"Debauchery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... walk on and on. She would cover all the territory where low debauchery fills its crop on Mondays and finds its loves, between a hospital, a slaughter-house, and a cemetery; Lariboisiere, the Abattoir ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... disappointment he afterwards wrote: "Had I remained and become a member of the university at that time, as I should have done in case of success, the profligate acquaintances I had there would have introduced me to scenes of debauchery, in which I must in all probability, from my ...
— Life of Henry Martyn, Missionary to India and Persia, 1781 to 1812 • Sarah J. Rhea
... not content with the name you bear, sir?" 'Our name is good as any in the three kingdoms,' said I, with truth. 'Then you would have me, for the sake of the coronet, joined to a wretch who is steeped in debauchery. Yes, debauchery, sir! You might then talk, forsooth, to the macaronies of Maryland, of your ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Sterile, dissipated and prodigal, she made her husband very unhappy, thus avenging the first Mme. Brunner. She was a step-mother of the most abominable sort, launching her stepson into an unbridled life, hoping that debauchery would devour both the child and the Jewish fortune. After ten years of wedded life she died before her parents, having made great inroads upon Gedeon Brunner's ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the past has nothing to do for them, and they do nothing for the future. Ignorant and superstitious from education, they become ferocious from the murders they commit, and corrupted by the most horrible debauchery." On the other hand, they had every sort of incentive and teaching to prompt them to rapacity and lawlessness. "The young peasant, sold in Mingrelia or Georgia, no sooner arrives in Egypt, than his ideas undergo ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... thou wert a boy I have borne all things: drunkenness, debauchery, blood-guiltiness, rebellion against those whom God has set over us, and at last war, the murder ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... waves, with the hapless people they had plundered on board. Then they went on their way rejoicing, and confident that no witnesses existed of their crime. They knew not of the Eye above which had watched them; they thought not of the avenging witness in their own bosoms. In the wildest revels and debauchery they spent their ill-gotten wealth. This time they were true to each other, and if any one suspected that their gold was obtained by unfair means, it was found impossible to prove anything against them. It was before this, I believe, that Delano had attempted to carry out some smuggling transaction ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... perfection. His longest narrative in prose, the Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle, has borne the lapse of time ill. "J'y ai vomi la verite," he said. It is not the happiest way of communicating truth, and the moral of the book, that debauchery ends in cynicism, was not left for Musset to discover. Some of his shorter tales have the charm of fancy or the charm of tenderness, with breathings of nature here, and there the musky fragrance of a Louis-Quinze boudoir. Pierre et Camille, with its deaf-and-dumb lovers, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... in all other virtues, so in temperance he was so strict that he abhorred all debauchery to that degree, that, at a great festival solemnity, where he once was, when very many of the nobility of the English and Scots were entertained, being told by one who withdrew from thence, what vast drafts of wine they drank, and "that there was one earl who had drunk most ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... prince, de Montbarrey. This gentleman made up in pretensions for what he lacked in talent. He was weak, self-important, selfish, fond of women, and endeavored to preserve all the airs of a man of good breeding in the midst of the grossest debauchery. He was full of respect for himself and his house, of which in time of need he could cite the whole genealogy. His nomination was a real scandal; no one dreamt of his ever being minister of war. It was one of the thousand follies of old Maurepas, ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... retired into the country, and abandoned himself to debauchery; but he did not long survive his abdication; he was seized with a horrible distemper, and died a loathsome and mortifying object, and a melancholy proof of the futility of ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... recent official American investigators sent to Russia found a great change in the life of the cities from of old. They described the life as puritanical. Russians explained the change to them by the fact that vice and debauchery had been confined mostly to the idle ruling class, the old aristocracy, and these things had passed with the ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... the city whom he had corrupted, Cornelius Lentulus kept together and encouraged. He had the surname Sura, and was a man of a noble family, but a dissolute liver, who for his debauchery was formerly turned out of the senate, and was now holding the office of praetor for the second time, as the custom is with those who desire to regain the dignity of senator. It is said that he got the surname Sura upon this occasion; being quaestor in the time of Sylla, he had lavished ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... indulged himself in amours unworthy of his character and tormenting to his wife; but he never suffered any other female to possess influence over his mind, nor insulted public opinion by any approach to that system of unveiled debauchery which had, during whole ages, disgraced the Bourbon Court, ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... brave, handsome Le Gardeur de Repentigny—a captain of the Royal Marine, a Colonial corps recently embodied at Quebec. In general form and feature Le Gardeur was a manly reflex of his beautiful sister Amelie, but his countenance was marred with traces of debauchery. His face was inflamed, and his dark eyes, so like his sister's, by nature tender and true, were now glittering with the adder tongues ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... and a white moustache trimmed in military fashion. It was Brahim Bey, the most gallant officer of the regency of Tunis, aide-de-camp to the former bey, who made Jansoulet's fortune. This warrior's glorious exploits were written in wrinkles, in the scars of debauchery, on his lower lip which hung down helplessly as if the spring were broken, and in his inflamed, red eyes, devoid of lashes. His was one of the faces we see in the felon's dock in cases that are tried behind closed ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... of Debauchery, the King of Uproar, Louis X., called the Hutin, succeeded his father, Philippe le Bel; ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... old lord, nor any of the new guests. But when the coachman missed his coach and horses, he was in a greater maze, and thought some body had stolen them, and accusing himself of sluggishness and debauchery, that made him not able to hear, when the coach went out, he forswore all drinking: but when the house-keeper and he met, and discoursed about the lady and the rest, they concluded, that the old gentleman ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... unequalled throne, his face sickly pale with boyish debauchery; his young fore head worn with the premature sensual wrinkles of lust; and his eyes bloodshot with last night's intemperance. He sits there, the Emperor-boy, vainly trying to excite himself, and forget her, in the blazonry of that pomp, ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... give him his right, he had the most piercing judgment naturally upon a figure of theft, and many other questions, that I ever met withal; yet for money he would willingly give contrary judgments; was much addicted to debauchery, and then very abusive and quarrelsome; seldom without a black eye or one mischief or other. This is the same Evans who made so many antimonial cups, upon the sale whereof he chiefly subsisted. He understood Latin very well, the Greek tongue not all; he had ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... certain that defeat or death would be the consequence. Cromwell obtained, and we may add, maintained his ascendancy over the people of England, by his earnest and continually directed efforts towards these two important ends. His court was a rare example of irreproachable conduct, from which all debauchery and immorality were banished; while such was his deep and intimate though mysterious acquaintance with every occurrence throughout the commonwealth, its subjects had the certainty of knowing that, sooner or later, whatever crimes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... discovery when it transpired that the officers' mess of our most select regiment included a flogging club presided over by the senior subaltern. The disclosure provoked some disgust at the details of this schoolboyish debauchery, but no surprise at the apparent absence of any conception of manly honor and virtue, of personal courage and self-respect, in the front rank of our chivalry. In civil affairs we had assumed that the sycophancy and idolatry which encouraged ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... of the face were swollen with blood, the features became coarse, the eyes lost their lashes and grew hard and dry. No longer careful of his person, Philippe exhaled the miasmas of a tavern and the smell of muddy boots, which, to an observer, stamped him with debauchery. ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... them an eloquent speech. D'Annunzio would indeed be the master of his job if with some rounded periods in Italian he could cause the very numerous hostile business men to forget so blissfully that they were men of business. Under his dispensation the town is said to have been turned into a place of debauchery. Accusations were brought against his sexual code, and with regard to men of commerce: "those who are not partisans of d'Annunzio are expelled, and their establishments handed over to friends of the ruling power.... Woe to him who dares to condemn the transactions of the poet's adherents. ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... of irregular gratification, open debauchery, and all kinds of luxury,[76] had spread abroad with no less force. Men forgot their sex; women threw off all the restraints of modesty. To gratify appetite, they sought for every kind of production by land and by ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... came suddenly like the furious driving Jehu. Her cyclonic joint smashing shook the rum power of the United States from apex to foundation-stone. The great American god Bacchus turned pale on his throne. Gambrinus and his thirty thousand white-aproned priests of debauchery and licentiousness trembled in every saloon and bagnio throughout the union. No whirlwind, tornado or simoon of the desert ever startled a nation as her volcanic career. From ocean to ocean, from Canada to Texas. she faced a storm of relentless criticism and bitter sarcasm from political ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... feudal ladies, unbridled Jezebels, with less sense of shame in them than the men, scorned all disguise whatever; displayed themselves with face uncovered. In their sensual rages, in their mad parade of debauchery, the king, the whole company might see the bottomless pit itself yawning for the life, the feeling, the body, and the soul ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... by his profligacy, the proud name that he bears. Even the friendship which existed for many, many years between his deceased father and myself, shall no longer induce me to receive at this house a young man whose reputation is all but tainted, even in a city of dissipation and debauchery, such as, alas! the once glorious Florence has become! For his immorality is not confined to gaming and wanton extravagance," continued the count, his glance becoming more keen, as his words fell like drops of molten lead upon the heart of Giulia; "but his numerous intrigues amongst ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... much bigger man and artist. The feminine note, despite his sensibility, is missing. He has control of his technical forces and he never indulged in such nervous excesses as Kubin. Besides, he is sincere, while the other is usually cynical. He deals with the same old counters, love and death, debauchery and consequent corruption. He is an exponent of feverish visions, yet you never feel that he is borne down by his contact with dwellers on the threshold. A border-lander, as is Maurice Maeterlinck, Munch has a more precise vision; in a word ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... evangelical reform was broached to the world, there was prescription in favor of violence, debauchery, and selfishness; when Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and their disciples reconstructed philosophy and the sciences, there was prescription in favor of the Aristotelian philosophy; when our fathers of '89 demanded liberty and equality, there was prescription in favor ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... proved no more than a 'lath painted to look like iron'. Such is the case against Seneca. That it can be rebutted entirely it is impossible to claim. But we must remember the age in which he lived. Its love of debauchery was only equalled by its prurient love of scandal. Seneca's banishment on the charge of an intrigue with Livilla is not seriously damaging. The accusation may have been true: it is at least as likely to have been false, for it was ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Boddy! Pah! She's far from domestic! She yearns for the halls of dazzling light, for gayety and even debauchery. Her devotion to home and children is the blackest of lies! And Iva Payne! She's no invalid! It's a pose to seem interesting and delicately fragile. You should see her stuff when no ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... a fight, and yet the memory of inheritance had waked within him, revealing other traits besides his yearning for debauchery and "frawgs"; so now he squared himself and uncurled ...
— A Night Out • Edward Peple
... people so poor, with incomes so small, that they are compelled to live miserable and unhappy lives. Young men and women, inheritors of vast fortunes, living lives of idleness, uselessness and vanity at one end of the social scale are driven to dissipation and debauchery and crime. At the other end of the social scale there are young men and women, poor, overburdened with toil, crushed by poverty and want, also driven to dissipation ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... refined simplicity of nature worship there gradually evolved a phase of worship, which in the beginning had for its basic principle an exalted ideal of the purpose and the powers of the female sex-function; but this ideal sunk to the level of debauchery and sex-degradation, in which the symbol of the female sex-organ of generation was worshipped, literally, although not reverently; and yet from the fact that it is only upon the temples and in the groves dedicated to worship that are found the carvings of the generative organs of either ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... that unequalled throne, his face sickly pale with boyish debauchery; his young forehead worn with the premature sensual wrinkles of lust; and his eyes bloodshot with last night's intemperance. He sits there, the Emperor-boy, vainly trying to excite himself, and forget her, in the blazonry of that pomp, and bids them call ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... thee, man, for very shame's sake! Art thou dead to the honor of thy calling, that thou dost wilfully consent to be the victim of wine-bibbing and debauchery? O thou frail soul! how hast thou quenched the heavenly essence within thee! ... why wilt thou be thus self-disgraced and all inglorious? Sah-luma! Sah- luma!"—and he shook him violently by the arm—"Up,—up, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... from 'Hudibras,' the only poet, alas! in whom he seemed to take any particular interest. There, in the parlour, were the fraternal meetings attended by all the neighbouring Independent ministers, all clad in sober black, and whose wildest exploits in rollicking debauchery were confined to a pipe and a glass of home-made wine. Madeira, port and sherry were unknown in ministers' houses, though now and then one got a taste of them at the houses of men better to do, and who, perhaps, ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... investor, discourages thrift, and encourages gambling and speculation; while perhaps worst of all is the trickiness and dishonesty which it implies—for harm to morals is worse than any possible harm to material interests, and the debauchery of politics and business by great dishonest corporations is far worse than any actual material evil they do the public. Until the National Government obtains, in some manner which the wisdom of the Congress may suggest, proper control ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... ill repute, where dwell women of evil life, and where roysterers and drunkards come by night. He knew that the sacred duty of avenging his master's death had led him to cast off his faithful wife so that he might pretend to riot in debauchery at the Three Sea-Shores. The fame of his shameful doings had spread abroad, and it must soon come to the ears of the man whom he wished to take unawares. Now he was lying prone in the street, seemingly sunk in a drunken slumber, ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... 5. Among which vices, debauchery and unrestrained gluttony grew to a head, and costly banquets superseded triumphs for victories. The common use of silken robes prevailed, the textile arts were encouraged, and above all was the anxious care about the kitchen. Vast spaces were sought out for ostentatious houses, ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... was a man of gigantic size, and possessed a voice of thunder. His countenance was that of an Ogre on the shoulders of a Hercules. He was as fond of the pleasures of vice as of the practice of cruelty; and it was said there were times when he became humanized amidst his debauchery, laughed at the terror which his furious declamations excited, and might be approached with safety, like the Maelstrom at the turn of tide. His profusion was indulged to an extent hazardous to his popularity, for the populace are jealous of a lavish expenditure, as raising their favourites ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... of his iron money; but, on the contrary, the worth of speech was to consist in its being comprised in a few plain words, pregnant with a great deal of sense: and he contrived that by long silence they might learn to be sententious and acute in their replies. As debauchery often causes weakness and sterility in the body, so the intemperance of the tongue makes conversation empty and insipid. King Agis, therefore, when a certain Athenian laughed at the Lacedaemonian short swords, and said, "The jugglers would swallow ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... corn, killing their domestic animals, and whipping the women and children. They carried with them, as articles of traffic, whiskey and other intoxicating liquors, and by distributing them in the tribe, made drunkenness and scenes of debauchery common. Black Hawk and the other chiefs of the band, remonstrated against these encroachments, and especially in regard to the introduction of spirituous liquors among their people: and, upon one occasion, when a white man continued, openly, ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... hook-nose, fox-eyes, grizzled billow of frowsy moustache, and chin of a beast of prey. This fellow, habitually one of the dogs lining the green tables of the foreign Baths, snapping for gold all day and half the night, to spend their winnings in debauchery and howl threats of suicide, never fulfilled early enough, when they lost, claimed his princedom on the strength of his father's murder of a reigning prince and sitting in his place for six months, till a merited ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... had already sadly mutilated several brave officers and students, who had had the bad luck to stand up against him. He himself was anything but pleasant to look upon, his natural plainness having been rendering repellent by a life of low debauchery. He cherished a secret grudge against the bridegroom and bitter feelings toward the bride, because the latter had so plainly shown her aversion for him when he had ventured to ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... Columns and arches appeared in all the leading public buildings, columns generally forming the external, and arches the internal construction. Fabric after fabric arose on the ruins of others. The Flavii supplanted the edifices of Nero, which ministered to debauchery, by structures ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... an organization which has no other excuse for existing than the profits of an annual dance, and which last year combined debauchery with dancing in a manner entirely new to this city, on Wednesday night had possession of the Theatre Francais, in which was to be given what was extensively advertised as the 'First Bal d'Opera.' The only conspicuous name in this society (which is composed of Frenchmen) ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Negro, unrestrained by moral laws, spends his days in sloth, his nights in debauchery. He smokes hashish till he stupefies his senses or falls into convulsions; he drinks palm-wine till he brings on a loathsome disease; he abuses children, stabs the poor brute of a woman whose hands keep him from starvation, and makes a trade of his own offspring. He swallows up his youth in ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... The initiated, or the elect, as they were called, gave themselves up to unspeakable crimes. A number of them on being arrested at Carthage confessed immoral practices that would not bear repetition, and this debauchery was not peculiar to a few wicked followers, but was merely the carrying out of the Manichean ritual, which other heretics ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... though he told the tale of another, but he is met with scorn and only bidden to fight the husband who has repulsed her. Bellmour, meantime, in despair and rage at his misery plunges into reckless debauchery, and in company with Sir Timothy visits a bagnio, where they meet Betty Flauntit, the knight's kept mistress, and other cyprians. Hither they are tracked by Charles, Bellmour's younger brother, and Trusty, Lord Plotwell's old steward. Sharp words pass, the brothers fight and Charles is slighted ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... real, but unavowed sentiments. They were for the most part men of pleasure, fitter to grace a court than to endure the rigour of military discipline, devoid of mental energy, and likely, by their indolence and debauchery, to offer advantages to a prompt and vigilant enemy. Ambition would induce them to aspire to office, and commands and honours, to form cabals against their competitors, and to distract the attention of the monarch by their importunity or ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... two extremes, no doubt can be made, that Blackmore's was the safest, and even dullness in favour of virtue (which, by the way, was not the case with Sir Richard) is more tolerable than the brightest parts employed in the cause of lewdness and debauchery. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... protecting children from cruelty even against their own parents; to raise the "age of consent" in order to prevent the unwitting moral suicide of little girls; to sweep the streets free from vicious allurements that young boys may be preserved from debauchery and disease; to place trustees of society's power of public protection as chaperones in every place of moral danger; these modern women are near of kin to all motherhood of any past. So also are those of the same spirit as the ancient ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... boastful and quarrelsome. That Sunday, as always happens in the Mountains, where there are plenty of whisky and a crowd of men, was utterly horrible. The men went wild in all sorts of hideous horseplay, brawls and general debauchery, and among them Ould Michael reigned ...
— Michael McGrath, Postmaster • Ralph Connor
... references to poesia, as closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental activity of the poet-scholars. This it is whose enemies he so vigorously combats—the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the "Octavius of Minucius Felix" (c. 25), we meet with the following startling challenge—"Where are there more bargains for debauchery made, more assignations concerted, or more adultery devised than by the priests amidst the altars and shrines of the gods?" This, of course, refers to the state of things in the third century, but there is no reason to believe that it was now ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... had been thrown upon London streets, their vices and debauchery, by a sordid and rapacious mother. What the younger girl was then, the elder had been once; and what the elder then was, the younger must soon become. A melancholy prospect, but how surely to be realised; a tragic drama, but how often acted! Turn to the prisons and police offices ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the pillow she brought from the spare room. When she had spread the fur over him, and pushed her chair close to the sofa, she stood by it for a little, looking down in meditation at his demoralized face. Under the painful surface-blur of wretchedness and fatigued debauchery, she traced reflectively the lineaments of the younger and cleanlier countenance she had seen a few months before. Nothing essential had been taken away. There was only this pestiferous overlaying of shame and cowardice to be removed. The ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... the monastery after having had offspring, or for any other prince on account of the peace of the entire kingdom or province, to prevent the exposure of the entire kingdom or province to wars, carnage, pillae, debauchery, conflagrations, murders,—nevertheless, in private persons who abandon vows in apostasy such grounds for dispensations cannot be urged. For the assumption is repelled that the vow concerns a matter that is impossible. ...
— The Confutatio Pontificia • Anonymous
... seduced. If they are many, the wages of corruption are the lower; and would to God it were not rather a contemptible and hypocritical adulation than a charitable sentiment, to say that there is already no debauchery, no corruption, no bribery, no perjury, no blind fury, and interested faction among the electors in many parts of this kingdom: nor is it surprising, or at all blamable, in that class of private men, when ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... surroundings of their houses. They are very polite and courteous. This character and their dress are accounted for by their long subjection to tyranny. They are "profoundly immoral," have indecent dances, and are dying out on account of the "exhaustion of men and women by premature debauchery."[1457] The Kavirondo are naked, but are, "for negroes, a moral race, disliking real indecency and only giving way to lewd actions in their ceremonial dances, where indeed the intention is not immodest, as the pantomime ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... unextinguishably behind it, awaiting the necessity or the opportunity of a fresh eruption. The volcano was not permitted to slumber. Shere Singh, liberated from the imminent oppression of the soldiery, plunged headlong into a slough of detestable debauchery. But in our annals his memory ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... returned with my brother, met likewise with a gracious reception. Le Guast was now no more, having died under the operation of a particular regimen ordered for him by his physician. He had given himself up to every kind of debauchery; and his death seemed the judgment of the Almighty on one whose body had long been perishing, and whose soul had been made over to the prince of demons as the price of assistance through the means of diabolical magic, which he constantly practised. The King, though ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... independent dominion, and publickly avowed these absurd and criminal pretensions. On returning from Parto, he remained a long while at Quito, continually feasting and rejoicing; he and his adherents abandoning themselves to every degree of licence and debauchery, particularly in regard to the sex. It is even asserted that Gonzalo caused a citizen of Quito to be assassinated, whose wife he publickly lived with, and that he hired a Hungarian soldier, named Vincente Pablo to execute this infamous deed. This ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... succumb to the poisonous influences by which she was surrounded, and that the poor girl did not sink into the depths of that luxurious sensuality which characterized Neapolitan society at that time. It was a more distinguished and fascinating type of debauchery than that which she had known in other days in England, and from which Greville had rescued her. The temptation to plunge into the boisterous merriment of a higher order of depravity than that to which she had ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... she dragged through all the lodging-houses in the Latin Quarter, in vain had she led a low, riotous life. Her nerves were ruined. Debauchery ceased to give her a sufficiently violent shock to render her oblivious of the past. She resembled one of those drunkards whose scorched palates remain insensible to the most violent spirits. She had done with lust, and the society of her paramours ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... enough to speak. "If you are indeed Ulysses, great are your wrongs, for your property has been, squandered, and riot and debauchery have filled your palace. But at your feet now lies Antinous, whose wild ambition meant to slay your son and divide your kingdom. Since he is dead, spare the rest of your people. Our gold and treasures shall defray the expense, and the waste of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... foundation in rare and heroic virtues will be sure to have its superstructure in the basest profligacy and corruption. An honorable and fair profit is the best security against avarice and rapacity; as in all things else, a lawful and regulated enjoyment is the best security against debauchery and excess. For as wealth is power, so all power will infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other; and when men are left no way of ascertaining their profits but by their means of obtaining them, those ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... reflected how this property, thus wrested from its former possessor, who might, if he had retained it, have done much good with it, would now be squandered away in riot and dissipation, in purchasing crime and administering to debauchery. I was young then, and felt so disgusted and so angry with myself and everybody else, that if I had been in England, I probably should never again have put my foot on ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... movement she was beside him, looking down upon the unconscious face; and wonderful it was to see that all its lines were smoothing out, and all the marks of years of debauchery. Even the sallow hue of them seemed to be changing in his cheeks. Extraordinary that the healthy colour of early manhood should reappear in the cheeks ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... see it, since it was a book that everybody was talking of. And the perusal of it had exasperated him. Forsaking the customary bachelor's flat where in previous works he had been so fond of laying scenes of debauchery, Santerre had this time tried to rise to the level of pure art and lyrical symbolism. The story he told was one of a certain Countess Anne-Marie, who, to escape a rough-mannered husband of extreme masculinity, had sought a refuge in Brittany in the company ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... health from attending him. Holmes had been with him from a boy, and was also a great favourite; by appointments and perquisites he had as much as L12,000 or L14,000 a year, but he had spent so much in all sorts of debauchery and living like a gentleman that he was nearly ruined. There seems to have been no end to the tracasseries between these men; their anxiety to get what they could out of the King's wardrobe in the last weeks, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... the tradition of hospitality to encourage this taste. The habitants were fond of visiting one another, and hospitality demanded on every such occasion the proffer of something to drink. On the other hand, the scenes of debauchery which a few chroniclers have described were not typical of the colony the year round. When the ships came in with their cargoes, there was a great indulgence in feasting and drink, and the excesses at this time were sure to impress the casual visitor. But when the fleet had weighed anchor and departed ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... in those days, so the street outside Newgate had not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since attached to it. But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and villainy were practised, and where dire diseases were bred, that came into court with the prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself, and pulled him off the bench. It had more than once happened, ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... of the revolt against social corruption. They fondly believed that a new era was to be ushered in by the rule of the Cromwellian saints. What the Cromwellian saints did in truth usher in, was the carnival of debauchery of Charles II, in its turn to be succeeded by the capitalistic competitive age which we have known, and which has abutted in the ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... ill-bred cubs; and having lived together from their infancy, without knowledge of the distinctions and decencies that are proper to be paid to each other's sex, they squabble like two brothers. The father is one of those who knows no better than that all pleasure is debauchery, and imagines, when he sees a man become his estate, that he will certainly spend it. This branch are a people who never had among them one man eminent either for good or ill: however, have all along kept ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... tolerable prosperity and success, while in every thing that related to personal conduct and character, the condition of the emperor was becoming every day more and more deplorable. He spent his days in sloth and sensual stupor, and his nights in the wildest riot and debauchery. He used to disguise himself as a slave, and sally forth at midnight with a party of his companions similarly attired, into the streets of the city, disturbing the night with riot and noise. Sometimes they would go out at an earlier hour,—while the people were in the streets ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... is the same in the science of health, arts, and in that of morals. If often happens, that the sweeter the first fruit of a habit is, the more bitter are the consequences. Take, for example, debauchery, idleness, prodigality. When, therefore, a man, absorbed in the effect which is seen, has not yet learned to discern those which are not seen, he gives way to fatal habits, not only by inclination, but ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... animadverted like an incorruptible censor on the vices which were undermining the moral health and preparing the way for violence; on the hypocrisy of philosophers and the cruelty of tyrants; on the frivolity of women and the debauchery of men. He discoursed on the vanity of human wishes with the moral wisdom of Dr. Johnson, and urged self-improvement like Socrates ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... blood from the wounds—a modern "Succubus." Pare mentions the perverted appetites of pregnant women, and says that they have been known to eat plaster, ashes, dirt, charcoal, flour, salt, spices, to drink pure vinegar, and to indulge in all forms of debauchery. Plot gives the case of a woman who would gnaw and eat all the linen off her bed. Hufeland's Journal records the history of a case of a woman of thirty-two, who had been married ten years, who acquired a strong ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... charged with murders, with debauchery, hated by every one and yet threatening still, like a panther thirsting for blood, she fell under the blows of men whom she had rendered desperate, though they had never done her the least injury; she met with judges whom her ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Europe, and as a painting-gallery, it reflects great credit upon France. I used to frequent it, yet I must, to be honest, confess that many of its pictures are too sensual and licentious to suit my taste. Are such pictures as can be found in the French gallery, pictures which express sensuality and debauchery, productive ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... the Borgia on his white horse, with Fratricide riding beside him, and his mantle stained with the blood of Perotto; Pietro Riario, the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, child and minion of Sixtus IV., whose beauty was equalled only by his debauchery, and who received Leonora of Aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... invitation, like myself," some one remarked, "who probably spreads these rumours, for one always hears it hinted that some disgraceful and illegal exhibition is on tap there—a new sort of drugging party, or some novel form of debauchery." ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wherefore every one had license to do whatsoever pleased him. Many others held a middle course between the two aforesaid, not straitening themselves so exactly in the matter of diet as the first neither allowing themselves such license in drinking and other debauchery as the second, but using things in sufficiency, according to their appetites; nor did they seclude themselves, but went about, carrying in their hands, some flowers, some odoriferous herbs and other some divers kinds of spiceries,[7] which ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... instead of making use of that superior knowledge with which the Almighty, the common Parent of mankind, had favoured them, to strengthen the principle of peace and good will in the breasts of the incautious Negroes, the Europeans have, by their bad example, led them into excess of drunkenness, debauchery, and avarice; whereby every passion of corrupt nature being inflamed, they have been easily prevailed upon to make war, and captivate one another; as well to furnish means for the excesses they had been habituated to, as to satisfy the greedy desire of gain ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... you don't know what it is to have moved, breathed, existed, and even triumphed in the mere smother and froth of life—the brilliant froth. There thoughts, sentiments, opinions, feelings, actions too, are nothing but agitation in empty space—to amuse life—a sort of superior debauchery, exciting and fatiguing, meaning nothing, leading nowhere. She is the creature of that circle. And I ask myself if she is obeying the uneasiness of an instinct seeking its satisfaction, or is it a revulsion of feeling, or is she merely deceiving her own heart by this dangerous trifling with romantic ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... a Council, or permanence of a Council without a Single-Person sovereignty. His real objection to so-called Parliaments, it will be found, lay in the association with them of the ideas of shiftingness, interruptedness, successiveness, the turmoil and debauchery of successive general elections. So possessed was he with the notion of permanence of tenure as desirable in the governing agency, whatever it might be, that he had even modified the notion, as we have seen, to suit the anomalous conditions of that stage of the Anarchy which ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... from time to time, at night and on days and hours when they least expect you, in order to keep them always in fear of being found absent from their huts. Endeavour to assign each of them a wife, to keep clear of debauchery and its bad consequences. It is necessary that the negroes have wives, and you ought to know that nothing attaches them so much to a plantation as children. But above all do not suffer any of them to abandon his wife, when he has once made choice of one {366} in your presence. Prohibit ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... borrows nor affects vices; and, if he unfortunately has any, he gratifies them with choice, delicacy and secrecy.' He observes that an intrigue with a woman of fashion is an amusement which a man of sense and decency may pursue with a proper regard for his character; gallantry without debauchery being 'the elegant pleasure ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... others were added, obscene to the last excess, and worthy of the god who chose to be honoured in such a manner. The spectators gave into the prevailing humour, and were seized with the same frantic spirit. Nothing was seen but dancing, drunkenness, debauchery, and all that the most abandoned licentiousness can conceive of gross and abominable. And this an entire people, reputed the wisest of all Greece, not only suffered, but admired and practised. I say ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... prohibition of acts of gluttony is left to paternal admonition, since it is contrary to the good of the household; hence it is said (Deut. 21:20) in the person of parents: "He slighteth hearing our admonitions, he giveth himself to revelling, and to debauchery ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... with how much indulgence his conduct and character were regarded both before and subsequently to his treason. There was something attractive about the man. In an age when many German and Netherland nobles were given to drunkenness and debauchery, and were distinguished rather for coarseness of manner and brutality of intellect than for refinement or learning, Count Renneberg, on the contrary, was an elegant and accomplished gentleman—the Sydney of his country in all but loyalty of character. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... deeper reasons which explain why the loss of a battle should lead to the loss of a state? It is not enough to say that Louis XIV was an improvident and passionate ruler, that Louis XV was a dreary and revolting voluptuary. The problem is rather this: Why were improvidence, passion, and debauchery in two men able to bring down in utter ruin one of the greatest monarchies the world has ever seen? In other words, what was the cause of the consummate failure, the unexampled ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... writing to the Anglican Bishop of Quebec to help him to do something. He lives, he says, in "the most Northerly and, I believe, the poorest parish on the Continent of America." The people cannot read and have no literary amusement. Their idle days they spend in drunkenness and debauchery and he wishes something done for them. Ten years later Nairne is returning to the charge. There are five Protestant families in the neighbourhood. They cannot even be baptized except by the cure. They cannot get any Protestant instruction; so the Protestant children are reared ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... the great science of government. He was accordingly made Grand Vizier of that prince, and ruled the state with some advantage; but in a science still more difficult, he failed completely. He could not rule his own passions, but gave himself up to wine and women, and led a life of shameless debauchery. Amid the multifarious pursuits of business and pleasure, he nevertheless found time to write seven treatises upon the philosopher's stone, which were for many ages looked upon as of great value by pretenders to the art. It is rare that an eminent physician as Avicenna appears to have been, abandons ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... unhappy young man had long been given to drunkenness and debauchery, and that his constitution was undermined by his excesses. The girl pressed her hands together and was silent; but after a few moments' pause she looked up at Reuben, and said, "You have given me courage by this visit. Come again soon. I must to my mother now. I must ask her what ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied to arts and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... its resentment or muttering its remonstrances at seasons of the deepest gloom and depression. Henry VIII. might have heard that voice mingling with the groans of his victims; Charles II. could not altogether shut it out from the scenes of his midnight revel and debauchery. But no such hopeful contrast meets us in the features or the history of the neighboring continent. Democracy, it is true, the rough and hardy growth of the German forests, struck an earlier root and flourished at first with better promise there than in England. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... scenes of humble happiness and content, the toiler in the fields, the family about the hearth-stone, which scarcely are seen by the chronicler busy with kings and popes. There are superstitions and mummeries; wild fears of spectres and devils; sentimental piety handed with cruelty and debauchery. There are inward struggles, sorrows, achievements; rapturous glimpses, tender consolations; the ministry of faithful priests; the comforting of women and the purifying of men by the thought of the Virgin Mother and the saints. There are civilizers in state and church,—Alfred, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... by his new client. Without much difficulty Buckner was located in New Orleans, and identified as the proprietor of a low dive which had become the rendezvous for the most vicious outcasts of the city. Drink and debauchery had long since destroyed the physical advantages he had possessed over other men at the time of his marriage. The death of his child, to whom he had given as much affection as his nature possessed, the stern arraignment of the neighbor who helped him to his ranch and later brought ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... in eating appears! Miserably hot with gluttonous debauchery. He has feasted upon a thousand deaths! Belshazzar's court fed on fish of every type, birds of every flight, brutes of every clime, and added thereto each finer luxury known in the catalogue of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... to be taken off the marquis's hand for the present, yet it appeared afterwards that this godly freedom was never forgot, until it was again repaid him with the highest resentment (such was the way to hearken to his counsel); for if debauchery and dissimulation had ever been accounted among the liberal sciences, then this prince was altogether ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... him any day standing at the street corners, begging, a miserable-looking object, exciting the pity of the humane, and gathering in money to spend in drunken debauchery at night. He has been known to bring in some days as high as ten and some fifteen dollars, all of which is wasted in riot before the next morning. He lives just over the way, and night after night I can hear his howls and curses ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... said that the amateur golfers of Great Britain are in these days suffering from a "debauchery of long driving." The general sense of Mr. Travis's remark is excellent, meaning that there is a tendency to regard a very long drive as almost everything in the playing of a hole, and to be utterly careless of straightness and the short ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... despotic judicial powers are exercised to crush the unions, to break strikes, and to imprison union men. And, if paid professional armies of detectives deal with the unions, so paid professional armies of politicians deal with the socialists. By every form of debauchery, lawlessness, and corruption they are beaten back, and, although it is absolutely incredible, not a single representative of a great party polling nearly a million votes sits in the ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... tempted from her husband, Drusilla, the daughter of that Herod whose dreadful death is familiar to us all; and his court reeked with blood and debauchery. He is here face to face with Paul for the second time. On a former interview he had seen good reason to conclude that the Roman Empire was not in much danger from this one Jew whom his countrymen, with suspicious loyalty, were ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... over his mind that he publicly proclaimed "that he had divorced and discarded Terunish, and that Tamagno should in future be considered by all as the queen." Soon Waizero Tamagno had numerous rivals; but she was a woman of tact; and far from complaining, she rather encouraged Theodore in his debauchery, and always received him with a smile. One day she said to her fickle lord, who felt rather astonished at her forbearance, "Why should I be jealous? I know you love but me; what is it if you stoop now and then to pick up some flowers, to ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... when my husband spends an evening out, and returns minus his overcoat, with his hat mashed, a lump the size of an egg over his ear, and puts a pair of fire-tongs in the umbrella stand under the impression that it is an umbrella, I have a right to ask at least if he intends to continue his life of debauchery." ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... account him brave. And, indeed, if modesty, and decency, and chastity, and, in one word, temperance, is only upheld by the fear of punishment or infamy, and not out of regard to their own sanctity, then what lengths will adultery and debauchery and lust shrink from proceeding to, if there is a hope either of escaping detection, or of obtaining ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... when the population of Salem was not half so great as it is at present, more riot, debauchery, and vice, obtruded themselves upon the sight in a week, than could now be discovered by diligent search in a month. The corruption of manners was so general, that almost none escaped from its contaminating influence. ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... one live man among our whole set. Yes, you're all right! Choose what you will; it's all the same. You'll be all right anywhere. But look here: give up visiting those Kuragins and leading that sort of life. It suits you so badly—all this debauchery, dissipation, and the rest ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... but upon forms which are unconnected with either, and which even can be executed by a substitute, of course excludes the necessity for morals of any kind. All is corruption—"Born amid falsehood and deceit, cradled in bloodshed, and nursed in the arms of idleness and debauchery, the national character ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... not so much take into calculation its probable bearing on the existing race of colonists, the greater part of whom are and will, perhaps, always be more or less addicted to the pernicious habits contracted in their early days of riot and debauchery, as on their posterity, who will necessarily soon form the majority of this colony, and whose amelioration or reformation all legislative measures should have principally in view. With those the immoderate ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... being thought, the lord's child. In the West Indies it cannot have these effects, because the mulatto is marked by nature different from the father, and because there is no bond, no law, no custom, but of mere debauchery.—1815. ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... is known, the worldly life enjoyed by Pascal during this period can hardly be qualified as "dissipation," and certainly not as "debauchery." Even gambling may have appealed to him chiefly as affording a study of mathematical probabilities. He appears to have led such a life as any cultivated intellectual man of good position and independent means ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... over the whole land, affected nobles and people with its baleful influence. All law was at an end: the people, even while they murmured against the King, followed his evil example; and history shrinks from the scenes of debauchery and licentiousness, robbery and murder, which desecrated the land. But this state of things could not last long, while there still remained some noble hearts amongst the Castilians. Five years after their marriage, the Queen was said to have given birth ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... ways, he has influenced them. As the Spaniard perfectly understands the objective vagabond side of the Gitano, so the Southeastern European understands the musical and wild-forest yearnings of the Tsigane. Both to gypsy and Slavonian there is that which makes them dream so that even debauchery has for them at times an unearthly inspiration; and as smoking was inexpressibly sacred to the red Indians of old, so that when the Guatemalan Christ harried hell, the demons offered him cigars; in like manner tipsiness is often to the gypsy and Servian, or Czech, or ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... bristling with violent political and religious prejudices, provocative of strife that amounted to revolution. Its social life ran the gamut from the severity of the Commonwealth Puritan to the unbridled debauchery of the Restoration Courtier. In literature it experienced a remarkable transformation in poetry, and developed modern prose, watched the production of the greatest English epics, smarted under the lash of ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... their devotion to the people's welfare, have told here in medical terminology the intolerable consequences, to guilty and innocent, of the odious business of making commerce of girls and promoting the debauchery of young men. We are sure the time has come when millions will thank these lawyers and physicians for breaking the seal of secrecy and giving ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... weary to death of all the simple innocent delights of home, sick of the companionship of gentle sisters, the love of a fond mother, and wishing to be back again at the old uproarious wine-parties, the drunken orgies, the card-playing and prize-fighting, the extravagance and debauchery of the bad set in which he ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... come back to live prudently on his fortune in his mansion on the avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, tormented by the hereditary malady of which he was to die young, having gained from his precocious debauchery a salutary fear of pleasure, resolved above all to shun emotions and responsibilities, so that he might last as long as possible. Acute pains in the limbs, rheumatic he thought them, had been alarming him for some ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... heads of stable-boys and serving maids? Have you not kept the poor worse housed than your dogs and your horses, worse fed than your pigs and your sheep? Is there an ancient house among you, again, of which village gossips do not whisper some dark story of lust and oppression, of decrepit debauchery, of hereditary doom? ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... while his cheek was inflamed with unnatural red, as if either the effect of the Bacchanalian orgies had not passed away from the constitution, or a morning draught had been resorted to, in order to remove the effects of the night's debauchery. ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... that young men, corrupted in early youth and addicted to women and debauchery, are inhuman and cruel; their passionate temperament makes them impatient, vindictive, and angry; their imagination fixed on one object only, refuses all others; mercy and pity are alike unknown to them; they would ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... the royal standard might justly be thought virtuous when compared with some of those who, while they talked about sweet experiences and comfortable scriptures, lived in the constant practice of fraud, rapacity, and secret debauchery. The people, with a rashness which we may justly lament, but at which we cannot wonder, formed their estimate of the whole body from these hypocrites. The theology, the manners, the dialect of the Puritan were thus associated in the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sovereign power was too agreeable to him. He only regarded what his subjects owed to him, without considering what was his duty towards them, and consequently took little care to govern them well. He revelled in all sorts of debauchery among the voluptuous youth, on whom he conferred the prime employments in the kingdom. He lost all command of his power. Being naturally prodigal, he set no bounds to his grants, so that his women and his favourites insensibly drained ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... luring ever its victims to death and damnation. No wonder that Lord Chesterfield, in words as eloquent as they were burning, should say of rumsellers: "Let us crush out these artists in human slaughter who have reconciled their countrymen to sickness and ruin and spread over the pitfalls of debauchery such baits as men cannot resist." And his suggestions continue to be repeated, serving as a nucleus to which many cling and receive strength for present and future action. Yet there is room for more, as the battle is fierce and will ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... from the doctrines of the "divine men," made great use of this strange idea of "spiritual love" in bringing about the triumph of debauchery in the ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... can supply it to the young man with the least danger. For if he once knows the state of your feelings, that you would sooner part with your life, and sooner with all your money, than allow your son to leave you; whew! what an inlet[58] will you be opening for his debauchery! aye, and so much so, that henceforth to live can not be desirable to you. For we all become worse through indulgence. Whatever comes into his head, he'll be wishing for; nor will he reflect whether that which he desires is right or wrong. You will not be able ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... carries herself after a more regular manner. As we see some who complain of having vowed chastity before they knew what they did; and I have also known others really, complain of having been given up to debauchery before they were of the years of discretion. The vice of the parents or the impulse of nature, which is a rough ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the Roman Emperors, a monster of cruelty, extravagance, and debauchery; he raised a dreadful persecution against the Christians, in which St. Paul was beheaded, and St. Peter crucified. At last, being deserted by his army and the senate, he destroyed himself, after a ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... suddenness all the lurid light which the advertiser had thrown around the star died away. The faces which mocked and mourned, the clutching hands, the lines of barbaric ornaments, the golden goblets of debauchery, the jewelled daggers, the poison phials—all those accessories, designed to produce the siren of the posters, faded out, and he found himself face to face with a human being like himself, a thoughtful, self-contained, and rather serious American girl of twenty-six ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... thrown out of work, is compelled to lead a vagabond's life and finally does become a vagabond, or who, grown up under improper training, sinks into vice. But to style "lazy fellow" the man who rolls in money and kills the day with idleness or debauchery, would be an insult: he is ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... valleys of Piedmont, and refused to make treaties with hostile powers unless the religious liberties of the Protestants were respected. He lived at Hampton Court, the old palace of Cardinal Wolsey, in simple and sober dignity; nor was debauchery or riot seen at his court. He lived simply and unostentatiously, and to the last preserved the form, and perhaps the spirit, of his early piety. He surrounded himself with learned men, and patronized poets and scholars. Milton was his familiar guest, and ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... politeness." Certainly Jack did not lack admonition and when he does well his father writes that it makes him "very happy." When in one letter Jack mentions the practise of smoking his father is severe: "All our family have ever been temperate not [practising] even the Debauchery of smoking tobacco, a nasty Dutch, Damn'd custom, a forerunner of idleness and drunkenness; therefore Jack, my lad, let us hear no more of your handling your Pipe, but handle well your fuzee, your sword, your pen ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... time the workpeople of the sister city of Roubaix had a much better reputation, while of the rural populations of French Flanders Dr. Villerme then affirmed, after a careful study of their habits, that nothing was to be seen among them of the 'debauchery and the daily and disgusting drunkenness prevalent ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... with eternal hatred against the Holy Church of Christ. This Devil presides at their sabbath when they all kiss him and dance around him. He then envelops them in total darkness, and they all, male and female, give themselves up to the grossest and most disgusting debauchery." ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... for some myriads of years ever a fighting animal when certain conditions exist in his environment. Though, through education, man be habituated in social and intelligent behavior or, through license, in sexual debauchery, still, at those times when his life or liberty is threatened, his instinct-emotional nature will inhibit either social thought or sex ideas, and present him as merely an irrational fighting animal. . ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... spend, not to save,—to command, not to fawn! He was not formed to plod through the dull mediocrities of fortune; he must toss up for the All or the Nothing! It was no control over himself that made Varney now turn his thoughts from certain grave designs on Percival St. John to the brutal debauchery of his three companions,—rather, he then yielded most to his natural self. And when the morning star rose over the night he passed with low profligates and venal nymphs; when over the fragments on the board and emptied bottles and drunken riot ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with indispensable supplies for the colony. Then he was seized with a dangerous fever; and while the vessels waited at San Domingo for him to be well enough to resume the voyage, his villains roamed the island and rioted in debauchery. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... and this is why the morals, intelligence and progress of Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippine Islands, are to-day on the same plane of depravity as they were centuries ago, and no one is to blame for this carnality and debauchery of the inhabitants of these islands but the Roman Catholic Church, and until the Government of the United States shall declare and back up her declaration by Protestant manhood, the inhabitants of these islands will never know of the beauties of chastity ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... a composer, Keiser had a singular fluency of melody in a style that hovers between those of Germany and Italy; had he been a man of more solid character he might have accomplished greater things. But he had inherited from his parents a love of pleasure and debauchery; extravagant in his private life, he was no less extravagant in his theatrical management, and was ready to provide his audiences with anything in the way of startling sensation. One of his most famous operas was on the subject of Stoertebeker, a notorious ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... unjointed legs, unstable because of recurrent debauchery, carried him disconsolately to lower levels. The Banker must be sure of his business, must have it well in hand, when he ignored the usual diplomatic ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... superstition. The gods of the conquered had always been part of her spoils. The Pantheon had become a lupanar of divinities that presided over birth, and whose rites were obscene; an abattoir of gods that presided over death, and whose worship was gore. To please them was easy. Blood and debauchery was all that was required. That the upper classes had no faith in them at all goes without the need of telling; the atmosphere of their atriums dripped with metaphysics. But of the atheism of the upper classes the people knew nothing; they clung piously to a faith which ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... himself with a set of dissolute men like himself; who, let loose from the restraint under which they had been held, during the latter hypocritical days of Louis XIV., now gave way to every kind of debauchery. With these men the regent used to shut himself up, after the hours of business, and excluding all graver persons and graver concerns, celebrate the most drunken and disgusting orgies; where obscenity and blasphemy formed the seasoning of conversation. For the profligate companions of ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... more real, or more exactly true: it is the situation of almost all men, even the wisest and most esteemed of the world. The morality of the younger stages of life is always lax, if not licentious. Age, disgust, and establishment for life, fix the heart and withdraw it from debauchery: but where are those who are converted? Where are those who expiate their crimes by tears of sorrow and true repentance? Where are those who, having begun as sinners, end as penitents? Show me, in your manner of living, the smallest trace of penitence! Are your graspings ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... tight-laced officers who make the court-residences of Europe look like camps; or, as they are often the sons of noblemen or rich parents, they may reach some of the sinecures in the State. They make their student-years but a pretext for a life of rough debauchery, from which they issue with a bought diploma; and, in many cases, satiated and disgusted with their own lives, they dwindle down into the timeserving reactionaries, the worst enemies of free development, because they themselves have abused in youth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... black shadow of the building she realised suddenly the terror of her position—the intense loneliness; the silence seemed to smite her. There occurred to her mind the wild, rough nature of the camp, the drunkenness of the night before; the wide contrast between that other scene of debauchery and this solitude of silence leaving her almost unnerved. She endeavoured to recall her surroundings, how the land lay here at the rear of the hotel. She could see only a few shapeless outlines of scattered buildings, not enough to determine what they were like. She ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... sense. His very vices could not repress the clearness, the sincerity of his understanding. At the foot of the tribune, he was a man devoid of shame or virtue: in the tribune, he was an honest man. Abandoned to private debauchery, bought over by foreign powers, sold to the court in order to satisfy his lavish expenditures, he preserved, amidst all this infamous traffic of his powers, the incorruptibility of his genius. Of all the qualities of being the great man of an age, Mirabeau was wanting ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... grim, consuming pestilence of gaming claim more victims than in the Ghetto. The ravages of drink and debauchery are slight indeed; but the tortuous streets can show too many a humble home haunted by the spectres of ruin and misery which stalked across the threshold when the first ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert
... light, then, I saw that though I had not the evil of the common uncleanness, debauchery, profaneness, and pollutions of the world to put away, because I had, through the great goodness of God and a civil education, been preserved out of those grosser evils, yet I had many other evils ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... knows what!—excuse me; but it does so bore me. They don't know what they're talking about. I do. They think they have achieved the perfection of love because they have no bodies. Sheer imaginative debauchery! Faugh! ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... there were magnificent hunting parties, when Caesar—who had begun to cast off is cardinal's robe,—weary perhaps of the colour, appeared in a French dress, followed, like a king by cardinals, envoys and bodyguard. The whole pontifical town, given up like a courtesan to orgies and debauchery, had never been more the home of sedition, luxury, and carnage, according to the Cardinal of Viterba, not even in the days of Nero and Heliogabalus. Never had she fallen upon days more evil; never had more traitors done her dishonour or sbirri stained her streets ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... his guests to wear red coats. The habitues of the place, who were the contemporaries of the Squire, had, as it were, gone to seed. But there was a sprinkling of a better class, or, at all events, of a class that had not as yet sunk so low as they in the mire of debauchery: a young lord or two in their minority, whom their parents or guardians could not coerce into keeping better company; and other young gentlemen of fashion, in whose eyes Carew was "A devilish good fellow at bottom;" "Quite a character, by Jove!" and "A sort of man to know." ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... It sets these evils up as benefits and blessings representing the highest attainable degree of honor and virtue, whilst any criticism of or revolt against them is savagely persecuted as the extremity of vice. The revolt, driven under ground and exacerbated, produces debauchery veiled by hypocrisy, an overwhelming demand for licentious theatrical entertainments which no censorship can stem, and, worst of all, a confusion of virtue with the mere morality that steals its name until the real thing is loathed because the imposture is ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... the beaver proved to be more of a curse than a blessing. The Indian then wore the European blanket, and bartered his valuable furs away for whiskey and brandy. The riotous scenes of drunkenness, debauchery and murder became unspeakable. To Detroit the Indians swarmed from the shores of Erie and all the rivers in the interior. Hunting for weeks and months and enduring privation, suffering and toil, they came in at last with their women and children to buy rifles, ammunition ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... banks. No one would dare pretend that these are 276,000 spendthrifts and ne'er-do-weels who expose themselves to misery voluntarily. Now, as among the very ones who make the savings there are to be found poor and inferior persons for whom the savings bank is but a respite from debauchery and misery, we may conclude that, out of all the individuals living by their labor, nearly three-fourths either are imprudent, lazy, and depraved, since they do not deposit in the savings banks, or are too poor to lay up anything. There is no other alternative. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... thinking men like you; and how much more with those who have your prejudices without your sense! But note well that they are not oftener in company—these tastes and vices—than honesty and meanness, good-nature and clownishness, sincerity and brutality, hospitality and debauchery, chastity and the absence of that virtue without which all others are as nothing. And let me remind you, by the way, that we of this age and generation make it our business, in fact, feel it our duty, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various |
