"Criminality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... crime. But in the absence of more definite proof we must assume Claudius' murder of his brother to have been a solitary achievement, skilfully carried out by one whose genial good-fellowship and convivial habits gave the lie to any suggestion of criminality. Whatever may have been his inward feelings of remorse or self-reproach, Claudius masked them successfully from the eyes of all. Hamlet's instinctive dislike of his uncle was not shared by the members of the Danish court. The "witchcraft of his wit," his "traitorous gifts," ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... hear Olinthus!' sighed the old man, more and more affected by the virtue of his son, but not less strongly convinced of the criminality ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... one name, idleness, a series of results due to different causes have been grouped, of which each one could be a source of good, instead of being a source of evil to society. Like all questions concerning criminality and related to human faculties, facts have been collected having nothing in common with one another. People speak of laziness or crime, without giving themselves the trouble to analyze the cause. They are in a hurry to punish these faults without inquiring if the punishment itself does not ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... great enemy breathed his last. He was not exactly the monster of iniquity that he has been painted; not a criminal for the love of criminality. He was a Tiberius rather than a Nero; a morbid influence, not a devouring pestilence. A perfectly sombre bigot; an example of what the Greeks would have called [Greek: hubris] of a very exceptional ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... punishment. He who is sane enough to conceive an act of wickedness, to plan its execution, and to attempt to perpetrate it, although he may be in other respects of unsettled mind, is equally amenable to the law, and ought equally to suffer for his criminality with him who has a wiser and ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... faces, pointed suddenly a finger with a shriek, "That's the man," and incontinently went off into a fit of hysterics in front of thirty-six seamen. I must say that never in my life did I see a ship's company look so frightened. Yes, in this tale of guilt, there was a curious absence of mere criminality, and a touch of that fantasy which is often a part of a seaman's character. It wasn't greed that moved him, I think. It was something much less simple: boredom, perhaps, or a bet, or the pleasure ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... was that manual labour was undignified, and that it didn't pay. No trade for me, was my decision, and no superintendent's daughters. And no criminality, I also decided. That would be almost as disastrous as to be a labourer. Brains paid, not brawn, and I resolved never again to offer my muscles for sale in the brawn market. Brain, and brain only, would ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... many lives when there is a cessation of energy and loss of power. Men and women of education and refinement come to live in a cheaper neighborhood because they lack the ability to make money, because of ill health, because of an unfortunate marriage, or for other reasons which do not imply criminality or stupidity. Among them are those who, in spite of untoward circumstances, keep up some sort of an intellectual life; those who are "great for books," as their neighbors say. To such the Settlement may be ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... with Nature in stamping the seal of its approval upon Regularity of conformation: nor has the Law been backward in seconding their efforts. "Irregularity of Figure" means with us the same as, or more than, a combination of moral obliquity and criminality with you, and is treated accordingly. There are not wanting, it is true, some promulgators of paradoxes who maintain that there is no necessary connection between geometrical and moral Irregularity. "The Irregular," they say, "is ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... proceedings; spread upon the official records a full account, in the plainest language, of Porter's outrages upon his parents, exhibiting it in details that could not but shock every sentiment of humanity and decency; holding up the commissioners as the abettors and protectors of criminality of the deepest dye; and planting themselves fair and square against them on the merits of Porter's case. The commissioners tried to explain and extricate themselves; but they could not escape from the toils in which, through rashness, they ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... may be questioned whether Johnson was entirely in the right. I suppose it will not be controverted that the difference in the degree of criminality is very great, on account of consequences: but still it may be maintained, that, independent of moral obligation, infidelity is by no means a light offence in a husband; because it must hurt a delicate attachment, in which a mutual constancy is implied, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... the mad and morbid literature that the enthusiasm of 1830 called into existence. The gloomy and sterile little pictures of "Gaspard de la Nuit," or the elaborate criminality, "Les Contes Immoraux," laboriously invented lifeless things with creaky joints, pitiful lay figures that fall to dust as soon as the book is closed, and in the dust only the figures of the terrible ferryman and the unfortunate ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... continued the Superior with a gentle smile, putting his feet comfortably on the mantelpiece, "have had my little fling, and the dear boys used to say—ahem!—but this is mere worldly vanity. You alone, my dear son," he went on with slight severity, "seem to be wanting in some criminality, or—shall I say?—some appropriate besetting sin to qualify you for this holy retreat. An absolutely gratuitous and blameless idiocy appears to be your only peculiarity, and for this you must do penance. From this day ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... that torments me, and not the unlikely, and you cannot but recognize that what I fear is possible. I was at Caffies the day of the crime. I lost there a button torn off by violence. This button picked up by the police proves, according to them, the criminality of the one who lost it. They will find that I am ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... reluctance. The Paris Club and bilateral creditors have eased the external debt situation, while pressing for more rapid structural reforms. Benin continues to be hurt by Nigerian trade protection that bans imports of a growing list of products from Benin and elsewhere. As a result, smuggling and criminality along the Benin-Nigeria border ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... she found herself seeing more and more of Tom Peters, and gradually, strange to say, he grew less repulsive. From the talks they had together, she began to see that there was really no reason to put faith in Everard; his criminality, his faithlessness, were too flagrant. Gradually she grew ashamed of her early mistrust of Peters; remorse bred esteem, and esteem ultimately ripened into feelings so warm, that when Tom gave freer vent to the love that had been visible to Clara from the first, she did ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... was hired for!" he mused, "a fence; a wretched mask put up to hide the trickery and chicanery and criminality—the crookedness which has never been put aside; which nobody ever meant to put aside! My God! they've let me stultify myself in a thousand ways; let me sit here day after day with a lie in my mouth, saying things that ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... 'Pecorantes et Sodomise in terra, vivi confodiantur.' The Mirror makes it treason. Bestiality can never make any progress; it cannot therefore be injurious to society in any great degree, which is the true measure of criminality in foro cirili, and will ever be properly and severely punished, by universal derision. It may, therefore, be omitted. It was anciently punished with death, as it has been latterly. LI AElfrid. 31. and 25 H. 8. c. 6. see Beccaria, Sec. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... study of the causes of violence, Les Anarchistes: "History is rich in examples of the complicity of criminality and politics, and where one sees in turn political passion react on criminal instinct and criminal instinct on political passion. While Pompey has on his side all honest people—Cato, Brutus, Cicero; Caesar, more popular than he, has as his followers ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... result of those four minutes, ruin, utter and irretrievable, stares him in the face. He can be saved now. Imprison him as a criminal, and I affirm to you that he will be lost. He has neither the face nor the manner of one who can survive that terrible ordeal. Weigh in the scales his criminality and the suffering he has undergone. The latter is ten times heavier already. He has lain in prison under this charge for more than two months. Is he likely ever to forget that? Imagine the anguish of his mind during that time. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... highly developed than those of the countryman, so it is with his "morals." In positive attainments of conscience, virtue, and vice, the townsman shows considerable advance. This point is commonly misunderstood. The annals of crime afford irrefutable evidence of the greater criminality of the towns. London, containing less than one-fifth of the population of England and Wales, is responsible for more than one-third of the annual number of indictable crimes.[284] In France the criminality of the urban population is just double that of the rural population.[285] ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... absentees, is really unaccountable, unless we suppose it possible that his Excellency as a native of Ireland, and as having a well-grounded Hibernian antipathy to his absentee countrymen, uses the term as one expressive both of the criminality of the absentee and of his own abhorrence ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... carefulness, impulsiveness, temperance, high-spiritedness, joviality, benignity, quietness, cheerfulness, hospitality, sympathy, humorousness, love of fun, neighborliness, love of frontier life, love of travel and of adventure. The same may be said of immoral traits, such as criminality, pauperism, delinquency, irascibility, lying, truancy, superstition, clannishness, secretiveness, despondency, slyness, exclusiveness, vanity, cunning, cruelty, ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... proffered kiss; and, without much straining of words, 4. Merely to refrain from angry expostulation and a rupture of acquaintance when one is kissed—this last partaking rather of the nature of the ratification of an unauthorized act, and being, in fact, the measure of Dora's criminality. But the other shades of ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... manufacture and distribution. The great majority of citizens who are engaged in the processes that go to make up this portion of food costs are employed in an obviously essential economic function, and they do not approach it in a spirit of criminality, but as a very necessary, proper, and honorable function. They have, since the European War began, rather over-enjoyed the result of economic forces that were not of their own creation. That a considerable margin is necessary to cover the legitimate costs of, and ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... the social and educational psychologists and behaviorists could child-labor, the hobo, unemployment, poverty, and criminality be given their just emphasis; and it seems accurate to ascribe the social sterility of Economic theory and its programme to its ignorance and lack of ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... Frank and you were to be as strangers to each other. And even then I should have been afraid, he is such a determined fellow; but uncommonly clever. Stay!" said he, yielding to a sudden and inexplicable desire to see Edward, and discover if his criminality had in any way changed his outward appearance. "I'll go with you. I can hasten things. If Edward goes, he must be off, as soon as possible, to Liverpool, and leave no trace. The next packet sails the day after to-morrow. I noted it down from ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... personal hatred of him, for he never acted with aught but consideration for the welfare of others. No one could fail to respect him who knew him in public or private life. The defenders of those murderous criminals who seek to excuse their criminality by asserting that it is exercised for political ends, inveigh against wealth and irresponsible power. But for this assassination even this base apology ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... Christian point of view, to leave to them their consoling belief that those whom they loved acted from a sense of duty or a sentiment of patriotism; and not, just at a time of heart-rending sorrow, to press upon them the criminality of all and every one concerned in any way with war? I commend this suggestion to those who are not strangers to the value of personal sympathy and gentleness towards ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... imbecile and half-witted may seem in comparison with the normal members of the community, it should always be remembered that feeble-mindedness is not an unrelated expression of modern civilization. Its roots strike deep into the social fabric. Modern studies indicate that insanity, epilepsy, criminality, prostitution, pauperism, and mental defect, are all organically bound up together and that the least intelligent and the thoroughly degenerate classes in every community are the most prolific. Feeble-mindedness in one generation becomes ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... which includes whipping for the male offenders. There are brutes so low, so infamous, so degraded and bestial in their cruelty and brutality, that the only way to get at them is through their skins. Sentimentality on behalf of such men is really almost as unhealthy and wicked as the criminality of the men themselves. My experience is that there should be no toleration of any "tenderloin" or "red light" district, and that, above all, there should be the most relentless war on commercialized vice. The men who profit and make their living ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... off his color. He cannot, if he were born a member of a particular race, strip himself of that quality; nor can he, if he has been in servitude; nor can he, if he has been in rebellion, take out that taint; nor can he, if he has been convicted of other crimes, remove his record of criminality. These are an inherent, inseparable, indissoluble part of that man. But his education, his registration, his residence, his payment of a portion of the burdens of the State, and the other matters, are in his power and his control. I find it to be in accord with the ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... we allow." Neither in Rome nor in England has the advocate been held to be disgraced by undertaking the defence of bad men who have been notoriously guilty. What an English barrister may do, there was no reason that a Roman advocate should not do, in regard to simple criminality. Cicero himself has explained in the passage I have quoted how the Roman practice did differ from ours in regard to treason. He has stated also that he knew nothing of the first conspiracy when he offered to defend Catiline on the score of provincial peculations. No writer has been ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... though, in fact, it is far from venial. But to fail in a case where Providence has suddenly thrown into your hands the final interests of another,—a fellow creature shuddering between the gates of life and death: this, to a man of apprehensive conscience, would mingle the misery of an atrocious criminality with the misery of a bloody calamity. You are called upon, by the case supposed, possibly to die, but to die at the very moment when, by any even partial failure or effeminate collapse of your energies, you will be ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... Clodia, a dissolute and wicked woman, he married Servilia, sister to Cato. This also proved an unfortunate match, for she only wanted one of all Clodia's vices, the criminality she was accused of with her brothers. Out of reverence to Cato, he for a while connived at her impurity and immodesty, but at length dismissed her. When the senate expected great things from him, hoping ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... instead, the power of intelligent choice and the ability to learn by imitation. When these drop away, man without his instincts or his intelligence is more helpless than the brute. Students of sociology are making clear to us that a large portion of the criminality of the world, much of the looseness of life, and a large part of the alcoholic excesses are due to this taint of feeble-mindedness. Recent investigations have made it clear that one feeble-minded family in a community may, in the course of ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... in language, was pretty sharp on the "criminality" of such conduct as was imputed to the accused, yet certainly left some margin to the jury for the exercise of their opinion upon "the law ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... knowledge of the fact of voting, and to apply the term "knowingly" to the mere act of voting, would make nonsense of the statute. This word was inserted as defining the essence of the offense, and it limits the criminality to cases where the voting is not only without right, but where it is done willfully, with a knowledge that it is without right. Short of that there is no offense within the statute. This would be so upon well-established principles, even if the word "knowingly" had ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the new governor of the city, who now occupied the residence of the prefect Titianus, had taken advantage of the oppressed people to extract money, and Andreas, by the payment of a large sum, had succeeded in persuading him to sign a document which exonerated Polybius and his son from all criminality, and protected their person and property against soldiers and town guards alike. This safe-conduct secured a peaceful future to the genial old man, and filled the measure of what he owed to the freedman, even to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... terrible, replete with horror and shame," said the pope. "We lived blessed days, heavenly nights. Oh, we were so happy that we hardly had a thought for our criminality, but only for our love. One night there was a knocking at the closed door of the house, and we shudderingly recognized the voice ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... decisions to transcend the great purpose for which punishment is necessary. The full benefit of example being secured, policy as well as humanity equally forbids that they should be carried further. I have acted on this principle, pardoning those who appear to have been led astray by ignorance of the criminality of the acts they had committed, and suffering the law to take effect on those only in whose favor no extenuating ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... that the reports on this point were constantly corrected, brought under review of the governing elders, councils, judges, princes, or king, according to the historical circumstances, so that the need and the criminality of such a census would vanish at the same moment. But this was not the census ordered by David. He wanted a more specific return, probably of the particular wealth and nature of the employment pursued by each individual family, so that ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... individual: "To qualify for free board and lodging you must commit a crime. But if you do you must pay the price. You must allow me to ruin your character, and doom you for the rest of your life to destitution, modified by the occasional successes of criminality. You shall become the Child of the State, on condition that we doom you to a temporal perdition, out of which you will never be permitted to escape, and in which you will always be a charge upon our resources and a constant source ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... frantic—I readily joined Wilson in a perilous smuggling adventure in which we miscarried, and was willingly blinded by his logic to consider the robbery of the officer of the customs in Fife as a fair and honourable reprisal. Hitherto I had observed a certain line in my criminality, and stood free of assaults upon personal property, but now I felt a wild pleasure in disgracing myself as ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the next two years and the last of his money finding a way. The pattern of criminality had changed, too, and it was no easy matter to find the assistance he needed. About the only group crime still flourishing was hijacking; it took him a long while to locate a small under-cover outfit which operated around St. Louie and arrange to obtain a helicopter and pilot. Getting hold ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... was the first occasion of sorrow to thee, among so much prosperity, the horns, too, not his own, placed upon his forehead, and you, O dogs, glutted with the blood of your master. But, if you diligently inquire into his {case}, you will find the fault of an accident, and not criminality in him; for what criminality did ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... simplicity, instantly suspect him of trading upon it. He rode on in a deep study. Was he reviewing his past life? A vagabond by birth and education, a swindler by profession, an outcast by reputation, without absolutely turning his back upon respectability, he had trembled on the perilous edge of criminality ever since his boyhood. He did not scruple to cheat these Mexicans,—they were a degraded race,—and for a moment he felt almost an accredited agent of progress and civilization. We never really understand the meaning of enlightenment until we begin ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... Poor Laws." [1] Poor-law reform was at this time occupying the attention of the nation, and apparently also of the legislature. And we know, from the Enquiry into the Increase of Robberies, that the question of lessening both the sufferings and the criminality of the poor had for years occupied Fielding's warm heart and active intellect. But the extent to which he devoted these last months of his life to the cause of the poorest and most degraded deserves more than a passing recognition. He tells ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... partners in guilt; who thought they could not otherwise maintain the legal character of their league unless the unfortunate results against which they had warned the king really came to pass, and who hoped in the general guilt of all to conceal their own individual criminality. It is, however, incredible that the outbreak of the Iconoclasts was the fruit of a deliberate plan, preconcerted, as it is alleged, at the convent of St. Truyen. It does not seem likely that in a solemn assembly of so many nobles and warriors, of whom the greater part were the adherents ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... any finite mind to fix the degree of criminality of any human act or of any human life. The Infinite One alone can know how much of our sin is chargeable to us, and how much to our brothers or our fathers. We all participate in one another's sins. There is a community of responsibility attaching to every misdeed. ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... need of either. By the moderation we have mentioned, it is in the power of any woman to avoid the evils of an excessive family, without injury and without criminality. ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... few days pass before his vision. Retrospect is terrible. In this maze it avails not that he is guiltless of crime. The circumstances affirm his criminality. Is he not a ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... 'fanaticism;' where Ernest had spoken of Herr Max's 'single-hearted devotion,' Lancaster had merely changed the phrase into 'undisguised revolutionary ardour.' The whole paper was one long sermon against Max Schurz's Utopian schemes, imputing to him not only folly but even positive criminality as well. We all know how we all in England look upon the foreign political refugee—a man to be hit again with impunity, because he has no friends; but to Ernest, who had lived so long in his own little socialistic set, the discovery that people could ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... this most fatal error has been the increase of impiety in an astonishing manner, and there are a great number of villages where few go to mass, and more than the third part refuse to take the communion—which is probably also the cause of the increase in criminality which has been noted. But a short time ago, during the government of General Lardizabal, the religious presented a petition through the archbishop, asking that they be allowed to administer corrective punishment at the door of the church, as had always been ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... are base and disgraceful, and that they need not do them. They all know it. They know that what they are doing is wrong, and would not do it for anything in the world if they had the power of resisting the forces which shut their eyes to the criminality of their actions and ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... also they are less numerous than males of corresponding age charged with the like offenses. It has been asserted that in the law courts girls find more sympathy than boys, and that for this reason the former receive milder sentences than the latter; hence it results that in appearance merely the criminality of girls is less than that of boys. Others, again, refer the differences in respect of criminality between the youthful members of the two sexes to the influences of education and general environment. Morrison, however, maintains that all these influences ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... problems of law. A kind of popular psychology was naturally involved whenever judges or lawyers analyzed the experience on the witness stand or discussed the motives of crime or the confessions of the criminal or the social conditions of criminality. But when every day brought new discoveries in the psychological laboratory, it seemed natural to make use of the new methods and of the new results in the interest of the courtroom. The power of observation in the witness, the exactitude of his memory, the character of his illusions and imagination, ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... subjects were church discipline, rites and ceremonies, apostolical succession, the duty of reverence and obedience to the clergy, the atrocious criminality of dissent, the absolute necessity of observing all the forms of godliness, the reprehensible presumption of individuals who attempted to think for themselves in matters connected with religion, or to be guided by their own interpretations of ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... with food she told them the story of the new road—another shameless item in the wake of German criminality and dishonor. ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... seven men has had the manliness to avow that his own individual convictions are opposed to those of his fellows. We are compelled to regard their joint labours as one production. It is the corporate efficacy of the several contributions which constitutes the chief criminality of the volume. It is to the respectability and weight of the conjoined names of its authors, and to their combined efforts, that 'Essays and Reviews' are indebted for ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... France has done and close up the monasteries and convents, for just as long as these institutions are allowed to keep open house, and dictate to the inhabitants of Italy, just that long we may expect the immigrants who come over from Italy to bear the Vatican's mark of vice, immorality and criminality. ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... attached to the legation were arbitrarily seized at his Side, when leaving the capital of Paraguay, committed to prison, and there subjected to torture for the purpose of procuring confessions of their own criminality and testimony to support the President's allegations against the United States minister. Mr. McMahon, the newly appointed minister to Paraguay, having reached the La Plata, has been instructed to proceed without delay to Asuncion, there to investigate the whole subject. The rear-admiral ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... that without being vividly impressed by the baseness which is possible in man when his greediness is at stake? But it must also be said that all fault for such treatment must not be thrown entirely upon the criminality of human nature. Were not the teachings of men of science, and even of a notable portion of the clergy, up to a quite recent time, teachings of distrust, despite and almost hatred towards the poorer classes? Did not science teach that since serfdom ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... being a one-eyed wretch, who seemed hackneyed in the ways of vice. To break this vile connexion he was sent to sea; but, no sooner did he return, than his wicked disposition took its natural course, and every day he lived served only to habituate him to acts of greater criminality. He presently discovered his old acquaintance, who, no doubt, rejoiced to find him so ripe for mischief: with this worthless, abandoned fellow, he enters into engagements of the worst kind, even those of robbery and murder. Thus blindly ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... hand removed the children from their vicious and criminal surroundings known as one of the crime-cradles of the State of New York. Neither church nor school took them under its protecting care. Born and reared in the haunts of vice and crime, nothing but viciousness and criminality could be expected as a result. Without going, so far as a wellknown ex-member of our State Legislature, whose antagonism to the humanitarian treatment of prisoners led him to the belief that "there wasn't nothin' in ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... go back to the child—corrupt politics, dishonesty and greed in commerce, war, anarchism, drunkenness, incompetence and criminality."—Moxom. ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... chicaneries and despicabilities of commerce; who knew that a man's word was never trusted where there could enter the slightest suspicion of an advantage to himself in lying; whose daily terror had been lest some error, some luckless chance, should put him within the nets of criminality. It is the deepest curse of such a life as his that it directs the imagination in channels of meanness, and preoccupies the thought with sordid fears. What would it avail him, in the present instance, ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... even from a false idea that maternity is vulgar; but it is true, beyond all question, that the primary cause of the sin is far back of all these influences. The most unstinted and scathing invectives are used in characterizing the criminality of a mother who takes the life of her unborn babe; but a word is seldom said of the one who forced upon her the circumstances which gave the unfortunate one existence. Though doctors, ministers, and moralists have said much on this subject, and written more, it is reasonable to suppose that they ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... your audience, are empowered to commit assassination on your victim, the latter come under the charge of unseemliness, inasmuch as they are a description of public suicide. Assuming, then, manslaughter to be your pastime, and hari-kari not to be your bent, the phrase, to escape criminality, must rise in you as you would have it fall on him, ex improviso. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... every one of us felt how a very few minutes of the months and years called life, will sometimes suffice to place all time past and future in an entirely new light; will make us see the vanity or the criminality of the bygone, and so change the aspect of the coming time that we look with loathing on the very thing we have most desired. A few moments may change our character for life, by giving a totally different direction to our aims ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... his conduct in life, so candour, and indeed common integrity, enjoin it upon us to accompany that acknowledgment with all such circumstances, and the reasonings upon them that occur to us, as may serve to extenuate the criminality of those acts, and to show that his misconduct was the natural, or rather the necessary and inevitable result of the circumstances to which he was exposed, and nothing more than the every-day issues of human infirmity. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... of the undertaking, they preferred to dilate upon the criminality of methods and the character of the Sinn Feiners, which is just where they fell into the most fatal mistake of all and made the aftermath what it has been since—a far more complicated problem to deal with than ever existed before the rising or in the rising itself. Thus, when Sir Edward Carson ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... subjects. He heard, with horror, a narration of the arts by which he had been imposed on when he was unversed in the intricacies of government, and too sincere and noble to suspect deceit in others. That Allan Neville, whose person and merit he well remembered, whose rashness and reported criminality he had lamented, and whose supposed death he had deplored, was still alive, and no other than the renowned Colonel Evellin, whose address in forwarding to him the supplies procured from Holland, and whose brave exploits with the Northern army, had endeared his name to him, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... in itself showed how cleverly Rudolph Rayne was foresighted in all his plans. He always left a loophole for escape. Surely he was a past-master in the art of criminality, for his fertile brain evolved schemes and exit channels which ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... increased his alarm. Nor did I protest at the abuse he heaped upon your absent head. For I know how wickedly and unscrupulously you acted in the felony of my love, and there was a certain humorous satisfaction in hearing father give a "philosophic proposition" to your criminality. My only prayer was that he might not ask me if I loved you. Philip, I would rather live on bread and water a week than confess it to any living man besides yourself. But father has dwelt too long outside the realm of romance to ask that very natural question. Finally I ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... Quarterly Gilbert T. Stephenson, Judge of the Municipal Court of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, writes on the subject, "Education and Crime among Negroes." Although he accepts as facts certain unreliable statistics concerning the criminality of Negroes, he nevertheless presents the subject in a liberal manner. His following ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... having no counsellor to assist him, desired me to draw up his defence in such a manner that he might not implicate any person, and, at the same time, clear my brother and himself from any criminality of conduct. With God's help I accomplished this task to his great satisfaction, and to the surprise of the commissioners, who did not expect to find them so ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... tastes of a sybarite, he required a great deal of money to render him happy. Like the immortal Becky Sharp, he could have been fairly honest if possessed of a large income; but not having it he stopped short of nothing save actual criminality in order to indulge his luxurious tastes to the full. Candidly speaking, he had already overstepped the mark when he altered the figures of a check his brother-in-law had given him, and, had not Pine been so generous, he would have undoubtedly ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... also a less tendency to criminality, debauchery, and intemperance in the race; this, again, can in a measure be ascribed to their family influence, which even in our day has not lost that patriarchal influence which tinges the home or family life in the Old Testament. Crimes against the person or property committed ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... evidence that Charles was a lawbreaker and desperado his accusers gave full license to their imagination and distorted the facts that they had obtained, in every way possible, to prove a course of criminality, which the records absolutely refuse ...
— Mob Rule in New Orleans • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... breaking up of the Socratic institution for benefitting the human race, so much got the better of self-love, that he committed several petty larcenies in hopes of being transported thither; but whether his courage or his luck failed him, certain it is that he never reached the proper degree of criminality, and only succeeded in visiting by turns the various penitentiaries in London ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... authority, stands upon two principles: first, an incapacity arising from the supposed incongruity of two duties in the commonwealth; secondly, an incapacity arising from unfitness by infirmity of nature or the criminality of conduct. As to the first class of incapacities, they have no hardship annexed to them. The persons so incapacitated are paid by one dignity for what they abandon in another, and for the most part the situation arises from their own choice. But as to the second, arising ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... 104: Let him have his mistress)—Ver. 1001. It must be remembered that he has the notions of a Greek parent, and sees no such criminality in this sanction as a parent would be sensible ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... criminality to this invasion of Cuba is that, under the lead of Spanish subjects and with the aid of citizens of the United States, it had its origin with many in motives of cupidity. Money was advanced by individuals, probably in considerable amounts, to purchase Cuban bonds, as they have been called, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... near the capital without an escort, but later I have been much more surprised to see that in provinces distant from the capital a complete security is enjoyed. In order to show the condition of the criminality of the island we shall present the following data drawn from the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... high-treason," were but little more promising. Indeed, it was afterward ascertained to be the unanimous opinion of the judges that the charge of high-treason could not be legally sustained, since the individual who was alleged to be the partner in the criminality imputed to her was a foreigner, and therefore, "owing no allegiance to the crown," could not be said to ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... and all of them go out of town.' Retribution, therefore, for wrong-doing would be tardy, if wrong-doing there must be. She could but ruefully reflect that after all the girl was beautiful and gifted; moreover, if Hugh would force her to befriend him in this criminality, there might be a certain joy in thereby vindicating those Liberal principles of hers, in which a scornful family had always refused to believe. So, being driven into it, she would fain have done it boldly and with a dash. But she could ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... welcomed upon its shores the outcast, rejected, refuse of other lands; and, as a matter of course, when foreign capitals became positively too hot for irreclaimable characters, they flocked into Whitechapel and Soho, there to indulge their natural bent for every kind of criminality known to civilization, save those involving physical risk or physical exertion for the criminal. There were then whole quarters of the metropolis out of which every native resident had gradually been ousted, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... intolerable, I have submitted as best I might—but it can now no longer be endured that I should be in one eternal dread of thee only—that Catiline, on what alarm soever, alone should be the source of terror—that no treason against me can be imagined, such as should be revolting to thy desperate criminality. Wherefore begone, and liberate me from this terror, so that, if true, I may not be ruined; if false I may at least ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... sensation is this, for me, Ned!—I feel all your kindness, but if you would consult my peace of mind, and wish me to regain my self-respect, you will allow me to disburthen my soul of the weight that oppresses it. This is strong language; but, while I have no confessions of deliberate criminality, or of positive vice to make, I feel it to be hardly too strong for the facts. My tale will be very short, and I crave your patience, Ned, while I expose my former weakness to these young people." Here John Effingham paused, as if to recollect himself; then he proceeded with a seriousness ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... in this country about three days, and all that time my chief reading has been the "Address to Lochlomond" you were so obliging as to send to me. Were I impannelled one of the author's jury, to determine his criminality respecting the sin of poesy, my verdict should be "guilty! a poet of nature's making!". It is an excellent method for improvement, and what I believe every poet does, to place some favourite classic author in his own walks of study and composition, before him as a model. Though your ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... expresses itself in the attempted psychological solution of the riddles of criminality. It is characteristic of Wassermann's predilection for these matters that in his novel Kasper Hauser or Sluggishness of Heart (1909) he seeks to interpret anew and on the basis of scrupulous attention to all the documents in the case the oft-treated story of the mysterious foundling who ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... hemisphere, and that all he had to do was to offer a bribe, in order to purchase a man of Ithuel's deportment and appearance. In his own island ten sequins would buy almost any mariner of the port to do any act short of positive legal criminality; and the idea that a barbarian of the west would refuse such a sum, in preference to selling his shipmates, never crossed his mind. Little, however, did the Italian understand the American. A greater knave than Ithuel, in his own way, it was not easy to find; but it shocked all his ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... day, but nevertheless the list of casualties kept creeping to higher figures. Bok decided to help by arousing the parents of America, in whose hands, after all, lay the remedy. He began a series of articles in the magazine, showing what had happened over a period of years, the criminality of allowing so many young lives to be snuffed out, and suggested how parents could help by prohibiting the deadly firecrackers and cannon, and how organizations could assist by influencing the passing of city ordinances. Each ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... with his grandfather's figures. Well, what then? Would the old man thank his banker for making an accusation of criminality against his grandson? Herresford might be a mean man, but the honor of his name was doubtless dear ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... to punish the usurpation of the executive authority of the government of the United States in carrying on correspondence with the government of any foreign prince or state. Gallatin thought this resolution covered too much ground. The criminality of such acts did not lie in their being usurpations, but in the nature of the crime committed. There was no authority in the Constitution for a grant of such a power to the President. To afford aid and comfort to the enemy was treason, but there was no war, and therefore no enemy. He claimed the ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... seven graves without the mother," the Major answered, sternly. "And what odds whether seven or seventy? The criminality is the point, not the accumulation of results. Still, I never heard of so big a blackguard. And what did he do next, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... woven too securely, and should he struggle to break through it, he might find himself exposed to even more terrible dangers. He felt horrified at his position, but with this there was mingled no horror of the criminality of his associates, for the skilful hand of Mascarin had unwound and mastered all the bad materials of his nature. He was dazzled at the glorious future held out before him, and said to himself that ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... notice the objection, that other nations would not give up the Slave-trade, if we were to renounce it. But if the trade were stained but by a thousandth part of the criminality, which he and others, after a thorough investigation of the subject, charged upon it, the House ought immediately to vote its abolition. This miserable argument, if persevered in, would be an eternal bar to the annihilation of the evil. How was it ever to be eradicated, if every nation ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... exhaustion and excitement. She put her hand upon her forehead for a few moments, as if collecting her faculties, or endeavouring to remember the purport of their previous conversation. A slight moisture had broken through her skin, and altogether, notwithstanding her avowed criminality in entering into an unholy bond, she appeared ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... makes her plot Camillo's and Isabella's murders, and throws her before marriage into Brachiano's arms. Added to this ambition, she is possessed with the cold demon of her own imperial and victorious beauty. She has the courage of her criminality in the fullest sense; and much of the fascination with which Webster has invested her, depends upon her dreadful daring. Her portrait is drawn with full and firm touches. Although she appears but five times on the scene, she ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Winch for a little and discuss the larger question. I don't think this is a case of the black art or anything of the sort. I don't think there is any taint of criminality about it at all, Mr. Fotheringay—none whatever, unless you are suppressing material facts. No, it's miracles—pure miracles—miracles, if I may say so, of the ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Proverbial Philosophy, which long years after the celebrated Dr. Binney of the Weigh-house in Thames Street issued with my leave as a tractate useful to the present generation. And while there was so much fuss made as to the criminality of a false quantity in Greek, or a deficient acquaintance with those awkward verbs in "Mi," or above all a false concord (every one of which derelictions in duty involved severe punishment), let us remember that all ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... nation, I hold this power in 'contempt' of you, it signifies not on what authority he pretends to say it. It is no relief, but an aggravation to a person in slavery, to reflect that he was sold by his parent; and as that which heightens the criminality of an act cannot be produced to prove the legality of it, hereditary succession cannot be established as a legal thing.... Notwithstanding the taxes of England amount to almost seventeen millions a year, said to be for the ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... want of education and opportunity. Commercial immorality and developed swindling are impossible without a commerce, but the cupidity that begets these forms of vice is not lacking amongst the Natives and waits only for the opportunities which developed commerce affords. The potential capacity for criminality and immorality is indeed no less among the Natives than among Europeans. Theft, arson, murder and rape are the most common forms of crime committed by the Natives to-day because the opportunities for perpetrating systematic fraud are as ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... self, against humanity, that often do more harm than the crimes that make the perpetrator an outcast from society. Where a tiny flaw or the slightest defect may cost a precious life, carelessness is as much a crime as deliberate criminality. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... black and different. But in Southern communities, where the Negro is not outnumbered by many thousands of white people, the race problem, essentially, and in its most acute form, is something distinct from his laziness or ignorance, or brutality, or criminality, or all-round intellectual and moral inferiority to the white man. That problem as the South knows and deals with it would exist, as certainly as it does to-day, if there were no shadow of excuse for the conviction that the Negro is more lazy, or more ignorant, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... gradually dawned on them. For insurance swindlers and smugglers to work on such a large scale, very probably the organization branched over the whole civilized world. This vast shapeless vessel was a spider at the center of a great network of criminality. ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... the street under her window began to play the tune of "Bon-bon Buddy, My Chocolate Drop." Laura stopped her humming and listened. There was something in this rag-time melody which at that moment particularly appealed to her. It was peculiarly suggestive of the low life, the criminality and prostitution that constitute the night excitement of that section of New York City known as "The Tenderloin." The common tune and its vulgar associations was like the spreading before her eyes of a vivid panorama showing with terrific realism the inevitable ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... A man who falsely accuses an innocent person of theft (in cases of greatest criminality) is guilty of a capital offence; in all other cases the offenders, whether principals or accessaries, shall be sent ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... for the war to meet danger, and possibly death, in the defense of Virginia, she had said little, and that little was in reference rather to the imprudence of the course he had taken than to what she regarded in her own mind as its folly, and indeed its criminality. ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty |
