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More "Undermine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... observation and mature reflection, he became deeply impressed with the conviction that the practice was not only useless, but hurtful. He became convinced that it tends to lead men to intemperance; to undermine their constitutions; and to sow the seeds of death, temporal and eternal. And he felt that he could not be justified in continuing to cultivate his farm by means of a practice which was ruining the bodies and souls of his fellow-men. He therefore ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... PHILOSOPHY.—ANSWER.—Sixthly, you will say there have been a great many things explained by matter and motion; take away these and you destroy the whole corpuscular philosophy, and undermine those mechanical principles which have been applied with so much success to account for the PHENOMENA. In short, whatever advances have been made, either by ancient or modern philosophers, in the study ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... such to have existed. They looked only to their masters at Versailles; and hence a state of things as curious as it was lamentable. The little settlement was a hot-bed of gossip, backbiting, and slander. Officials of every degree were continually trying to undermine and supplant one another, besieging the minister with mutual charges. Brouillan, the governor, was a frequent object of attack. He seems to have been of an irritable temper, aggravated perhaps by an old unhealed wound in the cheek, which ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... Spence seemed attracted by the sound of my name, and would now and then secretly lend an ear to what was being said upon his other side. In fact I soon made up my mind that it was for his benefit Miss Kingsley was talking. She hoped to undermine my influence by an unflattering description of my doings in society. It was doubtless her cue to make her guests regard me as ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... indeed, slow; it required a hundred and twenty years for the searchers of God's truth, as revealed in Nature—such men as Hooke, Linnaeus, Whitehurst, Daubenton, Cuvier, and William Smith—to push their works under this fabric of error, and, by statements which could not be resisted, to undermine it. As we arrive at the beginning of the nineteenth century, science is becoming irresistible in this field. Blumenbach, Von Buch, and Schlotheim led the way, but most important on the Continent was the work of Cuvier. In the early years of the present century his researches among fossils began ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... hard at work with the honey," he said, speaking in English, and pointing at the bees. "Little do they think, as they undermine that comb, how near they are to the undermining of their own hive! But so it is with us all! When we think we are in the highest prosperity we may be nearest to a fall, and when we are poorest and hum-blest, we may be about to be exalted. I often think of these things, out here in ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... inspired the economic articles. The priest was the enemy of society, the patron of indolence, the hater of knowledge, the mutineer against the civil laws, the unprofitable devourer of the national substance, the persecutor. Sacerdotalism is the object of the encyclopaedic attack. To undermine this, it was necessary first to establish the principle of toleration, because the priest claims to be recognised as the exclusive possessor of saving doctrine. Second, it was necessary to destroy the principle of miracle, because the priest professes himself in his daily rites the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... revenge Or set their throne up on this temporal shore, As flatterers bade that wiser king Canute, Thence to command the advancing tides of battle Till one ensanguined sea whelm throne and king And kingdom, friend, I take my woman's way, Smile in mine enemies' faces with a heart All hell, and undermine them hour by hour! This island scarce can fend herself from France, And now Spain holds the keys of all the world, How should we fight her, save that my poor wit Hath won the key to Philip? Oh, I know ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the Governor's enemies in England had not been idle. Matthews, Utie, West and Pierce, upon landing in 1637, had secured their liberty under bail, and had joined with Dr. Pott in an attempt to undermine Harvey's influence at Court. Had Sir John sent witnesses to England at once to press the charges against them before the Star Chamber, while the matter was still fresh in the memory of the King, he might have brought about their ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... justice. You work harder to destroy it than the atheistic professors themselves; for, after all, the atheistic professors have but little power; you statesmen, who sometimes talk of your belief in God, you undermine His authority far more deeply than those professors, by the bad example of your practical atheism. You who imagine you believe in the Godhead of Christ are, in reality, prophets and priests of the false gods. ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... himself what it would be. Danger was there, doubtless—danger was everywhere, in the world of art, and still more in the world of commerce; but what he really seemed to catch, for the hour, was the beating of the wings of victory. Nothing could undermine that, since it was victory simply to be acted. It would be victory even to be acted badly; a reflection that didn't prevent him, however, from banishing, in his politic optimism, the word "bad" from his vocabulary. It had no application, in the ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... a state of mind very different from their own. She was beginning to be discouraged. The long-continued and bitter experience of failure and disappointment, which had now, for so many years, been her constant lot, seemed at last to have had power to undermine and destroy even her resolution and energy. Her friends, when they came to see her, found her plunged in a sort of stupor of wretchedness and despair from which they found it ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... gold flies from another coast. I dare not say, from the rich cardinal And from the great and new-made Duke of Suffolk, Yet I do find it so; for, to be plain, They, knowing Dame Eleanor's aspiring humour, Have hired me to undermine the duchess And buzz these conjurations in her brain. They say ' A crafty knave does need no broker;' Yet am I Suffolk and the cardinal's broker. Hume, if you take not heed, you shall go near To call them both a pair of crafty knaves. Well, so its stands; and thus, I fear, at last ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... ground under the stack. This wore upon him so that he grew cross, thinner than ever before, and generally disheveled. The little girl saw that another week of such confinement would all but kill him; while if he were shut up in the cave unchained he would undermine the stack. She feared, however, to give him his entire freedom; so she set to work to puzzle out a scheme that would ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... can scarcely fail to sunder the family roof-tree, and to uproot the family hearth-stone. It is the avowed determination of many of its champions that it shall do so; while with another class of its leaders, to weaken and undermine the authority of the Christian faith in the household is an object if not frankly avowed yet scarcely concealed. The great majority of the women enlisted in this movement—many of them, it is needless to say, very worthy persons as individuals—are little aware of all the perils ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... in the state of Loo gave annoyance to the neighboring princes; and to undermine the influence of Confucius with the duke, these princes sent the duke a present of eighty beautiful girls, possessing musical and dancing accomplishments, and also one hundred and twenty splendid horses. As the duke soon ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... mountains, the roads are never repaired; so far from it, the indigent natives extract the most convenient blocks to stop the holes in their hovel walls, or to build a fence on the windward side of their poppy patches. The rains soon undermine the pavement, especially where it is laid on a steep incline; sections of it topple down the slope, leaving chasms a yard or more in depth." Where traveling by water is impossible, sedan chairs are ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... the things which have always beforehand been taken for granted as correct and true. Along with this goes the fact that much of the literature of to-day, (including newspaper editorials and many magazine articles), has a tendency to undermine Christian faith rather than help it. Much of it comes from brains well saturated with Pagan philosophy rather than the principles laid down in the Holy Book. The swing away from Puritanism to what is called liberty has the effect ...
— The Demand and the Supply of Increased Efficiency in the Negro Ministry - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 13 • Jesse E. Moorland
... public in the intricacies of foreign policy, but which actually mask clever propaganda operations designed to sell 'co-existence' to Americans. There are many of these propaganda outfits working to undermine Americans' faith in America, but none, in our opinion, is as slick or as smooth or as dangerous as the Foreign Policy Association of Russian-born Vera ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... carelessly produced undermine the health of the mother, deepen the family's poverty, destroy the happiness of the home, and dishearten the father; all this in addition to being future competitors in the labor market. Too often their increasing number drives the mother herself into industry, ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... taught him to trust the word of a white man. "Cap'n, yes, suh." As far as he was concerned, the conversation was ended, but in spite of the Potent Noble's reassuring words, a feeling of uneasiness seemed to undermine him. ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... not, and shall not, boycott her in trade; but let us not go to sleep at the switch! Just as busily as she is baking pottery opposite Coblenz, labelled "made in St. Louis," "made in Kansas City," her "army of spies" is at work here and everywhere to undermine those nations who have for the moment delayed her plans for world dominion. I think the number of Americans who know this has increased; but no American, wherever he lives, need travel far from home to meet fellow ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... without serious risk of civil or ecclesiastical penalties make rigorism of any degree seem ridiculous and thus provide abundant amusement for himself and for like-minded readers; he could then proceed to undermine all the really important systems of morality of his time by applying more exacting standards than they could meet. Against a naturalistic and sentimental system, like Shaftesbury's, he could argue that it rested on an appraisal of human nature too optimistic to be realistic. Against ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... ferreting down in my part o' the country. You, or Eccles—I don't care who 'tis—you've been at my servants to get at my secrets. Some of you have. You've declared war. You've been trying to undermine me. That's a breach, I call it. Anyhow, I've come for my wife. I'll ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... displayed a splendid suit of plate armor, enriched with chased work and ornament in gold, his appearance in keeping with his character of monarch and knight who sought to revive the spirit of chivalry at a period when the practical modern tendencies seriously threatened to undermine the practices and traditions of a once-exalted, but now fast-failing, institution for the regulation of morals ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... contributed to its great width is the heterogeneity of the different formations—some hard and some soft. The softer bands, of course, introduce the element of weakness. They decay and crumble the more rapidly, and thus undermine the harder bands overlying them, which, by reason of their vertical fractures, break off and fall to the bottom, where they are exposed to the action of floods and are sooner or later ground up in the river's powerful maw. Hence the recession of the banks of the canon has gone steadily on with ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... flippantly of it; but, though towards Heaven we look with reverence and humble hope, I do not know that Tom, Dick, and Harry's notions of it have any special claim to our respect.) Such publicity would destroy all individuality, and undermine the foundations of society. Clairvoyance—if there be any such thing—always seemed to me a stupid impertinence. When people pay visits to me, I wish them to come to the front-door, and ring the bell, and send up their names. I don't wish them to climb in at the window, or creep through ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... our ancestors, for example, was coloured gules; it broke forth in acts of open and sanguinary violence against the objects of its fury. Our malignant feelings, which must seek gratification through more indirect channels, and undermine the obstacles which they cannot openly bear down, may be rather said to be tinctured sable. But the deep-ruling impulse is the same in both cases; and the proud peer, who can now only ruin his neighbour according to ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... more, Senor Don Quixote, say no more," said the duchess; "I assure you I will give orders that not even a fly, not to say a damsel, shall enter your room. I am not the one to undermine the propriety of Senor Don Quixote, for it strikes me that among his many virtues the one that is pre-eminent is that of modesty. Your worship may undress and dress in private and in your own way, as you please and when you please, for there will be no one to hinder you; ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... contribute to any part of your lordship's; but as your own partiality bestows their chief merit on them, you see they owe More to your friendship than to the writer. It is not my interest to depreciate them; much less to undermine the foundation of their sole worth. Yet it would be dishonest not to warn your lordship, that if my letters have had any intrinsic recommendation, they must lose of it every day. Years and frequent ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... for violence in language it did not try to controvert what I said. I have always entertained the opinion that frauds in elections are more dangerous crimes than cheating, theft and robbery, because they are committed against the whole people and sap and undermine republican institutions. I have always denounced them, or anything approaching them, when committed by ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... Good God, what a cover of wickedness and tyranny would he not become! A third class of his books had been written against private persons, those, namely, who had labored to protect the Roman tyranny and to undermine the piety which he had taught. In these he confessed that he had been more bitter than became his religion and profession. Even these, however, he could not recall, because to do so would be to throw his shield over tyranny and impiety, and to augment ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... in the bodily healing. But their plan of campaign is now begun in earnest, and is evident at once. Later criticism of His personal conduct and habits with the despised classes is mingled with an attempt to work upon His disciples and undermine their loyalty. The Sabbath question comes up again through the disciples satisfying their hunger in the grain fields, and brings from Jesus the keen comment that man wasn't made for the Sabbath, ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... was an engine of the nature of the Roman Vinea, which, by protecting the assailants from the missiles of the besieged, enabled them to undermine the wall of ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... impregnable citadel of virtue is religion; for there is no bulwark of mere morality which some temptation may not overtop, or undermine and destroy.—SIR ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... Videant Consules, the last favourable date for attacking France would have been in 1887. Bismarck sinned beyond forgiveness in not provoking a war at that time. More than that, his manoeuvres to undermine the credit of Russia and his policy of intimidation towards France, by exciting the hatred of both countries against Germany, only served ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... and forming the nuggets for us? Yet, strange to tell, if a digger steal away, prospecting for this true gold, into the unexplored solitudes around us, there is no danger that any will dog his steps, and endeavor to supplant him. He may claim and undermine the whole valley even, both the cultivated and the uncultivated portions, his whole life long in peace, for no one will ever dispute his claim. They will not mind his cradles or his toms. He is not confined to a claim twelve ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... theology in the University of Berlin, simply because, on the ground that an erring conscience ought to be obeyed, he had excused the deed of Sand. In short, the princes intended effectually to crush the efforts which, though indirectly, were tending to undermine their thrones. Seemingly they succeeded. But they had only 'scotched the snake, not killed it.' It is easy to see that these developments must have shaken Frederick William's purpose. Of all things, the most unpleasant to a monarch is to be driven by ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... submission. It is merely farcical to assume that Madame de Stael was kept well under discipline because of a whimsical despotism on the part of the man who had fixed a settled government on France, and who was kept well informed of the attempts of the Baroness and her anarchist associates to undermine and destroy the Constitution it had cost France and its ruler so much to reconstruct and consolidate. "Let her be judged as a man," said Napoleon, and in truth he was right in deciding in this way, as her whole attitude aped the masculine. He was right, too, in showing ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... locust hopes to brave it as he has many others; but, | | alas, its strength is undermined; Its vitals are eaten away, and it | | falls,—a victim to the tiny worm. Thus does tobacco, or alcohol, or | | opium, or any other poison when taken habitually, undermine the | | system, slowly, imperceptibly,—but surely. | | | | Go into any tobacco factory of cigars, snuff, or plug, and bring out | | a healthy man if you can. | | | | Tobacco so destroys the sensations and functions of the mouth that, | | mild ...
— Vanity, All Is Vanity - A Lecture on Tobacco and its effects • Anonymous
... condition now to talk to a gentleman, and I refuse to listen. You came here to lie about me—to undermine me, and I know it, and the ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... wrong. After striving with all my might during the whole of his brief little life to inculcate in him an absolute belief in the unalterable truth of God's promises, why should I now allow the weakness of my own faith to undermine his? My child is in the hands of a merciful God; there will I ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... many persons, blinded by their superstitious prejudices, are desirous to have considered as dangerous—as deserving of punishment—as calculated to disturb public tranquility—as tending to unchain the passions—to undermine the opinions man ought to have; and to confound his ideas of vice and ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... head. 'If you undermine the moral character of your fellow-citizens by a long course of unbridled miscellaneous philanthropy, you can have a funeral procession as long as you like, at the rate of about forty shillings a foot. But you'll never ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... of Commons, who would persuade them to think or to act as if they were a self-originated magistracy, independent of the people and unconnected with their opinions and feelings. Under a pretence of exalting the dignity, they undermine the very foundations of this House. When the question is asked here, what disturbs the people, whence all this clamour, we apply to the treasury-bench, and they tell us it is from the efforts of libellers ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... embraces the minutest details, and is therefore fully competent to make the necessary arrangements with a more than satisfactory result," when he might so easily have used his great and growing personal influence with the Chinese (he was a persona grata with them from the beginning) to undermine his chief. ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... the priest believe in me and forget the affront? Would they aid me frankly in behalf of the education that contests with the conventos the wealth of the country? Can they not pretend friendship, make a show of protection, and yet underneath in the shadows fight it, undermine it, wound it in the heel, in order to weaken it quicker than by attacking it in front? Granted the previous actions which you surmise, anything ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... should be washed daily with warm water; and a bath every night, for the purpose of thoroughly cleaning the body, is highly necessary. To bathe a delicate infant of a few days or even weeks old in cold water with a view "to harden" the constitution (as it is called), is the most effectual way to undermine its health and entail future disease. By degrees, however, the water with which it is sponged in the morning should be made tepid, the evening bath being continued warm enough to be grateful ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... small lunch to the mines each day. These lunches had to be carefully secreted or the Germans would steal them. They could not understand how it was that starving England could send food abroad to us. The sight of these lunches helped to undermine their faith in the truth of the official information they read ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... Greek gods natural substances, in Zeus the atmosphere, in the soul a particle of sun-dust, and so forth. In so far as this philosophy of nature, like the Stoic doctrine in later times, had in its most general outlines a certain affinity with the Roman religion, it was calculated to undermine the national religion by resolving it into allegory. A quasi-historical analysis of religion was given in the "Sacred Memoirs" of Euhemerus of Messene (about 450), which, under the form of reports on the travels of the author among the marvels of foreign lands, subjected to ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... explanation of this fact, which forms the central idea of the geological part of the book, he was indebted to his uncle Josiah Wedgwood, who suggested that worms, by bringing earth to the surface in their castings, must undermine any objects lying on the surface and cause an ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... clear intuition of the folly we were committing in risking ourselves so unconcernedly in that least known and most dangerous part of the Sahara. Every blow which had been struck in the last twenty years to undermine the French advance had come from this redoubtable Ahaggar. But what of it? It was of my own will that I had joined in this mad scheme. No need of going over it again. What was the use of spoiling my action by a continual exhibition ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... must be to our great President, who has exerted himself so to bring the German people to reason, to make them understand the horror that they alone have brought deliberately upon the world! Alas! Far from it. Indeed, they have attempted with insidious propaganda to undermine the morale of our troops...." A little storm of muttered epithets went through the room. The Reverend Dr. Skinner elevated his chubby pink palms and smiled benignantly..."to undermine the morale of our troops; so that the most ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... with having nothing sated, In the motion of moving poised aye, Within its dreams from its own dreams abated— This life let the Gods change or take away. For this endless succession of empty hours, Like deserts after deserts, voidly one, Doth undermine the very dreaming powers And dull even thought's active inaction, Tainting with fore-unwilled will the dreamed act Twice thus removed from ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... enriched, and in this respect the policy of England was not different from that of Spain, described in the beginning of this volume. As early as 1625 an English author (Hagthorne) wrote that even in time of peace it was the purpose and aim of England to undermine and beat the Dutch and Spaniards out of their trades, "which may not improperly be called a war, for the deprivation and cutting off the trades of a kingdom may be to some prince more loss if his revenues depend thereon than ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... matter of food, to me, for supplying better company. We had too much trouble with their partners in days gone by, and our kingdom is, even now, unsettled. Wherefore, turn them back or retain them yourself; for, by the infernal crown, if thou cast them hither, I will undermine the foundations of thy kingdom, until it fall and become one with ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... shun mention of it to-day, I would take this as a plain sign that he did not look forward to it with the enthusiasm which a lover ought to feel for his approaching bliss; and on such silence from him I would begin, if I could, to undermine his intention of keeping an engagement of the heart when the heart no ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... against his worst enemy. As I do not wish to treat such persons with even the appearance of disrespect, I shall endeavor to show just how the use of the hives which they have devised, has contributed to undermine the prosperity of the bees. Many of these hives have valuable properties, and if they were always used in strict accordance with the enlightened directions of those who have invented them, they would undoubtedly be real and substantial improvements ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... who find women the most interesting things in a full and interesting universe. He was an entirely good man and almost professionally on the side of goodness, his pen was a pillar of the home and he was hostile and even actively hostile to all those influences that would undermine and change—anything; but he did find women attractive. He watched them and thought about them, he loved to be with them, he would take great pains to please and interest them, and his mind was frequently dreaming quite actively of them, of championing them, saying ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the river and march straight into the city, there would have been no trouble, no tremors or doubts; but the turning back was a discouragement, and alas! the French have had too much of this of late. There were whisperers at work seeking to undermine faith in the Maid and her mission. As she says, no great hurt was done; it was but the work of a few—and some of these priests, who should better have understood the counsels of God—but a little leaven will work mightily ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots, constantly chafing under undoubted grievances, and calling vainly to Her Majesty's Government for redress, does steadily undermine the influence and reputation of Great Britain, and the respect for the British Government within the Queen's dominions. A certain section of the Press, not in the Transvaal only, preaches openly and constantly the doctrine ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... began to undermine our fort, which was situated sixty yards from Kentucke river. They began at the water-mark and proceeded in the bank some distance, which we understood by their making the water muddy with the clay; and we immediately proceeded to disappoint their design, by cutting a trench across ...
— The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone • John Filson
... wholly despised philosophy, and out of a kind of pride, scoffed at the Greek studies and literature; as, for example, he would say, that Socrates was a prating seditious fellow, who did his best to tyrannize over his country, to undermine the ancient customs, and to entice and withdraw the citizens to opinions contrary to the laws. Ridiculing the school of Isocrates, he would add, that his scholars grew old men before they had done learning with him, as if they were to use their art and plead ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... of filling it merely by their aggregation. I shall not repeat here the common and clear refutations of this absurdity, which are to be found everywhere in numbers: every one knows that it is impossible to undermine the evidence of mathematics by mere discursive conceptions; I shall only remark that, if in this case philosophy endeavours to gain an advantage over mathematics by sophistical artifices, it is because it forgets that the discussion relates solely to Phenomena and their conditions. ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... to undermine another, such sinister rivalry does a vast amount of injury to the Cause. To fill one's pocket at the expense of his conscience, or to build on the downfall of others, incapacitates one to practise or teach Christian Science. The occasional tem- [25] porary success of such an one is owing, in ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... heaviest on the subordinate orders. It is the interest of the great, therefore, to diminish kingly power as much as possible; because whatever they take from that is naturally restored to themselves; and all they have to do in the state, is to undermine the single tyrant, by which they resume their primaeval authority. Now, the state may be so circumstanced, or its laws may be so disposed, or its men of opulence so minded, as all to conspire in carrying on this business ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... for gold which followed the discovery of Columbus, the questionings which absorbed the attention of the learned, the indignation excited by the seeming vagaries of a Paracelsus, the fear and trembling lest the strange doctrine of Copernicus should undermine the faith of centuries, were all helps to the germination of the seed—stimuli to thought which urged it on to explore the new fields opened up to its occupation. This given, all that has since followed ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... Which we too long in favour have bestow'd Upon thy false, dissembling heart with us? What grief thou therewithal hast thrown on us, What shame upon our house, what dire distress Our soul endures, cannot be uttered. And durst thou, villain, dare to undermine Our daughter's chamber? durst thy shameless face Be bold to kiss her? th'rest we will conceal. Sufficeth that thou know'st I too well know All thy proceedings in thy private shames. Herein what hast thou won? thine own content, With the displeasure of thy lord and ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... stood upon the bank of the river, about sixty yards from its margin; and the purpose of the commander of the Indians was to undermine this, and blow up the garrison. Duquesne was pushing the mine under the fort with energy when his operations were discovered by the besieged. The miners precipitated the earth which they excavated ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... V. afterwards used force to reassert imperial rights over the Italian cities, acting not so much in the interest of the Empire as for the aggrandizement of the Spanish monarchy. At the same time the Papacy, which had done so much to undermine the authority of the Empire, exercised a power at once anomalous and ill-recognized except in the immediate States of the Church. By the extinction of the House of Hohenstauffen and by the assumed right to grant the investiture ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... gave lectures in his room, by which he has caught several young men. Lord Holland spoke of George III.'s letters to Lord North; the King liked Lord North, hated the Duke of Richmond. Amongst the few people he liked were Lord Loughborough and Lord Thurlow. Thurlow was always 'endeavouring to undermine the Minister with whom he was acting, and intriguing underhand with his enemies.' Loughborough used to say, 'Do what you think right, and never think of what you are to say to excuse it beforehand'—a good maxim. The Duke of Richmond in 1763 or 1764, after ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... an Influence over our Actions, and is in many Cases so impregnable a Fence to Virtue; what can more undermine Morality than that Politeness which reigns among the unthinking Part of Mankind, and treats as unfashionable the most ingenuous Part of our Behaviour; which recommends Impudence as good Breeding, and keeps a Man always ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... here when it was his to know How fared the barriers he had built between His triumph and his enemies unseen, For them to undermine and overthrow; And it was his no longer to forego The sight of them, insidious and serene, Where they were delving always and had been Left always to be ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... wide-spreading should come to an end and be superseded by something else, and that this change should be taking place under our very eyes. But, happily for me, the world-conflict which is now devastating Europe has begun to undermine in the soul of many the fetish-worship of civilization. And to assist further in breaking the spell which civilization may have cast over the imagination of most of my audience, I would remind you ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... last the men at the gate drew back for a time; but from the side attacks came a new danger. With spear butt and seax they were trying to undermine the stockade, and one could hear the creaking of the stout timbers as they tried to tear them down. It would have gone hardly with us had there been but a few more men, or if these had brought pick and spade ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... with a craft, and protected it against encroachments by adjoining unions and more especially by rival unions. The guarantee worked absolutely in the case of the latter, for the Federation knew no mercy when a rival union attempted to undermine the strength of an organized union of a craft. The trade unions have learned from experience with the Knights of Labor that their deadliest enemy was, after all, not the employers' association but the enemy from within who introduced confusion in the ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... government provides for all medical services and free education through the university level and subsidizes rice and housing. Brunei's leaders are concerned that steadily increased integration in the world economy will undermine internal social cohesion. Plans for the future include upgrading the labor force, reducing unemployment, strengthening the banking and tourist sectors, and, in general, further widening the economic ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... personal pride. He had been negligent of his personal safety at Conflans, but even then Charles had better reason to respect and protect him than in 1468, after Louis had manoeuvred for three years in every direction to harass and undermine the young duke's power, and when, too, the latter was aware of half of the machinations ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... insisting upon this necessary privilege in favour of ourselves in particular; and therefore if we do not allow that the judgment of an impartial jury is indispensably necessary in all cases whatsoever, wherein the life of man is depending, we certainly undermine the equitable force and reason of those laws, by which we ourselves are protected, and consequently are unworthy to be esteemed either ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... free. The arrest of Louis XVI. at Varennes deranged this plan. Leopold, alarmed not only by the impending fate of his sister, but lest the principles of popular liberty, extending from France, should undermine his own throne, wrote as follows to ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... take our beginning? From Space, istud litigium philosophorum, which leaves the mind equally dissatisfied, whether we deny or assert its real existence. To make it wholly ideal, would be at the same time to idealize all phenomena, and to undermine the very conception of an external world. To make it real, would be to assert the existence of something, with the properties of nothing. It would far transcend the height to which a physiologist must confine his flights, should we attempt to reconcile this apparent contradiction. It is the ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a melancholy voice, "is like pearls without a suitable dress, or food without clarified butter,[FN93] or singing without melody; they are all alike unnatural. In the same way, unclean clothes will mar beauty, bad food will undermine strength, a wicked wife will worry her husband to death, a disreputable son will ruin his family, an enraged demon will kill, and a woman, whether she love or hate, will be a source of pain. For there are few things which a woman will not do. She never brings ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... having to handle a gun and fight for his life. "I spotted him for a coward that day we stumbled on Red Cloud's band up by the Big Horn. You remember it, Dean, I thought him a villain when I learned how he was trying to undermine you. Time proved him a thief and a scoundrel, but, peace to his ashes, he died like a gentleman after all, with two Indian bullets through him, and just as rescue came. He had time to make full confession, and it was all pretty much as I suspected. ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... graceful ways. She welcomed his coming with infinite delight, and was ever ready to drop any other project when papa's brief letters and telegrams summoned her to the city. Whatever their feeling toward the doctor, her grand-parents had never betrayed them to her or sought to undermine—or rather undeceive—her loyal devotion; but never had it occurred to them as a possibility that he would assert his paternal claim and bear away with him the idol of their hearts, the image of the cherished daughter he had won from them so many years before. ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... tedious series of negotiations. Franklin sent ambassadors to argue her case before the Legislature of the mother State; the Governors and high officials exchanged long-winded letters and proclamations, and the rival Legislatures passed laws intended to undermine each other's influence. The Franklin Assembly tried menace, and threatened to fine any one who acted under a commission from North Carolina. The Legislature of the latter State achieved more by promises, having wisely offered to remit all ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... commencement of the fifteenth century no nation in Europe was at all calculated to vie with the Italian in arts of any kind, whether those whose tendency was the benefit or improvement of society, or those the practice of which serves to injure and undermine it. The artists and artisans of Italy were to be found in all the countries of Europe, from Madrid to Moscow, and so were its charlatans, its jugglers, and multitudes of its children, who lived by fraud and cunning. Therefore, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... "Even now they wander with the few they love, "Thro' subterranean gardens, by a light "Unknown on earth which hath nor dawn nor night! "Else, why those deathless structures? why the grand "And hidden halls that undermine this land? "Why else hath none of earth e'er dared to go "Thro' the dark windings of that realm below, "Nor aught from heaven itself except the God "Of Silence thro' those endless labyrinths trod?" Thus did I dream—wild, wandering dreams, I own, But such as haunt ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... himself that this was the last time he would handle it, for they would— they must—escape; and he wondered now that he could have hesitated so long, and have let the notion that Humpy Dee was quietly trying to undermine ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... submitted herself to the counsels and to the influences of a man who has endeavoured to undermine me in her affection. In saying that I make my accusation as light against her as is possible. I might make it much heavier, and yet not sin against ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... of Haman had been needed to wean him from her and to teach him to forget her. How rarely does a vile, unholy counsellor or companion seek to corrupt a private man, or a prince, or a ruler, without striving first to undermine the influence of the virtuous wife, ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... and, as the worm devours the lineaments of his mortal beauty, so the lichens and the moss and the most insignificant plants shall feed upon his columns and his pyramids, and the most humble and insignificant insects shall undermine and sap the foundations of his colossal works, and make their habitations amongst the ruins of his palaces and the falling ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... with affected pride to the historical period of the American colonial revolution against the taxation and tyranny of England, as the date of their origin. Whatever may be the facts as to the precise date of the existence, respectively, of these disreputable cables, laid to undermine the greatness and glory of the National Union, cemented as it is by the blood of the sires and sages of the Revolution, is unimportant to the purpose of the author, while the great living fact that they have been the most deadly weapon in the hands of the enemy ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... rigour of martial law any who shall attempt to undermine the spirit of the army by representing the difficulty of opposing the enemy, or ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... a singular alteration in his own habits and appearance. From being an active, tireless scout and forager, a bold and unovertakable marauder, he became lazy and apathetic; allowed gophers to burrow under him without endeavoring to undermine the settlement in his frantic endeavors to dig them out, permitted squirrels to flash their tails at him a hundred yards away, forgot his usual caches, and left his favorite bones unburied and bleaching in the sun. His eyes grew dull, his coat lusterless, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... strives to undermine the evidence for the authenticity of our present Gospels for an avowedly dogmatic purpose. He believes in the dogma of the impossibility of the supernatural; he must, for this purpose, discredit the witness of the ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... to work right and left and to undermine the walls, until large portions of them tumble over and ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... necessary to salvation, if to reject it is to merit damnation, and to undermine it is to imperil the eternal welfare of others, there is only one course open to its adherents; they must treat the heretic as they would treat a viper. He is a poisonous ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... act," Mr. Adams resumed, "intended to undermine the political virtue of the people. Two years ago our wives and daughters exhibited their allegiance to lofty principles by signing an agreement not to drink tea until the obnoxious laws then existing were repealed. Lord North laughed at the time, but he has discovered that ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... was religious with the consent of his whole faculties." It is faith's ability to engross a man's entire self, going down to the very roots of his being, that renders it indestructible. It can say of those who seek to undermine it, as Hamlet said ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... stands in juxtaposition with overwhelming millions of darker people throughout the earth, and we must cling to the caste idea if we would prevent a lapse that would taint our blood and eventually undermine our greatness. It is hard, but it is civilization. We cannot find this girl guilty. It would be declaring that marriage between a white man and a Negro ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... influence, generally speaking, is on the side of right, and for the promotion of the common weal. It is strange that such an organ of public sentiment should have been charged with the moral turpitude of receiving bribes. That it should destroy its reputation, darken its fair fame, and undermine the very foundation of its prosperity, by a course so degrading, we find it impossible to believe. We feel assured it is far removed from everything of the kind: that its course is marked by great honesty of purpose, and its ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... guest Knew care, and knew unrest, And weakness warn'd him, and he fear'd decline. And in the grave he laid a cherish'd wife, And men ignoble harass'd him with strife, And deadly airs his strength did undermine. Then from his Abbey fades The sound beloved of his victorious breath; And light's fair nursling stupor first invades, And next the crowning ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... obedience, and compared the future King to the Roman Emperor surnamed the Apostate. This made a great sensation, which was not lessened by the report that he had indited a pamphlet entitled Julian's Arts to undermine and extirpate Christianity. Johnson was subsequently condemned to a fine of one hundred marks, and imprisoned. On his release his efforts did not flag. He wrote An Humble and Hearty Address to all the Protestants in the Present Army at the time when the Stuart monarch had ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... was no section of the victorious party which had not been the object both of his flatteries and of his machinations; but never was he more unfortunate than when he attempted at once to cajole and to undermine Cromwell. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... events, that none remain unvisited by, and that bring, here the death of a husband, yonder the moral downfall of a beloved child; that lie, here in a long and serious illness, yonder in the wrecking of a warmly nursed plan;—not these undermine her (the housewife's) freshness and strength. It is the small, daily-recurring marrow and bone-gnawing cares.... How many millions of brave little house-mothers cook and scour away their vigor of life, their very ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... roots I had often watched the king-cups growing, was now in the centre of a stream as broad as the Avon by our tan-yard, and thrice as rapid. The torrent rushed round it—impatient of the divisions its great roots caused—eager to undermine and tear it up. Inevitably, if the flood did not abate, within a few hours more there would be nothing left of the fine ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... she had lamented that she had no children and no particular interests, and that her energy, such as it was, was ebbing rapidly. Of course, she had been too long in Lower Burma—eight years of Lower Burma, merely diluted with an occasional few weeks at May Myo, was enough to undermine any ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... the most sanguine confidence in a wisdom never to be deceived, it is clear that we should relax no energy within our means, but fight while we plot, and seek to conquer, while we do not neglect to undermine." ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cannot be. Do the billiard-balls when so grouped as to represent consciousness generate some second motive power distinct from, at variance with, and often stronger than, the original impetus? Clearly no scientific thinker can admit this. To do so would be to undermine the entire fabric of science, to contradict what is its first axiom and its last conclusion. If then the motion of our six billiard balls has anything, when it corresponds to consciousness, distinct in kind from what it always had, ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... began at once to undermine his rocky fortress, while the climbers undertook to scale its ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... the hearts of the country-wenches; Alcon, a quacksalver, who introduces tobacco to ruin the constitutions of the shepherds; Lincus, 'a petty-fogger,' who breeds litigation among the simple folk; and lastly Pistophanax, who seeks to undermine the worship of Pan. Colax has, it appears, already abused the love of Daphne, and won that of Dorinda from her swain Mirtillus; Techne has sown jealousy between the lovers Palaemon and Silvia; while Lincus has set Montanus and Acrysius ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... loud, too, in their praises of the Engineer officers. During the latter part of the siege the rebels, finding they could not carry the position by assault, tried hard to undermine the defences; but our Engineers were ever on the watch, and countermined so successfully that they were able to frustrate the enemy's designs on almost ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... the ground about the edges of the bed every two or three weeks for the purpose of cutting off any grass roots that may have run into the bed. If beds are made in the turf, see that they are 3 ft. or more wide, so that the grass roots will not undermine them. Against the shrub borders, this precaution may not be necessary. In fact, it is desirable that the flowers fill all the space between the overhanging branches ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretext. One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system; and thus to undermine what can not be directly overthrown. In all the changes to which you may be invited, remember that time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of governments, as of other human institutions:—that experience is the surest standard by which to test the real ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... student tries to undermine another, such sinister rivalry does a vast amount of injury to the Cause. To fill one's pocket at the expense of his conscience, or to build on the downfall of others, incapacitates one to practise or teach Christian Science. The occasional tem- [25] porary success of such an one is owing, ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... people admitted its theoretic truth they could not entirely accept it as guidance for their conduct. Then, too, the dissemination of the truth in a society based on coercion was always hindered in one and the same manner, namely, those in power, feeling that the recognition of this truth would undermine their position, consciously or sometimes unconsciously perverted it by explanations and additions quite foreign to it, and also opposed it by open violence. Thus the truth—that his life should be directed by the spiritual element which is its basis, which manifests itself as love, and which ...
— A Letter to a Hindu • Leo Tolstoy
... presence of the patient, for you must remember that he has full possession of his mental faculties and will notice every evidence of fear or worry in the faces of those who are nursing him. This will only add to his sufferings, affect his nervous system and undermine his general vitality. Read carefully the nursing department in this book and you will gain some valuable hints and ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... mortal enemies of the House of Commons, who would persuade them to think or to act as if they were a self-originated magistracy, independent of the people and unconnected with their opinions and feelings. Under a pretence of exalting the dignity, they undermine the very foundations of this House. When the question is asked here, what disturbs the people, whence all this clamour, we apply to the treasury-bench, and they tell us it is from the efforts of libellers and the wickedness ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... should not surprise a novice in theological matters; they are only misunderstandings that militate less against the Church than against the erroneous notions we have of her. To allow such difficulties to undermine faith is like overthrowing a solid wall with a soap-bubble. Common sense demands that nothing but clearly demonstrated falsity should make us change firm convictions, and such demonstration can never be made ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... shouldn't ha' run ferreting down in my part o' the country. You, or Eccles—I don't care who 'tis—you've been at my servants to get at my secrets. Some of you have. You've declared war. You've been trying to undermine me. That's a breach, I call it. Anyhow, I've come for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and want of attention to diet, are common errors with most young men, and these gradually, but at first imperceptibly, undermine the health, and lay the foundation for various forms of disease in after life. It is a very difficult thing to make young persons comprehend this. They frequently sit up as late as twelve, one, or two o'clock, without experiencing any ill effects; they ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... Jesuits; they fain Would undermine the power of the land In which they dwell, and every effort strain To take the civil sceptre in their hand. They creep, as serpents, smoothly on their prey, But subtly spread ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... He was by no means deceived as to the position in which he stood, and the few among Nero's followers in whom any spark of honour was left informed him of the incessant calumnies which were used to undermine his influence. Tigellinus and his friends dwelt on his enormous wealth and his magnificent villas and gardens, which could only have been acquired with ulterior objects, and which threw into the shade the splendour of the Emperor himself. They tried to kindle the inflammable jealousies ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... usurper's activity, energy, and vigour, his authority is liable to be soon disputed, or even set at nought It behoves him to give indications of strength and breadth of character, or of a wise, far-seeing policy, in order to deter rivals from attempting to undermine his power. Sheshonk early let it be seen that he possessed both caution and far-reaching views by his treatment of a refugee who, shortly after his accession, sought his court. This was Jeroboam, one of the highest officials in the neighbouring kingdom of Israel, whom ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... Agnes, I think if you were to speak boldly to her, you might do some good. You might begin to undermine this unlucky infatuation of her's; and I am sure, if her eyes were once opened, that the more she saw him, the less ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... then another man has the same right to violate another Law; and thus any villainy on earth may be perpetrated under the sacred names of "conscience," and "the higher laws of God!" Nothing is safe in the hands of men of such principles. These principles undermine the foundations of all society among men! As I told you last Wednesday evening in my lecture, the question before the country is not, (as the deceivers pretend,) whether God's laws are not higher than ...
— The Religious Duty of Obedience to Law • Ichabod S. Spencer
... divine title as that by which he has tenure of his kingdom; to degrade an aristocracy which is the first step of his throne; to throw down social hierarchies of which he is the head and crown; to undermine laws of which he is the highest,—is to ask of the vaults of an edifice to sap the foundation. The king could not do so, and would not. In thus overthrowing all that serves him for support, he feels that he would be rendered wholly destitute. He would be ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... attract the observation of other nations. It therefore may in the progress of time occur that opinions entirely abstract in the States in which they may prevail and in no degree affecting their domestic institutions may be artfully but secretly encouraged with a view to undermine the Union. Such opinions may become the foundation of political parties, until at last the conflict of opinion, producing an alienation of friendly feeling among the people of the different States, may involve in general destruction the happy institutions under which ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... woods, select a place where it is thick with strong, young, healthy, rapid growing trees. I commence by making a trench across so as I will get as many as I want. I may have to destroy some until I get a right start. I then undermine, taking out the trees as I advance; this gives me a chance not to destroy the roots. I care nothing about the top, because I cut them into what is called poles eight or ten feet long. Sometimes I draw them out by hitching a team when I can get them so far excavated that I can turn them down enough ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... unobserved. He even professes to speak "dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions." We may admit the want of passion and perhaps the want of partiality, but we cannot avoid seeing the ulterior intention, which is to undermine and belittle the reputation of the great figures of the Victorian Age. When the prodigious Signor Marinetti proposes to hurl the "leprous palaces" of his native city into her "fetid canals," and to build in their place warehouses and ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... went on often enough, for the two lads were always at work trying to undermine each other's principles; but they dropped into the habit of leaving off at the right time, so as to avoid quarrelling, and the days glided on in the regular routine of the court. But a great change had taken ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... powerful enemies to undermine Bourbon in the favor of the King led to the threatened loss of the Constable's dignities and lands, and provoked him to renounce the French service. After making a secret treaty with Charles V and with his ally, Henry VIII ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... from this branch of government we have most to fear. Taxes and short elections will keep them right. The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone. This will lay all things at their feet, and they are too well versed in English law to forget the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... of Saint Francis did much to undermine feudalism; and it almost regenerated the spirit of Christianity in the thirteenth century. "Man of the people," writes R. F. O'Connor, "he did more for the people than ever yet had been done by any one; whose vocation was to revive in the midst of a corrupting opulence ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... her claim to Elizabeth's crown, nor would she directly assert it. Elizabeth, then, knowing that all her danger lay in the power and influence of her own Catholic subjects, went to work, very cautiously and warily, but in a very extended and efficient way, to establish the Reformation, and to undermine and destroy all traces of Catholic power. She proceeded in this work with great circumspection, so as not to excite opposition ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... superficial in the case of her less favored sisters. The inevitable limitations of the life and of the times, the ignorance, the social prejudices, the inexplicable dissatisfaction which really haunted all things, all combined to undermine this brilliant social life, and there was a general ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... three hundred aliens who escaped military service in Seattle by renouncing their right to become citizens. Twenty-seven per cent, were shown to be I.W.W.'s of the thousands who thus escaped military service. Throughout the country a large percentage are probably of the element which is seeking to undermine American institutions. They still remain despite their affidavits that they would leave the country and there is no existing law under which they can be deported. The first move towards making this country one hundred per cent. ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... satisfaction. They affect to give a declaration of the national will, and are as ambiguous as the Delphic Oracle; and it is said that their half- measures, and determination not to see that public opinion is against them, and that a thorough change can alone undermine this military revolution, will contribute more than anything to ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... in this piece of fruitless toil, and spent, I think, three or four weeks about it. At last, finding it impossible to heave it up with my little strength, I fell to digging away the sand, to undermine it, and so to make it fall down, setting pieces of wood to thrust and guide it right in the fall. But when I had done this, I was unable to stir it up again, or to get under it, much less to move it forward towards the water; so I was forced to give it over. ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... Undermine, v. [andermin] Minar abrir camino por debajo de la tierra. Humukay magbuks ng daan sa ...
— Dictionary English-Spanish-Tagalog • Sofronio G. Calderon
... for Brigham to "bend his finger." If a governor could openly criticise polygamy, and a judge seek to undermine Young's legal and military authority, without a protest, his days of power were certainly drawing to a close. Accordingly, a big mass-meeting was held in Salt Lake City on March 3, 1863, "for the purpose of investigating certain acts of several of ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Hildebrand's decrees. Marriage was forbidden for the future; the capitular clergy had to part from their wives; but the vested interest of the parish priest was respected. In another point William directly helped to undermine his own authority and the independence of his kingdom. He exempted his abbey of the Battle from the authority of the diocesan bishop. With this began a crowd of such exemptions, which, by weakening local authority, strengthened the power of the Roman see. All these things ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... has been of these masters of consolidated industries whom it is proposed that the federal government should take under its patronage as well as under its control. They have been the stoutest and most successful opponents of organized labor, and they have tried to undermine it in a great many ways. Some of the ways they have adopted have worn the guise of philanthropy and good-will, and have no doubt been used, for all I know, in perfect good faith. Here and there they have ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... in no condition now to talk to a gentleman, and I refuse to listen. You came here to lie about me—to undermine me, and I know it, and the ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... and under the sympathy for suffering which inspired his action on such questions as the native races or the treatment of the alien Jew, there lay the sense that the degradation of any class of labour in one country affected its status in all, and that to be insular on industrial questions was to undermine everything that the pioneers of English Labour had ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... the Heads of Houses are the legitimate maintainers in this place. They exclude me, as far as may be, from the University Pulpit; and, though I never have preached strong doctrine in it, they do so rightly, so far as this, that they understand that my sermons are calculated to undermine things established. I cannot disguise from myself that they are. No one will deny that most of my sermons are on moral subjects, not doctrinal; still I am leading my hearers to the Primitive Church, if you will, but ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... is contrary to all truth.... That I have utterly, in my private conversations, disapproved of the system of the secretary of the treasury I acknowledge and avow; and this was not merely a speculative difference. His system flowed from principles adverse to liberty, and was calculated to undermine and demolish the republic by creating an influence of his department over the members of the legislature. I saw this influence actually produced, and its first fruits to be the establishment of the great outlines of his project, by the votes of the very persons who, having swallowed ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... so much nutrition that a port-manteau full of it would furnish the daily rations of any army. Luckily even her iron constitution could not stand the strain of such ideal living for long, and her growing anaemia threatened to undermine a constitution seriously impaired by the precepts of perfect health. A course of beef-steaks and other substantial viands loaded with uric acid restored her to ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... Burgundian cousin. It is curious how small was his measure of personal pride. He had been negligent of his personal safety at Conflans, but even then Charles had better reason to respect and protect him than in 1468, after Louis had manoeuvred for three years in every direction to harass and undermine the young duke's power, and when, too, the latter was aware of half of the ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... you had not been so assured of your own conduct I would not. But 'tis but reasonable that since I consent to like a man without the vile consideration of money, he should give me a very evident demonstration of his wit: therefore let me see you undermine my Lady Touchwood, as you boasted, and force her to ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... probably taken first. Against this Nebuchadnezzar could freely employ his whole force—his "horses, his chariots, his companies, and his much people"—he could bring moveable forts close up to the walls, and cast up banks against them, and batter them with his engines, or undermine them with spade and mattock. When a breach was effected, he could pour his horse into the streets, and ride down all opposition. It is the capture of the continental city which Ezekiel describes when he says:[14231] "Thus saith the Lord ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... perfection of diplomacy, but of that hereafter. I owe Lord Alphingham a spite, which I will pay off one day, for his desertion of me the moment Caroline appeared. I may do all I wish with, one word. All my present intention is, by a gradual yet sure process, to undermine Caroline's confidence in her mother, and make me her confidant instead, and if I do that, the ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... southern state of Chiapas, the assassination of a presidential candidate, several high profile kidnappings, the killing of a second high-level political figure, and renewed threats from the Chiapas rebels - combined with rising international interest rates and concerns of a devaluation to undermine investor confidence and prompt massive outflows of capital. The dwindling of foreign exchange reserves, which the central bank had been using to defend the currency, forced the new administration ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots, constantly chafing under undoubted grievances, and calling vainly to her Majesty's Government for redress, does steadily undermine the influence and reputation of Great Britain within the Queen's dominions. A section of the press, not in the Transvaal only, preaches openly and constantly the doctrine of a republic embracing all South Africa, and supports it by menacing ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... competent to make the necessary arrangements with a more than satisfactory result," when he might so easily have used his great and growing personal influence with the Chinese (he was a persona grata with them from the beginning) to undermine his chief. ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... would insist very emphatically upon marriage and the purity of the home, much more emphatically than we do now. Such a case as the one numbered 197, a beautiful instance of the sweet, old-fashioned, homely, simple life of the poor we Socialists are supposed to be vainly endeavouring to undermine—would certainly be dealt with in a ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... Catholic king to have kept a Protestant nation in working order we cannot say. At all events Matthias did not give the experiment a fair trial. He did not, indeed, attack the Royal Charter directly on the lands of the aristocracy. But he did his best to undermine it on his own. The Protestants of Braunau, on the lands of the Abbot of Braunau, and the Protestants of Klostergrab, on the lands of the Archbishop of Prague, built churches for themselves, the use of which was prohibited by the abbot and the archbishop. A dispute immediately arose as ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... Schwartzenberg on the occasion of the espousals, and of the fire which consumed the dancing-hall, and the tragic death of several persons, notably of the sister of the prince. They drew from this coincidence bad auguries; some from ill-will, and in order to undermine the enthusiasm inspired by the high fortunes of Napoleon; others from a superstitious credulity, as if there could have been any serious connection between a fire which cost the lives of several persons, and the very usual accident of a storm in June, which ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... Every attempt to undermine the integrity of the Pontiff had now failed; and Henry saw with alarm that the thunder, which he had so long feared, was about to burst on his dominions. A plan of adjustment had been arranged between his envoys and Alexander; and to defeat the chicanery of his advisers, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... a large number of 'city men' live out their lives without ever opening a book that is worth reading meditatively; for newspaper-reading in course of time must completely undermine one's mental stability. After a few years, a book that is not composed of headlines, short chapters, small paragraphs and ejaculatory sentences, is unreadable without mental effort. So that long before he is middle-aged the city man has acquired the habit of 'glancing at' ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... sinners he was translated. Yea, speedily was he taken away, lest that wickedness should alter his understanding, or deceit beguile his soul. For the bewitching of naughtiness doth obscure things that are honest; and the wandering of concupiscence doth undermine the simple mind (O how constantly true is this!). He, being made perfect in a short time, fulfilled a long time; for his soul pleased the Lord: therefore hasted He to take him away from the ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... in a hired vessell from Rye, and not in a man of war. He told me in discourse, that my Lord Chancellor is much envied, and that many great men, such as the Duke of Buckingham and my Lord of Bristoll, [George, second Earl of Bristol.] do endeavour to undermine him, and that he believes it will not be done; for that the King (though he loves him not in the way of a companion, as he do these young gallants that can answer him in his pleasures,) yet cannot be without him, for his ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... hearty breakfast, thus proving that the marvels and portents of the previous day had not begun to undermine his constitution. Finding he had time, after attending to his correspondence, to walk to Handyside's hotel in the Strand, he did so. The American was awaiting him at the end ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... always be choosing first one and then the other, and will never be able to make up its mind permanently. This will breed vacillation and uncertainty in its opinions about religion, and politics, and business, and sweethearts, and everything, and will undermine its principles, and rot them away, and make the poor thing characterless, and its success in life impossible. Every one in the ship says so. And this is not all—in fact, not the worst. For there is an enormously rich brewer in the ship who said as much as ten days ago, that if the child ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... remote and collateral. This would appear to constitute a kind and degree of knowledge to be found only in the Omniscience of the Deity. It is, in fact, by giving its full weight to this difficulty, that the doctrine of utility has been employed by some foreign writers, in their attempts to undermine the whole foundation of morals. "The goodness of actions," says Beausobre, in his Pyrrhonisme Raisonable, "depends upon their consequences, which man cannot foresee, nor accurately ascertain." What harmony, indeed, or what consistency of moral sentiment can we expect from a system, by which ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... notes afterward; they went out sketching together, and instructed each other in the ways of art; and they carefully examined the foundations of each other's beliefs, and endeavoured respectively to strengthen and undermine the same. Gradually they fell into the habit of wondering every morning whether or not they should meet during the coming day; and of congratulating themselves nearly every evening that they ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... that land. A few rich men among a multitude of poor have all the more power because they are few, and they used all their influence with the people to dethrone the Prophet from His height, and to undermine His career. These illustrious men found their best tools in the Rabbis, who circulated the sophism that the people who followed the teaching of this man must quickly come to ruin. For the poor, who willingly gave up their last possessions, must become poorer, and the ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... listen to these envoys, "dripping with French blood," and haughtily bade Venice evacuate her mainland territories.[78] For various reasons he decided to use guile rather than force. He found in Venice a secretary of the French legation, Villetard by name, who could be trusted dextrously to undermine the crumbling fabric of the oligarchy.[79] This man persuaded the terrified populace that nothing would appease the fury of the French general but the deposition of the existing oligarchy and the formation of a democratic municipality. The people and the patricians ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... some respects already an old man. He had entered, although happily he did not know it, on the last decade of his life; and was already beginning to suffer from the two diseases, gout and ophthalmia, which were soon to undermine his strength and endurance. Religion of a mystical fifteenth-century sort was deepening in him; he had undertaken this voyage in the name of the Holy Trinity; and to that theological entity he had resolved to dedicate the first new land ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... similar object in view—taking their salaries and mileages for services supposed to be performed for the benefit of the very Government they were conspiring to injure, and swearing anew the sacred oath to support and defend the very Constitution which they were moving heaven and earth to undermine and destroy! ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... I said. I have always entertained the opinion that frauds in elections are more dangerous crimes than cheating, theft and robbery, because they are committed against the whole people and sap and undermine republican institutions. I have always denounced them, or anything approaching them, when committed by ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... calmly, and in the faith of the Trinity, for what they are fighting and if the aims of both justify all this horrible misery and devastation. On this account, and with an eye to the assertion of several English Statesmen that the war was begun and carried on with the determined end to undermine Her Majesty's authority in South Africa, and to establish in the whole of South Africa a Government independent of Her Majesty's Government, we consider it our duty to declare that this War was only commenced as a measure of defence and for the purpose ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... development that it is small wonder they grow worse as they grow older in service. They either dislike the men and use them accordingly, or they make secret compacts with them for surreptitious favors, which undermine discipline and corrupt such morals as prisoners may be supposed to possess. Often, however, they will solicit favors from prisoners, and, when the latter seek some accommodation in return, grin in their face, or austerely threaten to report them. Their brutality is sometimes quite whimsical ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... and, more than any others, perhaps, by the politicians. Last month it was decided to strike a dangerous blow at us and our interests. A bill is to come before the Senate before very long which is framed purposely to undermine our power. ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Pope Gregory XI moved back again to Rome after the popes had been exiles for seventy years, during which much had happened to undermine the papal power and supremacy. Yet the discredit into which the papacy had fallen during its stay at Avignon was as nothing compared with the disasters which befell it ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... examined whether or not they were good Christians. As they could only speak very bad Portuguese, while two of them spoke good Dutch, having resided several years in the low countries, a Dutch Jesuit who was born at Bruges in Flanders, and had resided thirty years in India, was sent to them, to undermine and examine them; in which they behaved so well, that they were holden and esteemed for good and Catholic Christians; yet were they still suspected, as being strangers and Englishmen. The Jesuits told them that they would be sent prisoners into Portugal, and advised them to leave off their ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... near the equator. The Venetians call these worms bissa, and quantities of them come into life in both the ports of Alexandria, in Egypt. These worms, which are a cubit long and sometimes more, and never thicker than your little finger, undermine the solidity of ships which lie too long at anchor. The Spanish sailors call this pest broma. It was therefore because he feared the bromas and was wearied out with struggling against the currents that the Admiral allowed ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... bell-crowned hat, and a long, pointed, swallow-tailed coat showed that the artist had in his mind the conventional dandy, as shown in prints of thirty or forty years ago, rather than any actual human aspect of the time. But it was passed round among the boys and made its laugh, helping of course to undermine the master's authority, as "Punch" or the "Charivari" takes the dignity out of an obnoxious minister. One morning, on going to the schoolroom, Master Langdon found an enlarged copy of this sketch, with its label, pinned on the door. He took it down, smiled a little, put ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... marked improvement. Mrs. Stowe relates a very interesting story of a city-girl who had all to gratify her that fond parents could procure, and, though constitutionally strong, this hothouse, fashionable life had began to undermine her general health, and having exhausted the skill of the regular physician, her condition became so alarming that other counsel was sought; and this new disciple of Esculapius was a shrewd, honest man, and wont to get at the root of difficulties. He saw at a glance that the patient's ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... praise, E'en as a bird, conceal'd in sylvan ways, May laud the rose, and wish, from hour to hour, That he had petals like the empress-flower, And there could grow, unwing'd, and be a bud, With all his warblings ta'en at singing-flood And turned to vagaries of the wildest scent To undermine the meekness in ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... ideas and habits was bound to loosen to some extent the Brahmans' hold upon Hindu society, for that hold is chiefly rooted in the immemorial sanctity of custom, which new habits and methods imported from the West necessarily tended to undermine. Scrupulous—and, according to many earnest Englishmen, over-scrupulous—as we were to respect religious beliefs and prejudices, the influence of Western civilization could not fail to clash directly or indirectly with many of the ordinances of Hindu orthodoxy. In non-essentials ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... only in name. She, the Queen of England, and he, king of this queen. What a proud, intoxicating thought was that! And what plans, what hopes might not be twined with it! Five years of sway—was not that a time long enough to undermine the throne of the royal boy and to sap his authority? Who could conjecture whether the people, once accustomed to the regency of the queen, might not prefer to remain under her sceptre, instead of committing themselves to this feeble youth? The people must be constrained ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... your place, I am sure I should do what you are doing, for I have always told myself that those who marry with points unsettled between them have taken the first step toward unhappiness. Suspicion and deceit would undermine the greatest love that ever existed. Acts in the past that cannot be explained create suspicion, and those in the present that are ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... ambitious just desire, To mastery in so fire an art aspire, Must all extreams first diligently shun, And in a settled course of vertue run. Let him not fortune with stiff greatness climb, Nor, courtier-like, with cringes undermine: Nor all the brother blockheads of the pot, Ever persuade him to become a sot; Nor flatter poets to acquire the fame Of, I protest, a pretty gentleman. But whether in the war he wou'd be great, Or, in the ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... and with the greatest alacrity they would do their leader's bidding. But no sooner had they reached a safe distance than they began to consult how they were to manage this new and unlooked for phase of affairs, which seemed destined to undermine all their former arrangements and to overthrow their entire calculations and plans. But Duffel could not be more determined to avoid defeat than they were, and they set down the thwarting or overreaching him as the ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... recovered a little, he told them the trick the gipsy woman had played him; and yet for all that, he dug a hole, more than a fathom deep, in the place pointed out to him, in spite of all his neighbours could say; and had he not been forcibly prevented by one of them, when he was beginning to undermine the foundations of the house, he would have brought the whole of it down about his ears. The story spread all over the city; so that the little boys in the streets used to point their fingers at him, and shout in his ears the story of the gipsy's ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... stupid grudge was at the bottom of this cruel business. The king, on reading the petition, presented by the trembling lad on his knees, became furious, and, dashing it back into the child's face, accused the mother of plotting to undermine his power, saying he knew her to be at heart a rebel, who hated him and his dynasty with all the rancor of her Peguan ancestors, the natural enemies of Siam. Thus lashing himself into a rage of hypocritical patriotism, and seeking to justify himself by condemning her, he sent one of his ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... when slave captives were not valuable; but as soon as slavery became instituted in any form, then women slaves were particularly valued, not only for their labor, but because they might be either concubines or wives. It is evident, then, that war and slavery would thus indirectly tend to undermine the maternal system. ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... persons who are called "soakers." Scattered over the country are thousands of men and women who do not go to bestial excesses, but who steadily undermine their constitutions by persistent tippling. Such a man as a commercial traveller imbibes twenty or thirty nips in the course of the day; he eats well in the evening, though he is usually repelled by the sight of food in the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... our civilization should spring. The mad quest for gold which followed the discovery of Columbus, the questionings which absorbed the attention of the learned, the indignation excited by the seeming vagaries of a Paracelsus, the fear and trembling lest the strange doctrine of Copernicus should undermine the faith of centuries, were all helps to the germination of the seed—stimuli to thought which urged it on to explore the new fields opened up to its occupation. This given, all that has since followed came out in regular order of development, and need be here considered ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... prairie farms of the West are now brought into competition with the fields of Great Britain in supplying the Englishman's table, and seem not unlikely, within this generation, to break down the aristocratic holding of land, and so perhaps to undermine aristocracy itself." ...
— The New Minister's Great Opportunity - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... a second intifadah that broke out in September 2000. The resulting widespread violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel's military response, and instability within the Palestinian Authority continue to undermine progress toward a permanent agreement. Following the death of longtime Palestinian leader Yasir ARAFAT in November 2004, the election of his successor Mahmud ABBAS in January 2005 could bring a ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... their throne up on this temporal shore, As flatterers bade that wiser king Canute, Thence to command the advancing tides of battle Till one ensanguined sea whelm throne and king And kingdom, friend, I take my woman's way, Smile in mine enemies' faces with a heart All hell, and undermine them hour by hour! This island scarce can fend herself from France, And now Spain holds the keys of all the world, How should we fight her, save that my poor wit Hath won the key to Philip? Oh, I know ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Romans were bravely repelled until, on the night of the 22d of September, two soldiers of the Fifteenth Legion contrived to creep, unobserved, to the foot of one of the highest towers of the wall; and began, silently, to undermine its foundations. Before morning broke, they had got in so far that they could not be perceived from the walls. Still they worked in, leaving a few stones in their place, to support the tower until the last moment. Then they struck these away, and ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... who, like him, had long been endeavouring to undermine the authority which was the only safeguard to the morality of the school, felt themselves distinctly baffled. Mackworth had been put to utter rout by Bliss, and though he was almost bursting with dark spite, would not venture to do much; Jones had become a perfect joke through ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... of your church were like them we should quickly bid adieu to all hope of converting these regions, but we are thankful to be able to say that such folks are not numerous; there are, moreover, causes at work quite sufficient to undermine even their zeal. Their sons return at the vacations, from Oxford and Cambridge, puppies, full of the nonsense which they have imbibed from Platitude professors; and this nonsense they retail at home, where it fails not to make some impression, whilst the daughters scream—I beg ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... speaks of laying up treasure in heaven as opposed to the treasures which men store up on earth; and He points out that whenever things are put aside unused, in order that the owner may comfort himself by the thought that they are there if he wants them, decay and corruption begin at once to undermine and destroy them. What exactly the treasure in heaven can be it is hard to define. It cannot be anything quite so sordid as good deeds done for the sake of spiritual investment, because our Saviour was very severe ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... fiend from his bright home in this little star. Again, we hear of it at a later period, when Sir Robert Walpole bestowed the ring, among far richer jewels, on the lady of a British legislator, whose political honor he wished to undermine. Many a dismal and unhappy tale might be wrought out of its other adventures. All this while, its ominous tinge of dusky red had been deepening and darkening, until, if laid upon white paper, it cast the mingled hue of night and blood, strangely illuminated ...
— Other Tales and Sketches - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... always showed sympathy. Let news of a single wrong to a serf get through the hedges about the Russian majesty, and woe to the guilty master! Many of these wrongs came to Nicholas's notice; and he came to hate the system, and tried to undermine it. Opposition met him, of course; not so much the ponderous laziness of Peter's time as an opposition, polite and elastic, which never ranted and never stood up—for then Nicholas would have throttled ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... terror and dismay, And gives great Hector the predestined day. Strong in themselves, but stronger in his aid, Close to the works their rigid siege they laid. In vain the mounds and massy beams defend, While these they undermine, and those they rend; Upheaved the piles that prop the solid wall; And heaps on heaps the smoky ruins fall. Greece on her ramparts stands the fierce alarms; The crowded bulwarks blaze with waving arms, Shield touching shield, a long refulgent row; Whence hissing darts, incessant, rain ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... might envy America her Washington, if she could not herself boast of an Alfred, worthy also of being called the Great—a sovereign who voluntarily conceded liberty to his people, and founded it on bases which all the inglorious artifices of his successors have been unable to undermine—but, alas! such men, like Epic poets, seem destined to succeed but once ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... inviolable rule, as did also his friend Southampton, never to enter into any connection with the royal mistresses. The king's favorite was Mrs. Palmer, afterwards created duchess of Cleveland; a woman prodigal, rapacious, dissolute, violent, revengeful. She failed not in her turn to undermine Clarendon's credit with his master; and her success was at this time made apparent to the whole world. Secretary Nicholas, the chancellor's great friend, was removed from his place; and Sir Harry Bennet, his avowed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... of which, looming large, warn us off even while they hold. He did too much for us surely ever to leave us free—free of judgment, free of reaction, even should we care to be, which heaven forbid: he laid his hand on us in a way to undermine as in no other case the power of detached appraisement. We react against other productions of the general kind without "liking" them the less, but we somehow liked Dickens the more for having forfeited half the claim to appreciation. That process belongs to ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... It is composed of a brave, a free, a virtuous, and an intelligent people. Our country abounds in the necessaries, the arts, and the comforts of life. A general prosperity is visible in the public countenance. The means employed by the British cabinet to undermine it have recoiled on themselves; have given to our national faculties a more rapid development, and, draining or diverting the precious metals from British circulation and British vaults, have poured them into those of the United States. It is a ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... then, that soon after the birth of Romulus and his brother Remus, Amulius, King of Alba, fearing that they might one day undermine his authority, ordered that they should be exposed on the banks of the Tiber; and that in this situation the infant Romulus was suckled by a wild beast; that he was afterward educated by the shepherds, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... trappings, and though this did no one any harm, they grumbled and seemed hurt. It is an ineradicable human trait to turn critical eyes on new-found fortune, and to insist upon moderation most of all in those who used to be our equals. Crossing the Po, Caecina tried to undermine the loyalty of the Othonians by negotiations and promises. They retaliated with the same weapons, and when they had finished bandying empty and fine-sounding phrases about Peace and Union, Caecina devoted all his attention and plans to an ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... reproach, liberally bestowed for some years past, by the Whigs and Tories, upon each other. We charge the former with a design of destroying the established Church, and introducing fanaticism and freethinking in its stead. We accuse them as enemies to monarchy; as endeavouring to undermine the present form of government, and to build a commonwealth, or some new scheme of their own, upon its ruins. On the other side, their clamours against us, may be summed up in those three formidable words, Popery, Arbitrary Power, and the Pretender. Our accusations against them we endeavour ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... the delegates was the problem of defense. After Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" speech, the delegates made provisions for developing a military establishment. What they in fact did was to undermine the regular militia through the formation of "Independent Companies" in the counties. The revolutionary government which was evolving became a little more clearly defined when the Convention instructed each county to elect two delegates ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... again to mar all the prosperity of the colony, and to undermine all its foundations of growth and happiness. The Mohican Indians, on the east side of the North river, and whose territory extended to the Connecticut, were allies of the English. Uncas, the chief of this tribe, declared that Governor Stuyvesant was ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... anxious as the sultan was, as well as myself, that I should present him with an heir, that happiness was denied me, and was eventually the cause of my ruin. The queen mother, and the Kislar Aga, both of whom I had affronted, were indefatigable in their attempts to undermine my power. The whole universe, I may say, was ransacked for a new introduction into the seraglio, whose novelty and beauty might seduce the sultan from my arms. Instead of counter-plotting, as I might have done, I was pleased at their ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and sung songs in his praise, would become his bitterest enemies so soon as he ceased paying for their friendship with position, with pensions, with honors, and with orders. He spent hundreds of thousands yearly to gain friends and admirers, but still he was in constant fear that some enemy would undermine him. This had indeed once happened. During the time that the king's favor was shared equally with Count Bruhl, Count Sulkovsky, and Count Hennicke, whilst playing cards, a piece of gold was given to the king, upon which was represented the crown of Poland, resting ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... sea) 343. excavator, sapper, miner. honeycomb (sponge) 252.1. V. be concave &c adj.; retire, cave in. render concave &c adj.; depress, hollow; scoop, scoop out; gouge, gouge out, dig, delve, excavate, dent, dint, mine, sap, undermine, burrow, tunnel, stave in. Adj. depressed &c v.; alveolate^, calathiform^, cup-shaped, dishing; favaginous^, faveolate^, favose^; scyphiform^, scyphose^; concave, hollow, stove in; retiring; retreating; cavernous; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Some who most bitterly condemned what he did gave the most emphatic proof that what he did was necessary. Nor can they honestly defend themselves by saying that their partisan attacks on the treaty were justifiable reprisal. Before he ever made his appeal they were doing all in their power to undermine his influence at home and abroad, and he knew it. The appeal was no reflection on Republicans as such, nor any minimization of the heroic service rendered in the war by Republicans and Democrats alike in the fighting and civilian ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... you have in part acknowledged it, by your laughing at our easy delivery of your cautionary towns: The best is, we are used by you as well as your own princes of the house of Orange: We and they have set you up, and you undermine their power, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... "I fear that you have allowed your intercourse with this worldly city to undermine your moral sense. It is useless to dangle rich bribes before the editorial eyes. Peaceful Moments cannot be muzzled. You doubtless mean well, according to your somewhat murky lights, but we are not for sale, except at fifteen cents weekly. From the hills of Maine to the ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... Belgium and Holland should be one. But in doing this, the statesmen or politicians concerned failed to take into account certain factors and facts which must inevitably, in the course of time, undermine their arrangements. Nations cannot be arbitrarily manufactured to suit the convenience of others. There is a chemistry in nationalities which has laws of its own, and will not be ignored. Between the Hollanders and the Belgians there existed not merely a negative ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... doing he reopened the old disputes with Spain. In vain did he seek to avert bickerings by suggesting a friendly understanding about Hayti. Godoy was determined to bicker. And, as the war changed its character, the old Latin affinities helped that adventurer to undermine the monarchical league and to draw back Spain to the traditional ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... anybody here who takes pleasure in them, who thinks that such writing and such witticisms as he gets purveyed to him in these sheets do really help the cause of truth and intellectual freedom, I shall not attack his position from the front. I shall try to undermine it. I shall aim at rousing in him such a state of feeling as may suddenly convince him that what is injured by writing of this sort is not the orthodox Christian, or the Church, or Jesus of Nazareth, but always and inevitably the man who ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... referring to her wiles of speech, of dress, of flattery, and of love, think of her in the arena of politics, joining her forces to infidelity, and with the disbelievers of the Bible, to obtain for woman a place for which she is not fitted, and which will destroy her peace, injure and undermine her influence in the home, and cause her to neglect wifehood and motherhood, to turn from the interior world of a quiet home, to the outside world of conflict and strife. It is the boast of a writer in favor of "Woman's Rights," that "among the disbelievers ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... closed over the last than the hand of Heaven fell upon their destroyer. That Louis XVI. was not the friend of this member of his family can excite no surprise, but must rather challenge admiration. He had been seduced by his artful and designing regicide companions to expend millions to undermine the throne, and shake it to pieces under the feet of his relative, his Sovereign, the friend of his earliest youth, who was aware of the treason, and who held the thunderbolt, but would not crush him. But ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... Kent Page?" asked Stephen in surprise, and remembered that his mother had once accused Corinna of trying to "undermine society." ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... American colonial revolution against the taxation and tyranny of England, as the date of their origin. Whatever may be the facts as to the precise date of the existence, respectively, of these disreputable cables, laid to undermine the greatness and glory of the National Union, cemented as it is by the blood of the sires and sages of the Revolution, is unimportant to the purpose of the author, while the great living fact that ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... he pursued Sheba through all the country of Israel, one told him that he was in a strong city, called Abelbeth-maachah. Hereupon Joab went thither, and set about it with his army, and cast up a bank round it, and ordered his soldiers to undermine the walls, and to overthrow them; and since the people in the city did not admit him, he was ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... manifesto was a final word of warning, in which the people were reminded that for seven months, while on the brink of ruin, they are to stand without representation; also reminding them of all that may be done in that time to undermine their hopes, and to obtain a pliable and subservient Parliament, if, indeed, any Parliament at all be convoked at the time promised by ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... after the wedding, while they were visiting her friends, and outwardly on good terms. He seemed resolved to shake and combat both her religious principles and her views of the family state. He tried to undermine her faith in Christianity as a rule of life by argument and by ridicule. He set before her the Continental idea of the liberty of marriage; it being a simple partnership of friendship and property, the parties to which were allowed by one another ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... every part of the world. The Catholic nations will never allow the head of their Church to be robbed of his independence and reduced to be the subject of a foreign Prince. They will not suffer him to be degraded by a faction which, under the cloak of his venerable name, is endeavoring to undermine and destroy his power. In order that the Bishop of Rome, who is at the same time the Sovereign Pastor of the Church, may be able to exercise the duties of his exalted office, it is necessary that he should be ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... were otherwise: that I could beat him, whilst he rail'd at me! 'Sfoot, I'll learn to conjure and raise devils, but I'll see some issue of my spiteful execrations. Then there's Achilles, a rare engineer! If Troy be not taken till these two undermine it, the walls will stand till they fall of themselves. O thou great thunder-darter of Olympus, forget that thou art Jove, the king of gods, and, Mercury, lose all the serpentine craft of thy caduceus, if ye take not that little ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, found himself confronted with great difficulties in the siege of Byzantium, he set his men to undermine the walls. His desires, however, miscarried, for no sooner had the operations been begun than a crescent moon suddenly appeared in the heavens and discovered his plans to his adversaries. The Byzantines ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... absorbing, if not the most aggressive of all the Powers; and a perpetual temptation alike to merchant and to missionary, who, each in different directions, finding the feudalism and spirit of isolation barriers to their path, will not cease to batter them in breach, or undermine them to their downfall. Such seems to be the probable fate of Japan, and its consummation is little more than a question of time. When all is accomplished, whether the civilising process will make them as ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... anti-Semitism of the West was after all only a weak aftermath of the infantile disease of Europe—the medieval Jew-hatred—whereas culturally retrograde Russia was still suffering from the same infection in its acute, "childish" form. The social and cultural anti-Semitism of the West did not undermine the modern foundations of Jewish civil equality. But Russian Judaeophobia, more governmental than social, being fully in accord with the entire regime of absolutism, produced a system aiming not only at the disfranchisement, but also at the direct physical annihilation of the Jewish people. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... is the duty of the ministry to discourage all republican tendencies and specious attempts to degrade the King to the rank of a mere superior chief, as calculated to undermine his influence and authority, and place the islands ...
— Speeches of His Majesty Kamehameha IV. To the Hawaiian Legislature • Kamehameha IV
... honorable man. And it is therefore a considerable tribute to the malefic influence of apartment-house life that he had no suspicion of the gross anti-social immorality of his act in tipping the chef. Clearly it was an act calculated to undermine the chef's virtue. If all the other experienced dwellers did the same, it was also a silly act, producing no good effect at all. But if only a few of them did it, then it was an act which resulted in the remainder of the ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... seducer the more intensely; only the more concentrated upon one object all the womanly and tender feelings denied every other and less sinful vent. But she felt her shame, though she sought to conceal it, and a yet more gnawing grief than even that of shame contributed to prey upon her spirits and undermine her health. Yet, withal, in Montreal's presence she was happy, even in regret; and in her declining health she had at least a consolation in the hope to die while his love was undiminished. Sometimes they made short excursions, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... affirm. I have betrayed myself; But there's no torture in the mystic wells Which undermine your palace, nor in those Not less appalling cells, the "leaden roofs," To force a single name from me of others. The Pozzi[397] and the Piombi were in vain; They might wring blood from me, but treachery never. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... scowls; an epitome of brutality. Away with modesty, good-nature, and forbearance. Wipe the blush from your cheek for ever. Your hunting-ground will be the crowded city. You will live alone in its midst, holding communion with none, admitting neither friend nor guest; for such would undermine your power. Scruple not to perform the deeds of darkness in broad daylight: select your love-adventures with a view to the public entertainment: and finally, when the fancy takes you, swallow a raw cuttle-fish, and die. Such are the delights ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Consules, the last favourable date for attacking France would have been in 1887. Bismarck sinned beyond forgiveness in not provoking a war at that time. More than that, his manoeuvres to undermine the credit of Russia and his policy of intimidation towards France, by exciting the hatred of both countries against Germany, only served ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... I leave every man to decide whether the result of any one of these experiments can be said to countenance a suspicion, that a diffusive mode of choosing representatives of the people tends to elevate traitors and to undermine the public liberty. ...
— The Federalist Papers
... venerable hermit, "hope is at all times our duty, and despair our crime. It is not in the power of events to undermine the felicity of the virtuous. Goblins, and spirits of darkness, are permitted a certain scope in this terrestrial scene; but their power is bounded; beyond a certain line they cannot wander. In vain do they threaten innocence ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... we see, let us rejoice, In peace and loyalty, And still despise the factious noise Of those that vainly try To undermine our happiness, That they may by it get; Knavery has great increase When ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... the outset—if, for the sake of power, they allied themselves with a man who had deserted all alliances he had ever made; that he had deserted them before, after a treaty made, and had then deserted Perceval, after endeavoring to undermine Castlereagh; his conduct to whom had injured himself with the public in the most serious manner, in having allowed him to retain his office and undertake that melancholy expedition, five months after he had declared him so incapable that he put his own resignation upon ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... the less reserved became those who were instructed to undermine his fidelity toward his master, the Florentine Envoy. They represented to him how Christians, who had abjured their creed and embraced the Moslem faith, had risen to the highest offices, even to the post of grand vizier, ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... bought and sold; the countless young people, who have, as we say, been educated, but who have not been taught the principles and habits which lead to honorable living; the thousands in our great cities who are driven into surroundings which pervert and undermine character. And worse still, the good, instead of uniting to labor for a better state of things, misunderstand and thwart one another. They divide into parties, are jealous and contentious, and waste their time and exhaust their strength in foolish ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... effects, being non-sublatcd as it were, a kind of existence called 'empirical' (or 'conventional'—vyavaharika), you yourself acknowledge that fundamentally they are nothing but products of avidya; you thus undermine your own position. We have, on the other hand, already disposed of this your view above, when proving that in all cases effects are originated by real causes only. Nor may you plead that what perception tells us in ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... deeply deplored that promotions were no longer due to military efficiency alone, but also to victories achieved at the courts of princes. To this circumstance, opening up, as it did, an anything but reassuring view of the good faith of the authorities, was to be added yet another, also tending to undermine the soundness of the army: the ever-increasing luxury apparent in military circles. Of necessity, and in the true interests of the army, the best material in the corps of officers—the members of the old noble ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... either in Scripture, or in that valuable code of morality which the writing-master proposes to youth as the pattern of their imitation. "I have sometimes observed," he will say, "that vicious intercourse has a tendency to undermine good morals;" and he illustrates his position by the fate of an early friend, who went to the dogs from keeping bad company. Or again, "It may be safely affirmed," he observes, "that a conciliatory reply will frequently allay irritation in an angry assailant;" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... responsible to the Empire. Another influence was the rise of a super-civic philosophy, derived chiefly from the writings of Plato (see footnote 1, page 42), which held that certain men could be above the State and yet by their wisdom in part direct it. The two influences combined to undermine the resisting strength of ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... daily. But after much attentive observation and mature reflection, he became deeply impressed with the conviction that the practice was not only useless, but hurtful. He became convinced that it tends to lead men to intemperance; to undermine their constitutions; and to sow the seeds of death, temporal and eternal. And he felt that he could not be justified in continuing to cultivate his farm by means of a practice which was ruining the bodies and souls of his fellow-men. He therefore called his men ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... undermine settled fallacies, and to scatter doubt among conventional certitudes; and this loosening of foundations prepared the way for a bolder political projector, who delivered his frontal attack in disdain of the philosopher's warnings. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... been bringing down the shining particles and forming the nuggets for us? Yet, strange to tell, if a digger steal away, prospecting for this true gold, into the unexplored solitudes around us, there is no danger that any will dog his steps, and endeavor to supplant him. He may claim and undermine the whole valley even, both the cultivated and the uncultivated portions, his whole life long in peace, for no one will ever dispute his claim. They will not mind his cradles or his toms. He is not confined to a claim twelve feet square, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
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