"Demoralizing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... earnest manner that he had been thinking deeply, and that the subject of his remarks was a matter of no ordinary importance. It was John Henry Wichern, founder of the Rough House, near Hamburg. He had just returned from his laborious tour through the districts of Silesia, which, in addition to the demoralizing revolutionary excitement, were stricken by famine and fever. Whole villages were depopulated, not enough inhabitants being left alive to bury the dead. Grief and despair reigned everywhere. The number of orphans had ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... disgraceful skulking which had become so universal, the worn and weary appearance of the men, their flags, each surrounded by only enough men to constitute a respectable color-guard, all showed that even the hard experiences of the Army of the Potomac had never had so demoralizing ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... uneducated people realize that lawlessness and outrages will be rewarded by an Act remitting debts and breaking contracts, they are not likely in future to limit their operations to land, but will apply the same maxims to other contracts. The demoralizing of character is a fact to be taken ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... to help themselves!" Mrs. Heth was saying. "Wholesale, thoughtless generosity is demoralizing to poverty. It is sheer ruination to their ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... not in front of the child. (JOYCE kicks). It's demoralizing for her to hear her idolized ...
— I'll Leave It To You - A Light Comedy In Three Acts • Noel Coward
... of wealth that is not common, that is not given freely; and for that reason it has a deadening and demoralizing effect upon the minds of those who cultivate and increase it for its own sake, or fail to put it to its larger and more human uses. Wise distribution is the only way in which money can be made valuable in the world: it is only as a developing power, as an aid to the worker, and a creator of instrumentalities ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... gunboats." The impression among Confederates there present was that the gunboats saved the army by saving the landing and transports, while during the night the shrieking of the VIII-inch shells through the woods, tearing down branches and trees in their flight, and then sharply exploding, was demoralizing to a degree. The nervous strain caused by watching for the repetition, at measured intervals, of a painful ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... a long painful record of war, corruption, rapine, and lust. Why Christians who wished to convert the heathen to our religion should send them these books, passes all understanding. It is most demoralizing reading for children and the unthinking masses, giving all alike the lowest possible idea of womanhood, having no hope nor ambition beyond conjugal unions with men they scarcely knew, for whom they could not have had the slighest ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... wished there was no such season. Save for his very young childhood there were few happy memories connected with it, but only of late, only during the past few years, had the recurrence awakened within him a sort of horror, its approach a sense of loneliness that was demoralizing, and its celebration an emptiness in life that chilled and depressed beyond all reason. Why was it that as it drew near a feeling of cowardice so possessed him that he wanted to go away, go anywhere and hide until it was over, ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... Liane ended her pensive moment by leaning toward Lanyard and making demoralizing eyes, while the hand left his and stole with a caressing gesture ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the Constitution. Guerrero was violently made President. That the other party contemplated the destruction of the Constitution is very probable; but the worst that they, its enemies, could have done against it would have been a trifle in comparison with the demoralizing consequences of the violation of that instrument by its friends. Yet the Presidency of Guerrero will ever have honorable mention in history, for one most excellent reason: Slavery was abolished by him on the anniversary of Mexican independence, 1829, he deeming it proper ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... for many of them show a strong element of Chinese blood. This seems to have developed an unfortunate combination of the worst characteristics of both races. Even where there is no real mixture, their contact with the Chinese has been demoralizing, and they will rob and steal at every opportunity. The headdresses of the southern women are by no means as elaborate as ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... it is by the active, not the intellectual powers, the desires, not the understanding, that the great majority of men are governed; that it is the vast addition civilisation and commerce make to the wants and passions of men, which constitutes the real cause of its demoralizing influence; and that these dangers never will be obviated till means are discovered of combating sin with its own weapons, and by desires as extensively felt as its passions. We must fight it, not only with the armour of reason, but the fire of imagination. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... the Emperor—who with the greatest difficulty had been prevailed on to leave Carignan the night before about eleven o'clock—when entreated to push on to Mezieres had refused point-blank to abandon the post of danger and take a step that would prove so demoralizing to the troops. Others asserted that he was no longer in the city, that he had fled, leaving behind him a dummy emperor, one of his officers dressed in his uniform, a man whose startling resemblance to his imperial master had often puzzled the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... heartless. Art is a source of innocent enjoyment, and an important aid to higher culture; but unless it leads to higher culture, it will probably be merely sensuous. And when art is merely sensuous, it is enfeebling and demoralizing rather than strengthening or elevating. Honest courage is of greater worth than any amount of grace; purity is better than elegance; and cleanliness of body, mind, and heart, than ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... and a godless church. One English (p. 091) gentleman in the British military service, after being some time in this country, writes, after his return, to an American friend, and thus cheerfully records his impressions. "The frightful effects produced by an unrestrained democracy," he says, "the demoralizing effects produced by universal suffrage never appeared to me so odious as they do now by contrast with the good breeding, the order and mutual support which all give to each other in this country, from the highest to the lowest." This letter belongs to the year 1839, and it only continues a line of ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... by Elias B. Caldwell, the Princeton schoolmate of Charles Fenton Mercer. He argued for the expediency and practicability of African colonization. It was expedient because the free blacks have a demoralizing influence on our civil institutions; they can never enjoy equality among the whites in America; only in a district by themselves will they ever be happy. To colonize them in America would invite the possibility of their making ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... us compare the beautiful creations of the Venetian school with the demoralizing brightness of aniline colours, or the opaque, earthy tints which some call beautiful, mistaking their dulness for softness and sobriety of colouring. But they, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... gospel of Jesus the Christ. The great idols of this world are fame, pleasure and wealth, and the love of these is the strong passion of the heart. But it is the most prolific source of individual, social and public misfortune, the most mischievous, contentious and demoralizing passion. The ambitious, the voluptuous, the rich and the great are not necessarily happy. Alexander wept upon the throne of the world because there was not another world for ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... by passing from one study to another of a different kind. The point is, that you should not dissipate your powers by taking up too many subjects, looking into them cursorily, then dropping them and passing on to something else. This habit of beginning many things and completing nothing, is most demoralizing and will result in your doing nothing well. Do not attempt more than you can do properly. Select first the subjects that will be directly useful to you, and study them thoroughly. Gain the power of concentrating ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... the earning of the motion picture men. What I object to is the demoralizing effect such a picture film would have. It would tend to make a hero out of this man, and I don't propose that the young shall be allowed to worship him as ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... in any country to which we may export them; and the types can be several, as our territory is so great and demands so varied, but blood and breeding must be the standard for each type. Our fancy breeders have a standard now, called a "time standard," which is purely a gambling standard, demoralizing in all its tendencies to both man and beast. With this the government need have nothing to do, for it will die out of itself as the masses learn more of it, and especially would it cease to be, once the government established a blood standard for the breeding of all horses, and particularly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... but you are constantly offered fractions, to an eighth or a sixteenth. There are ticket-brokers who accommodate the poorer classes with interests to the amount of ten cents, and so on. Thus, for them, the lottery replaces the savings-bank, with entire uncertainty of any return, and the demoralizing process of expectation thrown into the bargain. The negroes invest a good deal of money in this way, and we heard in Matanzas a curious anecdote on this head. A number of negroes, putting their means together, had commissioned a ticket-broker to purchase and hold for them a certain ticket. After ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... following morning. They exchanged significant looks, and he was gone. A ring, set with old-fashioned garnets, was left in the hand he had pressed; one of his mother's rings, worn on his watch-chain. Phyllis seized Burbage and danced her up and down the hall and back again, demoralizing the rugs. Then, having picked up her muff and thrown it at her, Phyllis raced ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... adopted some of the articles of the creed of that church and some of those upon which the doctor is fond of expatiating, and which appear to me both unscriptural and very unprofitable, and, I think, very demoralizing." ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... he urged, after many other accusations, "I consider that Mr. Quarrier is setting the very worst, the most debasing, the most demoralizing example to these working folk, whose best interests he professes to have at heart. I am assured (and the witness of my own eyes in one instance warrants me in giving credit to the charge) that he constantly enters public-houses, taverns, even low ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... extermination of atheists by law. The position of each was at once irrefragable and impossible. It was impossible to effect a stable reconstitution of the social order until men had been accustomed to use their minds freely, and had gradually thrown off the demoralizing burden of superstition. But then the existing social order had become intolerable, and its forces were practically extinct, and consequently such an attack as Rousseau's was inevitable, and was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... sketch the model statesman, I would say he must have mental breadth and clearness, incorruptible integrity, strength of will, tireless patience, humanity, preserved from demoralizing weakness by conscientious reverence for law, ardent love of country, and, regulating all, a commanding sense of responsibility to God, the Judge of all. These, though wrapped in seeming rustic garb, were ...
