"Degenerate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it; But I would have the soil of her fair rape Wip'd off in honourable keeping her. What treason were it to the ransack'd queen, Disgrace to your great worths, and shame to me, Now to deliver her possession up On terms of base compulsion! Can it be That so degenerate a strain as this Should once set footing in your generous bosoms? There's not the meanest spirit on our party Without a heart to dare or sword to draw When Helen is defended; nor none so noble Whose life were ill bestow'd or death unfam'd Where Helen is the subject. Then, ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... northern extremity of the island of Ceylon in the beginning of the year 1819, when one morning my servant called me an hour or two before the usual time with, 'Master! master! people sent for master's dogs; tiger in the town!' Now my dogs chanced to be very degenerate specimens of a fine species called the Poligar dogs. I kept them to hunt jackals, but tigers are very different things. This turned out to be a panther; my gun chanced not to be put together, and while my servant was doing it the collector and two medical men, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... blackguard of reputable name. The man was cold-blooded enough to see that her gentle weakness was of value because it could be bullied, her money was to be counted on because it could be spent on himself and his degenerate vices and on his racked and ruined name and estate, which must be rebuilt and restocked at an early date by someone or other, lest they tumbled into ignominious collapse which could not be concealed. Bettina of the ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... attacked every Minister and every measure which favoured the interest of the army—encouraged the workmen not to pay their taxes and the farmers not to pay their rents—and thus became the leader of a noisy faction, and is now surrounded by the degenerate class throughout Italy which dreams of reconstructing society by ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... this transaction, went to his son's apartment, taking with him Philotas, the son of Parmenio, one of Alexander's intimate friends and companions, and there reproved him severely, and reproached him bitterly, that he should be so degenerate, and unworthy of the power he was to leave him, as to desire the alliance of a mean Carian, who was at best but the slave of a barbarous prince. Nor did this satisfy his resentment, for he wrote to the Corinthians, to send Thessalus ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... other at the welfare of the whole of which the thing is a part (bonum suitatis—bonum communionis). The second is not only the nobler but also the stronger; this holds of the lower creatures as well as of man, who, when not degenerate, prefers the general welfare to his individual interests. Love is the highest of the virtues, and is never, as other human endowments, exposed to the danger of excess; therefore the life of action is of more worth than ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... the thirteenth century, whilst the enterprises which were still called crusades were becoming more and more degenerate in character and potency, there was born in France, on the 25th of April, 1215, not merely the prince, but the man who was to be the most worthy representative and the most devoted slave of that religious and moral passion which had inspired the crusades. Louis IX., though ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... presence of his sister and her husband. But I must not distress you with sordid details. Suffice it to say, I turned at last like the proverbial worm. I applied for a divorce ten months ago. It was granted, provisionally as I say. He is a degenerate. He was unfaithful to me in every sense of the word. But in spite of all that, the court in granting me the separation, took occasion to placate national honour by giving him the child during the year, pending the final disposition of the case. Of course, everything depends on ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... love of God. To-day, herded in thousands, chained to the walls of their huge dungeons, they are just specimens like the dead butterflies which we pay to see, which some scientific critic without any care for beauty will measure and describe in the inarticulate and bestial syllables of some degenerate dialect he thinks is language. Our unfortunate gods! How much more fortunate were they of the older world: Zeus, whose statue of ivory and gold mysteriously was stolen away; Aphrodite of Cnidus, which someone hid for love; and you, O Victory of Samothrace, that ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... in a garret a chest containing a quantity of papers and parchments, and the beautifulest dust. No such dust is made in these degenerate days. Some of these MSS. bore recent dates, and were easily legible, though not so easily intelligible, being written as Gratiano spake.* The writers had omitted to put the idea'd words into red ink, so they had ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... remember, even with a general decrease of mortality you may often find a race thus degenerating and still oftener a family. You may see poor little feeble washed-out rags, children of a noble stock, suffering morally and physically, throughout their useless, degenerate lives, and yet people who are going to marry and to bring more such into the world, will consult nothing but their own convenience as to where they are to live, or how ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... thirteenth century, and Luther soon threw off the fully developed Christianity of Rome. Since then we have had the Tuebingen School, that resolved everything into myth, and the very many other negative points of view expressed in Nietzsche's supremest condemnation of Jesus as a wretched degenerate, while Wagner's deliberate slogan was, "Das Deutschtum muss ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... thou hast none of thine own, maketh not thee renowned. But if there be anything good in nobility, I judge it only to be this, that it imposeth a necessity upon those which are noble, not to suffer their nobility to degenerate from ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... even in the face of the most desperate assault upon them; your civilized man is forever yielding to them. Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... suspect that we are some of those that degenerate from the Institutions of our Founder; we are strict Observers ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... on it, to press down the earth. When the plants are an inch high, thin them out, leaving spaces proportioned to their sizes. Seeds of a similar species, such as melons and squashes, should not be planted very near to each other, as this causes them to degenerate. The same kinds of vegetables should not be planted in the same place, for two years ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... sudden enfranchisement, and her marriage with my dear cousin's natural child. Ma'am, I am your most obedient, humble servant. Duke, I congratulate you upon the noble alliance you have formed. You come well, you come happily, to witness me curse that base and degenerate boy. But it is a pity you did not bring the happy bridegroom, Mr. Brown, that we might have two fine specimens of noble ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... degenerate and base art thou, To make such means for her as thou hast done, And leave her on such slight conditions. Now, by the honour of my ancestry, I do applaud thy spirit, Valentine, 140 And think thee worthy of an empress' love: Know, then, I here forget all former griefs, ...
— Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... to discharge the mighty river, whose source is far distant among the mountains of Tibet. His return was along the skirts of the northern hills; nor could this rapid campaign of one year justify the strange foresight of his emirs, that their children in a warm climate would degenerate into a race ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... recluse who taught that "to whom little is not enough, nothing is enough," and who regarded plain living as at the same time a duty and a happiness. The lives of too liberal disciples have been a slander on the name of Epicurus. Horace is not among them. With degenerate Epicureans, whose philosophy permitted them "To roll with pleasure in a sensual sty," he had little in common. The extraction from life of the honey of enjoyment was indeed the highest purpose, but the purpose could never be ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... phrenologists call combativeness, we could doubtless stop prize-fight, but we might have a springless society. The only safe way is that taught by horticulture, to feed a fruit-tree generously, so that it has vigor enough to throw off its degenerate tendencies and its enemies, or, as the doctors say in medical practice, bring up the general system. That is to say, there is more hope for humanity in stimulating the good, than in directly suppressing the evil. It is on something ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... observed of armies, that in the present age they are brought to some degree of humanity, and a more regular demeanour to each other and to the world, than in former times; it is certainly a good maxim to endeavour preserving this temper among them, without which they would soon degenerate into savages. To this end, it would be prudent among other things, to forbid that detestable custom of drinking to the damnation or ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... in different toes. There are no associated constitutional symptoms, no tendency to similar morbid changes in other parts, and no infiltration elsewhere. There is little or no edema with ainhum. In ainhum there is, first, simple hypertrophy, then active hyperplasia The papillae degenerate when deprived of blood supply, and become horny. Meanwhile the pressure thus exerted on the nervi vasorum sets up vascular changes which bring about epithelial changes in more distant areas, the process advancing anteriorly, that is, in ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... swamp-hens, and perhaps a bittern or two, by these conflagrations. On the whole, I like burning the hill-sides better than the swamp—you get a more satisfactory blaze with less trouble; but I sigh over these degenerate days when the grass is kept short and a third part of a run is burned regularly ever spring, and long for the good old times of a dozen years ago, when the tussocks were six feet high. What a blaze they must have ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... theories, but no government had been previously established for the great purpose of their preservation and enforcement. That which was experimental in our plan of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the power so often found necessary of representing or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... attract the huntsman with a false show of pleasure, from which he can reap but small advantage. They look on the desire of the bloodshed, even of beasts, as a mark of a mind that is already corrupted with cruelty, or that at least by the frequent returns of so brutal a pleasure must degenerate into it. ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... wild boys and girls in the school who try to spread filthy knowledge, but if the atmosphere is filled with respect and reverence, and the minds are trained by inner discipline and morality, the contagion of such mischievous talk will reach only those children who have the disposition of the degenerate. The majority will remain uncontaminated. Plenty of lewd literature in the circulars of the quacks and even in the sensational newspapers will reach their eye and their brain, and yet it will leave not ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... and public, sit down here, and have not mind of further progress? They think, if they keep that stance, they are well, and so have few designs or endeavours after more communion with God, or purification from sin. Now this makes them degenerate to formality. They wither and become barren, and are exposed by this to many temptations which overcome them. But, my beloved, is not this really and indeed to say, "we have no sin?" Do not your walking and the posture of your spirits ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... disguise: but in their passage from town to town, which is sometimes by coach, and other times by boat, they chanced one day to encounter a young Hollander of a more than ordinary gallantry for that country, so degenerate from good manners, and almost common civility, and so far short of all the good qualities that made themselves appear in this young nobleman. He was very handsome, well made, well dressed, and very well attended; and whom we will call Octavio, and who, ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... the more plausible becomes the interpretation of the legislature's work as a matter of reason, not of pressure, and the more common it is to hear condemnations of those portions of the process at which violence shows through the reasoning as though they were per se perverted, degenerate, and the bearers of ruin. There is, of course, a strong, genuine group opposition to the technique of violence, which is an important social fact; but a statement of the whole legislative process in terms of the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... god Min was the patron of the crops, who watched over the growth of the grain. In modern times a degenerate figure of this god Min, made of whitewashed wood and mud, may be seen standing, like a scarecrow, in the fields throughout Egypt. When the sailors cross the Nile they may often be heard singing Ya Amuni, Ya Amuni, ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... world, cautiously and carefully, moving unobtrusively and unobserved. We wanted to contemplate the corruption, seek out the weaknesses in your degenerate civilization. And we found them, immediately. Those weaknesses are everywhere apparent, for they are physical. You're one of a dying race, Littlejohn. Mankind's days are numbered. There's no need for grandiose schemes of reactivating warheads in buried missile-centers, of loosing thermo-nucs ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... should be held responsible for all damage done to roads, railways, and telegraphs by guerillas. His orders, it is true, were warranted by the practice of war. But "forced requisitions," unless conducted on a well-understood system, must inevitably degenerate into plunder and oppression; and Pope, in punishing civilians, was not careful to distinguish between the acts of guerillas and those of the regular Confederate cavalry. "These orders," says a Northern historian, "were followed by ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... except in a case of hunger. All the same, leaving the tree out of consideration, bear-chasing with hounds is a tremendously exciting and hazardous game. But my ideas about sport are changing. Hunting, in the sportsman's sense, is a cruel and degenerate business. ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... never degenerate into a nod; this is both ungracious and ungentlemanly. The hat should be lifted sufficiently to clear the head, and the bow, in the reception room, should slightly incline the body also. Ladies should ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... nation; and in our desire for peace, let us never be willing to surrender the Constitution bequeathed us by fathers at least as wise as ourselves, (even with Jefferson Davis to help us,) and, with those degenerate Romans, tuta et presentia ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... strokes he painted vast outlines of the whole sad picture—the System based on robbery and fraud and exploitation; its natural results in millionaire and tramp and harlot and degenerate; the crime of armies of unemployed and starving men, of millions of women forced into the factories and shops, there to compete with men and lower wages and lose their finest feminine attributes in the sordid and ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... be able to read all sorts of nice and horrid things about me in the papers at breakfast-time. I can be brilliantly amusing at times, and I understand the value of silence; there is no fear that I shall ever degenerate into that fearsome thing—a cheerful talkative husband. For a girl with money and social ambitions I should think I was rather ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... eloquent advocate in the late Professor A. N. Whitehead, in his book Science and the Modern World, where, in view of the contradictory nature of modern physical theories, he insists that 'if science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and enter upon a thorough criticism ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... the dung-beetle is recent in the general chronology of creatures, as it takes rank among the last comers, as the geological strata are mute concerning it, it is possible that these horn-like processes, which always degenerate before they reach completion, may be not a reminiscence but a promise, a gradual elaboration of new organs, timid attempts which the centuries will harden to a complete armour, AND IF THIS WERE SO THE PRESENT WOULD TEACH US WHAT THE FUTURE ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... languages spoken by the human tongue, from the powers of his mind, which occupied a pure and healthy physique. In a word he was well made and fully endowed with all the physical and mental forces necessary to the whole journey of his life. Now a question arises: "When did he begin to degenerate physically and mentally?" Let us reason some on this line, which seems to be a rather solid foundation, and as history is young itself, and has imperfectly recorded only such events as have transpired during a few ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... satirical writings of the first half of the century as "an aristocratic drawl," and his pronunciation was archaic. Like other high-bred people of his time, he talked of "cowcumbers" and "laylocks," called a woman an "'ooman," and was "much obleeged" where a degenerate age is content to be obliged. The frigidity of his address and the seeming stiffness of his manner, due really to an innate and incurable shyness, produced even among people who ought to have known