"Degeneracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... memorials, through the course of time; remark the several gradations by which corruption steals into the world, and oppose it in every step, by giving perpetual warning and instruction to mankind; which, added to the strong influence of our own example, would probably prevent that continual degeneracy of human nature so justly complained of ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... as Catholics from this great work of reconstruction is profoundly un-Catholic. It is the act of a traitor to the Church and country. As Burke so gloriously said: he was aware that the age is not all we wish, but he was sure that the only means to check its degeneracy was heartily to concur in whatever is best ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... tendency downward from the Christian to the infidel level. If churches do not labor for the conversion of the world, and endeavor to become themselves more Christ-like and godly, degeneracy, and utter degradation and ruin are inevitable. And the tendency, at the time to which I refer, throughout the whole little world of Unitarianism was downwards to utter unbelief. In many minds there was as much impatience with old-fashioned ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... upon a hill," she was in the valley of humiliation; and few were the faithful watchmen upon her walls. The period commencing with the Restoration, and continuing down to the time of which we speak, was one of ministerial and laic degeneracy. Bishop Burnet, writing of his own generation, said, "I am now in the seventieth year of my age, and as I cannot speak long in the world, in any sort, I cannot hope for a more solemn occasion than this of speaking with all due freedom, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... gentleman of the last century, very severe on the degeneracy of the present race.—Henry Mackenzie, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... foot of a tree, he spent half an hour in such agitation that when he arose he found the whole front of his waistcoat wet with tears, although he had not known that he was shedding any. Thus did his great theory of the degeneracy of man under civilization burst upon him.[Footnote: Rousseau, xviii. 135 (Confessions, Part. ii. liv. viii); xix. 358 (Seconde Lettre a M. de Malesherbes). Exaggerated as the above story probably is, we may reasonably ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... courts, in the presence of the sheriff and his deputies, in the presence of the entire police force, take out the prisoner, take his life, often with fiendish glee, and often with acts of cruelty and barbarism which impress the reader with a degeneracy rapidly approaching savage life. That the State is disgraced but faintly expresses the humiliation which has settled upon the once proud people of Tennessee. The State, in its majesty, through its organized life, for ...
— Southern Horrors - Lynch Law in All Its Phases • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... a rule without exception, and is a reassuring reflection in view of the talk about the degeneracy of the House of Commons, and the decadence of its standard of manner. It would not be difficult to show that the House at present in Session will, from the point of view of manners, favourably compare ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in these degenerate days of iron and brass he never shows us the light of his countenance, nor ever visits us, save one night in the year; when he rattles down the chimneys of the descendants of the patriarchs, confining his presents merely to the children, in token of the degeneracy of the parents. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... crests on their nasty little embroidered blankets, fat old women with epilepsy and gouty old men with scrofula, representing the aristocracy at its best, were being half carried to and from tables, and the degeneracy of noble Europe was being borne in upon my soul ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... rebuke, or a good-humored repartee, constitutes an unpardonable offence. He always looks on the dark side of human character, so that a single foible or one glaring fault will eclipse a thousand real excellences. He is always complaining of the degeneracy of the times, and especially of the corruption of the church; for he can see nobody around him who is perfect, and therefore he comes to the conclusion that there is very little piety in the world; forgetting that, were he to find a church ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... our command, new morality, new wisdom, predicate of the Future by the Past? In ancient States, the mass were slaves; civilization and freedom rested with oligarchies; in Athens twenty thousand citizens, four hundred thousand slaves! How easy decline, degeneracy, overthrow in such States,—a handful of soldiers and philosophers without a People! Now we have no longer barriers to the circulation of the blood of States. The absence of slavery, the existence of the Press; the healthful proportions ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mercenary Muse. In the Second Isthmian Ode, we find an elaborate justification of his practice of praising for pay,—a practice, he admits, unknown to primitive poets, but rendered inevitable, in his time, by the poverty of the craft, and the degeneracy of the many, with whom, in the language of the Spartan sage, "money made the man." With this Pindaric precedent, therefore, for selling Pindaric verses, it is no wonder, if the children of the Muse, in an age still ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... of the meals, consisted in spinning and weaving. In Homer we see the wives of the nobles occupied in this way; and the custom of the women making the necessary articles of dress continued to prevail even when the luxury of later times, together with the degeneracy of the women themselves, had made the establishment of workshops and places of manufacture for this purpose necessary. Antique art has frequently treated these domestic occupations. The Attic divinities, Athene Ergane and Aphrodite Urania, as well as the Argive ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... we allow ourselves, and which all the world admits our right to, happen to be such as waste wealth and time, make light of the advantage of others, and of the good of our own souls. This fact does not imply either original sinfulness or degeneracy—religious and scientific terms for the same thing—in poor mankind. It means merely that we are all of us as yet very undeveloped creatures; the majority, moreover, less developed than the minority, and the bulk of each individual's nature very much in the rear of his own aspirations ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... health and vigour to the last; that without these the happiness of man in every stage, and even his obedience to my laws, and my power to dispense with punishments, would be greatly impaired. For I had observed that the sufferings and degeneracy of the man would make him discontented, restless, and miserable, notwithstanding the blessings with which Providence had ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... English history would have been changed. It was ordered otherwise, and doubtless wisely. The church was allowed a hundred and fifty more years to fill full the measure of her offences, that she might fall only when time had laid bare the root of her degeneracy, and that faith and manners ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... her condition have in all civilised societies laid the female more early and seriously open to the attacks of parasitism than the male. And while the accumulation of wealth has always been the antecedent condition, and the degeneracy and effeteness of the male the final and obvious cause, of the decay of the great dominant races of the past; yet, between these two has always lain, as a great middle term, the parasitism of the female, ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... was by promissory notes, and that on several occasions he asked for special favours, such as dating bills ahead or the privilege of renewal of notes, one is able to read a certain unmistakable sign of degeneracy in the customer's credit. New orders from such a customer will bear scrutiny; and a closer attention to the present condition of the account may save the firm from ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... vagabonds," according to the act of Edward I, who went about the country under color of minstrelsy; men who cared more about the supper than the song; who for base lucre divorced the arts of writing and reciting and stole other men's thunder. Their social degeneracy may be traced in the dictionary. The chanter of the "gests" of kings, gesta ducum regumque, dwindled into a gesticulator, a jester: the honored jogelar of Provence, into a mountebank; ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... since the morning when Hengist and Horsa, Limited, landed from their three keels in the Isle of Thanet. Gildas is the oldest historian of these islands, and his work consists entirely of a good old Tory lament in the Ashmead-Bartlett strain upon the degeneracy of the times and the proximate ruin of the British people. Gildas wrote some fourteen hundred years ago or thereabouts—and the country is not yet quite visibly ruined. On the contrary, it seems to the impartial eye a more eligible place of residence ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... accomplished women of this period, Valadata, the daughter of the caliph Mahomet, is celebrated as having frequently carried away the palm of eloquence in her discussions with the most learned academicians. Others again, with an intrepidity that might shame the degeneracy of a modern blue, plunged boldly into the studies of philosophy, history, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... the misshapen bodies, by marks of degeneracy, recognizable to your practised eyes everywhere on the streets, by the agony of the mother who bore you, and later wept over you, I conjure you men to live up to your high and holy privilege, and tell all men that they can be clean, if they will. This in memory of the mother ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... expulsion of evils and sins once a year. Now, if it occurred to people to combine these two customs, the result would be the employment of the dying god as a scapegoat. He was killed, not originally to take away sin, but to save the divine life from the degeneracy of old age; but, since he had to be killed at any rate, people may have thought that they might as well seize the opportunity to lay upon him the burden of their sufferings and sins, in order that he might bear it away with him to the unknown ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... were doubtless prescribed by the founders of the League; but the speeches of the Book, and this hymn, all refer to the League as the work of a past age. The speakers appeal to the wisdom of their forefathers (literally, their grandsires), and lament the degeneracy of the later times. They expressly declare that those who established the "great peace" were in their graves, and had taken their work with them and placed it as a pillow under them. This is the language of men who remembered the founders, and to whom the burial of the last of them was a comparatively ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... had still less for downright madness, and he hastily begged his friend to defer the volcanic question until after luncheon. Merton's language surprised him, it seemed so wildly irrational, and uttered with so much seriousness. In his appearance also there were signs of degeneracy: he was thin and pale and rather shabbily dressed, and wore a broad-brimmed rusty black felt hat, which he frequently pulled off only to twist it into some new disreputable shape and thrust it on again. Over a black half-unbuttoned waistcoat ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... said, the question does not impress me as one demanding my particular attention. I also like the woman who does not smoke. I have met in my time some very charming women who do not smoke. It may be a sign of degeneracy, but I am prepared to abdicate my position of woman's god, leaving her free to lead her ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... by one of the greatest authorities on our domesticated animals, are sufficient to show that the fact of infertility or degeneracy appearing in the offspring of hybrids after a few generations need not be imputed to the fact of the first parents being distinct species, since exactly the same phenomena appear when individuals of the same species ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... achievements as a people! This is the grand thought of the Union men of America. This is the principle of their organization, and this it