— Abraham Lincoln - A Memorial Discourse • Rev. T. M. Eddy
... selling lead pencils. With a roar of consternation, the tall man rushed into the street, flourishing his arms, and begging some one—any one—to "Take it away! Take it away!" He finally collided with the head end of the dragon, demoralizing that half of the chink procession as completely as ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... has marked you for her own; and nothing will stop her now. You are doomed. [Straker comes back with a newspaper]. Here comes the New Man, demoralizing himself with ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... or Byzantines protested against these exhibitions of the phallus, which to us are so obscene. The mimus was the lowest and most popular kind of theatrical exhibition, and it was in it that the use of the phallus was most constant. Even Christian preachers who denounced the mimus as demoralizing, and who specified in detail what they found objectionable in it, never mention the display of obscene things. All people were accustomed to the phallus as the archaic symbol of the servants of Dionysus.[1550] Christian preachers would have made no allowance for it on that account,—rather ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... also of the most baneful nature. Without alluding to the glutton or to the drunkard, what accumulated guilt, degradation, and wretchedness follow the course of the libertine,—blasting whatever comes within the reach of his influence, and extending a demoralizing power alike to him who inflicts and to those who suffer the wrong. Thus is constituted a class of evils, of which no human law can take any adequate cognizance, and which therefore raise our views, in a special and peculiar manner, to ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... power. Superstition, indeed, or the sympathy with the invisible, is the great test of man's nature, as an earthly combining with a celestial. In superstition lies the possibility of religion. And though superstition is often injurious, degrading, demoralizing, it is so, not as a form of corruption or degradation, but as a form of non-development. The crab is harsh, and for itself worthless. But it is the germinal form of innumerable finer fruits: not apples only the most exquisite, and pears; the peach ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... hour went by, a time of dead silence and anxious watching. Some of the less eager conspirators began to feel the demoralizing effects of the long wait; their courage began to ebb. Andrew Windybank had time to reflect, and he wished himself well out of the whole business. Here and there a man sighed or fidgeted in the darkness. Basil was quick to notice the signs, and equally quick to combat them. He whispered ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... mountains, where the pastures were poorer, but where they would be free from his depredations. If the $1,750 in the bank had been meant as a bribe or a stipend for good behavior, such as was formerly paid to Italian brigands, it certainly could not have been more demoralizing in its effect; for all agreed that, since Lars Moe's death, Bruin misbehaved worse ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... no longer have any doubt on the point. It is not nudity, it is not the natural description of sexual life, but the obscene intention of the artist, his improper and often venal object, which has a demoralizing effect. ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the rigid Scottish Highlands that I was demoralizing Christian worship by giving organs to churches. The very strict Presbyterians there still denounce as wicked an attempt "to worship God with a kist fu' o' whistles," instead of using the human God-given voice. After that I decided that I should require a partner in my sin, and ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... that 20 per cent. of the London electorate had changed residence. To what extent the uncertain conditions of employment impose upon the poor this changing habitation cannot be yet determined; but the absence of the educative influence of a fixed abode is one of the most demoralizing influences in the life of the poor. The reversion to a nomad condition is a retrograde step in civilization the importance of which can hardly be exaggerated. When we bear in mind that these houses are also the workshop of large numbers of the poor, and know how the work done in the ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... hand that could weld the warring elements into one, and push Russian trade far down from Alaska to New Spain, driving off the field those foreigners whose relentless methods—liquor, bludgeon, musket—were demoralizing ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... to cease dreading us. In the language of a powerful journalist, (the Spectator,) opposed on most points to the present Government, "the late Ministers commenced a career, perilous in the extreme to all the best interests of the nation—demoralizing public opinion, wasting public resources, and entangling the country in quarrels alike endless and aimless; and all this with a labouring after melodramatic stage effect, and a regardlessness of consequences perfectly unprecedented." We were, in the words of truth and soberness, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... happiness of marriage were interfered with, and the priesthood, debarred from that condition, showed themselves not insensible to the charms they so fiercely denounced, and presented to their flocks demoralizing examples of profligacy. The Northern invaders brought with them their own ideas concerning women, rough and crude, but containing the germ of much good. Being met by Christianity, they embraced it in large numbers, unreflectingly, at the command of their leaders. But ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... cigarette is usually the hall-mark of the particularly mild and harmless individual. It is the dissipation of the Y.M.C.A.; the innocent joy of the pure-hearted boy long ere the demoralizing influence of our vaunted civilization has dragged him down into the ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... however, instead of demoralizing him, had been his salvation. It set him to work, and made a man of him. He never believed that he would inherit a dollar of his father's, so he prepared to make his own way in the world, regardless of ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... Dempster, in a loud, rasping, oratorical tone, struggling against chronic huskiness, 'as long as my Maker grants me power of voice and power of intellect, I will take every legal means to resist the introduction of demoralizing, methodistical doctrine into this parish; I will not supinely suffer an insult to be inflicted on our venerable pastor, who has given us sound instruction ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... the most powerful of all "interests" in the corruption of politics, one of the most demoralizing phases of our American life. [Footnote: H. S. Warner, op. cit, chap. XI.] The saloon power is in politics with a grim determination to keep its business from extermination. It is able to throw the votes of a large body of men as it wills. It maintains a powerful lobby at Washington and at the state ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... to 1783, encroached on the hunting grounds of the Indians and explored the wilderness, seeking out the remote tribes and trading the villainous rum for the rare pelts. In 1784 the French authorities, realizing that these vagrants were demoralizing the Indians, warned them to get off the soil. Finding this course ineffectual they arrested those that could be apprehended and sent them to Canada. But it was too late: the harm had been done: the poor, ignorant savage had tasted of the terrible "fire-water," as he called the rum and ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... iniquity. incorrigible, irreclaimable, obdurate, reprobate, past praying for; culpable, reprehensible &c (guilty) 947. unjustifiable; indefensible, inexcusable; inexpiable, unpardonable, irremissible^. weak, frail, lax, infirm, imperfect; indiscrete; demoralizing, degrading. Adv. wrong; sinfully &c adj.; without excuse. Int. O tempora!^, O mores!, Phr. alitur vitium vivitque tegendo [Vergil]; genus est mortis male vivere [Lat.] [Ovid]; mala mens malus animus ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... man who is burdened with unnecessary and exaggerated fears, and who mistakes for a fancied security the privilege of sitting quietly in one place, that the uprooting which comes with war is demoralizing. The natural officer sees it as an hour of opportunity, and though he may not like anything else about war, he at least relishes the strong feeling of personal contention which always develops when there are many openings inviting many men. As one World War II commander expressed it: "During ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... by them, like flowers scorched by the blast of a furnace; how, in fact, as in the case of those cruel executions and bloody tortures then universal in the jurisprudence of Europe, these pictures of eternal torture seemed to exert a morbid demoralizing influence which hurried on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... Evelina's clock had been a more important event in the life of Ann Eliza Bunner than her younger sister could divine. In the first place, there had been the demoralizing satisfaction of finding herself in possession of a sum of money which she need not put into the common fund, but could spend as she chose, without consulting Evelina, and then the excitement of her stealthy trips abroad, undertaken on the rare ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... should not be of the very best quality. The effect of a victory is two-fold, moral and material. Had we been as roughly handled on water as we were on land during the first year of the war, such a succession of disasters would have had a most demoralizing effect on the nation at large. As it was, our victorious seafights, while they did not inflict any material damage upon the colossal sea-might of England, had the most important results in the feelings they produced at home and even abroad. Of course they were magnified absurdly by most ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the more wretched is her life. Married women are so afraid of resembling the professional dancing girls, that they cannot be persuaded to learn anything the latter are taught. If a Brahman woman is rich her life is spent in demoralizing idleness; if she is poor, so much the worse, her earthly existence is concentrated in monotonous performances of mechanical rites. There is no past, and no future for her; only a tedious present, from which there is no possible escape. And ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... everywhere—that is war. And accompanying it all the hopeless sensation that this will never, never stop, that it will go on like this forever, until one's thoughts are dulled by some terrible, cruel, incomprehensible, demoralizing force. Those bounding puffs of smoke everywhere on the ground, rifle shots which have been aimed too short and every one of which— That abominable sharp singing as of a swarm of mosquitoes, buzz, buzz, like the buzzing of angry hornets continually knocking ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... simply by being a loving, indulgent husband, had come into the position, in some measure, of demoralizing the public conscience, of bringing in luxury and extravagance, and countenancing people who really ought not to be countenanced. He had a sort of uneasy perception of this fact; yet, at each particular step, he seemed to himself to be doing no more ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... against false opinions in league with false facts, the press, confined to truth, needs no other legal restraint; the public judgment will correct false reasoning and opinions on a full hearing of all parties; and no other definite line can be drawn between the inestimable liberty of the press and its demoralizing licentiousness. If there be still improprieties which this rule would not restrain, its supplement must be sought in the ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... have been less mixed. What we see truly with our imagination we see clearly, and the metaphors born of clear sight are ever pure. Hence such description is extravagant because untrue; hence such description is demoralizing because extravagant, immoderate. ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... older people, he was exerting a very demoralizing influence over the younger boy. Every afternoon they sought out some private spot and had a game of cards, and little by little Ralph had introduced gambling into the game, till now the stakes were high in proportion to ...
— Elsie's New Relations • Martha Finley
... circumference the patriotic spirit was more alive than at the centre. There was a general sense that our affairs were being strangely mismanaged.' The men who think and talk like this are not struggling for place and power amid the demoralizing surroundings of modern Parliamentary life. They are able to take a cool and dispassionate view of us and our affairs, and they begin to think that public life has degenerated into a mere scramble for the spoils of office. Their indignation, when Gordon was deserted ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... plantations—that is, as business investments rather than as communities of human beings. The existence of Chartered Company government marks a survival of this habit of mind. The old colonial system, which embodied this point of view, proved demoralizing not only to the home government but to the colonists, as a similar view is to the working class, and it led to the loss of the American colonies as surely as a similar attitude on the part of employers leads to unrest and rebellion ...
— Progress and History • Various
... fortuitous but unalterable circumstances (cards, in this case), and to get as much out of them as one can: and to do this a man must learn a little dissimulation, and how to put a good face upon a bad business. But, on the other hand, it is exactly for this reason that card-playing is so demoralizing, since the whole object of it is to employ every kind of trick and machination in order to win what belongs to another. And a habit of this sort, learnt at the card-table, strikes root and pushes its way into practical life; ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... was impossible to efface her image from his memory. Even amidst the fumes of wine and the debauched revelry of the supper table he could see the form that he had once so passionately loved standing out like a pillar of light, clear and distinct against the darkness. He had led this demoralizing existence for fully six months, when one day, as he was riding down the Avenue des Champs Elysees, he saw a lady give him a friendly bow. She was seated in a magnificent open carriage, wrapped in the richest and ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... revolting to the soul. And we shall be rid of phthisis and phthisic and pneumonia and pneumatics, and diphtheria and pterodactyl, and all those other insane words which no man addicted to the simple Christian life can try to spell and not lose some of the bloom of his piety in the demoralizing attempt. Do not doubt it. We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change places with an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it. We do not regret our old, yellow fangs and snags ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... freedom made reasonable allowance for a man brought up under such demoralizing influences as Thomas Hughes had been, they of course felt less confidence in him, than they would have done had he sought to obtain liberty by some more commendable process. Being aware of this, he returned to his master, not long after he acknowledged the theft. At one ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... life it is a great exception to divorce or to be divorced. The only class amongst whom it is at all common is the class of hangers-on to our Administration, the clerks and policemen, and so on. I fear there is little that is good to be said of many of them. It is terrible to see how demoralizing our contact is to all sorts and conditions of men. To be attached to our Administration is almost a stigma of disreputableness. I remember remarking once to a headman that a certain official seemed to be quite regardless of public opinion in his life, and asked ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... of mere physical torture, in gladiatorial combats, or in the bloody precincts of plaza de toros, as grossly demoralizing as the loathsome minutiae of heinous crimes upon which legal orators dilate; and which Argus reporters, with magnifying lenses at every eye, reproduce for countless newspapers, that serve as wings for transporting moral dynamite to hearthstones ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Shakers and Rappists have, and it is an advantage in point of neatness. The slop-made coats and trousers worn in many societies quickly turn shabby, and give a slouchy appearance to the men, which is disagreeable to the eye, and must be more or less demoralizing to the wearers. The blue jacket of the Rappist is a very suitable and comfortable working garment; and the long coat of the Shaker always looks ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... men are declared to be equal (which man never will permit his fellow to be if he can prevent it), the only source of distinction is wealth, and thus the desire of wealth becomes the ruling passion of the whole body, and there is no passion so demoralizing. The other is, that where the people, or, more properly speaking, the mob govern, they must be conciliated by flattery and servility on the part of those who would become their idols. Now flattery is lying, and a habit ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... tribes which declared allegiance to the French, the English, or the Americans, were in their turn the means of bringing a neighboring tribe into subjection. Thus began a new era in the history of the Indian, inaugurating a kind of warfare that was cruel, relentless, and demoralizing, since it was based upon the desire to conquer and to despoil the conquered of his possessions—a motive unknown to the ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... hours, is no exaggeration. Then the cards they presented, the insinuations they indulged in with regard to the other man's goods (who was waiting outside)! It really was amusing, but it grew tiresome, and was demoralizing, because one was compelled to "bargain" if anything was purchased at all, the first scale of ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... your views and measures, declare that they would sooner forego their Abolitionism than their party.... Now, these are not the views of here and there a straggling Abolitionist, but of seven-tenths of all the voting Abolitionists of the State.... They are entirely unconscious of the demoralizing influence of their course. They need light, warning, entreaty, and rebuke." Besides this demoralization of the Abolitionists, as described by Collins, the parent society at New York fell into bad financial straits. It was absolutely without funds, and without any means of supplying the lack. ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... triumphs of her calling to live a simpler and wholesomer life. That passage in the career of Miss Gertrude White somewhat puzzled Janet Macleod. If it were the case that the ambitions and jealousies and simulated emotions of a life devoted to art had a demoralizing and degrading effect on the character, why had not the young lady made the discovery a little earlier? What was the reason of her very sudden conversion? It was no doubt very noble on her part, if she really were convinced that this continual stirring up ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... filthy literature that was almost openly sold in the streets of many of our largest cities. Too much credit cannot be given the society that took the matter in hand. I believe that nearly every dealer to-day aims to keep his stock free from demoralizing books; but in the nature of things the line of demarcation cannot be drawn with entire satisfaction to all. About twenty years ago an itinerant dealer was arrested in a New Jersey town for selling a certain book. I was present at the trial, ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... tyrannical. The archbishop asks that a new governor be appointed, who shall have no selfish aims in accepting the post, preferably an ecclesiastic. Some check must be placed on the immigration of Chinese, who are ruining the country and demoralizing the natives. The Inquisition should be reestablished in Manila. In another letter (dated July 26) Santibanez explains to the king his attitude in regard to the marriage of one of his relatives, and complains that the governor has, in consequence of this affair, slandered and persecuted ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair
... activities greatly benefited the public. The future historian of American society will probably attribute enormous influence to the trolley car in linking urban community with urban community, in extending the radius of the modern city, in freeing urban workers from the demoralizing influences of the tenement, in offering the poorer classes comfortable homes in the surrounding country, and in extending general enlightenment by bringing about a closer human intercourse. Indeed, there is probably no single influence that ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... on the hillside, Peter knew, was cached illicit whisky, and at night the boot-leggers carried on a brisk trade among the gamblers. More than that, the glade on the Big Hill was used for still more demoralizing ends. It became a squalid grove of Ashtoreth; but now, in the autumn evening, all the petty obscenities of white and black sloughed away amid the religious implications of ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... integrity is not considered in its proper light, and is not valued as it should be; that these men have a secret influence which is well known, and are countenanced and retained for the weight of their control among a certain class; and, strange to say, that the party ex-officio make these demoralizing things the basis of their complaints against the "powers that be;" yet such is their feeble dependence, that no sooner are they in office than we have the repetition of the ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... that is demoralizing in a hundred ways, and is fraught with peril to the republic, peril to society, and peril to all the interests of humanity; and therefore as I would assert,—and who would deny the supreme right and power of the people to protect the republic ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... in caring for children, and her cleanliness, honesty, truthfulness, morals, and general character carefully investigated. She ought to be fond of children, and young-hearted enough to enter into their little games and joys and sorrows. No maid whose example is demoralizing to the little ones should have any place in the home. The nurse probably will do the baby's washing, and may help a little here and there about the house, but as a rule she has nothing to do ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... fellows take to laying in supplies of whatever is within reach, and surrounding themselves with plates heaped with the substance of future courses, it is first unfair and next demoralizing. If one man hogs the available supply for merely later use, he teaches his neighbor to do the same in self-defense. And so you can watch the proof of the old copy-book motto ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... the secret cutting of rates and the sudden fluctuations that constantly take place are demoralizing to all business except that of a purely speculative character, and frequently occasion great ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... people. He must not hesitate to use constantly his voice as a protest against all forms of evil. This duty is the more incumbent upon him as there are none among the people to protest and to denounce the most flagrant, demoralizing and universal evils of the land. One of the most discouraging things concerning the situation in India is, not the universality of certain evils, but the utter absence of those who dare to withstand them and denounce ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... of the Marshal's name revived Don Marcelo's hope. Perhaps this soldier, who was keeping his faith intact in spite of the interminable and demoralizing marches, was nearer the truth than ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... subscriptions and funds for his benefit, and gifts of money for his table, and checks or notes for several thousand dollars in token of admiration of the 7th of March speech.[1] This was, of course, utterly wrong and demoralizing, but Mr. Webster came, after a time, to look upon such transactions as natural and proper. In the Ingersoll debate, Mr. Yancey accused him of being in the pay of the New England manufacturers, and his biographer ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... practically a Confederate port. The officers and sailors expended their ill-gotten wealth with the usual lavishness of the irresponsible, the people of Nassau reaping thereby a fabulous harvest in cash. This was quite demoralizing to honest industry, and, as might be expected, a serious reaction has followed. Legitimate trade and industry will require years before they can reassert themselves. Sudden and seeming prosperity is almost sure to be equally transitory. We were told that, during the entire period ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... Idolatry, and their Demoralizing Tendency. Counteracting Influences. Contradictory Views of Hindu Character. Professor Max Muller. Sir Thomas Munro. Sir ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... whole system of management, as I have described it, you will see that there is no reward for, or incentive to, excellence; it is all debauching and demoralizing; it is a disgrace to the Government, which consents to maintain at the public cost what is, in fact, nothing else but a pauper shop and ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... probably it is a surfeit, and what we suppose are the pangs of hunger are really the miseries of repletion. More people are suffering from too much than from too little. Especially are the good things here in a demoralizing profusion. Ask any large employer of labor, and he will tell you that what ails the working-classes is an excess of pianos and buggies and opera-boxes. Ask any workman what ails his employer, and he will say that ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... formidable problem. As yet, their provisions had not run out, and they were living in their marquee as we had seen them three weeks earlier, just after their yacht went ashore. It could not be said that they were molestive in the same sense as the sailors, but they were even more demoralizing in the spectacle they offered the neighborhood of people dependent on hired service, and in their endeavors to supply themselves in perishable provisions, like milk and eggs, by means of money. Cyril ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... boarding-houses,—numbering be it remembered between 11,000 and 12,000 girls and women,—two thirds of them lack the use of a sitting-room and must entertain men as well as women in their bedrooms. Not a few indications were seen in the course of the investigation of the demoralizing results of this practice. Many of the young women in lodgings were young and were friendless and were earning very low pay. Eighteen per cent of those who were reported without the use of a sitting-room were under twenty-five. The housing ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... of France, Belgium, and Germany all yield convincing and corroborative testimony to the demoralizing influence on political life which results from the coalitions at the second ballots. Insufficient attention, however, has been directed to one aspect of this influence, its pernicious effect upon the ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... would the nation tolerate being thus ruthlessly trodden under the unclean heels of an insolent oligarchy? The capitalists, banded together for the sole purpose of pillage and loot, had already succeeded in enslaving the toiler. The appalling degradation of the working classes, the sordidness and demoralizing squalor in which they passed their lives, the curse of drink, the provocation to crime, the shame of the sweat shops—all which evils in our social system she had seen as a Settlement worker, were directly traceable to Centralized Wealth. The labor unions regulated ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... head of this chapter—an era of fifty-nine years—inherited as legacies from the immediate past: a well-furnished treasury, a nation in the enjoyment of peace, a firmly established throne, and a satisfactory state of foreign relations. These comfortable conditions seem to have exercised demoralizing influence. The bonds of discipline grew slack; fierce quarrels on account of women involved fratricide among the princes of the blood, and finally the life of an Emperor was sacrificed—the only instance of such a catastrophe ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... out of Armenia, with its remnant race of human wrecks, and after months of the demoralizing fatalism and moral laxity of the Russian, I was astounded by the miracle of stability of the tiny Czech force in establishing an economic frontier between the Germanophile sections of Russia and freedom-loving Siberia. Not only is this force the key to the military ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... restraining influence; but over and against this one or two hours in seven days were pitted the moral atmosphere of the shop, the bold admiration and advances in the streets, which were no longer unheeded and were scarcely resented, and the demoralizing sights and sounds of a tenement-house. The odds were too great for poor Belle. Like thousands of other girls, she stood in peculiar need of sheltered home life, and charity broad as heaven should be exercised toward ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... down the short lane that ended at the gate of Holly Court, and joyous and chattering men and women to come in to tea. Nancy loved this, and to see a group of men standing about his blazing logs filled Bert's heart with pride. It was rather demoralizing in a domestic sense, dinner was delayed, and their bedtime consequently delayed, and Dora, the cook was disgruntled at seven o'clock, when it was still impossible to set the dinner table. But Nancy, rather than disturb her guests, got a second servant, an enormous ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... mode" from which the "Ionic" was derived was still more demoralizing; it was counted "orgiastic," and proper only in certain excited ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... anyway. Do you ever think, Susy!" she seized her sister's wrist and looked her in the eyes—"that there are a million more women than men in this country? It is evident we can't all be married. Well, then, I withdraw from the competition! It's demoralizing to women; and it's worse for men. But I don't intend to confine myself to ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... moment Blunt began to lose his head. No doubt he had not thought of such a serious fight as this when he had given his challenge, and there was a savage bull-dog tenacity about Myles that could not but have had a somewhat demoralizing effect upon him. ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... considerable proportion of his recruits had been drawn from among the convicts of the French jails. Had the colony been then established, the mixture of such an element must have tainted its very source, and exercised an utterly demoralizing influence on its future. But God had designs of special mercy on Canada, so the day of her visitation was deferred, only that it might rise at a later period with a steadier, a clearer, and a more enduring light. Although Jacques Cartier failed in his immediate object, ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... has in it lessons of virtue and morality,—for those who can extract them; but even for these few it is a very partial teaching; and for the many who cannot read so spiritually, whether in the book or the brothel, the experience is demoralizing and deadening. But toward the end of the paper the critic lets it appear that he does not place Le Sage so high as some of his phrases prompt us to infer; and he quotes this judgment of Joubert: "Of the novels of Le Sage it may be ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... not. But we are hunting for him." Cutty had not explained his interest in Gregor. Those plaguey stones again. They were demoralizing him. Loot. ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... must return to our lilies. There is no sense of wealth like floating in this archipelago of white and green. The emotions of avarice become almost demoralizing. Every flower bears a fragrant California in its bosom, and you feel impoverished at the thought of leaving one behind. But after the first half-hour of eager grasping, one becomes fastidious, rather scorns those on which the wasps and flies have alighted, and seeks only the stainless. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... hitherto considered it right to preserve a rigid silence—I allude to the trade in opium; and I now unhesitatingly declare in this public manner that after the most unbiased and careful observations I have become convinced during my stay in China that the alleged demoralizing and debasing evils of opium have been and are vastly exaggerated. Like all other indulgences, excesses in its use are bad and reprehensible; but I have neither myself seen such vicious consequences as are frequently ascribed to it, ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... more confirmed" [he said, Jan, 3, 1882] "in my belief that there is something demoralizing in politics and parties. I, at any rate, shall never be able to join a party which has the majority on its side. Bjoernson says, 'The majority is always right'; and as a practical politician he is bound, I suppose, to say ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... be! All that horrible publicity. All that concentrating of crude popular interest on themselves! Believe me, nobody who watches a public career carefully but sees the demoralizing effect the limelight has even on men's characters. And I suppose you'll admit that men are less ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... Schwalbe in a low tone, for his Leutnant's words had produced a demoralizing effect upon the men. "How much cable ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... benches of St. Stephen's for new company and—voila tout! the nation was reformed at a stroke! Yet that was not all by any means. In most of the rural districts of England there were parishes, not here and there, but parishes by shoals, presenting a state of things more rotten and more demoralizing than anything that the ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... influence of gold or spleen; and in the most critical epoch of an empire, the poising of his tremendous influence—the influence of so much earnestness and magical power—was the accident of an accident. We admit for him, in palliation, the demoralizing influence of terrific example, and of maddening oppression; but where is the worth of a morality that, in a man of heroic mould, will not stand assay? and what is virtue but a name, if she may be betrayed whenever she demands ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... when all persons, with any sense of moral good and evil, will look upon it with the same indignation with which my father regarded it. My father was as well aware as anyone that Christians do not, in general, undergo the demoralizing consequences which seem inherent in such a creed, in the manner or to the extent which might have been expected from it. The same slovenliness of thought, and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... outposts, and in the depths, of the Western wilderness an armed host was working and cheating for Astor, and, in turn, being cheated by their employer; while, for Astor's gain, they were violating all laws, debauching, demoralizing and beggaring entire tribes of Indians, slaying and often being themselves slain in retaliation, what was the beneficiary of this orgy of crime and bloodshed doing ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... had a very demoralizing effect upon Hoopdriver, a demoralization that was immediately completed by the ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... Eugenia on the absurd, contradictory and demoralizing Dogmas and Mysteries of the Christian Religion. Now first translated from the French of Frret, but supposed to be written by Baron Holbach, author of the System of Nature, Christianity Unveiled, Common Sense, ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... read this affecting story without finding in it a complete answer to the charge of demoralizing the lower classes? Does the Barrister really think, that this generous and grateful enthusiast is as likely to be unprovided and poverty-stricken in his old age, as he was prior to his conversion? Except indeed that at that time his old age was as improbable ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the earth—better death. Not yet—not yet—he would argue. Heaven might send him a happy chance. So the weeks melted into months, and he kept the weary way hoping against reason, conspiring, betraying, demoralizing, sinking into despair. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace |
