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Prostitution   /prˌɑstətˈuʃən/   Listen
Prostitution

noun
1.
Offering sexual intercourse for pay.  Synonyms: harlotry, whoredom.



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"Prostitution" Quotes from Famous Books



... above alluded to, were disclosed in a private letter from Hamilton, who said: "This man (Arnold) is in every sense despicable. In addition to the scene of knavery and prostitution during his command in Philadelphia, which the late seizure of his papers has unfolded, the history of his command at West Point is a history of little as well as great villainies. He practiced every dirty act of peculation, and even ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... that soon there would be none left, if a fresh supply were not obtained equal to the number of deaths. But a fresh supply is always obtained without the least trouble; seduction easily keeps pace with prostitution or mortality. Those that die are, like factory children that die, instantly succeeded by new competitors for misery and death." There is no hour of a summer's or a winter's night, in which there may not be found in the streets a ghastly wretch, expiring under the double tortures of ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... poisoning him beyond redemption; it had hounded Dyke from his legitimate employment and had made of him a highwayman and criminal. It had cast forth Mrs. Hooven to starve to death upon the City streets. It had driven Minna to prostitution. It had slain Annixter at the very moment when painfully and manfully he had at last achieved his own salvation and stood forth resolved to do right, to act unselfishly and to live for others. It had widowed Hilma in the very dawn of her happiness. It had ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... were well if the effect of intrusion were simply co-extensive with its presence; but it mars all the good hours afterwards. These scratches in appearance leave an orifice that closes not hastily. "It is a prostitution of the bravery of friendship," says worthy Bishop Taylor, "to spend it upon impertinent people, who are, it may be, loads to their families, but can never ease my loads." This is the secret of their gaddings, their visits, and ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

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

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

... observed that such depictions, for the most part, are primarily portraits of prostitutes, and not pictures of prostitution. It is also a singular fact that war, another scourge has met with similar treatment. We have the pretty, spotless grenadiers and cuirassiers of Meissonier in plenty; Vereshchagin is still alone in the grim starkness of his wind-swept, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... be nearly so, and if Mr. Wright's estimate is as much too low in all the other cities as it seems to be in New York, the actual number employed in trades in the twenty-two cities instead of being only 295,450, cannot be far from 1,200,000. With the exception of certain statistics on prostitution, the entire work of the United States report has been done by women appointed by the Bureau, and Mr. Wright bears cordial testimony to the efficiency of each one in a most difficult and laborious task, adding: "They have stood on an equality in all respects ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

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

... driven to that terrible fate by economic causes outside of their control. Socialism would at least remove the economic pressure which forces so many of these women down into the terrible hell of prostitution. I ask you, Jonathan, to think also of the thousands of wives who are deserted every year. So far as the investigations of the charity organizations into this serious matter have gone, it has been shown that poverty is responsible for by far the greatest ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo

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

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

... stags nor bulls were in existence in Carthage. Hamilcar asked the Ancients for the hair of their wives; all sacrificed it, but the quantity was not sufficient. In the buildings of the Syssitia there were twelve hundred marriageable slaves destined for prostitution in Greece and Italy, and their hair, having been rendered elastic by the use of unguents, was wonderfully well adapted for engines of war. But the subsequent loss would be too great. Accordingly it was decided that a choice should ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... Avaries, Maeterlinck's Monna Vanna and Mr. Granville Barker's Waste may or may not be great poems, or edifying sermons, or important documents, or charming romances: our tribal citizens know nothing about that and do not want to know anything: all that they do know is that incest, prostitution, abortion, contagious diseases, and nudity are improper, and that all conversations, or books, or plays in which they are discussed are improper conversations, improper books, improper plays, and should ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw

... us of harmony and reconciliation, can ye restore to us the time that is past? Can ye give to prostitution its former innocence? Neither can ye reconcile Britain and America. The last cord now is broken, the people of England are presenting addresses against us. There are injuries which nature cannot forgive; she would cease to be nature if she did. ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine

... ill-acquired gains upon some abandoned profligate, bearing, indeed, the outward form of man, but presenting a most degrading spectacle—a wretch so lost to all sense of honour and manhood as meanly to subsist on the wages of prostitution. One or two characters I must not omit: observe the fair Cyprian with the ermine tippet, seated on the right of a well-known billiard sharp, who made his escape from Dublin for having dived a little ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... is Mawas Pasha.' I won't translate—but it is a terrible epithet when uttered in a tone which gives it the true meaning, though in a general way the commonest word of abuse to a donkey, or a boy, or any other cattle. The wages of prostitution are unclean, and this tax renders all Government salaries unlawful according to strict law. The capitation tax too, which was remitted for three years on the pasha's accession to the people of Cairo, Alexandria, Damietta and Rascheed, ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... while The Leader called him a "hireling." Thompson, defending himself, declared that if he had sold his talents, as charged, he would not be found fighting the slaves' battle but would be sitting by the side of bloated prostitution in Washington." There were even some clerical critics of the society and its work. The Church, a denominational publication, took the ground that Canada was not bound in any way to denounce "compulsory ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various

... purged of all impurities, Nietzsche rendered military honours to a foe, which far exceed in worth all that His most ardent disciples have ever claimed for Him. In verse 26 we are vividly reminded of Herbert Spencer's words "'Le mariage de convenance' is legalised prostitution." ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... of the world to pick up art as best it could without him, and fleeing to join his wife in paradise, the loving, adoring father had in effect abandoned a beautiful idolised daughter to the alternatives of starvation or prostitution. He had shackled her wrists behind her back and hobbled her feet and bequeathed her to wolves. That was what he had done, and what many and many such fathers had done, and still do, to their ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... huge relish for good feeding, and an humble ambition to be great men in a small way—who thirst after a little brief authority, that shall render them the terror of the almshouse and the bridewell—that shall enable them to lord it over obsequious poverty, vagrant vice, outcast prostitution, and hunger-driven dishonesty—that shall give to their beck a hound-like pack of catshpolls and bumbailiffs—tenfold greater rogues than the culprits they hunt down! My readers will excuse this sudden ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... deposed, in effect, by persons pretending to be his allies, and assigning what are pretended to be his wishes as the motive for using his usurped authority in the execution of these acts of violence against his own family and his subjects. You see him struggling against this violent prostitution of his authority. He refuses the sanction of his name, which before he had given up to Mr. Hastings to be used as he pleased, and only begs not to be made an instrument of wrong which his soul abhors, and which would make ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke

... ruts of inconceivable depth, and the roads so overgrown with trees as to be impervious to the sun. Some of the turnpikes were spoken of as being rocky lanes, with stones "as big as a horse, and abominable holes!" He adds that "it is a prostitution of language to call them turnpikes—ponds of liquid dirt and a scattering of loose flints, with the addition of cutting vile grips across the road under the pretence of letting water off, but without the effect, altogether render these turnpike roads as infamous a turnpike ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston

... His love! Talk not of love. Love has no thought of self! Love buys not with the ruthless usurer's gold The loathsome prostitution of a hand Without a heart? Love sacrifices all things To bless the thing it loves! He knows not love. Father, his love is hate—his hope revenge! My tears, my anguish, my remorse for falsehood— These are the joys that he wrings ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... childhood when his father came home drunk and the children for very fear had to hide themselves or run out into the streets, often to sleep wherever they could, and perhaps steal to satisfy the pangs of hunger. Such children are quickly absorbed, the girls into the ranks of prostitution, the boys into those of crime. Many too, by reason of their parents' intemperance, are weaklings and unable to take their stand in the ranks of honest labourers. Unless they are rescued by philanthropic effort they very soon take to crime, and physically and psychically ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll

... is sometimes punished amongst the Crees in the manner above described, yet it is no crime, provided the husband receives a valuable consideration for his wife's prostitution. Neither is chastity considered as a virtue in a female before marriage, that is, before she becomes the exclusive property ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin

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

... endow; where they are denied the right to practice law and are thus debarred from one of the most lucrative professions; where they are denied a voice in the government, and thus, while suffering all the ills that grow out of the giant evils of intemperance, prostitution, war, heavy taxation and political corruption, stand powerless to effect any reform. Prayers, tears, psalm-singing and expostulation are light in the balance compared with that power at the ballot-box that coins opinions into law. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