is which gives them hope, and strength, and courage. What weakness, what degeneracy, what dwindling of power for good and retrogression of thought and aim would be the consequence of permanent division! What a lamentable fall in our position among the nations of the earth, and what a diminution of our capacity for progress among ourselves ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... the wing of prominent citizens and their wives, who gave them, at elaborate luncheons, the Southern white man's views of the negro, sighing sentimentally over the disappearance of the good old negro of before the war, and gravely deploring the degeneracy of his descendants. They enlarged upon the amount of money the Southern whites had spent for the education of the negro, and shook their heads over the inadequate results accruing from this unexampled generosity. It was sad, they said, to witness this spectacle ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Swinburne. Really, is any great genius quite sane according to philistine standards? The answer must be negative. The old enemy has merely changed his mode of attack: instead of charging genius with madness, the abnormal used in an abnormal sense is lugged in and though these imputations of degeneracy, moral and physical, have in some cases proven true, the genius of the accused one can in no wise be denied. But then as Mr. Philip Hale asks: Why this timidity at being called decadent? What's ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... double door-plates on their portals, looking out on streets and courts which to know is to be unknown, and where to exist is not to live, according to any true definition of living. Therefore complain I not of modern degeneracy, when, even from the open window of the small unlovely farmhouse, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine flavors and the flat-patterned woman of broken-down countenance, issue the same familiar sounds. For who knows that Almira, but for these keys, which ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... have broken down the Puritan stock, that in another century our old families will be extinct, and that the flood of immigration means a Niagara of muddy waters fouling the pure springs of American life. In his address in New Haven Professor Kellogg calls the roll of the signs of race degeneracy and tells us that this deterioration even indicates a trend ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... cases, the state of the society does not place the greater part of individuals in such situations; and some attention of government is necessary, in order to prevent the almost entire corruption and degeneracy of the great ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... becomes a practice to collect debts by law, it is a proof of corruption and degeneracy among the people. Laws and courts are necessary, to settle controverted points between man and man; but a man should pay an acknowledged debt, not because there is a law to oblige him, but because it is just and honest, and because he has promised ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Accoramboni, or that Medea da Carpi, for the present; some day I shall perhaps find a grand passion, a woman to play the Don Quixote about, like the Pole that I am; a woman out of whose slipper to drink, and for whose pleasure to die; but not here! Few things strike me so much as the degeneracy of Italian women. What has become of the race of Faustinas, Marozias, Bianca Cappellos? Where discover nowadays (I confess she haunts me) another Medea da Carpi? Were it only possible to meet a woman of ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... speaks of Humanity, of what good are all our efforts in the cause of constitutions or of revolutions if one cannot even approximately estimate what humanity really requires? Perhaps in this liberty of which we dream lie the germs of future degeneracy, and man, having realized his ideal, will go back, walking once more on all fours? Thus, all would have to be recommenced. And if I care for nothing but myself, what then? What do I gain by it? The most I could do ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... experimental knowledge. But they had read of men who exerted themselves in the cause of their country with an energy unknown in later times, who had violated the dearest of domestic charities, or voluntarily devoted themselves to death for the public good; and they wondered at the degeneracy of their contemporaries. It never occurred to them that the feelings which they so greatly admired sprung from local and occasional causes; that they will always grow up spontaneously in small societies; and that, in large empires, though they may ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... close by the destruction of the world.[50] The Works and Days of Hesiod show us that precisely the same succession of ages was held by the Greeks, but without their duration being calculated by years, and with the supposition of a new humanity being produced at the beginning of each; the gradual degeneracy, however, which marks this succession of ages is expressed by the metals after which they are named—gold, silver, brass, and iron. Our present humanity belongs to the age of iron, and is the worst of all, although it began with the heroes. Zoroastrian Mazdeism also admits this theory of the four ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... in mind that the first effect of association with the more advanced race was not improvement but degeneracy. I have no wish to discredit the statements of the early explorers, including the Jesuit priests; but it is evident that in the zeal of the latter to gain honor for their society for saving the souls of the ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... whether he would be their victim or their accomplice. His choice was soon made. He tasted blood, and felt no loathing; he tasted it again, and liked it well. Cruelty became with him, first a habit, then a passion, at last a madness. So complete and rapid was the degeneracy of his nature that, within a very few months after the time when he had passed for a good-natured man, he had brought himself to look on the despair and misery of his fellow creatures with a glee resembling that of the fiends whom Dante saw watching the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... among mountainous people who drink largely of lime water, and is characterized by a condition of physical, physiologic, and mental degeneracy and nondevelopment, and possibly goiter. The subjects of this disease seldom reach five feet in height, and usually not more than four. The word cretin is derived from the Latin creatura. They are found all over the world. In Switzerland it is estimated ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... The minister's punishment, also, is visibly from the physician, who illustrates man's individual way of dealing with sin in another; but it is not the minister's suffering under the hand of revenge working subtly in secret that arrests our attention; it is the physician's own degeneracy into a devil of hate through enjoyment of the sight and presence of this punishment, that stamps him into the reader's mind as a type of the failure of such a revenge. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord" is the text here ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... make it capable of conveying the whole breadth of the philosophic conception. For it is the scientific doctrine of MAN that is taught here; and that is, that man must be human in all his relations, or 'cease to be.' It is the violation of the ESSENTIAL humanity. It is a DEGENERACY which is exhibited here, and the 'SEQUENT EFFECTS' which belong naturally to the violation of a law that has the force of the universe to sustain it. And it is not by accident that the story of the illegitimate Edmund begins the piece; it is not for nothing that we are compelled ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... acquires the power to execute it better and more readily than another; but at the same time he becomes less capable of any other occupation, whether physical or moral; his other faculties become extinct, and there results a degeneracy in the individual man. That one has made only the eighteenth part of a pin is a sad account to give of one's self: but let no one imagine that it is the workingman who spends his life in handling a file ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... watch and saw, with an almost overwhelming surprise, that it was only four o'clock. It was just an hour since she had entered the cavern-like doorway of the tenement. But in that hour she had come, for the first time, against life in the rough. She had seen degeneracy, and poverty, and—she was thinking of the expression in Jim's eyes—a menace that she did not at all understand. She had seen the waste of broken middle age and the pity of blighted childhood. She had seen fear and, if she had stayed a few moments longer, she would have seen ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... influences are seen to operate; and, as the country was notoriously demoralized at the close of the Cromwellian dictatorship, when Calvinistic divines had enjoyed a long and signal triumph, so is the present age marked by a degeneracy in the public morals, which has kept pace with the progress of opinions of similar character and tendency. The rude multitude is taught that there is no grace but special grace, and this produces recklessness ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... till I'm forty for my good luck," he said to his brother sometimes in moments of expansion; "and then I shall have ten years in which to enjoy myself, and twenty more in which I shall have life enough left to eat good dinners and drink good wine, and grumble about the degeneracy of things in general, after the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... the pure and lofty and highly ennobling sentiments, the spiritually beautiful inspiration which characterizes that book of his—that deft little dip into degeneracy—something about a frozen wedding! Oh, slush! Percy, ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... learned disquisitions on the decay of the art of church building. Lack of time in our rushing age, lack of patience, decline of religious zeal, or change in belief, these are some of the popular reasons for this architectural degeneracy. Strange as it may seem none of these have had so powerful an influence as the invention of printing. The first printing-press was made in the middle of the XV century,—after the conception of the great Cathedrals. In an earlier age, when the greatest could neither read ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... age is not what we all wish. But I am sure that the only means of checking its precipitate degeneracy is heartily to concur with whatever is the best in our time, and to have some more correct standard of judging what that best is than the transient and uncertain favor of a court. If once we are able to find, and can prevail on ourselves to strengthen an union of such men, whatever accidentally becomes ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... except in connection with the occasional attempts to end the discord between production and distribution by diminishing the former. It is impossible not to see that in this way morality also would be preserved from a degeneracy the real cause of which this sort of reformers certainly did not understand, but which hovered before their mind's eye as an indistinct presentiment. And now, having noticed seriatim the three conceivable forms of evolution—namely, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... not know that I ever remember seeing a sight more pathetic in its way than that of this beautiful and high-spirited young woman weeping in the presence of her Council over the utter degeneracy of the race she was called upon to rule. Being old and accustomed to these Eastern expressions of emotion, I remained silent, however; but Oliver was so deeply affected that I feared lest he should do something foolish. He went red, he went white, ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... performances of comedies, and Aristotle says that young men should not be allowed to attend them until they are old enough to sit at table and get drunk. Moreover, to be humorous the comedian must necessarily have exceeded the bounds of ordinary usage. Aristophanes occasionally deplores the degeneracy of his times,—the youth of the period making "rude jests," but his own writings are the principal evidence of this depravity. His allusions are not excusable on the ground of ignorance; they are intentionally impure. There was once an age of innocence—still reflected in childhood, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... an account of the youth of Britain more true, in my opinion, than it is prudent. I am far from discovering any such remarkable degeneracy in the age, or any great prevalence of cowardice and unmanly delicacy; nor do I doubt of hearing that our youth, if they are sent upon any expedition, have shown that the British courage is not yet extinguished, and that, if they are ranged on the plains of America, they will ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... sat there for some time. It looked most miserable, the few things about being empty bottles and meat-tins. A man would need many resources, great energy, and an earnest desire to do his duty, in order to save him from complete degeneracy. He has no better prospect from his elevation, than a nearly level plateau of mangrove swamps and jungle, with low hills in the distance, in which the rivers rise. It ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... the Spirit's work have been entertained by theologians in consequence of erroneous conceptions regarding the degeneracy of human nature. Augustine held that man can do nothing which will at all contribute to His spiritual recovery. He is like a lump of clay, or a statue without life or activity. In consequence of these views, he held that ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... nature, not to any cultivation of the mind. Their health Buffered in a nomadic life from the ills of the country, the dangers of the climate, and the children by whom a few were accompanied, showed a degeneracy of blood which threatened ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first. Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to all back-woodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... here the thought that struck fire in the mind of young Schiller, whose bent was all for tragedy. If there was to be a proof that strong passion and bold action were still possible, notwithstanding the degeneracy of the age, what better object could there be for the passion to wreak itself upon than the age itself? If life had become vapid, and the German character servile and pusillanimous, here was the very field ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... days of tea and white bread it is to be feared that the "halesome parritch" is now very far removed from the honoured place of chief, and it must be more than a coincidence which connects the physical degeneracy of the Scottish working people with the supplanting of the porridge-pot by the tea-pot. Even in rural districts there is a great change in the daily fare, and there too anaemia, dyspepsia, and a host of other ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... Frankish king was decorated with the title of Most Christian; the history of that Church was written in Latin by Gregory of Tours. This work, upon which he was engaged from A.D. 576 to 592, bears strong marks of literary degeneracy. Gregory complained of the low state of education in the cities of Gaul. He became a historian only from a sense of necessity, and for fear lest the memory of important events should perish. He has been called ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... and THESE!! few individuals can conceive, and none could describe, the actual state into which the more than infernal tyranny of Austria has plunged this unhappy city. From the present decay and degeneracy of Venice under the Barbarians, there are some honourable individual exceptions. There is Pasqualigo, the last, and, alas! posthumous son of the marriage of the Doges with the Adriatic, who fought his frigate with far greater gallantry than any of his French coadjutors ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... irreverent, and irresistibly buoyant. William could not hear an opera praised without dragging Susan off to gallery seats, which the lady frankly characterized as "smelly," to see if his opinion agreed with that of the critics. If it did not, Susan must listen to long dissertations upon the degeneracy of modern music. His current passion was the German language, which he was studying in odd moments so that he might translate certain scientific treatises in a manner more to the ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... important chasm in a young man's life, during which he might have fallen from his integrity, and have rapidly formed habits of the opposite vices. But through that period no expressions occur in history which even by implication involve any degeneracy, any change from good to bad. On the contrary, to his zeal and steadiness, and perseverance and integrity, such incidental testimony is borne from time to time as would of itself leave a very different impression ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... concern and apprehension, that pockets are gradually falling into disuse. To use the flippant idiom of the day, they are going out! This is an alarming, as well as a lamentable fact; and one, too, strikingly illustrative of the degeneracy of modern fashions. Whether we ascribe the change to a contemptuous neglect of ancestral institutions, or to an increasing difficulty in furnishing the indispensable attributes of the pocket, it is alike ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... bees, butterflies, moths or humming birds about others, each visitor choosing the restaurant most to his liking? With what infinite pains the wants of each guest are catered to! How relentlessly are pilferers punished! The endless devices of the more ambitious flowers to save their species from degeneracy by close inbreeding through fertilization with their own pollen, alone prove the operation of Mind through them. How plants travel, how they send seeds abroad in the world to found new colonies, might be studied with ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... our domesticated animals. Climate, or chance, produced a change in certain individuals, and the sagacity of man, or, perhaps, mere chance, founded on these accidental varieties numerous breeds possessed of certain distinct characteristic properties. The degeneracy of the dog, also, in different countries, cannot for ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... the present day, may be ascribed to parental neglect of the young. The desolating curse of heaven invariably accompanies neglect of domestic obligations and duties; it was this that constituted that dreadful degeneracy which preceded the coming of the Messiah. The parents were alienated from the children, and the children from their parents. And the only way in which the Jews could avert deserved and impending ruin, was by "turning the heart of the fathers to the children, ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... of a fertile fancy and a few facts an altogether imaginary America, not at all like the real one; peopled by strange folk quite un-English in their ideas and ways, and very hard to understand and live with. In vain did Lionel protest and explain; his remonstrances were treated as proofs of the degeneracy and blindness induced by life in "The States," and to all his appeals she opposed that calm, obstinate disbelief which is the weapon of a limited intellect and experience, and is harder to deal with ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... performances, in all that you religiously do, and blessing will rest upon you." This is the bhaktan's creed; it is essentially the teaching of the "Divine Song"—Bhagavad-Gita. And it is this which has so powerfully helped the moral and spiritual degeneracy of India during the past few centuries. Men have attached themselves absolutely to gods whose mythology, detailed in the Puranas and Tantras, is a narrative of lust and of moral crookedness, devotion to which can mean only moral contamination ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... unaffected by the popular beliefs. Mingled with all these were the ancient legends of gods and heroes, accepted as inspired scripture by the people, and by philosophers in part explained away by an allegorical exegesis and in part felt increasingly as a burden to the intelligence. In this period of degeneracy there were none the less an awakening to religious needs and a profound longing for a new revelation of truth, which should satisfy at once the intellect and the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... wolverine. The lumberjacks call him the Injun devil. While among the trappers and the Indians themselves he is known as the carcajo, or as bad dog—which is the Indian's idea of absolute cussedness and degeneracy. ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... declined, and gradually the fear of over-population, which had saddened the lives of such men as John Stuart Mill, began to give way to the much less terrifying but still substantial fear of under-population, caused either by race degeneracy or race suicide. At that period the former of the two was the accepted explanation, and only by vague hints did scientific statisticians indicate that there might be or perhaps must be something else ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... 50. Family Degeneracy.—Several impressive illustrations have been published of degenerate families that show the far-reaching effects of heredity. In contrast to these pictures, has been set the life story of families who have won renown in successive generations because of unusual ability. Nothing so effective ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... causes may be ascribed their decision to withdraw the British force from the island of Yeu. The indignant letters of Windham to Pitt in 1796-8 show that, after the Yeu fiasco and the beginning of the peace negotiations with France, his advice was slighted. His moanings to Mrs. Crewe over the degeneracy of the age also tell their tale. In October 1796 he merely "drags on" at the War Office until he sees what ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... of lamentation over the degeneracy of the British seaman, my experience may be accepted as a contribution to the mass of evidence on this vexed question. I have not been surrounded by such smart seamen as can only be found on a man-of-war, but I have no ground for general or serious complaint. Many of my crew have done their ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... have bent down in a kindred gracefulness to shed their benedictions on her graceful head; old love-letters, shut up in iron boxes in the neighbouring offices, and made of no account among the heaps of family papers into which they had strayed, and of which in their degeneracy they formed a part, might have stirred and fluttered with a moment's recollection of their ancient tenderness, as she went lightly by. Anything might have happened that did not happen, and never will, for the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the general sentiments of man, what must be their depravity, what must be their degeneracy, who can blot out and erase from the bosom the virtue that is deepest rooted in the human heart, and twined within the cords of life itself—aliens from nature, apostates from humanity! And yet, if there is a crime more fell, more foul—if there is any thing worse than a wilful persecutor ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... value (and some will say it) in all this; that every labor and service is right and good for woman; and that we are to prefer a state of society where woman does these things with her own hands, instead of having them done for her, and that this is our only safeguard against luxury and degeneracy. I will not debate it. I am only showing that, tried by an ordinary test,—the position of woman,—Southerners are ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... Mall, and shrinking from the athletic and social recreations which, like so much that was manly and English, were confined almost to the English squire pur et simple after the Hanoverian accession; when so much degeneracy for a while obscured the English character, debased its tone, enervated its best races, vilified its literature, corrupted its morals, changed its ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... by the criticisms of men of taste and learning, is by no means exposed to the vicissitudes of those that are polished by refined nations;[AF] and that, however paradoxical it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that the degeneracy of a language is more frequently to be attributed to an extravagant refinement than to the neglect of an illiterate people, unless indeed external causes interfere. May we not hence conclude, that as the Romansh has never been used in any regular composition in writing till the sixteenth ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... however, some patriotic spirits, who, not insensible to this degeneracy of the French theatre, and lamenting the evil, have lately exercised much ingenuity in developing the cause. They have at length discovered, that all the republican tragedies, flat farces, and heavy comedies, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... sundials in his book, although they were his prop in how many a play back in the golden Nineties!