him well a totally erroneous notion of his ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... have studied and observed its forms. We see the limbless snakes; the lizards with active limbs; the huge, clumsy, slow crocodiles and alligators—the armor-bearing turtles and tortoises—all belonging to the one great family of Reptiles, and nearly all of them being degenerate descendants of the mighty Reptile forms of the geological Age of Reptiles, in which flourished the mighty forms of the giant reptiles—the monsters of land and water. Amidst the dense vegetation of that pre-historic age, surrounded by the most favorable conditions, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Christless, and therefore Godless, is unworthy of the name and can, therefore, claim from us no further consideration; it is mere naked rudeness and selfishness, ill-disguised by the gaudy rays of outward decency; a mere cherishing of the sensual nature which, left to itself, would soon degenerate into monstrous barbarism, of which we already see ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... lifeless trees; on the contrary, I followed the dusty road and examined the telegraph poles, for the woodpecker of these latter days has departed from the ways of his fathers, deserted the cool and fragrant woods, and taken up his abode in degenerate places, a fitting change of residence to follow his change of habit from digging his prey out of the tree-trunks to ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... of high adventure. He had held many a stag at bay, killed many a hare, and otherwise risen to the position of a Caesar among dogs. Care was taken that he should not mate indiscriminately, so that his descendants' blood should not degenerate. On the other hand, poor Lurcher bestowed his affections wherever he would and his brood became populous. He was the progenitor of all turn-spits in France; a variety which became common enough to form at last a race in themselves. They show more readiness ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... only trouble is that you, both of you, are fifty years behind the times. You're old American. How you ever got here in the thick of modern conditions is a miracle. You're Rip Van Winkles. Who ever heard, in these degenerate times, of a young man and woman of the city putting their blankets on their backs and starting out in search of land? Why, it's the old Argonaut spirit. You're as like as peas in a pod to those who yoked their oxen and held west to the lands beyond the ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... physiology of the present time. He believed that the functions are performed by the various organs of the bodies of animals and men as a mechanism, to which in man was added the soul. This soul he located in the pineal gland, a degenerate and presumably functionless little organ in the brain. For years Descartes's idea of the function of this gland was held by many physiologists, and it was only the introduction of modern high-power microscopy that reduced this also to a mere ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... to London: he observed, that a man stored his mind better there, than any where else; and that in remote situations a man's body might be feasted, but his mind was starved, and his faculties apt to degenerate, from want of exercise and competition. No place, (he said,) cured a man's vanity or arrogance so well as London; for as no man was either great or good per se, but as compared with others not so good or great, he was sure to find in the metropolis many his equals, and some his superiours. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... told seized all Italy at this time, the passionate devotion for the benign Madonna mingled the poetry of pity with that of pain; and assuredly this state of feeling, with its mental and moral requirements, must have assisted in emancipating art from the rigid formalism of the degenerate Greek school. Men's hearts, throbbing with a more feeling, more pensive life, demanded something more like life,—and produced it. It is curious to trace in the Madonnas of contemporary, but far distant and unconnected schools of painting, the simultaneous dawning of a sympathetic ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... Out along the wall for support. Was this a dream, some ghastly, soul-terrifying nightmare! Danglar! Those working lips! That callous viciousness, that leer in the degenerate face. It seemed to bring a weakness to her limbs, and seek to rob her of the strength to stand. She could not even hope against hope; she knew that Danglar was in deadly earnest. Danglar would not have the ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... for being fat; and when Milton and his Dutch opponent devoted pages of their controversy to the discussion of which of them was the uglier. . . . The new controversialists . . . call a man a physical degenerate, instead of calling him an ugly fellow. They say that red hair is the mark of the Celtic stock, ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... restrain; and insensibly humanity returns to natural conditions, permitting the underlying savage to gain ascendency. I have seen more than one seemingly polished gentleman, resplendent with all the graces of the social code, degenerate into a surly brute with only a few hours of such isolation and the ceaseless irritation of the trail. Yet I must acknowledge that De Croix accepted it all without a murmur, and as became a man. His entire plaint was over the luxuries he must forego, and he made ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... just as definitely, can the mind be developed and strengthened. Some are by nature keen, alert, brilliant. They may develop into masterfulness; or they, too, may degenerate, through abuse, or from the effect of body infections, into uselessness. The germ-plasm has foreordained some individuals to psychic disorders; but training and mode of life can modify many of these defects. ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... never as clearly seen and comprehended it as to-day. And more even than ever, do I find it little, aged, with worn-out blood and worn-out sap; I feel more fully its antediluvian antiquity, its centuries of mummification, which will soon degenerate into hopeless and grotesque buffoonery, as it comes into ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... earlier than the German poets, animated with a desire to extirpate the foreign and degenerate mode fostered by the vanity of the German princes, and to give free scope to their original and native talent. This regeneration was effected by the despised and simple organists of the Protestant churches. In 1717, Schroeder, a native of Hohenstein in Saxony, invented the pianoforte and improved ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... invaders found in the neighborhood a clan ready to receive them. The clansmen speedily assembled, and, falling on the plundering crews, showed them how different were the free men of a Celtic coast, who were inspired by a genuine love for their faith, from the degenerate ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... stoutest leather, joined with silver clasps, The skirt of softest wool or finest silk, Adorned with needlework and decked with gems, Such as the modest Aryans always wore In games intended for the public view, Before the Greeks became degenerate, And savage Rome compelled those noble men Whose only crime was love of liberty, By discipline and numbers overwhelmed, Bravely defending children, wife and home, Naked to fight each other or wild beasts, And called this brutal savagery high ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... despair." But the same sagacious thinker was able to point the moral of it all, and prove to his friends that their present trials were due to the selfish particularism of the German States: "It was a necessity that some great power should arise in the midst of the degenerate selfishness of the times and also prove victorious, for there was nothing vigorous to oppose it. Napoleon ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... churches, generally in portions of the church only, and are always connected, and that closely, either with the massy forms out of which they have emerged, or with the enervated types into which they are instantly to degenerate. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... have sounded absurd, but, to-day, some forms of heart disease are known to be the regular sequences of some particular form of kidney disease, just as some form of pneumonia attends an affected heart and that some forms of pneumonia degenerate into phthisis. When the blood change is an established fact, it is only a question as to which is the weak organ, and the organism of the individual will decide whether it will be a simple sick-headache or the beginning of a pneumonia ending ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... it be, there are many creatures, among what we sometimes call the 'lower order of creation,' which give promise of great things during the earlier period of their lives, but later degenerate ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... we reached the dizzy height of the Sixth Reader, were presented to us samples of the best English ever written. If you can find, up in the garret, a worn and frayed old Reader, take it down and turn its pages over. See if anything in these degenerate days compares in vital strength and beauty with the story of the boy that climbed the Natural Bridge, carving his steps in the soft limestone with his pocket knife. You cannot read it without a thrill. The same inspired hand wrote "The Blind Preacher," and who that ever ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... is best in life. It leads to hasty, ill-assorted matches, to an unwillingness to yield to each other's peculiarities, to a weakening of the family ties, to a lax morality. Carry it a trifle farther than it now is in some of the Western States, and marriage will lose all its sacredness, and degenerate into a physical union, not nobler than the crossing of ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... communities. It is to be remarked that a lively, but slightly specialized, animistic belief is to be found in most if not all peoples living in the ante-predatory, savage stage of culture. The primitive savage takes his animism less seriously than the barbarian or the degenerate savage. With him it eventuates in fantastic myth-making, rather than in coercive superstition. The barbarian culture shows sportsmanship, status, and anthropomorphism. There is commonly observable a like concomitance of variations in the same respects in the individual temperament of men in ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... methysticum, generally called Ava or Kava—its name in the Tongan and other languages. Some old men assert that the true Fijian mode of preparing the root is by grating, as is still the practice in two or three places; but in this degenerate age the Tongan custom of chewing is almost universal, the operation nearly always being performed by young men. More form attends the use of this narcotic on Somosomo than elsewhere. Early in the morning the king's herald stands in front of the royal ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... keeping a close watch that would degenerate into drudgery and to remain alive to events even when resting, with her back turned on the net, the ambushed Spider always has her foot upon the telegraph-wire. Of my observations on this subject, let me relate the following, which will ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... for much future expectancy from this world, I should be glad to see my son settled in a promising way to acquire an honest livelihood for himself. His behaviour, so far in life, has been irreproachable; and I hope he will not degenerate, in principles or practice, from the precepts and pattern of an indulgent parent. Your Grace's favourable reception of this, from a distant corner of the diocese, and an obscure hand, will excite filial gratitude, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... closes round! my life draws to its end! Nay, weep not, child! were it not for thee I would long ere this have prayed the gods my masters to remove me from my sojourn among the degenerate sons of our noble fathers; but I trembled for thy fate, sweet one!" These last words were almost inexpressibly tender. "I dared not trust thy slight frame to battle unsheltered with the storm. Now the blast summoning me is sounded. I cannot much ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... important features in the show, and the subjects of many a jest. Hogarth introduces them in one of his series, "Industry and Idleness," and Punch has cast many a missile at those disconsolate warriors, who all but perished under their weight of armour, degenerate race ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... plays, the moving picture snows, the vaudeville resorts, whose highest priced "talent" is some voluptuous female, who has cultivated the art of draping nudity with suggestiveness and singing immoral songs, all tend to give youth a false impression of the reality of life and to make the path of the degenerate easy and profitable. The rich are growing richer, and their children are pampered and overfed and underrestrained. Time hangs heavily on their hands and their only mental effort is to devise new methods and new ways of satisfying the lust of liberty and overstimulated ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... first appearance they are commonly of a palish blue, or rather of a colour somewhat approaching to livid, and are surrounded by an erysipelatous inflammation. These pustules, unless a timely remedy be applied, frequently degenerate into phagedenic ulcers, which prove extremely troublesome[2]. The animals become indisposed, and the secretion of milk is much lessened. Inflamed spots now begin to appear on different parts of the hands of the domestics employed in milking, and sometimes on the wrists, which quickly ...
— An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae • Edward Jenner
... a eugenic [xxiii] significance. So long as there exists an unsupported mother or a suffering child; so long as we rely on hospitals and prisons, penitentiaries and the police, to minister to the correction and regeneration of the unfit and degenerate; so long as we tolerate grafting politicians and deprive the poor of breathing spaces, sanitary appliances, and a hygienic environment; so long as war and pestilence deprive posterity of the best of the race for parenthood; so long ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... statement of a Roman Catholic—a Consular agent with a large amount of information as to the land and its inhabitants. He stopped me in speaking of the priests by saying, 'I know all that. You cannot exaggerate their immorality. Everybody knows it—but the Latin race is a degenerate race. Nothing can be done with it. The Roman Church has had four centuries of trial and has ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... friend. But I'm one of those nobodies who cherish a degenerate belief that man comes first, and then his works, and that the main idea is to get through life as happily as possible with the minimum of inconvenience to others. Human happiness is what I venture ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... finding and establishing systems of means for himself and by himself. If, however, we lay the emphasis on the mere imparting of the garnered experiences of the ages, the danger to be feared is lest our teaching degenerate into mere dogmatism or mere cram. If, on the other hand, we lay too much emphasis on the ability to self-find and self-establish systems, we are in danger of losing sight of the social purpose of all knowledge—of forgetting that ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... are they? and where art thou, My Country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy Lyre, so long divine, Degenerate ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... officers for protection against personal injury. And while the original purpose of this militant, even defiant, attitude is self-protection, those who are long compelled to maintain it conceive a contempt for the law, which they find inadequate to guard them, and not infrequently degenerate into bandits. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... myself as comfortable as I could in his house, and to enjoy myself thoroughly in it for the next fortnight to come, at the very least. It may have been that, in considering my faults as those of the degenerate age in which I lived—which age, however, be it known, lived afterwards to recover its character, and to be held up as a model of propriety and virtue to the succeeding generation—the merciful doctor was willing to merge my chastisement in that which he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... a Dutch enterprise; and though all the proofs in the world were introduced on the other side, I would set them at nought as undeserving my attention. If these three reasons be not sufficient to satisfy every burgher of this ancient city, all I can say is they are degenerate descendants from their venerable Dutch ancestors, and totally unworthy the trouble of convincing. Thus, therefore, the title of Hendrick Hudson to his renowned ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... the admirers of Miss Becraft, gave her instruction, and extended to her most heartfelt aid and approbation in all her noble work, as they were in those days wont to do in behalf of the aspiring Colored girls who sought for education, withholding themselves from such work only when a depraved and degenerate public sentiment upon the subject of educating the Colored people had compelled them to a more rigid line of demarcation between the races. Ellen Simonds and others conducted the school a few years, but with the loss ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... intrigue, and even progress, had succumbed to a foe its founders and proprietors had loftily ignored and left to Jews and traders. The acquisition of money, except by despoilment, gift, royal favor, or inheritance, had been unknown at Oldenhurst. The present degenerate custodian of its fortunes, staggering under the weight of its sentimental mortmain already alluded to, had speculated in order to keep up its material strength, that was gradually shrinking through impoverished ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!" Such are the compliments bandied between my great-grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... audacious! By Heaven, I will have thy tongue torn out with hot pincers, for mentioning the very name of a noble Christian damsel! Know, degenerate traitor, that I was already aware to what height thou hadst dared to raise thine eyes, and endured it, though it were insolence, even when thou hadst cheated us—for thou art all a deceit—into holding thee as of some name and fame. But ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Many of the figures are distorted, and all of them have a smutty look, as if they had been rubbed with lampblack or coal-dust. There is not one simple, honest presentation of the natural human form in the book. When the Parisian becomes a degenerate, he is the most degenerate of all—a refined, perfumed degenerate. A degenerate Englishman may be brutal and coarse, but he could never be guilty of the inane or the outrageous things which the Cubists, the Imagists, the Futurists, and the other Ists among the ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... time he carried the small automatic in his hand; but later, hearing no evidence of pursuit, he returned it to the pocket in his coat where it had lain when it had saved him from death beneath the blade of the degenerate Charlie. ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... The men are not the same: 'tis we are base, Poor, and degenerate from the exalted strain Of our great fathers. Where is now the soul Of god-like Cato? he, that durst be good, When Caesar durst be evil; and had power, As not to live his slave, to die his master? Or where's the constant ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... spent much time and energy on philosophic study. He claims Philosophy as his mistress in The Fisher, and in a case where he is in fact judge as well as party, has no difficulty in getting his claim established. He is for ever reminding us that he loves philosophy and only satirizes the degenerate philosophers of his day. But it will occur to us after reading him through that he has dissembled his love, then, very well. There is not a passage from beginning to end of his works that indicates any real comprehension ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... only meeting in ten years where there was no contention or bitterness of feeling. For once these good people were all of the same mind, and a "barrill of W. I. Rum," which in these days gives rise to such excited controversy, in the presumably degenerate days of 1796 acted like oil upon the ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... mark of great poetry. He does not demand of poetry an orthodox code of morals, but he does contend that great poetry marches along the path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate egotism. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... most cherished notions disputed. What was the lady of the manor to do but to superintend the church, parsonage, and parish generally? Not her duty? She had never heard of such a thing, nor did she credit it. Papa would come home, make these degenerate Charnocks hear reason, and ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... prided herself on her good constitution, and despised doctors and dentists as people who pandered to the fads and fancies of a degenerate generation—a generation who, according to her creed, weakened their backs and ruined their health by lounging on sofas and easy chairs, while, for her part, though seventy years of age, she was thankful to say a straight-backed chair was good enough for ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... Eloquence; and he was not destitute of the qualifications of a fine orator, a good voice, graceful gesture, and forcible elocution. Warburton justly remarked, "Sometimes he broke jests, and sometimes that bread which he called the Primitive Eucharist." He would degenerate into buffoonery on solemn occasions. His address to the Deity was at first awful, and seemingly devout; but, once expatiating on the several sects who would certainly be damned, he prayed that the Dutch might be undamm'd! ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... you can through committees, and have an occasional general meeting to voice popular opinion," she counselled. "Always keep your position as leaders, but don't degenerate into an oligarchy. Listen to just grievances, and try and bring everybody into harmony. The tone of the school will depend very largely upon you four. Remember it's a responsibility as well as an honour to have such ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... then they know that he is pleading for their lives; not only pleading, but offering a large ransom if they be given up to him. How anxiously they listen for the reply! The king will not hear of it. The spirit of his father complains that he has been neglected; that his nation must have become degenerate; that they have ceased to conquer, since so few captives have been sent to bear him company in the world of shades. Again the strange white chief speaks, and offers higher bribes. Curious that he should take so much trouble about some poor black captives they think. What can be his object? ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... bag. Everything was plain to the Masons, and if it had not been clear, the way in which the writer emphasized his hatred of the Jesuits would have told it all. It was a Jesuit[140] plot hatched in Rome to expose the secrets of Masonry, and making use of the dissolute and degenerate Mason for that purpose—tactics often enough used in the name of Jesus! Curiously enough, this was further made evident by the fact that the order ceased to exist in 1738, the year in which Clement XII published his Bull against the Masons. Thereupon the "ancient order of Gormogons" swallowed itself, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... them in this world. Nor yet for their damned and doomed offspring—while the individual liberty shibboleths endure, while mere numbers rule, or while our degenerate fear of every form of compulsion lasts. And the present tendency is, not merely to stipulate for complete freedom of action for the poor wretches, but to invite them to govern, by count of heads. So marvellously enlightened ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... can look further for victims. I believe that only a small proportion of the women who are in the houses of ill-fame—only a small proportion—make their way there of their own volition, and that small proportion are of the degenerate class who are born with a screw loose somewhere. From their babyhood they who are born with this taint—and we could, perhaps, trace that taint back—but born with that taint, they gradually go into that life—but they make a small proportion. The rest of them are either betrayed into ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... who drew up to the wall, and showed by the gleam of our lanterns upon his yellow face that he inwardly cursed us all for Giaours, and wondered that Allah in His providence permitted us to exist. In fact, the Anatolian Turk is still a good Mohammedan of the time of Solyman, and not one of the degenerate race of Stamboul. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... vicious outlaw of wide and evil repute? The renegade thief? The persecutor of women? The pitiless butcher of defenseless men? Were those fine, clean-cut features but a mask that covered an abyss of black evil? Did that broad forehead actually conceal the crafty, degenerate brain that planned and executed the bloody and ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... difference being that the Apache shack is not covered with birch bark, a material peculiar to the North, but the Apache uses a thatch of the rank grass to be found where his shacks are located. To-day, however, the White Mountain Apache has become so degenerate and so lost to the true sense of dignity as a savage that he stoops to use corn-stalks with which to thatch the long, sloping sides of his shed-like house but by so doing he really shows good horse sense, for corn-stalks and corn leaves make ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... weak voice, his eyes starting from his head. "Life cannot be unchequered by the frowns of fate, but death must bring dumbness to my lips. Caution, when besmeared in blood, is no longer virtue, or wisdom, but wretched and degenerate cowardice; no, never let him that was born to execute judgment secure his honours by cruelty and oppression. Hath not thy Koran told thee that fear and submission is a subject's tribute, yet mercy is the attribute ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... Ferdinand Armine. He was the best rider among them, and the deadliest shot; and he soon became an oracle at the billiard-table, and a hero in the racquet-court. His refined education, however, fortunately preserved him from the fate of many other lively youths: he did not degenerate into a mere hero of sports and brawls, the genius of male revels, the arbiter of roistering suppers, and the Comus of a club. His boyish feelings had their play; he soon exuded the wanton heat of which a public school would have served as a safety-valve. He returned to his books, his ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... doorway, with arms akimbo and hands on massive hips, gaped Jap's mulatto wife, for of such measure was the man. Graves crossed the alley, suppressing such of his five senses as he could shift without, and ascertained that the degenerate Jasper, true to prophecy, was fishing from ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... organs will enable them to be photographed will bring all such morbid growths as tumours and cancers into the photographic field, to say nothing of vital organs which may be abnormally developed or degenerate. How much this means to medical and surgical practice it requires little imagination to conceive. Diagnosis, long a painfully uncertain science, has received an unexpected and wonderful assistant; and how greatly the world will benefit thereby, how ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... replied, with a smile, 'There is hope till forty-five.' He spoke also of Tennyson and Carlyle as the two men connected with literature in England who were most satisfactory to meet, and better than their books. His respect for literature in these degenerate days is absolute. It is religion and life, and he reiterates this in every possible form. Speaking of Jones Very, he said he seemed to have no right to his rhymes; they did not sing to him, but he was divinely led to them, ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... love of beauty, covering his moral depravity with the mantle of the philosopher, he placed another canvas before her—something so unrefined, so animal, so destructive of womanly modesty and of all reserve, that any one looking upon it would instantly know that the man who had painted it was a degenerate demon—an associate of dissolute models, an anarchist in the world of women. It was fit only for the banquet-halls ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... "was a faithful servant, but he has left behind him a degenerate son. For such an enterprise as yours large resources were requisite. ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... allow yourself to be surprised at anything; it is a weakness. Here we are in total darkness, buried in the Andes, surrounded by hairy, degenerate brutes that are probably allowing us to eat in order that we may be in condition to be eaten, with no possibility of ever again beholding the sunshine; and what is the thought that rises to the surface of my mind? Merely this: that I most earnestly desire ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... am not one of those who think the age degenerate: but certainly the rigid manly character of old times is melted into one of elegance and comparative softness. Perhaps the change is for the better, as I think no virtue has been lost in the transfusion. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... then remarked, as if more to himself than to the child, "are those we notice in Sol Jerrems and Joe Brennan and Mary Ann Hopper. They are characteristic, of the rural population, which, having no spur to improve its vocabulary, naturally grows degenerate in speech." ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne) |
