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More "Degrading" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... last hope with it. Elise had conquered. Her letter had brought him face to face with those realities which, during this week of madness, he had simply refused to see. He could pit himself against her no longer. When it came to the point he had not the nerve to enter upon a degrading and ignoble conflict, in which all that was to be won was her hatred or her fear. That, indeed, would be the last and worst ruin, for it would be the ruin, not of happiness or of hope, but of ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... victory, seemed to triumph in obtaining what fortune alone had put them in possession of. To murmur at their treatment was only to expose ourselves to repeated and more provoking insults; to resist was only hazarding our lives. We were therefore obliged, however degrading in our own opinion, to submit to ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Amy had no extravagant aspirations; a home of simple refinement and freedom from anxiety would restore her to her nobler self. How could he find fault with her? She knew nothing of such sordid life as he had gone through, and to lack money for necessities seemed to her degrading beyond endurance. Why, even the ordinary artisan's wife does not suffer such privations as hers at the end of the past year. For lack of that little money his life must be ruined. Of late he had often thought about the rich uncle, John Yule, ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... in that work is most emphatic. "The whole commerce between master and slave," he says, "is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it.... The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives loose to his worst of passions; and thus nursed, educated, ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... asked too much, you have pleaded the fear of ridicule, but you could not understand that you were consenting to buy me—me—your wife! You wished to possess me for a little, as a sort of variation to your usual list, although your heart must have told you that it was degrading to me to be placed on such a plane. You did not recoil from such an idea, but pursued it, just as you pursue them, and the more eagerly, because I was more expensive. But you have deceived yourself, not me. Not thus will you ever regain possession of your wife. Adieu, Monsieur! ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... are here on false pretences, and we stay here no longer,' he said. 'Had you still loved me, right or wrong, I should have taken you away, because then I could have made you happy. But as it is - I must speak plainly - what you propose is degrading to you, and an insult to me, and a rank unkindness to your father. Your father may be this or that, but you should use ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not in words, but in deeds. It said, "We have come to an end. We have been robbed of the rights guaranteed to us by the Kansas-Nebraska bill. We have been robbed of the rights of American citizens. We have been given the alternative of abject and degrading submission or of extermination. And now we make our answer. We will return blow for blow, wound for wound, stripe for stripe, and burning for burning. Murder shall be paid back with murder, robbery with robbery; and every act of aggression shall be paid back with swift and terrible ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... none of that rioting or confusion by which an assembly of the middling classes in England is too often disgraced; no quarrelling or intoxication even among the poorest ranks, and little appearance of that degrading want which destroys the pleasing idea of public happiness. The people appear all to enjoy a certain share of individual prosperity; their intercourse is conducted with unbroken harmony, and they seem to resign themselves to those delightful feelings ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... his large hospitable hand at the full length of his arm, and spread abroad his wide chest to greet him, and they went through the ceremony of shaking hands,—which, even in their case, I cannot judge so degrading and hypocritical as the Latin nations seem to consider it. Then Wingfold had ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... impeachment of Judge Chase, which aroused very strong feelings, Mr. Adams was fortunately able to vote for acquittal. He regarded this measure, as well as the impeachment of Judge Pickering at the preceding session, as parts of an elaborate scheme on the part of the President for degrading the national judiciary and rendering it subservient to the legislative branch of the government. So many, however, even of Mr. Jefferson's stanch adherents revolted against his requisitions on this occasion, and he himself so far lost heart before the final ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... Johann, Beethoven's two younger brothers, of whom no previous mention has been made, were engaged, the one in studying music, and the other as apprentice to the Court apothecary, but neither was bringing grist to the mill. The father had sunk still deeper under the degrading influence of drink, and his voice was almost ruined by his excesses, so that it had become increasingly difficult to maintain for the family even the appearance of respectability. On more than one occasion Beethoven, in returning ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... notwithstanding all that could be said for it, there was something in her heart which told her it was wrong, and she admitted all I said. Since my last argument on this subject, it has appeared to me in another light. I remarked that a Carolina mistress was literally a slave-driver, and that I thought it degrading to the female character. The mistress is as great a slave to her servants, in some respects, as they are to her. One thing which annoys me very much is the constant orders that are given. Really, when I go into mother's room to read to her, I am continually interrupted by a variety of orders which ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... the welfare of the state. Then it was subverted, as Napoleon rode into absolute dominion over the bridge which the Revolution had built. And the Roman constitution was remarkable, not only because it prevented a degrading subjection of the masses, even while it refused them the rights of government, but because it maintained a balance among the governing classes themselves, and restricted the usurpations of powerful families, as well as military heroes. For nearly five ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... is this delight of self-interest and cupidity, wallowing in the slough of the 2nd of December! Faith! let us live, let us go into business, let us speculate in zinc and railway shares, let us make money; it is degrading but it is an excellent thing; a scruple less, a louis more; let us sell our whole soul at that rate. One runs to and fro, one rushes about, one cools his heels in anterooms, one drinks deep of every kind of shame, and if one cannot get a concession of railways in France or of lands in Africa, ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... sin? Could anyone tell, with the uneven standard set up by morality and religion? The world smiled upon a loveless marriage. What more degrading? It frowned upon a love perfect in all but the sanction of the Church, if the two had the courage to proclaim their love. It discreetly looked another way when the harlot of "Society" tripped by with her husband on one hand and her lover on the other. A man enriched himself at the ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... horse-power,—an animal tread-mill in fact. Whether the horses working this were here on good behaviour, or not, I could not rightly ascertain, but certainly they were scampish-looking steeds, their physiognomical expression was low and dogged, such as one might expect from the degrading nature ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... an active and willing young man. The foreign girl fills in her time bricklaying and grooming down the horses. It is a young and charming lady who serves you when you enter the tobacconist's. She doesn't understand tobacco, is unsympathetic; with Mr. Frederic Harrison, regards smoking as a degrading and unclean habit; cannot see, herself, any difference between shag and Mayblossom, seeing that they are both the same price; thinks you fussy. The corset shop is run by a most presentable young man in a Vandyck beard. The wife runs the restaurant; the man does the cooking, and yet the woman ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... of their nature will be coloring all their activities. It will beautify their arts, and erotically confuse their religions. It will lend a little interest to even their dull social functions. It will keep alive .degrading social evils in all their great towns. Through these latter evils, too, their politics will be corrupted; especially their best and most democratic attempts at self-government. Self-government works best among those who have ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... me to stand with confidence in his Royal presence on the happy day of his recovery;—and, on the contrary, that those who, under color of respect and attachment to his Royal person, have contrived this project for enfeebling and degrading the executive authority of the realm, will be considered by him as having risked the happiness of his people and the security of the throne itself, by establishing a fatal precedent which may hereafter ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... mine with the Noo Zeeling savages, after cutting away from his ship; but our old skipper said he ought to be ashamed of hisself for going and living that way, and them beginning to tattoo him in a pattern. He said he was a-degrading of hisself, and fetched him aboard, saying as if he wanted tattooing some of his messmates should mark his back with a rope's end. No, sir, we thinks a deal o' that monkey—our crew does—and we don't want to see ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... convinced, whether rightly or wrongly, that he knows all about his own ideas that needs to be known. Byron never did thus know himself, either morally or intellectually. The higher part of him was consciously dragged down by the degrading reminiscence of the brutishness of his youth and its connections and associations; they hung like miasma over his spirit. He could not rise to that sublimest height of moral fervour, when a man intrepidly chases from his memory past evil done, suppresses the recollection of old corruptions, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... one of those numerous violations of the marriage vow which she feels certain he has committed. It is a cruel resort, but the law which permits a man to outrage a woman in almost every other way frowns upon that one, and she is driven to it as the sole method of release from an intolerable and degrading bondage. In such cases as this might perhaps be found some justification for the existence of private detectives; but they themselves do not appear to know that they stand in need of extenuation, and so neglect the opportunity thus presented to vindicate their necessity ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... said the Marquis, "you may be confident; I myself felt the delicacy of the matter too much to place a gentleman nearly connected with my house in a degrading or dubious situation with these Ashtons. But I pointed out all the advantages of their marrying their daughter into a house so honourable, and so nearly related with the first of Scotland; I explained ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... after sin and to hide one's corruption from the sight of men. But that time was over. Now it was God's turn: and He was not to be hoodwinked or deceived. Every sin would then come forth from its lurking place, the most rebellious against the divine will and the most degrading to our poor corrupt nature, the tiniest imperfection and the most heinous atrocity. What did it avail then to have been a great emperor, a great general, a marvellous inventor, the most learned of the learned? ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... notable projects in hand. If my son had delayed four-and-twenty hours longer in removing the Duc du Maine from the King it would have been decided to declare His Majesty of full age; but my son frustrated this by dismissing the Duke, and degrading him at the same time. The Chief President is said to have been so frightened that he remained motionless, as if he had been petrified by a gaze at the head of Medusa. That celebrated personage of antiquity could not have been more a fury than Madame du Maine; she threatened dreadfully, and did ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... and minds of mankind with this notion of a God ruling over the world. They have also invented for the people the notion of another world, in which their God is to punish with eternal torture (not a Bible term) those who have refused to obey their degrading laws here on earth. This God is nothing but the personification of absolute tyranny, and has been invented with a view of either frightening or alluring nine-tenths of the human race into submission to the remaining tenth. If there were really a God, surely he would use that lightning which he holds ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... us'd only upon slight Subjects, where no real Abilities or Merit are questioned, in order to avoid degrading the Person you attack, or rendering him contemptible; Whereas Ridicule observes no such Decency, but endeavours really to degrade the Person attack'd, and to render ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... nothing to be gained in reviewing that unhappy affair," continued the other. "Your mother's family are headlong, impulsive, fiery, unstable, emotional. There was a last shameful and degrading scene. I offered her a separation; but she was unwisely persuaded to ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... the countess, "most degrading experience of all, Hatszegi no longer attempts to conceal from his wife his outrageous liaisons with pretty peasant women. The thing has long been a byeword, though his wife knew nothing of it—but ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... which he more than once paid dearly, for they were remembered against him when be had forgotten them. Meanwhile Clodius—a sort of milder Catiline, not without many popular qualities—had got himself elected tribune; degrading himself formally from his own order of nobles for that purpose, since the tribune must be a man of the commons. The powers of the office were formidable for all purposes of obstruction and attack; Clodius had taken pains to ingratiate himself with all classes; and the consuls of the year were ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... of his own honesty when he cannot let his words stand for themselves. It betokens a blasphemous disrespect for God Himself, represented by that name which is made a convenient tool to further every vulgar end. It is therefore criminal and degrading, and the guilt thereby incurred cannot be palliated by the plea of habit. A sin is none the less a sin because it is one of a great many. Vice is criminal. The victim of a vice can be considered less guilty only on condition of seriously combating that vice. Failing ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... from light weight beneath; and it is in the unity derived from this higher pervading, yet not too assertive "invisible reality," that Stevenson most often fails, and is, in his own words, "execrable"; the ending shaming, if not degrading, the beginning—"and without the true sense of pleasurableness; and therefore really imperfect in essence." Ah, it is to be feared that Stevenson, viewing it in retrospect, was a far truer critic of his own work, than many or most of his all too effusive and admiring critics—from Lord Rosebery ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... dishonesty, cast a deep shade over that bright prospect which the Revolution in America and the establishment of our free governments had opened to the votaries of liberty throughout the globe. I fear, and there is no opinion more degrading to the dignity of man, that those have truth on their side who say that man is incapable ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... here? The original calamity was either caused by God or arose without leave of God, in either case degrading God to man. It is the old dilemma whose horns are the irreconcilable attributes of goodness and omniscience in the supposed Creator of sin and suffering. If the one quality be predicable, the other cannot be predicable of the same subject. ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... enthusiasm so often excited by tragic excellence. The thing to be dreaded with the great bulk of the spectators—that is, by far the largest portion of mankind—is not their avowed infidelity and their open wickedness; it is the sway of the degrading or selfish passions which is chiefly dangerous. The thing to be feared is, not that they will say there is no God, but that they will live altogether without God in the world. How important, then, that genius should be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... people disappointed Robert. In the work of moving in he had to do with people who work at day's work, and the fault was his more than theirs. He forgot that they did not consider their work degrading. They resented his bossing. The drayman ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... say that the foregoing considerations are all strictly applicable to SUCH AS FURNISH THE MATERIALS for the distiller. Were these withheld, his degrading occupation would of course cease. By suffering, then, the fruits of your industry to pass into his hands, you perpetuate his work of death. You share all his guilt, and shame, and curse. And remember, too, that the bushel of grain, the barrel of cider, the ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... could say in what a proper sitting consisted, though all depended on that; for they went to and fro on the horse without stirrups. Moreover, the instruction seemed contrived only for cheating and degrading the scholars. If one forgot to hook or loosen the curb-chain, or let his switch fall down, or even his hat,—every delay, every misfortune, had to be atoned for by money; and one was laughed at into the bargain. This put me in the worst of humors, particularly as I found the place of exercise ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Millet's paintings. From the very first those who care only for the subject of a picture have condemned it, while the critics have praised its artistic qualities. Many have thought that Millet made the subject as unpleasant as possible in order to show the degrading effects of work. The same theory was suggested when the Sower and the Gleaners appeared. The painter himself was much troubled by these misunderstandings. "I have never dreamed of being a pleader in any cause," he said. He simply painted life as he saw it, and had no thought of ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... for I believe it is not for sale,) is made up of extracts from Blackwood; and I thought that a contest with your grog-drinking, cock-fighting, cudgel-playing Professor of Moral Philosophy would be too degrading. I could have demolished every paragraph of the defence. Croker defended his thuetoi philoi by quoting a passage of Euripides which, as every scholar knows, is corrupt; which is nonsense and false metre if read as ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... behalf of the outcasts of their sex readily exposed the English women to misrepresentation and degrading remarks from the quarter of narrow-minded men, the women did not allow themselves to be held back from energetically opposing the introduction of the law that was an insult to their sex. In newspaper articles and pamphlets the "pros" and "cons" were ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... This settles the question of the right of inheritance, which Socialism will have no need to abolish formally."[322] "Socialism condemns as reactionary and immoral all that tends to the debasement of humanity. It condemns our industrial and commercial system as a degrading system—degrading both to the few who amass wealth and to the many who by their labour enable the few to lay up riches. It is degrading to those who rob and to those who are robbed; to those who cheat and to those who are cheated; to those who swim and ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... muck of yellow journalism, with its hideous colored supplements and spine-thrilling tales. So much for the reader. But the publisher himself—well, he battens materially, of course, upon the tired victims of our degrading social system. He sees but the sordid revenue in dollars and cents. Beyond that ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... think I see him now, and I am certain that I shall never forget the expression of his face. It was perfectly fearful; and afterwards, when I learned who and what he was, I was not surprised that he should feel so acutely the painfully degrading office which he ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... him as plainly as can be: he wants me to find out gold, or tin and precious stones, and other things for his benefit. It is degrading to ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... illness, every woman is sterile. Conception may be avoided by refraining from coition except for this particular number of days, and there will be no evasion of natural intercourse, no resort to disgusting practices, and nothing degrading. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... forward; he made a speech of some length, and one that was very impressive. Nothing could be more clear, more just, more true, than the picture he drew of the manifold evils of intemperance; a vice so deceitful in its first appearance, so treacherous in its growth; so degrading, so brutalizing in its enjoyments; so blasting and ruinous in its effects—ruinous to body and mind, heart and soul—blasting all hopes for this life and for the next, so long as it remains unconquered. ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... difference? From everything in the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen women off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and coarse men with no respect for a girl's honour, degrading the sex and being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. They would be just good friends like a big brother and sister without all that other in spite of the conventions of Society with a big ess. Perhaps it was an old flame he ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the disgrace was intolerable. At that moment he hated Dr Rowlands, he hated Mr Gordon, he hated his school-fellows, he hated everybody. He had been flogged; the thought haunted him; he, Eric Williams, had been forced to receive this most degrading corporal punishment. He pushed fiercely through the knot of boys, and strode as quickly as he could along the ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... do none of these things, though I have three boys of my own. That is not out of disrespect to you, but because I think it would be unbeseeming to me. Such displays, as though death were something altogether terrifying, are to me astonishing and degrading to our city in the sight of strangers, for persons reputed to excel in anything, as in some respects I am held to ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... against this degrading habit with determined resolution. Let neither the example, nor the solicitations, nor the taunting jests of your companions, induce you to demean yourself so far, as to be guilty of a vice so utterly unworthy ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... homage to fictitious rank of every kind. A vulgar millionaire of the Fifth Avenue, and a foreign adventurer with a meaningless title, are equally objects of their misplaced deference. Losing sight of their own manhood and self-respect, they descend to the most degrading sycophancy. We have little hope of benefiting them. They are "joined to their idols; let ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... race-survival were forced on and hastened by the cruelties against which Las Casas protested in vain, but the triumphal march of human progress has followed on. Cannibalism, idolatry, slavery, and other barbarisms have disappeared from the American continents; the Christian religion has replaced degrading superstitions, agriculture and commerce flourish, while literature and the arts adorn life in the several republics, whose meanest citizen enjoys a security of life and property unknown to the proudest of ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... heart. The guilty, I believe, in every case, less patiently bear the detecting truth, than the innocent do the degrading falshood. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... which had so ruthlessly tormented Nedopyuskin the father, took to the son too; she had a taste for them, one must suppose. But she treated Tihon on a different plan: she did not torture him; she played with him. She did not once drive him to desperation, she did not set him to suffer the degrading agonies of hunger, but she led him a dance through the whole of Russia from one end to the other, from one degrading and ludicrous position to another; at one time Fate made him 'majordomo' to a snappish, choleric Lady Bountiful, at another a ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... have, the most remote suspicion of this Barratt's connection with the shop which he had not accidentally entered; and the sudden appearance of this wretch it was, at the very moment of finding herself charged with so vile and degrading an offence, that contributed most of all to rob her of her natural firmness, by suddenly revealing to her terrified heart the depth of the conspiracy which thus yawned like a gulf below her. And not only had this sudden horror, upon discovering a guilty design ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... him they compelled to carry the cross of Jesus. No Roman or Jew would have voluntarily incurred the ignominy of bearing such a gruesome burden; for every detail connected with the carrying out of a sentence of crucifixion was regarded as degrading. The man so forced to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, bearing the cross upon which the Savior of the world was to consummate His glorious mission, was Simon, a native of Cyrene. From Mark's statement that ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... many now who would introduce a system of schooling without correction; and who maintain that the present system is degrading." ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... what forces he may be brought in contact beyond the veil? Initiation which leads to making use of spiritual forces, whether good or evil, is therefore capable of raising man to greater heights or of degrading him to lower depths than he could ever have reached by remaining on the purely physical plane. And when men thus unite themselves in associations, a collective force is generated which may exercise immense influence over the world around. Hence ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... barbarizing of taste in the younger minds by the dark madness of the late war, the unabashed cultivation of selfishness in all classes, the plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom, "a degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation" (to quote Wordsworth again), or from any other cause, we seem threatened with a new ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... her lord in anger, looking at him, 'Knowing everything, O monarch, how canst thou, like an inferior person, thus say that thou knowest it not? Thy heart is a witness to the truth or falsehood of this matter. Therefore, speak truly without degrading thyself. He who being one thing representeth himself as another thing to others, is like a thief and a robber of his own self. Of what sin is he not capable? Thou thinkest that thou alone hast knowledge of thy deed. But knowest thou not that the Ancient, Omniscient one (Narayana) liveth ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... that the Rhamdas, superintellectual as they are, can consent to such a contest? Is it not degrading, to their way of ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... he had had no such intention the night before; an accumulated mail and many matters demanding decisions were awaiting him; and his sudden departure seemed an act directed personally against her, in the nature of a retaliation, since she had offended and repulsed him. Through Lise's degrading act she had arrived at the conclusion that all adventure and consequent suffering had to do with Man—a conviction peculiarly maddening to such temperaments as Janet's. Therefore she interpreted her suffering in terms of Ditmar, she had ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Peter can contrive a way of keeping our heads above water without having recourse to these detestable methods, I shall be only too relieved. I loathe having to traffic with these dirty swindlers; it's too insufferably wearying and degrading.... By the way, Peter, ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... have been degrading for Sir Wulfric de Talbot,' said Jane dreamily, 'if he could have known that half the ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... was angry at Thrale, for sitting at General Oglethorpe's without speaking. He censured a man for degrading himself to a non-entity. I observed, that Goldsmith was on the other extreme; for he spoke at all ventures. JOHNSON. 'Yes, sir; Goldsmith, rather than not speak, will talk of what he knows himself to be ignorant, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... he had found them useful instruments; but he was not disposed to make them his own masters, or the masters of India. His mind was large; his knowledge of the native character most accurate. He saw that the system pursued by the Supreme Court was degrading to the Government and ruinous to the people; and he resolved to oppose it manfully. The consequence was, that the friendship, if that be the proper word for such a connection, which had existed between him and Impey, was for a time completely dissolved. The Government placed itself firmly ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... side, or elsewhere—that upon which his life actually depends, is too precious to be risked beyond his care. Why should he be blamed then for the apparent "filth" which surrounds it? Whether is it his fault, or that of the system which has driven him to this degrading necessity? ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... he richly deserved. And who should say that all was not upon the whole for the best as it had pleased heaven to cause it to fall out? The Marchese Lamberto was saved, despite his own folly, from a disgraceful and degrading marriage; and Ludovico was saved from ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... was purchased by bribery, for Ivan condescended to buy the interference of a Tartar princess. So slavish and degrading was his outward seeming that his wife, a noble and spirited lady, the daughter of the Emperor of Byzantium, could with difficulty prevail upon him to forego the humiliating usages which had hitherto attended the reception of the Mongol ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... will be doomed to the undying contempt of those who cultivate the mysterious and the sublime—Mr. Blotton, we say, with the doubt and cavilling peculiar to vulgar minds, presumed to state a view of the case, as degrading as ridiculous. Mr. Blotton, with a mean desire to tarnish the lustre of the immortal name of Pickwick, actually undertook a journey to Cobham in person, and on his return, sarcastically observed in an oration at the club, that he had seen the man from whom the stone was purchased; that the man ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... felt in the presence of Napoleon would not be credited in England. His courtiers literally trembled before him. 'In what sort of a humour is the Emperor to-day?' was a frequent question in Paris.... How I have blushed for the adulation, the degrading, I may almost say the blasphemous flattery that has been offered before the throne of Napoleon by men of the highest rank. But perhaps I ought to make some allowance for those who had witnessed the horrors of the Revolution. Can, however, such men be expected to recover the high tone of feeling ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... self-will and independence, whether for good or evil, so their reverence for their abbots was a voluntary loyalty to one who they fancied had a right to rule them, because he was wiser and better than they; a feeling which some have found not degrading, but ennobling; and the parent, not of servility, but of true freedom. And as for the obsolete virtue of humility, that still remains true which a voice said to Antony, when he saw the snares which were spread over the whole earth, and asked, sighing, "Who can pass safely over these?" ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... continuing to farm, Pestalozzi now tried to express his faith in education in printed form. His Leonard and Gertrude (1781) was a wonderfully beautiful story of Swiss peasant life, and of the genius and sympathy and love of a woman amid degrading surroundings. From a wretched place the village of Bonnal, under Pestalozzi's pen, was transformed by the power of education. [7] The book was a great success from the first, and for it Pestalozzi was ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Theresa thirty years before; it vanished, along with most of the legal distinctions of class, wherever the victories of France carried a new political order; even the misused peasantry of Poland had been freed from their degrading yoke within the borders of the newly-founded Duchy of Warsaw. If Prussia was not to renounce its partnership in European progress and range itself with its barbarous eastern neighbour, that order which fettered the peasant to the soil, and limited every Prussian to the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Laetitia had formerly chafed at it, rejecting it utterly, save when now and then in a season of bitterness she handed here and there a volatile young lady (none but the young) to be stamped with the degrading brand. Vernon might be as philosophical as he pleased. To her the gaiety of these two, Colonel De Craye and Clara Middleton, was distressingly musical: they harmonized painfully. The representative of her sex was hurt ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that the greatest number possible of his brothers should participate in the succor offered. He addresses himself, in the first place, to honest, industrious workmen, with families, whom the want of work often reduces to the most cruel extremities. It is not a degrading alms which he gives to his brothers but a gratuitous loan which he offers. May this loan, as he hopes, prevent them often from resorting to those cruel pledges which they are forced to make (while awaiting the return of work), for the purpose of sustaining a family of ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... turn them from their evil intentions. Of the principal officers of the ship the master alone had hitherto escaped destruction. He was no coward. He had seen with horror the murder of his messmates and captain, but life was sweet, and when offered to him, even on terms degrading, undoubtedly—that he would navigate the ship into an enemy's port—he accepted them. The few warrant and petty officers who had escaped being killed, at once declared their intention of acting as ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... you about the fun,' Borrodaile objected. 'That's why I'm glad they've had their lesson. I should say there was almost nothing more degrading than this public spectacle of——' Borrodaile lifted his high shoulders higher still, with an effect of intense discomfort. 'It never but once came my way that I remember, but I'm free to own,' he said, 'there's nothing that ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... as to their parents; that the parents have a right to claim this relationship and its privileges for their children until such children are excluded from the Church by the lawful acts of its executive authorities. Otherwise, the youth baptized by our ministry are in the most pitiful and degrading religious position of the youth of any Church that recognizes the doctrine of infant baptism; and it appears to me that we ought rather not to baptize infants at all, or recommend their parents to take them to other churches for baptism, than thus to treat the feelings of such ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... but will there be no one to remind you that in your old age you were not ashamed to violate the most sacred laws from a miserable desire of a little more life? Perhaps not, if you keep them in a good temper; but if they are out of temper you will hear many degrading things; you will live, but how?—as the flatterer of all men, and the servant of all men; and doing what?—eating and drinking in Thessaly, having gone abroad in order that you may get a dinner. And where will be your fine sentiments ...
— Crito • Plato
... of course, Caroline," replied the other; "but I trust, my poor girl, that if you see him, you will act both wisely and firmly. Let him not move you to yield any farther than you have done; left him not move you, my sweet Caroline, to remain in a degrading and painful state of doubt. Act firmly, and as you proposed but yesterday, in order, at least, if you do no more, not to be, as it were, an accomplice in his ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... feeling herself awkward in the discharge of the extraordinary, and, as she might have thought it, degrading office of ushering a barbarian chief to the banquet, felt, on the contrary, flattered, at having bent to her purpose a heart so obstinate as that of Count Robert, and elated, perhaps, with a certain degree of satisfied pride while ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... and his resolutions melted away before this discovery. There was nothing to be done but to save the poor girl from this miserable and degrading attachment, and its ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... Monsieur Massot," said he. "How disgusting all that parliamentary cooking is! You ought to point it out in an article, and show people how the country is gradually being weakened and rotted to the marrow by all such useless and degrading discussions. Why, a great battle resulting in the loss of 50,000 men would exhaust us less than ten years of this abominable parliamentary system. You must call on me some morning. I will show you a scheme of military ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... delight,' as the French call them, pure and simple. She told me point blank that she preferred her present mode of life to respectability, and that she considered that taking even my money or Vane's, when she had no real claim upon us, was more degrading and would hurt her self-respect a great deal more than doing what she is doing. In other respects she's as good a girl as ever walked, and as honest as the daylight, but I'm afraid there is no hope of ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... her ill-fated and ill-regulated love, were matter of admiration and pity; especially when, from the detail of the events of the nineteenth of October, it was apparent that she preferred suffering and death to any in her eyes degrading application for the pity and assistance of her lover. Her subsequent conduct did not diminish this interest. At first, relieved from famine and the grave, watched over by Raymond with the tenderest assiduity, with that feeling of repose ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... grossly mistaken the ideas of Rousseau. Do you discover a symptom of it? Far otherwise. You see only confidence and love. That jealousy for which you are an advocate, he condemns as appertaining to brutes and sensualists. Discard, I beseech you, ideas so degrading to true love. I am mortified with the reflection that they ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... study door, and still more from the faces of his father and uncle, he guessed that they must have been talking of his mother. And to avoid condemning the father with whom he lived and on whom he was dependent, and, above all, to avoid giving way to sentimentality, which he considered so degrading, Seryozha tried not to look at his uncle who had come to disturb his peace of mind, and not to think of ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... that she heard him aright. She felt the blood rush to her cheeks in testimony to the audacity of the insult. Coming from this man such an avowal inspired her with rage and disgust. He, the society costermonger, sighing at her feet! Bah! It seemed too degrading to be true. It could not be true. And yet there he was and a response was necessary. A politic response, too, or all was lost. If she rejected him he would have her arrested. Her ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... asleep, when a party of Moors entered the hut, and pulled away the cloak. He made signs that he was sick, and wished to sleep, but his distress afforded sport to these savages. "This studied and degrading insolence," says Mr. Park, "to which I was constantly exposed, was one of the bitterest ingredients in the cup of captivity, and often made life itself a burthen to me. In these distressing moments I have frequently envied ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... is the doctrine of no indemnity, and if sanctioned would be a public acknowledgment that our country was wrong and that the war declared by Congress with extraordinary unanimity was unjust and should be abandoned—an admission unfounded in fact and degrading to the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... heart, whose influence had strengthened and comforted her, in the chapel of the Refuge. One of the finest passages in his sermon had been especially devoted by Julian Gray to warning the congregation whom he addressed against the degrading influences of falsehood and deceit. The terms in which he had appealed to the miserable women round him—terms of sympathy and encouragement never addressed to them before—came back to Mercy Merrick as if she had heard them an hour since. ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... Not until he was returning—not, indeed, until he entered the house did the whiff of its degrading, heated odours bring home to him the tragedy which it held, and he grasped the banister on the stairs. The thought that shook him now was of the cumulative misery of the city, of the world, of which this history on which he had stumbled was but one insignificant ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... what to answer. He felt as if a judgment were coming on him, and a shameful degrading from his knightly rank. Suddenly Folko drew him away from the shield, and taking him towards the rattling window, he asked: ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... had yet united the guilty Caroline to Vargrave was broken,—a woman forgives sin in her lover, but never meanness. The degrading, the abject position in which she had seen one whom she had served as a slave (though, as yet, all his worst villanies were unknown to her), filled her with shame, horror, and disgust. She rose abruptly, and quitted the room. They did ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... deceived: but he was unwilling to despise the characters of those men whose talents deserved his esteem: he desired to escape the double reproach of imprudence and inconstancy; and he was apprehensive of degrading, in the eyes of the profane, the honor of letters and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... consider some of the appendages to the theory, such as the assertion of the essential unity of the human and the brute intellect, the denial of the immaterial nature of mind, and the advocacy of the system of phrenology. These absurd and degrading doctrines are naturally connected with the atheistic hypothesis we have been considering. They are its legitimate children. But they have already been refuted so often and so conclusively, that any revival of them at the present day is hardly deserving of notice. If we should stop here, then, it ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... the thought that there is not a flower, not a colour, not a breath of air, which has not absorbed the minds and stirred the hearts of other men till it has received a name sacred among all peoples. Since I have learnt that it is allowed to man, without degrading his reason, to people the universe and interpret it by his dreams, I live wholly in the contemplation of the universe; and when the sight of the misery and crime in the world bruises my heart and shakes ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... mercy, nor compunction towards her, such as arose in many men's bosoms after a little time, and have been rife ever since both in writers and readers. The Detection is without ruth, and assumes the most criminal and degrading motives throughout. Its intention clearly is to convince Scotland, England, and the world of Mary's utter depravity, and the impossibility of any excuse for her or argument in her favour. The strong and ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... the names of Magistrates and Justices of the Peace. Such native thieves in some instances ceasing to be hirelings in the criminal business, trade on their own, but it is not clear what purpose it is intended to serve by subjecting native pedestrians to the degrading requirement of carrying passes when they are not in charge ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... to Reynolds all days were sacred—sacred to work; that is, to the expression of his best. Why should you cease to express your holiest and highest on Sunday? Ah, I know why you don't work on Sunday! It is because you think that work is degrading, and because your sale and barter is founded on fraud, and your goods are shoddy. Your week-day dealings lie like a pall upon your conscience, and you need a day in which to throw off the weariness of that slavery under which you live. You are not free yourself, and you insist ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... natural; but all who looked beneath the surface well knew that Prussia was overthrown before the first shot was fired. She was the victim of a deadening barrack routine, of official apathy or corruption, and of a degrading policy which dulled ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... lose. As we have seen, force ruled the world, and the common people had no voice in their government. The workers were looked down upon by the members of the fighting class, who never did a stroke of work themselves and considered honest toil as degrading. In fact, as one writer has said, the only respectable trade in Europe in those days was what we ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... he may merit by his bad conduct; and as for the present Governor of Tennessee, his wholesale abuse of the American party, towards whose members, without a single exception, he has indulged in language which ought not to be tolerated within the precincts of Billingsgate, no epithet is too low, too degrading, or disgraceful, ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... first place, then, horse-racing, in itself, is neither degrading nor anything else that is bad; a race is a beautiful and exhilarating spectacle, and quiet men, who never bet, are taken out of themselves in a delightful fashion when the exquisite thoroughbreds thunder past. No sensible man supposes for a moment that owners and trainers ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... freedom of their inter course, was frankly avowed to Marmaduke, while the other continued profoundly hid in the bosom of his friend, The last was nothing more than pride. To the descend ant of a line of soldiers, commerce, even in that indirect manner, seemed a degrading pursuit; but an insuperable obstacle to the disclosure existed in the prejudices ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Ministers of those Courts had demanded their passports to retire from the Court of St. James. Napoleon had done more than that. The disturber of mankind had subverted the government of Portugal, but that magnanimous Prince, Don Pedro, had emigrated with his Court to the Brazils, rather than submit to the degrading chains of such a master. His Majesty, the King of Great Britain, had offered the Americans reparation, immediately and spontaneously, for the unauthorised attack upon the Chesapeake, but the American government taking advantage of the state of affairs in Europe, were endeavoring ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... into a popular error concerning the division of labour in savagery, if we consider that all women's work is regarded as degrading to men and all men's work is tabooed to women. The duties of war and the chase are the chief occupation of men, yet in all parts of the world women have fought at need, and sometimes habitually, both to ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... the best mode of accomplishing the end, nor could it in any case be thoroughly efficient. The restraint and punishment of crime belong to society as a whole, in its sovereign capacity. To the same society belongs the duty of seeing that its members do not fall into degrading ignorance and vice. God, in ordaining human society, had something higher in view than merely providing for the punishment of crime. Our Heavenly Father would have his children raised to the full enjoyment of their ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... the ores at the pit's mouth, and dress and sort them. The hard nature of the employment may not be actually injurious to health, yet it quite unsexes them. Their whole demeanor becomes as coarse and rude as their degrading occupation. As they labor at men's work, so they wear men's clothing. A stranger would feel sure that they were men, and it would be by their conversation alone that he could identify them as women. He would think it strange to hear persons dressed like men conversing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... especially the male portion, seem to have a natural distaste for labor. They would be aristocratic if they could. In days of slavery they had their household servants, and tried to imitate the more wealthy slave-owners by living in idleness, and they still look upon labor as degrading. ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 01, January, 1884 • Various
... might have reverted to its proper course, while he was in the flower of age, with eyesight still available, and a spirit exalted by the triumph of the good cause. His fame would have been saved from the degrading incidents of the contention with Salmasius and Morus, and from being tarnished by the obloquy of the faction which he fought, and which conquered him. No man can with impunity insult and trample upon his fellow-man, even in the best of causes. ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... the glorification of his own name, settling everything by sacerdotal authority, and issuing every day, concerning ceremonies, faith, and all else, new decrees which he sought to make as sacred and authoritative as the laws of Moses. (14) Religion thus sank into a degrading superstition, while the true meaning and interpretation of the laws became corrupted. (15) Furthermore, while the high priests were paving their way to the secular rule just after the restoration, they attempted to gain popular favour by assenting to ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza
... age-period of 18 to 30 would fall that pseudo-educational monstrosity, the undergraduate university, and the degrading popular activities of 'beginning a business' or 'picking up a trade.' Much money must be spent here. Perhaps few fields of activity have been conventionalized as much as university education. Here, just where a superficial theorist would expect to find enthusiasm, emancipated ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... was engaged in the painful process of trying to bring the apparently drowned girl to life. More than once Blanche felt tempted to implore him to leave off those terribly arduous efforts of his. It seemed to her so—so horrible, almost degrading, that Bubbles' delicate little body should be ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... recesses and writes its fearful sentence on the palace wall of recoiling tyrants. As an englishman, my expiring sigh should be breathed for its preservation; but as an admirer of social repose and national liberality, I regret to see its noble energies engaged in the degrading service of fretful spleen, and ungenerous animadversion. When the horizon is no longer blackened with the smoke of the battle, it is unworthy of two mighty empires to carry on an ignoble war of words. If ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... character well: I knew how far his affections and his sympathies might prevail over his prejudices—even over his principles—in some peculiar cases; and this very knowledge convinced me that the consequences of a degrading marriage contracted by his son (degrading in regard to rank), would be terrible: fatal to one, perhaps to both. Every other irregularity—every other offence even—he might sooner or later forgive. This irregularity, ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... which corrupts soul and body alike. But might not the girls be somehow put into the way of earning a decent livelihood? Ida knew so well the effect upon them of the occupations to which they mostly turned, occupations degrading to womanhood, blighting every hope. Even to give them the means of remaining at home would not greatly help them; there they still breathed a vile atmosphere. To remove them altogether was the only efficient way, and how could ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... prospect that is now exhibited in Europe, those troubles which are the natural offspring of their forms of government originating, indeed, in the spirit of liberty, but gradually degenerating in tyrannies, equally degrading to the rulers and the ruled, I rejoice in finding an asylum from persecution in a country in which these abuses have come to a natural termination, and have produced another system of liberty founded on such wise principles, as, I trust, ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... he said, in accents that vainly struggled for calm, "if thou hast admitted to thy heart one unworthy thought towards a Moorish infidel, dig deep and root it out, even with the knife, and to the death—so wilt thou save this hand from that degrading task." ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... raised his face and given one look at my swollen, tearful eyes, he deliberately crossed the name out again. And, indeed, throughout that period he so consistently refused to see that the boys were showing detestation of my degrading presence, and was so inexpressibly gentle in his manner towards me, that now I always think of this weak-eyed German master as a ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... Letheon is administered to the judgment by continual progression in some improper path, till that which is to all others palpably and painfully degrading becomes pleasant and eminently proper in him who labours under the mental oblivion. Such a course Mr. Freeman has trod, for while he admits that gambling is pernicious, he clamours for the natural right which all men possess, to do it so ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... earnestness the band of abstainers, as he sat in all boyish sincerity at Mr Bernard Oliphant's table, eager to make the trial and bear the cross, were fresh upon his memory now. And all the bitter past, with its shameful, degrading, sinful records, gathered its thick shadows round his soul. What should he do? He sank upon his knees and prayed—prayed to be forgiven, prayed that he might do better—and then he rose, and was in part comforted. And now, what should he do with ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... right hand of brotherhood to nature worshippers, demon worshippers, animal worshippers, tree worshippers, fetich worshippers. It does not scruple to permit the most grotesque forms of idolatry and the most degrading varieties of superstition, and it is to this latter fact that yet another remarkable peculiarity of Hinduism is mainly due—namely, that in no other System of the world is the chasm more vast which separates the religion ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... Brahmans only, yet by a distinction which it is difficult for Europeans to grasp, the priests of temples are not necessarily and, in many places, not usually Brahmans. The reason perhaps is that the easy and superstitious worship offered in temples is considered trivial and almost degrading in comparison with the elaborate ceremonial and subtle speculation which ought to occupy a ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... comes, nor what it costs. If, at least, you had to justify your expenses, the excuse of some great passion, or of some object, were it absurd, ardently pursued! But I defy you to confess upon what degrading pleasures you lavish our humble economies. I defy you to tell us what you mean to do with the sum that you demand to-night,—that sum for which you would have our mother stoop to beg the assistance of a shop-keeper, to whom we ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... to say. I would wish to show you something at least of the success with which religion among the Jews has been turned to domestic uses. No detail of the home life is left unhallowed. Even the poorest Jewish home is saved by its ceremonies from the degrading indifference to decency and tenderness, which is the terrible feature of the industrial homes of poverty. The sanctity of the home is an affectionate tradition linking the Jews through the ages with a golden chain. The purity of home life has fought and triumphed over ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... concerned with his vileness," Mark answered. "I hate myself sometimes and wish I was a grocer or a linen draper or even a soldier or sailor. It's degrading to let your life's work depend on the wickedness of your fellow creatures, Ganns. I hope a time is coming when our craft will be as obsolete ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... of education or through insufficient mental capacity'.[77] Along the lines of this philosophy no permanent industrial advance is possible. It may improve the product for a time, but only at the cost of degrading the producer. If we are to make happiness our test, and to stand by our definition of happiness as involving free activity, such a system, destructive as it is of any real or intense relationship between the workman ...
— Progress and History • Various
... could understand how useless it is, dearest, or how it hurts me, this talk of hell. For people to be good for fear of hell is like saying 'Honesty is the best policy;' it is degrading. And it seems selfish to me, somehow, to think so much about one's own salvation,—it is small, John. The scheme of salvation that the elders talk so much about really resolves itself into a fear of hell and hope of heaven, all ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... though Burns took advantage of her weakness, it was in the ugliest and most cynical spirit, and with a heart absolutely indifferent judge of this by a letter written some twenty days after his return - a letter to my mind among the most degrading in the whole collection - a letter which seems to have been inspired by a boastful, libertine bagman. "I am afraid," it goes, "I have almost ruined one source, the principal one, indeed, of my former happiness - the eternal propensity ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... charge of him! Go, rate him well—for degrading you, and me and his other friends with ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... learned to know life in the great cities. What a life he had found it. He shuddered as it all came back to him now. The many times when inspired by the memory of his mother, he had tried to break away from the evil, degrading things that were in and about him, and the many times he had been dragged back by the training and memory of his father; the gambling, the fighting, the drinking, the periods of hard work, the struggle to master ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... mischievous notion of it which would encourage us to draw immediate and crude deductions from Holy Scripture, subject only to the control and the colouring of our own minds, responsible for nothing further than our own consciousness of an honest intention. Whilst we claim a release from that degrading yoke which neither are we nor were our fathers able to bear, we deprecate for ourselves and for our fellow-believers that licentiousness which in doctrine and practice tempts a man to follow merely ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... to think, to misuse the Divine gift of artistic inspiration. The poet may devote his genius to animalism, like Byron, or to teach immoral license, like Swinburne; the painter may crowd his canvas with degrading ideas and vulgar representations, and the artificer may be ingenious in the production of forms of ugliness and degrading grotesqueness. Such desecration of great endowments is alike displeasing to God and ruinous to the man. Of such it may be said: ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... the mind was oft Stolen at the body's cost. I have gone dinnerless And supperless, the scoff of our poor street, For tattered vestments and lean, hungry looks, To pay the pedagogue.—Add what thou wilt Of injury. Say that, grown into man, I've known the pittance of the hospital, And, more degrading still, the patronage Of the Colonna. Of the tallest trees The roots delve deepest. Yes, I've trod thy halls, Scorned and derided midst their ribald crew, A licensed jester, save the cap and bells, I have borne this—and I have borne the death, The unavenged death, of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... greatest number possible of his brothers should participate in the succor offered. He addresses himself, in the first place, to honest, industrious workmen, with families, whom the want of work often reduces to the most cruel extremities. It is not a degrading alms which he gives to his brothers but a gratuitous loan which he offers. May this loan, as he hopes, prevent them often from resorting to those cruel pledges which they are forced to make (while awaiting the return of work), for the ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... exclaimed, is it not dangerous to tell them anything about it? Such a course is unnecessary. Teach them that any handling of the parts, any indecent language, any impure thought, is degrading and hurtful. See that the servants, nurses, and companions with whom they associate are not debased; and ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... increased, for he found the dominant vice was precisely that one most repugnant to his nature. If Lord Byron ever admitted, with La Rochefoucault, that hypocrisy is a homage vice renders to virtue, he did not the less consider this homage as degrading to him who offered it, insulting to those to whom it is addressed, and most corrupting in its effect upon ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... saying; but that is the result of disputing with shoemakers. Besides, it is degrading to compare women to wine! He is a coarse fellow who sets his wife on the same ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... except by the ruin of those who had offended him. With all this, the manners of Lord Lovat were courteous, and, for the times, polished; whilst beneath that superficial varnish lay the coarsest thoughts, the most degrading tastes. His address must have been consummate; and to that charm of manner may be ascribed the wonderful ascendancy which he acquired even over the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... magnificent art which the Vandals produced. To centuries, to revolutions which at least laid waste with impartiality and grandeur, are conjoined the host of scholastic architects, licensed and sworn, degrading all they touch with the discernment and selection of bad taste, substituting the tinsel of Louis XV. for Gothic lace-work, for the greater glory of the Parthenon. This is the donkey's kick at the dying lion. It is the old oak, decaying at the crown, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... or wives. No man who is engaged in the serious work of the world, in the effort to purify public opinion and direct it aright, but is helped or hindered by the women of his household. Few men can stand the depressing and degrading influence of the uninterested and placid amiability of women incapable of the true public spirit, incapable of a generous or noble aim—whose whole sphere of ideas is petty and personal. It is not only that such women do nothing themselves—they slowly asphyxiate their friends, ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... journeyed to Jerusalem to fulfil his office, for a week of six days and two Sabbaths. There were, Josephus tells us, somewhat more than 20,000 priests settled in Judaea at this time; and very many of them were like those whom Malachi denounced as degrading and depreciating the Temple services. The general character of the priesthood was deeply tainted by the corruption of the times, and as a class they were blind leaders of the blind. Not a few, however, were evidently deeply religious ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... deformed, we will seek everywhere, even in the darkness of a religion we have ceased to practise, for some God whose intention to question; but if the child be born poor—a calamity, as a rule, no less capable than the gravest infirmity of degrading a creature's destiny—we do not dream of interrogating the God who is wherever we are, since he is made of our own desires. Before we demand an ideal judge, we shall do well to purify our ideas, for whatever blemish ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Our Benevolent Fund is sufficient for the relief of those who apply in distress. We cannot build "almshouses," but "Atheist widows" are not neglected. On the whole, however, we are not so loud as the Christians in praise of "charity," Much of it is very degrading. If we had justice in society there would be ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... proved by Mr. Hastings's own evidence, had ruined the country. Nothing is more natural than that a man, sensible of his duty to himself and his subjects, should form a scheme to get rid of a band of robbers that were destroying his country and degrading and ruining his family. Thus you see a family compact naturally accounted for: the Nabob at the head of it, his mother joining her own son, and a natural brother joining in the general interests of the family. This is a possible case. But is this ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... is something degrading in this recollection, it is not unpleasant to compare it with those of the last war, when Edinburgh, besides regular forces and militia, furnished a volunteer brigade of cavalry, infantry, and artillery, to the amount of six ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... the morning, I will cudgel my brains without ceasing, I will chastise my laziness without mercy. I will toil, suffer, even to the extent of making myself ill; but I will put a stop, once for all, to this languishing and tiresome life, which is degrading me and causing sorrow to others. Courage! to work! To work with all my soul, and all my nerves! To work, which will restore to me sweet repose, pleasing games, cheerful meals! To work, which will give me back ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... somehow it hadn't come off. Instead of diminishing as he should have done, Horace had worked himself gradually up to her height, had caught flame from her flame, and now he was consuming her with her own fire. It was she who had taken, the view most degrading to the man she admired; she who would have dragged her poet down to earth and put him on a level with Rankin and Fulcher and such people. Horace would have her believe that his own outlook was the clearer and more heavenly; ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... blotch, big as the Royal seal, Branded beneath the beard of every Jew. These vermin so infest the isle, so slide Into all byways, highways that may lead Direct or roundabout to wealth or power, Some plain, plump mark was needed, to protect From the degrading contact ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... Telia for Teli, Jugia for Jogi, Kuria for Kori, and that the Bharias belong to the great Bhar tribe who were once dominant in the eastern part of the United Provinces, but are now at the bottom of the social scale, and relegated by their conquerors to the degrading office of swineherds. The Rajjhars, who appear to have formed a separate caste as the landowning subdivision of the Bhars, like the Raj-Gonds among Gonds, are said to be the descendants of a Raja and a Bharia woman. The Rajjhars form a separate caste in the Central Provinces, and the Bharias ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... Tennessee, his wholesale abuse of the American party, towards whose members, without a single exception, he has indulged in language which ought not to be tolerated within the precincts of Billingsgate, no epithet is too low, too degrading, or disgraceful, to ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... said that "He desired one Service, because he thought it was most degrading that certain man, although they were doing the same work should be classed in a Provincial Service, while others should be classed in an Imperial Service. The prospects of the members of the Provincial Service were not at all what they ought ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... Maurepas, the D'Aiguillons, and that hateful Abbe Terray, who, for rapacity, were none of them better than Du Barry—and thus he ended by losing the love of his subjects. I have often pitied Louis XV. for degrading himself as he did before the eyes of his family, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... last night recklessly imputed to him that I felt deeply ashamed, and was nearly carried away by mingled admiration and self-reproach to confess the absurd vagrancy of my thoughts and humbly ask his pardon. But you can understand the reluctance at a confession so insulting to him, so degrading to me. It is at all times difficult to tell a man, face to face, eye to eye, the evil you have thought of him, unless the recklessness of anger seizes on it as a weapon with which to strike; and ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... considered, she thought he would go without delay. That Miss Crawford should endeavour to secure a meeting between him and Mrs. Rushworth, was all in her worst line of conduct, and grossly unkind and ill-judged; but she hoped he would not be actuated by any such degrading curiosity. He acknowledged no such inducement, and his sister ought to have given him credit for ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... informers, ever ready, for their own advantage, to swear before ex parte committees to pretended private conversations between the President and themselves, incapable from their nature of being disproved, thus furnishing material for harassing him, degrading him in the eyes of the country, and eventually, should he be a weak or a timid man, rendering him subservient to improper influences in order to avoid such persecutions and annoyances; because they tend to destroy ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... selection of elders, care was enjoined that all such persons should be honorable, free from any pernicious or degrading habits, "for if men cannot control themselves, they are not fit to be rulers or leaders in the ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... instance, the new government has ushered itself to the world as honest, masculine, and dignified. It has shown genuine dignity, in my opinion, in exploding adulatory titles; they are the offerings of abject baseness, and nourish that degrading vice in the people. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... English, and spoke with great bitterness of the ill-treatment of Philip, the native chief, who came as passenger in the ship. He described and mimicked his cleaning shoes and knives; his being flogged when he refused to do this degrading work; and, finally, his speech to his countrymen when he came on shore, soliciting their assistance in capturing the vessel, and revenging his ill-treatment. Over and over again our friend George, having worked up his passion by a full recollection ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... religions could hardly be expected to harmonise or combine. Confucianism exalts letters, and lays stress on ethics to the neglect of the spiritual world. Taoism inculcates physical discipline; but in practice it has become the mother of degrading superstition—dealing in magic and necromancy. Buddhism saps the foundations of the family and enjoins celibacy as the road to virtue. Metempsychosis is its leading doctrine, and to "think on nothing" its mental discipline. It forbids a flesh diet and ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... employed to bring in the labourers, seem to have abused their powers. To the genuine Matabili, who lived only for war and plunder, and had been accustomed to despise the other tribes, work, and especially mine work, was not only distasteful, but degrading. They had never been really subdued. In 1893 they hid away most of the firearms they possessed, hoping to use them again. Now, when their discontent had increased, two events hastened an outbreak. One was the removal of the white police to Pitsani. Only forty-four were left in Matabililand ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... his friends had arranged this disgraceful exhibition of unholiness in order to discredit and destroy Grichka's rival. Five minutes later I met the Bishop Theophanus walking with the Procurator of the Holy Synod, who, like myself, witnessed the degrading sight, and from that moment Mitia the Blessed no longer exercised power, and was not further invited to the salons of those mystical members of the aristocracy. He had been swept into oblivion in ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... plans and his resolutions melted away before this discovery. There was nothing to be done but to save the poor girl from this miserable and degrading attachment, and ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... most ancient sacred hymns;" then he comes to this conclusion: "Egypt, in possession of an admirable fund of doctrines respecting the essence of God, and the immortality of the soul, did not for all that defile herself the less by the most degrading superstitions; we have in her, sufficiently summed up, the religious history of all antiquity."[12] As regards the civilization which flourished in India, M. Adolphe Pictet, in his learned researches on the subject of the primitive Aryas, arrives, in what concerns ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... within reach she clung to it with pathetic tenacity. But if the young man's value had risen in the eyes of his employers it had deteriorated in his own. He was condemned to play a part he had not bargained for, and it seemed to him more degrading when paid in bank-notes than if his retribution had consisted merely in good dinners and luxurious lodgings. The first time the smiling aide-de-camp had caught his eye over a verbal slip of Mrs. Hicks's, Nick had flushed to the forehead and gone to bed swearing that he would chuck ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... victims, the drinking saloon first opens its gorgeous doors, and when the burning liquid has inflamed the mental and physical man, soon hurries him onward into those fascinating habitations where vice and voluptuousness mingle their degrading powers. Once in these whirlpools of sin, the young man finds himself borne away by every species of vicious allurement-his feelings become unrestrained, until at length that last spark of filial advice which had hovered round his consciousness ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... had had no such intention the night before; an accumulated mail and many matters demanding decisions were awaiting him; and his sudden departure seemed an act directed personally against her, in the nature of a retaliation, since she had offended and repulsed him. Through Lise's degrading act she had arrived at the conclusion that all adventure and consequent suffering had to do with Man—a conviction peculiarly maddening to such temperaments as Janet's. Therefore she interpreted her suffering in terms of Ditmar, she had looked forward ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... properly enough demanded of every student, when matriculated, as a pledge for meeting any loss from unsettled arrears, such as his sudden death or his unannounced departure might else continually be inflicting upon his college. By releasing the college, therefore, from all necessity for degrading vigilance or persecution, this demand does, in effect, operate beneficially to the feelings of all parties. In most colleges it amounts to twenty-five pounds: in one only it was considerably less. And this trifling consideration it was, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... believes in spirit. He is timid and womanly, his mind is pure and inexpressibly shocked at the carnal desires which disfigure the otherwise fair picture of humanity. Love, marriage, procreation, cannot these be purged from the base and degrading obsessions of sex? By abstinence, by concentration, we may eliminate them. Surely the story of the Fall makes it quite clear that we were never meant to perpetuate such gross mistakes.... Here is the woman who believes sex to be the source of all good, all life, ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... dream I have sometimes, you know.... I often dream it—it's always the same ... that some one is hunting me, some one I'm awfully afraid of ... that he's hunting me in the dark, in the night ... tracking me, and I hide somewhere from him, behind a door or cupboard, hide in a degrading way, and the worst of it is, he always knows where I am, but he pretends not to know where I am on purpose, to prolong my agony, to enjoy my terror.... That's just what you're doing now. It's ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... offer up the poor man's sweat to the abomination,—when they lay before it the crippled child of the factory,—when they take from life its bloom and dignity, and degrading human nature to mere brute breathing, make offering of its wretchedness as the most savoury morsel to the perpetual craving of their insatiate god,—when we consider all the "manifold sins and wickednesses" of the barbarians ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... for his "masterly refutations of the vagaries of this man Darwin, wherein the Creator is left out of all things and man proclaims himself independent, his own king, his own priest, his own God—then degrading man to the level of the brute by declaring he had the same origin, and this origin was lifeless matter. Could folly and pride go further than to degrade Science into a vehicle for throwing contumely and disrespect ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... degrading or vilifying an object, is done successfully by ranking it with one that is really low."—Kames, El. of Crit., ii, 50. "The magnifying or diminishing objects by means of comparison, proceeds from the same cause."—Ib., i, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... contribute to deforestation and soil degradation; water pollution and overfishing threaten marine life populations; groundwater contamination limits potable water supply; growing urban industrialization and population migration are rapidly degrading environment in Hanoi and ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to become a mere walking, talking machine, be the object of a beginner, by all means let him be instructed in calisthenics and elocution, and the art of first-night speech-making; but to call such a combination of classes a School of Dramatic Art is degrading; it robs the calling of its highest attribute—imagination. Innate ability must undoubtedly be developed, "which nobody can deny," but such an institution as is suggested would develop everything in the same form; and as there is no accepted standard to aim at, the result would be, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... this Ministry of little men were suspected of tricks degrading and treacherous. The recitals of their distorted versions of their woes affected the public imagination like a dreary litany. Vast communities of men were beginning to realise that a tragedy was being engineered in the name of sanctity ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... but no one could be sure at what unlooked-for moment, and how fiercely, she might resent in earnest a display of what she had herself encouraged. Essex was ruined for all real greatness by having to suit himself to this bewildering and most unwholesome and degrading waywardness. She taught him to think himself irresistible in opinion and in claims; she amused herself in teaching him how completely he was mistaken. Alternately spoiled and crossed, he learned to be exacting, unreasonable, absurd in his pettish resentments or brooding sullenness. ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... to destroy or in any wise to impair the civil and political rights of the citizens of the United States, and much more so the power to establish inequalities amongst those citizens by creating privileges in one class of those citizens, and by the disfranchisement of other portions or classes, by degrading them from the ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... for her unfortunate and peculiarly unhappy child. It had been neglected and seemed almost starved. Those around apparently took pleasure in tormenting it and rendering it miserable, and vied with each other in applying to it insulting and degrading epithets. The little articles that Cecil gave to it, in the hope that the Indians seeing him manifest an interest in it would treat it more tenderly, it put to its mouth eagerly; but not finding them eatable, it threw them aside in disgust. Cecil turned away ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... she had served her apprenticeship at that, but simply to force herself to realize vividly just how matters stood with her. Those columns and pages of closely printed offerings of work! Dreary tasks, all of them—tasks devoid of interest, of personal sense of usefulness, tasks simply to keep degrading soul in degenerating body, tasks performed in filthy factories, in foul-smelling workrooms and shops, in unhealthful surroundings. And this, throughout civilization, was the "honest work" so praised—by all who don't do it, but live pleasantly ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... in the midst of tears, terror, and murder. Why does the stately Muse of History, that delights in describing the valor of heroes and the grandeur of conquest, leave out these scenes, so brutal, mean, and degrading, that yet form by far the greater part of the drama of war? You, gentlemen of England, who live at home at ease, and compliment yourselves in the songs of triumph with which our chieftains are bepraised—you pretty maidens, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... in Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, Knox, we discover humiliating proofs of imperfection and fallibility. And, while the fundamental truths of Christianity have been preserved in the Catholic Church, those truths have been mingled or associated with errors so injurious and degrading, that no blind faith is to be rested on any human authority. Let us uphold the majesty of divine revelation, and vindicate our right and our duty to interpret the sacred page—not by the traditions of fallible men, not by the metaphysics of the schools, not ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... was so amiable and so much beloved by the princess, that she easily yielded; and casting down her eyes, confessed that she loved one who regarded her with contemptuous indifference; and what rendered her choice still more degrading was, its object being equally ugly ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... whom they call the infidel, is full of contempt. They know no gratitude, and they would not cringe to the greatest Christian potentate. They are very long-suffering in adversity, hesitating in attack, and the bravest of the brave in defence. They disdain work as degrading and only a fit occupation for slaves, whilst warfare is, to their minds, an honourable calling. Every male over 16 years of age has to carry at least one fighting-weapon at all times, and consider himself ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... her previous conduct has in any way prepared her friends, is now said to have been due to the shock of hearing, some time during her wedding-day, that a sister whom she had supposed dead was really alive and in circumstances of almost degrading poverty. As this sister had been her own twin the effect upon her mind was very serious. To find and rescue this sister she left her newly made husband in the surreptitious manner already recorded in the papers. That she is not fully herself is shown ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... leave less of a sting than to be bilked by a male. But, as burglars, the idea seems revolting. To think of women going about nights with a jimmy and a dark lantern, and opening doors, or windows, and sneaking about rooms, is degrading. If a male burglar gets in your house, and he is discovered, you can shoot him, if you get the drop on him, or kick him down stairs; but who wants to shoot a female burglar, or kick her over the banisters? It would be unnatural. ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... for himself was a serious business. It would be very silly to jump into a career with slaves, coarse and degrading, just because a fool happened to be teaching at the County Academy. He must think this thing over. Tired as he was, he lay awake until eleven o'clock, thinking, thinking ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... Burke was alive to the existence of social problems, and that he was even tormented by them, we know from an incidental passage in the Reflections. There he tells us how often he had reflected, and never reflected without feeling, upon the innumerable servile and degrading occupations to which by the social economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed. He had pondered whether there could be any means of rescuing these unhappy people from their miserable industry without disturbing ...
— Burke • John Morley
... too, like the first listeners, drink in the tale with delight. The poet, in other words, has the secret not only of seeing but of idealizing the actual world. We catch from him some subtle art by which, standing a little aloof from the pressure and turmoil around us, often felt as painful or degrading, we see it through an atmosphere in which it becomes a splendid and heart-stirring scene. At a later stage we may perhaps in a degree analyze the change of view; we may partly understand how through the struggle with evil man is ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... breathe the spirit of the most primitive magic." Speaking of the importance of magic in the East, and especially in Egypt, Professor Maspero remarks that "we ought not to attach to the word magic the degrading idea which it almost inevitably calls up in the mind of a modern. Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion. The faithful who desired to obtain some favour from a god had no chance of succeeding except by laying hands on the deity, and ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... wiles and her beauty had culminated in a degrading scene of anger on her part, when, forgetting her breeding, her birth and her nationality, she had first of all twitted him and then openly laughed at ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... three other graves were added to that sunny bank! One by one, all those fair children whom Fessenden's had seen in the warm room where the fire was had followed their sister to the tomb. So fast they followed that Mr. Frisbie had no time to move his family-vault from the degrading proximity of the negro graves. And Fessenden's still lived, an orphan, yet happy, in the family of blacks which had adopted him; while the parents of those children, who had loved them, were left alone in the costly house, desolate. Was it, as some supposed, a judgment upon Frisbie for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen women off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and coarse men with no respect for a girl's honour, degrading the sex and being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. They would be just good friends like a big brother and sister without all that other in spite of the conventions of Society with ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... play off one against the other, for the existence of a lower paid class makes it increasingly difficult for the Men Clerks to substantiate a claim for better pay themselves. The standard of their work is raised by the "moving-down" or "degrading" of duties, without any improvement in pay such as they would probably be able to obtain if women were not involuntarily undercutting them. Women fully sympathise with their male colleagues, whose prospects are injured in this way, but they insist that the only ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... dishonorable. . . . There is a generally, in militant society, small respect for the common forms of labor. But in old Japan the occupation of the farmer and artisan were not despised; trade alone appears to have been considered degrading, and the distinction may have ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... is to provide a temporary home and school for the dependent and neglected children of the state. No child in Minnesota need go without a home if the officers of the several counties do their duty. There is not a semblance of any degrading or criminal feature in the manner of obtaining admittance to this school. Under the law, it is the duty of every county commissioner, when he finds any child dependent, or in danger of becoming so, to take steps to send him to this school. The process of admission wisely guards against the ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... in his own thoughts, but in the air; it was the spontaneous revulsion of white men against the rule of an inferior race. These were the very men, above all others in the town, to join him in a movement to change these degrading conditions. ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... action, and the total refutation and utter explosion of Filmer would not have been effected. By criminal prosecutions the odious positions would only have been suppressed for a time, not as they now are, extinguished for ever; and the base and degrading doctrines of passive obedience and divine right, which are the stigma of the times in which they prevailed, might have been the disgrace and reproach ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... faith in the Paternal love I need, so ruthless or so negligent seems the government of this earth. I feel calm, yet sternly, towards Fate. This last plot against me has been so cruelly, cunningly wrought, that I shall never acquiesce. I submit, because useless resistance is degrading, but I demand an explanation. I see that it is probable I shall never receive one, while I live here, and suppose I can bear the rest of the suspense, since I have comprehended all its difficulties in the first moments. Meanwhile, I live ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... far more definite terms, he perceived the injustice of the world toward women. Here with Berrie, as in ages upon ages of other times, the maiden must bear the burden of reproach. "In me it will be considered a joke, a romantic episode, in her a degrading misdemeanor. And ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... are two or three poor societies; it is for them to look after these cases. What is the use of having poor societies, if we are to do the work ourselves? So low! so undignified! so degrading! just ask any minister,—ask Dr. Blandford,—what ...
— Trading • Susan Warner
... wings to the mind and make a man soar to heaven. Thus I hope that my wise words will give you wings to fly to some less degrading trade. ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... spirits in bodily decay, in fasting, and in ascetic practices, is no disproof of the general principle, but merely the introduction of another principle, namely, that we can feed one part of the system at the expense of degrading and ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... Shaftesbury, more than to any other is due the persistent investigation and disclosure which aroused the public mind to the prevailing conditions in mine and factory where hours of labor were excessive, and where women and children were subjected to degrading tasks and brutal treatment. The Factory Law and kindred legislation since 1830 are the fruits of the beneficent and untiring labors ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... fancying that it was degrading to his dignity to root in the gutter, came upon the sidewalk, and full of his consequence, promenaded from morning till night, leaving his humbler companions to munch corn, husks and potatoe parings. He fared as people usually do, who from vanity assume a station they are not qualified ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... proud queen of the Am[)a]zons. Being rejected by Bellodant "the Bold," she revenged herself by degrading all the men who fell into her power by dressing them like women, giving them woman's work to do, such as spinning, carding, sewing, etc., and feeding them on bread and water to effeminate them (canto 4). When she overthrew Sir Artegal in single combat, she ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... her. She would not listen to the first insidious suggestion of the tempter. Thus the man who expected to go away despising now honored, reverenced, loved her, and through her strong but gentle ministry had turned his back on evil, and was struggling to escape its degrading bondage. ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... exercised in my mind about Stokes' going into Parliament (as a strong party man, moreover) while still P.R.S. I do not know what you may think about it, but to my mind it is utterly wrong—and degrading to the Society—by introducing ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... he said, sadly. "Then, if domestic service is degrading in your eyes, and people are not willing servants among you, may I ask why ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... addressed her lord in anger, looking at him, 'Knowing everything, O monarch, how canst thou, like an inferior person, thus say that thou knowest it not? Thy heart is a witness to the truth or falsehood of this matter. Therefore, speak truly without degrading thyself. He who being one thing representeth himself as another thing to others, is like a thief and a robber of his own self. Of what sin is he not capable? Thou thinkest that thou alone hast knowledge of thy deed. But knowest thou not that the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... with sexuality, and its purely spiritual element is lost. In every instance this spiritual element should constitute the basis of marriage, which, without it, is nothing more than legal prostitution. Without it, the selfish, degrading, animal propensities run rampant, while the emotions with all their boundless sweetness lie dormant. Woman is regarded as only a plaything to ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... face with his blue eyes, and receiving her crown-piece in his hand, which was nobler than his face, inasmuch as it was seamed with the action of his paints and tools, without a notion of anything unbecoming or degrading. ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... long within myself, watching the mere shadows and shades of life. To deceive a man on some issue which could be decided quicker, by his destruction while one is disarmed, helpless, without even the power to run away—no! That seems to me too degrading. And yet I have you here. I have your very existence in my keeping. What do you say, Lena? Would I be capable of throwing you to the lions to save ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... themselves have been always free from the pernicious influence of the errors and corruption, which had already spread almost throughout the world; it was necessary that their minds should have remained unpolluted by the notions of the extravagant and degrading idolatries, which were in practice among almost all the ancient nations; and that their hearts should have remained untouched by the contagion of universal depravity. The soil to which any seed, however good, is to be committed, would never respond to ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... were to see her, to catch her in the brazen act of looking for him! Mrs. Maldon was grieved; and her gentle sorrow for Rachel's incalculable lapse was so dignified, affectionate, and jealous for the good repute of human nature that it mysteriously ennobled instead of degrading ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... process had been a dangerous one, and during the long business experience the iron had entered his soul, and he had witnessed at close quarters the degrading influence of the lust of acquisition. The self-advertising humbug of most philanthropy had clouded something in him that he felt could never again grow clear and limpid as before, and a portion of his original zest had faded. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... disappointed Robert. In the work of moving in he had to do with people who work at day's work, and the fault was his more than theirs. He forgot that they did not consider their work degrading. They resented his bossing. The drayman ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... that the reader will carefully distinguish between those opinions which have a dramatic propriety in reference to the characters which they are designed to elucidate, and such as are properly my own. The erroneous and degrading idea which men have conceived of a Supreme Being, for instance, is spoken against, but not the Supreme Being itself. The belief which some superstitious persons whom I have brought upon the stage entertain of the Deity, as injurious to the character of his benevolence, is widely ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and thought how great England was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly. Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek. Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to smother their souls within them, to blight ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... audience of Louis the Just, who recruits his finances by the present of a handful of pistoles; and a few days later he is appointed to a cadetship in the company of guards of the Chevalier des Essarts, a brother-in-law of Treville. According to the singular ideas of those days, there was nothing degrading to a gentleman in receiving money from the king's hand. D'Artagnan, therefore, pockets the pistoles with many thanks, and takes an early opportunity of dividing them with his friends with the mythological names, Messieurs Athos, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Dr. Tyng. For any intelligent Christian must allow that those claiming to represent the Church of Christ have too often sided with the oppressor, fettered human thought in departments foreign to religion, and inculcated degrading beliefs, which scholars eminent in orthodoxy declare indeducible from any Biblical precept. It is not the incredibleness of a metaphysical belief, but a laxity or cowardice of the practice connected with it, which can point the reformer's gibe and wing his sarcasm. Theodore ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... emotionally excited; I from relief at escaping the clutches of that dread hell of which for certain moments I had felt the flaming grasp; he because of a sudden degrading realization that he had attempted to practise on a faithful comrade in arms a cowardly and contemptible piece of treachery. My impulsive gratitude for the measure of justice granted me made his avaricious greed seem even to him despicable, and for an instant ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... fumbled in his pocket and brought forth the thin packets of letters and the folded yellow cheques. One by one he laid them where her hands could touch them. He dared not look at her. He felt that her newly awakened soul was staring from her eyes at the mute evidence of a degrading past. ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... original state, and make me give up the name of Bellino, which I hate since the death of my protector, and which begins to inconvenience me. I have only appeared at two theatres, and each time I have been compelled to submit to the scandalous, degrading examination, because everywhere I am thought to have too much the appearance of a girl, and I am admitted only after the shameful test has brought conviction. Until now, fortunately, I have had to deal only with old priests who, in their good faith, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... upon individual initiative, individual capacity and effort; upon the energy, character, and foresight which it is so important to encourage in the individual. But as a matter of fact the deadening and degrading effect of pure socialism, and especially of its extreme form communism, and the destruction of individual character which they would bring about, are in part achieved by the wholly unregulated competition which results in a single individual or corporation rising at ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... pretty—that most seductive prettiness which seemed to be warmed into life by her consciousness of himself. Why should he take her or himself so seriously? Why not play out the farce, and let those who would criticise him and think his acceptance of the work degrading understand that it was only an affair of gallantry. He could afford to serve Woodridge at least a few weeks for the favor of this Rachel! Forgetful of his rebuff of the night before, he fixed his brown eyes on hers ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... their hands in cadence, and burst at intervals into a barking laugh. I could not find any thing very amusing in this entertainment; on the contrary, it had the effect of making me feel very melancholy, as displaying these good people in a very idiotic and degrading light. ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... this connection. It consists of a comfortably and elegantly fitted-up clubhouse, within easy driving distance of a large city, and surrounded by facilities for tennis, racquets, golf, polo, baseball, racing, etc. So far it has kept clear of the degrading sport ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... this; but it was the singular fact of seeing a white woman stretch her sinews in any toilsome exercise which astounded them, accustomed as they are to see both men and women of the privileged skin eschew the slightest shadow of labour, as a thing not only painful but degrading. They will learn another lesson from me, however, whose idea of Heaven was pronounced by a friend of mine, to whom I once communicated it, to be 'devilish hard work'! It was only just six o'clock, and these women had all done their tasks. I exhorted them to go home and wash their children, ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... in taming and driving the horse, and the others in the use of the sword and spear. When Arjuna made use of the bow and the noose the plaudits with which the spectators greeted his skill so enraged the Kauravas that they turned the contest of clubs, which was to have been a friendly one, into a degrading and blood-shedding battle. The spectators left the splendid lists in sorrow, and the blind Raja determined to separate the unfriendly cousins before further harm could come from ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... holiness. But there is was; the pride of riches was beginning its disintegrating work. They had lived to prove, once more, a sad truth which had been proven many times before in the world: that whereas principle is a great and noble protection against showy and degrading vanities and vices, poverty is worth six of it. More than four hundred thousand dollars to the good. They took up the matrimonial matter again. Neither the dentist nor the lawyer was mentioned; there was no occasion, they were out of the running. Disqualified. They discussed the son of the ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... discipline such as could be exercised only by the pope. He, in their ideal, was to stand towards the whole world as the Cluniac abbat stood towards each Cluniac priory, the one ultimate source of jurisdiction, the Universal Bishop, appointing and degrading the diocesan bishops as the abbat made and unmade ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... we have loaded this great natural process of human labor with a mass of superstitions and degrading lies. The lazy old orientals called it a curse! Work, a curse! Work; which is the essential process of human life; man's natural function and means ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... day—degenerate lot! To seize a fisherman, or stop a cart, Or "fright the wandering spirits from the shore." His "brief authority" has just detain'd A boat of cockles and a quart of gin! The smart Lieutenant's epaulette, methinks, Blushes at this degrading, pimping trade.— For deeds like these—let objects be employ'd, Who never shared their country's high renown! Adieu! vast Ocean, cradle of the brave, Tablet of England's glory, and her shield! To ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... was the man who, with thoughts intent on his last and most degrading makeshift, was forging his way up Second Avenue, the mantilla—the veriest film of old Salamanca lace—pressed into a small wad and stuffed in ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... freedom from anxiety would restore her to her nobler self. How could he find fault with her? She knew nothing of such sordid life as he had gone through, and to lack money for necessities seemed to her degrading beyond endurance. Why, even the ordinary artisan's wife does not suffer such privations as hers at the end of the past year. For lack of that little money his life must be ruined. Of late he had often thought about the rich uncle, John Yule, who might perhaps leave something to Amy; but the ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... and courage the preaching of the word of God. His enemies were active and powerful, but the queen and many of the nobles were his friends, and the people in great numbers sided with him. Comparing his pure and elevating teachings and holy life with the degrading dogmas which the Romanists preached, and the avarice and debauchery which they practised, many regarded it an honor ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... as when we kneel at that altar, for we are coming to that which is part of God's image—made in His likeness. And as we speak to them, when they answer purely and simply, the Word of God speaks through them. This is not degrading the sacraments—nay, but raising all human life—nay, raising the sacraments as well, for it brings them into relation with real life, and transforms the poor magical abstractions into ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... servitude is not a degrading one, but the reverse. Nothing is so pleasant to a reasonable and truly noble mind as to pay obedience to those to whom it is due; and if the adaptability of the same individual to be both master and servant was more practically ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... possible for any society in which there is a very large body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society is—to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so much belief in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion of what pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows. Therefore let us have done with this nonsense about our being much better than the rest of our countrymen, or the pretence that that was a reason ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... the sailor. It was on all hands taken for granted that he was bad, and, wonderful to say, he was provided for accordingly. His treatment was a disgrace. The barrack-room, with its corners curtained off as married quarters, the lash, the hideous and degrading medical inspection—samples of the general treatment—all tended to destroy what remained of manly self-respect and virtue. Whilst the neighbourhood of the barracks and the naval ports, teeming with public-houses and brothels, still further aided the degradation. ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... been repeated in fifty communities from the Alleghanies to the Pacific coast; only these little states, instead of dying in the bud, would have gone through a rank flowering period of bloody and aimless revolutions, of silly and ferocious warfare against their neighbors, and of degrading alliance with the foreigner. From these and a hundred other woes the West no less than the East was saved by the knitting together of the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... accustomed to sing—anything but hymns—with a kind of mad, ferocious joy. I spoke to all who approached my dungeon, jeering and bitter things; and I tried to look upon the whole creation through the medium of that commonplace wisdom, the wisdom of the cynics. This degrading period, on which I hate to reflect, lasted happily only for six or seven days, during which my Bible had become covered with dust. One of the jailer's boys, thinking to please me, as he cast his eye upon it, observed, "Since you left off ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... unclean and degrading about this humble side of Christianity. Ursula suddenly revolted ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... shut his teeth with a snap. "That's worse than hoarding money as I've done. Mine may, as you say, do good in the future, but theirs is degrading human beings at the present. I wish I could do something for them, especially the mothers. It's a shame they have ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... experimental garden and model farm. An English gardener was also employed to naturalise the large collection of valuable plants from the East and West Indies and the South Sea Islands supplied by Kew. The Nova Scotians, however, like true slaves, considered agriculture servile and degrading work—a prejudice which, as will be seen, prevails to this day not only in the colony, but throughout the length and ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... street boys shouted to one another, "Take care what you're doing! You haven't got Captain Burton's six senses." At Great Russell Street, Burton commenced by defending materialism. He could not see with Guizot that the pursuit of psychology is as elevating as that of materialism is degrading. What right, he asked, had the theologian to limit the power of the Creator. "Is not the highest honour His who from the worst can draw the best?" [313] He then quoted his letter to The Times, and ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... mansion of a wealthy man, they raised a wild din, and whirled about, and cut themselves and scourged themselves until they were covered with blood. The master of the mansion was so impressed with this savage and degrading spectacle that he gave the priests a good sum of money, and invited them into his house. They took the goddess with them, and I scampered out into the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... however, he, my poor father, believed implicitly my assertions of entire innocence of the crime for which I had been transported. But he felt bitterly for the degrading situation in which I stood, and from which neither my own conscious innocence nor his convictions, he was but too sensible, could rescue me in so far as regarded the opinion of ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... of the degraded condition of the people. I wandered around and examined the idols, most of which had in front of them, and in some instances on their flat heads, offerings of tobacco, food, red cotton, and other things. My heart was sad at these evidences of such degrading idolatry, and I was deeply impressed with my need of wisdom and aid from on high, so that when I met the people who here worshipped these idols I might so preach Christ and Him crucified that they would be constrained to accept Him ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... I attempted to show that slighter causes than is commonly thought may change a nation from the stationary to the progressive state of civilisation, and from the stationary to the degrading. Commonly the effect of the agent is looked on in the wrong way. It is considered as operating on every individual in the nation, and it is assumed, or half assumed, that it is only the effect which ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... admit with a gulp, as if he were swallowing his pride, and he knew that in saying the word he was degrading his sister—throwing her at this man's feet as the price ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... believe very much in marriage—modern, upper-class marriage," she repeated. "And, just precisely on that account, it seems to me all the more degrading and shameful that a girl should risk marrying the wrong man. People talk about a broken engagement as though it was a disgrace. I can't see that. An unwilling, a—a—loveless marriage is the disgrace. And ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... in the pulpit and defiling the very show of religion, by pretending to read and preach lessons of holiness and godliness to those who, the night before, had witnessed him in a state of beastly intoxication, at a common village alehouse, not only degrading the character of a clergyman, but even that of the lowest and most abandoned of the human species, by exhibitions of his person, most indecent and most revolting to humanity; nor am I alluding to this as a solitary ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... it from being only a degrading superstition in those who believe that mortals like themselves can predict the future, that it seems, on the contrary ennobling. It is precisely because man feels a mystery within himself that he admits it may ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... the poems that interested him, and on the whole he did not think much of poetry. But this opinion he never dared to put into words. To do so in the face of Dally's clearly manifested reverence would have been like openly confessing a particularly degrading form ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... arrives at practical strength who is convinced, whether rightly or wrongly, that he knows all about his own ideas that needs to be known. Byron never did thus know himself, either morally or intellectually. The higher part of him was consciously dragged down by the degrading reminiscence of the brutishness of his youth and its connections and associations; they hung like miasma over his spirit. He could not rise to that sublimest height of moral fervour, when a man intrepidly chases from his memory past evil done, suppresses the recollection of old corruptions, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... the Campanile of Airolo. But he saw instead the fair myth of Endymion. This woman was a goddess to the end. For her no love could be degrading: she stood outside all degradation. This episode, which she thought so sordid, and which was so tragic for him, remained supremely beautiful. To such a height was he lifted, that without regret he could now have told her that he was her worshipper too. But what was the use of telling ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... now pass well enough among the Mahometans," he said, "for you have learned a good deal of our manners, and if you had been willing to forsake your degrading idolatry, and embrace the true worship of Allah, you might have attained to a high position among us. But now you are to pass through the country parts of Bengal, in which there are few or no Moors, but only Gentoos, of whom I would have you beware. For the secret ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... it be that Miss Barrett is afraid of degrading poetry to the low rank of an accomplishment—whether it be that she has some peculiar theory of her own on the subject of language, and on the mode in which poetical emotions may be most felicitously expressed—whether ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... a table in the sitting-room beyond which extended other rooms that, in addition to being ugly, were dark. But Lennox had no degrading manias for comfort. Pending the great day he camped in these rooms, above which, on an upper storey was a duplex apartment which, if Margaret liked, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... father,' she said, with dignified reproach. 'I hope'—here a timid glance, as if imploring support—'I hope we know better than to place any real faith in these degrading superstitions.' ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... deeds. It said, "We have come to an end. We have been robbed of the rights guaranteed to us by the Kansas-Nebraska bill. We have been robbed of the rights of American citizens. We have been given the alternative of abject and degrading submission or of extermination. And now we make our answer. We will return blow for blow, wound for wound, stripe for stripe, and burning for burning. Murder shall be paid back with murder, robbery with robbery; and every act of aggression shall be paid back with swift and terrible ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... before he was well aware that his life had begun in earnest; and when he realised that he was in possession of his full manhood, and that the prime of life was not far off, he found himself chained hand and foot, toiling heavily in the most degrading servitude. A few more years and he realised also that, do what he would, he could not set himself free. No one in the world had any knowledge of the struggle he made. Some—his mother among them—gave ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... having no private property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want. These are the poor, and amongst them there is no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilisation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life. From their collective force ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... not be long delayed, and that his best chance of saving himself and his cause lay in stirring up the king to energetic action against the Earl of March. The death of his uncle irritated Edward, who at seventeen was old enough to feel the degrading nature of his thraldom, and was eager to govern the kingdom of which he was the nominal head. In June, 1330, the birth of a son, the future Black Prince, to Edward and Philippa seems to have impressed on the young monarch that he had come to man's estate. Lancaster accordingly found him eager ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
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