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

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

... sometimes, upon my bended knees I pray for death. What matter would it be to me how death might come, so long as I am prepared to welcome it? I hate and loathe myself when I stop to consider all the contemptible acts I am compelled to perform, when I pause to realize the utter prostitution of self-respect I am forced to undergo, in order to carry on the plots of our 'good friends,' as you call them. Good friends, indeed! To whom, let me ask you, do they demonstrate the friendly spirit? ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

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

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

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

... wrong diet, wrong posture, sexual excess, alcohol, nerve-strain, and numerous other preconditions, besides infection with the tubercle bacillus. The social evil can be fought not only directly by attack on prostitution, and by appeals to self-control and moral ideals, but also indirectly by diminishing the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, for alcohol not only produces abnormal sexual desire but reduces the strength of ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... before, and are quite admirable; some of the seats are paid for, others are given free to members of trade unions. There is, of course, no drunkenness, or at any rate so little that none of us ever saw a sign of it. There is very little prostitution, infinitely less than in any other capital. Women are safer from molestation than anywhere else in the world. The whole impression is one of virtuous, ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell

... expelled from the land cannot be sold. The hammer of the auctioneer cannot be allowed to separate parents from children, or husbands from wives, but poverty, drunkenness, and prostitution produce a similar effect, and in a form even more deplorable. In the five years preceding 1840, every fifth person in Glasgow had been attacked by fever, and the deaths therefrom amounted to almost ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey

... forced into the arms of age and disease; a lord may invite a citizen's daughter he despises to his bed, to repair a shattered fortune; and she may accept him, allured by the rays of a coronet: but such conjunctions are only a more shameful species of prostitution. ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke

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

... work is discontinued. The parts entitled "Those that will work" and "Those that cannot work" have been completed, and form a valuable book; but the discontinuance of the third part is no loss at all, for in commencing upon "Those that will not work," Mr. Mayhew began with a history of prostitution in ancient and modern times, a subject which did not possess the novelty or originality of his other divisions, and consequently his readers fell off so fast that he was forced first to raise the price of, and afterwards to discontinue altogether, the publication. Probably, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various

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

... only Penury in its grimmest shape, but the desperate and dangerous guilt which is not to be lightly encountered in its haunts and domiciles. Here children imbibe vice with their mother's milk. Here Prostitution, commencing with childhood, grows fierce and sanguinary in the teens, and leagues with theft and murder. Here slinks the pickpocket, here emerges the burglar, here skulks the felon. Yet all about and all around, here, too, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... murderer) we should know little or nothing of the life of the men and women who, in mediaeval France and Germany, did the work which had been taught by Hesiod and Virgil. About all these tragedies the literature of the Middle Ages, ready to show us town vice and town horror, dens of prostitution and creaking, overweighted gibbets, as in Villon's poems, utters not a word. All that we can hear is the many-throated yell of mediaeval poets, noble and plebeian, French, Provencal, and German, against the brutishness, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

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

... out all possible inspiration, and consequent happiness. Everywhere he has set up his own lustful desires as the rule and right of life in his relationship to woman, destroying the spiritual sacrament of marriage; and by his selfishness and greed of power, he has reduced her to a condition of prostitution. He outrages the helpless ones who have confided their honor, and their lives to his keeping, and the law—the vile, cursed, man-made law—upholds him in this slaughter of all that should make his heaven of trusting ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... already began to consider himself an authority in such matters as baseball, horse racing, drinking and going about with women. He began to tell of a night when he with two men from Winesburg went into a house of prostitution at the County Seat. The butcher's son held a cigar in the side of his mouth and as he talked spat on the floor. "The women in the place couldn't embarrass me although they tried hard enough," he boasted. "One of the girls in the house tried to get fresh ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

