"Debauchery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... matter of fact, most of the Indians are demoralised, especially those who live in or near the towns, and they live in a state of degradation and perpetual debauchery. Though it is a legal offence to supply them with liquor, they nevertheless manage to get drunk at all times and seasons. When they work they are not to be relied on to continue at it steadily, and when drunk ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... disappointed, and like our own Chaucer, but more frequently, he pours forth lamentations to his empty purse. He was evidently a friend of most of the prominent men of letters of his time, and he entered freely into the debauchery of the period. Thus his verse gives a representation of the debased manners of the day in gay society. His style was remarkably felicitous, and it is said that he adorned all that he touched. Most of his poems are quite short, and their subjects range from a touching outburst ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... wine, pays the bill and, if need be, yields his mistress. "After a few days debauchery, the young libertine, with no money to pay his debts, is obliged to sell himself, while the laborer, transformed into soldier, begins to drill under the lash."—Strange recruits these, for the protection of society, all selected ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... character of the court changed entirely; retaining only a semblance of its former decency, it became utterly corrupt. It possessed external elegance and distingue manners, but below this veneer lay intrigue, debauchery, and gross immorality. In order to meet the vast expenditures of the king and the queen-mother, the taxes were enormously increased; the people, weighed down by the unjust assessment and by want, began to clamor and protest. Undismayed by famine, poverty, and epidemic, ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... existence, for instance, we find applied to arts and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all the weaknesses of the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... deadened nerves. Inside the flabby, coarsened body with its red face munching out monosyllables, lived a recluse. "Too much living has driven him from life," Dorn thought, "and killed his lusts. So he sits and reads books—the last debauchery: strange, twisted phrases like idols, like totem poles, like Polynesian masks. He sits contemplating them as he once sat drunkenly watching the obscenities of black, white, and yellow bodied women. Thus, the mania for the rouge of life, for the grimace that lies beyond satiety, passes ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... does the grim, consuming pestilence of gaming claim more victims than in the Ghetto. The ravages of drink and debauchery are slight indeed; but the tortuous streets can show too many a humble home haunted by the spectres of ruin and misery which stalked across the threshold when the ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... enough to speak. "If you are indeed Ulysses, great are your wrongs, for your property has been, squandered, and riot and debauchery have filled your palace. But at your feet now lies Antinous, whose wild ambition meant to slay your son and divide your kingdom. Since he is dead, spare the rest of your people. Our gold and treasures shall defray the expense, and the waste of years shall be ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... companions. He returns home to find his father dead: and having had a substantial income left him already by an aunt, with the practical control of his mother's resources, he goes on living entirely a sa guise. This involves no positive debauchery or ruination, but includes smoking (then, it must be remembered, almost as great a crime in French as in English middle-class circles), playing at billiards (ditto), and a free use of strong drink and strong language. He spends and gives money freely, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... his effeminate costume? Extravagance imposes on some people. They take it for liberality. They are wrong. He will know how to squander money, but not how to give it away. His mind is full of lechery and debauchery and intrigues with women. These are in his eyes the prerogatives of the throne. And the pleasure of his vices would be all his, the blushes of shame would be ours. No man has ever ruled well who won the ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... to prevent all that Debauchery that is acted in the Streets of this great City every Night, I dress'd up my self as like a Beau as possibly I could, and then taking my short Staff in my Pocket, I went t'other Night abroad, to see what Discoveries I could make: And as I went along the Strand, I met with a young Woman by the ...
— The London-Bawd: With Her Character and Life - Discovering the Various and Subtle Intrigues of Lewd Women • Anonymous
... their lives. There is no imagery, no ideality. The world to them is a humdrum routine, a common-place affair. They have no heroes, and they look upon all men, not as protectors, but seducers, not as beings formed in the image of a pure and holy God, but in the image of a God of lust and debauchery. ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various
... occurred to me that of late years—I mean the years immediately before 1914—Paris has been rather more bent upon adapting itself to human and moral as well as scientific progress. There has certainly been less debauchery visible to the naked eye. I was assured that the patronage had so fallen away from the Moulin Rouge that they were planning to turn it into a decent theater. Nor during my sojourn did anybody in my hearing ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... They are conceited all the forenoon of life, and stupid all its afternoon. The vigour and freshness, which should have been stored up for the purposes of the hard struggle for existence in practical life, have been washed out of them by precocious mental debauchery—by book gluttony and lesson bibbing. Their faculties are worn out by the strain put upon their callow brains, and they are demoralised by worthless childish triumphs before the real work of life begins. I have no compassion for sloth, but youth has more need for intellectual rest than ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... Seas; and that those communities have been the least injured, who have always kept aloof from us, and whose jealous disposition did not suffer our sailors to become too familiar among them, as if they had perceived in their countenances that levity of disposition, and that spirit of debauchery, with which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... and armed robbery. Behind that, his dark past disappeared in a depth of mystery. There were vague rumors that he had participated in a series of other murders and robberies, and in his path there was felt to be a dark trail of blood, fire, and drunken debauchery. He called himself murderer with utter frankness and sincerity, and scornfully regarded those who, according to the latest fashion, styled themselves "expropriators." Of his last crime, since it was useless for him to deny anything, he spoke freely and ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... much alike as twins, although they aren't twins, whose names were Wenham and Jerry Gardner. There's nothing in fast life which those young men haven't tried. Between them, I should say they represented everything that was known of debauchery and dissipation. The eldest can't be more than twenty-seven to-day, but if you were to see them in the morning, either of them, before they had been massaged and galvanized into life, you'd think they were little old ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... our fondest designs! Speaking of this disappointment he afterwards wrote: "Had I remained and become a member of the university at that time, as I should have done in case of success, the profligate acquaintances I had there would have introduced me to scenes of debauchery, in which I must in all probability, from my ...
— Life of Henry Martyn, Missionary to India and Persia, 1781 to 1812 • Sarah J. Rhea
... because they create warmth in those parts whose office it is to elaborate the semen and to convey it to the generative organs. He, therefore, considered it by no means wonderful that the miserable victims of debauchery and lasciviousness, as well as those whose powers have been exhausted by age or excess, should have recourse to flagellation as a remedy. He observes that its effect is very likely to be that of renewing warmth in the now frigid ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... without children, the past has nothing to do for them, and they do nothing for the future. Ignorant and superstitious from education, they become ferocious from the murders they commit, and corrupted by the most horrible debauchery." On the other hand, they had every sort of incentive and teaching to prompt them to rapacity and lawlessness. "The young peasant, sold in Mingrelia or Georgia, no sooner arrives in Egypt, than his ideas undergo a total alteration. A new and extraordinary scene opens before ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... heaven, admonishing all to repentance and amendment. They were joined of course, by a crowd of idle vagabonds, who, under the mask of extraordinary sanctity and humble penitence, indulged in every species of disorder and debauchery. At last the affair assumed so grave an aspect, that the pope and many secular princes declared themselves against the Flagellants, and speedily put an end to their extravagancies. Various ways were still, however, resorted to by various tempers to snatch the full enjoyment of that life ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... hump, constructed of straw or hay underneath his blouse. Then he is known as the "ragamuffin," on account of his covering of rags. Lastly he is termed the "infidel," and this is most significant of all, because by his cynicism and his debauchery he is supposed to typify the opposite of ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... Zouave Coucou took leave in the villa, a mixed company, like on all other nights, had gathered together in the Spider. English, French, Maltese, Italians and Spanish sailors sat round the heavy oak tables; girls in curious dresses, whose painted cheeks showed plainly the traces of debauchery, thronged around a female card conjurer, who in a corner was performing her black art, while a woman with a harp was waiting with her old instrument till called upon to play or sing before the company. Here and there sat groups of men and women on whose foreheads vice was plainly written, and ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... little soldier under his Brother, full of spirit and talent, but liable to weak health;—was Father of the "Prince Louis Ferdinand," a tragic Failure of something considerable, who went off in Liberalism, wit, in high sentiment, expenditure and debauchery, greatly to the admiration of some persons; and at length rushed desperate upon the Frenoh, and found his quietus (10th October, 1806), four days before the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... pagan sensuality, turns to Christianity for relief, but, repelled by the hypocrisy, pride, and lack of sympathy of its ministers, gives up in despair, and returns to drown his anxieties in his old debauchery. ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... these armies well, you must bear in mind that the immense French army had, among its notable persons, almost the whole of that wicked nobility, whose debauchery had made France a desert; and so besotted were they by pride, and by contempt for the common people, that they had scarcely any bowmen (if indeed they had any at all) in their whole enormous number: which, compared with the English army, was at least as six to one. For these proud fools had said ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... endeavours to have the children of the emancipated, and even of the enslaved Africans, instructed in common literature—in the principles of virtue and religion, and in those mechanic arts which will keep them most constantly employed, and, of course, will less subject them to idleness and debauchery; and thus prepare them for becoming good citizens of the United States: a privilege and elevation to which we look forward with pleasure, and which we believe can be best merited by habits of industry ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... with all the appearance of absolute sincerity, and made no attempt to palliate or tone down anything that told against himself. He admitted that upon reaching New York he had entered upon a career of wild dissipation. He drank, gambled and indulged in debauchery to such an extent that in less than six weeks he had got pretty nearly to the end of his four hundred pounds. He assumed a false name and carefully abstained from ever looking at the newspapers, so that he remained in ignorance of all that had taken place in the neighborhood ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... the probable destiny of the Pandora. Her voyage was to be a success; five hundred more unfortunate beings were to swell the ranks of slavery—her captain would be enriched—her crew would receive bounty and live for a time in riotous debauchery—and all this at the expense of every right of humanity—every principle ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... This costume, utterly uncouth, seemed to have been invented as a final test of grace, and to show that there was nothing too ridiculous for fashion to consecrate. The rider seemed to be about thirty years old, but he was really twenty-two; perhaps he owed this appearance of age to debauchery, possibly to the perils of the period. In spite of his preposterous dress, he had a certain elegance of manner which proved him to be a man ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... was the most attractive part of the colony, and the scene of infinite idleness and debauchery in the early days of the Spanish settlement. As Margarite and other mutineers had acted, so did Roldan and his soldiers now act, making sallies against several of the chain of forts that stretched across the island, and even upon Isabella itself; and returning ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... feminine note, despite his sensibility, is missing. He has control of his technical forces and he never indulged in such nervous excesses as Kubin. Besides, he is sincere, while the other is usually cynical. He deals with the same old counters, love and death, debauchery and consequent corruption. He is an exponent of feverish visions, yet you never feel that he is borne down by his contact with dwellers on the threshold. A border-lander, as is Maurice Maeterlinck, Munch has a more precise vision; in a word he is a mystic, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... lowest abyss of crime, and who would a short time ago have expiated their crimes on a scaffold. They generally work or rob for a space, and when well stocked with gold, retire to Melbourne for a month or so, living in drunkenness and debauchery. If, however, their holiday is spent at the diggings, the sly grog-shop is the last scene of their boisterous career. Spirit selling is strictly prohibited; and although Government will license a respectable public-house on the ROAD, it is resolutely ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... to fawn! He was not formed to plod through the dull mediocrities of fortune; he must toss up for the All or the Nothing! It was no control over himself that made Varney now turn his thoughts from certain grave designs on Percival St. John to the brutal debauchery of his three companions,—rather, he then yielded most to his natural self. And when the morning star rose over the night he passed with low profligates and venal nymphs; when over the fragments on ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... according to its size. A number of these boats frequently sailed in company. The boatmen were proverbially lawless at every town and landing, and indulged without restraint in every species of dissipation, debauchery and excess. But this race has become reformed, or nearly extinct;—yes, reformed by the mighty power of steam. A steamboat, with half the crew of a barge or keel, will carry ten times the burden, and perform six or eight trips in the time it took a keel ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... the tiara became the purchase of an ambitious family, which had already furnished two popes, in behalf of a boy of twelve years of age, who reigned by the name of Benedict the Ninth. This youth, as he grew up, contaminated his rule with every kind of profligacy and debauchery. But even he, according to Benno, was a pupil in the school of Silvester, and became no mean proficient in the arts of sorcery. Among other things he caused the matrons of Rome by his incantations to follow him in ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... "Succubus." Pare mentions the perverted appetites of pregnant women, and says that they have been known to eat plaster, ashes, dirt, charcoal, flour, salt, spices, to drink pure vinegar, and to indulge in all forms of debauchery. Plot gives the case of a woman who would gnaw and eat all the linen off her bed. Hufeland's Journal records the history of a case of a woman of thirty-two, who had been married ten years, who acquired a strong taste for charcoal, and ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... set of dissolute men like himself; who, let loose from the restraint under which they had been held, during the latter hypocritical days of Louis XIV., now gave way to every kind of debauchery. With these men the regent used to shut himself up, after the hours of business, and excluding all graver persons and graver concerns, celebrate the most drunken and disgusting orgies; where obscenity and blasphemy formed the seasoning of conversation. ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... in either ring for an unscrupulous scoundrelism which made his fortune. His father had added to the family treasure and importance by cautious usury and adventurous stock-jobbing. Horace himself was a gentleman at large, with no other profession than the consistent pursuit of all kinds of debauchery. He was calculating even in his pleasures, and, they say, kept a regular ledger and daybook of the moneys disbursed in ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... circumstances, easily over-reached, easily seduced. If they are many, the wages of corruption are the lower; and would to God it were not rather a contemptible and hypocritical adulation than a charitable sentiment, to say that there is already no debauchery, no corruption, no bribery, no perjury, no blind fury, and interested faction among the electors in many parts of this kingdom: nor is it surprising, or at all blamable, in that class of private men, when they see their neighbours aggrandised, and themselves ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... sturdy smoker for years. Goethe did not smoke, neither did Shakespeare. I cannot recall a single allusion to Tobacco in all his plays; even Sir Toby Belch does not add the pipe to his burnt sack. But Shakespeare hated every form of debauchery. The penitence of Cassio is more prominent than was his fun. 'What! drunk? and talk fustian and speak parrot, and discourse with one's shadow?' Shakespeare held drunkenness in disgust. Even Falstaff is more an intellectual ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... those days, so the street outside Newgate had not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since attached to it. But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and villainy were practised, and where dire diseases were bred, that came into court with the prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself, and pulled him off the bench. It had more than once happened, that the ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... a great war, the waste of unheard-of sums of money, the giving of contracts involving millions by which fortunes were made in a night, the riot of speculation and debauchery by those who tried to get rich suddenly without labour, had created a new Capital of the Nation. The vulture army of the base, venal, unpatriotic, and corrupt, which had swept down, a black cloud, in wartime to take advantage of the misfortunes of the Nation, had settled in Washington ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... observed the lowest strata of city life, who has drawn the most miserable outcasts, the most abandoned men and women in the dregs of society, who has invented many dreadful scenes of passion, lust, seduction, and debauchery; and yet in forty works and more you will not find a page which a mother need withhold from her grown daughter. As Thackeray wrote of his friend:—"I am grateful for the innocent laughter and the sweet and unsullied page ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... citizens".(2) Security and peace of mind, in this world and for the next, were, we know not how, borne into the hearts of Pindar and Sophocles in the Mysteries. Yet, if we may at all trust the Fathers, there were scenes of debauchery, as at the Mysteries of the Fijians (Nanga) there was buffoonery ("to amuse the boys," Mr. Howitt says of some Australian rites), the story of Baubo is only one example, and, in other mysteries than the Eleusinian, we know of mummeries in which ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... deepest gloom and depression. Henry VIII. might have heard that voice mingling with the groans of his victims; Charles II. could not altogether shut it out from the scenes of his midnight revel and debauchery. But no such hopeful contrast meets us in the features or the history of the neighboring continent. Democracy, it is true, the rough and hardy growth of the German forests, struck an earlier root and flourished at first with better promise there than in England. But this ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... was created a Cardinal when a spoilt boy, and became, as a man, infamous for his debauchery and villainy. Sixtus had the effrontery to select him as successor to Archbishop Orsini in Florence, but his action was prompted by a motive, which was firmly fixed in his heart. This was nothing less than the supplanting of Lorenzo de' Medici by Piero or Girolamo! ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... rare and heroic virtues will be sure to have its superstructure in the basest profligacy and corruption. An honorable and fair profit is the best security against avarice and rapacity; as in all things else, a lawful and regulated enjoyment is the best security against debauchery and excess. For as wealth is power, so all power will infallibly draw wealth to itself by some means or other; and when men are left no way of ascertaining their profits but by their means of obtaining ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in the mere smother and froth of life—the brilliant froth. There thoughts, sentiments, opinions, feelings, actions too, are nothing but agitation in empty space—to amuse life—a sort of superior debauchery, exciting and fatiguing, meaning nothing, leading nowhere. She is the creature of that circle. And I ask myself if she is obeying the uneasiness of an instinct seeking its satisfaction, or is it a revulsion of feeling, or is she merely deceiving her own heart by this dangerous trifling with romantic ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... Younger succeeded to the government of Syracuse in 367, but he was incompetent to the task; and his tyranny and debauchery brought about his temporary overthrow, ten years later, by Dion, his father's brother-in-law. Dion had enjoyed unusual favors under Dionysius the Elder, and was now a man of wealth and high position, as well as of great energy and marked mental capacities. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... disciplined soldiers and armed men who, for nearly three months, day and night, had never ceased to attack the position; and the Kaisarbagh, that pretentious, garish palace of the Kings of Oudh, the centre of every kind of evil and debauchery. ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... their parents, the lowest and most degraded set of brutes in England, teach them swearing and indecency at home, and rob them of all decent education, and drive them to their death, in order to squeeze a few shillings out of their young lives; for what?—to waste in drink and debauchery. Count the public houses ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... had begun during their last joint campaigns in France, crystallised into definite parties the discordant tendencies that had been well marked since the crisis of 1371. The old king was a mere pawn in the game. His health had been broken by the debauchery and frivolity to which he had abandoned himself after the death of Queen Philippa. He was now entirely under the influence of Alice Perrers, a Hertfordshire squire's daughter, whose venality, greed, and shamelessness ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... been reduced to receive it from those who believed neither Catholicism nor Protestantism, but who read the Bible in search of the picturesque. We thus refuse to regard the painters who passed their lives in prayer, but are perfectly ready to be taught by those who spent them in debauchery. There is perhaps no more popular Protestant picture than Salvator's "Witch of Endor," of which the subject was chosen by the painter simply because, under the names of Saul and the Sorceress, he could paint a captain of banditti, and ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... they damned the blackguards pretty freely. In numberless instances the blackguards were to all intents and purposes damned before Muggleton's sentence was pronounced. They were fellows given over to drink and debauchery, sots who had not much life in them, scoundrels who were in hiding, skulking in the vilest holes of the city, whom the plague or famine would be likely to rid the world of any day. They died frequently enough after the sentence was pronounced, ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... who have invited you, if you were to examine them one by one, every one of them would be found to have deserved ten thousand deaths; for the very rascality and offscouring of the whole country, who have spent in debauchery their own substance, and, by way of trial beforehand, have madly plundered the neighboring villages and cities, in the upshot of all, have privately run together into this holy city. They are robbers, who by their prodigious wickedness have profaned this most sacred floor, and who are ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... scenes of humble happiness and content, the toiler in the fields, the family about the hearth-stone, which scarcely are seen by the chronicler busy with kings and popes. There are superstitions and mummeries; wild fears of spectres and devils; sentimental piety handed with cruelty and debauchery. There are inward struggles, sorrows, achievements; rapturous glimpses, tender consolations; the ministry of faithful priests; the comforting of women and the purifying of men by the thought of the Virgin Mother and the ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... attractive as they were, excited less admiration than the account which Adams gave of their virtuous conduct. He assured his visitors that not one instance of debauchery or immoral conduct had occurred among these young people, since their settlement on the island; nor did he ever hear, or believe, that any one instance had occurred of a young woman having suffered indecent liberties to be taken with her. Their native modesty, assisted by the precepts ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... backward to the promiscuity of the sexes (excuse me, he said to the lady), the haphazard sin of certain raskolniks. The old foundation is shattered; we must build a new one, but we must not preach debauchery." ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... was born at Bagdad, had a moderate fortune left me by my father and mother, who died within a few days of each other. Though I was then but young, I did not squander away my fortune as most young men do, in idle expenses and debauchery; on the contrary, I neglected no opportunity to increase it by my industry. At last I became rich enough to purchase fourscore camels, which I let out to merchants for caravans, who paid me well for every journey I went with them throughout the ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... was, freely and openly, a life of shameless debauchery, wholesale blackmail and political intrigue, it is marvellous how his power became so unlimited. To those who disbelieved in his doctrine or in his divinity, he simply smiled evilly, and said: "If you fail to do my bidding you will ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... stigma. Their houses were built, their coffers were replenished, from the drained resources of exhausted provincials. Every young man of active ambition or noble birth, whose resources had been impoverished by debauchery and extravagance, had but to borrow fresh sums in order to give magnificent gladiatorial shows, and then, if he could once obtain an aedileship, and mount to the higher offices of the State, he would ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... majority of writers draw from the three courts that occupied society at that time, the Rue des Tournelles, Madame de Sevigne, and Versailles, is, that men demand human nature and will have it in preference to abnormal goodness, and female debauchery. Ninon never hesitated to declaim against the fictitious beauty that pretended to inculcate virtue and morality while secretly engaged in the most corrupt practices, but Moliere came with his Precieuses Ridicules and ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... unheard of. Entire streets dispeopled; nonagenarians and girls of sixteen decapitated after a mockery of a trial; death buffeted, insulted, adorned, rejoiced in; executions to music; battalions of children recruited to guard the scaffold; the debauchery, the cynicism, the refinements of an insane satrap; a romance by Sade turned epic; it seems, as we watch the unpacking of these horrors, that a whole country, long terrorised, is at last disgorging its terror and revenging itself for its cowardice ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... understand me. I suppose it's hopeless that you ever will. We are too different. You regard me as a vulgar reprobate, who by some odd freak of nature happens to be akin to you. I can picture so well what your imagination makes of me. All the instances of debauchery and general blackguardism that the commerce of life has forced upon your knowledge go towards completing the ideal. It's a pity. I have always felt that you and I might have been a great deal to each other if you had had a reasonable education. I remember you as a child rebelling ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... to the Crowley family, and when you have become acquainted with them bear well in mind that in this broad land of ours there are thousands upon thousands of families in a condition as deplorable, and some whose mercury line of debauchery has dropped to a point of miserable existence as yet unsounded by ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... was harsh and ungenerous, held in close neighborhood with felons and loose livers, and not informed of what they were accused. Leach and Edes kept diaries when in prison. "From the 2d July to the 17th," writes Leach, "a Complicated scene of Oaths, Curses, Debauchery, and the most horrid Blasphemy, committed by the Provost Marshal, his Deputy and Soldiers, who were our guard, Soldier prisoners, and sundry soldier women, confined for Thefts, &c.... When our Wives, Children, and Friends ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... outnumbered the invaders, and were better provided with munitions of war; yet the pirates, fighting with the bravery of desperate men, were victorious, and the city fell into their hands. Then followed days of murder, plunder, and debauchery. Morgan saw his followers, maddened by liquor, scoff at the idea of discipline and obedience. Fearing that while his men were helplessly drunk the Spaniards would rally and cut them to pieces, he set fire to the city, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... her, Lucy,—thoroughly unworthy. This man, who calls himself devoted to a creature as innocent as she is lovely,—who pretends to feel a pure and genuine passion for this pure and too-believing girl, passes his evenings, his nights, in drinking, in gambling, in debauchery of the lowest and most degrading nature. He is doubtless at this very instant at the wretched beer-shop at the corner of the common—the haunt of all that is wicked, and corrupter of all that is frail, 'The Foaming Tankard'. ...
— The Beauty Of The Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... debauchery," said she. She was pleased with her way of putting it; she was pleased, immeasurably ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... trials of the children of poverty and crime. The lodgers moved slowly off to bed, one by one; the kitchen was securely locked up, and the landlord then walked away, leaving drunkenness, misery and debauchery about the door. ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... was expatriated; and that Trajan colonised Dacia from various parts of the Empire; but the custom of the Roman generals, which Trajan would doubtless have followed, was to divide the most fertile districts amongst their veteran soldiers,[100] and therefore, if the charges of cowardice and debauchery made by Carra were true, they would apply to the bravest in the legions who had conquered the almost indomitable Decebalus. But Carra lived and wrote at a time (A.D. 1777) when cool judgment could hardly be expected in a writer on Roumania, ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... time he reveals his love as though he told the tale of another, but he is met with scorn and only bidden to fight the husband who has repulsed her. Bellmour, meantime, in despair and rage at his misery plunges into reckless debauchery, and in company with Sir Timothy visits a bagnio, where they meet Betty Flauntit, the knight's kept mistress, and other cyprians. Hither they are tracked by Charles, Bellmour's younger brother, and Trusty, Lord Plotwell's old steward. Sharp words pass, the brothers fight and Charles is slighted ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... youngest) married, and left me alone. Some time after, my eldest sister's husband sold all that he had, and with that money and my sister's portion they went both into Africa, where her husband, by riotous living and debauchery' spent all; and finding himself reduced to poverty, found a pretext for divorcing my sister, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... mentioned by the missionaries as the favorite pastime of the Indians; and as it was impossible to do away with them altogether, they contented themselves with suppressing their most objectionable features, drunkenness and debauchery, and changed them, at least in name, from ceremonies in honor of some heathen god, to some saint in the Roman calendar. In some of these, vast numbers of assistants took part, as is mentioned by Xahila ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... Progress at all adequately, one must read Grace Abounding. It is a short book, written in the years when he was already growing old, for those whom he had brought into the fold of religion. From this autobiography it has usually been supposed that he had led a life of the wildest debauchery before his Christian days; but the more one examines the book, and indeed all his books, the less is one inclined to believe in any such desperate estimate of the sins of his youth. The measure of sin is the sensitiveness of a man's conscience; and where, as in Bunyan's case, the conscience is abnormally ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... again!—The London Chronicle of August 14, 1788, quoting from a "gentleman" who had visited this town, says that "the people are all diminutive in size, sickly in appearance, and spend their Sundays in low debauchery," the manufacturers being noted for "a great deal of trick and low cunning ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... was but a matter of money price and that pardons could be easily bought for any offence, as the venality of the clergy was astounding. The corruption of the time was great, and the priests themselves were steeped in crime and debauchery. In former generations, the Church at Rome had many times issued strict orders against the marriage of the clergy, and, doubtless as one of the consequences of this regulation, it had become the custom for many of the priests to have ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... to the surroundings of their houses. They are very polite and courteous. This character and their dress are accounted for by their long subjection to tyranny. They are "profoundly immoral," have indecent dances, and are dying out on account of the "exhaustion of men and women by premature debauchery."[1457] The Kavirondo are naked, but are, "for negroes, a moral race, disliking real indecency and only giving way to lewd actions in their ceremonial dances, where indeed the intention is not immodest, as the pantomime ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... at a different period of the bombardment—speaks of well-dressed people "loitering in the boulevards as if nothing were going on. The cafes, indeed, were ordered to close their doors at midnight, but behind closed shutters went on gambling, drinking and debauchery. After spending a riotous night, fast men and women considered it a joke to drive out to the Arch of Triumph and see how the fight was ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... in any thing that is innocent, and are fortunate in finding any occupation which prevents the effects of a temper that would prey upon themselves, or upon their fellow creatures. But they who are blessed with a happy disposition, with capacity and vigour, incur a real debauchery, by having any amusement that occupies an improper share of their time; and are really cheated of their happiness, in being made to believe, that any occupation or pastime is better fitted to amuse themselves, than that which at the same time produces ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... thrown upon London streets, their vices and debauchery, by a sordid and rapacious mother. What the younger girl was then, the elder had been once; and what the elder then was, the younger must soon become. A melancholy prospect, but how surely to be realised; a tragic drama, but how often acted! Turn to the prisons and police offices of London—nay, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... are, lads," cried Macgregor, his flushed face still blazing with wrath, which he made no effort to subdue, and his eyes red with prolonged debauchery, flashing like the eyes of a tiger—"here we are, too late to cut off the retreat o' these detestable reptiles from the woods, but not too late to ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... know how, upon occasion, to give it to themselves. It is not for weak beings, who enter into a composition with guilt, and cover selfishness and cowardice with the name of prudence. It is not for corrupt wretches, who rise from the bed of debauchery, or from the mire of indigence, to feast their eyes upon the blood that streams from the scaffold. It is the portion of a people who delight in humanity, practice justice, despise their flatterers, and respect the truth. While you ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... their fatal contest in B.C. 510, which ended in the ruin of Sybaris. During the whole of this period they were two of the most flourishing cities in all Hellas. Sybaris in particular attained to an extraordinary degree of wealth, and its inhabitants were so notorious for their luxury, effeminacy, and debauchery, that their name has become proverbial for a voluptuary in ancient and modern times. Croton was the chief seat of the Pythagorean philosophy. Pythagroras was a native of Samos, but emigrated to Croton, where ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... men conduct their elections," Dolly went on, smilingly. "But the women of the present day wouldn't stand it. They would change it right away. They wouldn't continue giving the men an excuse two or three times a year to engage in all that carnage and debauchery for no rational reason. Do you know the sort of election the women will hold, Warren, if they ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... Proclamation against drinking, swearing, and debauchery, was read to our ships companies in the fleet, and indeed it gives great ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... OF OLD FATHER CHRISTMAS for encouraging his Majesty's subjects in Idleness, Drunkenness, Gaming, Rioting, and all manner of Extravagance and Debauchery, at the Assizes held in the city of Profusion before the Lord Chief Justice Churchman, Mr. Justice Feast, Mr. Justice Gambol, and several other his Majesty's Justices of Oyer ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... and were brought before the ecclesiastical magistrate at Poitiers. They accused Grandier of having corrupted women and girls, of indulging in blasphemy and profanity, of neglecting to read his breviary daily, and of turning God's sanctuary into a place of debauchery and prostitution. The information was taken down, and Louis Chauvet, the civil lieutenant, and the archpriest of Saint-Marcel and the Loudenois, were appointed to investigate the matter, so that, while Urbain was instituting proceedings against ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... an age of corruption and debauchery, and though closely associated with Humanists who had hardly a thin veneer of Christianity, and who were bent on reviving paganism, yet himself maintained a positive Christian faith and a pure and simple life. He found it possible to be a priest in the Christian Church ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... cities is decency compared with what prevails in this; it has features of a peculiar and striking description, and the general expression is that of a monstrous union of opposite vices. Alternately dissolute and cruel, gay and vindictive, the Parisian vaunts amidst debauchery the triumph of assassination, and enlivens his midnight orgies by recounting the sufferings of the massacred aristocrates: women, whose profession it is to please, assume the bonnet rouge [red cap], and affect, as a means of seduction, an intrepid and ferocious courage.—I ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... learned in the past may point out exceptions to this rule. But Charles James Fox or Bolingbroke were only competing with equals in the art of genteel debauchery. Their habits were those of their competitors. They were not fighting men who safeguarded their health and kept a cool head in the morning. It is impossible to imagine to-day a leader of the Opposition who, after a night of gambling ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... preserved his soul pure, loving and serene in the midst of the savagery of war, the sorrows of life, and the corruption of his time, and Johann Christian Guenther, the unbalanced genius who wore himself out in debauchery and despair, casting his life to the four winds. He had translated Guenther's cries of provocation and vengeful irony against the hostile God who overwhelms His creatures, his furious curses like those of a Titan overthrown hurling the thunder back against the heavens. He had selected Fleming's ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Objection, That the Debauchery of the Town is to be attributed to the Looseness ...
— A Letter to A.H. Esq.; Concerning the Stage (1698) and The - Occasional Paper No. IX (1698) • Anonymous
... Nero clapped his hands, other followed, and in a moment clapping of hands was heard all around,—for Crispinilla had been divorced a number of times, and was known throughout Rome for her fabulous debauchery. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... race, fed on the coarsest food, subject to the tyranny of brutalised overseers, often themselves convicts; your ears forced to listen to the foulest language, your eyes to witness the grossest debauchery, till you yourself become as bad as those with whom you are compelled to herd; so that, when the time of your punishment is expired, you will be unfit for freedom; and if you venture to return home, you will find yourself, wherever you appear, branded with dishonour, and ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... vice whose hardened subjects would prolong It even beyond the grave by asking that "a bottle of whiskey may be put in their coffin." The obedience of the children was rewarded by invitations to drink, which initiated them in debauchery. It was among women abandoned to drink that lived Eliza Clark, a child of eleven years, paying for the drinks with the gains which she realized from dancing or singing; in return, the women gave her ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... postponed or prevented altogether. I found it a refinement of luxury to prolong the period of tumescence as far as possible, by frequently checking a too rapid progress toward the goal. By this practice of repeated arrest when the orgasm was imminent, and the mental debauchery which was its habitual accompaniment, I believe I did my nervous system more damage than by anything else—even the early age at which the dangerous indulgence became established. Nocturnal emissions ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... was the most infamous Chief Justice that ever existed in England. Charles II. and James II. well acquainted with his talents for chicane, his debauchery and blood-thirstiness, his baseness and his crimes, made use of him to exterminate, with the sword of law, all those worthy men who defended the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... spoiling his life. After the war, enriched by the death of his wife, he had come back to live prudently on his fortune in his mansion on the avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, tormented by the hereditary malady of which he was to die young, having gained from his precocious debauchery a salutary fear of pleasure, resolved above all to shun emotions and responsibilities, so that he might last as long as possible. Acute pains in the limbs, rheumatic he thought them, had been alarming him for some time past; he saw himself in fancy already an invalid tied down to an easy-chair; ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... who were privileged to eat of it, there were carried up to the dead-house the baskets of long-pig. It is told that the feasts were long kept up; the people came from them brutishly exhausted with debauchery, and the chiefs heavy with their beastly food. There are certain sentiments which we call emphatically human—denying the honour of that name to those who lack them. In such feasts—particularly where the victim had been slain at home, and men banqueting on the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sunshine." As a young man Diogenes had been given to all excesses of dissipation; but he later went to the opposite extreme of asceticism, being one of the earliest and most striking illustrations of "plain living and high thinking." The debauchery of his youth and the privation and exposure of his old age did not deeply affect his hardy constitution, for he is said to have lived to the age of ninety. In the charming play by the Elizabethan, John Lyly, A moste excellente Comedie of Alexander, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... knowledge, the more virtue; the more understanding, the less courage. Why then is the plume elevated to the head? and what must the present mode of female education and manners end in, but in more ignorance, dissipation, debauchery and luxury? and, at length, in national ruin. Thus it was at ROME, the mistress of the world; they became fond of the most vicious men, and such as meant to enslave them, who corrupted their hearts, by humouring and gratifying their follies, and encouraging, on all sides, idleness and dissolute ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... on, from generation to generation, and this is why the morals, intelligence and progress of Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippine Islands, are to-day on the same plane of depravity as they were centuries ago, and no one is to blame for this carnality and debauchery of the inhabitants of these islands but the Roman Catholic Church, and until the Government of the United States shall declare and back up her declaration by Protestant manhood, the inhabitants of these islands will never ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... brave. And, indeed, if modesty, and decency, and chastity, and, in one word, temperance, is only upheld by the fear of punishment or infamy, and not out of regard to their own sanctity, then what lengths will adultery and debauchery and lust shrink from proceeding to, if there is a hope either of escaping detection, or ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... under British discipline, though there are but few in the Indian army. Sobriety and hardiness characterize the bulk of the people, though the higher classes are too often stained with deep and degrading debauchery. The first impression made by the Afghan is favourable. The European, especially if he come from India, is charmed by their apparently frank, open-hearted, hospitable and manly manners; but the charm is not of long duration, and he finds that the Afghan is as cruel and crafty as he is independent. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... man, on coming of age, acquired control of the whole of his father's property, and soon started on a career of extravagance and debauchery. His mother, however, retained some influence over him, and persuaded him, a year later, before he had had time to dissipate the whole of his inheritance, to return with her to England, hoping that the moral ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the Jesuits to their village. But Brebeuf's demands were heavy. They should believe in God; keep His commandments; abjure their faith in dreams; take one wife and be true to her; renounce their assemblies of debauchery; eat no human flesh; never give feasts to demons; and make a vow that if God would deliver them from the pest they would build a chapel to offer Him thanksgiving and praise. They were ready to make the vow regarding the chapel, but the other conditions were too severe—the pest was preferable. ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... would besmear her virtue. And the lewd fellow, perceiving that the lady did not stop her ears, commenced to describe to her, after the fashion of arabesque pictures, which at that time were much esteemed, the wanton inventions of debauchery. Then did his eyes shoot flame, his words burn, and his voice ring, and he himself took great pleasure in calling to mind the various ways of his ladies, naming them to Madame d'Hocquetonville, and even revealing ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... success. So I charged the taverners and confectioners and fruiterers and candle-chandlers and the keepers of brothels and bawdy houses to acquaint me of these two good men whenever they should anywhere be engaged in drinking or other debauchery, or together or apart; and ordered that, if they both or if either of them bought at their shops aught for the purpose of wassail and carousel, the vendors should not conceal-it from me. And they replied, 'We hear ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... some pity for this monarch of twenty-three years, born with fine talents, a taste for literature and the arts, a character naturally generous, whom an execrable mother had tried to deprave by all the abuses of debauchery ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... discipline; who threaten to fire on their officers; who stray off the road, pillage everything, and take aim at the corporal who tries to bring them back." At Blois, a part of the regiment "has just arrived without either clothes or arms, the soldiers having sold all on the road to provide for their debauchery." One among them, delegated by his companions, proposes to the Jacobins at Paris to "de-aristocratise" the army by cashiering all the nobles. Another declares, with the applause of the club, that "seeing how the palisades of Givet are constructed, he is going to denounce the Minister ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Mazarin, who tricked the nobles into order; and Mazarin's pupil, Louis XIV, who bribed them into order. But a nobility borne on high by the labor of a servile class must despise labor; so there came those weary years of indolent gambling and debauchery and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... after having had offspring, or for any other prince on account of the peace of the entire kingdom or province, to prevent the exposure of the entire kingdom or province to wars, carnage, pillae, debauchery, conflagrations, murders,—nevertheless, in private persons who abandon vows in apostasy such grounds for dispensations cannot be urged. For the assumption is repelled that the vow concerns a matter that is impossible. For continence, which so many thousands of men and virgins ...
— The Confutatio Pontificia • Anonymous
... masterpiece of genius. Plutarch, in his usual graphic style, places him before us as if he were an acquaintance,—aloof from the world; immersed in the study of his high calling, with his brow never unbent from care and thought; severely abstemious in the midst of dissoluteness and debauchery; a water-drinker among Greeks; like that other Agonistes, elected and ordained to struggle, to suffer, and to perish for a people ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... falsehoods off his reel as you have been doing. You might have borne up for Greenwich, and been looked after by a grateful country; or you might have saved money enough to have kept yourself in comfort to the end of your days; but it all went in drink and debauchery, and now you abuse the government for not looking after you. Howsumdever, Tom Fletcher, I'm very sorry for you, and if you'll knock off this sort of vagabond life, which brings disgrace on the name of a British sailor, I'll answer for it our good captain will exert his ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... along the water-front. With an exoteric eye (for the deeps of the man were in communion) he regarded the faces of all nations. Coral City held as complete a record of crime, cruelty, and debauchery as one could find in the human indices of any port. Many were closing their annals of error in decrepitude and beggary; others were well-knit studies of evil, with health still hanging on, more or less, and much deviltry to do. A blue blouse, ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... Christian congregation one sees in the faces on every hand that peculiar cast of feature which Christian nurture, inherited through many centuries, has produced; and it is only here and there that a face may be seen in the lines of which is written the tale of debauchery or crime. But in this Corinthian congregation these awful hieroglyphics are everywhere. "Know ye not," Paul writes to them, "that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... reform was broached to the world, there was prescription in favor of violence, debauchery, and selfishness; when Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and their disciples reconstructed philosophy and the sciences, there was prescription in favor of the Aristotelian philosophy; when our fathers of '89 demanded liberty and ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... addition to the title of Viscount Purbeck, assumed that of Earl of Buckingham, the reversion of which had been secured by the first Earl and Duke to his brother and his heirs, in the case of his own direct heirs failing. This self-styled Earl squandered his fortune in a life of debauchery, and then married the daughter of a clergyman, a widow with a large jointure but about as dissolute in character as himself, which is saying much. He ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... made their way down the main street, it would have required no great strain upon the imagination to have fancied that the town had recently been carried by assault, and the victorious troops allowed the licence consequent upon street fighting. Even in the few short hours of occupation debauchery had had its way. Drunkenness is the worst attribute of irregular soldiering upon five shillings a-day. If the Colonial has money he will drink. Where the average white man greets a friend and acquaintance with a hand-shake, the South African Colonial calls him to the nearest ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... during his early years, and led a life that in any city but Rome would have occasioned talk. He got into a great many youthful scrapes, and nothing seemed to please him better than to repeatedly bring his father's gray hairs down in sorrow to the grave. Debauchery was a matter to which he gave much thought, and many a time he was found consuming the midnight oil while pursuing his studies ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... will remain, a city of the fifteenth century. It is now only a relic of a cruel and barbarous period, when the Portuguese governors, the "gentlemen adventurers," and the Arab slave-dealers, under its blue skies, and hidden within its barred and painted walls, led lives of magnificent debauchery, when the tusks of ivory were piled high along its water-front, and the dhows at anchor reeked with slaves, and when in the market-place, where the natives now sit bargaining over a bunch of bananas or a basket of dried fish, their forefathers were ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... There, however, there were only scattered cottages and isolated farms; wastes and woods so separated the families from one another that the exercise of any mutual control was impossible. Shame is stronger than conscience. I need not tell you of all the bonds of infamy that united masters and slaves. Debauchery, extortion, and fraud were both precept and example for my youth, and life went on merrily. All notions of justice were scoffed at; creditors were defrauded of both interest and capital; any law officer who ventured to serve a summons received a sound thrashing, and the mounted police were fired ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... of theft and debauchery met the detectives at every turn, but, helped in a great measure by the publicity the American newspapers gave to the movements of his pursuers, Eyraud was able to elude them, and in March they returned to France to concert further ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... one of them shouted a name, generally Peden's name, or the name of some dealer or bouncer in his hall. Nobody answered, nobody raised hand or voice to interfere or protest. During their short reign of pillage and debauchery under the protection of the city marshal, the members of the gang had not made a friend who cared to risk his skin to ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... movements—no easy matter, for he is very shrewd and cautious—I soon found out that the law club was a myth, and that his nights were passed in the wildest debauchery. He had not only resumed all his old vices, but ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... that time, when the population of Salem was not half so great as it is at present, more riot, debauchery, and vice, obtruded themselves upon the sight in a week, than could now be discovered by diligent search in a month. The corruption of manners was so general, that almost none escaped from its contaminating influence. Mechanics ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... told also of Anacreon. Perhaps in both cases it was a poetical fiction to mark the love of wine which distinguished these two personages; for Sophocles is accused by Athenaeus of licentiousness and debauchery, particularly when he commanded the Athenian army. In like manner it is asserted by Pausanias that Bacchus appeared to Aeschylus under the shadow of a vine, and ordered him to write tragedies, thereby figuratively alluding to the well known truth that that poet drank wine ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... inundation do not frustrate his labour; and the pursuits of agriculture are more favourable to health, and consequently to population, than mechanical employments in crowded cities, and large manufactories, where those who are doomed to toil are more liable to become the victims of disease and debauchery, than such as are exposed to the free and open air, and to active and wholesome labour. In China there are few of such manufacturing cities. No great capitals are here employed in any one branch of ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... exhaust themselves; every victory of the passions drawing down the creative force from the higher planes, to waste it on the lower; till at last what had been an attempt of the Spirit to lift humanity up on to nobler lines of evolution, and to open a new order of ages, expires in debauchery, weakness, degeneracy, physical and moral death. The worst fate you could wish a man is genius without moral strength. It wrecks individuals, and it wrecks nations. I said we stand now on an isthmus of time; fifth-century ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... tawdry, half squalid streets that one finds in the vicinities of our theatres; some wretched courts, haunts of misery and crime, blended with gin palaces and slang taverns, burnished and brazen; not a being was stirring. It was just that single hour of the twenty-four when crime ceases, debauchery is exhausted, and even desolation finds ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... license of an Orleans or a Stuart, and although in this respect he wanted not for patterns, yet rumor persisted in attaching to his excesses a certain criminal blackness below the standard dye of aristocratic debauchery. It is but reasonable to presume, that a man so universally obnoxious should have suffered, to some extent, from that calumny which the best find it difficult to repel, and practical evidence was furnished in certain public suits, that ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... wretchedness and raggedness, their Petition of Grievances; and, for answer, getting a brand-new Gallows forty feet high? Hunger and Darkness, through long years! For look back on that earlier Paris Riot, when a Great Personage, worn out by debauchery, was believed to be in want of Blood-baths; and Mothers, in worn raiment, yet with living hearts under it, 'filled the public places' with their wild Rachel-cries,—stilled also by the Gallows. Twenty years ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... day standing at the street corners, begging, a miserable-looking object, exciting the pity of the humane, and gathering in money to spend in drunken debauchery at night. He has been known to bring in some days as high as ten and some fifteen dollars, all of which is wasted in riot before the next morning. He lives just over the way, and night after night I can hear his howls and curses and laughter mingled with those of the ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... the Puritan impulse from within. It is, indeed, but a single manifestation of one of the deepest prejudices of a religious and half-cultured people—the prejudice against beauty as a form of debauchery and corruption—the distrust of all ideas that do not fit readily into certain accepted axioms—the belief in the eternal validity of moral concepts—in brief, the whole mental sluggishness of the lower orders of men. But in addition ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... lowest ebb of infamy, the shadow of which, seeming to extend over the whole land, affected nobles and people with its baleful influence. All law was at an end: the people, even while they murmured against the King, followed his evil example; and history shrinks from the scenes of debauchery and licentiousness, robbery and murder, which desecrated the land. But this state of things could not last long, while there still remained some noble hearts amongst the Castilians. Five years after their ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... into the country, and abandoned himself to debauchery; but he did not long survive his abdication; he was seized with a horrible distemper, and died a loathsome and mortifying object, and a melancholy proof of the futility of ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... got a very distinct impression of him. He was a very handsome young man of five-and-twenty, and I must own I was impressed by him. I had expected to see a dirty ragamuffin, sodden with drink and debauchery. He was on the contrary, the most elegant gentleman I had ever met' extremely well dressed, with an air and manner only to be found in a man accustomed to culture and refinement. I was not the only person surprised. It was a surprise to all the townspeople to whom, of course, young Stavrogin's ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... that many superficial folks think virtue tame and vice exhilarating. Here lies the difficulty. They look on those parts which are contiguous to vice, but are really not parts of it. In the self of vice is nothing attractive. Lying, lust, envy, hate, debauchery,—which of these is not tainted? Penuriousness is vice unadorned, and who thinks it fair? Like Spenser's "false Duessa," it is revolting. Drunkenness, bestiality, spleen,—what roseate views shall you ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... effects. It gave birth to new wants, and new desires. Veterans, long accustomed to hardship and toil, acquired of a sudden a taste for profuse and inconsiderate dissipation and indulged in all the excesses of military licentiousness. The riot of low debauchery occupied some; a relish for expensive luxuries spread among others. The meanest soldier in Peru would have thought himself degraded by marching on foot; and, at a time when the price of horses in that country was exorbitant, each individual ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... two are brethren, and we have a third brother, a lewd fellow and good for nothing. When our father died, he left us some money, which we shared amongst us, and he took his part of the inheritance and wasted it in frowardness and debauchery, till he was reduced to poverty, when he came upon us and cited us before the magistrates, avouching that we had taken his good and that of his father, and we disputed the matter before the judges and lost the money. Then he waited awhile and attacked us a second time, until he brought us to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton |
