"Degradation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Bathsheba instinctively adored. That she had never, by look, word, or sign, encouraged a man to approach her—that she had felt herself sufficient to herself, and had in the independence of her girlish heart fancied there was a certain degradation in renouncing the simplicity of a maiden existence to become the humbler half of an indifferent matrimonial whole—were facts now bitterly remembered. Oh, if she had never stooped to folly of this kind, respectable ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... because his interest and pride are involved. One side his welfare and that of those around him is at stake, his capital, his reputation, his social position and advancement; on the other side, are poverty, ruin, social degradation, dependence, bankruptcy and the alms-house. In the presence of this alternative he keeps close watch and becomes industrious; he thinks of his business even when abed or at his meals; he studies it, not from a distance, speculatively, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... sacrifices for its better preservation, makes them attribute exactions of this kind to an abuse of superiority. Hence are they led to consider these restraints as the symbols of their own slavery and degradation, as in fact the natives in these Islands have ample reasons for doing, when the legal exemption of the whites is considered, without any other apparent reason than the difference in color. Independent of this, the substitute above alluded to would ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... ground which should have supported them; and at this period, when the most assiduous cultivation was necessary to procure a return, into what a situation was I thrown? In a ship crowded with three hundred men, each of them, or nearly so, cohabiting with an unfortunate female, in the lowest state of degradation; where oaths and blasphemy interlarded every sentence; where religion was wholly neglected, and the only honour paid to the Almighty was a clean shirt on a Sunday; where implicit obedience to the will of an officer, was considered of more importance than the observance of the Decalogue; and ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... pleasures of the world, nor accept the specious proffer of ecclesiastical preferment in exchange for his honest convictions. Honor, however bigoted the sense, bound him to his oath, or at least to a compromising observance of it harmless to the Church. Pride contributed to hold him from the degradation of a renegade and apostate priest. And both rested primarily on an unshaken basis of maternal affection, which fell little short of obsession, leaving him without the strength to say, "Woman, what have I ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... pursue him; it would grow faint with the distance. He was no longer Military Governor, and never would he reassume that thankless burden. He would retire to private life far removed from the savage envy of these aspiring charlatans. Unhappy memories and wretched degradation would close his unhappy days and shroud his name with an unmerited and ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... seemed an abyss. St. Leo had compelled Anatolius to give up the canons he so much prized; since then northern barbarians had twice sacked Rome, and Ricimer's most cruel host of adventurers had reaped whatever the Vandal Genseric had left. If there was a degradation yet to be endured it would be that a Herule soldier of fortune should compel a Roman senate to send back the robes of empire to Constantinople, and be content to live under a Patricius, sprung from one of the innumerable Teuton hordes, and sanctioned by the emperor of ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... makes upon slavery in South America are very forcible, and also illustrate his own sympathetic nature. Here is one incident which struck him more than any story of cruelty, as showing the degradation of slavery. "I was crossing a ferry with a negro, who was uncommonly stupid. In endeavouring to make him understand, I talked loud, and made signs, in doing which I passed my hand near his face. He, I suppose, thought ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... punishment is no impediment to beauty, but it is an obstacle to the recovery of power. Like all persons of real genius, Milady knew what suited her nature and her means. Poverty was repugnant to her; degradation took away two-thirds of her greatness. Milady was only a queen while among queens. The pleasure of satisfied pride was necessary to her domination. To command inferior beings was rather a humiliation ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the dim darkness of a corner sat the doctor. As Shock stood up and looked into the faces of the men before him and thought of their lives, lonely, tempted, frankly wicked, some of them far down in degradation, he forgot himself, his success, or his failure. What mattered that! How petty seemed now all his considerations for himself! Men were before him who by reason of sin were in sore need of help. He believed he had what they needed. How to give it to them, that was the question. ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... that often marriages turn out hopeless—impossible; mere prisons of degradation. But that is when the sacred tie is entered into for other than the essential reasons of a perfect love and mutual need; or without due consideration, 'unadvisedly, lightly, wantonly,' notwithstanding the Church's warning. Or when people have found out their mistake ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... to the rigid practices of her present mode of living. Her aunt had once asked her if she meant to be the light-of-love of this young man. Linda had well known what her aunt had meant, and had felt deep offence; but yet she now thought that she could foresee a state of things in which, though that degradation might yet be impossible, the infamy of such degradation would belong to her. She did not know how to protect herself from all this, unless she did so by telling her aunt of the young ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... therefore, have the effect of preventing such useless expenditure, and of averting the obviously impending danger of future parsimonious naval administration, abandonment of essential measures of nautical improvement, and the national disgrace of maritime degradation—all inseparable from an unnatural hermaphrodite union between a distinguished service, which might still further be immeasurably exalted, and the most extravagant, derogatory, inefficient, and preposterous project that could be devised for the security and protection of an insular, ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... not have debased her and humiliated her as had the pastor's attack. For a moment she almost decided to let her mother suspect there had been some strange scene with the organist; anything better than own to the degradation of having suffered the insult of the greasy burgher. Then with a revulsion of feeling, her soul sickened at the injustice of letting Monsieur Gabriel pay the penalty of the pastor's wicked insolence, ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... fearful? Isn't it fearful that you are living in this filth which you loathe so, and at the same time you know yourself (you've only to open your eyes) that you are not helping anyone by it, not saving anyone from anything? Tell me," he went on almost in a frenzy, "how this shame and degradation can exist in you side by side with other, opposite, holy feelings? It would be better, a thousand times better and wiser to leap into the water and end ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of the material advantages of the defensive. The moral advantage of having taken the initiative remains, but that is all. The advantage which we thus gain will of course have the same kind of depressing effect upon the blockaded fleet as it had of old, but scarcely in so high a degree. The degradation of a steam fleet in port can scarcely be so rapid or debilitating as it was when nine-tenths of seamanship lay in the smart handling of sails. For the blockading fleet it is also true that the effects of weather, which formerly were the main cause of wear and tear, can ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... indolence from his childhood, and see what it has brought him to. He has been in the habit of lounging about the streets unemployed, or perhaps watching for opportunities for mischief; step by step he descends in his moral degradation; vice succeeds folly, till a dark catalogue of crimes brings him to a drunkard's grave. State prison, or the gallows. While, on the other hand, take a man who has been accustomed to labor and toil for his daily food, and ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... anti-clerical movement similar to that which other Roman Catholic countries have witnessed, were to succeed in discrediting the priesthood and lowering them in public estimation, it would be followed by a moral, social, and political degradation which would blight, or at least postpone, our hopes of a national regeneration. From this point of view I hold that those clergymen who are predominantly politicians endanger the moral influence which it is their ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... jurisdiction in the matter. The definitorio, which was composed of nine of the most prominent friars of their order, advised with the other orders as to whether, without consulting the pope, it could condemn the criminals to actual degradation and deliver them over to the secular arm. The Society [of Jesus] avoided, as far as it could, giving its opinion upon an affair that was of such moment, and that must create such a sensation. In the decision ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... workhouse which stands at the top of it; and what had seemed soft, sweet repose among the cottage homes, felt like cold death beneath these ashy walls. To Joan, the workhouse was a word of shame unutterable. Those among whom she lived would hurl the word against enemies as a prophecy of the utmost degradation. She shivered as she passed, and was sad, knowing that a whole world of poverty, failure, sorrow, regret, was hidden away in that cold, still pile. But the hand of sleep lay softly there; only a sick soul or two stirred, the paupers ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... property was all squandered. She had no friends to whom she could look for assistance, and they were every month sinking deeper and deeper in poverty. Her husband at last became a perfect sot, and staggered through the streets in the lowest state of degradation. She was left with one or two small children, and without any means of support. In a most miserable hovel, this poor woman was compelled to take up her residence. By this time, her pride had experienced a fall. She ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... to differentiate in punishments inflicted upon these two classes of offenders, he further says: "When a Government exercises its punitive power, it should, in awarding sentence, distinguish between the two classes of offenders. To confound in a common degradation those who violate the moral law by acts which all men condemn, and those who offend against the established order of society by acts of which many men approve, and for objects which may sometime be accepted as integral parts of established order, is manifestly ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... your soul, how can you be so foolish, so inconsiderate, as to bring degradation and shame upon yourself by carelessness in duty? He who is not prompt and orderly in small things, will neglect the most important duties. Where were ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... gathered together so many families in innocence and repose, was to her blacker than its own blackness in misery and turpitude; the morning, that radiated gladness over the face of the world, revealed the extent and exaggerated the sense of her own degradation. But the vision of Jesus had alighted upon her; she had seen him speeding on his errands of mercy; she hung about the crowd that followed his steps; his tender look of pity may have sometimes gleamed into her soul. Stricken, smitten, confounded, her yearnings for peace gush forth afresh. It was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... regenerated Africa. Peter Cooper has his monument in all the philanthropies which for the last quarter of a century he encouraged by his one great practical effort for the education of the common people. That is a fame worth having. That is a style of immortality for which any one without degradation may be ambitious. Fill all our cities with such monuments till the last cripple has his limb straightened, and the last inebriate learns the luxury of cold water, and the last outcast comes home to his God, and the last abomination is extirpated, and "Paradise ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... the forms and activities of the cells, their multiplication and degradation, and how they build up tissues, both ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... was acquainted with the Latin tongue and with Roman manners, was regarded with something of the same curiosity and interest as a tamed tiger might be. Besides, however much gladiators might be the fashion in Rome, he felt a degradation in the calling, although he quite appreciated the advantage that the training would be to him should he ever return to Britain. He was pleased to learn from Pollio, on the day before he started, that he had heard that his uncle would ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... a small fortune at his disposal, and was bred, says Jacob, a Mercer in the Strand; but having a genius for high excellences, he considered such an employment as a degradation to it, and relinquished that occupation to ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... a people to suffer more than the inhabitants of Benares have suffered, from the noble possessor of the splendid mansion down to the miserable tenants of the cottage and the hut? Yes, there is a state of misery, a state of degradation, far below all that you have yet heard. It is, my Lords, that these miserable people should come to your Lordships' bar, and declare that they have never felt one of those grievances of which they complain; that not one of those petitions with which they pursued Mr. Hastings had a word of truth ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... half-demented women revile the aristocrats who betray the people and who, even in prison, eat delicate food and drink expensive wines. Among the prisoners there is some light-heartedness, much demoralization, with here and there, at rare intervals, a Madame Roland or an Andre Chenier, to keep high above degradation their minds and their characters. And every day comes the heartrending hour of the roll call for the Revolutionary Tribunal which with ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... winter daylight had scarcely come before we were jolting in a fiacre over the stony streets of Versailles. In the gutters, crones were eagerly rummaging among the dust heaps that awaited removal. In France no degradation attaches to open economies. Housewives on their way to fetch Gargantuan loaves or tiny bottles of milk for the matutinal cafe-au-lait cast searching glances as they passed, to see if among the rubbish something of use to them might not be lurking. ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... base men, who are dead to the feeling of patriotism and national glory, had spoken of me thus, I would not have complained. I would have disregarded it; but I have a right to complain of the degradation to which the first magistrates of the Republic reduce those who have aggrandised, and carried the French name to so high a pitch of glory. Citizens-Directors, I reiterate the demand I made for my dismissal; I wish to live ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... marriage, but because she imagined it would hinder Abelard's advancement, Heloise denied the marriage. Fulbert was furious. With hired assistance, he invaded Abelard's rooms and brutally mutilated him. Abelard, distressed by this degradation, turned monk. But he must have Heloise turn nun; she agreed, and at 22 took the veil. Ten years later she learned that Abelard had not found content in his retirement, and wrote to him the first of the five famous letters. Abelard died in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... abominable room! The lamplight showed her all its repulsive details. She had done her best for it; but in the last two months it had sunk back into something worse than its former ugliness, degraded in its owner's degradation. There was no trace now of the clever alterations and contrivances which she had devised for his comfort. The muslin curtains she had lent him were dark with smoke; the rug had slipped from the horsehair sofa; ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... says that things cannot degrade, that is, change downwards into lower forms, ask him, who told him that water-babies were lower than land-babies? But even if they were, does he know about the strange degradation of the common goose-barnacles, which one finds sticking on ships' bottoms; or the still stranger degradation of some cousins of theirs, of which one hardly likes to talk, so shocking and ugly ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... are still dangers in the world: rampant arms proliferation, bitter regional conflicts, ethnic and nationalist tensions in many new democracies, severe environmental degradation the world over, and fanatics who seek to cripple the world's cities with terror. As the world's greatest power, we must therefore maintain our defenses and our responsibilities. This year we secured indictments against terrorists and sanctions ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... say that Comstockery is the arch enemy of society. It seeks to make hypocrisy respectable; it would convert impurity into a basic virtue; it labels ignorance, innocence; it has legislated knowledge into a crime; and it seeks its perpetuation in the degradation of an enfeebled human race. And that these are not over-statements can easily be established to the satisfaction of any ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... natural foundation, which needs no support from venal pens; and, happily for his peace of mind, no less than for his character, he feels that the prosperity of the Republic is not to be sought in the degradation of surrounding nations. ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... age was when the Greek threw the light of his genius around her; when rose those mighty temples which now, even in their ruin, call forth the wonder and admiration of the traveller; her greatest degradation was in the age just passed away. As an exemplification of this, it is sufficient to say, that from the time of the Norman until the accession of the present monarch, a space of seven hundred years, not a single road has been constructed in ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... another way to measure it. My sins are deep, my helpless miseries are deep, but they are shallow as compared with the love that goes down beneath all sin, that is deeper than all sorrow, that is deeper than all necessity, that shrinks from no degradation, that turns away from no squalor, that abhors no wickedness so as to avert its face from it. The purest passion of human benevolence cannot but sometimes be aware of disgust mingling with its pity and its efforts, but Christ's love comes down to the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... had resorted. This talkative person was the only other man in the house. Their discussion concerned the melancholy disappearance of wonder and adventure in these latter days, the prevalence of globe-trotting, the abolition of distance by steam and electricity, the vulgarity of advertisement, the degradation of men by civilisation, and many such things. Particularly was the talkative person eloquent on the decay of human courage through security, a security Mr. Ledbetter rather thoughtlessly joined him in deploring. Mr. Ledbetter, ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... was noticeable. They were keenly alive to business and did not laugh and joke or even talk in reasonable measure. As a race they are solemn even in their looks, and no wonder, such is their degradation, misery, and despair. They have so little sympathy and care for each other, so little comfort, and so neglected and hopeless, so sunken beneath the so-called better class that when a little mission gospel was started one could hardly refrain ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... manners and customs of your country—I have gone into the dens of the poor and have there found conditions under which it would have appeared positively miraculous if those who lived there had not sought in the dram-bottle forgetfulness of their torture, their shame, and their degradation. I saw persons to the number of twenty or thirty—all ages and sexes thrown indiscriminately together—sleeping in one room, which was only large enough for those who were in it to crowd close together upon the filthy straw that covered ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... emblems of the church, whose members all shine, but with different degrees of lustre—sometimes eclipsed, and at others mistaken for transient meteors. The whales and lions are figures of great persecutors. But the most singular idea of all is, that the moral degradation of human nature before the flood, was occasioned by hypocrisy and persecution for conscience sake, arising from governors interfering with matters of faith and worship; in fact, that a STATE CHURCH occasioned the deluge—and since that time has been the fruitful source of the miseries ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... she suffered. Of course she still told her heart wonderful tales about the shame that she had to bear and her torturing wrongs, and beyond doubt she believed most of them. For she could still profess to herself a miserable degradation in being married to a man of no name: she would be gloomily convinced that Harry was by his father's villainy a proven knave. But what hurt her most was the growing suspicion that she was much to ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... of an egg is composed of albumen, which can be coagulated or hardened by alcohol. As albumen enters so largely into the composition of the brain, is not the impaired intellect and moral degradation of the inebriate attributable to the effect of alcohol in hardening ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... existence was troubled by riots, and broken in upon by expulsions. The schools, of old so flourishing, fell into a state of utter decay. About 1360 France could not count six Jewish scholars, and the works of the time show to what degree of degradation rabbinical studies had sunk. With the expulsion of 1394 Charles VI dealt the finishing stroke. Thereafter French Judaism was nothing but the shadow of itself. Having received a mortal wound in 1306, its life up to the final expulsion in ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... course, gentlemen, would be to degrade your judgments from a decision upon the thought, and opinions (which, are alone important) of an author to a criticism and condemnation of his words, and would be waging war with the vocabulary and the dictionary, a degradation, to which I trust, your reason will never submit. A difference of style in political writings is much too refined and subtle to found a distinction upon between innocence and crime. Difference of style is so minute, and is a subject of ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... held that the pastor of the church should not be solely a learned critic but the minister of the common people. In his day, the pastor was considered the mere instrument of the state, a sort of theological policeman;—a degradation which Herder could hardly permit himself to think of without violent indignation. In his Letters on the Study of Theology, published in 1780, and in subsequent smaller works, he sought to evoke a generation of theologians who, being imbued with his own ideas of humanity, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... well treated all the way over, but every night my prayer was that we might run on an iceberg or go down, so that my wife might be spared long years of agony and me from the misery and degradation ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... two years, enjoying at all events a respite from the sufferings and the evils of the boarding school. He was then sent to Westminster School, at that time in its glory. That Westminster in those days must have been a scene not merely of hardship, but of cruel suffering and degradation to the younger and weaker boys, has been proved by the researches of the Public Schools Commission. There was an established system and a regular vocabulary of bullying. Yet Cowper seems not to have been so unhappy there as at the private school; he speaks of himself as having excelled ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... stayed whenever military success was checked. The Faith was meant for Arabia and not for the world, hence it is constitutionally incapable of change or development. The degradation of woman hinders the growth of freedom and ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... distinction. The Earl of Sussex, moreover, was of more ancient and honourable descent than his rival, uniting in his person the representation of the Fitz-Walters, as well as of the Ratcliffes; while the scutcheon of Leicester was stained by the degradation of his grandfather, the oppressive minister of Henry VII., and scarce improved by that of his father, the unhappy Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, executed on Tower Hill, August 22, 1553. But in person, features, and address, weapons so formidable in the court of ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... "was the acme of degradation to which I was rapidly advancing, when an incident occurred to arrest the progress of dissipation, and give a stimulus ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... wished for no revenge superior to that of this moment. For her, who had all her life, until lately, looked forward to dispensing her favours as the Queen of Cressingham, to be offered apartments in the Maidens' Lodge as an indigent gentlewoman, was in her eyes about the last insult and degradation which could be inflicted on her. She went white and red by turns; she took up the hem of her apron, and began to plait it in folds, with as much diligence as though it had been a matter of serious importance that there should be a given number of plaits to an inch, and ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... is the patent Philanthropical Hay-tosser, a stupendous machine, invented expressly to prevent the degradation and slavery to which thousands of our fellow men are subjected during hay-harvest. It must gratify every friend to the amelioration of his species to learn, that the humane intention of the inventer is likely to be realized, as there ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various
... the continent is indebted to England for the gift of many noble monks who served France and Germany as intellectual and moral guides, at a time when these countries were in a state of extreme degradation. Boniface, the Apostle to the Germans, who is regarded by Neander as the Father of the German church and the real founder of the Christian civilization of Germany, was the gift of the English cloisters, and a native of Devonshire. Alcuin, the ecclesiastical prime minister of Charlemagne ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... distinctly of opinion that all stimulants are decidedly injurious to the physical system, and that as a consequence they tend to weaken and destroy the mental powers. I believe tobacco to be a more insidious stimulant than alcoholic beverages. It can be indulged in more constantly without visible degradation; but surely it saps the powers of the mind. In this view I gave it up some years ago. Many men say they smoke to make them think. I notice that a number of them seem to think to very small purpose, either for themselves or mankind ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... numberless delays caused by the old Piankeshaw's drunkenness, could scarce have been left more than eight or ten miles behind,—we have said but little, since imagination can only picture them properly to the reader. Grief, anguish, despair, and the sense of degradation natural to a man of proud spirit, a slave in the hands of coarse barbarians, kept his spirit for a long time wholly subdued and torpid; and it was not until he perceived the old Piankeshaw's repeated potations, and their effects, that he began to wake from his lethargy, and question himself ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... poor affectionate fellow conjured on the spot the black vision of a father saved by a daughter's degradation. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the pure joy of the sacrificial meals in Jehovah's worship. Dagon's temple was filled with a drunken crowd, whose mirth would be made more boisterous by a spice of cruelty. So, a roar of many voices calls for Samson, and this deepest degradation is not spared him. The words employed for 'make sport' seem to require that we should understand that he was not brought out to be the passive object of their gibes and drunken mockery, but was set ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... immense regretfulness that life should be departing. Doubtless it was at this moment of lucidity amidst the kind of intoxication with which the poison overwhelmed him, that he for the first time realised his perilous condition. Ah! to die, amidst such pain, such physical degradation, what a revolting horror for that frivolous and egotistical man, that lover of beauty, joy, and light, who knew not how to suffer! In him ferocious fate chastised racial degeneracy with too heavy a hand. He became horrified with himself, seized with childish ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... shook his head; he feared it would be difficult, if not impossible, to meet the wishes of the illustrious strangers in the particular manner spoken of. The male inhabitants of the village were all warriors, to whom work of any description would be an unspeakable degradation. But he would see what could be done. If women, now, would serve the strangers' purpose as well as men, the thing could ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... during the eighteenth century, although it could boast of no names in any way comparable with those of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, showed still a vast improvement on the degradation of the preceding century. Among the most famous writers of the times—Goldoni, Parini, Metastasio—none is so great or so famous as Vittorio Alfieri, the founder of Italian tragedy. The story of his life and of his literary activity, as told by himself in his memoirs, is one of extreme interest. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... keenly the degradation of my situation. I was obliged to help Lady Blanche at her toilet and help her to look beautiful. For what? To captivate him? Oh—no, no,—but why this sudden thrill and faintness? Did he really love her? I had seen him pinch ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... upstairs, falling twice over Miss Ada's cushions on the way, and threw herself on her bed, in tears of humiliation and rage. Had she actually stooped to quarrel with a Sloane? Was it possible anything Charlie Sloane could say had power to make her angry? Oh, this was degradation, indeed—worse even than being the rival ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... afterwards she was riding by Habeebah's side into the town, through the Bab Toot across the Feddan, and up to the courtyard of the Kasbah, which had witnessed the beginning of her own and her father's degradation. Then, tethering the beast in the open stables there, Habeebah took Naomi into her own little room and left her alone for some minutes, while she hastened to Ben Aboo in secret with ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... representatives constitutionally chosen, and place in their stead the repudiated of her people, strike from the flag which waves above you the star which represents her there; but leave the stripes, apt emblem of your iniquity and her degradation." ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... government had issued an order that officers holding the king's commission should rank provincial officers, and that provincial generals and field officers should have no rank when a general or field officer holding a royal commission was present. The degradation of being ranked by every whipper-snapper who might hold a royal commission by virtue, perhaps, of being the bastard son of some nobleman's cast-off mistress was more than the temper of George Washington at least could bear, and when Governor ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... live at Motlatsa wells, have always been very friendly to us, and listen attentively to instruction conveyed to them in their own tongue. It is, however, difficult to give an idea to a European of the little effect teaching produces, because no one can realize the degradation to which their minds have been sunk by centuries of barbarism and hard struggling for the necessaries of life: like most others, they listen with respect and attention, but, when we kneel down and address an unseen Being, the position and the act often appear to them so ridiculous ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... a while, me and Perry, and, as sure as I live, that man interrupted me in the middle of my talk to tell me about six tomato plants he had growing in his garden. Shoved his agricultural degradation right up under my nose while I was telling him about the fun we had tarring and feathering that faro dealer at California Pete's layout! But by and by Perry shows ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... consciousness with the alienated mournful faces of things, with the hostile retributive forces of things, produces unrest and suffering with the same natural necessity that the meeting of certain chemical substances deposits poison and bitterness. Perdition being the degradation and wretchedness of the soul through ingrained falsehood, vice, impurity, and hardness, salvation is the casting out of these evils, and the replacing them with truth, righteousness, a holy and sensitive life. To ransom from hell and translate to heaven is not, then, so much to ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the great Atlantean race. In thinking of the Adepts and schools of occultism of that remarkable people our minds instinctively revert to the evil practices of which we hear so much in connection with their latter days; but we must not forget that before that age of selfishness and degradation the mighty civilization of Atlantis had brought forth much that was noble and worthy of admiration, and that among its leaders were some who now stand upon the loftiest pinnacles as yet attained by man. ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... first Zygfried resolved to starve himself to death; but when be heard the announcement that in such case Hlawa would forcibly open his teeth with a knife and stuff the food down his throat, he gave up his intention in order to avoid such a degradation of the Order and ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... President rejects this policy, deserts the loyal men of the North by whom he was elected, conspires with the traitors in the loyal States and the Rebels of the disloyal States for the humiliation, the degradation, the political enslavement of the loyal people of the country. And this is the second great conspiracy against liberty, against equality, against the peace of the country, against the permanence of the American Union; and of this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... reason to conclude, from the gradual degradation of light on its partially illuminated disc, that Mercury possesses a tolerably dense atmosphere.[796] During the transit of May 7, 1799, he was, moreover, struck with the appearance of a ring of softened luminosity encircling the planet ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... in the mud; he pretends to be most disgustingly drunk. His poor wife runs after him, picks him up, calls for help, tears out the hempen hair that protrudes in stringy locks from beneath her soiled cap, weeps over her husband's degradation, ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... effort to resist this degradation of the managerial dignity; but his protest was a very feeble one, and his head fell back heavily on the managing ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... afterwards he regrets his folly," she said. "He clamors for the beautiful woman as a child might cry for the moon, and when he at last possesses her, he tires. Satisfied with having compassed her degradation, he exclaims: 'What shall I do with this beauty, which, because it is mine, now palls upon me? Let me kill it and forget it; I am aweary of love, and the world is full of women!' That is the way of your sex, Monsieur Gervase; it is a ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... a malicious snarl, "but the Earth man shall suffer for the indignities he has put upon the holy of holies, nor shall any vileness be too vile to inflict upon his princess. Would that it were in my power to force him to witness the humiliation and degradation of the red woman." ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... have been driven out of Christianity by the crudity of the religious ideas set before them, the contradictions in the authoritative teachings, the views as to God, man, and the universe that no trained intelligence could possibly admit. Nor can it be said that any kind of moral degradation lay at the root of the revolt against the dogmas of the Church. The rebels were not too bad for their religion; on the contrary, it was the religion that was too bad for them. The rebellion against popular ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... refuse them, and you may say to the people who have made them that they must be shameful sweaters to dare to offer women salaries that leave them no choice between starvation and degradation. ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... impossible. Their captors would have released them for ransom; but who was near to redeem them? So they were taken to Damascus, and, in the absence of such ransom, were exposed in the slave market. Oh, what degradation for the young knight! Hubert prayed for death, but it never came. Death flies the miserable, and seeks the happy who cling ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... of accomplishing this, without plunging into debt, he is certainly my superior, and I could learn a great deal from him. I could learn of him how to rid myself of this torment that I endure from day to day, from hour to hour. What could be a greater degradation to an honorable man than to be compelled to flatter the base pride of these vile usurers to whom I am forced to resort for the money I need; this money pressed, perhaps, from widows and orphans? To think that I, the inheritor of a kingdom, am in this condition—that I must lower myself ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the exceeding beauty and harmony of inanimate Nature with the human degradation and deformity before me, I felt, as I confess I had never done before, the truth of a remark of a rare thinker, that "Nature is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because, it has no citizen. The beauty of Nature must ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the story gives an example of the final powerlessness of such half-convictions. One need not repeat the grim narrative of the murder. We all know it. One knows not which is the more repugnant—the degradation of the poor child Salome to the level of a dancing-girl, the fell malignity of the mother who would shame her daughter for such an end, the maudlin generosity of Herod, flushed with wine and excited passion, the hideous request from lips so young, the ineffectual sorrow of Herod, his fantastic ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... away, and he has come to—to this! Oh, don't you see? Don't you understand that something more than chance has crossed my path with his, just at this moment of my supremest happiness, and of his utter degradation? My duty is plain. It is to help him, to uplift him, to make a man of him once more—to undo what I have done! I'm responsible—and I'm helpless! What can I do? What can any girl do in such a case? I can't go out into the streets and search for him. I can only ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... the neighbor boys, and felt so; but this feeling was curiously mingled with a sense of degradation. By every test of common life, he was a failure. His family history was a badge of failure. People despised a man who was so incontestably smarter than they, and yet could do no better with himself than to work in the fields alongside the tramps and transients ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... it is to write it, it is to the preaching of hell that we must return—the hell of degradation and of loss and of sure retribution. That hell is the latter state to which every path of wrong-doing leads with the inevitability of eternal law. Sin is hell in the making. Hell is sin found out, perhaps, ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... full armour, but wearing a woman's distaff where the sword should have been, and round their necks the placards which proclaimed their shame. The brutal Roman mob hooted them also, that mob which ever loved spectacles of cruelty and degradation, calling them cowards. One of the men, a bull-necked, black-haired fellow, suffered it patiently, remembering that at even he must be set free to vanish where he would. The other, who was blue-eyed ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... heart-broken submission to the chastening hand of heaven. At the end of this time she died. Marston read the letter that announced the event with a stern look, and silently, but the shock he felt was terrific. No man is so self-abandoned to despair and degradation, that at some casual moment thoughts of amendment—some gleams of hope, however faint and transient, from the distant future—will not visit him. With Marston, those thoughts had somehow ever been associated ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... pretending to agree whenever agreement is demanded from you, and by voting whether you agree or do not. And what is to be your reward? Some few precarious hundreds a year, lasting just so long as a party may remain in power and you can retain a seat in Parliament! It is at the best slavery and degradation,—even if you are lucky enough ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... slaves and God's laws concerning them are spoken of, while, as far as profane history goes back, we cannot fail to see proofs of the existence of slavery. "No legislator of history," says Voltaire, "attempted to abrogate slavery. Society was so accustomed to this degradation of the species, that Epictetus, who was assuredly worth more than his master, never expresses any surprise at his being a slave." Egypt, Sparta, Athens, Carthage, and Rome had their thousands of slaves. In the Bible, the best and chosen servants of God owned slaves, while in profane ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... this connection, because I suspect that not a few in our own day are unduly influenced by the associations which cling to the words "realism" and "idealism." Realism in literature, as many persons understand it, means the degradation of literature to the portrayal of what is coarse and degrading, in a coarse and offensive way. Realism in painting often means the laborious representation upon canvas of things from which we would gladly avert our eyes if we ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... conspirators and the perversity of fortune, the most sensitive love of liberty was entrapped into the support of a war whose implied end was the erecting in our advanced century of an Anglo-American empire based upon the systematic degradation of man. ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... makes men and women fearful of being without it. Such people shiver at the bare thought of losing what money will buy, for the shameful reason that then there would be nothing left to them; and they are driven, many of them, both in London and in New York, to any humiliation, often to any degradation, to avoid it. They grossly overrate the value of money, and they exaggerate the terrors of being ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the same time to amend the Constitution so as to consolidate New England into two States to be called East New England and West New England, the evident attempt being to avenge the overthrow of the slave system by the degradation of that section of the country in which the anti-slavery sentiment had originated and received ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... spread over the whole earth, those horrible cruelties in the wars of the Greeks and the Romans, that barbarous inequality between the two sexes which still reigns in the East; hence the tyranny of the great towards the common people in hereditary aristocracies, the profound degradation of subject peoples. In short, everywhere the stronger have made the laws and have crushed the weak; and if they have sometimes consulted the interests of a given society, they have always forgotten those of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... he said to Mr. Byles, "object to the question, and I will answer it by saying that it would take a great deal more than the hon. member for Shipley will ever be able to pay." There the words stand—in the immensity of their vulgarity, in their unsurpassable degradation, let ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... to accomplish as good citizens and patriots? Do we mean only to inflict upon the late rebels pain, degradation, mortification, annoyance, for its own sake; to torture their feelings without any ulterior purpose? Certainly such a purpose could not by any possibility animate high-minded men. I presume, therefore, that those who still ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... girl, burning in her shameful robe, saw it vastly otherwise. That a man could bend so low! That she should ever have loved a man with such a stooping back! To think of that made (for the moment) every other degradation light. Her part as yet was one of sufferance: to look handsome, languid with the excess of her burden of beauty; to smile slowly, to keep her eyes on her lap. Pure passivity all this, under which the miserable soul could torture in secret. ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... song from degradation to the level of the Syrian wasf is easy enough. But some may feel that there is more plausibility in the case that has been set up for the connection between Canticles and another type of love song, the Idylls of Theocritus, the Sicilian poet whose Greek compositions gave ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... essential that they should not be allowed to reproduce their kind, thus further enfeebling and deteriorating the national stock, adding to the burden of the community and to the sum of human misery and degradation. "To produce but not to reproduce" sums up the best scheme of life for ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... suitable to him—set down, late in life, in the midst of strangers, to him cold and reserved—himself too proud to bend to those who disdained him as an Irishman—is he not more to be pitied than blamed for—yes, I, his son, must say the word—the degradation which has ensued? And do not the feelings, which have this moment forced him to leave the room, show that he is capable?—Oh, mother!' cried Lord Colambre, throwing himself at Lady Clonbrony's feet, 'restore my father to himself! Should such feelings be wasted?—No; give them again to expand ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... and merry company, Langland goes to another inn on the next street; there he looks with pure eyes upon sad or evil-faced men and women, drinking, gaming, quarreling, and pictures a scene of physical and moral degradation. One must look on both pictures to know what an English inn was like ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... friendship sprung up between the two—the bitter strong one, and the vicious weak one. It kept a soft corner in Jeffreys' heart to find some one who held to him even in this degradation, and to the poor prodigal it was worth anything to have some ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... rooms, the dirty strip of garden, the shabby suburb, the London rain—but beyond all these things is the central figure of Gregg himself. Here is a character entirely new to English fiction—a man who in spite of his degradation has his brilliance, his humour and, above all, his mystery. It is in this implication that, at the very heart of the man, there are fine things too degraded and degraded things too fine for any human record of them to be possible that the exceptional merit of Mr. Beresford's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... former lord of the manor lost the right of governing this community, but he had brought himself to consider it a sort of degradation to take any part in the government of it. The central power of the state alone took any care of the matter, and as that power was very remote, and had as yet nothing to fear from the inhabitants of the villages, the only care it took of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... his was the morality not of Christ but of Rome. 'The Poor' are as dirt to him: he can stoop to immortalize some gleam of goodness in low life, but even then his main object is by scorn of contrast to galvanize the aristocracy into better ways. Only in them can true virtus grow. Their degradation seems the death of goodness. Tacitus had little sympathy with the social revolution that was rapidly completing itself, not so much because those who rose from the masses lacked 'blood', but because they had not been trained in the right ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... dear? Do you know that thin Malacca cane in the hall? Yes, you do. Well, my dear, the law says it is an assault to thrash a boy, and that he ought to be left to the law to punish, which means prison and degradation. I'm going to take that cane, my dear, ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... matter," he said, plunging at once into the depths of the subject. "I have wealth which you desire. To obtain it you will sell your revenge on a helpless woman whose hand you have obtained, but whose love you have never sought. Your offer is specious, but to accept it would be wickedness in me, degradation to her. I know well that she would die rather than escape your vengeance on such ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... unfavorable influence on the position of woman by widening the gulf between the sexes, as the higher culture was almost exclusively the prerogative of the men. Moreover, religion, and especially the great religions of the world, has contributed to the degradation of the female sex by regarding woman ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit |