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

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

... has been said, it will not be difficult to understand the existence of the custom of religious prostitution. Considering the sexual impulse as specially connected with a supernatural force, man pays it religious honour, and comes to identify its manifestations as an expression of the supernatural and also as an act of worship towards it. In ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... society at large. The desire seems to be, if possible, to make scapegoats of those who are fortunate. It is this sentiment that has given rise to investigations into the cooperative stores in order to charge their managers with responsibility for the prostitution of some of their employees because of the wages they pay. As the investigation shows, there never was a more unfounded charge, but the very fact that it was used is an indication of what I mean. It manifests ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft

... mass reduced to a condition of the same distress. These things in his government at home. Abroad, scorn, contempt, and derision cast upon and covering the British name, war stirred up, and dishonorable treaties of peace made, by the total prostitution of British faith. Now take, my Lords, together, all the multiplied delinquencies which we have proved, from the highest degree of tyranny to the lowest degree of sharping and cheating, and then judge, my Lords, whether the House of Commons could rest for one moment, without bringing these ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke

... you shall see whether we have not power over him to resist till he shall flee from us. But failing that ghostly armament against these strange and unearthly enemies, truly I would recommend, that as a house of witchcraft and abomination, this polluted den of ancient tyranny and prostitution should be totally consumed by fire, lest Satan, establishing his head-quarters so much to his mind, should find a garrison and a fastness from which he might sally forth to infest the whole neighbourhood. Certain it is, that I would ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... writers of belles-lettres to "filles de joie." That was not, I think, appropriate to the artists in words, but at any rate it is a condition into which the journalist who knows nothing of the watch- dog's duties can easily descend. Our danger is to fall into a kind of intellectual prostitution, and from this the duty of ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... among the Jews it was ordained and commanded that every one must be married. Therefore also the young were early provided for [married], so that the virgin state was held in small esteem, neither were public prostitution and lewdness tolerated (as now). Therefore adultery was the most common form of unchastity ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther

... and defined by the best writers on moral theology, is in harmony with nature, in consonance with the higher nature of man. "God hath set the earth in families." Adultery is a sin, because it disorders that divine arrangement. Fornication is a sin, because it prevents pure marriages. Prostitution is a sin, because it is a sacrifice of women, who might be wives and mothers, to the selfish lusts of men. All useless indulgence is a waste of life, and a kind of suicide. In a pure marriage union, men and women unite themselves with God in acts of creative ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous

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

... the rear of the shop on the long winter evenings; he who shared her crust of bread moistened with the sweat of her brow, and her love at once sublime and poor; he, that same man, after abandoning her, finds her after a night of orgy, pale and leaden, forever lost, with hunger on her lips and prostitution in her heart. ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... for them except in the mad times of the French Revolution. Some maintained that there existed no distinction between moral good and moral evil; and that every man's actions were prompted by the Creator. Prostitution was professed as a religious act; a glazier was declared to be a prophet, and the woman he cohabited with was said to be ready to lie in of the Messiah. A man married his father's wife. Murders of the most extraordinary nature were occurring; one ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... done in this spirit with that accomplished under the stimulus of financial gain, or for the end of mere selfish display. The latter is a species of artistic prostitution. Superficially the performances may seem something alike, the difference may be intangible, but it exists and is real. Time is ever the winnower. Things always prove their survival value, that is to say the real things last, while the shams are sooner or later extinguished. ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt

... ostentatious luxury, in private furniture of all sorts, in palace building, in the exquisite confections of costly feminine adornment, in the luxurious binding of books, in the cooking of larks, in the distinguished portraiture of undistinguished persons, in the various refinements of prostitution, in the subtle accommodations of mystic theology, in jewellery. It is quite conceivable that in such departments Socialism will discourage and limit aesthetic and intellectual effort. But no mercantile plutocracy ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... clear, cool air of American State Departments of Health is the knowledge and love of sexual cleanliness fructifying. In the Dublin Review for January-March, 1922, there is a wonderfully fine article on "The Church and Prostitution," by the Right Rev. Monsignor Provost W.F. Brown, D.D., V.G., in which he quotes from a very recent Moral Theology, "De Castitate," by the Rev. A. Vermeersch, S.J., Professor of Moral Theology at the Gregorian ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout

... against the very secret heart of nature. The mystery of love and the sanctity of death are to be used by writers and artists only in their ennobling aspect of results. A certain class of French writers have sickened the world by invading the sacredness of passion and giving prostitution the semblance of self-abnegated love; a certain class of English and American writers have purchased popularity by the meretricious parade of the scenes of death-beds. Both are violations of the ethics of art as they are of nature. True love as true sorrow shrinks from ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison

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

... jury, and then the lawyer for the prostitution got up and begun. He made a terrible speech against the old man, that made him moan and groan, and made Benny and Aunt Sally cry. The way HE told about the murder kind of knocked us all stupid it was so different from the old man's tale. He said he was going to prove ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... know the market-price, inch by inch, of certain districts of Zenith, he did not know whether the police force was too large or too small, or whether it was in alliance with gambling and prostitution. He knew the means of fire-proofing buildings and the relation of insurance-rates to fire-proofing, but he did not know how many firemen there were in the city, how they were trained and paid, or how complete their apparatus. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... at this time, when revolt was in the air and man was preoccupied with his primal right to liberty of existence, that art was given the bad name of a luxury. Until its long prostitution throughout the seventeenth century, its mission had been noble; but now, coincident to the fall of the old regime, the people, from an ignorance which was more their misfortune than their fault, confounded art with luxuries more than questionable, ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various

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

... Durfey's bell. It is unpleasing to have the merit of any of the Fair Sex lessened. Mrs. Behn suffered enough at the hands of supercilious prudes, who had the barbarity to construe her sprightliness into lewdness; and because she had wit and beauty, she must likewise be charged with prostitution ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber

... patriot of foresight, observes, therefore, with a feeling of disappointment this prostitution of an important department of the Federal Government to the use of the reactionary forces in the United States endeavoring to whittle away the essentials of the Constitution which guarantees to all persons in this country all the rights enjoyed under the most progressive ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various

... that an angel told him a father was so poor he was about to raise money by the prostitution of his three daughters. On hearing this St. Nicholas threw in at the cottage window three bags of money, sufficient to portion each ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... what means acquired!—What sympathy can I hold with that?—Wouldst thou not have pandered to the lust of the King, though the object was thine own orphan niece?—You smile?—Smile again when I ask you whether you meant not my own prostitution, when you charged me to remain in the house of that wretched Buckingham?—Smile at that question, and by Heaven, I stab you to the heart!" And she thrust her hand into her bosom, and partly showed the hilt of a ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... bodily functions, perverting the character and constitution at the same time. Depravity of thought and secretion go together. Degradation of mind and corruption of the body are concomitants. There is a very close affinity between mental and moral perversion and physical prostitution, of which fact too many are unconscious. Nervous influence preserves the fluidity of the blood and facilitates its circulation, for it appears that simple arrestment of this influence favors the coagulation of the blood in the vessels; ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

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

... some slight touch of this higher power, are nevertheless so absolutely destitute of all right feeling in connection with it as to use it for the most sordid ends—actually even to advertise themselves as "test and business clairvoyants!" Needless to say, such use of the faculty is a mere prostitution and degradation of it, showing that its unfortunate possessor has somehow got hold of it before the moral side of his nature has been sufficiently developed to stand the strain which it imposes. A perception of the amount of evil karma that may be generated ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater

... number of deities, and the somewhat similar divisions of the templum of the heavens as given by Martianus Capella in explanation of the celestial dwellings of the Italian deities. A study of this unprofitable subject, of which the only interest lies in the illustration it offers of the prostitution of human ingenuity, will be found in a little work by Carl Thulin, published in the series called ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... females, the bulk of the males being between fourteen and thirty years of age, the females between twenty-five and fifty. Few young girls find their way here, as in their earlier career they are able to gain enough by a life of prostitution, without committing larceny, and consequently do not resort to it till their charms begin to wear, and the consequent diminution of their means of subsistence from such a source compels them to resort to some other. There is another ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin

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

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

... of thousands imploring for employment, and only too happy if they may find it at the most repulsive and unwholesome labor, sufficient to stay their famished frames and adjourn for a time the pangs of hunger and frosts. Driven in despairing hordes to beggary, prostitution, and crimes of every kind, how fearfully threatening are the neglected duties and obligations that confront us in their behalf! What, then, shall we say to those who propose to swell the frightful tide by turning loose millions ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various

... change of manners the disgraceful plague of public prostitution will perish of itself. It is especially at the time when the man possesses the frankness and timidity of adolescence, that in his pursuit of happiness he is competent to meet and struggle with great and genuine passions ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac

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

... unwelcome child is ushered into being, the fruit of a prostitution more base than any which is called by that name, because sanctioned and shielded by a covenant of holiness. If any children are illegitimate such are. If any mothers are to be condemned, they are those, who, vain ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams

... motives of that step; but subsequently she forfeited her claim to a return, even in the eye of the law. Shelley had information which made him believe that she fell even to the depth of actual prostitution. If she left him, it would appear that she herself was deserted in turn by a man in a very humble grade of life; and it was in consequence of this desertion that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various

... as hers had been was the prostitution of love, and now she deserved to be loveless for the rest of her life. Vanity and sensuality had been her substitutes for love. She had dealt in travesty and had pretended, even to herself, that she was following reality. ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... no more children because of physical disability; and a railway station where I go down the steps, pick from the floor a flower—wondering if it is all right,—reach a restaurant in which seventy have that night been served and where I lose my flower, symbolizes a house of prostitution mentioned in Chicago's famous report where one woman served sixty men in one night and was said to have seven thousand dollars in the bank. Beneath convention strange unconvention lurks. A young woman of irregular life appears in ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... little more than brothels, in each of which a dozen or more young Bayaderes are kept for the purpose of increasing the revenues of the gods and their priests. Religious prostitution and theological licentiousness prevailed also in Persia, Babylonia, Egypt, and other ancient civilized countries. Commenting on a series of obscene pictures found in an Egyptian tomb, Erman says (154): "We are ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

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

... form any idea of the wide development of philanthropy, the significance of religion, and the practical application to life of ethical principles, the application of moral obligations in business, the upright, God-fearing life of the Americans, unless one has lived among them. They have neither prostitution, foundling hospitals, nor hospitals for venereal diseases. A European is not accustomed to see empty prisons and hospitals in densely settled localities—to come upon cities where there is nothing for the police, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... sometimes even constrained to doubt the lawfulness of my own art when I perceive its prostitution, were I not fully persuaded that the art itself, when used for its legitimate purposes, is one of the greatest correcters of grossness and promoters of refinement. I have been led, since I have been in Italy, to think much of the propriety of introducing ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse

... absent together on a sealing excursion, they often exchanged wives for the time, as a matter of friendly convenience; and indeed, without mentioning any other instances of this nature, it may safely be affirmed that in no country is prostitution carried to greater lengths than among these people. The behaviour of most of the women when their husbands were absent from the huts plainly evinced their indifference towards them, and their utter disregard of connubial fidelity. The departure of the men was usually the signal ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry

... the regulations of the monastery were in a measure broken up; many of the monks had become disorderly and even licentious, and one of them robbed the shrine of St. Oswald of a number of jewels, and other valuable articles, for the purpose of paying a woman in the town the wages of her prostitution. Others gave themselves up to bacchanalian riots in a neighbouring tavern, and, instead of devoting their nights to "prayer," gave themselves up to the vulgar "company of ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips

... upon an age in which corruption is barely not universal, is universally confessed. Venality sculks no longer in the dark, but snatches the bribe in publick; and prostitution issues forth without shame, glittering with the ornaments of successful wickedness. Rapine preys on the publick without opposition, and perjury betrays it without inquiry. Irreligion is not only avowed, but boasted; and the pestilence that used to walk in darkness, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... 10, chapter 20, that they gave divine honor to notorious common prostitutes, as unto goddesses, to Venus, or Faula, to Lapa, the nurse of Romulus, so called among the shepherds for her common prostitution, and to Flora, who enriched herself by her crime, and then, by will, made the people of Rome her heir, and, also left a sum of money by which her birthday was yearly celebrated with games, which, in memory of her, they called Floralia. They claimed that their great goddess, Juno, was both ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various

