"Illegitimacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the country are the vices of isolation. Sex difficulties arise spontaneously and require no commercial exploitation when young people live a barren and narrow life without ideals. This emphasis of sex is expressed not merely in immorality and illegitimacy, but also in a precocious interest in sex and in a precocious courtship. Early marriage, therefore, often represents the reaction from an uninteresting and empty environment and, however fortunate in itself, certainly does not demonstrate a socially ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... without the consent of the sovereign, and if any union has taken place without the sanction of the head of the family, it is regarded, not only at court, but even by the tribunals of the land, as invalid, and children that may be born of the marriage bear the stigma of illegitimacy. If a marriage has received the full authorization of the ruler, and there is any issue, the children cannot be educated without the sovereign's wishes being consulted. The parents, in fact, are regarded much as if they were either minors, outlaws, or demented people, unfitted to be entrusted ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... frequently laments the 'selfishness' of the refusal of maternity by healthy and educated women of the professional classes, I have yet to learn that it has made any official pronouncement on the English illegitimacy laws or any organized effort toward defending ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... birth, according to the Athenian prejudice, since his mother was a foreigner. His father, though connected with the priestly and high-born house of the Lycomedae, was not himself a Eupatrid. The young Themistocles had many of the qualities which the equivocal condition of illegitimacy often educes from active and stirring minds—insolence, ostentation, the desire to shine, and the invincible ambition to rise. He appears, by a popular tale, to have early associated with his superiors, and to have evinced betimes the art and address which afterward distinguished ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Undueness — N. undueness &c adj.; malum prohibitum [Lat.]; impropriety; illegality &c 964. falseness &c adj.; emptiness of title, invalidity of title; illegitimacy. loss of right, disfranchisement, forfeiture. usurpation, tort, violation, breach, encroachment, presumption, assumption, seizure; stretch, exaction, imposition, lion's share. usurper, pretender. V. be undue &c adj.; not be due &c 924. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... incommoded with so small a matter. The word coach—let it be whose it would—or coach-man, or coach-horse, or coach-hire, could never be named in the family, but he constantly complained of carrying this vile mark of illegitimacy upon the door of his own; he never once was able to step into the coach, or out of it, without turning round to take a view of the arms, and making a vow at the same time, that it was the last time he would ever ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... advice," said Dr. Ravenshaw gravely, "I say that I entirely agree with Mrs. Pendleton. Your first duty is to Sisily. She should out-weigh all other considerations. If you make her illegitimacy public you may live to be ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... received at Court. He might have ascertained very easily beforehand what would happen, or have contrived to keep her away from Dublin. It was understood when he took the Great Seal that he declined being made a peer, on account of the illegitimacy of his eldest son. Half the world had never heard of Lady Sugden, or knew anything of her history; and as she is an excellent woman, charitable and kind-hearted, I fancy she has moved without obstruction in his ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... have heard long before you receive this. Charles Fox attributes it entirely to the vexatious and uneasy life which he led with Lady Munster, but he was always, as your Majesty knows, an unhappy and discontented man, and there is something in that unfortunate condition of illegitimacy which seems to distort the mind and feelings and render them incapable of ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... that the crown shall be entailed to his majesty, and the sons or heirs males of his body; and in default of such sons to the lady Elizabeth (who is declared to be the king's eldest issue female, in exclusion of the lady Mary, on account of her supposed illegitimacy by the divorce of her mother queen Catherine) and to the lady Elizabeth's heirs of her body; and so on from issue female to issue female, and the heirs of their bodies, by course of inheritance according to their ages, as the crown of England hath been accustomed and ought to go, ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... of these laws, there is one objection to them which is not given sufficient prominence in the consideration of the subject, even where it is discussed at all; they make mixed blood a prima-facie proof of illegitimacy. It is a fact that at present, in the United States, a colored man or woman whose complexion is white or nearly white is presumed, in the absence of any knowledge of his or her antecedents, to be the offspring ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... undergo that experience, on the day when I learn that I am to become a father without having intended it. Morality arises out of the proper or improper performance of social obligations; and I have sometimes wondered whether society's most insane treatment of illegitimacy would not have compelled me into a misalliance with my 'mistress,' as you call her, ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... saw himself in such danger of failing, he fancied himself far more in love with Arctura than he was. And as he got familiarized with the idea of his illegitimacy, although he would not assent to it, he made less and less of it—which would have been a proof to any other than himself that he believed it. In further sign of the same, he made no inquiry into the matter—did not once even question his father ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... has three divisions—thirty years at Florence, nearly twenty years at Milan, then nineteen years of wandering, till he sinks to rest under the protection of Francis the First at the Chateau de Clou. The dishonour of illegitimacy hangs over his birth. Piero Antonio, his father, was of a noble Florentine house, of Vinci in the Val d'Arno, and Leonardo, brought up delicately among the true children of that house, was the love-child ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... abolished by the Emperor Joseph II, in the early years of his reign. It was the general opinion that this severe legislation was really ineffective, and that it caused much more serious evils than it cured.[149] It is certain in any case that, for a long time past, illegitimacy has been more prevalent in Vienna than in any ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... severity the motives which had produced it. The nation at large, justly dreading a disputed succession, with all its long-experienced evils, in the event of Henry's leaving behind him no offspring but a daughter whom he had lately set aside on the ground of illegitimacy, rejoiced in the prospect of a male heir to the crown. The populace of London, captivated, as usual, by the splendors of a coronation, were also delighted with the youth, beauty, and affability of the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... But the illegitimacy, or at any rate the great doubtfulness, of many current geological inferences, is best seen when we contemplate terrestrial changes now going on; and ask how far such inferences are countenanced by them. If ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... conservative forces of society. At the same time they were required to be disciples of St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Thomas had a very large element of political liberalism. He believed in the Higher Law, in conditional allegiance, in the illegitimacy of all governments that do not act in the interest of the commonwealth. This was convenient doctrine in the endeavour to repress the forces of Protestantism, and for a time the Jesuits were revolutionists. The ideas of 1688, of 1776, of 1789 prevail among them from the wars of religion to ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... distinctly a principle that the woman's honor is and ought to be of less value than a man's honor. Napoleon personally insisted on this principle, and more than once emphasized his belief that no importance should be attached to men's share in illegitimacy. ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... excellence, would prevent the application of the law in his individual case. But Alcibiades, for reasons unknown to the public, united his influence with that of Aspasia; and their partizans were active and powerful. When the case was tried in the court of illegitimacy at Cynosarges, Philaemon was declared a sojourner in Athens, incapable of holding any office, and dispossessed ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... discovered and so the whole story was nicely pieced together. It was not the idea of the newspaper editor to be cruel or critical, but rather complimentary. All the bitter things, such as the probable illegitimacy of Vesta, the suspected immorality of Lester and Jennie in residing together as man and wife, the real grounds of the well-known objections of his family to the match, were ignored. The idea was to frame up a Romeo and Juliet story in ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... who was reigning in Cyprus, was not even so well treated. The Romans passed a law making that wealthy island a Roman province, no doubt upon the plea of the will of Alexander II. and the king's illegitimacy; and they sent Cato, rather against his will, to turn Ptolemy out of his kingdom. Ptolemy gave up the island without Cato being called upon to use force, and in return the Romans made him high priest in the temple of the Paphian ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... postulate, George Douglas, the most active of the gang. Let him arise at your call—the claimant of wealth which he does not possess, the partaker of the illustrious blood of Douglas, but which in his veins is sullied with illegitimacy. Paint him the ruthless, the daring, the ambitious—so nigh greatness, yet debarred from it; so near to wealth, yet excluded from possessing it; a political Tantalus, ready to do or dare anything to terminate his necessities and assert his ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... As the parent-plant growing in Edinburgh was found by Mr. Scott to be in a high degree sterile, it may have transmitted a similar tendency to its offspring, independently of their illegitimate birth. I am, however, inclined to attribute some weight to the illegitimacy of their descent, both from the analogy of other cases, and more especially from the fact that when the plants were LEGITIMATELY fertilised with pollen of the common primrose they yielded an average, as may be seen in the table, of only 5 more seeds than ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... this; nor is it very Christian to put a ban upon any woman who, in accordance with their religion and their country's laws, has formed this sacred alliance with a man and has lived with him for years. Nor can it be right to brand with illegitimacy the children born of ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... Salisbury (it is to be observed that Fielding's entire connections, both in life and letters, are with the Western Counties and London), who were certainly of competent means, and for whose alleged illegitimacy there is no evidence but an unsupported fling of that old maid of genius, Richardson. The descriptions both of Sophia and of Amelia are said to have been taken from this lady; her good looks and her amiability are as well established as anything ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... deafness attacked the race. Such an event is made conceivable by the loss of allied imaginative habits, which is observable in historic times. Yet possible variations in human faculty do not involve the illegitimacy of such faculties as actually subsist; and the abstract world known to science, unless it dries up the ancient fountains of ideation by its habitual presence in thought, does not remove those parallel dramatisations or abstractions which experience ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... impossible, incredible, and resolutely barred it from his mind. But with all his resolution, it only seemed to wait at a little distance, as if constantly seeking an opportunity to return. What if Dr. Deane were his own father? In that case Martha would be his half-sister, and the stain of illegitimacy would rest on her, not on him! There was ruin and despair in the supposition; but, on the other hand, he asked himself why should the fact of his love throw his mother into a swoon? Among the healthy, strong-nerved people of Kennett such a thing as a swoon was of the rarest occurrence, ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... though no mention is said to be made of her in the sermon? For as the duchess of Suffolk was older than Richard, and consequently would have been involved in the charge of bastardy, could he have declared her son his heir, he who set aside his brother Edward's children for their illegitimacy? Ladies of the least disputable gallantry generally suffer their husbands to beget his heir; and if doubts arise on the legitimacy of their issue, the younger branches seem most liable to suspicion—but a tale so gross could not have passed even on the mob—no ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... to the sobriety and morality of the colonists. The New York Tribune correspondent in 1857 was able to report that liquor was neither made nor sold in the colony and that drunkenness was unknown. There was no illegitimacy and there had been but one arrest for violation of the Canadian laws in the seven years of the colony's history. Though the Presbyterian church gave special attention to the Buxton colony this did not hinder the growth of other sects, Methodists ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... it may here be noted, had, if we pass over his own illegitimacy, in the absence of direct male heirs of Earl Hakon since Erlend Haraldson's death in 1156, probably the best title to receive a grant of the jarldom of Orkney and Shetland and the earldom of Caithness of all the surviving descendants ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... Abyssinians, describes them as living practically in a state of promiscuity, divorce being so frequent that he once saw a woman surrounded by seven former husbands, and there being hardly any difference between legitimacy and illegitimacy. Another old writer, Rev. S. Gobat, describes the Abyssinians as light-minded, having nothing constant but inconstancy itself. A more recent writer, J. Hotten (133-35), explains, in the following sentence, a fact which has often ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... for the possession of Nid de Merle lay in either the death of the young baron and his child or else in his acquiescence in the invalidity of his marriage, and therefore in the illegitimacy ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to the seemingly incompatible ends of rapidly accumulating gold while frantically pursuing pleasure, there is an amount of immorality unequalled in any capital in Europe. In the whole German Empire the average of illegitimacy is ten per cent. but in Berlin the average for the last few years is twenty per cent. Out of every five children born in Berlin each year one is illegitimate! It is questionable whether the increasing demands of the army and navy require such ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... illegitimate in the strictest sense, but he had been bred as a prince; and I have shown that, in default of a legitimate heir, the king had thought of him as his possible successor. Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate also, according to law and form; but the illegitimacy of neither the one nor the other could be pressed to its literal consequences. They were the children, each of them, of connexions which were held legal at the period of their birth. They had each received the rank of a princess; and the instincts of justice demanded ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... friendship. Cherish him then, preserve him next your soul, for he is a jewel fit for such a cabinet: his form, his parts, and every noble action, shews us the royal race from whence he sprung, and the victorious Orange confesses him his own in every virtue, and in every grace; nor can the illegitimacy eclipse him: sure he was got in the first heat of love, which formed him so a hero—but no more. Philander is as ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... every man whose soul throbs with a feeling of liberty should do. I, my lords, shall scarcely—I feel I should not at all—mention the name of Massey. I feel I should not pollute my lips with the name of that traitor, whose illegitimacy has been proved here—a man whose name even is not known, and who, I deny point blank, ever wore the star of a colonel in the Confederate army. Him I shall let rest. I shall pass him, wishing him, in the words of ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... without posterity. Unfortunately, she had not always acted with like circumspection; for at the death of Mary Tudor, known as Bloody. Mary, she had laid claim to the throne of Henry VIII, and, relying on the illegitimacy of Elizabeth's birth, had with the dauphin assumed sovereignty over Scotland, England, and Ireland, and had had coins struck with this new title, and plate engraved ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... she really thought of that boy as a possible heir. In spite of her hatred of all conquerors from without, was it likely that she would accept him as a conqueror, in the face of her outraged womanly feelings and her bourgeois horror of illegitimacy? And yet if he were not her son, he was at least her husband's. And perhaps an idea of saving her empire by placing the works in the hands of that heir was dimly rising within her, above all her prejudices and her rancor. But however ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... directed against Cardinal Consalvi. "The rest have their theological prejudices," said he, "but he has offended me on political grounds; he is my enemy; he has dared to lay a trap for me by holding out against my dynasty a pretext of illegitimacy. They will not fail to make use of it after my death, when I am no longer there to keep them in awe!" On the day after the marriage the whole court were to defile before the new empress, and the cardinals were ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... piece of work in this field will be a blessing to the race. This step lies in inculcating in our boys and girls high ideals of parenthood. This is more effective than legal prohibition of certain forms of marriage which cannot prevent matings, and adds the curse of illegitimacy to the other handicaps of the children of such unions. The first step in this process has already been reasonably well accomplished. Both our boys and our girls are in love with health. A good husband ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... conferred upon me, I now saw had only been bestowed to effect my ruin; that he had been acting a base and treacherous game with me to further his own dishonest views; that I was fully aware of his motives, and appreciated them as they deserved; that he well knew the story of my illegitimacy was a forgery, that I had the means to prove it one, and would do it shortly; that the term of my articles would expire on the following day, and I would then leave his house for ever and ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... imagined? In the village, certainly, she was respected by all; but people were very tolerant—very easy, in fact—on the question of morals in this district, where the gallantries of Claude de Buxieres were thought quite natural, where the illegitimacy of Claudet offended no one's sense of the proprieties, and where the after-dinner conversations, among the class considered respectable, were such as Julien had listened to with repugnance. Nevertheless, even in his most suspicious moods, Julien had never dared broach the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... separated from his wife, in consequence of infidelity on her part with a man of high fashion, an officer of the Guards. An action and divorce ensued; but two children whom he had previous to this unfortunate event, he refused to acknowledge, thus endeavoring to put the stain of illegitimacy upon them. Years rolled on, and the father and son never met. Rouge-et-Noir was the fashionable game of the day, and Pall-Mall and St. James-street swarmed with gambling-houses. Two gentlemen were quarrelling upon ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... Alfieri, and which she could love whether deserving or not; something besides Alfieri's glory, in which she could take an interest whether other people did or did not agree? Such a connection as hers with Alfieri may have had an attraction of romance, of poetry, connected with its very illegitimacy, its very negation of normal domestic life, as long as both she and Alfieri were young and passionately in love; but where was the romance, the poetry now, and where was the humdrum married woman's happiness, at whose expense ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... then was to supplant the Tudor princesses, on the score of their illegitimacy once officially affirmed, by Lady Jane Grey; having first secured a dominating influence over his unhappy puppet by marrying her to one of his sons, Guildford Dudley. It might plausibly be argued that, since the courts had ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes |
