"Indecency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... resentment terminate here; they exercised their fury in the cathedral, tore down the altar, broke the organ in pieces, and committed a kind of sacrilegious devastation in the church; they burnt the service books in the market-place, filled the cathedral with musketeers, who behaved in it with as much indecency, as if it had been an alehouse; they forced the bishop out of his palace, and employed that in the same manner. These are the most material hardships which, according to the bishop's own account, happened to him, which he seems to have born with patience and fortitude, and may serve ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... distaste. 'I warn you not to discourage my talking,' he said dejectedly. 'Believe me, men who don't talk are even worse to live with than men who do. O have a care of natures that are mute. I confess I'm shirking writing this thing. It is almost an indecency. It's mixing two moods to write the sort of letter I mean to write, and at the same time to be sitting in the same ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... it was not the less hard to bar on that account—and after all, its bottom, its groundwork, was selfishness. There is no avoiding that conclusion. In the instance under consideration, I did think the indecency of running on in that way might occur to him; but no, the child was saved and he was glad, that was sufficient—he cared not a straw for MY feelings, or my loss of such a literary plum, snatched from my very mouth at the instant it was ready to drop into ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sheet that scarcely concealed their forms, passed through the streets of the towns, or wearily trudged from village to village, responsively singing the litanies of the Virgin or the saints, and loudly repeating the refrain, Ora pro nobis.[117] Often shameful indecency and a reckless disregard of human life were displayed. In one of the villages of Champagne, during the protracted drought of 1556, the sacred scenes of the Passion were publicly enacted in the streets. The person of our Lord was represented by a young man in a state of entire nudity and bound ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... write; how many even can sew well? The cottage girl is always a poor hand at her needle, and has to be taught by the elder servants when she first goes into her place. Accustomed from childhood to what would be considered abominable indecency in a higher class of life; constantly hearing phrases which it is impossible to allude to; running wild about the lanes and fields with stalwart young men coarser and ruder than those at home; seeing other girls none the worse off, ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... I could name him, but it would be an indecency to do so, for part of his charm is his complete unconsciousness of the affection, and even adoration, of the little group of younger men who call themselves his "fans"—I suppose that B——'s talk is as nearly Johnsonian in virtue and pungency as any spoken wisdom now hearable in this ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... deliberately shows herself bitter, caustic, sickly and capricious, and who will abjure her vows of elegance and cleanliness, rather than not see her husband turn away from her; in presence of a wife who will stake the success of her schemes upon the horror caused by her indecency? ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... But afterwards being carried down with the current of the times, he was transported to Edinburgh, where he became a mighty stickler for prelacy, especially, the five articles of Perth; insomuch that by the year 1620, he pressed kneeling at the sacrament with much impudence and indecency; and though he would not preach on Sabbath, yet he behoved to preach on Christmass.—At his Christmass sacrament 1621, he commanded the communicants to kneel, and he himself bowed with the one knee and sat with the other. ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... shown himself anxious to maintain the tie between Great Britain and her colonies. This attack upon his character made him one of England's enemies, and, as it proved, one of the most dangerous of them. His conduct is not palliated by the indecency of his opponents. It has been urged in his defence that, as Whately had shown the letters to certain English politicians, it was fair that Boston politicians should also see them, that as agent he was bound to do the best for his ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... women. That is the way of simple candor and naturalness. Treat the sex question as you would any other question. Don't treat it reverently; don't treat it rakishly. Treat it naturally. Don't insult your intelligence and lower your moral tone by thinking about either the decency or the indecency of matters that are familiar, undeniable, and unchangeable facts of life. Don't look on woman as mere female, but as human being. Remember that she has a mind and a heart as well as a body. In a sentence, don't join in the prurient clamor ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... exquisitely delicate and glancing style. He has contributed some immortal characters to English fiction, including Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. His great faults as a writer are affectation and a peculiarly deliberate kind of indecency, which his profession renders all the more offensive; and he was by no means scrupulous in adopting, without acknowledgment, the good things ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... is not our business to go round the rooms of the French Embassy picking holes in the earthly robes of society's elect. Suffice it to say that every one was there. Miss Kate Whyte, of course, who had made a place in society and held it by the indecency of her language. Lady Mealhead said she couldn't stand Kitty Whyte at any price. We are sorry to use such a word as indecency in connection with a young person of the gentler sex, but facts must sometimes be recognized. And it is a bare fact ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... Court, if it were questioned. He liked to recite his old triumphs. He especially plumed himself on his sagacity in dealing with one case which came before him. A complaint was made of a book well known at that time, the memoirs of a dissolute woman, which was full of indecency, but in which there could not be found a single, separate indecent sentence or word. The Major was at a loss for some time what to do in indicting it. If he set forth the whole book, it would give it an immortality on the records of the court which perhaps would be worse for the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... towards the Brewster house, his horse and buggy became the nucleus of a gathering procession, shouting and exclaiming, with voices all tuned to one key of passionate sympathy. There were even many women of the poorer class who had no sense of indecency in following the utmost lead of their tender emotions. Some of them bore children of their own in their arms, and were telling them with passionate croonings to look at the other little girl in the carriage who had been lost, and gone away a ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... by a gentleman in golden uniform, or a lady in a lace dress? But if the defenders of the civilization of Rossia and of the noble manners of its aristocracy knew all the cruel judgments of Rossian masters, the lewdness, recklessness, indecency, and shallowness often concealed beneath their artificial good breeding and apparent courtesy, they would learn that laces may cover coarse tissues, and gold hide corroded brass. The gaudy dress and uniform serve but ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... certain it is that the inhabitants who live at the foot of Etna will always have a certain pitch of life-vibration, antagonistic to the pitch of vibration even of a Palermitan, in some measure. And old houses are saturated with human presence, at last to a degree of indecency, unbearable. And tradition, in its most elemental sense, means the continuing of the same peculiar pitch ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... This section, which is sufficiently comprehensive, runs as follows: 'Any male person who in public or private commits or is a party to the commission, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person, of any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour.' The penalty is imprisonment for two years, with or without hard labour. It is provided by Section 4 of the same Act that a boy under ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... have his cake and eat it, if he might use so homespun a simile for a woman who had persistently lived for him and in him and then had made clear spaces about him by going away in the dignity of death. He wanted to breathe in the space she had left, and he also wanted to be spared the indecency of recognizing his relief. But Nan, studying the fire persistently, to allow his eyes all possible liberty of searching her face while she generously avoided his, was going on in what was evidently a preconceived task of ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... the centre of a great crowd, in a dusty hall, on a warm midsummer day, it is also a disgusting dance. Night is its only appropriate time. The blinding, dazzling gas-light throws a grateful glare over the salient points of its indecency, and blends the whole into a wild whirl that dizzies and dazes one; but the uncompromising afternoon, pouring in through manifold windows, tears away every illusion, and reveals the whole coarseness and commonness and all the repulsive details of this ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... my power to describe, being such as to make me feel as if I had broke into Bedlam. Their faces were all red and blotched with drink, and their heads covered with extravagant ringlets, which might never have seen a comb, while their dress was disordered to indecency, and the whole table was covered with a confusion of tankards and bottles and tobacco-pipes, not to mention playing-cards and dice. The huge man at their head bore a most terrifying aspect. He had an immense head set on a neck so short and thick ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... this despicable faction is distinguished by plebeian grossness, and savage indecency. To misrepresent the actions and the principles of their enemies is common to all parties; but the insolence of invective, and brutality of reproach, which have lately prevailed, are ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... that the Adone is an obscene poem. Marino was too skillful a master in the craft of pleasure to revolt or to regale his readers with grossness. He had too much of the Neapolitan's frank self-abandonment to nature for broad indecency in art to afford him special satisfaction; and the taste of his age demanded innuendo. The laureate of Courts and cities saturated with licentiousness knew well that Coan vestments are more provocative than nudity. It was his object ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... adjourned. Question put that Clause 3 pass. Then SAGE, smelling obtrusively of cigarettes, interposed, and declared it "would be indecent" to accept the Clause without further discussion. Nothing House shrinks from just now more abjectly than from charge of indecency. Accordingly debate stood over, and Thursday may, if the SAGE and his Party please, and the Closure is not invoked, be appropriated for further discussion of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... and these lazy varletesses (in full health) not come down yet to breakfast!—What a confounded indecency in young ladies, to let a rake know that they love their beds so dearly, and, at the same time, where to have them! But I'll punish them—they shall breakfast with their old uncle, and yawn at one another ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... Edwardes, was acted at Court in 1566, and a second piece, called 'Palamon and Arsett' (also lost), was purchased by Henslowe in 1594. The non-Shakespearean residue of 'The Two Noble Kinsmen' is disfigured by indecency and triviality, and ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... extravagance of the age. There never was such a rage for dress and finery amongst English women as there is now. It rivals the corrupt and debauched age of Louis XV. of France. A delirium of fashion exists. Women are ranked by what they wear, not by what they are. Extravagance of dress, and almost indecency of dress, has taken the place of simple womanly beauty. Wordsworth once described the "perfect woman nobly planned." Where will you find the perfect woman now? Not in the parti-coloured, over-dressed creature—the thing of shreds and patches—with false hair, ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... traditional Anglo-Saxon lines. Anybody who knows no more of Japan than may be gathered from the pages of LAFCADIO HEARN will at least have learned that her youth is taught to regard the love-interest of an ordinary English novel as an indecency; and so will recognise the improbability of the romantic element in the play. Still, all that is of little consequence, for there must have been very few who went to His Majesty's to improve their acquaintance ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... Paris and find him going to bed in the street, I shall say that he is still true to the genius of his civilisation. All that is good and all that is evil in France is alike connected with this open-air element. French democracy and French indecency are alike part of the desire to have everything out of doors. Compared to a cafe, a public-house is ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... does Comstockery conjure decency into the stomach and indecency into the bowels? But how rejoiced we should be that it is no worse than indecent to speak of the receptacle of the intestines by its common name. By some hocus pocus of which Comstockery is easily capable it might have been obscene to speak of the digestive process ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... easy for us to understand how such a farrago of absurdity, profanity, and indecency could ever have been gravely produced in a so-called court of justice in England as a state paper—a bill of indictment against a body of noblemen and gentlemen; against an order that for two hundred years had been the right arm of the Church and the defender ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... him as if they had been cut by little, little knives close under the eyeballs. He turned from her, shamed, as if he had witnessed some indecency, some outrage on a ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... forgotten an essential part of its attire and was outraging decency. The ball of hair which had been allowed to grow on the dog's tail, and the circles of hair which ornamented its ankles, only served to intensify the impression of indecency. A pink ribbon round its neck completed the outrage. The animal had absolutely the air of a decked trollop. A chain ran taut from the creature's neck into the middle of a small crowd of persons gesticulating over trunks, and Constance traced ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... passion is wrought to its height, he follows his sister the whole length of the stage, and forbears killing her till they are both withdrawn behind the scenes. I must confess, had he murdered her before the audience, the indecency might have been greater; but as it is, it appears very unnatural, and looks like killing in cold blood. To give my opinion upon this case, the fact ought not to have been represented, but to have been told if there was any ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... visit upon every pretence, but was not allowed one interview without witness; at last I declared my passion to Lucius, who received me as a lover worthy of his daughter, and told me that nothing was wanting to his consent, but that my uncle should settle his estate upon me. I objected the indecency of encroaching on his life, and the danger of provoking him by such an unseasonable demand. Lucius seemed not to think decency of much importance, but admitted the danger of displeasing, and concluded that as he was ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... rhymes, it was refreshing in its boldness and freedom. There is no consenting estimate of this poet. Many think that his so-called poems are not poems at all, but simply a bad variety of prose; that there is nothing to him beyond a combination of affectation and indecency; and that the Whitman culte is a passing "fad" of a few literary men, and especially of a number of English critics like Rossetti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc., who, being determined to have something unmistakably American—that is, different from ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... because he could not take in all the little infinity of homely facetiae in which the Madigans lived and had their being. Besides, it was pleasant and exciting, being leagued with Kate against Aunt Anne, who was known to have positively had the indecency to speak openly upon the subject, and in favor of it, to ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... class of her Majesty's subjects cries so loud, and so vainly, to her motherly bosom, and the humanity of Parliament as these poor little children; their parents, the lowest and most degraded set of brutes in England, teach them swearing and indecency at home, and rob them of all decent education, and drive them to their death, in order to squeeze a few shillings out of their young lives; for what?—to waste in drink and debauchery. Count the public houses ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... many things were said. Inquiries were made into the venerable Senator's condition—which, the orthodox papers declared, was but another example of the indecency of the Boxer journals. The Governor went to his cotton plantation. The Lieutenant-Governor went into office, and was pronounced a worthy successor to a good executive. The venerable Senator continued ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... aesthetically mature enough to appreciate Ibsen does not leave "The Ghosts" with eugenic reform ideas. The inherited paralysis on a luetic basis is accepted there as a tragic element of human fate. On the height of true art the question of decency or indecency has disappeared, too. The nude marble statue is an inspiration, and not a possible stimulus to frivolous sensuality, if the mind is aesthetically cultivated. The nakedness of erotic passion in the drama of high aesthetic intent before ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... urged by personal animosities and small but intense ambitions. They accused him of treating them with contempt, and of embezzling public money; while he retorted by charging them with encroaching on the royal prerogative and treating the representative of the King with indecency. Under such conditions an efficient conduct of the war was out of ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... personal." Then follow the terms of subscription. The last quoted lines are probably a bark at some forgotten detraction, and if not actually ironical, doubtless about as sincere as Fielding's promise, in the Prologue to his first comedy, not to offend the ladies. Those who had found inelegancy and indecency in the previous productions of the painter, would still discover the same defects in the masterpiece he now submitted to the public. And although it may be said that the "characters" represented are not "personal" in a satirical sense, his precautions, as he himself tells us, "did ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... ran through me. I felt as if I had suffered a kind of indecency. I got up and changed my place. My husband watched me with the look of a man who wanted to roar with laughter. It was the proud and insolent as well as passionate look of one who had never so much ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... were alone, the plastered skeleton thrust its arms forward, and, without giving me time to know what I was about, the creature gave me a horrible kiss, and then one of her hands began to stray with the most bare-faced indecency. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... such censures are amongst the follies of men immoderately given over to one Science, and ignorantly undervaluing all the rest. Those learned Critics might, and perhaps did, laugh in their turn (tho' still, sure, with the same indecency and indiscretion) at that incomparable Man, for wearing out a long Life in poring through a Telescope. Indeed, the weaknesses of Such are to be mentioned with reverence. But who can bear, without indignation, the ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... right to be grateful to God for having a sense of decency, just as you may be grateful for having a sense of beauty. The hatefulness of it comes in when you are secretly glad that other people love indecency and ugliness." ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the occasion, a sort of laugh was heard in the court at the extraordinary nature of the proposal. The Judge checked this indecency, and Evan, looking sternly around, when the murmur abated, 'If the Saxon gentlemen are laughing,' he said, 'because a poor man, such as me, thinks my life, or the life of six of my degree, is worth that of Vich Ian Vohr, it's like enough they may be very right; but if they laugh because they think ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... case of this gentleman deserves pity, especially if he loves sweetmeats, to which, if I may guess from his letter, he is no enemy. In the meantime, I have often wondered at the indecency of discharging the holiest men from the table as soon as the most delicious parts of the entertainments are served up, and could never conceive a reason for so absurd a custom. Is it because a ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... of the indulgence shown to Edmund Smith, the poet. 'The indecency and licentiousness of his behaviour drew upon him, Dec. 24, 1694, while he was yet only bachelor, a publick admonition, entered upon record, in order to his expulsion. Of this reproof the effect is not known. He was probably less notorious. At Oxford, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... thing occurred. The captain broke loose upon the dead man like a thunderclap. Oaths rolled from his lips in a continuous stream. And they were not namby-pamby oaths, or mere expressions of indecency. Each word was a blasphemy, and there were many words. They crisped and crackled like electric sparks. I had never heard anything like it in my life, nor could I have conceived it possible. With a turn for literary expression myself, and a penchant for forcible ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... farmer paid his wife that day. I never hear the love of a man for his wife misnamed by the new disillusioned thinkers of our times that I do not recall the charming testimony of this husband against the injustice and indecency of their views. ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... almost universally recognised as an honest and honourable artist, and as a great master in his craft. Nobody who is at all instructed ventures any longer to say that Zola is indecent because he loves indecency, or is pleased by the contemplation of the squalid and obscene. We see him as he truly is—a pessimist in humanity—sad and oppressed, and bitter with the gall of a hopeless sympathy with suffering ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... it is 'indelicate' and 'indecent' and 'improper,' and I do not know how much else, for a Christian teacher or minister to say a word about certain moral scandals. But they do not say anything about the immorality and the indelicacy and the indecency of doing them. Let us have done with that hypocrisy, brethren. I am arguing for no disregard for proprieties; I want all fitting reticence observed, and I do not wish indiscriminate rebukes to be flung at foul things; but it is too much to require that, by reason ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... shall not be stinks, for that is a loathsome and obscene word. We will, with your good leave—granted, I trust, Master Rattray, granted, I trust—study this—this scabrous upheaval of latent demoralization. What impresses me most is not so much the blatant indecency with which you swagger abroad under your load of putrescence" (you must imagine this discourse punctuated with golf-balls, but old Rattray was ever a bad shot) "as the cynical immorality with which you revel in your abhorrent ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. I might upon these lines, and had I Zola's genius, turn out, in a page or so, a gem of literary art, render the lantern-light with the touches of a master, and lay on the indecency with the ungrudging hand of love; and when all was done, what a triumph would my picture be of shallowness and dulness! how it would have missed the point! how it would have belied the boys! To the ear of the stenographer, the talk is merely ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... watchword that sustained me, and encouraged me in my hours of trial: 'All for the crown!' And now you want to sell it—that crown that has cost me such anguish and such tears; you want to barter it for gold, for the lifeless mask of that Jewess, whom you had the indecency to bring face ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... his beaming countenance with a lowering hostility. The indecency of anyone being cheerful at such a time struck him forcibly. He would have liked mankind to have preserved till further notice a hushed gloom. He glared ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... a boy, a very beautiful and virtuous lady who is yet living, and the widow of a prince, had, I know not what, more ornament in her dress than our laws of widowhood will well allow, which being reproached with as a great indecency, she made answer 'that it was because she was not cultivating more friendships, and would never marry again.'" This cynical view of woman, as well as the extravagantly complimentary one sometimes taken by the poets, was based upon the notion that woman was an unexplainable being. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... neglect and many unkindnesses do far more injury to a child than by an act of unfaithfulness. I need not wait to prove this perfectly obvious fact. It seems to me, however, that these home-destroying acts, the result of any sort of daily indecency of living, which brings suffering, with lasting injury, to little children, are the one condition that makes divorce necessary and also right in a marriage where ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... cardinal was pleased to express himself on this occasion have become memorable. "Where the devil, Master Lodovick," said the reverend personage, "have you picked up such a parcel of trumpery?" The original term is much stronger, aggravating the insult with indecency. There is no equivalent for it in English; and I shall not repeat it in Italian. "It is as low and indecent," says Panizzi, "as any in the language." Suffice it to say that, although the age was not scrupulous in such matters, it was one of the last words ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... [901], he planted himself, yielded three hundred and fifty bottles of wine. But the greatest of all his vices was his unbridled licentiousness in his commerce with women, which he carried to the utmost pitch of foul indecency [902]. They tell a droll story of some one who met him in a crowd, and upon his offering to kiss him, could not escape the salute, "Master," said he, "do you want to mouth every one you meet with ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... keeps this great end in view, it answers a valuable purpose to the community. The poet should use his pen to reform, not to indulge a corrupt age, as was the case in the days of Charles the Second, when indecency was brought on to raise ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... French Canadians are simple, almost infantine, in their language, and as chaste in expression as the hymns of other countries. Impure songs originate in classes who know better, and revel from choice in musical slang and indecency. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... avoided is indecency. We are not only to forbear the repeating of such words as would give an immediate affront to a lady of reputation, but the raising of any loose ideas tending to the offence of that modesty which, if a young woman hath not something ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... permitted by the regulations to write one letter, did not write to any of his old pals in London or elsewhere, but to Mr. Eden. He told him that he regretted his quiet cell where his ears were never invaded with blasphemy and indecency, things he never took pleasure in even at his worst—and missed his reverence's talk sadly. He concluded by asking for some good books by way ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... was not sullied with the impressions of indecency, and the baseness of looser desires. She understood not the innuendos of Roderic, and she remarked not with an eager and inquisitive eye the distraction of his visage. She replied therefore only to the ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... band play for here to-day? She has been dead and I so short a time!... Her little hands are hardly cold as yet; But they can show such cruel indecency As to ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... turn upon temperamental traits rather than on the judgment, or, at any rate, upon modes of judgment not clearly analyzable in consciousness. An openness of manner in the relations of the sexes is very charming, but a little more, and it is boldness, or, if it relates to bodily habits, indecency. A modest behavior is charming, but too much modesty is prudery. Under these circumstances, when the suggestive effect of bodily habits is realized, but the effect of a given bit of behavior cannot be clearly reckoned, and when, at the same time, the ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... amazement and alarm, that she was Telesforo's implacable enemy. She was just as he had described her to me—with her enormous nose, her devilish eyes, her awful mouth, her percale handkerchief, and that diminutive fan which seemed in her hands the sceptre of indecency and mockery. ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... privately knows of "Courts" (perhaps the GLORWURDIGSTE, Glory-worthiest, August the Great's Court, for one?) "with their hired Tom-Fools," not yet an extinct species attempting to ground wit on that bad basis. Prussian Majesty could not endure any "ZOTEN:" profanity and indecency, both avaunt. "He had to hold out in this way, awake till ten o'clock, for the chance of night's sleep." Earlier in the afternoon, we said, he perhaps does a little in oil-painting, having learnt ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... allusion to the great controversy then just raised by Jeremy Collier in his famous Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage, in which all the dramatists of the day were violently attacked for their indecency. Catharine Trotter has the courage to side with Collier, and the tact to do so without quarrelling with her male colleagues. She takes the side of the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... have no writing-folk to-day Like those whose names, in days gone by, Upon the scroll of fame stood high. And when I think of Smollett's tales, Of waspish Pope's ill-natured rails, Of Fielding dull, of Sterne too free, Of Swift's uncurbed indecency, Of Dr. Johnson's bludgeon-wit, I must confess I'm glad ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... all eternity cleaves the earth at his feet with a glare of truth. Once in her loathsome life, that woman, brazen with sin and shame, flaunting on the pavement, the scorn and jest of decency and indecency, the fearful index of corrupt society,—even she has her hour of softness, when the tiny grass that creeps out from the stones comes greenly into a spring sunshine, and as with a divine whisper recalls to her the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... indescribable emotion. The purport of it was to invite him to dinner, and to ridicule his chivalrous respect for me. He assured him, 'that every woman had her price, and, with gross indecency, hinted, that he should be glad to have the duty of a husband taken off his hands. These he termed liberal sentiments. He advised him not to shock my romantic notions, but to attack my credulous generosity, and weak pity; and concluded with requesting him to lend him five hundred pounds for a ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... me when they will," said Mistress Clo, springing to her feet with a light jump and sending the last of her apple whizzing into space with a boyish throw. "'Tis I who am the modest woman—for all my breeches and manners. I do not see indecency where there is none—for the mere pleasure of ogling and bridling and calling attention to my simpering. I should have seen no reason for airs and graces if I had been among those on the bank when the fine young Marquess we heard of saved the boat-load on the river and gave orders for the reviving ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to a "thus saith the Lord," come forth as the defender of the Bible, the champion of the home and the guardian of the sacredness of marriage, concentrating all its thunders against the shame and indecency of divorce? ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... warning. As soon as they shall replenish Mr. Grand's hands, I will give you notice, that you may recommence your usual drafts on him; unless the board should provide a separate fund for you, dependent on yourself alone, which I have strongly and repeatedly pressed on them, in order to remove the indecency of suffering your drafts to pass through ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... in the first freedom of her life. The very fact that deception was no longer necessary seemed to sweep her accustomed moorings from beneath her feet. She had lied so long that lying had become at last a second nature to her, and to her surprise she found almost an indecency in the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... was the foremost of English sentimentalists, and he had that taint of insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment, like Goldsmith's, for example. Sterne, in life, was selfish, heartless, and untrue. A clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the indecency of his writings were a scandal to the Church, though his sermons were both witty and affecting. He enjoyed the titilation of his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent pathos that lies in the expression of dumb things ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the horrid indecency of Miss Chudleigh's habit at the Ranelagh Masquerade some five years back, when Mrs Montagu, observing her, said: "Here is Iphigenia for the sacrifice, but so naked the high priest may inspect the entrails of the victim without more ado." And says Horry: ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... indecency! Filth, filth!" It was said, to use an Arabian Nights expression, that he had hauled up all the dead donkeys in the sea. The principal attack came from The Edinburgh Review (July 1886). "Mr. Payne's translation," says the writer, "is not only a fine ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... Japanese beauty. The traveller in China is early impressed by the contrast between the almost entire freedom from apparent immorality of the Chinese cities, especially of Western China, and the flaunting indecency of the Yoshiwaras of Japan, with "their teeming, seething, busy mass of women, whose virtue is industry and whose industry ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... and customs, and family and political government, were very much like those of the other Indian tribes, but they were distinguished from the Hurons by their greater dissoluteness and indecency. On the other hand they were ...
— The Country of the Neutrals - (As Far As Comprised in the County of Elgin), From Champlain to Talbot • James H. Coyne
... service, the clergy may use a form of service approved by the bishop without being liable to any ecclesiastical or temporal penalty. Except as altered by this act, it is still the law that "the Church knows no such indecency as putting a body into consecrated ground without the service being at the same time performed"; and nothing in the act authorizes the use of the service on the burial of a felo de se, which, however, may take place in any way ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... seems to have been always busy. He first tried his hand on some satires, which gained for him numerous enemies; and in 1748 he produced his first novel, Roderick Random, which, in spite of its indecency, the world at once acknowledged to be a work of genius: the verisimilitude was perfect; every one recognized in the hero the type of many a young North countryman going out to seek his fortune. The variety is great, the ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... little of the idolatry of India; and that little, though excessively absurd, is not characterised by atrocity or indecency. There is nothing of the sort at Ootacamund. I have not, during the last six weeks, witnessed a single circumstance from which you would have inferred that this was a heathen country. The bulk of the natives here are a colony from the plains ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... appalling. A man does not change as he crosses the threshold of the larger room. His personality remains the same, although the expression of it may be altered. Here we have material bodies in a material world—there, perhaps, ether bodies in an ether world. There is no indecency in reasonable speculation and curiosity about the life to come. One end of the thread is between our fingers, but we are haunted for the most part by the snap ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... nothing to charm the eye or conjure up visions of past glory; nothing elegant or romantic; nothing savouring of grim warlike purposes. It was a modern ruin; a pile of rubbish; a shameless, frivolous skeleton. Those hastily built walls and staring windows wore an air of faded futility, almost of indecency—as though the mouldering bones of some long-forgotten lady of pleasure had crept out of their tomb to give themselves an airing ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the celebrated writers of this age remain monuments of genius, perverted by indecency and bad taste; and none more than Dryden, both by reason of the greatness of his talents and the gross abuse which he made of them. His plays, excepting a few scenes, are utterly disfigured by vice or folly, or both. His translations appear too much the offspring of haste and hunger: even ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... followed a train of Seloucian music-girls, who sang songs derisive of the effeminacy and cowardice of the proconsul. After this pretended parade of his prisoner through the streets of the town, Surenas called a meeting of the Seleucian senate, and indignantly denounced to them the indecency of the literature which he had found in the Roman tents. The charge, it is said, was true; but the Seleucians were not greatly impressed by the moral lesson read to them, when they remarked the train of concubines that had accompanied Surenas himself in the field, and thought of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... spite of the struggles it should use, and the various shapes into which it might be transformed. The redemption of the abstracted person was then to become complete. The minister, a sensible man, argued with his parishioner upon the indecency and absurdity of what was proposed, and dismissed him. Next Sunday, the banns being for the first time proclaimed betwixt the widower and his new bride, his former wife, very naturally, took the opportunity of the following night to make him another visit, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... about the middle of the fifteenth century it was the custom for males and females to bathe together, in puris naturalibus, which was at length prohibited by Bishop Beckyngton, who ordered, by way of distinction, the wearing of breeches and petticoats; this indecency was suppressed, after considerable difficulty, at the end of the sixteenth century, (quere, what indecency does our author of the "Walks through Bath" mean? the incumbrance of the breeches and petticoats, we must imagine). It also ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... ceremonies. His character is pointedly defined by St. Evremond, as "a lover whom the Precieuse is to love without enjoyment, and to enjoy in good earnest her husband with aversion." The scene offered no indecency to such delicate minds, and much less the impassioned style which passed between les cheres, as they called themselves. Whatever offered an idea, of what their jargon denominated charnelle, was treason ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... will require no further explanation, in order to be satisfied as to the moral of this play: but is it not a very bitter satire upon the country, which calls itself the politest nation in the world, that the incidents, the indecency, the coarse blasphemy, and the vulgar wit of this piece, should find admirers among the public, and procure reputation for the author? Could not the Government, which has re-established, in a manner, the theatrical censorship, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a conversation which began between the duke and Madame Mignon to escape to the terrace, where Modeste joined him, influenced by curiosity, though the poet believed her desire to become Madame de Canalis had brought her there. Rather alarmed at the indecency with which he had just executed what soldiers call a "volte-face," and which, according to the laws of ambition, every man in his position would have executed quite as brutally, he now endeavored, as the unfortunate Modeste approached him, to find plausible ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... conduct of their prudent neighbors. Amida sustained a long and destructive siege: at the end of three months the loss of fifty thousand of the soldiers of Cabades was not balanced by any prospect of success, and it was in vain that the Magi deduced a flattering prediction from the indecency of the women [1361] on the ramparts, who had revealed their most secret charms to the eyes of the assailants. At length, in a silent night, they ascended the most accessible tower, which was guarded only by some monks, oppressed, after ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... companion (whose appearance indicated an Englishman) an American on an adjoining seat held forth to his friends on what he called the "indecency" of the conduct of the girls in coming down to the public hall and the "effrontery" of ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... robust their wordings or their incidents, are always sung in a plaintive minor which goes oddly with the large-moulded virility of the singers. Some are sentimental, or religious, to the last degree, while others reek with an indecency of speech that would shroud the Tenderloin in blushes. Both kinds are equally popular in the camps, and both are of the most astounding naivete. Of the worst of them, even, the simple-minded woodsmen are not in the least ashamed. They seem unconscious of their enormity. Nevertheless, it came about ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... politely to the Russian the indecency of being seasick in that crowded space. He points out that there is one course only open to the sufferer—to go away and bear the worst elsewhere. Honour calls for the sacrifice. The Russian opens his eyes feebly and looks at the deck beyond the narrow limits of his refuge. It is swept ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... expanded these so-called arguments, often they have pushed them to trifling and indecency. They have found God in the folds of the skin of the rhinoceros: one could, with equal reason, deny His existence because ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... have retained this shocking woman—nay, even have refused to sell her, on more than one occasion, when offered her full value? It could not be from ignorance of her character, for the circumstance which he adduces as a proof of her shameless depravity, and which I have omitted on account of its indecency, occurred, it would appear, not less than ten years ago. Yet, notwithstanding her alleged ill qualities and habits of gross immorality, he has not only constantly refused to part with her; but after thirteen long years, brings her to England as an attendant on his wife and children, with the ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... their extravagant mixture of grave admonition with facetious illustration, comic tales which have been occasionally adopted by the most licentious writers, and minute and lively descriptions, to the great simplicity of the times, when the grossest indecency was never concealed under a gentle periphrasis, but everything was called by its name. All this was enforced by the most daring personalities, and seasoned by those temporary allusions which neither spared, nor feared even the throne. These ancient sermons ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... immodest to do so. Their code is, however, not so whimsical as this bit of etiquette might suggest. The intent is with them the touchstone of propriety. In their eyes a state of nature is not a state of indecency. Whatever exposure is required for convenience is right; whatever unnecessary, wrong. Such an Eden-like condition of society would seem to be the very spot for a something like the modern French school of art to have developed ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... outrage every sense of decency in foul language addressed to the negro woman; but if one of the helpless creatures, goaded to resistance and crazed under tyranny, should answer back with impudence, or should relieve his mind with an oath, or retort indecency upon indecency, he did so at the cost to himself of one dollar for every outburst. The agent referred to in the statute was the well-known overseer of the cotton region, who was always coarse and often brutal, sure to be profane, and scarcely ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... People will think you are grieving over Rosalind.... But why in heaven's name isn't Jimmy at home this very moment,—with a wife and carpet-slippers and a large-size bottle of paregoric on his mantelpiece,—instead of here, grinning like a fool over some blatant indecency? He ought to marry; every young man ought to marry. Oh, you futile, abject, burbling twin-brother of the first patron that procured a reputation for Bedlam! why aren't you married—married years ago,—with a home ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... such a one, that as bad as I had been myself, it shocked my very senses. I began to nauseate the place I was in and, about all, the wicked practice; and yet I must say that I never saw, or do I believe there was to be seen, the least indecency in the house the whole time ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... from the beginning has been to force Meynell into the open. For his own sake—for the parish's—the situation must be brought to an end, in some way. The indecency of it at ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his confused and only half-intelligible jumble of indictments for indecent practices and crude philosophy of the moral and metaphysical kind. A vigorous line or phrase occasionally redeems the chaos of rant, fustian, indecency, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... battle would never have been fought, nor the joy of liberty have been sung in the streets of the capital. There is seldom, if ever, any grossness in these spontaneous songs of the people—never indecency or double meaning. No sooner has an event happened than it finds its history recorded in some of these popular coplas, and sung by ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... and a confused account of money matters and broker business, which he sent to Michelangelo in 1540. The Leda remained at Fontainebleau till the reign of Louis XIII., when M. Desnoyers, Minister of State, ordered the picture to be destroyed because of its indecency. Pierre Mariette says that this order was not carried into effect; for the canvas, in a sadly mutilated state, reappeared some seven or eight years before his date of writing, and was seen by him. In spite of injuries, he could trace the hand of a great master; "and ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... say, when asking about Hinduism, "Surely if the idolatry, and folly, and indecency, which we know exists in the religion as it now is could be cleared away, we should find remaining some deep philosophic thoughts and mystical poetical fancies which we ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... connected with inflamed stomach, in which case the punching practice is death. We have heard from eminent physicians, that several lives have, within their knowledge, been endangered by it. Moreover, the real indecency of the Halstedian process, particularly in the case of women, has greatly shocked even the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... education to temperance is a difficult question in which the enthusiastic women and ministers, backed by the well justified fears of psychiatrists, will hardly be on the same side as the sober judgment of scientists, unprejudiced physicians, and historians. In any case the saloon and its humiliating indecency must disappear and every temptation to intemperance should be removed. Above all, from early childhood the self-control has to be strengthened, the child has to learn from the beginning to know the limits to the gratification of his desires ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... is nothing in the nature of the endowment of a national theatre, which is sometimes demanded nowadays. All the encouragement he asks for is liberty—"entire liberty to all those who from their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, music, dancing, by all sorts of dramatic representations and exhibitions." But in pressing for this liberty, he expresses the strongest conviction that "the frequency and gaiety of public diversions" ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... to lose by it, that is obvious, and I to gain, and nothing could equal the indecency of insistence on my part; but I feel that I am going to persist to the point of persecution. You are fond of me, you know. I only dare to say you are fond of me because you have said it yourself more than once. And you are always sincere, and I wouldn't be likely ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... that extremes meet, and prudish Manichaeism always ends in sheer indecency. Those Papists have forgotten what woman was made for, and therefore, they have forgotten that a woman's hair is her glory, for it was given to her for a covering: as says your friend, Paul the Hebrew, who, by the bye, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... of his mean and hypocritical career. He was assailed not only by Napoleon but by those whose fall had been his own rise; for Godoy was sent to Bayonne by Murat, and the old King and Queen hurried after their son in order to witness his humiliation. Ferdinand's parents attacked him with an indecency that astonished even Napoleon himself; but the Prince maintained his refusal until news arrived from Madrid which terrified him into submission. The irritation of the capital had culminated in an armed conflict between the populace and the French ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... half in jest, yet 'with a certain degree of seriousness.' We observe that they entered into one part of Greek literature, but not into another, and that the larger part is free from such associations. Indecency was an element of the ludicrous in the old Greek Comedy, as it has been in other ages and countries. But effeminate love was always condemned as well as ridiculed by the Comic poets; and in the New Comedy the allusions to such topics have disappeared. ...
— Symposium • Plato
... utterly to acquire, a good knowledge of Greek. Like Petrarch, he was assisted largely by the Popes, and took service at the papal court. But his views of life and morality were coloured by Paganism rather than by Christianity. Many of his minor poems are steeped in indecency and immorality, and reflect only too clearly the tendency to treachery and deceit so characteristic of the Italian rulers of his day; while the /Decameron/, his greatest work, is more like the production of a Pagan writer than of one acquainted with Christian ethics and ideals. ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... not one gesture of indecency. A man who had stared at a woman would have been thrown out, execrated and forever more refused admission. But out in the street, where the litter-bearers and attendants whiled away the time, there were tales told that spread to the ends ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... the storm again? What spirit is there but the devil's spirit in bloodthirsty threats of revenge?"—"I denounce the weapons which you have been deluded into employing to gain you your rights, and the indecency and profligacy which you are letting be mixed up with them! Will you strengthen and justify your enemies? Will you disgust and cripple your friends? Will you go out of your way to do wrong? When you can be free by fair ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... swagger in good broadcloth clothes and brass buttons in the theatre, by not leaving his bed of sickness for the amusement of their high mightinesses, that they had resolved to hiss and drive him off the stage. Those who were most prompt to condemn the insolence and indecency of the band alluded to, thought that such a design would be an outrage too unjust, too stupid even for such persons as their high mightinesses; and, therefore, refused to give it credit. In this, however, they very much underrated the modesty and good nature of their ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... found a judge. The bold woman branded the indecency as with hot iron. "They who were swallowed up by the Flood never behaved so ill!... Even of thee, O Sodom, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... I, "the indecency of your suggestion is almost grotesque. To impose upon a timid, trusting Thou is either base or dastardly—I forget which. I am glad none of the others were here to hear what I feel sure to have been but a thoughtless, ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... reputation during his life; but the joy which they and all his enemies in Europe showed at his death, is a proof of the terror in which they held him. Young as Esmond was, he was wise enough (and generous enough too, let it be said) to scorn that indecency of gratulation which broke out amongst the followers of King James in London, upon the death of this illustrious prince, this invincible warrior, this wise and moderate statesman. Loyalty to the exiled king's family was traditional, as has been said, in ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tread. Ralph Limbert, who belonged to nobody and had done nothing—nothing even at Cambridge—had only the uncanny spell he had cast upon her younger daughter to recommend him; but if her younger daughter had a spark of filial feeling she wouldn't commit the indecency of deserting for his sake a deeply dependent and ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... would decline speaking of before a family, and which, if the questions were propounded by another in the presence of my daughter, aye, or even of my, no less, in mind and imagination, innocent wife, I should resent as an indecency? ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... Cleitophon, flourished about A.D. 450, perhaps later. Suidas, who alone calls him Statius, says that he became a Christian and eventually a bishop—like Hellodorus, whom he imitated—but there is no evidence of this. Photius, while severely criticizing his lapses into indecency, highly praises the conciseness and clearness of his style, which, however, is artificial and laboured. Many of the incidents of the romance are highly improbable, and the characters, except the heroine, fail to enlist sympathy. The descriptive passages and digressions, although ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... distinction between those two opposite schemes or systems. In the liberal or loose system, luxury, wanton, and even disorderly mirth, the pursuit of pleasure to some degree of intemperance, the breach of chastity, at least in one of the two sexes, etc. provided they are not accompanied with gross indecency, and do not lead to falsehood and injustice, are generally treated with a good deal of indulgence, and are easily either excused or pardoned altogether. In the austere system, on the contrary, those excesses are ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... led to the Salon, and it was only as the servant in rich livery came forward to take my hat and cane that I remembered where I was. Then the full sense of all I had been listening to rushed upon me, and the unfitness, and indeed the indecency of the place for such communications as we were engaged in, came most forcibly before me. Sir Guy, it is true, had always preferred my cousin to me; he it was who was always destined to succeed both to his title and his estates, and his wildness and extravagance had ever met with ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... people of the Simpson class, hail-fellow-well-met men, who didn't dance but took it out in drinking, and who in their intercourse with the other sex, betrayed more vulgar familiarity and less refined indecency than characterized the men and boys of White, Edwards, Robinson, and Co.'s set. But of these it may be supposed that the set took no heed. There was some really pretty scenery about the glen, but they took ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... infringements of propriety. In the whole of the Elizabethan drama there was no piece which presented so liberal a mass of indelicacy as Fletcher's Custom of the Country. Dryden, who was innocent of prudery, declared that there was "more indecency" in that drama "than in all our plays together." This was one of the pieces which Pepys twice saw performed after carefully reading it in his study, and he expressed admiration for the rendering of the widow's ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... are forbidden, operas are forbidden, circuses are forbidden, sweetmeats are forbidden, pretty colors are forbidden, all exactly as vice is forbidden. The Creator is explicitly prayed to, and implicitly convicted of indecency every day. An association of vice and sin with everything that is delightful and of goodness with everything that is wretched and detestable is set up. All the most perilous (and glorious) appetites and propensities are at once inflamed ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... we could to comfort her, and we at last silenced her with I do not know what pretences. The affair was quite too much for me, and I made a feint of having heard the children calling me, and I went out into the hall. I felt that there was a sort of indecency in my witnessing that poor young thing's emotion; women might see it, but a man ought not. Perhaps old Hasketh felt the same; he followed me out, and when we were beyond hearing, even if he had spoken aloud, he dropped his voice to a thick murmur and said, ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... Orleans had not long been in power, before France showed that Versailles had ceased to control her literature. A new Rabelais with an 18th century lisp, Montesquieu, by seasoning his Lettres Persanes with a sauce piquante compounded of indecency and style, succeeded in making the public swallow some incendiary morsels. The King of France, he declared, drew his power from the vanity of his subjects, while the Pope was "an old idol to whom incense is offered from sheer habit"; nothing stronger ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... or later she would do great things in the musical world. Mr. Mahomet M. Moss was the gentleman in question, and he at present was in London. That such a voice as Rachel O'Mahony's should be lost to the world, was to his thinking a profanity, an indecency, an iniquity, a wasting of God's choicest gifts, and an abomination not to be thought of; for Mr. Mahomet M. Moss was in the affairs of his own profession a most energetic gentleman. Rachel rather turned up her nose at Mr. Mahomet M. Moss; but she was very ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... "When indecency formed the staple of our plays, and a drunken debauch formed the inevitable sequence of every dinner-party, a fool and a fox-hunter were synonymous. Squire Western was the representative of a class, which, however, was not more ridiculous than the patched, ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... people who wear crinoline could see the indecency of their own dress as other people see it. A respectable elderly woman stooping forward, invested in crinoline, exposes quite as much of her own person to the patient lying in the room as any opera-dancer does on the stage. But no one will ever tell ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... them? And though Lady Mallowe was a woman not in the least distressed or hampered by shades of delicacy and scruple, she surely was astute enough to realize that even this bounder's dullness might be awakened to realize that there was more than a touch of obvious indecency in bringing the girl to the house of the man she had tragically loved, and manoeuvering to work her into it as the wife of the man who, monstrously unfit as he was, had taken his place. Captain Palliser knew well that the pressing of the relationship had meant ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Banneker looked up in the Sunday advertising the leading theater display, went to the musical comedy there exploited, and presently devoted a column to giving it a terrific and only half-merited slashing for vapid and gratuitous indecency. The play, which had been going none too well, straightway sold out a fortnight in advance, thereby attesting the power of the press as well as the appeal of pruriency to an eager and jaded public. Zucker left a note on the editorial desk warmly thanking his ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... own confession Art is something ideal. It is beautiful, it is good, it is lifted above chance and change; its connection with matter, that is to say with reality, is a kind of flaw, an indecency from which we discreetly turn our eyes. The real world is nothing of all this; on the contrary, it is ugly, brutal, material, coarse, and bad as bad ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... tunes, makes one despair—I mean hope. What do I mean? That's the worst of music! I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes, yellow cakes, drink thin, sharp wine. Or an indecent story, now—I could relish that. The older one grows the more one likes indecency. Hah, hah! I'm laughing. What at? You said nothing, nor did the ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... in the respect they owe you, and in the consideration which is due to all sovereigns [French not famous for their refined demeanor in Saxony this time]. Why could not I fly to prevent such disorders, such indecency! I can only offer you a great deal of good-will; but I feel well that, in present circumstances, the thing wanted is effective results and reality. May I, Madam, be so happy as to render you some service! May your fortune be equal to your virtues! ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... married yesterday. Don't we manage well! the original day was not once put off: lawyers and milliners were all ready canonically. It was as sensible a wedding as ever was. There was neither form nor indecency, both which generally meet on such occasions. They were married at my brother's in Pall-Mall, just before dinner, by Mr. Keppel; the company, my brother, his son, Mrs. Keppel, and Charlotte, Lady Elizabeth Keppel, Lady Betty Waldegrave, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... my House, who said, that they had travelled through divers Countries lately discovered, which are wanting in the antient Maps. They said they came to an Island of a very temperate Air, where they look'd upon it as the greatest Indecency in the World, to cover ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... conductors, for they are of a nature which cannot be publicly exposed, without much private injury to the individuals who partake of them. It is, however, not a little remarkable, that till lately, on the very opposite side of the road, the neighbourhood has exhibited scenes of vice, immorality, and indecency, which it is the great object of this Charity if possible to prevent, by an endeavour to reclaim the miserable and deluded wretches from their evil ways. I remember the late John Home Tooke related in the House ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... De prostibulis veterum, if one of his relations had not charitably committed it to the flames. Before the sentence of banishment had been pronounced he wrote an apology, professed penitence, and was allowed to remain at Utrecht, where he composed several pamphlets. Being exiled on account of the indecency of his writings, he came to England, where he affected decorum, and his friend and countryman Isaac Vossius, who enjoyed the patronage of Charles II. and was Canon of Windsor, obtained for him a pension charged upon some ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... women evince for tragical composition. Lastly, Julius Pollux, among the technical expressions belonging to the theatre, mentions the Greek word for a spectatress. But in the case of the old comedy, I should be inclined to think that they were not present. However, its indecency alone does not appear to be a decisive proof. Even in the religious festivals the eyes of the women must have been exposed to sights of gross indecency. But in the numerous addresses of Aristophanes to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... one matter of special importance in the book- -its turpiloquium. This stumbling-block is of two kinds, completely distinct. One is the simple, naive and child like indecency which, from Tangiers to Japan, occurs throughout general conversation of high and low in the present day. It uses, like the holy books of the Hebrews, expressions "plainly descriptive of natural situations;" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the womanly costume of our time is the cause of the temporal and eternal damnation of a multitude of men. There is a shamelessness among many in what is called high life that calls for vehement protest. The strife with many seems to be how near they can come to the verge of indecency without falling over. The tide of masculine profligacy will never turn back until there is a decided reformation in womanly costume. I am in full sympathy with the officer of the law who, at a levee in Philadelphia last winter, went up to ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... satisfaction of our hero, had not Jolter, to the manifest peril of his own person, interposed, and partly by force, and partly by exhortations, put a stop to the engagement before it was fairly begun. After having demonstrated the indecency of such a vulgar rencontre, betwixt two fellow-citizens in a foreign land, he begged to know the cause of their dissension, and offered his good offices towards an accommodation. Peregrine also, seeing the fray was finished, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Government could not be allowed to pass without protest, but that at such a moment of national danger debate in Parliament on this domestic quarrel, forced upon them by Ministers, was indecent; and that, having made his protest, neither he nor his party would take further part in that indecency. Thereupon the whole Unionist Party followed Mr. Bonar Law ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... spectator found now himself and now the scene incredible, and indeed they were hardly conceivable in relation to each other. A melancholy sense of the absurdity, of the incongruity, of the whole absorbed at last even a sense of the indecency. The audience was much the same in appearance as other audiences, witnessing like displays at the other theatres, and did not differ greatly from the usual theatrical house. Not so much fashion smiled upon the efforts ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... vague just what is indecent and that the word 'indecent' should be defined with precision. In the nature of things there are, however, very great difficulties in attempting such a definition. It is significant that no precise definition of indecency exists either in the principal Act or so far as we are aware in the legislation ...
— Report of the Juvenile Delinquency Committee • Ronald Macmillan Algie
... ought to thank me for." "More, indeed, I fear, than he deserved," cries Blifil; "for in the very day of your utmost danger, when myself and all the family were in tears, he filled the house with riot and debauchery. He drank, and sung, and roared; and when I gave him a gentle hint of the indecency of his actions, he fell into a violent passion, swore many oaths, called me rascal, and struck me." "How!" cries Allworthy; "did he dare to strike you?" "I am sure," cries Blifil, "I have forgiven him that ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... should be allowed to originality of conception regarding the form as well as the substance, the manner as well as the matter, it is in the province of art, always provided, of course, that the artist is sane and not guilty of indecency. The artist, like the poet, is born not made; you cannot make an artist, you can only make an artisan. The artist, who represents the Creator, the creative faculty, can influence man: man cannot, and should not try to, influence the artist, but can, and should only, offer him the materials ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... distorted humanity, the sight of which would have impelled Dore to more diabolical flights of fancy than he ever succeeded in achieving. It was a welter of rags and filth, of all manner of loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency, leering monstrosities, and bestial faces. A chill, raw wind was blowing, and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to sleep. Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from twenty years to seventy. ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... in singing psalm-tunes. There are many who never employ their tongues in singing God's praises, because they have no skill. It is with great difficulty that this part of worship is performed, and with great indecency in some congregations for want of skill; it is to be feared singing must be wholly omitted in some places for want of skill if this art is not revived. I was present in a congregation where singing was for a whole Sabbath ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... should be decided. On a division, in which though many said aye to adjourning, nobody would go out for fear of losing their seats, it was carried by 379 to 31, for proceeding—and then—half the House went away. The ministers representing the indecency of this, and Fitzherbert saying that many were within call, Stanley observed, that after voting against adjournment, a third part had adjourned themselves, when, instead of being within call, they ought to have been within ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether morality is valid at all. At the very instant that we curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft. At the very instant we accuse it (quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... of His poor, hard-worked brothers here below. But he remembers that it is a holy eye, too; an eye which looks with sadness and horror on anything which is wrong; on all drunkenness, quarrelling, indecency; and so on in all his merriment, he is still master of himself. He remembers that his soul is nobler than his body; that his will must be stronger than his appetite; and so he keeps himself in check; ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... matters rest on suspicion. He soon gave open proofs of his interest with the Confessor in procuring an office of some importance for one Rollo, a Roman of mean extraction and very despicable parts. When I represented to the king the indecency of conferring such an honor on such a fellow, he answered me that he was the archbishop's relation. 'Then, sir,' replied I, 'he is related to your enemy.' Nothing more passed at that time; but I soon perceived, by the archbishop's behavior, ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... by rubric stains disgraced, The leering eye, in wayward circles roll'd, Mark him the pastor of a joyial fold, Whose various texts excite a loud applause, Favouring the bottle, and the good old cause. See! the dull smile which fearfully appears, When gross indecency her front uprears, The joy conceal'd, the fiercer burns within, As masks afford the keenest gust to sin; Imagination helps the reverend sire, And spreads the sails of sub-divine desire; But when the gay immoral joke goes round, When ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe |
