied, and in all probability followed there the trade of prostitution for a subsistance. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber

... honourable embassy is immediately despatched, and greater rewards proposed. Then the iniquity of his heart began to disclose itself. A thorough honest man would without hesitation have repeated his former answer, that he could not be guilty of so infamous a prostitution of the sacred character with which he was invested, as in the name of a prophet to curse those whom he knew to be blessed. But instead of this, which was the only honest part in these circumstances that lay before him, he desires the princes of Moab to tarry that ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler

... rights of a husband, the punishment of adultery and seduction, the exclusion of certain classes from the privilege of worship, the cleanliness of the camp, the duty of humanity to a runaway slave, the prohibition of religious prostitution, the regulation of divorce, the duty of humanity to the stranger, the fatherless and the widow, and of kindness to animals, the duty of a surviving brother to marry his brother's childless widow, the prohibition ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen

... game or to associate with certain companions; the slave-trade is now prohibited by the leading nations of the world. Many things are prohibited by law which can not be wholly prevented, as gambling and prostitution; on the other hand, things may be prevented which are not prohibited, as the services of religion, the payment of debts, or military conquest. That which is precluded need not be prohibited. Compare ABOLISH; ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... 25th).[102] In this disgraceful affair the gravest offences against international comity were committed; high officials, including Mr. Tjaart Krueger, the President's youngest son, were implicated in a gross and scandalous prostitution of the machinery of justice; and yet no apology was offered to the Imperial Government, nor any compensation awarded to Nicholls for the two months' imprisonment and continuous persecution by the agents-provocateurs, to which he had been subjected. The impassioned ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold

... with what I ascribed to the motive of friendship, though it was carried to an excess, and all excess is faulty and vicious: but in this I made allowance for youth. Little did I suspect that the sacrifice of truth, which we both imagined to have been made to friendship, was in reality a prostitution of it to a depraved and debauched appetite. You now plainly see whence all the seeming generosity of this young man to the family of the gamekeeper proceeded. He supported the father in order to corrupt the daughter, and preserved the family from starving, to bring one of them to shame ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... to pay this debt in any superficial way. She cannot pay it with palliatives—with child-labor laws, prohibition, regulation of prostitution and agitation against war. Political nostrums and social panaceas are but incidentally and superficially useful. They do not touch the source of the ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... Fantine, the heroine, after having been seduced by a Parisian student, comes to work in his factory. She has a child that she supports by her labor. This fact is discovered by some female gossip, and she is dismissed from the factory as an immoral woman, and descends to the lowest depths of prostitution,—still for the purpose of supporting her child. Jean Valjean, the reformed criminal, discovers her, is made aware that her debasement is the result of the act of his foreman, and takes her, half dead with misery and sickness, to his own house. Meanwhile ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... thought to himself, had he seen any system which entailed in the end so much misery on both sexes, though more particularly on the women, as that system of closely tabooed marriage, founded upon a broad basis of prostitution and infanticide, which has reached its most appalling height of development in hypocritical and puritan England. The ghastly levity with which all Englishmen treated this most serious subject, and the fatal readiness with which even Frida herself seemed to acquiesce in ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen

... lovers, read no more that day. It were well if the effect of intrusion were simply co-extensive with its presence; but it mars all the good hours afterwards. These scratches in appearance leave an orifice that closes not hastily. "It is a prostitution of the bravery of friendship," says worthy Bishop Taylor, "to spend it upon impertinent people, who are, it may be, loads to their families, but can never ease my loads." This is the secret of their gaddings, their visits, and morning calls. They ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... Cloud, Malmaison, the Tuileries, and Fontainebleau the social vices of courts began to appear; but they were sternly repressed, especially high play. By way of contrast, the city of Paris was at that very moment debauched by a profusion of gambling-hells and houses of prostitution, all licensed at an enormous figure by Fouche and producing great revenues for the secret police. The gorgeous state uniforms of the marshals, the rich and elegant costumes of the ladies, the bespangled ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... exercised the most powerful and despotic influence on morals is in the illicit intercourse of the two sexes. It is well known that prostitution was freely practiced in the Middle Ages, before the appearance of syphilis. A discussion, however, on these questions does not belong to our present work. What seems characteristic of Italy at this time, is that ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... History gives an account of Constantine the Great being the first to abolish in Phoenicia and other places the shameless custom of using virgins, before their nuptials, for purposes of prostitution. Such monstrous infamies were accounted religion and righteousness among the Gentiles. There is nothing, in fact, so ridiculous, so stupid, so obscene, nothing so remote from all propriety, that it cannot be foisted as the very essence of religion upon men who have been forsaken ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther

... since he still believes that integrity and faithfulness are virtues. Yet, in his endeavor to respect the courtesy due to his host, he reaches for pencil and pad, and notes the various moral lessons he had derived thus far from the Old Testament. He wrote lust, incest, infidelity, and prostitution; arriving at the story of Dinah, Genesis XXXIV, 1-2, he wrote that in addition to those vices already listed, rape should be given a prominent place. The stories of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, Judah and Tamar, King David and his wives, the rape of Tamar by her brother ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... unto whose lott She shall hereafter fall may boast himself To bee a happy husband. For our trade Shees out at that: neather promises, rewards, Example or Intreaty, fayre, fowle meanes, Gaine present or the hope of future goodd, Can force from her a presens; then much lesse A frendly prostitution. ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen

... world, particularly in the field of morals, is based upon unsound assumption, e.g., that God observes the fall of a sparrow and is shocked by the fall of a Sunday-school superintendent. The truth is that prostitution is one of the most attractive of the occupations practically open to the sort of women who engage in it, and that the prostitute commonly likes her work, and would not exchange places with a shop-girl ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... invigorate the intellect; and it was now rapidly losing its hold on the consciences of the multitude. The high places of idolatrous worship often exercised a most demoralising influence, as their rites were not unfrequently a wretched mixture of brutality, levity, imposture, and prostitution. Philosophy had completely failed to ameliorate the condition of man. The vices of some of its most distinguished professors were notorious; its votaries were pretty generally regarded as a class of scheming speculators; and they enjoyed ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... boys, of every rank, and of every province; and, wherever the arts of seduction proved ineffectual, the brutal lover had recourse to violence. The ancient historians [29] have expatiated on these abandoned scenes of prostitution, which scorned every restraint of nature or modesty; but it would not be easy to translate their too faithful descriptions into the decency of modern language. The intervals of lust were filled up ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... case ever yet received. But in general those women who counsel the delay of the marriage age are opposing the facts of feminine development and psychology. They are indirectly encouraging male immorality and female prostitution, with their appalling consequences for those directly concerned, for hosts of absolutely innocent women, and for the unborn. Further, those who suppose that the granting of the vote is going to effect radical ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... had not, with those vices which proceed from the warmth of youth, one of the virtues which we should naturally expect from the same sanguine disposition. He shewed us that grey hairs could add nothing but hypocrisy to him; for he avowed public prostitution, laughed at all honour, public spirit, and patriotism; and gave convincing proofs that the most phlegmatic old miser upon earth could not be sooner tempted with gold to perpetrate the ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding

... or not in the statistics of crime. A proof of this fact may be seen in the Report of the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, for the year 1888. In the year 1886, the number of persons convicted in the Metropolis of "Annoying male persons for the purpose of prostitution" was 3,233; in 1888, the number was only 1,475. This enormous decrease in the course of two years is not due to a diminution of the offence, but to a change in the attitude of the police. Again, in the year 1887, the Metropolitan police arrested 4,556 persons under the provisions of the Vagrant ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison

... so sentimentally selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities, and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends stained with the blood of child labour, and sweated labour, and of prostitution itself. When I mentioned such facts, expecting in my innocence that these sisters of Judy O'Grady would at once strip off their blood-dyed silks and jewels, they became excited and angry, and read me ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... opponents and favouritism of adherents; such encouragement of oppression and connivance at corruption; such a prostitution of justice; such a cynical indifference to all moral principle—unparalleled even in the history of Greece—could not but make the Cretan's rule both odious and despicable. What made it more hateful still in the eyes of the people ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... got from his fellow members in the local, and from the Socialist papers which came each week and from the many speakers he heard. These speakers were men and women of burning sincerity and with a definite and entirely logical point of view. Whether they talked about war, crime, prostitution, political corruption, or any other social evil, what they wanted was to tear down the old ramshackle structure, and to put in its place something new and intelligent. You might possibly bring them to admit slight ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... some of the chiefs do not provide their girls with food or clothing, but they tell them to get these necessaries of life as best they can, i.e., by prostitution—for the labor of the debtor being the property of the creditor, prostitution is in this case a necessity ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... prostitute a gift (though but a left-handed one) of nature, to the enlarging of my worldly substance; prudent as the necessities, which that fatal gift have involved me in, might have made such a prostitution to appear in the eyes of an ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... worship of Astarte the prostitution of women, and of effeminate men, played the same part that child murder did in the worship of Baal. "This practice," says Dr. Doellinger,[11128] "so widely spread in the world of old, the delusion that no service more acceptable could be rendered ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... usually the forerunner of a happy and contented marriage. And incidentally, a happy marriage is the best guarantee that reproduction, the carrying on of the species, will be morally and physically a success. Here, too, the fact should be strongly stressed that prostitution cannot be justified on any moral grounds. It represents a deliberate ignoring of the rightful function of sex, and the perversion of the sane and natural laws of reproduction. It is in marriage, in the sane ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton

... chiefly while in the Legislature to laws for the reformation of Primaries and of the Civil Service and endeavored to have a certain Judge Westbrook impeached, on the ground of corrupt collusion with Jay Gould and the prostitution of his high judicial office to serve the purpose of wealthy and unscrupulous stock gamblers, but was ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... he dropped the noble for the confidential, "I have got things to say, things that are vital to me. I couldn't put them in my other work. How could I? It would have seemed—you will think me ridiculous—a kind of prostitution." ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco

... made of marriage, 'leading your own lives'? You make marriage a sort of intelligent and intellectual prostitution—and you develop divorce. The best among you—those who will not marry unless the man can arouse their 'best selves'—will not bear children even then. And you think you have the right to choose again when your so-called souls have ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... God," she continued, "there is nothing, and you have delivered those letters to me that you ought never to have returned. And I have paid you for them, paid for them with new caresses and a last prostitution! Well! that ends it, doesn't it? There is nothing more between us, nothing, nothing, nothing!—And these two beings, who exchanged here their loveless kisses, the kisses of a debauchee and a courtesan, will never recognize each other again, I hope—you hear, never ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... this riot of sensuality. What is true is that they did nothing to hinder it. And it is also true that the lechery, which he flings so acridly in the face of the pagans, the gross stage-plays, the songs, dances, and even prostitution, were all more or less included in the essence of paganism. The theatre, like the games of the arena and circus, was a divine institution. At certain feasts, and in certain temples, fornication became sacred. All the world ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... that all those who have talked about the "White Slave Traffic" have been quite sure what they meant by the term. Some people, indeed, have seemed to think that it meant prostitution in general. That is, of course, an absurd misapprehension. We are concerned with a trade which flourishes on prostitution, but that trade is not itself the trade or (as some prefer to call it) ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... affections to two more students. Again after a term of years they were forsaken, until the flower of their youth was gone, and no one desired to support them as mistresses. Then a downward step was taken. Nothing but promiscuous prostitution was before them—except starvation. And still they could not forget their old life, and came nightly to this public promenade to see the old sights, and possibly with the hope of drawing some unsophisticated ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett

... character and strength at the fountain, if the privilege is claimed and exercised without right, and by means of fraud and corruption. The body politic can not be sound and healthy if many of its constituent members claim their standing through the prostitution of the high right and calling of citizenship. It should mean something to become a citizen of the United States; and in the process no loophole whatever should be left ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... everybody and in almost every imaginable way: they went into partnership with dishonest contractors; sold privileges and permits to business men; extorted money from restaurants and saloons; levied assessments on municipal employees; shared the profits of houses of prostitution; forced beer, whiskey, champagne, and cigars on restaurants and saloons on commission; blackmailed gamblers, pool-sellers, and promoters of prize-fights; sold franchises to wealthy corporations; created such municipal bureaus as the commissary ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth

... lust, slander, anger, voluptuousness, revenge, lying, prostitution, and envy are sins which arise from a consumption of a large quantity of aliments containing a higher percentage ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves into a society for doing it. . . . I'm certain that if people like ourselves were to take things in hand instead of leaving it to policemen and magistrates, we could put a stop to—prostitution"—she lowered her voice at the ugly word—"in six months. My idea is that men and women ought to join in these matters. We ought to go into Piccadilly and stop one of these poor wretches and say: 'Now, look here, I'm no better ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf

... of, some higher aggregate. So Science functions for and serves society at large, and would, from society at large, receive no support, unless it did so divert itself or dissipate and prostitute itself. It seems that by prostitution I mean usefulness. ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... in their way were the laws applying to mendicants and vagrants. Six months or a year in the penitentiary or workhouse was the usual sentence. After the panic of 1837, crime, mendicancy, vagrancy and prostitution tremendously increased, as they always do increase after two events: war, which, when over, turns into civil life a large number of men who cannot get work; and panics which chaotically uproot industrial conditions and bring about widespread destitution. ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... houses of prostitution, from the middle class apartments, scattered in the most respectable streets, to the damp, ill-smelling dens which cast out their wares at night on the Calle de Peligros, circulated the story of a certain gentleman, provoking shouts of laughter. ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... estimate of nearer objects and aims would be, if once we clearly recognised what we are here for! The prostitution of powers to obviously unworthy aims and ends is the saddest thing in humanity. It is like elephants being set to pick up pins; it is like the lightning being harnessed to carry all the gossip and filth of one capital of the world to the prurient readers in another. Men take these great ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... difficult for such men as you to understand the religious dependence of people like myself. We see the church's lack of appreciation of true worth of character, we know the vulgar, petty scheming and wire-pulling for place, the senseless craving for notoriety, and the prostitution of the spirit of Christ's teaching to denominational ends. We understand how the ministers are at the mercy of the lowest minds and the meanest spirits in their congregation; but, Dan, because we love the cause we do not talk of these things even to ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright

... see the fact of prostitution advertised so unblushingly as a public spectacle, his hatred and contempt breaking over the heads of the swine-faced men who followed the harlot, and picked their ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... shawls, put them on. Many of these children support drunken or depraved parents by begging, and are soundly beaten by them if they return home at night without money. They grow up to a life of vagrancy. They soon learn to cheat and steal, and from such offences they pass rapidly into prostitution and crime. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... that there were numberless underground connections between the lower Theatres and the Schools of Suicide, and with the varied haunts of Prostitution ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris

... his horns into his head, then his body into his shell, so your Church adapts itself to its surroundings. Let me give you a case in point—it touches on our present discussion. I have heard often enough the cheaper forms of prostitution decorously alluded to; but when did I ever hear dealt with, either for approval or reprobation, the established practice among the unmarried youth of ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... to gratify his passions with the greater conveniency, he put the virtuous lady into the hands of Aphrodica, a very infamous and licentious woman. This wretch tried every artifice to win her to the desired prostitution; but found all her efforts were vain; for her chastity was impregnable, and she well knew that virtue alone could procure true happiness. Aphrodica acquainted Quintian with the inefficacy of her endeavours, who, enraged to be foiled in his designs, changed his lust into resentment. ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... are over-rated, his faults overlooked, and his metrical canons received without scruple and without consideration. But the unquestionable possession of considerable genius by several of the writers here censured renders their mental prostitution more to be regretted. Imbecility may be pitied, or, at worst, laughed at and forgotten; perverted powers demand the most decided reprehension. No one can wish more than the Author that some known and ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... a little ashamed to find himself thinking of his newspaper story so soon after the singer was led forth—the man who would sing for the wounded, but who would not sing men to their death. Come to think—there was a prostitution about it. Certainly Poltneck had a point of view. And he was a hair-raiser of ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort

... about the failure of the negotiations for a penny post with France. Brieux is too violent a reformer ever to be a serious dramatist. Violent reformers are unprincipled, and the reformer in Brieux forces the dramatist in him to prostitution. The dramatist in him is not strong enough to resist the odious demands of the reformer: which fact alone shows how far he is from being a first-rate dramatist. As a dramatist Brieux is no stronger, no more sincere, no less unscrupulous, no less viciously sentimental, ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett

... "prospects," readily find husbands on the marriage market, while the most robust women of the people or of the middle class who have no dowries are condemned to the sterility of compulsory old-maiddom or to surrender themselves to a more or less gilded prostitution.[22] ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... reason it is, perhaps, that establishments devoted to purposes like the present, have, in most countries, for their invariable adjuncts, the brothel and the bar-room. If they are not in the immediate tenement, they are sufficiently nigh to make the work of moral prostitution comparatively easy, in all its ramifications, with the young and inconsiderate mind. Kingsley turned over the cards, and I could see that while affecting to show me the pictures he was himself subjecting the cards to a close inspection of another kind. This ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms

... Household Book of Sir Ed. Coke, Original MS.; Early English Poetry, MS. temp. James I.; Grammatical Treatises printed by W. de Worde; Facetiae; Works on Marriage Ceremonies, the Intercourse of the Sexes, and the Philosophy of Marriage; the Plague; Polygamy, Prostitution and its Consequences; Meteors and Celestial Influences; Miracles, Monkish Frauds and Criminal Excesses; Phrenology and Physiognomy, &c. Catalogues will be sent ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various

... is thus explained in a private letter from Colonel Hamilton—"This man (Arnold) is in every sense despicable. In addition to the scene of knavery and prostitution during his command in Philadelphia, which the late seizure of his papers has unfolded, the history of his command at West Point is a history of little as well as great villanies. He practised every dirty ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall

... spoke to him for a long while. Glogowski frowned and said: "First of all, I haven't the money for it, for it would cost a great deal and, in the second place, I am not at all anxious to be 'one of our well-known and celebrated,' for that is a prostitution of ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont

... the distribution of wealth and the means of getting it were under attack; that questions were raised as to the rights of property and the causes and necessity of war. Soon moral concepts began to be shaken. He learned that prostitution might be regarded as an economic evil. He found that sex morality was regarded by some as a useful taboo; psychology taught him that repression could be as harmful as excess; the collapse of the Darwinian optimists, who believed that all curves were upward, left him with the inner conviction ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... the rank and education of the offender only aggravate the offence; and that, if they allow a man so convicted to escape, in consequence of his high position in life, every humble man found guilty and executed for the same crime—is murdered. They will tell us it would be a prostitution of the prerogative of the Crown to connive at crime in the rich and punish it in the poor. And, again, there's the devil of it; your beggarly want of hospitality in the first place, and the cursed swaggering severity with which you carried ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... god Pan reward thee for that good Thou hast given thy poor Shepherd: fairest Bud Of Maiden Vertues, when I leave to be The true Admirer of thy Chastitie, Let me deserve the hot polluted Name Of the wild Woodman, or affect: some Dame, Whose often Prostitution hath begot More foul Diseases, than ever yet the hot Sun bred through his burnings, whilst the Dog Pursues the raging Lion, throwing Fog, And deadly Vapour from his angry Breath, Filling the lower World with Plague ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... be found there is no action, however abominable, that has not received the applause, that has not obtained the approbation of some people. Parricide, the sacrifice of children, robbery, usurpation, cruelty, intolerance, and prostitution, have all in their turn been licensed actions; have been advocated; have been deemed laudable and meritorious deeds with some nations of the earth. Above all, superstition has consecrated the most ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach

... nevertheless return to Me saith the Lord." Now the sentence of the Church is God's sentence, according to Deut. 1:17: "You shall hear the little as well as the great: neither shall you respect any man's person, because it is the judgment of God." Therefore even those who are guilty of the prostitution of unbelief which is spiritual prostitution, should be received all ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... adventure might end in a licensed house. And yet in London—what was there in London but, ultimately, the pavement? And the pavement meant complications with the police, with prowlers, with other women; it meant all the scourges of the profession, including probably alcoholism. It meant prostitution, to which she had ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... how to constrain him to it by re-waking, in a single moment, their lost love. So she set out towards La Huchette, not seeing that she was hastening to offer herself to that which but a while ago had so angered her, not in the least conscious of her prostitution. ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... men they never saw, and without their consent previously obtained, there can be no hardship in consigning them over to the arms of the prince; nor is any disgrace attached to the condition of a concubine, where every marriage is a legal prostitution. At the death of the sovereign all his women are removed to a separate building, called by a term which, divested of its metaphor, implies the Palace of Chastity, where they are doomed to reside during the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... follows evidently from our general propositions that every form of prostitution is a double sin, against one's individuality and against the species which we serve by the development of ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... make the vices contribute to the State, because such a procedure authorizes them, gave to the public treasury one of his lands the revenue of which equalled the product of the annual tax levied on prostitution.(63) ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... life with other things to the exclusion of supreme devotion to God are, then, sacrilege and rebellion. The emperor's head was the token of sovereignty and carried with it the obligation to pay tribute. Every fibre in your nature protests against the prostitution of itself to anything short of God. You remember the story in the Old Testament about that saturnalia of debauchery, the night when Babylon fell, when Bel-shazzar, in the very wantonness of godless insolence, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... the disgraceful plague of public prostitution will perish of itself. It is especially at the time when the man possesses the frankness and timidity of adolescence, that in his pursuit of happiness he is competent to meet and struggle with great and genuine passions of the heart. The soul is happy in making great efforts of whatever ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... welfare by legislation. The sudden revival of business which followed the adoption of Hamilton's plan to redeem all the debts seemed to them both natural and legitimate. The other group looked upon the entire matter as a corrupt transaction, contrived by Hamilton, and a prostitution of government from its legitimate purposes. Madison wrote that just before the report came out the value of the various forms of debt rose from a few shillings to eight or ten shillings in the pound, and that emissaries were still exploring the interior ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks

... to the group before them, "look, yon wretched mother, whose voice an instant ago uttered the coarsest accents of maudlin and intoxicated prostitution, is now fostering her infant, with a fondness stamped upon her worn cheek and hollow eye, which might shame the nice maternity of nobles; and there, too, yon wretch whom, in the reckless effrontery of hardened abandonment, we ourselves heard ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... not to offer sacrifices out of the hire of a woman who is a harlot [17] for the Deity is not pleased with any thing that arises from such abuses of nature; of which sort none can be worse than this prostitution of the body. In like manner no one may take the price of the covering of a bitch, either of one that is used in hunting, or in keeping of sheep, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... resemblance to the histories in which we read about the most celebrated women of ancient times, who occupied a middle station between the condition of marriage and prostitution—a class of women whose Greek name is familiarized to our ears in translations of Aristophanes. Ninon de l'Enclos was of the order of the French "hetaerae," and, as by her beauty and her talents, she attained the ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.

... Hamilcar asked the Ancients for the hair of their wives; all sacrificed it, but the quantity was not sufficient. In the buildings of the Syssitia there were twelve hundred marriageable slaves destined for prostitution in Greece and Italy, and their hair, having been rendered elastic by the use of unguents, was wonderfully well adapted for engines of war. But the subsequent loss would be too great. Accordingly it was decided that a choice should be made of ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... you cannot restrain those instincts which are implanted in human nature, and people will have the gratification and satisfaction of passions powerfully implanted, if not in one way, in some other way. So you have the evils of prostitution substituted for the evils of over-population. Now, what says Dr. Knowlton? There being this choice of evils—there being this unquestioned evil of over-population which exists in a great part of the civilised world—is the remedy ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant

... scholar named Neumann speaks about maternity regulations and the bringing up of children—it doesn't seem to him the place to talk about fallen girls—women have understood that it is right and proper to stay where they belong—the misery of prostitution—posed gestures. Voice. Raise the eyebrows. I must express myself in extremes. I must decidedly condemn zionism as a special variety of prostitution. Maternity regulations: The mother must be protected against her children (new sensational ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein

... the Player is, in an assumed Character. The Lawyer, who is vehement and loud in a Cause wherein he knows he has not the Truth of the Question on his Side, is a Player as to the personated Part, but incomparably meaner than he as to the Prostitution of himself for Hire; because the Pleader's Falshood introduces Injustice, the Player feigns for no other end but to divert or instruct you. The Divine, whose Passions transport him to say any thing with any View but promoting the Interests of true Piety ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... You'll cry, "—Pity,—a mother's fondness."—I allow it. But then how rarely you provided for her! What could you mean? consider!—for 'tis plain, You have betray'd your child to that old beldam, Either for prostitution, or for sale. So she but liv'd, it was enough, you thought: No matter how, or what vile life she led. —What can one do, or how proceed, with those, Who know of neither reason, right, nor justice? Better or worse, for or against, they see ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer

... will is manifestly revealed, determining his people's duty in all their regulations; so his glory is equally concerned, that they receive, observe, keep pure and entire, all the ordinances he hath appointed in his word. The sinful prostitution of any of these, or breaking over the boundaries which Jehovah hath set is an evident contempt of his sovereign authority, and violation of the moral law. God requires of his people an universal respect to all his ordinances and commandments. Hence what is designed by them in this undertaking, ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery

... families has shown that there are whole generations, almost all the members of which belong to the ranks of crime, insanity, and prostitution (this last being amongst women the equivalent of criminality amongst men). A striking example is furnished by the notorious Jukes ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... beautiful children, who have been decoyed or purchased from their parents by these prostitute-hunters, are taken to be reared and trained for the profession. In Bombay there is actually a caste in which the girls are in early childhood "married to the dagger," or, in other words, dedicated to a life of prostitution. In some of the cities old men are employed as touts to secure customers for the women, who remain in their haunts, thus seducing and leading into vice crowds of lads and young men who ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker

... Provision is made against allowing children between the ages of four and sixteen to be in brothels; it is also made a misdemeanour if any custodian, &c., of a girl under sixteen causes or encourages her seduction or prostitution, and any person having the custody of a young girl may be bound over to exercise proper care if it is shown to the satisfaction of a court of summary jurisdiction, on the complaint of any person, that she is exposed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... leading Socialist organ complained: "Our opponents decline to deal with the fundamental principles of Socialism—its unanswerable indictment of the capitalist system, with all its concomitants of wage-slavery and slumdom; prostitution and child murder—and prefer instead to indulge in calumniation and misrepresentation of Socialism. We need not complain about that. It is a tribute to the soundness of the Socialist position, to the irrefutability of its principles, ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... a lawyer defend a rogue whom he knows to be guilty? Can one change the nature with which he was born? Is violence justified in the name of social reform? If what is right in one age or place is wrong in another, is it fair to object when moral laws are broken? If a practice like prostitution is common, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... captious word, which signifies to it always: Gold and Pleasure! If we comprise in it all those who hold out their hands for an alms, for lawful wages, or the five francs that are granted to every kind of Parisian prostitution, in short, for all the money well or ill earned, this people numbers three hundred thousand individuals. Were it not for the cabarets, would not the Government be overturned every Tuesday? Happily, by Tuesday, this people is glutted, sleeps off ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac

... two evils of which I have now spoken, together with the physical effects of masturbation, young men become powerless to face the sexual temptations of manhood; and many, who in all other relations of life are admirable, sink in this matter into the mire of prostitution or the less demoralising, but far ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly

... fact, the symptoms were certain and obvious. The houses of prostitution disappeared, and as soon as one of them closed, a cafe ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans



Words linked to "Prostitution" :   harlotry, house of prostitution, vice crime, whoredom, prostitute



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