"Degrading" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mistaken. There are two or three poor societies; it is for them to look after these cases. What is the use of having poor societies, if we are to do the work ourselves? So low! so undignified! so degrading! just ask any minister,—ask Dr. ...
— Trading • Susan Warner
... very notable projects in hand. If my son had delayed four-and-twenty hours longer in removing the Duc du Maine from the King it would have been decided to declare His Majesty of full age; but my son frustrated this by dismissing the Duke, and degrading him at the same time. The Chief President is said to have been so frightened that he remained motionless, as if he had been petrified by a gaze at the head of Medusa. That celebrated personage of antiquity could not have been more a fury than Madame du Maine; she threatened ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... pigeons, a pudding, cheese and coffee. I was so over-eaten after this 'hunger and burst' that I could scarcely move; and it was my sad fate that night in the character of the local author to eloquute before the public - 'Mr. Stevenson will read a selection from his own works' - a degrading picture. I had determined to read them the account of the hurricane; I do not know if I told you that my book has never turned up here, or rather only one copy has, and that in the unfriendly hands of -. It has therefore only been seen by enemies; and this combination of mystery and evil ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suppose that he knew or cared whether I stood ashamed, sullen, indifferent or indignant under my accuser's blows. Anger possessed me altogether, and if I thought of my new gaoler at all it was to suppose him seeing in me a subject, common in his experience, whose degrading punishment of stocks, whip or pillory was to be stuccoed over with a mockery of religion. Judge, therefore, of my surprise when, having bowed the inquisitor out of the door, Father Carnesecchi returned to the room, and putting his hand upon my shoulder, said in excellent ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... aspirations; a home of simple refinement and freedom from anxiety would restore her to her nobler self. How could he find fault with her? She knew nothing of such sordid life as he had gone through, and to lack money for necessities seemed to her degrading beyond endurance. Why, even the ordinary artisan's wife does not suffer such privations as hers at the end of the past year. For lack of that little money his life must be ruined. Of late he had often thought ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... passions, easily supposed the afflatus of some preternatural power, and easily, therefore, susceptible of personification. And the pride of men, more especially if habitually courageous and warlike, will gladly yield to the credulities which shelter a degrading and unwonted infirmity beneath the agency of a superior being. TERROR, therefore, received a shape and found an altar probably as early at least as the heroic age. According to Plutarch, Theseus sacrificed to Terror previous to his battle with the Amazons;—an idle tale, it is true, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... should," returned the other, changing his tone to one of greater satisfaction. "As a New-Zealander, I observe nothing degrading in the superiority of Old Holland." And considering the prowess of VAN TROMP in the past, there was perhaps nothing so strange in the triumph of ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 103, July 16, 1892 • Various
... "a strange face; but these monks are subject to such degrading practices; their fasts make them pale, the blows of the discipline make them hypocrites, and their eyes become inflamed through weeping for the good things of this life we common folk enjoy, but they ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... rest."—"And here," replied Philemon, "we do nothing but fret and fume if our fancied merits are not instantly rewarded, or if another wear a sprig of laurel more verdant than ourselves; I could mention, within my own recollection, a hundred instances of this degrading prostitution of talent—aye, a thousand."—"Gently reprimand your fellow creatures," resumed Lysander, "lest you commit an error as great as any of those which you condemn in others. The most difficult of human tasks seems to be the exercise of forbearance ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... tango lizard, Height, though he knew himself to be? And who was this girl, anyway, to come out of a little back-woods town where the standards of life were so narrow that all who could lived out of them in degrading secrecy, and make him feel himself unworthy when he had lived openly in a way about which his own conscience had not troubled him? Why did he hesitate to tell her about his affair with the Violet and his anxiety about her contract, and why ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... positively one of the most urgent reasons for granting suffrage to women; for it is predicated on the concession of the superiority of woman over man in purity of purpose and excellence of character. Hence the cry is, that it will not only be descending, but degrading for her to appear at the polls. But, if government is absolutely necessary, and voting not wrong in practice, it is surely desirable that the admittedly purest and best in the nation should find no obstacle to their reaching the ballot-box. Nay, the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... worthless. No work on the Negro that calls Toussaint L'Ouverture and Sojourner Truth mulattoes and that will not give the race credit for several well-known pure Negroes of the present day, can long command the attention of scholars. This whole argument on the mulatto goes back to the fallacy of degrading human beings by slavery for two hundred years and then arguing that they have not the capacity or the inclination to rise. In a country predominantly white the quadroon has frequently been given some advantage that his black friend did not have, from the time that ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... his word, temperate and enduring, and looking upon courage as the highest virtue, the true Baluch of the Derajat is a pleasant man to have dealings with. As a revenue payer he is not so satisfactory, his want of industry and the pride which looks upon manual labour as degrading making him but a poor husbandman. He is an expert rider; horse-racing is his national amusement, and the Baluch breed of horses is celebrated throughout northern India. Like the Pathan he is a bandit by tradition and descent and makes a first-rate fighting man, but he rarely ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... the Soveraigns favour. The former, (though they may faile by nature, or accident,) cannot be taken away by a Law; and therefore the losse of them is not Punishment. But the later, may be taken away by the publique authority that made them Honorable, and are properly Punishments: Such are degrading men condemned, of their Badges, Titles, and Offices; or declaring them uncapable of the like in time ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... catechising and instructing of children and ignorant persons, the examination of those who are to come to the holy communion, the ecclesiastical discipline, the ordination of ministers, and the abdication, deposing, and degrading of them (if they become like unsavoury salt), the deciding and determining of controversies of faith and cases of conscience, canonical constitutions concerning the treasury of the church and collections of the faithful, ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... qualities were used pretty generally for selfish ends. In his later works, in consequence, his villains were very apt to be New Englanders. They were not villains of a romantic type. They were mean rather than vicious; crafty rather than bold; given to degrading but at the same time cheap excesses. The first of these (p. 247) these special representatives of the New England character is the powerful but somewhat unpleasant creation of Ithuel Bolt in "Wing-and-Wing," ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... claim to infallibility; in consequence, that my own thoughts are not my own property; that I cannot tell that tomorrow I may not have to give up what I hold today, and that the necessary effect of such a condition of mind must be a degrading bondage, or a bitter inward rebellion relieving itself in secret infidelity, or the necessity of ignoring the whole subject of religion in a sort of disgust, and of mechanically saying everything that the Church says, and leaving to others the defence of it. As then I have above spoken ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... impossible, that the man in whom the habit of vice had formed should be able to cast off his degrading weakness, like a shameful garment, by sheer force of will, and be sane and strong and masterful again? I say, possible with this man. You see him plucked from the slough by the strong hand of manly fellowship, and nerved and strengthened, if only for a little while, to ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... her dream is real, and that the man of her choice is pure; whose heart is free and open as her own; all of whose thoughts may be avowed; who is incapable of wronging the innocent, or still further degrading the fallen,—a man, in short, whose brute nature is entirely subject to the impulses of his better self. Such men there are in countless numbers, who have kept themselves free from stain, and who ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... immense people be reduced, stronger in its natural resources than in its artificial defences, opposing to a monstrous and discordant confederation, simple and united counsels and combinations, that the cowardly, degrading idea of sacrificing its soverignty, of permitting any discussion as to its liberties, of committing to negotiation its rights, could be considered among the possibilities of ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... are domestic animals, and the property of the United States when a hundred miles out in the Pacific Ocean was a humiliating reflection on the intelligence of both parties to the dispute, and showed abject and degrading subserviency to the corporation controlling the seal monopoly. Added to this was the disgrace of forgery, detected, unfortunately, not at Washington, but in London, and indicating that, while Washington officials were doubtless innocent of complicity ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... for it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. The abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity, were among the consequences of ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... personally many of what are called great characters, both in Europe and America, but I do not hesitate to say that I never met any man who, in my estimation, was the equal of General Armstrong. Fresh from the degrading influences of the slave plantation and the coal mines, it was a rare privilege for me to be permitted to come into direct contact with such a character as General Armstrong. I shall always remember that the first time ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... a gentleman in your composition, I hope, not to inflict your company any longer upon a woman who does not desire it. I ask you to leave me here alone. When you have gone, and I have had time to recover from your degrading offer, I may perhaps feel able to go down ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... said, to "that oyster," to look upon the matter in such a degrading light nor would ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... gone, and his last hope with it. Elise had conquered. Her letter had brought him face to face with those realities which, during this week of madness, he had simply refused to see. He could pit himself against her no longer. When it came to the point he had not the nerve to enter upon a degrading and ignoble conflict, in which all that was to be won was her hatred or her fear. That, indeed, would be the last and worst ruin, for it would be the ruin, not of happiness or of hope, but of love ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pan, here in England, due to Cardinal Newman and Cardinal Manning, who introduced some good old Protestant virtues into your teaching; but that cannot last. You carry the instrument of your own destruction along with you in the degrading exercises with which you seek to debase our ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... it comes, nor what it costs. If, at least, you had to justify your expenses, the excuse of some great passion, or of some object, were it absurd, ardently pursued! But I defy you to confess upon what degrading pleasures you lavish our humble economies. I defy you to tell us what you mean to do with the sum that you demand to-night,—that sum for which you would have our mother stoop to beg the assistance of a shop-keeper, ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... saying; but that is the result of disputing with shoemakers. Besides, it is degrading to compare women to wine! He is a coarse fellow who sets his wife on the same ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... remuneration, enables the department to play off one against the other, for the existence of a lower paid class makes it increasingly difficult for the Men Clerks to substantiate a claim for better pay themselves. The standard of their work is raised by the "moving-down" or "degrading" of duties, without any improvement in pay such as they would probably be able to obtain if women were not involuntarily undercutting them. Women fully sympathise with their male colleagues, whose prospects are injured in this way, but they insist that the only solution of the ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... bitterness or delay, mixed with it, turns men into beasts, but does not slay them,—leaves them, on the contrary, power of revival. She is herself indeed an Enchantress;—pure Animal life; transforming—or degrading—but always wonderful (she puts the stores on board the ship invisibly, and is gone again, like a ghost); even the wild beasts rejoice and are softened around her cave; the transforming poisons she gives to men are mixed with ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... indignant at hearing it treated with contempt. An attempt has been made to explain the whole, by asserting that, to put an end to the extravagances of Don Juan, and to pacify the family of Ulloa, without exposing the delinquent to the degrading penalties of justice, he was decoyed into this convent under a false pretext, and either plunged into a perpetual dungeon, or privately hurried out of existence; while the story of the statue was circulated by the monks, to account ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... don't approve of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it, either; but I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatever, and so I don't want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of smoking cigars and then came back, in my absence, with your vile, reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Paulus, the proconsul at Paphos, by their preaching, was the first seed of Christianity implanted in Cyprus at the period when the inhabitants were steeped in heathenism; but some of the superstitions at present existing are hardly less degrading than pagan rites, and in the kissing of the Virgin's cave at Trooditissa for the purpose already described, we can trace an affinity with the ancient worship ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions—the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... look towards the group of black penitents kneeling near the altar? Before he could cast a second look they were hid from his sight; and now the Bishop of Placencia advances towards the group of those sentenced to death, and with a knife commences the operation of degrading the priests by scraping off the crown of the head the part which was supposed to have received the holy oil at their consecration. Then garment after garment was torn from them, the Bishop pronouncing all the time terrible curses on their heads. ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... you say that," she answered sadly. "But nothing could alter the fact that you wish to be treacherous, and throw me over—and just for money! It's simply degrading. It's all nonsense to say it ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... contemptuous that Napoleon shrank, and lowered his eyes. "Sire," she said, "no one who bears chains is happy, and your majesty—who once said to the Italians, 'You need not fear me, for I have come to break your chains and to deliver you from degrading servitude!'—will not now reduce a state to servitude. For to wrest it from its legitimate sovereign, and to compel it to submit to another prince is chaining it—to distribute a people like merchandise, is reducing them to slavery. ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... lie of law, which assumed the non-existence of the Catholic had infused itself into his nature, and while it was erased from the statute book, it was legible on his heart. That terrible necessity of denying his feelings, his property, his religion and his very being, had stamped its degrading influence on his nature. In a moral sense the law had become a truth—there was no people. The Catholic gentry, giddy by their recent elevation, had only changed for that semblance of liberty their old stern spirit of resistance and revenge. Their new concessions hung ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... have chosen for this work, was necessary perhaps before Italy could take her place as a united nation gifted with constitutional self-government and independence. Except, therefore, for the sufferings and the humiliations inflicted on her people; except for their servitude beneath the most degrading forms of ecclesiastical and temporal tyranny; except for the annihilation of their beautiful Renaissance culture; except for the depression of arts, learning, science, and literature, together with the enfeeblement of political ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... here on false pretences, and we stay here no longer,' he said. 'Had you still loved me, right or wrong, I should have taken you away, because then I could have made you happy. But as it is - I must speak plainly - what you propose is degrading to you, and an insult to me, and a rank unkindness to your father. Your father may be this or that, but you should ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... need for these "nation-degrading" rules, as O'Meara called them? Or were they imposed in order to insult the great man? A reference to the British archives will show that there was some reason for them. Schemes of rescue were afoot that called for ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... stoop To whelm the world, and heave the floors o' the deep, Of purpose to pursue me from my place? And since I gave men knowledge, must He take Their length of days whereby they perfect it? So shall He scatter all that I have stored, And get them by degrading them. I know That in the end it is appointed me To fade. I will not ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... John of necessity—seeing that he was a good man, but unconsciously, the consequence being much confusion of mind on the subject, and a wide difference between his words and his deeds. He preached, for instance, the degrading doctrine that we ought to be miserable in this world, that all our wonderful powers of enjoyment were only given to us to be suppressed; and further blasphemed our sacred humanity by maintaining that we are born in sin, and sinners ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... fortunately for the natives of it, they never bear at all. The queens of Eyeo are, to all intents and purposes, slaves, and so are also other queens; but then they are slaves to foolish and ridiculous customs, to stiff starched etiquette, and to ceremonies degrading to a ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... periods of election, huzzaing for your candidates, and gathering all your influence to win success for them. So shall you nobly fulfil the high destiny allotted you, instead of longer enduring the degrading cares attendant on the happiness of your fathers' and your husbands' homes. So shall you take by storm the hearts of men as well as the citadels of your enemies; forcing them to admire those female 'braves' who so kindly relieve them of the weighty ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... disunion, then it must sooner or later come under the wheels of truth and be ground to dust. No, we are not burdened with some monstrous superiority, unmeaning in its singular abruptness. It would be utterly degrading for us to live in a world immeasurably less than ourselves in the quality of soul, just as it would be repulsive and degrading to be surrounded and served by a host of slaves, day and night, from birth to the moment of death. On the contrary, this world is ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... pocket-handkerchief subject to those general laws, concerning secrets, that are recognized among all honorable persons. Not having been actually present on this occasion, should I proceed to relate ALL that passed, or that I fancied passed, it would be degrading myself to the level of those newspapers which are in the habit of retailing private conversations, and which, like most small dealers in such things, never ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... Carlyle on the other side of the street, a broken, pathetic figure, walked over and spoke to him. The old man merely remarked, "You're Huxley, aren't you? the man that says we are all descended from monkeys," and passed on. Huxley, however, saw nothing degrading to man's dignity in the theory of evolution. In a wonderfully fine sentence he gives his own estimate of the theory as it affects man's future on earth. "Thoughtful men once escaped from the blinding influences of traditional prejudices, will find in the lowly stock whence man has sprung ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... in such a room! Think of brothers and sisters of such ages lying side by side, and think of the mistakes that might occur when—which is possible—the whole family may have taken liquor and the floor is one common bed. There are hundreds of families living in this big, charitable city in this degrading manner. Is it any surprise that children here are bad and criminally vicious at five years ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... don't believe in the nobility of labor. I believe that work is the crowning shame and humiliation of the human race. It's all right for a horse or a dog or an ox to work, but a man ought to be above it. It's degrading, interferes with his pleasures and wastes ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... have often seen her; I have made plan after plan to meet her; I have—O degrading thought!—paid her to take me out in her canoe, under the pretence of fishing. I no longer looked forward; I lived only in the present, and thought only of when and where I could see her. Thus it has been until this morning, when the orders came. Now, ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... one cannot exist long without the other—the individual must seek that most powerful and helpful of all aids, divine grace. If, in the conflict with his animal nature, man had only to contend with the degrading influences of his own propensities, the battle would be a serious one, and it is doubtful whether human nature alone—at least in any but rare cases,—would be able to gain the victory; but, in addition to his own inherent tendencies to evil, man is assailed at every point by unseen agencies ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... he was told that he might be elected to the House of Representatives, and the gentleman who made the proposition ventured to say that he thought an ex-President, by taking such a position, "instead of degrading the individual would elevate the representative character." Mr. Adams replied that he had "in that respect no scruples whatever. No person can be degraded by serving the people as Representative in Congress, nor, in my opinion, would an ex-President ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... system to this extremity, the Americans are obliged to encourage informers by bestowing on them a portion of the penalty in certain cases;[95] and to ensure the execution of the laws by the dangerous expedient of degrading the ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... of the average of his contemporaries is in a high degree improbable. He was a man of the world, peculiarly attractive to women, and likely to have been attracted by them. On the other hand, the undiscriminating looseness attributed to him would have been peculiarly degrading in a man whose passions were so eminently under control, whose calmness was never known to be discomposed, and who, in everything which he did, acted always with deliberate will. Still worse would it be if, by his ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... if they could get things right, they could marry; but he would not marry unless he could feel strong in the joy of it—never. He could not have faced his mother. It seemed to him that to sacrifice himself in a marriage he did not want would be degrading, and would undo all his life, make it a nullity. He would try ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... most earnestly protests against national interference to abolish the right where it has been secured by the Legislature—as, for example, the Edmunds Tucker Bill, which proposes to disfranchise all the women of Utah, thus inflicting the most degrading penalty upon the innocent equally with the guilty, by robbing them of their most sacred right ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... individual to live in some degree of comfort and security is nothing but the taking shape of these ideas and emotions; for the end of all civilisation is to ensure that there shall be freedom for all from debasing and degrading conditions, and that is perhaps as far as we have hitherto advanced; but the further end in sight is to set all men and women free to some extent from hopeless drudgery, to give them leisure, to provide them with tastes and interests; and further still, ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... seductive paths of sin. The woman whose steps take hold on hell does not pass their doors; the gambler spreads no snares for them; no gilded palace invites them to music and intoxicating draughts; they are not maddened by ambition; and they have no vanity that leads them to degrading and ruinous display. If they are little assailed from without, they are not more moved toward vice from within. The fact that their vital energies are all expended upon labor relieves them from the motives of temptation. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... have used the word reformer in this Tract. We formerly noted that, in India, there have arisen from time to time men who saw and sorrowed over the erroneous doctrines and degrading rites ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... the winter of 1077, was performed a most degrading act of penance by Emperor Henry IV. of Germany. He had been excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII., and had suffered much on that account. He resolved to see the Pope, and, if possible, obtain absolution. The Emperor made a long and toilsome journey in the cold, in company with his loving wife Bertha, ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... be gained in reviewing that unhappy affair," continued the other. "Your mother's family are headlong, impulsive, fiery, unstable, emotional. There was a last shameful and degrading scene. I offered her a separation; but she was unwisely ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... in accents that vainly struggled for calm, "if thou hast admitted to thy heart one unworthy thought towards a Moorish infidel, dig deep and root it out, even with the knife, and to the death—so wilt thou save this hand from that degrading task." ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... after married. Gibbon, in speaking of the lies which Severus told his two competitors in the contest for empire, says, 'Falsehood and insincerity, unsuitable as they seem to the dignity of public transactions, offend us with a less degrading idea of meanness than when they are found in the intercourse of private life. In the latter, they discover a want of courage; in the other, only a defect of power; and, as it is impossible for the most able statesmen to subdue millions of followers and enemies by their own personal strength, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... be possible that human persons were subject to the spells of persons with tastes, aims, practices, pursuits alien to theirs? It was a riddle taxing her to solve it for the resistance to a monstrous iniquity of injustice, degrading her conception of our humanity. She attacked it in the abstract, as a volunteer champion of our offended race. And Oh! it could not be. The battle was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pessimistic, relieved by a power of seizing the humorous elements in human stupidity and ill-doing. There is also, however, much seriousness in her treatment of the phases of life upon which she touches, and few writers have brought out with greater power the hardening and degrading effects of continuance in evil courses, or the inevitable and irretrievable consequences of a wrong act. Her descriptions of rural scenes have ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... were here on good behaviour, or not, I could not rightly ascertain, but certainly they were scampish-looking steeds, their physiognomical expression was low and dogged, such as one might expect from the degrading nature of their ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... very first morning of his acquaintance with the Epanchins, six months ago. Since his return to Petersburg from Moscow, he had been remarkably silent, and had told Prince S. on one occasion, before everyone, that he did not think himself justified in degrading any ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... scratch, and even spit, until one or the other is unable to move. No time is called, catch as catch can, and strike as best, and where best you may, are the simple rules of these contests, and the sight is a somewhat degrading and unpleasant one, though it excites the spectators to ecstasies of delight and laughter. Most big Chiefs in Kelantan keep trained men to take part in these prize fights, and heavy bets are made ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... theory) is placed above us, on a certain pedestal, as an almost sacred being, and the more so because mysterious. Now sensuality and sexual desire are considered as rather vulgar, and a little dirty, even ridiculous and degrading, not to say bestial. The woman who enjoys it, is, therefore, rather like a profaned altar, or, at least, like a divinity who has descended on to the earth. To give enjoyment to a woman is, therefore, like perpetrating ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... great ingenuity and eloquence he proceeded to develop the theme of the supreme value of the human factor in modern life, social and industrial. With great cogency he pressed the argument against the inhuman and degrading view that would make man a mere factor in the complex problem of Industrial Finance, a mere inanimate ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... not mistake, limited his waiting to languishing admiringly against the sideboard when Bella didn't want anything, and swooping at her when she did. Him, his Grace the Archbishop perpetually obstructed, cutting him out with his elbow in the moment of success, despatching him in degrading quest of melted butter, and, when by any chance he got hold of any dish worth having, bereaving him of it, and ordering him ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... to degrading slavery as "harlots" in one case, according to the eleventh century English practice ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... every race of men under the light of the sun. There is not a color from white to black, from red to yellow, there is not a nation from pole to pole, that does not send its contingent to govern American women. If American men are willing to leave their women in a position as degrading as this they need not be surprised when American women resolve to lift themselves ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... emancipation from the grossest superstitions. But for science we should be still worshipping fetishes; or, with hecatombs of victims, propitiating diabolical deities. And yet this science, which, in place of the most degrading conceptions of things, has given us some insight into the grandeurs of creation, is written against in our theologies and frowned ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... Positivism on an Island, a short satirical story in the style of Voltaire's Candide. This is a story of an atheistic professor, such as Tyndall, who, together with a demimondaine, now the wife of a High Church colonial bishop, is wrecked on a desert island, and there endeavors to redeem her from the degrading superstitions of theism and to make her a partner with him in the sublime service of Humanity—of that "Grand Etre," so he says to her, "which, so far as we are concerned, has come in the course of progress to consist of you and me." The New ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... if, unhappily, a different impression should at any time obtain in any quarter, they will, I am sure, rally round the Government of their choice with alacrity and unanimity, and silence for ever the degrading imputation. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... he declared that he meant no such evasion, but that no marriage ceremony, legal or illegal, had ever taken place; and farther, that in saying this he was speaking on the direct authority of the Prince himself. No more degrading act stains the annals of British royalty. For the fact was true—the very next evening Fox learned the deceit which the Prince had practised on him from a gentleman who had been one of the witnesses to the marriage, which had been solemnized ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... preparation, to break down or overthrow a power of this kind? On the contrary, the words of this parable stand here to declare to us that it is nothing less than perversity and folly in any man to go on either defiling his nature, or degrading it, or even neglecting to strengthen and support it, under this delusion that some day the breath of Heaven will sweep it clean or give it new vigour. And your own experience is in exact accordance with these parabolic warnings of the Saviour. You know that your moral ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... would become operative. It would teach them that, as immortal beings, as cosmic units of the larger cosmos—The Great Over Soul—they could not become totally depraved, even under pressure of evil conditions of the most degrading character; no matter how much their spiritual natures had ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... effect against almost any number of men who had no heart in the fight, save that which was engendered by an uneasy and uncomfortable sentiment of badly founded loyalty to the flag of a tyrant, or that degrading spirit of hireling hostility, which changed its force and direction, in accordance with the amount of gold offered ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... disgraceful exhibition of unholiness in order to discredit and destroy Grichka's rival. Five minutes later I met the Bishop Theophanus walking with the Procurator of the Holy Synod, who, like myself, witnessed the degrading sight, and from that moment Mitia the Blessed no longer exercised power, and was not further invited to the salons of those mystical members of the aristocracy. He had been swept into ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... and so much beloved by the princess, that she easily yielded; and casting down her eyes, confessed that she loved one who regarded her with contemptuous indifference; and what rendered her choice still more degrading was, its object being equally ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... fierce agitation sprang up for the recovery of this loss of balance, and ultimately for Southern preponderance, which resulted in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska war, and the civil war. The fugitive slave law was hateful to the North not only because it was cruel and degrading, but because it was seen to be a move formed for nationalizing slavery. It was unsatisfactory to the South because it was deemed inadequate in its provisions, and because the South did not believe the North would execute it in good faith. So unstable did the compromise ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... always seemed to me that to put one's self at the beck and call of another man is essentially degrading. In the long perspective of eternity, was his soul any more majestic than mine? In this luminous new vision of my importance as a fragment of immortal mind, could I, should I, bow to the force of ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... and numberless others of the same type, would have been condemned to the ignominy of being mere pets; useless canine adjuncts to human beings—creatures that were allowed in the house, and were given strangely repulsive bits of food in return for degrading antics, such as sitting on one's ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... most interesting, as well as most valuable, of modern works of travel. It has revolutionized our ideas of African character as well as of African geography. It shows that Central Africa is peopled by tribes barbarous, indeed, but far from manifesting those savage and degrading traits which we are wont to associate with the negro race. In all his long pilgrimage Livingstone saw scarcely a trace of the brutal rites and bloody superstitions of Dahomey and Ashanti. The natives every where long for intercourse with the whites, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... thought that he had had nothing less than a coup-de-soleil. And when he recovered from his faintness, he began to be so horribly ill, that Clara, who had been called in to help, had some grounds for the degrading hypothesis (for which Lucia all but boxed her ears) that "Master had got away into the woods, and gone eating toadstools, or some such poisonous stuff;" for he lay a full half-hour on the sofa, death-cold, and almost pulseless; moaning, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... of the older and abler girls from the first house were used for the domestic work of the second, partly to save hired help, and partly to accustom them to working for others and thus give a proper dignity to what is sometimes despised as a degrading and menial form of service. By April 8, 1837, there were in each house thirty ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... of an honest mind is perpetually excited at the unblushing effrontery with which the most scandalous treacheries seem to have been all but acknowledged. France was still the great corrupter, and French money was lavished, not more in undermining the fidelity of public men, than in degrading the character of the nation. But when Charles was an actual pensioner of the French King, and James a palpable dependent on the French throne, the force of example may be easily conceived, among the spendthrift and needy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... like a child with a sea-shell at his ear, he began to be aware of the great roar of the "underground," that, in his third-class carriage, the cruelty of the reservation penetrated, with the taste of acrid smoke, to his inner sense. It was really degrading to be eager in the face of having to "alter." Peter Baron tried to figure to himself at that moment that he was not flying to betray the extremity of his need, but hurrying to fight for some of those passages of superior boldness which were exactly what the conductor of the "Promiscuous ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... experimental garden and model farm. An English gardener was also employed to naturalise the large collection of valuable plants from the East and West Indies and the South Sea Islands supplied by Kew. The Nova Scotians, however, like true slaves, considered agriculture servile and degrading work—a prejudice which, as will be seen, prevails to this day not only in the colony, but throughout the length and ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... unpunctuated; it was almost illegible; it was fretful in tone, and selfish in sentiment. It was not, I fear, even original in the story of its woes. It was the harsh recital of poverty, of suspicion, of mean makeshifts and compromises, of low pains and lower longings, of sorrows that were degrading, of a grief that was pitiable. Yet it was sincere in a certain kind of vague yearning for the presence of the degraded man to whom it was written,—an affection that was more like a ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... great, would, however, in my opinion, be purchased at the cost of degrading for ever the standard of ...
— University Education in Ireland • Samuel Haughton
... whose fault it is?" she said wearily. "The fact remains we would quarrel endlessly and hatefully. It would be degrading!" ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... the house? Have you got the rose she gave you there? Is it in your Bible, brother? Do you remember the months that followed—months of mad grief and wild yearning, till the yearning grew less—less wild—and the grief less desperate; and then, worst of all, the degrading consciousness that you were, in spite of yourself, getting rid of your love, and that she was not to you as she had been? Do you remember all this? When you come across the rose in your Bible, do you feel that you would give ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... rejected by Paul as a ministration no ways capable of abiding in the church now, since the ministration of the Spirit also hath taken its place (2 Cor 3). Wherefore instead of propounding it to the churches with arguments tending to its reception, he seeks by degrading it of its old lustre and glory, to wean the churches ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and perhaps most important of all, the discontent very properly felt by the French Zouaves, who were compelled to work at the trenches, to dig, to plant, etc., while the Mussulmans utterly refused to take part in this, to their mind, degrading toil. The Gordian knot was cut, and all difficulty done away, by making the regiment, in effect, exclusively European. Thus reorganized and reinforced, the regiment, on receiving the standard sent it by the king, immediately separated,—one battalion marching for Oran, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... it from being only a degrading superstition in those who believe that mortals like themselves can predict the future, that it seems, on the contrary ennobling. It is precisely because man feels a mystery within himself that he admits ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... antiquity, combined with the exaltation of the priesthood to such a degree as to make priests the real rulers of the land, reminding us of the spiritual despotism of the Middle Ages. The priests of Egypt ruled by appealing to the fears of men, thus favoring a degrading superstition. How far they taught that the various objects of worship were symbols merely of a supreme power, which they themselves perhaps accepted in their esoteric schools, we do not know. But the priests believed in a future state of rewards and punishments, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... seeing her continually as she entered the jungle (walking so silently and swift, her face flushed from crossing the open space this side of the city in the terrible heat of noon)—and then not finding him there. Something about this hurt like degrading a sacred thing, but he didn't mean to. He repeated that he didn't mean to hurt her. . . . Then suddenly it occurred to him that it was all his own thinking about her coming at noon. There had been no word about it. ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... vital question upon which so much of human life and happiness depends, the weak and degrading answer must suffice; to the effect that the last vestige of public respect for the sciences would be shaken, and many wise theories would fail of their imaginary virtues and succumb, before humanity's best birthright—the quality of ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... torn to pieces by she-goats at Genoa. Poor, beautiful Bianca! On the fulfilment of her unjust and barbarous sentence it is too horrible to dwell at any length. This glorious creature, this resplendent vision, this divine goddess—she-goats! Dreadful, degrading, unutterable!!! ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... really do not even now see what I could have done save endure. To have struggled with him in the street, or to have exacted any lower recompense from him than his heart's best blood, would have been futile and degrading. Moreover, he was a boy whom no man could hurt; an invulnerable and dodging serpent who, when chased into a corner, flew out again between his captor's legs, scornfully yelping. I wrote, however, to Mr. Trabb by next day's post, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... utterance; he turned livid with mortal fright. He pleaded for life; life on the terms most degrading, most painful, most joyless—life, life and that only. He cried out to Cornelia to save him, he confessed his villanies, and vowed repentance a score of times all in one breath. But Cornelia lived in an age when the wisest and best—whatever ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... my mind about Stokes' going into Parliament (as a strong party man, moreover) while still P.R.S. I do not know what you may think about it, but to my mind it is utterly wrong—and degrading to the Society—by ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... economic or social, whether of training or of environment, which in any degree tends to limit her power of choice, or to narrow its range, or to lower her standards of selection, works out in a national and racial deprivation. And surely no one will deny that the degrading industrial conditions under which such a large number of our young girls live and work do all of these, do limit and narrow the range of selection and do lower the standards of the working-girl in making her ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... a shame," cried Anstey in a ringing voice. "And now you seek to deepen the shame by further degrading Prescott, who has always been the champion of our class. Mr. President, I move that we lay the motion on the table indefinitely. As soon as that has been done I shall make another motion, that we remove the silence from the grand, ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... most awful sensation of discomfort—the very fact of having to hear of all this through servants was sufficiently disgusting, without the events themselves being so degrading. ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... haven't got Captain Burton's six senses." At Great Russell Street, Burton commenced by defending materialism. He could not see with Guizot that the pursuit of psychology is as elevating as that of materialism is degrading. What right, he asked, had the theologian to limit the power of the Creator. "Is not the highest honour His who from the worst can draw the best?" [313] He then quoted his letter to The Times, and declared that he still held the same opinions. ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... RADEGONE, the proud queen of the Am[)a]zons. Being rejected by Bellodant "the Bold," she revenged herself by degrading all the men who fell into her power by dressing them like women, giving them woman's work to do, such as spinning, carding, sewing, etc., and feeding them on bread and water to effeminate them (canto 4). When she overthrew Sir Artegal in single combat, she imposed on him ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... without the guidance and help of those who are working with him or over him, either through lack of education or through insufficient mental capacity'.[77] Along the lines of this philosophy no permanent industrial advance is possible. It may improve the product for a time, but only at the cost of degrading the producer. If we are to make happiness our test, and to stand by our definition of happiness as involving free activity, such a system, destructive as it is of any real or intense relationship between the workman and his ...
— Progress and History • Various
... its ladylike ears. The next morning he met the from-dance-returning Bessy abstractedly, and soon took his leave, full of a disloyal plan, conceived in the sleeplessness of her own bedchamber. He was satisfied that he owed a duty to its unknown parents to remove the child from the degrading influences of the barber Kanaka, and Hank Fisher especially, and he resolved to write to his relatives, stating the case, asking a home for the waif and assistance to find its parents. He addressed this letter to his cousin Maria, partly in consideration of the ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... intellect; and the metaphysics of dress are, the hiding what is not symbolic and displaying by discrimination what is. The love of Adam and Eve in Paradise is of the highest merit—not phantomatic, and yet removed from every thing degrading. It is the sentiment of one rational being towards another made tender by a specific difference in that which is essentially the same in both; it is a union of opposites, a giving and receiving mutually of the permanent in either, a completion ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... him, the great egotistical brute! How strange the madness that binds a woman to the man to whom she first surrenders! I sometimes think it is the most blind, pathetic and tragic instinct that ever shadowed the soul of a human being. It is degrading. You are a woman of character and intelligence. You must shake off ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... showed, as it seemed to him, any desire for his company, and he was reduced to looking at a stand of miniatures near the door, while his heart swelled fiercely. So this was what society meant?—a wretched pleasure purchased on degrading terms! A poor dependant like himself, he supposed, was to be seen and not heard—must speak when he was spoken to, play chorus, and whisper humbleness. As to meeting these big-wigs on equal terms, that clearly was not expected. An artist may be allowed to know ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... manifestations, whether as objective reality or only as truth-teaching allegory, what a field is opened to our speculations regarding the realms of spirit and the possible punishments there in store for those who, by degrading their natures in this world, may have rendered themselves unfit for happiness in the next,—and who, perhaps, still attracted to earth by the debasing excesses they once mistook for pleasure, may be doomed, in the phantom repetition of their sins, to detect their naked reality, to have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... reality it sealed the doom not only of the truly conservative policy of Pitt, but of the European fabric. Prussia it was which enabled the Jacobins to triumph and to extend their sway over neighbouring lands. The example of Berlin tempted Spain three months later to sign degrading terms of peace with France, and thus to rob England of her gains in Hayti and Corsica. Thanks to Prussia and Spain, France could enter upon that career of conquest in Italy which assured the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and the temporary ruin of Austria. The mistakes of Pitt were great; but, after ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... centuries tended to increase information, and to secure the liberty of the mass of the people. The invention of printing; the reformation; the destruction of the feudal system, at least in its most objectionable, degrading, and paralizing features; the contentions between the nobility and the sovereigns, and between the latter and the people; gave a stimulus to the human mind, and thus enlarged its capacities, desires, and views, in such a manner, that ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... measures of humanity as the Factory Acts were long resisted by men so humane as Cobden and John Bright as arbitrary interventions with the natural liberty of man to drive bargains with his fellows in search of a living wage. There seemed to be no idea that economic warfare might be quite as degrading as that primitive condition of natural war, in which Hobbes said that the life of man was "nasty, short, brutish and mean," and that it might as urgently require a similar sovereign remedy. The repugnance to such a ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... band of patriots combined, and fought bravely to rescue their country from the degrading condition into which it had fallen; but its long subjection to a foreign yoke has left, it is feared, a lasting impression on the character of its inhabitants, and this, combined with their great poverty, has engendered a sadness and soberness of spirit ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... was one drawback, she had discovered, to a morning on the Roville plage, it was that you had a tendency to fall asleep: and this is a degrading thing to do so soon after breakfast, even if you are on a holiday. Usually, Sally fought stoutly against the temptation, but to-day the sun was so warm and the whisper of the waves so insinuating that she had almost ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... supernatural.(105) Likewise the intuitive faculty, if it be regarded as giving a noble grasp over the fact of God as an infinite Spirit, may cause the mind to relax its hold on the idea of the Divine Personality, and fall into Pantheism, and identify God with the universe, not by degrading spirit to matter, but by elevating matter to spirit.(106) Or, instead of allowing experience and revelation to develop into conceptions of the fundamental truth whose existence it perceives, it may attempt to develop a religion wholly a ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... humanity. The Gothic and the Lombard invasions contributed probably their share of fugitives, but fear of the Hunnish world-waster—whose very name, according to some, was derived from one of the mighty rivers of Russia—was the great "degrading" influence that carried down the fragments of Roman civilization and strewed them over the desolate lagoons. The inhabitants of Aquileia, or at least the feeble remnants that escaped the sword of Attila, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... commenting here upon the blindness of allowing ecclesiastics to meddle with public affairs; above all, cardinals, whose special privilege is immunity from everything most infamous and most degrading. Ingratitude, infidelity, revolt, felony, independence, are the chief characteristics ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... hearts. I never wish their minds to be under the influence of the god of this generation— fashion—nor their hearts to become callous to the sufferings of their fellows. I never wish them to regard labor as degrading, nor poverty as a crime. Situated as I am I cannot rear them in health and purity, and, therefore, I am anxious to remove them from the baneful influences that surround them. Again: I look upon labor as a blessing, ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... the government on the subject of a loan, provided that the Directory would in the meantime suspend proceedings against captured American vessels. This offer was not accepted, and the American representatives, after further conference with the French intermediaries, stated that they considered it degrading to their country to carry on further indirect intercourse, and that they had determined to receive no further propositions unless the persons who bore them had authority to treat. In April, 1798, after spending in the French capital six months, during ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... confidence men. To have a female confidence game played on a man would leave less of a sting than to be bilked by a male. But, as burglars, the idea seems revolting. To think of women going about nights with a jimmy and a dark lantern, and opening doors, or windows, and sneaking about rooms, is degrading. If a male burglar gets in your house, and he is discovered, you can shoot him, if you get the drop on him, or kick him down stairs; but who wants to shoot a female burglar, or kick her over the banisters? It would ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... connected with the safety, honor, and welfare of the state, and with the interests of religion and morality, is a general resolution of the inhabitants to establish a voluntary monthly contribution, and strictly prohibit the abominable and degrading practice of street-begging; the unlimited exercise of which, notwithstanding its fatal and disgraceful consequences, is perhaps more glaringly indulged in Munich than in ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... From the Sentimental Journey is taken the motif that valuable or interesting papers be used to wrap ordinary articles of trade: here herring are wrapped in fragments of the father's philosophy; in the Sentimental Journey we find a similar degrading use for the "Fragment." Schummel breaks off the chapter "La Nave,"[11] under the Sternesque subterfuge of having to deliver manuscript to an insistent publisher. Yorick writes his preface to the Journey in the "Dsobligeant," that is, in the midst of the narrative itself. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... to have a maid. All the same, I felt that she was a little vexed with me, poor dear. But, apart from the economical question, I'm glad I insisted. It's so much better for her not to be so dependent on another woman. It's a little degrading for both ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and civilized white men has been becoming, for the last 100 years at least, more and more unfashionable; and is likely, to judge from the signs of the times, to become more unfashionable still: after which reign of degrading ungodliness, I presume—from the experience of all history—that our children or grandchildren will see a revulsion to some degrading superstition, and the latter end be worse than the beginning. But it is notorious that men are doubting more and more of the efficacy ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... opens its gorgeous doors, and when the burning liquid has inflamed the mental and physical man, soon hurries him onward into those fascinating habitations where vice and voluptuousness mingle their degrading powers. Once in these whirlpools of sin, the young man finds himself borne away by every species of vicious allurement-his feelings become unrestrained, until at length that last spark of filial advice which had hovered round his consciousness ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... nor anything really inhering in substances, nay, to admit that they are the necessary conditions of the existence of all things, and moreover, that they must continue to exist, although all existing things were annihilated— we cannot blame the good Berkeley for degrading bodies to mere illusory appearances. Nay, even our own existence, which would in this case depend upon the self-existent reality of such a mere nonentity as time, would necessarily be changed with it into mere appearance—an absurdity which no ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... witness who is permitted to come from the scene of a degrading punishment to give a prompt and decisive answer. What is your ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... beautiful muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the curves and colours of the hair, the lips, the eye; so the soul in its turn has its nutritive functions also, and can transform into noble moods of thought and passions of high import what in itself is base, cruel and degrading; nay, more, may find in these its most august modes of assertion, and can often reveal itself most perfectly through what was intended to desecrate ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... pollution from power plant emissions results in acid rain; acidification of lakes and reservoirs degrading water quality and threatening aquatic life; Japan is one of the largest consumers of fish and tropical timber, contributing to the depletion of these resources in Asia ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... plans and his resolutions melted away before this discovery. There was nothing to be done but to save the poor girl from this miserable and degrading attachment, and its ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... into kings. Ambition claimed as a right what merit had gained as a free offering. Arrogance succeeded to greatness; and out of the child-like attachment for benefits received, the duty of blind obedience was framed by the iron hand of violence, and by the craft of impious hypocrisy, degrading everything held for holy by men—religion itself—into a tool of oppression on earth. It was the era of uncontroverted despotism, which, with sacrilegious arrogance, claimed the title of divine rank; and mankind advanced slowly in progress, because it was not conscious of its own aim. ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... no great trouble weighing upon my mind, and giving its own dull colour to every event of my life, I think I might have been considerably entertained by the society of Mr. Carter, the detective. The man had an enthusiastic love of his profession; and if there is anything degrading in the office, that degradation had in no way affected him. It may be that Mr. Carter's knowledge of his own usefulness was sufficient to preserve his self-respect. If, in the course of his duty, he had unpleasant things to do; if ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... addressed her lord in anger, looking at him, 'Knowing everything, O monarch, how canst thou, like an inferior person, thus say that thou knowest it not? Thy heart is a witness to the truth or falsehood of this matter. Therefore, speak truly without degrading thyself. He who being one thing representeth himself as another thing to others, is like a thief and a robber of his own self. Of what sin is he not capable? Thou thinkest that thou alone hast knowledge of thy deed. But knowest thou not that the Ancient, Omniscient one ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... accustomed to sing—anything but hymns—with a kind of mad, ferocious joy. I spoke to all who approached my dungeon, jeering and bitter things; and I tried to look upon the whole creation through the medium of that commonplace wisdom, the wisdom of the cynics. This degrading period, on which I hate to reflect, lasted happily only for six or seven days, during which my Bible had become covered with dust. One of the jailer's boys, thinking to please me, as he cast his eye upon ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... required to represent a human figure with stone only, we cannot represent its colour; we reduce its colour to whiteness. That is not elevating the human body, but degrading it; only it would be a much greater degradation to give its colour falsely. Diminish beauty as much as you will, but do not misrepresent it. So again, when we are sculpturing a face, we can't carve its eyelashes. The face is none the better for wanting its eyelashes—it is injured by the want; ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... the originality, dexterity, and vivacity of the effect produced by the stratagem which Infelice employs for the humiliation of her husband, when by accusing herself of imaginary infidelity under the most incredibly degrading conditions she entraps him into gratuitous fury and turns the tables on him by the production of evidence against himself; and the scene is no doubt theatrically effective: but the grace and delicacy of the character are sacrificed to this comparatively unworthy consideration: the pure, ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... degrading experience of all, Hatszegi no longer attempts to conceal from his wife his outrageous liaisons with pretty peasant women. The thing has long been a byeword, though his wife knew nothing of it—but she knows it now. Nor ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... broken people's heads by scores, defied their masters, nay, even achieved some glorious murders in the streets, which privileges had gradually been wrested from them, and in all which noble aspirations they were now restrained; how the degrading checks imposed upon them were unquestionably attributable to the innovating spirit of the times, and how they united therefore to resist all change, except such change as would restore those good old English customs, by which they would ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... said, "a very charming friend of mine expressed herself strongly last night about the degrading influence of farming, especially that branch of agriculture which evolves itself in a furrow; hence it is my none too happy work to plow the west eighty where she can't look our way without seeing me; and I have ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... especially for them, a prize bullock. As a human being they disregarded him. Nay, in the depth of their hearts they despised him. Not one of them would have stood where he did. He would have considered it—rightly—as degrading to his manhood. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the degrading, lust-creating influence of the waltz itself is united with the efforts of such vile demons of men as I have, described, that two-thirds of ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner
... of temper and improvement of mind, have, in too many cases, cherished pride and supplied funds for supporting refractory spirits in strikes wantonly inflicted upon one set of mill-owners after another throughout the several districts of Lancashire for the purpose of degrading them into a state of servitude." ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... the sentiment of Russian nationality at the time when its overwhelming humiliation suddenly came, a degrading subjection to Asiatic Mongols, which lasted ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele |
