"Debased" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to disavow all participation in the fact. I constrained myself, and gently veiled what I would fain have revealed in all its naked beauty. I condemned to darkness these charms which this monster of a woman only wished me to enjoy that I might be debased. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... "Odd, but they're not afraid of us—a flying-machine means nothing to them, does not terrify them as it would human savages. They're too debased even to feel fear!"—even as this thought crossed his brain he, too, saw the terrible thing that the girl had ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... Germany became insensible, indifferent and debased by stupid and selfish ideals from beyond the Vosges; till at last Germany became, literally, a land without a people, a ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... had Debased the savage kind, And they this most unhappy lad Before (and eke behind) Designed In ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... you out of pure malignity, who would rather injure you than not, who, perhaps, have an old, by you long-forgotten, grudge, and become your apparent friends to pay you back—these are few. Human nature, with all its depravity, is seldom so completely debased. But there are many who are only selfishly your friends. When you most need their friendship, where is it? When some great calamity sweeps over you, and, bowed and weakened, you would lean on this friendship, though it were but a 'broken reed,' you stretch ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... skies. These once apprehended, all the minor details of life follow in their proper places, and spread abroad in the details and the comfort of practicality. But until these gifts of a lofty civilization are secured, men are sure to remain low, debased ...
— Civilization the Primal Need of the Race - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Paper No. 3 • Alexander Crummell
... why—as hurried in a dream; Unstable, they, like water, take all forms, Are quick and stagnant; have their calms and storms; High on the hills, they in the sunbeams glow, Then muddily they move debased and slow; Or cold and frozen rest, and neither rise nor flow. Yet none the cool and prudent Teacher prize. On him ther dote who wakes their ectasies; With passions ready primed such guide they meet, And warm and kindle with th' imparted heat; 'Tis he who wakes the ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on their mercy. The desire of having some one below them descends to those who are the very lowest of all,—and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose footman's instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... them. No thought of wrong-doing had ever attached to them, and no shadow had dimmed the luster of their fair fame. Now all was changed, and the irreproachable reputations of days gone by were shattered. Debased and self-convicted, they stood before the bar of justice, to answer for their crimes. Instead of being the objects of admiration, they were now receiving the well-merited scorn of those who had ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... ballads are wont, 'to a very doleful tune'—obviously a form of the Supernatural Birth; and the story, true as it is pitiful, of the fish that turned to woman, and then back again to fish, in which he that runs may read an example from the Mermaid Cycle. They are to be found to-day, often in debased and barely recognisable guise, in the hands of the peripatetic ballad-mongers who still haunt fairs and sing in the streets, and in the memories of multitudes of country folks who know scarce any other literature bearing the ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... the opprobrium of the Hebrew faith. At a later period he made himself master of Samaria and Galilee, when, to gratify still farther the vindictive grudge which yet rankled in the breasts of his people, he destroyed the capital of the former, and debased it to the condition of a stagnant lake. Nor was his attention confined to foreign conquest. He strengthened the fortifications of Jerusalem, and built the castle of Baris within the walls which surrounded the hill of the Temple,—a stronghold, that at a future period attracted no ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... range of three open-sided and deeply recessed doorways, has unmistakably debased tendencies, but is filled with sculptured statuary of more than ordinarily effective disposition, more remarkable for magnitude and ornateness than for finesse of skill and workmanship, or even as a detail ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... say about Grandmother?" he asked in a low, intimate voice. "Ah, c'est degoutant. No one believes it, and everybody is jeering at Tychkov for having debased himself to interrogate a drink-maddened old beggar-woman. ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... Fire, 424-u. Persians resembled the Hindus in language and poetic legends, 610-u. Persians under Xerxes destroyed Grecian Temples and erected fire chapels, 610-m. Persians worshipped the Sun as Mithras; also the Moon, etc, 459-m. Persians worshipped the Heavenly Host, 459-m. Person, none so debased but they have something of sacredness, 191-m. Personal Divinity remains a mystery; personification but a symbol, 672-m. Personal God seemingly leaned to by Aristotle, 679-l. Personal God suited to human sympathies and free from mystifications, 672-m. Personification ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... universities to his aid; and they responded to the call. Port Royal appealed, not in vain, to the hearts and to the understandings of millions. The dictators of Christendom found themselves, on a sudden, in the position of culprits. They were arraigned on the charge of having systematically debased the standard of evangelical morality, for the purpose of increasing their own influence; and the charge was enforced in a manner which at once arrested the attention of the whole world: for the chief accuser was Blaise Pascal. His intellectual powers were such as have rarely been bestowed ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... stingier year by year, unless a bolt from heaven withered him or the hand of man laid him low. What might come to him, he deserved, even the anguish of death with a strangling cord about his neck; even the strong blow of an ax as he slept on his bed, snatching from him the life that he had debased of all its beauty, without the saving chance of repentance in ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... the light of their liberties. Father," he continued, with an eagerness which grew as he spoke, "you know something of the souls of slaves. You know how they are smothered in the lusts of the body, how they are debased by the fear of man, how blind they are to the providence of God! You know how oppression has put out the eyes of their souls, and withered its sinews. If now, at length, a Saviour has once more for them stretched out His healing hand, and bidden ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... in the world to the King, and to the Queen-Mother of France; wherein he strove to mitigate his treason, with the poorest arguments imaginable, and, as if his good sense had declined with his fortune, his style was altered, and debased to that of a common man, or rather a schoolboy, filled with tautologies and stuff of no coherence; in which he neither shewed the majesty of a prince, nor sense of a gentleman; as I could make appear by exposing those copies, which I leave ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... now wonder. Was it well, or ill, what you did when you bid me go? In God's time I have learned to think it well. That hour is to me now like a blurred dream. To-day I can bless the anger and the sense of duty to our children which drove me forth—too debased a thing to realize my loss. I have won again my self-control, thank God! am a man once more. You have, have always had, my love. You have to-day again a dozen times the fortune I meanly squandered. I shall never touch it; it is yours ...
— Mr. Kris Kringle - A Christmas Tale • S. Weir Mitchell
... the vices of society, without being benefited by its civilization. That proud independence which formed the main pillar of savage virtue has been shaken down, and the whole moral fabric lies in ruins. Their spirits are humiliated and debased by a sense of inferiority, and their native courage cowed and daunted by the superior knowledge and power of their enlightened neighbors. Society has advanced upon them like one of those withering airs that will sometimes breed desolation over a whole region of fertility. It has enervated ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... angels, and the nation was left to the control of the leader she had chosen. Her children had spurned the grace of Christ, which would have enabled them to subdue their evil impulses, and now these became the conquerors. Satan aroused the fiercest and most debased passions of the soul. Men did not reason; they were beyond reason,—controlled by impulse and blind rage. They became satanic in their cruelty. In the family and in the nation, among the highest and the lowest classes alike, there was suspicion, envy, hatred, strife, rebellion, murder. There ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... warning example, the king, on the very same day, had these obstinate ones arrested and accused of some pretended crime. For this people, enslaved by the king's cruelty and savage barbarity, were already so degenerate and debased in self-consciousness, that men were always and without trouble found, who, in order to please the king and his bloodthirstiness and sanctimonious hypocrisy, degraded themselves to informers, and accused of ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... upon every sign of decreasing reserve on her part. He shamed himself more than once for deploring the fact that her ankle was mending with uncommon rapidity, and that in a few days she would be quite able to walk without support. And he actually debased himself by wishing that the Rushcroft company might find it imperative to go on rehearsing for weeks in that ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... (concave) 252. molehill; lowlands; basement floor, ground floor; rez de chaussee[Fr]; cellar; hold, bilge; feet, heels. low water; low tide, ebb tide, neap tide, spring tide. V. be low &c. adj.; lie low, lie flat; underlie; crouch, slouch, wallow, grovel; lower &c. (depress) 308. Adj. low, neap, debased; nether, nether most; flat, level with the ground; lying low &c. v.; crouched, subjacent, squat, prostrate &c. (horizontal) 213. Adv. under; beneath, underneath; below; downwards; adown[obs3], at the foot of; under foot, under ground; down ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in their hearts to find a denial of the deeds which have become incredible after their awakening from the nightmare. For a little while they had been caught up in the soul of war and their heroism had been spoilt by obscenity, and their ideals debased by bestial acts. They will have only one excuse to their recaptured souls: "It was War." It is the excuse which man has made through all the ages of his history for the bloody thing which, in all those ages, has made ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... morality, in which I have had the honor to be born, the moral sense is so debased that I should not be at all surprised if I were asked, by many a worthy proprietor, what I see in this that is unjust and illegitimate? Debased creature! galvanized corpse! how can I expect to convince you, if you cannot tell robbery when I show it to you? A man, by soft and insinuating words, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... of this country should not be debased. It is vital that we should keep high the standard of well-being among our wage-workers, and therefore we should not admit masses of men whose standards of living and whose personal customs and habits are such that they tend to ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... indifferent, and barbarously cruel. Its only thought in reference to its debased members is not their lost condition, and how to redeem them, but how to punish them revengefully for their evil deeds, in imitation of the Divine Demon whom orthodox theology recognizes as its model. Until society has enough of benevolence or enough of practical ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... will be all over the world," we heard him begin. "Deceived, decoyed, inveighed, in order to be made a laughing-stock before the most debased of all mankind, that woman and her associates." This was really a meditation. And then he screamed: "I will kill you all." Once more he started worrying the door but it was a startlingly feeble effort which he abandoned ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... way, are not so debased as you might think. Though cannibals, they do not kill for the sake of eating 'long pig,' like the cannibals of the South Seas. Neither do they eat the whole body. Only the hands and feet of their dead enemies are devoured. These are carefully cooked and eaten as delicacies along with monkey ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... Rock-rooted domes of prayer; and she that rears With words auguster temples. Happy thou Healing that leper with thy virgin kiss! A leprosy there is more direful, child!— Therein the nations rot when flesh is lord And spirit dies. Such ruin Arts debased Gender, or, gendered long, exasperate more. But thou, rejoice! From this pure centre Arts Unfallen shall breathe their freshness through the land, With kiss like thine healing a nation's wound Year after year successive; ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... by any means, to the Mexicans; but rather they have been exemplified in those Americans with bad characters, who have, from time to time, crept in among the people. These men, in several instances, have set examples which the most debased Mexican would hesitate ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... demonstrates that your acquaintance "went out" very little, and had but few engagements. How vulgar, too, is one of your heroines, who bids Mr. Darcy "keep his breath to cool his porridge." I blush for Elizabeth! It were superfluous to add that your characters are debased by being invariably mere members of the Church of England as by law established. The Dissenting enthusiast, the open soul that glides from Esoteric Buddhism to the Salvation Army, and from the Higher Pantheism to the Higher Paganism, we look for in vain among your studies of character. Nay, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... to pass of itself from the savage state to the civilized. But the primitive man, as described by Horace in his Satires, and asserted by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others, is far below the savage. The lowest, most degraded, and most debased savage tribe that has yet been discovered has at least some rude outlines or feeble reminiscences of a social state, of government, morals, law, and religion, for even in superstition the most gross there is a reminiscence of ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... aside the tribute which is due to such men alone. Would you dash out the signature of one who declares you his trustee for a legacy to your children? No, you would not. Neither will you reject the proofs of high esteem, however manifested, which England, however debased, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... cannot pretend to self-sustaining power. Hardly was it started on its course, when it began to be polluted by the heathenism and false philosophy around it. With the decline of national genius and civil culture it became more and more debased. So far from being able to uphold the existing morality of the best Pagan teachers, it became barbarized itself, and sank into deep superstition and manifold moral corruption. From ferocious men it learnt ferocity. When civil society ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... whisper of love-tones, deep, burning, tremulous, into his ear. And from this he had awakened, had awakened to the reality—to the weird and depressing surroundings of human life in its most cruel and debased form; to the recollection of scenes of recurring and hideous peril, of pitiless atrocity, which seemed to render the burning, brassy glare even as the glare of hell; and to the consciousness of similar scenes now immediately impending. Yet the remembrance of that sleeping ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... possibility. When they said a pound they thought of what was then a poundsworth of living. The Mint has since been increasing its annual output of gold coins to two or three times the former amount, and we have, as it were, debased the coinage with extraordinary quantities of gold. But we who know and own did nothing to adjust that; we did not tell the working man of that; we have let him find it out slowly and indirectly at the grocer's shop. That may be permissible from the lawyer's point ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... be certain actions exceptionally fitted to increase the welfare and augment the happiness of the community, and the men and women who perform these acts will undoubtedly be rewarded by the plaudits and the love of their comrades. Indeed, we with our debased standards are incapable of conceiving how dear to them this reward will be. It is because I believe that this love of one's fellows under Socialism will be a joy far exceeding in intensity any pleasure known to us, that I look for dramatic art to reach under Socialism ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... decline from that point or period; and men thenceforth relapsed gradually into ignorance and barbarism. The unlimited extent of the Roman empire, and the consequent despotism of its monarchs, extinguished all emulation, debased the generous spirits of men, and depressed that noble flame by which all the refined arts must be cherished and enlivened. The military government, which soon succeeded, rendered even the lives and properties of men insecure and precarious; and proved ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... of The Patriot would pass into Banneker's hands; The Searchlight would thus be held at bay until he and Io were married, for he could not really doubt that she would marry him, even though there lay between them an unexplained doubt and a seeming betrayal; and he could remould the distorted and debased policies of The Patriot to his heart's desire of an honest newspaper fearlessly presenting and supporting ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... time almost supreme in European influence, and planted with every circumstance of apparent advantage upon the shores of a fertile and luxurious continent given by the immortal Genoese to the crown of Spain. We had found them distracted by internal commotions, disgraced by ignorance, debased by superstition, and ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... never rest safely, it can never rest peacefully, upon any foundation save that of the intelligence and virtue of its subjects. No government, republican in form, was ever prosperous where its people were ignorant and debased. And in this Government, where our fathers paid so much attention to intelligence, to the cultivation of virtue, and to all considerations which should surround and guard the foundations of the republic, I am sure that we would do dishonor to their memory by conferring the franchise upon men ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... said, perusing the parchments further. "Charles consents to the fall of Luxembourg. I did not sign all this. I see it all: Louis's ambition to rule the world, England's King debased by promises won and royal contracts made with a clever woman—forgery mixed with truth. Sweet Heaven, what ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... relation, to their age, to their worn-out condition, as becomes them? Is it not common now-a-days, for parents to be brought into bondage and servitude by their children? For parents to be under, and children above; for parents to be debased, and children to lord it over them. Nor doth this sin go alone in the families where it is; no, those men are lovers of their ownselves; covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemous, that are disobedient to their parents. This is that the prophet means, when he saith, 'The ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... kisses passively, but gave none in return, until she asked him to kiss her. "When you are my wife," he said, evasively. And then—she must have loved him—she burst out into passionate sobs and fell at his feet in the quiet cabin and told him of her debased life in Fiji. "But, as God hears me, Will, that is all past since your last letter. I was mad. I loved money and did not care how I got it. I left Fiji to come here, intending to return to Australia. But, Will, dear Will, if it is only to ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... coins of different bullion value: bad money drives out good money. Sir Thomas Gresham (whose name has but recently been given to this so-called law), explained the principle to Queen Elizabeth when counseling her regarding the recoinage of the debased money of the realm as was done in 1560. He showed that when old, worn coins were in circulation and the mint began putting out full-weight coins, the old lighter ones remained as money, while the new ones, being ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... has been revived in our own day, it is not one of the loftiest of literary forms, and its possibilities are severely limited. It suffers to-day from the fact that in the half century and more since Poe set the pattern it has been vulgarized, debased, degraded by a swarm of imitators who lacked his certainty of touch, his instinctive tact, his intellectual individuality. In their hands it has been bereft of its distinction ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... magnificent rivers and broad lakes, and many curious and interesting objects, not more wonderful, however, than those of other parts of the globe, while the inhabitants in every direction, though often savage and debased, differ in no material degree from the other ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... they may not be worked on Sunday. And while all that is going on, comfortable gentlemen sit in armchairs and write alarmist articles about the falling birth-rate and the horrible amount of infant mortality. A Government calling itself Liberal goes pettifogging on about side issues, while women are debased and babies die. Here and there we find a man who realizes that the main concern of the State should be its children, and that you can't get worthy citizens where the mothers are sickly and enslaved. The question of statecraft, rightly considered, always reaches back to the mother. That State ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... Godolphin was struck by the remark. He was surprised, also, to see how much Fanny remained the same. A life of gaiety had not debased her. ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... emphatically to the Sixties. We had never been debased by trade, and a mesalliance was not known in our family. To be sure, my father had lost a fortune instead of making one in any way; but that did not alter his position or mine. We belonged to the aristocracy ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... too much. Now the cloud broke with thunder and lightning, and the storm descended with such violence upon the head of the sinning son that there seemed nothing less for him to do than to sink into the ground as a creature too debased to live; but he did not sink; he bent his head before the driving tempest, and when his mother stopped a moment—she had to take breath—he looked up quietly ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... usually a humorous person, but no man or woman of the white race could have checked the laughter which rose spontaneously to her lips. The circumstances were too grotesque, the contrast too violent, for subdued mirth. The man a debased specimen of one of the most primitive races of the earth, and of an ugliness which was simply devilish; the woman of high degree, beautiful, accomplished. She thought that her first moment's consideration of the outrage—it was nothing less in her eyes—had given her the ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... than the wealthy. My own experience is that you will find more real Christianity in Shoreditch than you will ever find in Mayfair—even though the "revealers" of it may drink and swear and otherwise lead outwardly debased lives. Well, the surroundings, the "atmosphere" in which they have been forced to live, encourage them in their blasphemy. I never marvel that they are often profane; I wonder more greatly that they are not infinitely more so. But it seems to me that you will ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... Patriarch, as an uncomely Delilah who had speciously shorn it of its strength and beauty; the State, as a political prompter and coadjutor of the Delilah; and Rome, a false God seeking to promote worship unto itself through the debased ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... them exclaimed, "it is frightful to murder this young man, whose only offence is resistance to insult from his debased half-breed keeper. Is ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... developed, not without relapse and reverse. To Dean Swift must be attributed the change in the national weapon and the initiation of a leadership of resistance within the law, which has lasted into modern times. Accident made Swift an Irishman, and a chance attempt to circulate debased coins in Ireland for the benefit of a debased but royal favorite made him a patriot. Swift drove out Wood's halfpence at the pen-point. He shamed the government, he checked the all-powerful Walpole, and he roused the manhood ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... the columns which he has preserved erect amid scenes of ruin, as assurances that he is able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by him; goes to the graveyards where fallen Smyrnas, idolatrous Saxons, debased Sandwich Islanders, and cannibal New Zealanders have buried the image of the living God, and in Jesus' name proclaims, "I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live;" ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... in the streets and in the clubs. Comedy was welcome in days of terror as at all other times. Collin d'Harleville drew mirth from the infirmities and follies of old age in Le Vieux Celibataire (1792); Fabre d'Eglantine moralised Moliere to the taste of Rousseau by exhibiting a Philante debased by egoism and accommodations with the world; Louis Laya, during the trial of the King, satirised the pretenders to patriotism in L'Ami des Lois, yet escaped the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... idiosyncrasy, or individuality, and considers its own being, not as appertaining solely to itself, but as a portion of the universal Ego. All important good resolutions of character are brought about at these crises of life; and thus it is our sense of self which debases and keeps us debased." ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... other excess it pleased them to commit. The Old Dominion, the last State of the thirteen to be swept over by the foe, was harried as the Jerseys had been, but by troops made less merciful by many a fierce conflict, and by its own servitors, debased by slavery to but one degree above the brute. Only with death did the people forget the enormities of those few months, when Cornwallis's army cut a double swath from tide water almost to the mountains, and Tarleton's and Simcoe's cavalry rode whither ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... to see their children deprived of that which had made them men. They saw that if slavery came in, schools must go out. They saw that where slavery existed there were three distinct classes in society,—the few rich, unscrupulous, hard-hearted slaveholders, the many poor, ignorant, debased white men, and the slaves. They saw that free labor and slave labor could not exist together. They therefore rightfully resisted the extension of slavery into the Territories. But the slaveholders carried the day. The North was outvoted and obliged ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... face had reddened and reddened with successive rushes of blood until it was now purple, lost all self-control at Marmaduke's commiserating tone. "I will see whether I cannot put him in the wrong," he burst out, in the debased voice of an ignobly angry man. "Do you think I will let him tell the world that I have been ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... capable of it,' said Theodora; 'there is nothing in her but time-serving and selfishness. And he, with that large true heart, so detesting falsehood—he must either be wretched or deceived—debased! No, there is no ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... intended to supersede this system of royal government; kings no less than emperors were regarded as holding a definite rank and office in the Christian commonwealth. No traditions of imperial bureaucracy, except in a debased and orientalised form, were accessible to Charles the Great. In Gaul and Italy he had subjects who lived under a corrupt and mutilated Roman Law; but he was unacquainted with the scientific principles of the great jurists whose writings were the highest achievements of the Roman ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... the worst experience she had yet endured, and she longed for the privacy of her cell again. Never before had she come in contact with such debased wrecks of humanity, and she blushed for womanhood as she cowered in the furthest corner and looked upon her companions—brutal women, with every vice stamped on their bloated features. The majority were habitual drunkards, filthy in person and foul of tongue. ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... gluttonies, the gorgeous feasts, the hollow compliments and lies of the people did not attract him. His mission, he told his Tempter, was not yet to free that people, once just and frugal, now debased by their insatiable ambition. When the time came for him to sit on David's throne, this with all other kingdoms of the earth would be shattered while his kingdom ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... thrive beneath the tropical sun of the Brazils. The enfeebled white man grows more enfeebled and more degenerate with each succeeding generation, and languishes in a clime which nature never designed him to inhabit. The time will come when the debased and suffering negroes shall possess this fertile land, and when some share of justice shall be awarded to their cheerful tempers and ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... and eighth centuries, instead of standing together against the threatening might of Assyria, sought heathen alliances, and wasted their strength in mutual contention. Against these hopeless alliances, and against the idolatry and the formalism which debased the people, the prophets contended with intense earnestness and unflinching courage. Amos, called from feeding his flocks, inveighed against frivolity and vice, misgovernment and fraud, in Israel. Hosea warned Menahem (743-737 B.C.) against invoking the help of Assyria ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... most painful things in the Western States and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children, only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old. The atmosphere in which they are brought up is one of greed, godlessness, ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... with our loathsome statistics and reports. The sweet air of heaven, the blue firmament, and the everlasting hills do not satisfy our poisoned hearts; so we make to ourselves a little tin-pot world of blotted-paper, debased rupees, graded lists, and tinsel honours; we try to feed our lungs on its typhoidal effluvia. Aroint[T] thee, Comptroller and Accountant-General with all thy grisly crew! Thou art worse than the blind Fury with the abhorred shears; for thou slittest my thin-spun pay-wearing spectacles, thrice branded ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... battles, in which the numbers of the Communists were hurled back or annihilated by the asphyxiator and the lightning gun; and finally, the most remarkable scene in all Martial history, when the last representatives of the great Anarchy, squalid, miserable, degraded, and debased in form and features, as well as indicating by their dress and appearance the utter ruin of art and industry under their rule, came into the presence of the chief ruler of the rising State—surrounded by all the splendour which the "magic of property," stimulating invention and ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... there had been a case of what we should call illegitimacy or of a child being born in the first months of a young couple's marriage. Someone mentioned, however, that the girls who went to the silk factories were, as a consequence of their life there, "debased morally ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... mansion of red sandstone, was built by Richard Prince, a lawyer, in 1578-82, "to his great chardge with fame to hym and hys posterite for ever." The Old Market Hall in the Renaissance style, with its mixture of debased Gothic and classic details, is worthy of study. Even in Shrewsbury we have to record the work of the demon of destruction. The erection of the New Market Hall entailed the disappearance of several old picturesque houses. Bellstone House, ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... son. Now attend to uncle." Kellogg leaned across the table, fixing him with an enthusiastic eye. "Here, have a smoke. I'm going to demonstrate high finance to your debased intelligence." He thrust the cigarette case over to Duncan, who helped himself mechanically, his gaze held in ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... has only served as a mantle to cover his deceitful heart. He is a serpent more subtle and venomous than that which entered the Garden of Eden. Ah! the vile wretch that he is! The deed is too base to forgive. I spurn the debased villain. I shall humble his proud heart. I shall crush him to the earth. I shall have revenge upon his guilty head. Revenge, revenge I ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... interesting partly as an instance of Florentine spite against Siena, partly as showing that in Italy great munificence was expected from the carpet-knights who had not won their spurs with toil, and partly as proving how the German Emperors, on their parade expeditions through Italy, debased the institutions they were bound to hold in respect. Enfeebled by the extirpation of the last great German house which really reigned in Italy, the Empire was now no better than a cause of corruption and demoralisation to Italian society. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... spoken with a plainness which will probably give offence of the debased supernaturalism which usurps the name of Mysticism in Roman Catholic countries. I desire to insult no man's convictions; and it is for this reason that I have decided not to print my analysis of Ribet's work (La Mystique Divine, distinguee des Contrefacons ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... is constantly placed before the eyes of "the temperamental youth" is a debased form of dramatic art, and a vulgar type of music, for the success of a song in these theaters depends not so much upon its musical rendition as upon the vulgarity of its appeal. In a song which held ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... for one of the debased symptoms which in very bad cases sometimes characterise an otherwise genial failing. There is another peculiar, and, it may be said, vicious propensity, exhibited occasionally in conjunction with the pursuit. This propensity ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... which you trace the foundations of temples and palaces, where now the owl hoots and the jackal lurks, was once a prosperous Christian village. Granted that the Christianity was pure neither in creed nor ritual; yet it had, even in its debased form, a thew and sinew that brought prosperity to its possessors. The history of that ruin is the history of a thousand such throughout the empire. Its prosperity led to its destruction. The insolent Turk, restrained by no public opinion, and curbed by no law, would wring from the ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... ashamed, and the more vexed because ashamed, I persisted. 'Cannot be done for me?' said I. 'Not for anybody,' said he—'by me, at least.'—I thought—Helen, I am ashamed to tell you what I thought; but I will tell it you, because it will show you how a mind may be debased by the love of power, or rather by the consequence which its possession bestows. I thought he meant to point out to me that, although he would not do it, I might get it done. And, speaking as if to myself, I said, 'Then I'll go ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... spectacular stage of Rome at the time when the papacy was at the zenith of its power—a height it had attained, not through love of the Church, nor by devotion to religion, which had long been debased, but by dazzling the luxury-loving people of the age and by modern politics; in addition to this, the Church had preserved since the Middle Ages a traditional and mystic character which held the ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... without him even if his scales are a little too quick on th' dhrop. But he ought to be left to dale with his akels. 'Tis a shame to give him a place where he can put th' comether on millions iv people that has had no business thrainin' beyond occasionally handin' a piece iv debased money to a car conductor on a cold day. A reg'lar pollytician can't give away an alley without blushin', but a business man who is in pollytics jus' to see that th' civil sarvice law gets thurly enfoorced, will give Lincoln Park an' th' public libr'y to th' beef thrust, charge an admission ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... future, and freedom for the present; superadd a due pressure of bodily suffering, and personal degradation; and you have a slave, who, (of whatever zone, nation or complexion,) will be what the poor African is, torpid, debased, and lowered beneath ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... boys followed Henry Fenn about the streets laughing; Henry Fenn, drunken and debased, whose heart was bleeding. It was late in the afternoon when he appeared in the Amen Corner. His shooting stars were all exploded from their rocket and he was fading into the charred papier-mache of the reaction that comes from over exhilaration. ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... the body more than the soul is base. His love passes away like the object of his passion. But the companion of the Olympic goddess is the Eros who fills the hearts of the lovers with the longing for virtue. The other Eros is the confederate of the debased Aphrodite." And Aristophanes, another of the participators in the feast, says: "The yearning does not seem to be a desire for the pleasures of the senses, the one taking delight in his intercourse with the other; far from it, it is obvious that each ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... There was that debased form of patriotism called Jingoism. It is a form of party politics without solid convictions or real beliefs, which puffs itself out with big words, and with the froth of high-sounding ideas and principles. It is a policy, nevertheless, which appeals most strongly to the instincts of self-interest ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... feed ITS taste For Literature and Poetry debased; Hither and thither pandering we strive, And one by one our ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... proposals for peace; he who endeavored to excite all the princes of Germany to crush me. I have acted with too much condescension to the court of France. Compelled by the necessities of my situation I debased my royal dignity by writing to the cardinal in terms which would have softened the most obdurate rock. He insolently rejected my entreaties; and the only answer I obtained was that his most Christian majesty had contracted engagements which he ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... on condition of the other two-thirds being delivered of a superior quality; and it is added that this relaxation has taken place simply from the distresses of the colonies, and in the hope of introducing specie, there being nothing in use at present but a debased copper coin. This measure would add to the trifling free produce ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... Morrison, his face stiffening from its genial unbent look into formality as he turned to her,—"the place itself I do not understand to be very disagreeable; it is the character of the population which must make it a hard place to live in. They are exceedingly debased. Vile people!" ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... the weariness of movement, either ending in final and blessed suspension or condemned to struggle on and on through countless lives of tormenting passion. All had this dignity of hope or despair; all she encountered were humble, impressive or debased in the working of the mighty law. She had been guilty, as this American had pointed out, of dangerous and wrong pride, and she accepted her lesson willingly. There was, however, an annoying conflict between ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... these pages, recorded the terrifying aspects of the Manchurian campaign, which one could not have foreseen in all of its horror. He has shown in a lasting manner the poor human creature torn from his home, debased to the role of a piece of mechanism. Not knowing where he is being led to, he goes, making murderous gestures, the meaning of which he does not know, without even having the illusory consolation of possible personal bravery, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... anything like a monopoly of its cultivation. They make the gons or double bags used for carrying grain on bullocks. In Chhattisgarh the status of the Patbinas is low, and no castes except the most debased will take food or water from them. The Kumrawats of Jubbulpore occupy a somewhat more respectable position and take rank with Kachhis, though below the good cultivating castes. The Dangurs of Betul will take food from the hands of ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... great coloured nation. This idea possessed me, and I travelled over the world for two years seeking for what I desired. At last I almost despaired of finding it. There was no hope of regeneration in the slave-dealing Soudanese, the debased Fantee, or the Americanised negroes of Liberia. I was returning from my quest when chance brought me in contact with this magnificent tribe of dwellers in the desert, and I threw in my lot with them. Before doing so, however, my old instinct ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... account; which, while following Shakespeare in his good points, should avoid his weaknesses, which should embody the best features of the nursery rhymes, and which should avoid like poison the shockingly debased ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... often urged against the anthropological method may be shortly disposed of. 'You examine savages,' people say, 'but how do you know that these savages were not once much more cultivated; that their whole mode of life, religion and all, is not debased and decadent from an earlier standard?' Mr. Muller glances at this argument, which, however, cannot serve his purpose. Mr. Muller has recognised that savage, or 'nomadic,' languages represent a much earlier state of language than anything ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... oneself, fear for oneself. Or else a false courage—who knows? Well, call it what you like; but tell me, how many of them would deliver themselves up deliberately to perdition (as he himself says in that book) rather than go on living, secretly debased in their own eyes? How many?... And please mark this—he was safe when he did it. It was just when he believed himself safe and more—infinitely more—when the possibility of being loved by that admirable girl first ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... declamation schools, where figures were appreciated.[100] But in spite of the ridiculous performance of the professors of the schools when they did come out into the sunlight, in spite of the protests of Tacitus who complained justly that debased popular taste demanded poetical adornment of the orator,[101] style continued to be loved for its own sake, extravagant figures of speech were applauded, and verbal cleverness and point were strained for. As Bornecque has ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... the mind with those unconscious prejudices which make critical thinking difficult. Yet for all its abuse the deliberate choice of issues is one of the high selective arts of the statesman. In the debased form we know it there is little encouragement. But the devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants. It is always a pretty good working rule that whatever ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... should humble the pride of the man, whom the one class regarded as an upstart and the other as an oppressor. Jacques was somewhat alarmed at the rumours that were afloat respecting him, and of dark hints that he had debased the coin of the realm and forged the king's seal to an important document, by which he had defrauded the state of very considerable sums. To silence these rumours, he invited many alchymists from foreign ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... found "Sabrace, sabracia, Comm." The authority cited, the Commentarius Curialium, is still unknown to me; and I have failed in searching for the word sabracia, which is not found in Ducange, or other glossaries of debased Latinity. Mr. Halliwell gives "Sabras, salve, plaster;" but he cites no authority. It appears, however, rather to signify a tonic or astringent solution than a salve. I have hitherto found it only in the following passage (Sloane MS. 73., f. 211., late xv. sec.) in a recipe for making ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... inaccessible. And his music was operatic, after all, grand opera saccharine with commonplace melodies gorgeously attired—nothing more. Wagner, declared the indignant critic, was not original. He popularized the noble ideas of the masters, vulgarized and debased their dreams. He never conceived a single new melody, but substituted instead, sadly mauled and pinched thematic fragments of Liszt, Berlioz, and Beethoven, combined with exaggerated fairy-tales, clothed ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... tell her that the torture was there, at her side; to describe to her the wooden horse, the points of iron, the wedges for jamming fast her bones. Her courage failed her, so weak she was now of body. She submitted to be set before her cruel master, who might laugh triumphant now that he had debased not only her body, but yet more her conscience, by making her the murderess of her ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... You will see that its fate has been ever to choose between the least of two evils, and ever to commit great faults in order to avoid others still greater. You will see.... on one side, the heathen mythology, that debased the spirit, in its efforts to deify the flesh; on the other, the austere Christian principle, that debased the flesh too much, in order to raise the worship of the spirit. You will see, afterwards, how the religion of Christ embodies itself in a church, and raises itself a generous democratic power ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the first repudiating State; A.G. McNutt, the first repudiating Governor; and Jefferson Davis, the first repudiating Senator. As another evidence of the incredible extent to which the public sentiment of that day was debased, I quote the following passage from Governor McNutt's message of 1840, proposing to repeal the bank charters, and to legalize the forgery of their notes—'The issuing of paper money, in contravention of the repealing act, could ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and dispersed. But, as to this matter, he could not absolutely rely on the support of his ministers; nor could his ministers absolutely rely on the support of that parliamentary majority whose attachment had enabled them to confront enemies abroad and to crush traitors at home, to restore a debased currency, and to fix public credit on deep and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... member for Huddersfield (Mr. Leatham) had used an argument which he (Colonel King-Harman) thought a most unworthy one, namely, that the franchise was not to be extended to women, because, unhappily, there are women of a degraded and debased class. Because there were 40,000 of them in this metropolis alone, the remaining women who were pure and virtuous were to be deprived of the power of voting. But would Mr. Leatham guarantee that the 2,000,000 men ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... education in the greater part of the universities in Europe. Logic was taught first; ontology came in the second place; pneumatology, comprehending the doctrine concerning the nature of the human soul and of the Deity, in the third; in the fourth followed a debased system of moral philosophy, which was considered as immediately connected with the doctrines of pneumatology, with the immortality of the human soul, and with the rewards and punishments which, from the justice of the Deity, were to be expected in a life to come: a short and superficial ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... Apostle saw his Lord in chains, he was afraid and denied Him; but he was not brought so low as to offer his services as executioner. He, Clerambault, had not only deserted the cause of human brotherhood, he had debased it; he had continued to talk of fraternity, while he was stirring up hatred. Like those lying priests who distort the Scriptures to serve their wicked purposes, he had knowingly altered the most generous ideas to disguise ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... the Germans or the Britons of antiquity and their modern descendants, after the lapse of eighteen centuries, and an entire revolution in government, religion, language, and laws. And travellers still perceive among the inhabitants of modern Greece, deteriorated and debased as they are by political servitude, many of those qualities which distinguished their predecessors: the same natural acuteness—the same sensibility to pleasure—the same pliancy of mind and elasticity ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... whatever loses the vital principle of renovation and growth, tends to decay. And if mere copyists, compilers, abridgers, and modifiers, be encouraged as they now are, it surely will not advance. Style is liable to be antiquated by time, corrupted by innovation, debased by ignorance, perverted by conceit, impaired by negligence, and vitiated by caprice. And nothing but the living spirit of true authorship, and the application of just criticism, can counteract the natural tendency of these causes. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... than people think. Dinah, who was ridiculous from the perversity of her cleverness, had really great qualities of soul, but circumstances did not bring these rarer powers to light, while a provincial life debased the small change of her wit from day to day. Monsieur de la Baudraye, on the contrary, devoid of soul, of strength, and of wit, was fated to figure as a man of character, simply by pursuing a plan of conduct which he was ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... which will at once place his establishment beyond the caprice and the tyranny of corrupt administrations, and secure hereafter the first monarchy in Europe from the possibility of sinking under weak Princes, by whom the royal splendour of France has too often been debased into the mere tool of vicious and mercenary noblesse, and sycophantic courtiers. A King, protected by a Constitution, can do no wrong. He is unshackled with responsibility. He is empowered with the comfort of exercising the executive authority for the benefit of the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... eternal, and His Godhead, as Romans i. clearly shows. The heathen themselves have lapsed from that knowledge. "When they knew God" is the intensely significant word of Scripture. This is, indeed, diametrically contrary to the teaching of modern science—that the barbarous and debased tribes of earth are only in a less developed condition—are on the way upward from the lowest forms of life, from the protoplasm whence all sprang, and have already passed in their upward course the ape, whose likeness they still, however, more closely bear! ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... the Rmoahals. As readers of the Transaction of the London Lodge on the "Pyramids and Stonehenge," will know, the rude simplicity of Stonehenge was intended as a protest against the extravagant ornament and over-decoration of the existing temples in Atlantis, where the debased worship of their own images was being ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... the highest are free from obedience to heaven's behests and the laws of right. I, whom men call the Preserver of Life, have debased myself by being found in evil company; and, although I have done no other wrong, I suffer rightly for the doings of this mischief-maker with whom I have stooped to have fellowship. For all are known, not so much by what ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... concentration on artistic pursuits or much enjoyment of terrestrial existence when it was liable to be violently extinguished at any moment: sufficient that the early Church survived its struggle for existence. But if he is referring to mediaeval Christianity, of any other than a debased kind,—common knowledge concerning mediaeval art and architecture sufficiently rebuts the indictment. So much so, that one may almost wonder if by chance he happened to be thinking of "Mohammedanism" ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... crime that he has not perpetrated than to discover a good or just action that he ever performed. He is so notorious a villain that even the infamous National Convention expelled him from its bosom, and since his Ministry no man has been found base enough, in my debased country, to extenuate, much less to defend, his past enormities. In a nation so greatly corrupted and immoral, this alone is ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... Greek church at Constantinople had been preserved from the reproach of image worship, and still later it made strenuous efforts against it; but the churches of the north of Africa, and the Asiatic portion of the Eastern empire, had become greatly debased, and worshipped saints and images. And while the territories of these were speedily subverted to Mohammedanism, and became a part of the Arabian empire, the east of Europe was wonderfully preserved ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... man lives secure under the shelter of the law, and through us participates in the gifts of the spirit; to the rich are offered the priceless treasures of art and learning. Now look abroad: east and west wandering tribes roam over the desert with wretched tents; in the south a debased populace prays to feathers, and to abject idols, who are beaten if the worshipper is not satisfied. In the north certainly there are well regulated states, but the best part of the arts and sciences which they possess they owe to us, and their altars ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... greatest contempt that it is possible for men to receive? What! the head of our most noble Aga of the Janissaries to be placed upon the most ignoble part of a Jew! what are we come to? We alone are not insulted; the whole of Islam is insulted, degraded, debased! No: this is unheard-of insolence, a stain never to be wiped off, without the extermination of the whole race! And what dog has done this deed? How did the head get there? Is it that dog of a Vizier's work, or has the Reis Effendi and those ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... was much to another when she was little. She was humbled now, and she no doubt deserved it. But how ineffably weak and mean did she appear in her own eyes! It was this which clouded Heaven to her at the moment that earth had become a desert. She felt so debased, that she durst not ask for strength where she was wont to find it. If she had done one single wrong thing, she thought she could bear the consequences cheerfully, and seek support, and vigorously set about repairing the causes of her fault; but here it seemed ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... innovation. It does not hurry forward a new order of things;—it recommends no fine projects of ticklish experiments; but, by a few safe and easy steps, and a few simple applications of English law, opens the way for the gradual introduction of a better system." "To advance above three hundred debased field Negroes, who had never before moved without the whip, to a state nearly resembling that of contented, honest and industrious servants; and after paying them for their labour, to triple, in a few years, the annual net clearance of his estates—these were ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... flattened. Clustered pillars. Windows and doors square-headed with perpendicular lines. Grotesque ornament. (The last fifty years of the sixteenth century were characterized by a debased Gothic style with Italian details in the churches and a beauty and magnificence in domestic architecture which ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... to the lost, one thing is certain,—He will do no injustice. With my loved ones, with your loved ones, with the most obscure, worthless creature, with the most refined, delicate nature, with the most cruel, debased creature that ever lived, God will do no wrong. Many have turned away to infidelity, not on account of the Bible's complete teaching as to future punishment, but because they have taken some one passage of Scripture and ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... which munificence has been highly appreciated. Ices don't seem to be provided for the ladies in the gallery—I mean the garden; they are prowling about there, endeavouring to peep in at the beef and mutton through the holes in the tent, on the whole, in a debased and degraded manner. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... the ensuing contests between labor and capital it was alleged to have made a profitable business of supplying spies and armed men to capitalists under the pretense of safeguarding property. These armed bands really constituted private armies; recruited often from the most debased and worthless part of the population, as well as from the needy and shifty, they were, it was charged, composed largely of men who would perjure themselves, fabricate evidence, provoke trouble, and slaughter without scruple for pay. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... nature, it is easy to imagine that a mutual exchange of good-will took place between two classes so differently gifted by fate. Inequality and wretchedness were then to be found in society; but the souls of neither rank of men were degraded. Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegal and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive. On one side was wealth, strength, and leisure, accompanied by the refinements of luxury, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... colour, nor even a touch of barbarism, is a squalid, brutal place, consisting of little dens built in the rock of the mountain which stands opposite the Alhambra. Worse than hovels, they are the lairs of wild beasts, foetid and oppressive, inhabited by debased creatures, with the low forehead, the copper skin, and the shifty cruel look of the Spanish gipsy. They surround the visitor in their rags and tatters, clamouring for alms, and for exorbitant sums ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... will yield coib annis, although now debased by the late mispending of the Stock, but wil bee brought up ...
— Iron Making in the Olden Times - as instanced in the Ancient Mines, Forges, and Furnaces of The Forest of Dean • H. G. Nicholls
... smiling, and the air we inhale too pure for that. It is a sensation of being entirely out of the world, and alone with a giant nature, surrounded by faint traditions of a bygone race; and the feeling is not diminished, when the silence is broken by the footstep of the passing Indian, the poor and debased descendant of that extraordinary and mysterious people, who came, we know not whence, and whose posterity are now "hewers of wood and drawers of water," on the soil where they once ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... murdering the traders who cross the plains, if they are not well armed, and in sufficiently large companies to keep them in check. Now the Americans had never this cause of complaint against the Africans, for, although like all heathen, they were debased, and were cruel and warlike among each other, they never annoyed us in America. And the Americans had not, therefore, even this insufficient excuse for enslaving them. The Indians were robbed of ...
— A Child's Anti-Slavery Book - Containing a Few Words About American Slave Children and Stories - of Slave-Life. • Various
... And if, when you have heard what an unhappy creature I am, you still wish to give me your heart, your name, I will be obedient to your wish. I will not speak to you of gratitude. If you could understand how debased an outcast I seemed to myself last night when I went to the river, you would know how I must feel your goodness. But you can never understand—you can never know what ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Prophet sat benignantly at the head of the table and blessed the meal. He tried to fix Prudence in this picture, but at every effort he saw, not her, the shy, sweet woman, full of surprised tenderness, but a creature hardened, debased, devoid of charm, dehumanised, ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... champaign, or ruby-tinted wine were served in beautiful and costly glasses. Rich divans and easy chairs invited weary men to seek repose from unnatural excitement. Occasionally women entered that saloon, but they were women not as God had made them, but as sin had debased them. Women whose costly jewels and magnificent robes were the livery of sin, the outside garnishing of moral death; the flush upon whose cheek, was not the flush of happiness, and the light in their eyes was not the sparkle of innocent joy,—women ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... manner, an unaffected wisdom in her thoughts, a vivacity in her conversation, and withal, a softness in her demeanour, that might alone engage the affections of a man of the nicest sentiments, and the strongest understanding. I will not see all these qualities and accomplishments debased. It is my office to protect her from the consequences of a degrading choice, and ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... the face of Philip left Lilburne terror-stricken with conviction. But the man's crafty ability, debased as it was, triumphed even over remorse for the dread guilt meditated,—over gratitude for the dread guilt spared. He glanced at Beaufort—at Dykeman, who now, slowly recovering, gazed at him with eyes that seemed starting from their sockets; and lastly fixed his look on Philip himself. ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... O Princes! that a strict account will be asked of your doings and non-doings, and a people newly-born will not fail to pay you in the coin you paid. Every one who shall have actively betrayed the trust of the people, disowned his fathers, and debased his blood by arraying himself against the Mother—he shall be crushed to dust and ashes.... Do you doubt our grim earnestness! If so hear the name of Dhingra and be dumb. In the name of that martyr, O Indian Princes, we ask you to think solemnly and deeply upon these words. Choose as you will ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... everybody here speaks it a little, and it is the first thing necessary for a new-comer to endeavor to acquire; only, unfortunately, there are no teachers, as in India, and consequently you pick up a wretched, debased kind of patois, interlarded with Dutch phrases. Indeed, I am assured there are two words, el hashi ("the horse"), of unmistakable Moorish origin, though no one knows how they got into the language. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... Dunk Island in times past, and in that respect the island was infinitely superior to its present state. Each appears to have effected a different kind of work—one devoting himself to realistic reptiles and the human form debased, and the other almost solely to the creation of conventional designs, and the representation of the animals and of weapons of his age. One illustrated man, and even gave to one of his reptiles a semi-human shape; the other exercised an exuberant fancy for ornamentation. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the committee would attend to the latter part of the assertion of Captain Smith. Yes:—this trade, while it injured the constitutions of our sailors, debased their morals. Of this, indeed, there was a barbarous illustration in the evidence. A slaveship had struck on some shoals, called the Morant Keys, a few leagues from the east end of Jamaica. The crew landed in their boats, with ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... own star with so much exultation, fell upon the spot where the little deformed prisoner, even Robin Hays, of the Gull's Nest Crag, was incarcerated. Again he spoke: "Complimented by the subtle Frenchman, feared by the cunning Spaniard, caressed by the temperate Dutch, knelt to by the debased Portuguese, honoured by the bigoted Pope, holding the reins of England—of Europe—of the world, in these hands—the father of many children—have I so true-hearted a friend, as to suffer the scale of his own interests to turn in the air, my life weighing so much the ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... work—a very great difficulty. The bank was not in the habit of having large cheques drawn upon it to pay money; for nearly all the merchants kept their cash in safes in their offices, and it was a very debased kind of money, coins composed of half copper and half silver, and very much defaced. You had to take a good many of them on faith. I had to send down fifteen days before the pay day came round, to commence getting the money from the bank, obtaining perhaps 2,000 or 3,000 pounds ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... the most scrupulous exactness, and its dignity was displayed in a variety of trifling and solemn ceremonies, which it was a study to learn, and a sacrilege to neglect. The purity of the Latin language was debased, by adopting, in the intercourse of pride and flattery, a profusion of epithets, which Tully would scarcely have understood, and which Augustus would have rejected with indignation. The principal officers of the empire were saluted, even by the sovereign himself, with the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... masculine countenance, which told of a naturally free, if not free-and-easy, spirit. Although born in a land where tyranny prevailed, where noble spirits were crushed, independence destroyed, and the people generally debased, there was an occasional glance in the black eye of Dobri Petroff which told of superior intelligence, a certain air of natural refinement, and a strong ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... buildings the shadows were many and dense. Here and there dreary and cheerless public houses appeared, with lighted windows conspicuous in a lightless waste. From time to time, as they hurried on, they encountered, and made wide detours to escape contact with knots of wayfarers—men debased and begrimed, with dreary and slatternly women, arm in arm, zigzaging widely across the sidewalks, chorusing with sodden voices the burden of some popularized ballad. The cheapened, sentimental refrains ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance |
