"Degrade" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... apartment fifteen feet square, which hardly gave them room to pass one another. Benson was the only person who entered his protest against the proceeding. He declared it was a shame that his countrywomen should degrade themselves so before foreigners; but his expostulations were only laughed at: nor could he even persuade his wife and sister-in-law to quit the place, though he stalked off himself in high dudgeon, and wrote a letter to the Episcopal Banner, inveighing against the shameless ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... bringing the precepts of art within the pale of our accepted literature, Sir Joshua Reynolds has given to art a better position. Would that there were no counteracting circumstances which still keep it from reaching its proper rank! Some there are, which materially degrade it, amongst which is the attempt to force patronage; the whole system of Art Unions, and of Schools of Design, the "in forma pauperis" petitioning and advertising, and the rearing innumerable artists, ill-educated in all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... as every collector knows, are among the most short-lived of all volumes. This is more especially true of those with illustrations, for their extra attractiveness serves but to degrade a comely book into a dog-eared and untidy thing, with leaves sere and yellow, and with no autumnal grace to mellow their decay. Long before this period, however, the nursery artist has marked them for his own, and with crimson lake and Prussian blue ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... floating speculations into recognised realities, require to be defended less strenuously than in the early doubtful phase of their being, and still less need for their support virulent onslaughts upon antagonistic views. It is no longer necessary to degrade some painters utterly for the proper exaltation of some others; or it may be better to say, to deify one by the damnification of the whole balance of the fraternity. There have been victims enough on the ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... her that, and a dozen other equally simple facts, for her own sake, and for the sake of that coming Demos which she is to bring into the world; a Demos which, if we can only keep it healthy in body and brain, has before it so splendid a future: but which, if body and brain degrade beneath the influence of modern barbarism, is but too likely to follow the Demos of ancient Byzantium, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... what you mean, sir. Mr. Monson, that would be degrading lawful wedlock to the level of a bet—a game of cards—a mercenary, contemptible bargain. No, sir—nothing shall ever induce me to degrade this honorable estate to such ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... for the antagonists he had mostly to deal with. He took knaves and fools on his shield well. He stole away its cloak from grave imposture. If he reduced other things below their true value, making them seem worthless and hollow, he did not degrade the pretensions of tyranny and superstition below their true value, by making them seem utterly worthless and hollow, as contemptible as they were odious. This was the service he rendered to truth and mankind! His Candide is a masterpiece of wit. It has been ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... responsibility rests upon every colored leader, moral and civic, in these northern States to take an especial interest in their newly arriving brethren. You must teach them not to take their liberty to be ladies and gentlemen for license to degrade themselves and their race here. You must urge them to avoid the deadly vice and wasting extravagance of the unhealthy congested city. They should find their homes and rear their families in the suburbs, where they can buy their ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... to be allowed to be conformed to Christ; St. Paul thought it so, so have all good men. The whole Church of God, from the days of Christ to the present, has been ever held in shame and contempt by men of this world. Proud men have reasoned against its Divine origin; crafty men have attempted to degrade it to political purposes: still it has lasted for many centuries; it will last still, through the promised help of God the Holy Ghost; and that same promise which is made to it first as a body, is assuredly made also to every one of us who seeks grace from God through it. The grace ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... September 2, 1843, Hone records that: "Bennett, the editor of the Herald, is on a tour through Great Britain, whence he furnishes lies and scandal for the infamous paper which has contributed so much to corrupt the morals and degrade the taste of the people of New York." In one of the last entries of the Diary, a few months before Hone's death, allusion is made to a personal attack on the editor by the defeated candidate of the Locofoco party for the District-Attorneyship. ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... is said that (1) there must be some one authority in a household and that this should be the man; (2) woman will neglect the home if she is left free to enter politics or a profession; (3) politics will degrade her; (4) when independent and self-asserting she will lose her influence over man; and (5) most women do not want to vote or ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... my own merits, which, if they exist at all, none ought to know so well as my countrymen, or to vindicate myself against suspicions which, if without foundation, they ought not to entertain. I cannot, therefore, humiliate myself, or degrade my friends, so far as, at this time of day, and under the circumstances in which I am placed, to furnish you or any other with a confession of my political faith, to be read either in the Richmond church or elsewhere, to the end that ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... protect the young from temptation while you are the silent partner of criminals? Have you ever contributed to send missionaries to Madagascar money that was received from people whose business it is to debauch your neighbor's sons and, if possible, degrade his daughters? No? Thank God for that. Do you know of any member of this church who is so guilty? You suspect as much? Then why do you not go on your knees to him and beg him to turn from his evil ways? Do you not know that by keeping silent you tacitly endorse his infamy—that ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... rose from his seat by the fire and approached the window. "What a disgusting appearance he presents!" said he, gazing on the slowly-receding figure. "It angers me to see a man degrade himself by ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... particulars that dull brains require To constitute the spiritless shape of Fact, They bow to, calling the idol, Demonstration. A whipping to the Moralists who preach That misery is a sacred thing: for me, I know no cheaper engine to degrade a man, Nor any half so sure. This Stripling's mind Is shaken till the dregs float on the surface; And, in the storm and anguish of the heart, He talks of a transition in his Soul, And dreams that he is happy. We dissect The senseless body, and why not the mind?— These ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... a razor to remove his beard; and the luxury of a barber to perform that essential part of his toilet was an expense which his foes could not incur. It was the studied endeavor of those who now rode upon the crested yet perilous billows of power, to degrade royalty to the lowest depths of debasement and contempt—that the beheading of the king and the queen might be regarded as merely the execution of a male and a female felon dragged from the ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... "Misfortune cannot degrade a man, unless he be intrinsically mean; it rather elevates him."—"If we could penetrate the judgments of God, we should find that frequently the objects most to be pitied were the conquerors, not the conquered; ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... year, and the hours of weekly attendance did not do more than make one day's work a week for a working man; but Mr Vavasor had been appointed an assistant commissioner, and with every Lord Chancellor he argued that all Westminster Hall, and Lincoln's Inn to boot, had no right to call upon him to degrade himself by signing his name to accounts. In answer to every memorial he was offered the alternative of freedom with half his income; and so the thing ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... excites admiration and to heap contempt on misery, to raise power into tyranny, and to make tyranny absolute; to thrust down that which is low still lower, and to make wretches desperate: to exalt magistrates into kings, kings into gods; to degrade subjects to the rank of slaves, and slaves to the condition of brutes. The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE; it is a noble or royal hunt, in ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... preferring to trust myself to French honour. I have not had reason to complain of that confidence from Fontainbleau to Avignon; but between that town and this, I have been insulted, and have been in great danger. The Provencals degrade themselves. Since I have been in France, I have not had a good regiment of Provencals under my orders. They are good for nothing but to make a noise. The Gascons are boasters, but at least they are brave."—At these words, one of the party, who no doubt was a Gascon, pulled ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... for using personal violence," said Mr. Groschut, very grandly. "He should have borne anything sooner than degrade his sacred calling." Mr. Groschut had hoped to extract from the Canon some expression adverse to the Dean, and to be able to assure himself that he had ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... that this passage refers to Rear-Admiral Maxse, yet, well as we may know our man, we have him presented like an awkward, silly, comic puppet from a show. The professor of slang could degrade the conduct of the soldiers on board the Birkenhead; he could make the choruses from Samson Agonistes seem like the Cockney puerilities of a comic news-sheet. It is this high-sniffing, supercilious slang that I attack, for I can see that it ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... not object to an educational or property test, but let the law be so clear that no one clothed with state authority will be tempted to perjure and degrade himself by putting one interpretation upon it for the white man and another for the black man. Study the history of the South, and you will find that where there has been the most dishonesty in the matter of voting, there you will find to-day the lowest moral ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... herself on Elizabeth's mercy she found prison and finally, after nineteen years, the scaffold. An inquiry was held concerning her case, but no verdict was rendered because it did not suit Elizabeth to degrade her sister sovereign more than was necessary. Not for the murder of her husband, but for complicity in a plot against Elizabeth, was Mary finally condemned to die. In spite of the fact that she did ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... showy spectacles for the imagination, or quaint paradoxes and epigrammatic disquisitions for the understanding: least of all was it to gratify in any shape the selfishness of its professors, to minister to their malignity, their love of money, or even of fame. For persons who degrade it to such purposes, the deepest contempt of which his kindly nature could admit was at all times in store. 'Unhappy mortal!' says he to the literary tradesman, the man who writes for gain, 'Unhappy mortal, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... emancipation), go ask his slaves their opinion of the merits of their master's invention, and their faces will kindle with the half ingenuous blush of conscious degradation, as they denounce his project, as the last device of insolence to degrade and ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... recovery, and the same should be observed with the criminal. He should be entirely removed from criminal surroundings and efforts made to eradicate the criminality which has expressed itself. Society has not the right to degrade a man, much less to school him in crime. If he prove absolutely incorrigible (a very difficult matter to ascertain) he should be banished from society for all time either by life-long imprisonment or by death. If not, the carrying out of his punishment must be performed ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... that I cannot guarantee on my credit as a man of business. You can look over them at your leisure, or not, as you please. I think you must know that I always had an independent spirit, and would be the last of mankind to degrade myself by any servile attempt to alter your line of ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... and above that he sought, and calling for a spear, bound him a banner and made him Governor over Armenia and Azarbijan[FN109] and Mesopotamia, saying, "Khuzaymah's case is in thy hands, an thou wilt, continue him in his office, and if thou wilt, degrade him." And Ikrimah said, "Nay, but I restore him to his office, O Commander of the Faithful." Then they went out from him and ceased not to be Governors under Sulayman bin Abd al-Malik all the days of his Caliphate. And they also ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... stamp of Rome's nationality, that stamp which no nation ever successfully and permanently resisted; and thus the reception of the cult on the part of the state was not only a disgraceful thing, tending to degrade true religion and spread the contagion of Orientalism, but it also made those whose appetite had been aroused eager for other deities, whose cult would have the great additional charm of being unlicensed by the state, and hence ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... mention with terror and aversion under the name of scholars, but whom I have found a harmless and inoffensive order of beings, not no much wiser than ourselves, but that they may receive as well as communicate knowledge, and more inclined to degrade their own character by cowardly submission, than to overbear or oppress us with their learning or ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... things cannot degrade, that is, change downwards into lower forms, ask him, who told him that water-babies were lower than land-babies? But even if they were, does he know about the strange degradation of the common goose-barnacles, which one finds sticking ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... to the common lot—the lot that will be the common lot as long as there are people to be made, by taking advantage of human necessities, to force men and women and children to degrade themselves into machines as wage-slaves. At two dollars a week, double what her income justified—she rented a room in a tenement flat in Bleecker street. It was a closet of a room whose thin, dirt-adorned walls were no protection against sound or vermin, not ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... like water-lines, and in places they form walls, regular as if built. The rounded forms result from the granites flaking off in curved lamin, like onion-coats. Want of homogeneity in the texture causes the granite to degrade into caves and holes: the huge blocks which have fallen from the upper heights often show unexpected hollows in the under and lower sides. Above the water we found an immense natural dolmen, under which apparently the Bedawin take shelter. After El-Murayt'bah the regular ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... and western departments. In this sublime display of hypocrisy, Fouche pronounces gold and silver to have been the causes of all the calamities of the republic. "I know not," says he, "by what weak compliance those metals are suffered to remain in the hands of suspected persons. Let us degrade and vilify gold and silver, let us fling those deities of monarchy in the dirt, and establish the worship of the austere virtues of the republic," adding, by way of exemplification of his virtuous abhorrence, "I send you seventeen ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... at what would be the results of such a practice, if it became general. If these are bad, if its tendency is to corrupt and degrade the character of the profession, then, however confident any man may feel in his moral power to ward off its evil influences from his own character and conduct, he should be careful not to encourage and give countenance to ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... will be,—I shall be in the tomb. May the young, as yet uncorrupted by scepticism, prepare the way for its realization; and may they, in the name of our national tradition and the future, unceasingly protest against all who seek to immobilize human life in the name of a dogma extinct, or to degrade it by diverting it from the eternal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... whom the soldiers brought from the wars, chose me, with many others, to join his household. And here in the Palace for a few years I have been happy and well cared for. I pray thee do not turn me out again; do not degrade me to the labour and misery of freedom. Even the beasts have masters! They are housed, and fed, and cared for; why should I then be cast out and left to drudge ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... Sheriff of Clare. Lord Anglesey wrote word that the subject had engaged his attention, and he had laid the case before the law officers, who had reported to him that there were no grounds for any legal proceedings against them. 'How, therefore,' said the Lord-Lieutenant, 'could I degrade men against whom my law officers advised me that no charge could be brought?' This was one offence; and another, that he had countenanced Lord Cloncurry, who, being a member of the Association, was unworthy to receive the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... brings every law of healthy existence into question with them, and every alleged method of help and hope into doubt. Indignation, without any calming faith in justice, and self-contempt, without any curative self-reproach, dull the intelligence, and degrade the conscience, into sullen incredulity of all sunshine outside the dunghill, or breeze beyond the wafting of its impurity; and at last a philosophy develops itself, partly satiric, partly consolatory, concerned only with the regenerative vigor of manure, and the necessary ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... are you still slumbering at your posts?—Are there no Shiphrahs, no Puahs among you, who will dare in Christian firmness and Christian meekness, to refuse to obey the wicked laws which require woman to enslave, to degrade and to brutalize woman? Are there no Miriams, who would rejoice to lead out the captive daughters of the Southern States to liberty and light? Are there no Huldahs there who will dare to speak the truth concerning ...
— An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South • Angelina Emily Grimke
... art right," he answered lowly, As a youth should sneak a maid; "Like thyself, thy word is holy; Love is hate, if it degrade. ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... of poetry?" The artist is he who enters into the divine realm; who discerns the divine creations as the true ideals of humanity, and who interprets to the world the sublime significance of the divine thought. Shall such an artist degrade his power by portraying ugliness—the mere defects of negations and distortions? Shall he degrade life ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... "to think that America should degrade herself so much as to enter into any kind of treaty with a power now tottering on the brink of ruin, whose principles are directly contrary to the spirit ...
— Revolutionary Heroes, And Other Historical Papers • James Parton
... your streets those traps of hell Into whose gilded snares I fell. Oh! freemen, from these foul decoys Arise, and vote to save the boys. Oh, ye who license men to trade In draughts that charm and then degrade, Before ye hear the cry, Too late, Oh, save the ...
— Poems • Frances E. W. Harper
... competitor. They could far more easily bear the preeminence of a distinguished stranger, yet even to such a stranger they would allow only a very limited and a very precarious authority. To bring a chief before a court martial, to shoot him, to cashier him, to degrade him, to reprimand him publicly, was impossible. Macdonald of Keppoch or Maclean of Duart would have struck dead any officer who had demanded his sword, and told him to consider himself as under arrest; and hundreds of claymores would instantly have been drawn to protect the murderer. All that was ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... so sweet a lady is set here to bear the brunts of a frontier fortress, where no man can aid her without espousing her husband's quarrel!—while hundreds of evil women degrade the courts of Europe. But I can only do mine errand and go. And you will best mend your own expedition at this time by a new start from ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... discuss. Yesterday I saw Dedel, who has lately been at Walmer, and he told me the Duke of Wellington's opinion exactly coincided with ours, coincided both as to the impossibility of our making any concession in Syria, and to its perfect inutility if we did. We might degrade ourselves, weaken our own cause, but we should neither strengthen Guizot nor satisfy the cravings of French vanity and insolence, still less silence that revolutionary spirit which, not strong enough in itself, seeks to become ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... as only a human being can possess. To attribute them to the Spirit of the Universe, or to suppose that it is capable of altering them, is to degrade God into man, and to annex to this incomprehensible Being qualities incompatible with any ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... with it, and the odium which it attaches to us, in the estimation of enlightened foreigners, many of whom are constant witnesses thereof, must inevitably sap the foundation of our free institutions, and degrade our national character in the eyes of the world. This, we conceive, (to say nothing of the injustice of slavery and its concomitants,) should be a sufficient incentive to action—a sufficient inducement to labor in the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... discovers, by the intervention of intermediate Ideas, what Connection Those in the Proposition have one with another: Whether certain; probable; or none at all; according whereunto, we ought to regulate our Assent. If we do not so, we degrade our selves from being Rational Creatures; and deprive our selves of the only Guide God has given us for our Conduct in our Actions ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... 1829 Adams retired to private life in the town of Quincy; but only for a brief period, for in 1830, largely by Anti-Masonic votes, he was elected a member of the national House of Representatives. On its being suggested to him that his acceptance of this position would degrade an ex-president, Adams replied that no person could be degraded by serving the people as a representative in congress or, he added, as a selectman of his town. His service in congress from 1831 until his death is, in some respects, the most noteworthy part of his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of Charles I. provoked the House of Commons to take some measures to prevent their growing power, which that pious monarch was too much disposed to favour. In consequence of this, the leading members of the opposition petitioned the King to remove the bishops from their seats in Parliament, and degrade them to the station at Commons, which was warmly opposed by the high church lords, and the bishops themselves, who protested against whatever steps were taken during their restraint from Parliament, as illegal, upon this principle, that as they were part of the legislature, no law could ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... order elevate all, injure none," wrote Fowler, "whilst infidelity, selfishness and disorder curse some, delude others and degrade all. I therefore want all of my people encouraged to cultivate religious feeling and morality, and punished for inhumanity to their children or stock, for profanity, lying and stealing." And again: "I would that every human being have the gospel preached to them in its original purity and simplicity. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... well—very well—if Fate decrees them a happy marriage; but, if otherwise, give their existence some object, their time some occupation, or the peevishness of disappointment and the listlessness of idleness will infallibly degrade ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... to explain what it was. He also showed me a musical-box and a spy-glass, asking many questions. From all I could learn by my visit to this pretender there was nothing in their religion to elevate, but everything to degrade. With them to rob and murder were virtuous deeds. "Slay the imps" was their watchword. Gordon found in this fanatic a foe of no mean order. But he soon found too that courage and faith in God had done and would still lead to victory. In a letter home ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... "see the ocean;" and threatened to dash her skull against the first rock in her path, if they attempted to carry her further. The stanch refusal embarrassed her Mahometan conductor, inasmuch as his country's law forbade him to use extraordinary compulsion, or degrade the maiden with ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... and set snares for him, so that they insinuated into King Shah Bakht's eyes hatred against him and sowed in his heart despite towards him; and plot followed plot, and their rancour waxed until the king was brought to arrest him and lay him in jail and to confiscate his wealth and degrade him from his degree. When they knew that there was left him no possession for which the king might lust, they feared lest the sovran release him, by the influence of the Wazir's good counsel upon the king's heart, and he return to his former case, so should their machinations be marred ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... to none in de world but de Debil!" She had, indeed, good cause to detest him; for, some years before, her daughter, a young black girl, maddened by his persecutions, had thrown herself into the creek and been drowned, after having been severely beaten for refusing to degrade herself. Outraged, despised, and black, she yet preferred death to dishonor. But these are things too heart-sickening to dwell upon. God alone knows how many hundreds of plantations, all over the South, might ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... eventually found their advantage in the democratic movement. Cobbett fought for the cause of the agricultural labourer, trodden under foot by squires and parsons. Owen believed that the grasping capitalist, with his steam machinery, would further degrade and impoverish the working classes. Godwin, who is merely mentioned by Mr. Stephen, was a peaceful anarchist, who proposed 'to abolish the whole craft and mystery of government,' to abandon coercion and rely upon just reasoning, upon the enlightened assent of individuals to the payment of taxes. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... flatter'd face, Abused his art, till Nature, with a blush, Saw cits grow centaurs underneath his brush? Or should some limner join, for show or sale, A maid of honour to a mermaid's tail? Or low Dubost (as once the world has seen) Degrade God's creatures in his graphic spleen? Not all that forced politeness, which defends Fools in their faults, could gag his grinning friends. Believe me, Moschus, like that picture seems The book, which, sillier ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... admires the girl who respects herself too much to permit him to tell her questionable stories, so will he reverence the wife who refuses to allow him to degrade himself in her presence either by speech or conduct. Love would not so often fail if wives knew the secret of retaining it, and that is not by sacrifice of principle, nor by tearful reproaches and upbraidings, ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... simply, "you were a daughter of Graustark. You were not born to serve a cause that means evil to the dear land. Graustark first made you noble; you can't go back on that, you know. Don't let your husband degrade you. I think you can see how I feel about it. Please believe that I know you ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... now I am neither ashamed nor afraid to assert, that those genteel vices, as they are falsely called, are only so many blemishes in the character of even a man of the world, and what is called a fine gentleman, and degrade him in the opinion of those very people, to whom he hopes to recommend himself by them. Nay, this prejudice often extends so far, that I have known people pretend to vices they had not, instead of carefully concealing those ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... his bill Mr. Wilson declared that he had "no desire to say harsh things of the South nor of the men who have been engaged in the Rebellion. I do not ask their property or their blood; I do not wish to disgrace or degrade them; but I do wish that they shall not be permitted to disgrace, degrade or oppress anybody else. I offer this bill as a measure of humanity, as a measure that the needs of that section of the country ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... virtue; and this is not brute courage, but loyalty in the hour of danger. The virtue of Tyrtaeus, although needful enough in his own time, is really of a fourth-rate description. 'You are degrading our legislator to a very low level.' Nay, we degrade not him, but ourselves, if we believe that the laws of Lycurgus and Minos had a view to war only. A divine lawgiver would have had regard to all the different kinds of virtue, and have arranged his laws in corresponding classes, ...
— Laws • Plato
... appearance. Even in his prison garb, somewhat ragged and squalid, he looked the gentleman and something more. For there was that in his air and physiognomy, which proclaimed him no common man. Captivity may hold and make more fierce, but cannot degrade, the lion. And just as a lion in its cage seemed this man in a cell of the Acordada. His face was of the rotund type, bold in its expression, yet with something of gentle humanity, seen when searched for, in the profound depths of a dark penetrating eye. His complexion was a clear ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... is as old as Dryden, and is defended by Lord Macaulay in a sentence of pre-eminent absurdity: "Posterity has felt that the greatest of English philosophers could derive no accession of dignity from any title which power could bestow, and, in defiance of letters-patent, has obstinately refused to degrade Francis Bacon into Viscount St. Albans." But, without stopping to discuss the propriety of representing a Britiph peerage, honestly earned, and, in his case as Lord Chancellor, necessarily conferred, as a "degradation," the mistake made is not ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... essentially necessary to make a woman charming as a woman. In this, I think, the world is harder to women than to men; that a woman often loses much by the chance of adverse circumstances which a man only loses by his own misconduct. That there are women whom no calamity can degrade is true enough and so it is true that there are some men who are heroes; but such are exceptions both among men and women. Not such a one had Mrs Askerton been. Calamity had come upon her partly, indeed, by her own fault, though that might ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... detestable habit still prevails of interweaving the names of our contemporaries among the accounts of former centuries, and thus corrupting the history of past times into a means of abuse and flattery for the present. This is to degrade history into the worst style of a Treasury pamphlet, or a daily newspaper. It is a fault ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... all formerly believed that there was a state of rewards and punishments to the good and bad after this life; and they now look on those that think otherwise as scarce fit to be counted men, since they degrade so noble a being as the soul, and reckon it no better than a beast's: thus they are far from looking on such men as fit for human society, or to be citizens of a well-ordered commonwealth; since a man of such principles must needs, as oft ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... ever had charge of them, for he has been an uncompromising enemy of the whiskey traffic, and has relentlessly pursued the white men who always gather about an agency to sell whiskey to the Indians, and thus not only rob them of their possessions, but degrade them as well. The prison doors of Deer Lodge have more than once opened to receive men sent there through the energy of Major Steell. For the good work he has done in this respect, this gentleman deserves the highest credit, and he is a ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... the evil may become a blessing in disguise. But if you lay the blame of your misfortunes to God alone, and believe that He inflicts His creatures with disease because He is angry with the world, you degrade the Lord into an angry, revengeful Being of human type, instead of the grand and supreme Adonai Echod whom our ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... commit no outrages; if slavery has not depraved him, it has done him little harm. If it be the normal tendency of bondage to produce saints like Uncle Tom, let us all offer ourselves at auction immediately. It is Cassy and Dred who are the normal protest of human nature against systems which degrade it. Accordingly, these poor, ignorant Maroons, who had seen their brothers and sisters flogged, burned, mutilated, hanged on iron hooks, broken on the wheel, and had been all the while solemnly assured that ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... combinations menace your institutions, you find the once loyal Hebrew invariably arrayed in the same ranks as the leveller, and the latitudinarian, and prepared to support the policy which may even endanger his life and property, rather than tamely continue under a system which seeks to degrade him. The Tories lose an important election at a critical moment; 'tis the Jews come forward to vote against them. The Church is alarmed at the scheme of a latitudinarian university, and learns with relief that funds are not forthcoming for its establishment; a Jew immediately ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... found myself on a Saturday, after a week's work, without a loaf of bread in the cupboard. I doubt, ma'am, if any one who has not experienced it can wholly understand the power of mere hunger to degrade a man; to what lengths he can be urged, willy-nilly, as it were, by the instinct to satisfy it. There were Sabbaths, ma'am, when to attend divine worship seemed a mockery; the craving drove me away from all congregations of Christian men and out into ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... officials for redress of wrongs claimed to have been inflicted upon them by the military. They were free to apply, and did apply, to tribunals outside of and independent of the executive. They and such as they should be the most unwilling to degrade the courts or lessen their power. A similar instance is that of the striking miners in Colorado who so loudly complained of the acts of the militia. They were not obliged to appeal to military or executive officers for redress. The Judicial Courts ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... three governed the empire. But, after the death of Crassus, my glorious achievements in subduing the Gauls raised such a jealousy in him that he could no longer endure me as a partner in his power, nor could I submit to degrade myself ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... you could not draw back without dishonour. And I answered that no engagement could bind you to become the wife of a man you did not love; that no moral code could hold you to such a sin; that no code of honour could command you to permit a man to degrade himself and you. Then you pleaded that you were not sure you liked my kind of a life, that you feared you wanted wealth and a great establishment and ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... the iron dust. Instantly Mr. Hardy stepped up between the two men before Burns could rise. We have spoken of Robert's intense horror of the coarse, physical vices. It seemed totally wrong to him that a workman should degrade himself with drink. Besides, he could not tolerate such actions in the shops. He looked the drunken man in the face ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... 'Admirable Crichtons' with a smattering of all sorts of knowledge, but men recognised for their proficiency in special branches of learning. Where there is much competition, there must be sooner or later an inclination to lower the standard, and degrade the value of the diplomas issued at the close of a college course. Theoretically, it seems preferable that in a great province like Ontario, the diplomas should emanate from one Central University authority rather than from a number of colleges, each pursuing ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... Possession of Raphael and Domenichino, by what law of classification are we bound to assign them to belong to the great style in painting, and to degrade into an inferior class the Rake of Hogarth when he is the Madman in the Bedlam scene? I am sure he is far more impressive than either. It is a face which no one that has seen can easily forget. There is the stretch of human suffering to the utmost endurance, severe bodily ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... physical and mental diseases, and, at the same time, lessening his power to make the best of himself in his life-work; while beyond this lies the awful risk of acquiring an appetite which may enslave, degrade and ruin him, body and soul, as it is degrading and ruining its tens ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... applicable to those who refuse submission to a Tyrannical Usurpation, whether in Kansas or elsewhere, then must some new word, of deeper color, be invented, to designate those mad spirits who could endanger and degrade the Republic, while they betray all the cherished sentiments of the fathers and the spirit of the Constitution, in order to give new spread to Slavery. Let the Senator proceed. It will not be the first time in history, that a scaffold erected for punishment ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... begged to take it away or pass it on to other persons. Hamburg would be grateful to God even if he transferred the cholera to Berlin. Thus do ignorance and selfishness go hand in hand; thus does superstition cloud the intellect and degrade ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... closer acquaintance we are making is this: It has an insatiable appetite. It grows hungrier by that on which it feeds. Its capacity is beyond the measuring line. If given free rein it will debase the holiest functions of the body, and degrade the highest powers of the mind to appease its gnawing, passion-bitten hunger. The noblest gifts, the purest emotions, the most sacred relationships, are dragged down to the slimy gutter to tempt and temporarily ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... number of free colonists, whose pretensions in early life were equally limited, rose by opulence to a superior station, and higher pretensions: to deny the usual appendages of their position, would be virtually to degrade them. Whether just or not, the formal exclusion of emancipists was a supplement to the penalty of the law, and, as such, must have been taken. It is not the actual exaltation, but equal eligibility of British subjects ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... clear of them, was delightful from its novelty. Hard a starboard! Steady! Port! Port! you may!—and we flew past some huge mass, over which the green seas were fruitlessly trying to dash themselves. Coleridge describes the scene around us too well for me to degrade it with my prose. I will give ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... countess, even more angrily than before, "that because my son has flown in the face of my wishes, and has mingled himself up with business matters, and because Maurice has chosen to degrade himself by entering a profession,—you thought that you might take the liberty of coming to his assistance, in some temporary difficulty, and might also be pardoned the insolence of using my name; but I resent the impertinence; ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... the skipper said, but I tell you at once I'm not going to stoop to do anything of the kind. Do you think I'm going to degrade myself ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... We must degrade the noblesse and attribute it to an odious origin, establish a germ of equality which can never exist but which will flatter the people; [we must] immolate the most obstinate, burn and destroy their ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... clothes hung loose on me; for I was much wasted, but I covered deficiencies with a shawl, and once more, clean and respectable looking—no speck of the dirt, no trace of the disorder I so hated, and which seemed so to degrade me, left—I crept down a stone staircase with the aid of the banisters, to a narrow low passage, and found my way presently to ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... such?" Guy asked, at length. "Yes, you are right; but I know a case where 'a man's being balked in his intention to degrade himself' ruined him for life. Ralph Mohun told me of it. It was a nine-days' wonder in Vienna soon after he joined the Imperial Cuirassiers. A Bohemian count flourished there then—a great favorite with every one, for he was ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... started up another corsair; one Paine, from America, who has published an answer to Mr. Burke.(7722) His doctrines go to the extremity of levelling and his style is so coarse, that you would think he meant to degrade the language as much as the government: here is one of his delicate paragraphs:—"We do not want a king, or lords of the bedchamber, or lords of the kitchen," etc. This rhetoric, I suppose, was calculated ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... insolent, but without refinement or point. He calls people names, and tries to transfix a character with an epithet, which does not stick, because it has no other foundation than his own petulance and spite; or he endeavours to degrade by alluding to some circumstance of external situation. He says of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, that "it is his aversion." That may be: but whose fault is it? This is the satire of a lord, who is accustomed to have all his whims or dislikes taken for gospel, and who cannot be at the pains to ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the princes of the blood and the queen herself, are obsequious to these two lemans of a king! May I freeze in the cold blast of royal disfavor, before I degrade my rank and womanhood by such servility! And mark this well, little marchioness, if you take service with me. Who goes to court with me, pays no homage to the mistresses of the king.—But why do you kneel, my child? What means ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... they formed but one people, not to do justice to the circumstance which prevented a total annihilation of the order. Though they are obliged by a prudent foresight, to keep out every thing from among themselves, which might pretend to divide them into orders, and to degrade one description of men below another, yet they hear with pleasure, that their allies, whom circumstances have already placed under these distinctions, are willing to consider it as one, to have aided them in the establishment of their liberties, and to wear a ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... differentia of which is that it has eternal significance, and that it is eternal life to know it? If we are to preach the Atonement, we cannot allow either history or philosophy to proceed on assumptions which ignore or degrade the fact of Christ. Only a person in whom the eternal has become historical can be the bearer of the Atonement, and it must be our first concern to show, against all assumptions whether made in the name of history or of philosophy, that in point of fact there ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... I entreat you, Miss Brandon, to see me, if but for a moment. I purpose to tear myself away from the place in which you reside, to go abroad, to leave even the spot hallowed by your footstep. After this night my presence, my presumption, will degrade you no more. But this night, for mercy's sake, see me, or I shall go mad! I will but speak to you one instant: this is all I ask. If you grant me this prayer, the walk to the left where you stand, at the entrance to which there is ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that her scruples were not so acute about arranging it by writing for the press. "If I could think for a moment that I had any right to it as a means of expression!" she reflected. "But I haven't. It is an art for others. And it is an art, as sacred as mine. I have no business to degrade it to my uses." Her mental position when she went to see Frank Parke was a cynical compromise with her artistic conscience, of which she nevertheless sincerely ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... religion which found its centre-point and its loftiest conception of the divine nature in the thought of His absolute righteousness made strong, if it made somewhat stern, men. And now we see renderings of the truth that God is love which degrade the lofty, noble, sovereign conception of the righteous God that loveth, into mere Indulgence on the throne of the universe. And what is the consequence? All the stern teachings of Scripture men recoil from, and try to explain away. The ill desert of sin, and the necessary iron nexus ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... as regards outlawry. As a rule the outlaw was not banished, as citizens were ostracized at Athens, to secure the State from dangerous rivalries. In other words, they were commonly not men of character and distinction, but just the reverse—persons whose conduct was so destitute of honour as to degrade them, in the eyes of the community, to the level of the worst sort of vermin. And they were treated accordingly. They were held to be unfit to exist as an integral part of the body politic, and either destroyed or, as an alternative, ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... countless millions of our race and an indefinite series of past generations. We are like the coral insects, who can add but a hair's breadth to the structure which has been raised by their predecessors. Yet the little which we can do is something; and we will neither degrade ourselves nor our race. As measured by an absolute standard, man may be infinitesimal, but the absolute is beyond our powers. Science tells us that our little individuality might be swept out of existence without appreciable injury to the world; ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... warmth of feeling, suavity of approach, and the whole passive power of pleasing. Thus much internal worth, tempered with but little of those showy powers which dazzle and seduce, gave early promise that he would escape all intriguing politics, and never degrade himself by the projects of party; for a party-man must always be comparatively mean, even on a scale of vicious dignity; in violence, subordinate to the ruffian; in chicane, below ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... sorry to degrade into Grig-street;" whether it alludes to the little vivacious eel, or to the merry character of its tenants, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... always degrade man to a lower state. Every evil deed, word, or thought lowers us in moral being. If some one has done evil toward us, he has lowered himself by that act; and for us to decide to "get even" by a similar act toward him is for us to decide that we will lower ourselves to his level. To "get even" means ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... lifting up his pale face, twitching with nervousness, "I don't want to get free by playing tricks on a court of law. I know that fifteen or twenty years in prison would not leave me much worth living for, but I will not degrade myself by evading justice with delays and false affidavits. If you can do anything for me fairly and squarely, I should like to ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... is the spirit of the Poem. Poetry, in the abstract, is not necessarily good or evil. It may be Christian, Jewish, Pagan, or Infidel in its spirit and tendencies. It may corrupt or purify the heart. It may save or ruin the reader in fortune or in fame. Hence, as Poetry is powerful to elevate or degrade, to purify or to corrupt a people, much depends on the spirit of the Poetry which they may put into the hands of the youth of a country; as well observed by an eminent moralist: 'Let me write ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... is "word-painting." I can see the picture also—some kings, and possibly queens, seated on gorgeous thrones, engaged in the festive occupation of grinding bones! Oh, I degrade the subject, do I? Nonsense! The term is a stilted affectation, perhaps never better applied than to Mrs. Browning's descriptive spasms. Still, she was undoubtedly a poet. She wrote many beautiful subjective poems, but she wrote much that was not poetry, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... unnecessary to give any specimen of Mr. Rowe's poetry; the most celebrated speeches in his plays, which are beautifully harmonious; are repeated by every body who reads poetry, or attends plays; and to suppose the reader ignorant of them, would be to degrade him from that rank of intelligence, without which he can be little illuminated by perusing the Lives of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... inculcate all the articles, of belief at the earliest age in such a way as to result in a kind of partial paralysis of the brain; this then shows itself throughout their whole life in a silly bigotry, making even extremely intelligent and capable people among them degrade themselves so that they become quite an enigma to us. If we consider how essential to such a masterpiece is inoculation of belief in the tender age of childhood, the system of missions appears no longer merely as the height of human importunity, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... not see in these commands the language of enthusiasm of hyperbole? These maxims! are they not directly fitted to discourage, and debase a man? to degrade him in his own eyes, and those of others? to plunge him into despair? And would not the literal fulfillment of them prove destructive to society? What shall we say of that morality which orders the heart to detach itself from objects, which God, and reason, ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... you,' answered Dr. Rylance, earnestly, with an admiring look in his blue-gray eyes. They were somewhat handsome eyes when they did not put on their cruel expression. 'Not for you. Nothing could degrade, nothing could exalt you. You are superior to the accident of ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... States—a fungus growth of military tyranny superinduced by the fostering of Loyal Leagues, the abrogation of our civil laws, the habitual violation of our national Constitution, and a persistent prostitution of all government, all resources and all powers, to degrade the white man by the establishment ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... imperative voice of my own conscience, and by that wide chasm between man and the noblest animals of the brute creation, which no perceivable or conceivable difference of organization is sufficient to overbridge—that I have a rational and responsible soul, I think far too reverentially of the same to degrade it into an hypothesis, and cannot be blind to the contradiction I must incur, if I assign that soul which I believe to constitute the peculiar nature of man as the cause of functions and properties, which man possesses in common with the ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... writers, we should conclude that the native was not a savage, at all, until the landing of the whites; and, instead of ascribing his atrocities to the state of barbarism in which he lived—thus indicating their only valid apology—we should degrade both the white and the red men, by attributing to the former all imaginable vices, and, to the latter, a peculiar aptitude in acquiring them. These mistakes are natural and excusable—as the man who kills another ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... was brewing, and asked him what course he proposed to himself. He said that he was wholly opposed to duelling and would do anything to avoid it that might not degrade him in the estimation of himself and friends; but if such a degradation, or a fight, were the only alternatives, he ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... who remained with me six years, and then left for no reason but that I could not continue to pay him. I liked him so much that one day, after flogging a boy in hot blood, and while (as usual) feeling sick with the revulsion of it, I then and there resolved that, however much this trade might degrade me, this Mr. Simcox should be spared the degradation whilst in my employ. I went to his class-room and asked to have a look at his punishment-book. He answered that he kept none. 'But,' said I, 'when you first came to me didn't I give you a book, and expressly command you, whenever ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... first, the Samurai-dokoro, which term, according to its literal rendering, signified "samurai place" and may be appropriately designated "Central Staff Office." Established in 1180, its functions were to promote or degrade military men; to form a council of war; to direct police duties so far as they concerned bushi', to punish crime, and to select men for guards and escorts. The president (betto) obviously occupied a post of prime importance, as he practically controlled all the retainers ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... coming northward, as the rigors of the last glacial period abated, domicile here, and build this huge gaunt temple before they passed farther north, to degrade and dwindle down into Eskimos wandering the dismal coasts ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... As yet too weak to attack civil laws, it had said to the powers—"I leave you still for a short space of time possession of the political world, confining myself to the moral world. Continue if you can to enchain, class, keep in bondage, degrade the people, I am engaged in the emancipation of souls. I shall occupy 2000 years, perchance, in renewing men's minds before I become apparent in human institutions. But the day will come when my doctrines ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... "I would not degrade myself, Mrs. Bingham, by any expostulations with her. I would have nothing more to do with her. Could you not relieve her of the unfinished gown? Mrs. Swanley, I am sure, under the circumstances would be only too happy ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... more. The cause, too, was a noble one. It was sustained by no aggression, perfidy, or desire of change. It was to protect a friendly nation, and to sustain an inspired cause. There was no taint of cruelty or crime to degrade the soldiership of England. We were acting in the character which had already exalted her name as protectors of the weak and punishers of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... a picture of one whom vagrancy assuredly did not degrade:—"I had not the least care for the future, and I awaited the answer [as to the return of Madame de Warens to Savoy], lying out in the open air, sleeping stretched out on the ground or on some wooden bench, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... and will be for ever and ever, no weak, and really cruel indulgence; but a burning fire of indignation against all hypocrisy, tyranny, lust, cruelty, and every other sin by which men oppress, torment, deceive, degrade their fellow-men; and still more, still more, remember that, all young men, their fellow-women. That fire burns for ever—the Divine fire of God; the fire not of hatred, but of love to mankind, ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... Irish of "Henry V.," and Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade the humour: into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... with the plainest living. 'The soul is its own place and can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' Let the people who wish to build themselves lordly treasure-houses do so, if they can afford it, but let us not degrade our ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... style uses every ornament that can beautify and avoids every excess which would degrade. Macaulay and Addison have been enthroned as the kings of this style. To them all writers bend ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... a college course is to humanize the individual, to emancipate him intellectually and emotionally from his prejudices and conventions by giving him a wider horizon, a sounder judgment, a firmer and yet a more tolerant point of view. "Our proclivity to details," said Emerson, "cannot quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry." The college seizes upon the liberating instinct of youth and utilizes it for all it is worth. We summarize by saying that the college prepares not merely for "life" ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... Gregory: Over the bishops of Gaul we give thee no authority, because from the earlier times of my predecessors the bishop of the city Arles received the pallium, whom we ought not to degrade nor to deprive of the received authority. But, if thou happen to go into the province of Gaul, have thou a conference and consultation with the said bishop what is to be done, or, if any vices are found in bishops, how they shall be corrected and reformed; and if there be a supposition ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... flowers of the field. It is not so recorded; but doubtless the nameless one in question was by profession a maker of opium pipes, for this person has observed from time to time how that occupation, above all others, tends to degrade the mental faculties, and to debase its followers to a lower position than that of the beasts of labour. Learn therefrom, O superficial Wang Yu, that wisdom lies in an intelligent perception of great principles, and not in a slavish imitation of details which ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... a glass of wine, a man esteemed and beloved by all who really knew him. Thus was first revealed to me what, in my opinion, is the worst evil in American public life,—that facility for unlimited slander, of which the first result is to degrade our public men, and the second result is to rob the press of that confidence among thinking people, and that power for good and against evil which it really ought to exercise. Since that time I have seen many other examples strengthening ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... the heads of political, civil, and human rights. The result of the whole policy was to degrade the Irish to the level of the wretched helots under Sparta, with this difference: while the slaves of the Lacedaemonians numbered but a few thousands, the ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... a notable establishment in its day. By far the largest in Ascalon, it housed nearly every branch of entertainment at which men hazard their fortunes and degrade their morality. It was a vast shell of planks and shingles, with skeleton joists and rafters bare overhead, built hastily and crudely ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... have now lived to see how the nationalization of private property in Egypt, Argentina, Algeria not to speak of Ethiopia and India proved disastrous and how 40 years of government ownership should degrade and corrupt the populations of Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Albania ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... collections made for the Christian churches. But in our faithless, loveless, selfish, sin-drowned century, such an attempt at community of goods would not only annihilate all morality completely, but absolutely degrade us back from civilisation and modern Catholicism into the rudest and most meagre barbarism. The apostles of such doctrines now must speak, though perhaps unconsciously, from the sole inspiration of Satan, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... of all kinds: it is like those neutral forces of faith and thought, which depend for their result upon the direction in which they are turned. Inspiration can uplift, but it may also degrade. We ourselves by the tuning of our own thoughts determine which it shall accomplish. Like can only answer to like: anger can never play echo to love, for their vibrations are so far apart in attunement that the one cannot influence the other. But anger answers to anger, and love to ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... neutralize it that it will not only have no effect upon you, but will not be able even to reach you. But more than this, you will by this course sooner or later be able literally to transmute the enemy into the friend. Meet hatred with hatred and you degrade yourself. Meet hatred with love and you elevate not only yourself but also the one who ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... if the book were meant to be a picture of human nature as a whole. "I count Rochefoucauld's Maxims," says one critic, "a bad book. As I am reading it, I feel discomfort; I have a sense of suffering which I cannot define. Such thoughts tarnish the brightness of the soul; they degrade the heart." Yet as a faithful presentation of human selfishness, and of you and me in so far as we happen to be mainly selfish, the odious mirror has its uses by showing us what manner of man we are or may become. Let us not forget ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... spectacle so extraordinary. Immediately they took from him the cowl, and left them with only some short cassocks such as are worn by clergymen. They delivered them to the bishop, who was already prepared for the degradation. He immediately began to degrade them, and then delivered them over to the secular arm. They were taken to jail by the strong guard of soldiers that had been in the church ever since the criminals had been removed from the prisons to hear the sentence. But it was possible to ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... he exclaimed, shaking his fist. "To express publicly the opinion that a nobleman could so far degrade himself as to become a secret assassin! I will know who my insolent calumniators are, and I will then see if justice has power at Antwerp to protect an innocent stranger against ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... "you have been off plundering houses, have you, in place of being with your company. I'll stop this sort of thing mighty sudden. This regiment shall not degrade itself by plundering and robbing, if I have to shoot every man in it. Captain, arrest those men, and keep thim in close confinement until I can have them tried and ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... are always in profile and in action. Complete personification being out of the question, it is expressly avoided,—each figure waives attention to itself, merges itself in the plot. Later, when the profounder idea of a personality that does not isolate or degrade has begun to make itself felt, this constraint is given up,—the figures face the spectator, and enter as it were into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various |