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

... asserts[101] in an often-quoted passage, 20,000 people in it, who got up every morning without knowing how they would get through the day. There were 5000 public-houses, and 50,000 women supported, wholly or partly, by prostitution. The revenues raised by crime amounted, as he calculates, to an annual sum of, L2,000,000. There were whole classes of professional thieves, more or less organised in gangs, which acted in support of each other. There were gangs on the river, who boarded ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... another person there was at that time whom I have since sought to trace with far deeper earnestness, and with far deeper sorrow at my failure. This person was a young woman, and one of that unhappy class who subsist upon the wages of prostitution. I feel no shame, nor have any reason to feel it, in avowing that I was then on familiar and friendly terms with many women in that unfortunate condition. The reader needs neither smile at this avowal nor frown; for, not to remind my ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey

... delineation of Bubb Dodington's character was furnished by himself in his 'Diary;' in which, as it has been well observed, he 'unveiled the nakedness of his mind, and displayed himself as a courtly compound of mean compliance and political prostitution.' It may, in passing, be remarked, that few men figure well in an autobiography; and that Cumberland himself, proclaimed by Dr. Johnson to be a 'learned, ingenious, accomplished gentleman,' adding, 'the want of company is an inconvenience, but Mr. Cumberland is a million:' in ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton

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

... speak with conviction. His spirits were low. Curll's offer was worrying him. To be in the service of such a man, whose personal character was as infamous as some of the books he published, was a humiliation. It meant the prostitution of his faculties. He shuddered at the prospect of becoming one of Curll's slaves to some of whom he paid a mere pittance and who were sunk so low they had no alternative but ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce

... not common pot-house people! Preach against drunkenness, if you like; that is a sin which increases the rates! Preach against prostitution, for we are afraid our sons will be entrapped some of these days. Preach against love of dress, or anything else that costs money, for we have to pay sadly too much to tailors and milliners for our children and wife; but let us alone, ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness

... personal habit more surely degrades the conscience and the intellect than [244] blind and unhesitating obedience to unlimited authority. Undoubtedly, harlotry and intemperance are sore evils, and starvation is hard to bear, or even to know of; but the prostitution of the mind, the soddening of the conscience, the dwarfing of manhood are worse calamities. It is a greater evil to have the intellect of a nation put down by organized fanaticism; to see its political and industrial affairs at the mercy of a despot ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... apart, the more disgusting this forced intimacy, the prostitution under the marriage vow, which I ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer

... take some that she mentioned, which recur to my mind, are the questions of illegitimacy and prostitution, of maternity homes for poor girls who have fallen into trouble, of women thieves, of what is known as the White Slave traffic, of female children who have been exposed to awful treatment, of women who are drunkards or ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard

... abroad their effect was otherwise. Foreigners have not yet learned thoroughly to appreciate our national practice of washing (and suffering others to wash) the foulest linen in fullest public. Mr. Stead's unworthy clap-trap representing London as the head-quarters of kidnapping, hocussing, and child-prostitution, the author invoking the while with true Pharisaic righteousness, unclean and blatant, pure intentions and holy zeal for good works was welcomed with a shout of delight by our unfriends the French, who hold virtue in England to be mostly Tartuffery, and by our cousins-german and rivals the Germans, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... fraud, oppression, tyranny, and cruelty with which the conduct of France has marked them, that they are not now nearly dead, extinct, and detested? But who are the Jacobins? Is there a man in this country who has at any time opposed Ministers, who has resisted the waste of public money and the prostitution of honours, that has not been branded with the name? The Whig Club are Jacobins. Of this there can be no doubt, for a right honourable gentleman [Mr. Windham] on that account struck his name off the list. The Friends of the People ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones

... lecture upon all imaginable subjects, and are listened to, whether treating of the right of their sex to the franchise, or the more unapproachable theme of its degraded misery in the public prostitution legally practiced in all the cities of this great New World, or the frantic vagaries of their theory of so-called Free Love. They are professors in colleges, practicing physicians; not yet, I believe, ordained clergywomen (the Quakers admit the female right to preach without the ceremony of laying ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

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



Words linked to "Prostitution" :   prostitute, vice crime



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