—the golden, promise-laden, contradictory Nineties, that fin-de-siecle decade when Max Nordau thundered that we were going to the dogs of degeneracy, and we youngsters knew that we were headed not alone for a new heaven, but what is much more important, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... designation of political functionaries. The party machinery of the present day, adapted chiefly to the purpose of availability and the means of securing success at all hazards, is mostly responsible for the degeneracy which unquestionably characterizes the public men of this day, in comparison with those who in former times filled the same high stations. In view of these facts, it may be that the military regime about to be ushered in as a consequence of the great ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... "Nueva Recopilacion," on "cosas prohibidas;" the laws on gilding and plating, lib. 5, tit. 24; on apparel and luxury, lib. 7, tit. 12; on woollen manufactures, lib. 7, tit. 14-17, et legas al. Perhaps no stronger proof of the degeneracy of the subsequent legislation can be given, than by contrasting it with that of Ferdinand and Isabella in two important laws. 1. The sovereigns, in 1492, required foreign traders to take their returns in the products and manufactures of the country. By a law of Charles V., 1552, the exportation ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... delivered up the King, their countryman, who had flung himself upon. their protection?—the Scots again. But this lad's father, you say, has fought on the part of the noble Montrose; and such a man as the great Marquis may make amends for the degeneracy of ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... a tyrannical prince in peace, a despicable general in war; nay, he would have equalled his predecessors in that art, had not his [62]degeneracy in other respects likewise detracted from his merit here. He began the war against the Volsci, which lasted two hundred years after his time, and took from them Suessa Pometia by storm; and when ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... unfavourable for a historian; that no reader of sentiment and imagination can be entertained or interested by a detail of transactions such as these, which admit of no warmth, no colouring, no embellishment; a detail of which only serves to exhibit an inanimate picture of tasteless vice and mean degeneracy." On the contrary, and Smollett might have discovered it, if he had been in the humour—the subject is capable of inspiring as much interest as even a novelist can desire. Is there no warmth in the despair of a plundered people?—no life ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... case with "Sea Dreams," we do not know; but, with his probable taste in poetry, supposing him to have cared for the poetry of his time, he would doubtless have looked upon Alfred's success as another sign of the degeneracy of the age. As has been hinted, Mr. Tennyson was very careful of his money, and his boys were not allowed much spending money. Alfred and his brother Charles had the natural youthful desire to see their poetry in ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... shall be informed of my family name. A Villain made himself Master of my affections, and to follow him I quitted my Father's House. Yet though my passions overpowered my virtue, I sank not into that degeneracy of vice, but too commonly the lot of Women who make the first false step. I loved my Seducer; dearly loved him! I was true to his Bed; this Baby, and the Youth who warned you, my Lord Baron, of your ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... me. "My brother," he began, "for whom I have so entire a love, and whom I selected out of so large a number, thinking to revive with you that virtuous and sincere friendship which, owing to the degeneracy of the age, has grown to be almost unknown to us, and now exists only in certain vestiges of antiquity, I beg of you, as a mark of my affection to you, to accept my library: a slender offering, but given with a cordial will, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... with a particular form of leprosy or a condition resembling it. Thus would arise the confusion between Christians and Cretins. To-day their descendants are not more subject to goitre and cretinism than those dwelling around them, and are recognized by tradition and not by features or physical degeneracy. It was not until the French Revolution that any steps were taken to ameliorate their lot, but to-day they no longer form a class, but have been practically lost sight of in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... and the unrestricted development of every nobler feeling and of every kind of profound knowledge. When it protects and fosters such tendencies, and makes good its title to an honorable place among other forms. But when it fails so to do, because of democratic, or aristocratic degeneracy, it then writes its own condemnation. Zwingli began his labors as a republican, in whom the citizen was not lost in the priest. And this we must always bear in mind, so as not to do him injustice, when we see ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... the pigmy brain and emasculate spirit can perceive in its own time nothing but dwarfishness and emasculation. Each century has seemed to some of its children an epoch of decadence and decline in national life and spiritual, in moral or material glory; each alike has heard the cry of degeneracy raised against it, the wave of emulous impotence set up against the weakness ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... that stone implements are an index to man in the beginning of his existence is an unwarranted conceit; they may point to a degeneracy. The lost arts are indicative of that which might have been repeated many times. Stone implements might have been used, as we know they have been, in times of great civilization. They are an uncertain index of civilization ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... a raid upon British territory this time. The Rand would be the centre of a great war; and Rudyard Byng was not the man he had been, in spite of his show of valour and vigour at the Glencader Mine. Indeed, that incident had shown a certain physical degeneracy—he had been too slow in recovering from the few bad hours spent in the death-trap. The government at Whitehall still consulted him, still relied upon his knowledge and his natural tact; but secret as his conferences were with the authorities, they were not so secret that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... nothing could be more slothful or slow, more given up to a life of ease and degeneracy, than the "reef-building polypifer"—to give him his scientific name. He is the hobo of the animal world, but, unlike the hobo, he does not even tramp for a living. He exists as a sluggish and gelatinous worm; he attracts to himself calcareous elements from the water to make ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the rapidity of their early conquests; by the immense extent of the dominions comprised in them; by the establishment of a satrap or pacha system of governing the provinces; by an invariable and speedy degeneracy in the princes of the royal house, the effeminate nurslings of the seraglio succeeding to the warrior-sovereigns reared in the camp; and by the internal anarchy and insurrections, which indicate and accelerate the decline and fall of those unwieldy and ill-organized fabrics of power. ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... likeness to the original, were lumped, and transferred to the divinity. As those like by similarity, so those unlike, were identified by contiguity, as traits of the unknown power. This is the active element in the degeneracy of religious idealism. The cow or the bull, chosen first as a symbol of creation or fecundity, led to a worship of the animal itself, and a transfer of its traits, even to its horns, to the god. In a less repulsive form, the same tendency ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... overtaken the depravity of a sunken nation; of the triumph of simple manliness, of Godfearing virtue itself, in the victories of the German army. There may have been truth in this; yet it would require a nice moral discernment to appraise the exact degeneracy of the French of 1870 from the French of 1854 who humbled Russia, or from the French of 1859 who triumphed at Solferino; and it would need a very comprehensive acquaintance with the lower forms of human pleasure to judge in what degree the sinfulness of ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Living, high, Intelligent, good, great, and glorious things, As much superior unto all thy sire Adam could e'er have been in Eden, as 70 The sixty-thousandth generation shall be, In its dull damp degeneracy, to Thee and thy son;—and how weak they are, judge By ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... task I have undertaken, lays me under the necessity of divulging this degeneracy in the sentiment of our imperious youth, who was now in the heyday of his blood, flushed with the consciousness of his own qualifications, vain of his fortune, and elated on the wings of imaginary expectation. Though he was deeply enamoured ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... was the best time; that the seasons were more genial formerly; that provisions were cheaper and more abundant; that men were taller, and stouter, and healthier; that, in a word, everything was better in the days of yore than it is now, and that degeneracy and effeteness are the prevailing characteristics of our age. Philosophers, statists, and political economists tell us that all this regret for the "good old time" is mis-spent sympathy; for that we are in every respect superior—in physique, health, morals, and wealth—to our ancestors. On ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... beauties, and even perhaps a good taste, ere surfeited by them: they multiply every day more and more in the fashionable compositions: nature and good sense are neglected: labored ornaments studied and admired: and a total degeneracy of style and language prepares the way for barbarism and ignorance. Hence the Asiatic manner was found to depart so much from the simple purity of Athens: hence that tinsel eloquence which is observable in many of the Roman writers, from which Cicero himself is not wholly ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... nature and natural laws and favors the development of the best that is in man; and he who shirks toil misses his opportunity. Whatever tends to wean men from work only weakens them. Luxury and indolence travel on the downward road of degeneracy. They may make pleasant temporary indulgence, but are fatal ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven. Except on the ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see no rational footing for scorning the whole present population of the globe, unless I scorn every previous generation from whom they have inherited their diseases of mind and body, and by consequence scorn my own scorn, which is equally an inheritance of mixed ideas ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... in the fire, seemed, indeed, to the subject to be more moderate and gentle, and to abate somewhat of its extreme severity; the edge of it being blunted, not by the clemency, but rather the sloth and degeneracy of the sovereign, whose dissoluteness, gaining ground daily, and growing upon him, soon weakened and broke those "adamantine chains," with which his father, Dionysius, said he had left the monarchy fastened and secured. It is reported of him, that, having begun ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... phrase of Whig coffee-houses have "swinged off" the "Examiner," most of which I had never seen nor heard of before. I remember some time ago in one of the "Tatlers" to have read a letter,[4] wherein several reasons are assigned for the present corruption and degeneracy of our taste, but I think the writer has omitted the principal one, which I take to be the prejudice of parties. Neither can I excuse either side of this infirmity; I have heard the arrantest drivellers pro and con commended for their ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... the degeneracy of the age in this regard, I cannot refuse to succumb to its influence. Looking out through my study-window, I see Mr. Biglow at a distance busy in gathering his Baldwins, of which, to judge by the number of barrels lying about under ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... and puff their hair like their elders, and trim their dresses to such excess, it will be impossible for them to find time for consecutive study. Every separate curl, lace, or fold, becomes a separate cause of worry; and "worry" lies at the bottom of American degeneracy, male ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett |
