"Degraded" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that he wanted me to perform some desperate piece of work or other for him. 'Well, what is it you want of me?' I asked, in rather a sulky mood, for somehow or other I did not like the gentleman; and, bad as I was, I felt rather degraded in being employed by him; but yet my fortunes were too low, to allow me to be nice in what I undertook. He looked rather astonished at my manner; but recovering himself, he said, 'I want you to manage a very delicate affair for me, Kidd; ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... creative impulse, that divine imagination of hers, his own appeared as something imitative and secondhand, and his art essentially degraded. He was nothing better than a ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... cities, piercing with its sad and holy star-eyes down into the hellish orgies of men, untouched and unchanged by just or unjust, forever shining and forever pure. But honor him! could that be done? What respect or trust was it possible to keep for a self-degraded man like that? And where honor goes down, obedience is sucked into the vortex, and the wreck flies far over the lonely sea, historic and prophetic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... underlings, and if everything else fails, blows and foul words cover defeat, and treat calm assertion of right as impertinence to high-placed officials. Caiaphas degraded his own dignity more than any words of a prisoner ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... to none. If you will hear me through a very little more, all you can ever do for me is done. I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul. In my degradation I have not been so degraded but that the sight of you with your father, and of this home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... I to Polly, "leave this degraded creature to ply his pernicious trade alone. I have some very important words ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... and not by the public. In a pecuniary point of view his subservience to men in high position was often successful. An almost universal custom, it was not regarded as degrading; but the poet must have been peculiarly constituted who was not degraded by it. ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... to think of the ancient slave as being identical with the miserable and degraded being that disgraced Christian countries less than a century ago. This, however, is far from the truth. The Roman slave did not, of necessity, lack education. Slaves were to be found who were doctors, writers, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... true!" cried the king. "The old Roman maxim is not applicable to our effeminate, degraded people. Nowadays, whoever flatters the people and glorifies their weaknesses, is a good fellow, and he is extolled to the skies. Public opinion calls him a genius and a Messiah. Away with your nonsense! ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... and the next day these promenaders were more rigorously expelled than ever. In consequence, "to-day," relates a chronicler of the period, "excepting on days of the opera, the Palais-Royal is nothing but a vast solitude." In 1784, the streets back of it, inhabited by a dissolute and degraded population of both sexes, had become "veritable cloacae." On the evening of the 31st of October, 1785, at a moment when the evening promenade was more crowded even than usual, a dragoon, having one ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... population density, limited land access, and strict internal and external controls have kept economic conditions in the Gaza Strip - the smaller of the two areas under the Palestinian Authority - even more degraded than in the West Bank. An anticipated Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 may offer some medium-term opportunities for economic growth. The beginning of the second intifadah in September 2000 sparked ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... And again, "Exhausted, degraded, and oppressed as France now is, I do not despair of her ultimate success in establishing her independence and a free form of government." But it was not till half a century later that Gambetta, the Mirabeau ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... the glory and dignity of womanhood. You get this dignity from Jesus Christ, who was born of a woman, and who said, "Whosoever shall do the Will of God, the same is My brother, and My sister, and My mother." Before Christ came into the world the condition of women was most miserable. They were degraded, despised, treated as slaves, and beasts of burden, as they are in heathen lands to this day. Since Christ came every good woman is loved, honoured, and respected. Jesus Christ set us the example. It was on a woman's breast that ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... by a creature, for this savors of the blasphemy of unbelief. Hence in the next chapter, it is said: "If any one swears by God's hair or head, or otherwise utter blasphemy against God, and he be in ecclesiastical orders, let him be degraded." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... Eloquent's stern gaze he smiled sweetly at him, and he was so like Mary when he smiled that Eloquent turned his eyes away in very shame. It seemed sacrilege even to think of her in connection with anything so degraded and disgusting as Grantly's state appeared to him at that moment. His Nonconformist conscience awoke and fairly shouted at him that he should have interfered to prevent the just retribution that had overtaken this ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... he, Laurence Stanninghame, to whom the vast bulk of mankind represented a commingling of rogue and fool in about equal proportion, should ever come to render himself unsteady on his feet, and hardly responsible for the words which came from his brain, presented a picture so unutterably degraded and loathsome, that his mind recoiled from ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... brother, the sons of a white by a Mississaga woman, having been converted to Christianity, and admitted as members of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, became anxious to redeem their countrymen from their degraded state of heathenism and spiritual destitution. They collected a considerable number together, and by rote and frequent repetitions, taught the first principles of Christianity to such as were too old to learn to read, and with the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and Commandments, were thus ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... day awaiting you when your husband's strength will be exhausted, when pleasure will have turned to satiety, and he sees himself, I will not say degraded, but shorn of his proper dignity before you. The stings of conscience will then waken a sort of remorse in him, all the more painful for you, because you will feel yourself responsible, and you ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... upon him was that the borough would not be spared. There was no comfort for him at Percycross,—other than what arose from a pure political conscience. On the very morning on which he left, he besought his friends, the young men,—though they were about to be punished, degraded, and disfranchised for the sins of their elders, though it might never be allowed to them again to stir themselves for the political welfare of their own borough,—still to remember that Purity and ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... to me were so dear, Long, long ago, long, long ago! Where are the hopes that my heart used to cheer? Long, long ago, long, long ago! Friends that I loved in the grave are laid low, All hope of freedom hath fled from me now. I am degraded, for man was my foe, Long, long ago, ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... "Her father has torn her from his heart, and calls Henrica his only daughter. Happiness abandons those who are burdened by a father's curse, and she certainly did not find it. Don Luis is said to have been degraded to the rank of ensign on account of some wild escapades, and who knows what has become of the poor, beautiful signorina. The padrona sometimes sent money to her in Italy, by way of Florence, through Signor Lamperi—but I have heard nothing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... ostentation and riotous overloading of ornament, the Baroque, now took the place of the classical beauty of the Renaissance and art degraded became the slave of wealth, until the great Cardinal Albani erected his villa to ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... proud of their goodness. They are respectable; dishonor comes not near them; their countenance has weight and influence; their robes are unstained; the poisonous breath of calumny has never been breathed upon their fair name. How easy it is for them to look down with scorn upon the poor degraded offender; to pass him by with a lofty step; to draw up the folds of their garment around them, that they may not be soiled by his touch! Yet the Great Master of Virtue did not so; but descended to familiar intercourse with publicans and sinners, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... he searched for merit only, and employed it wherever it was found. From the elevation of the house of Brunswick to the British throne, a great portion of the people, under the denomination of tories, had been degraded, persecuted, and oppressed. Superior to this narrow and short sighted policy, Mr. Pitt sought to level these enfeebling and irritating distinctions, and to engage every British subject in the cause of his country. Thus commanding both the strength and the wealth of the kingdom, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... thirty years ago, while the Priory is said to be in danger of being pulled down, though a later report speaks only of its restoration. In the coaching age the town was alive with traffic, and Burford races, established by the Merry Monarch, brought it much gaiety. At the George Inn, now degraded from its old estate and cut up into tenements, Charles I stayed. It was an inn for more than a century before his time, and was only converted from that purpose during the early years of the nineteenth century, when the proprietor of the Bull Inn bought it up and closed ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... such a little thing as this, and don't mean to feel degraded by it, though I should by letting you do it for me. I never lived out before: that's the reason I made a fuss. There's a polish, for you, and I'm in a good humor again; so Mr. Stuart may call for his boots whenever ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... not to tease their darling, and he was at last obliged to give way to her importunities, when Antony again sunk into his former destructive effeminacy. The strength of his body declined, in proportion as his mind was degraded ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... that excellence which no dross can tarnish, and his understanding was such that no error could pervert. His genius was transcendant, and when it rose as a bright star in the east all eyes were turned towards it in admiration. He was a Poet. That name has so often been degraded that it will not convey the idea of all that he was. He was like a poet of old whom the muses had crowned in his cradle, and on whose lips bees had fed. As he walked among other men he seemed encompassed with a heavenly halo that divided him from and lifted him above them. It was his surpassing ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... Mall who would consider Mr. Crane's velvet coat, red necktie, and soft felt hat quite intolerable, yet they would hardly be justified in speaking of a portrait of Mr. Walter Crane as a study of human degradation. Let me assure Mr. Walter Crane that when he speaks of M. Deboutin's life as being degraded, he is speaking on a subject of which he knows nothing. M. Deboutin has lived a very noble life, in no way inferior to Mr. Crane's; his life has been entirely devoted to art and literature; his etchings have been for many years the admiration of artistic Paris, and ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... little grain of truth at the bottom. I do not mean that it is true in essence, as he would have us believe. It could not be essentially true if the Ordinance of '87 was valid. But, in point of fact, there were some degraded beings called slaves in Kaskaskia and the other French settlements when our first State constitution was adopted; that is a fact, and I don't deny it. Slaves were brought here as early as 1720, and were kept here in spite of the Ordinance of 1787 against it. But slavery ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... not give THEM the sanction of our names, but that we confer the distinction merely upon Miss Snevellicci. That being clearly stated, I take it to be, as it were, a duty, that we should extend our patronage to a degraded stage, even for the sake of the associations with which it is entwined. Have you got two-and-sixpence for half-a-crown, Miss Snevellicci?' said Mr Curdle, turning over four ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... She went to the door and shut it. Then she sat down on the sofa at the foot of the bed. She clasped her hands together in her lap, but they went on trembling. Pulses were beating in her eyelids. She felt utterly degraded, like a scrupulously clean person who has been rolled in the dirt. And she fancied she heard a faint and mysterious sound, pathetic and terrible, but very far away—the white ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... corn he was now to set stealing treasure. And then there was Madame von Rosen, upon whom he looked down with some of that ill-favoured contempt of the chaste male for the imperfect woman. Because he thought of her as one degraded below scruples, he had picked her out to be still more degraded, and to risk her whole irregular establishment in life by complicity in this dishonourable act. It was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this may be, remember that scarce one of the self-styled artists who cater for the crowd deserves to be called MUSICIAN in the highest sense of the word. Most of them seek not music, but money and applause; and therefore the art they profess is degraded by them into a mere trade. But you, when you play in public, must forget that PERSONS with little vanities and lesser opinions exist. Think of what you saw in your journey with Azul; and by a strong effort of your will, you can, if you choose, COMPEL ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... been suffered to molest them. Would we have been as forbearing—as stern in the maintenance of order and discipline? The only acts of cruelty committed on the English side have been by Rangers not belonging to the regular army, and those only upon Indians or those degraded Canadians who go about with them, painted and disguised to resemble their dusky allies. For my part, I think that men who thus degrade themselves deserve all ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... to that," said Schill, after a long pause; "and our hearts do not break with grief and rage! heaven does not grow dark, and earth does not open to swallow up the degraded, in order to save them compassionately from the sense of their humiliation! These words will be read by the whole of Europe, and all will know that this insolent conqueror may dare with impunity to speak in insulting terms of our queen, the ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... account—at first, it might have been amidst considerable resistance and obloquy, but ultimately with triumphant success. This, however, he never attempted, and must therefore be classed, in this respect, with such writers as Byron, whose powers gilded their pollutions, less than their pollutions degraded and defiled their powers; nay, perhaps he should be ranked even lower than the noble bard, whose obscenities are not so gross, and who had, besides, to account for them the double palliations of passion ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... of ineptitude. Things amuse us in the mouth of a fool that would not amuse us in that of a gentleman; a fact which shows how little incongruity and degradation have to do with our pleasure in the comic. In fact, there is a kind of congruity and method even in fooling. The incongruous and the degraded displease us even there, as by their nature they must at all times. The shock which they bring may sometimes be the occasion of a subsequent pleasure, by attracting our attention, or by stimulating passions, such as scorn, or cruelty, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Nichols, Mr. Cooke, Mr. Joddrel, Mr. Paradise, Dr. Horsley, Mr. Windham,* I shall sufficiently obviate the misrepresentation of it by Sir John Hawkins, as if it had been a low ale-house association, by which Johnson was degraded. Johnson himself, like his namesake Old Ben, composed the Rules ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... our own day, who, after a serious survey of their surroundings, take pleasure in painting misery, the sordidness of poverty, and the dunghill of Lazarus. This may belong to the domain of art and philosophy; but by depicting poverty as so hideous, so degraded, and sometimes so vicious and criminal, do they gain their end, and is that end as salutary as they would wish? We dare not pronounce judgment. They may answer that they terrify the unjust rich man by pointing out to him the yawning pit that lies beneath the frail covering of wealth; just ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... the soldiery; the people hid themselves in dens and caves of the earth, took to the woods and mountains, where many of them remained swelling the multitude of brigands. When they could they wreaked upon the lansquenets a vengeance as dreadful as what they had suffered, and were thus degraded to the same level of ferocity. Moral life was broken up. The Germany of Luther with its order and piety and domestic virtue, with its old ways and customs, even with its fashions of dress and furniture, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... haven't the least belief in projects of that kind. At best, you would have been forced into some kind of paltry work just to support me—and where would be the good of our marriage? You know perfectly well that lots of men have been degraded in this way. They take a wife to be their Muse, and she becomes the millstone about their neck; then they hate her—and I don't blame them. What's the good of saying one moment that you know your work can never appeal to the multitude, and the next, affecting to believe that our ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... Considering the degraded position assigned by the Australian savages to their women, it is not surprising that the Prince of Wales Islanders should, by imitating their neighbours in this respect, afford a strong contrast to the inhabitants of Darnley and other islands ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... man whirled him out into the street!" Harding went on, his attention on the incident, as Leslie's apparently was not. "Just the treatment he deserved for being brutal to a woman, no matter how lost or degraded she may be! Tearing off her dress was all right enough, however, for all the woman deserve nothing better than to have their dresses torn into ribbons for thrusting them under our feet and sweeping the streets ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... the visible—that instinct of fierce, tyrannical cruelty which he had felt as he laid his hands on Radowitz in the Oxford dawn a month ago. He shrank from it now as he thought of it. It blackened and degraded his own image of himself. He remembered something like it years before, when he had joined in the bullying of a small boy at school—a boy who yet afterwards had become his good friend. If there is such a thing as "possession," devilish ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... slaves indeed, but they are pariahs, debarred from every fellowship save with their own despised race, scorned by the lowest white ruffian in your streets, not tolerated even by the foreign menials in your kitchen. They are free certainly, but they are also degraded, rejected, the offscum and the offscouring of the very dregs of your society.... All hands are extended to thrust them out, all fingers point at their dusky skin, all tongues, the most vulgar as well as the self-styled most refined, have learned to turn the very name of their race ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... Hulker. He would be handed over to the governess, only he is too big. Sometimes, I used to think that this desperate stupidity was a stratagem of the poor rascal's, and that he shammed dulness, so that he might be degraded into Miss Raby's class—if she would teach ME, I know, before George, I would put on a pinafore and a little jacket—but no, it is a natural incapacity for ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... compared with a fraudulent currency and the robberies committed by depreciated paper. Our own history has recorded for our instruction enough, and more than enough, of the demoralizing tendency, the injustice, and the intolerable oppression on the virtuous and well disposed of a degraded paper currency authorized by law or in any way countenanced by government. It is one of the most successful devices, in times of peace or war, expansions or revulsions, to accomplish the transfer of all the precious metals from ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... Cattle graziers and middlemen made enormous profits, rents were doubled and trebled. Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Limerick and Belfast flourished exceedingly on war prices and war profits. But there is no evidence that the mass of the people in their degraded and debased condition shared to any extent in this prosperity. It was at this very period that Arthur O'Connor spoke of them as "the worst clad, the worst fed, the worst housed people in Europe." Whiteboyism, ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... had just darted past the three watchers, stood at his feet. As though warned by an inner subconsciousness of danger, it had come in its sleep, for safety and care, to its mother's old lover—the strong and the weak—the degraded and disgraced, but exalted—the persecuted, drugged, and all but ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... of that animal, when his services were not in immediate requisition, to go out alone idling. I have met him a mile from his place of residence, loitering about the streets; and the expression of his countenance at such times was most degraded. He was attached to the establishment of an elderly lady who sold periwinkles, and he used to stand on Saturday nights with a cartful of those delicacies outside a gin-shop, pricking up his ears when a customer came to the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... noticing that the rich man is said to have fared sumptuously every day, as though faring sumptuously might have no significance, but the constantly faring sumptuously was what had degraded and debased the man below the level of the beggar at his gate. I feel that to be luxurious occasionally is no bad thing, if we can keep our self-control, and return constantly to simple habits. There is something very natural in the prayer which a ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... an example of the results produced by a course of interesting and romantic domestic treachery. No golden halo of fiction was about this example, I saw it bare and real, and it was very loathsome. I saw a mind degraded by the practice of mean subterfuge, by the habit of perfidious deception, and a body depraved by the infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul. I had suffered much from the forced and prolonged view of this spectacle; those sufferings I did not now regret, for their simple recollection acted ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... owners of the industrial North saw disaster in any such beginnings of industrial democracy. The opposition based its objections on the color line, and Reconstruction became in history a great movement for the self-assertion of the white race against the impudent ambition of degraded blacks, instead of, in truth, the rise of a mass of black and ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the essential points in which letters differ, and puts aside the flourishes and ornaments which disguise the simple form, we shall see how much a strong influence was needed to prevent writing from becoming obscure and degraded. That influence was found ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... of wrath Gilbert Winter shook the dust of the White House floor from his feet and solemnly promised God it would be many moons before he degraded himself by again ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... interrupted his thoughts. At sight of her all his cares and troubles vanished without a trace. He forgot Caesar, the disfavor into which he had fallen, the degraded Augustians, the persecution threatening the Christians, Vinicius, Lygia, and looked only at her with the eyes of an anthetic man enamoured of marvellous forms, and of a lover for whom love breathes from those forms. She, in a transparent violet robe called ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Malda was burnt by a slow fire, for saying that mass was a plain denial of the death and passion of Christ. At Limosin, John de Cadurco, a clergyman of the reformed religion, was apprehended, degraded, and ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... larger story of the universe. No sensible man is humbled or dismayed by the vastness of the universe. When the human mind reflects on its wonderful scientific mastery of this illimitable ocean of being, it has no sentiment of being dwarfed or degraded. It looks out with cold curiosity over the mighty scattering of worlds, and asks how they, including our own world, came ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... on to Cyprus, [75:2] the native country of Barnabas. [75:3] They probably spent a considerable time in that large island. It contained several towns of note; it was the residence of great numbers of Jews; and the degraded state of its heathen inhabitants may be inferred from the fact that Venus was their tutelary goddess. The preaching of the apostles in this place appears to have created an immense sensation; their fame at length attracted the attention ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Trubus, furiously. "Some of these degraded criminals are drawing my famous and honored name into this case to protect themselves. It is a ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... emancipation. This supposition would not be true. There were persons there, who wanted neither the virtue to propose, nor talents to enforce the proposition, had they seen that the disposition of the legislature was ripe for it. These worthy characters would feel themselves wounded, degraded, and discouraged by this idea. Mr. Jefferson would therefore be obliged to M. de Meusnier to mention it in some such manner as this. 'Of the two commissioners, who had concerted the amendatory clause for the gradual emancipation of slaves, Mr. Wythe could not be present, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... any officer offende in this crime, the first time he shall receive a reprooff from the Governour, the second time he shall openly be reprooved in the churche by the minister, and the third time he shall first be comitted and then degraded. Provided it be understood that the Govern^r[204] hath alwayes[205] power to restore him when he shall, ...
— Colonial Records of Virginia • Various
... confer are synonimous to their merits. There is Kiss-my-breech-Can, my favourite; Adulation-Can, lord treasurer; Prerogative-Can, head of the law; and Blasphemy-Can, high-priest. Whoever speaks truth, corrupts his blood, and is ipso facto degraded. In Europe you allow a man to be noble because one of his ancestors was a flatterer. But every thing degenerates, the farther it is removed from its source. I will not hear a word of any of your race before ...
— Hieroglyphic Tales • Horace Walpole
... reader unexplored fields of delight, leads him through delicious countries where all is joy for the senses, where all recollections are a feast for the soul, and where his love of moral beauty is as strongly marked in his praise of olden Greece, as is his condemnation of modern degraded Greece. Byron speaks again in his own name when he puts invectives in the mouth of the Mussulman fisherman, and makes him curse so strongly the crime of the Giaour and the criminal himself, whose despair is the expiation of his crimes and ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... its nose by the extremist tip. Oh! it's degradation! What respect can a woman have for her husband after that sight? Imagine it! And I have implored him to spare me. It's useless. You sneer at our hbops and say that you are inconvenienced by them but you gentlemen are not degraded,—Oh! unutterably!—as I am every morning of my life by that cruel spectacle of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... prepared upon his way. As he approached the trees where the council of the rooks was sitting, in dark and ominous silence, an official stopped him, and informed him that he had been dismissed from the command, degraded from the rank he held, and the title of Khan taken from him. He was to retire to a solitary tree at some distance, ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... her inborn economic sense of the uses of money. She cannot regard it like a man, as a mere amusement. Light loves are somewhat in the same category. Hence many misunderstandings between the sexes. Zora found the amusement profitless, the vice degraded. So, after her first evening, she played no ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... of the COOKS or one of the BUTLERS, we have forgotten which; but it is certain that he was degraded from the peerage for offering some of his sauce to the reigning ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... text—"Whether it be to friend or foe, talk not of other men's lives." And in Rachel's quiet soul a vast love and pity dwelt for these same fellow-creatures. She had lived and worked for years among those whose bodies were half starved, half clothed, degraded. When she found money at her command she had spent sums (as her lawyer told her) out of all proportion on that poor human body, stumbling between vice and starvation. But now, during the last year, when her great wealth had thrown her violently into society, she had met, until her strong ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... of charity it engenders) are numbered, and men are beginning to distinguish between the exaggerations of fanaticism and the meek toleration of pure Christianity. I can safely say that the lowest, the most degraded, and the most vulgar wickedness, both as to tone and deed, and the most disordered imaginations, that it has ever been my evil fortune to witness, or to associate with, was met with at school, among the sons of those pious forefathers, ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... grasp, ran furiously down the hill, mounted his horse, and forbidding any groom to attend him, galloped towards the high road with the impetuosity of a madman. All the powers of his soul were in arms, Wounded, dishonored, stigmatized with ingratitude and baseness, he believed himself to be the most degraded of men. ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... penetrated the innumerable ramifications of secret societies, whose agents guided, directed, and intensified the prevalent excitement. These were the men who originated those daily rumors which threw both government and people into a fever of agitation; who taught new hopes and new desires to the most degraded population of Christendom, and inspired even the lazaroni with wild ideas of human rights—of liberty, fraternity, and equality. These agents had a far-reaching purpose, and to accomplish this they worked steadily, in all parts and among all classes, until at last the whole state was ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... recognized by his own life. In fact, when one comes to read the story of his life, and to know that he was really and lastingly ashamed of having once put up shoe-blacking as a boy, and was unable to forgive his mother for suffering him to be so degraded, one perceives that he too was the slave of conventions and the victim of conditions which it is the highest function of his fiction ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... talking with this girl,—this nice simple girl, whom she had herself bade him cultivate, whom she had herself brought into notice, rubbing off her angles,—drilling her into beauty? The very notion was madness and absurdity. It degraded her in her own eyes. It was the measure of her own self-ignorance. She—resign him at the first threat of another claim! The passionate life of her own heart amazed and ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... notorious. His youth and name were degraded by vices so imperative, an immorality so profound, conduct so criminal, that his infamous life must have ended on the scaffold if he had not possessed the ability to play a double part, as indicated by his names. Hereafter, as his passions rule him more and ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... sufferings of this patient people have, before now, drawn tears from the sensitive eyes of "the brother of the sun;" and the "sagacious and enlightened Lin" has already suggested to his celestial master the propriety of dispatching some of his invincible war-junks to effect the liberation of the degraded slaves of the "red and blue devils" who have so cruelly annoyed him. Every one has heard, and every one talks, of Irish grievances; but no one seems to know exactly what those grievances are: their existence appears to be so unquestionable, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... by alcohol in prostitution has not been estimated at its true value. The coarser and more degraded forms of prostitution would not be possible without it. It is by the aid of alcoholic orgies that most girls are seduced, and by chronic drunkenness that they sustain themselves in ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... literature is obvious. The great fact is that there is an enormous crowd of readers, and the great hope is that they will eventually work their way up through Miss Laura Jean Libbey to heights of purer air. America has not so much degraded a previously existing literary palate as given a taste of some sort to those who under old-world conditions might never have come to it. In American literature as in American life we find all the phenomena of a transition period—all the symptoms that might be ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... detailed indictment of the methods pursued by the existing courts of justice, and of the terrible dangers to the public security produced by their methods of administration. He did not merely impugn the verdicts which were the issue of a jury system so degraded as to have become the sport of a political "faction," but he dwelt on the public danger which sprang from the parasites of the courts, the gloomy brood of public accusers which is hatched by a rotten system, feeds on the impurities of a diseased judicature, and terrifies the commonwealth by ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... make it a rule to have the good will of a dog, in preference to his ill will, when I can. But as your conduct to-day has removed the last thin screen from your real character, and revealed your naked depravity of heart, I care not even for your friendship. You know, you feel, that you are a degraded wretch, and that you are unworthy of ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... must be laboured at early and late, before it brings forth even an average crop. But we do not despair even here. Still less could we for a moment depreciate the labours of those who are carrying education to the utmost bounds of the earth. The more degraded and stupid the condition of any set of people may be, the more meritorious and thankworthy are those efforts that are made to advance them one point nearer to the heavens—one step above the beasts that perish. The advancement ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... afterwards, brought against the Jesuits. The essay, besides being a picture of the times as regards religion, is an example of what was to be Bacon's characteristic strength and weakness: his strength in lifting up a subject which had been degraded by mean and wrangling disputations, into a higher and larger light, and bringing to bear on it great principles and the results of the best human wisdom and experience, expressed in weighty and pregnant maxims; his weakness in forgetting, as, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... Public Opinion in Ireland Mr. Lecky traces the current of events which have led to the present situation. He shows how the Treaty of Limerick was shamelessly violated, and how the native population was oppressed and degraded. ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... humid England, and unlike Wolsey, who just missed the glory of canonization, Becket became a widely venerated saint. But less kind to St. Thomas of Canterbury than to St. Swithin, the Reformation degraded Becket from the saintly rank by the decision which terminated the ridiculous legal proceedings instituted by Henry VIII. against the holy reputation of St. Thomas. After the saint's counsel had replied to the Attorney-General, who, of course, conducted the cause for the crown, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Of a mental atmosphere I will not speak—suffice it to say that that also is immeasurably inferior; but is it fitting for a nation like ours, in the van of progress, to suffer a moral atmosphere degraded, pernicious, and suffocating to circulate in regions to which we could furnish one so infinitely ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... was still upon her the next afternoon when an errand for her father took her down-town. Adams had decided to begin smoking again, and Alice felt rather degraded, as well as embarrassed, when she went into the large shop her father had named, and asked for the cheap tobacco he used in his pipe. She fell back upon an air of amused indulgence, hoping thus to suggest that her purchase was ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... of Ireland between the years of Swift's birth and death—between, say, 1667 and 1745—could rise from that study in no unprejudiced mood. It would be difficult for him to avoid the conclusion that the government of Ireland by England had not only degraded the people of the vassal nation, but had proved a disgrace and a stigma on the ruling nation. It was a government of the masses by the classes, for no other than selfish ends. It ended, as all such governments must ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... while he run through with what little property she had; while he sunk lower and lower, until at last he needed the very necessaries of life; and then he bound her out to work, to a woman who kep' a drinkin'-den, and the lowest, most degraded hant ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... life of any sensitive being, and to feed on its flesh, appears incompatible with a state of innocence, and therefore no such grant was given to Adam in paradise, nor to the antediluvians. It appears to have been a grant suited only to the degraded state of man, after the deluge; and it is probable that, as he advances in the scale of moral perfection in the future ages of the world, the use of animal food will be gradually laid aside, and he will return again ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... or busy Hull, fresh from the recollection of his land and home, no doubt shudders at the comparative misery and barbarity of these poor people; but those who have seen the degraded Bushmen or Hottentots of South Africa, the miserable Patanies of Malayia, the Fuegians or Australians of our southern hemisphere, and remember the comparative blessings afforded by nature to those melancholy specimens ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... of escape from his wife's inexpressive acceptance of his shame. It seemed to him that as long as he could keep himself alive to that shame he would not wholly have succumbed to its consequences. His chief fear was that he should become the creature of his act. His wife's indifference degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to her pity for the man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to her. The one woman knew but did not understand; ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... the utter futility of any attempt to civilise or humanise the degraded beings she associated with; and so she took to the children. With great difficulty, she formed a school, and made it her daily labour to instil not only words, but ideas and principles, into the minds of the young, unfledged wreckers. She gained the goodwill of the elders, by nursing both ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... nations when all these crimes were regarded as divine institutions. Nations entertaining these views today are called savage, and with the exception of the Feejee islanders, some tribes in Central Africa, and a few citizens of Delaware, no human being can be found degraded enough to agree ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... stage, the poor, degraded stage, Holds its warped mirror to a gaping age. Curiosity. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... mother-love might have been content with the greatness of her son, and his regard for her. She bore on her heart "the salvation of his soul," and would not cease in her quest for his spiritual welfare. A profligate father, the degraded ideals which justified vice, distances which seemed to be almost world-wide, did not daunt her. Without haste and without rest she sought to bring her gifted son to his Saviour. He had fame, and at least all the wealth that he needed, but Monica never faltered in her prayers, ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... great word Solidarity has arisen. Of all dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn—they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account. Much quackery teems, of course, even on democracy's side, yet does not really affect the orbic quality of the matter. To work in, if we may so term it, and justify God, his ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... massacred. "Their carriage was still burning as I passed, and the corpses were stretched out not far off. Their driver was still in durance, and it was it vain that I solicited his release."—On the other hand, at Lyons, the power has fallen into the hands of the degraded women of the streets. "They seized the central club, constituted themselves commissaries of police, signed notices as such, and paid visits of inspection to store-houses;" they drew up a tariff of provisions, "from bread and meat up to common peaches, and peaches ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... I know! That is your strongest argument. Creatures degraded by centuries of slavery, drunk with the first hours of freedom, commit crimes. You argue from this, that they were meant for slaves. Yes, it is true that if you take a child from the leading strings that upheld it, the child falls down. But you who watch over it, you rejoice ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... ever before reached while incarnate? We are pursuing a downward course in the eternal march, and thus bring ourselves into the same range with beings whom death, in requital of their gross and evil lives, has degraded below humanity! To hold intercourse with spirits of this order, we must stoop and grovel in some element more vile than earthly dust. These goblins, if they exist at all, are but the shadows of past mortality, outcasts, mere refuse stuff, adjudged unworthy ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... seemed to put an immediate end to all difficulties, perfected us in that spirit of domination which our unparalleled prosperity had but too long nurtured. We had been so very powerful, and so very prosperous, that even the humblest of us were degraded into the vices and follies of kings. We lost all measure between means and ends; and our headlong desires became our politics and our morals. All men who wished for peace, or retained any sentiments of moderation, were overborne or silenced; and this city was led by every artifice (and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... brother;—nor could he be her husband. And at this very moment, as she knew, his heart was sore with love for another woman. And yet he hardly knew how not to throw himself at her feet, and swear, that he would return now and for ever to his old passion, hopeless, sinful, degraded as it would be. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... thought: "Alas! The men of old had this heavenly tree, yet they did not pluck from it any worthy fruit. They were mean-spirited. They simply begged it for some kind of wealth. And so they degraded themselves and the great tree too. But I will get from it the wish which is in ...
— Twenty-two Goblins • Unknown
... is a very helpful thing indeed," said Mrs. Allan, "and we should have a very high ideal of it, and never sully it by any failure in truth and sincerity. I fear the name of friendship is often degraded to a kind of intimacy that has nothing ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... confine ourselves to a brief description of Sandy's outer cat. He was of a pure breed, far removed from the long-legged, lanky race of ordinary station-cats, who from time to time disappeared into the bush and contracted alliances with the still more degraded specimens of their class who had long been wild among the scrub. No: Sandy came of "pur sang," and held his small square head erect, with a haughty carriage as beseemed his ancestry. His fur was really beautiful, a sort of tortoiseshell red, the lighter stripes repeating exactly the ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... adherents outnumber ours two to one. There is a civilization which was old before ours was born. Are we to believe that these swarming legions were created for no purpose? Are their generations to appear and fall and rot unnoticed, like the leaves of the forest? Degraded, superstitious, many of them still are. But they need only to be organized and directed to do untold mischief. More than once already has a similar catastrophe occurred. Some prodigy of skill and genius has seized such ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... safely remain in the chair for another moment; that he would, on all future occasions, be liable to disgrace whenever he fulfilled his duty; that the dignity of the house would be at an end if the chair should be degraded; and that the step which the court-faction had taken was an attempt to render the representatives of the people despicable in the eyes of their constituents. Ministers and the court faction were compelled to bow before the storm. The motion for an adjournment ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Manitou, had pressed his attentions upon her during the last year since he had returned from the East, bringing dissoluteness and vulgar pride with him. Women had spoiled him, money had corrupted and degraded him. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... doubtless say in reply,—Good people, young and old, you meet and harangue, and bring in the gods, whose existence or non-existence I banish from writing and speech, or you talk about the reason of man being degraded to the level of the brutes, which is a telling argument with the multitude, but not one word of proof or demonstration do you offer. All is probability with you, and yet surely you and Theodorus had better reflect whether you are disposed to admit of probability and figures of speech in matters ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... found Jog in a very roomy, bright, green-plush shooting-jacket, with pockets innumerable, and a whistle suspended to a button-hole. His nether man was encased in a pair of most dilapidated white moleskins, that had been degraded from hunting into shooting ones, and whose cracks and darns showed the perils to which their wearer had been exposed. Below these were drab, horn-buttoned gaiters, and ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... Parliamentary duty, nor yet in the further benefit of relaxing the rigorous laws which thrust the honest debtor into prisons which seemed to garner up disease in its most loathsome forms—crime in its most fiend-like works—humanity in its most shameless and degraded aspect; but it prompted still further efforts—efforts to combine present relief with permanent benefits, by which honest but unfortunate industry could be protected, and the laboring poor be enabled to reap some gladdening fruit from toils which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... keep her outside the pale of pity and consideration, just so long will our representatives have to resort to murder and intimidation to get to Congress. The strength of any race rests in the purity of its women, and when the womanhood is degraded, the life blood of a race is sapped. Should we be disappointed under this showing because the Negro does not vote with us? You know as well as I that the Negro's vote was at the bottom of all this trouble. And we will always have trouble as long as the destruction of Negro ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... some recompense for the miseries, the humiliations, the heart-sickening disgusts which I have endured in my profession, if, by its exercise, I had awakened a spirit of poetry whose influence would elevate, ennoble, and adorn our degraded ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the mother's side he was the grandson of Scipio Africanus. His father, after a distinguished career as a soldier in Spain and Sardinia, had attempted reforms at Rome. He had been censor, and in this capacity he had ejected disreputable senators from the Curia; he had degraded offending Equites; he had rearranged and tried to purify the Comitia. But his connections were aristocratic. His wife was the daughter of the most famous of them, Scipio Africanus the Younger. He had been himself in antagonism ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... realize that it was a time of decline to the Greeks; and during the life of Alexander perhaps this does not appear with clearness; but at the close of his reign there arose such contentions and troubles among his generals that everything in Greece suffered, and with the rest Greek art was degraded. In the time of Pericles it was thought to be a crime in him that he permitted his portrait to be put upon the shield of the Parthenon, and he was prosecuted for thus exalting himself to a privilege which belonged to the gods alone. Alexander, on the contrary, claimed to ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... A poor, degraded, downtrodden, ignorant, superstitious people, they were; accustomed for generations to the heel of first one invader and then another and in the interims, when there were any, the heels of their feudal lords ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... milkmaids. The most elaborate account is that they were originally Yaduvansi Rajputs, who assisted the Kurus to make a fort of lac, in which the Pandavas were to be treacherously burned. For this traitorous conduct they were degraded and compelled eternally to work in ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... that in the kingdom of Yemen there was a sultan who had three sons, two of whom were born of the same mother, and the third of another wife, with whom becoming disgusted from some caprice, and having degraded her to the station of a domestic, he suffered her and her son to live unnoticed among the servants of the haram. The two former, one day, addressed their father, requesting his permission to hunt: upon which he presented them each with a horse of true blood, richly caparisoned, and ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... Setting, whirling, glancing, Round the sun in circles dancing; Trembling, toiling, Yielding, spoiling, Want and plenty by turn enfold it— This world, behold it! On its surface, by time abraded, Dwelleth a vile race, defiled, degraded; Abject, haughty, Cunning, naughty, Carrying war and desolation From the top to the foundation Of creation. For them Satan has no being; They scorn with laughter A hell hereafter, And heavenly glory As idle story. Powers eternal! I'll join their laugh infernal Thinking ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... ultimately, in the fierce attack upon the Irish Parliament in the poem entitled "The Legion Club," dictated by his hatred of tyranny and oppression, and his consequent passion for exhibiting human nature in its most degraded aspect. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... the age of the Communes, when Gubbio was a free town, with a policy of its own, and an important part to play in the internecine struggles of Pope and Empire, Guelf and Ghibelline. The ruined, deserted, degraded Palazzo Ducale reminds us of the advent of the despots. It has been stripped of all its tarsia-work and sculpture. Only here and there a Fe.D., with the cupping-glass of Federigo di Montefeltro, remains ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... du Barry, whose sway was now supreme, was of course joined by the whole vitiated intriguing Court of Versailles. The King's favourite is always that of his parasites, however degraded. The politics of the De Pompadour party were still feared, though De Pompadour herself was no more, for Choiseul had friends who were still active in his behalf. The power which had been raised to crush the power that was still struggling formed a rallying ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... is beyond all description. The great problem of Republicanism—the question of human progress—has reached its last trial. If we keep this mighty nation one and inseparable, we shall have answered it forever; if not, why then those who revile man as vile and irreclaimably degraded may raise their paeans of triumph; the black spectres of antique tyrants may clap their hands gleefully in the land of accursed shadows, and hell hold high carnival, for, verily, it would seem as if they had triumphed, and that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Heaven the soul he held in earth; While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven, And claims himself a sole, exclusive Heaven. Oh, man! thou feeble tenant of an hour, Debased by slavery or corrupt by power, Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust, Degraded mass of animated dust! ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various |
