"Immoral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... broken with the Christian revelation from conscientious scruples. Their number is greater than is generally supposed, and it must on no account be supposed that they are necessarily wicked or even immoral men. When they declare the Christian revelation to be an absurdity, it is because they do not know it in its historical origin and its divine truth. To assume that every word, every letter,—for it has been carried even so far,—that every parable, every figure, was ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... whatever they be called; the blind and immoral mob that has been misled by wretches to destroy ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... then, if he should tire, you're your own mistress. All this caging of wild birds seems to me to be futile. Morals? Oh, morals be hanged! Are you going to call yourself immoral because the man has no great respect ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... that had not learnt by experience that the King's uniform was constantly insulted in Nationalist Ireland, and as invariably welcomed and honoured in Ulster. In the vote of censure debate on the 19th of March Mr. Cave quoted an Irish newspaper, which had described the British Army as "the most immoral and degraded force in Europe," and warned Irishmen that, by joining it, all they would get was "a red coat, a dishonoured name, a besmirched character." On the other hand, the very troops who were sent North from the Curragh against the advice of Sir Arthur Paget, to provoke "the Ulsterites to ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... third of a man's love, and to share his physical and mental and spiritual comradeship with two other wives, is far more immoral, to my thinking, than to take the whole of a man without ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... monk from drowning, and from two evil spirits, with instruments of torture, one who had lived an immoral life. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... when, in pursuance of our duty, we come to state these crimes with their proper criminatory epithets, when we state in strong and direct terms the circumstances which heighten and aggravate them, when we dwell on the immoral and heinous nature of the acts, and the terrible effects which such acts produce, and when we offer to prove both the principal facts and the aggravatory ones by evidence, and to show their nature and quality by the rules of law, morality, and policy, then ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... personality are the editorial lucubrations of the Rev. Homer Wilbur. The very lustre of the midnight oil shines upon their glittering fragments of philosophy, admirably twisted to suit the requirements of an eminently unphilosophical age; moral axioms from heathen writers applied judiciously to the immoral actions of Christian doers; distorted shadows of a monstrous political economy, and dispassionate and highly commendable views 'de ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... theater would become bankrupt in a twelvemonth. The great mass of those who frequent the playhouse go there for strong, passionate excitements..I do not affirm," says Dr. Cuyler, "that every popular play is immoral, and every attendant is on a scent for sensualities. But the theater is a concrete institution, it must be judged in the gross and to a tremendous extent it is only a gilded nastiness. It unsexes womanhood by putting her publicly in male ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... only five feet six inches in height, with sallow skin and jet black whiskers, his eyes dark and piercing, his whole personality, as one observer put it, "reminiscent of the spider." His reputation was that of an unscrupulous and immoral rascal, who would not hesitate to sacrifice his best friends, if need be. His war against Cornelius Vanderbilt for control of the Erie was one of his typical operations—a war which, when he saw he was losing, he won by issuing $5,000,000 worth of fraudulent ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... however, but a very slight resemblance to the terrific yells and whoops of Indian warriors. Advancing a few paces farther, a sudden turn of the road brought them in sight of two drunken soldiers, who were cursing and swearing and hallooing in a manner quite outrageous and immoral; and now and then, by way of adding a little spice to this part of their entertainment, firing off their pistols into the tree-tops. And this it was that had given rise to those wild rumors that had thrown the whole country ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... in drawing out a system of rules he is obliged to go by logic, and follow the exact deduction of conclusion from conclusion, and must be sure that the whole system is coherent and one. You hear of even immoral or irreligious books being written by men of decent character; there is a late writer who says that David Hume's sceptical works are not at all the picture of the man. A priest might write a treatise which was really lax on the ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... the world's eye, had enrolled her name among the giddy and inconsiderate; who labours under a parent's curse, and the cruel uncertainties, which must arise from reflecting, that, equally against duty and principle, she has thrown herself into the power of a man, and that man an immoral one?— Must not the sense she has of her inconsideration darken her most hopeful prospects? Must it not even rise strongest upon a thoughtful mind, when her hopes are the fairest? Even her pleasures, were the man to ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... this duty. But the heathen, instead of making use of this light, wantonly extinguished it. They were not willing to retain God in their knowledge and to fetter themselves with the restraints which a pure knowledge of Him imposed. They corrupted the idea of God in order to feel at ease in an immoral life. The revenge of nature came upon them in the darkening and confusion of their intellects. They fell into such insensate folly as to change the glorious and incorruptible nature of God into the images of men and beasts, birds and ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... hills, dowered with a little capital of their own earnings. The factory operatives at Lowell form a community that commands the respect of the neighborhood, and of all under whose observation they come. No female of an immoral character could remain a week in any of the mills. The superintendent of the Boott Corporation informed me, that, during the five and a half years of his superintendence of that factory, employing about nine hundred and fifty young women, he had known of but one case of an illegitimate ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... vices, embodied, as they so often are, in the person of father, brother, husband, son, employer. No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man himself ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... sufficient for a more complex society which is largely urban, such as exists at the present time. Moreover, recognized moral standards within the past fifty years have largely been raised through the growth of general intelligence. It follows that immoral acts, which were condoned fifty years ago and which produced but slight social effect, to-day meet with great reprobation and have far greater social consequences than a generation ago. This is particularly true of the standards which the wife imposes ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... employers. They do what they do, not freely and intelligently, but for the sake of the wage earned. It is this fact which makes the action illiberal, and which will make any education designed simply to give skill in such undertakings illiberal and immoral. The activity is not free because not freely ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... principle of difference is as substantial, and as strongly pronounced, as between the republicans and the monocrats of our country, I hold it as honorable to take a firm and decided part, and as immoral to pursue a middle line, as between the parties of honest men and rogues, into which ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... deal of discussion about the morality of this part of the novel. The question resolves itself into a question of art, for we hold that truth of representation and morality of effect are identical. Immoral characters may be introduced into a book, and the effect be moral on the reader's mind, but a character which is both immoral and unnatural ever produces a pernicious effect. Now the authoress of Jane Eyre has drawn in Rochester an unnatural character, and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... blackguards. Immoral, one must confess them to be, according to our lights, but even in England "Custom from time immemorial" ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... Name forgotten, but the fact is indelible.] blames Hilda severely for her betrayal of Miriam (who was at least her best friend in Rome), and furthermore designates her as an immoral character. This, we may suppose, is intended for a hit at New England Puritanism; and from the French stand-point, it is not unfair. Hilda represents Puritanism in its weakness and in its strength. It is true, what Hamlet says, that "conscience makes cowards of us all," ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... animated. A subject had been broached which lay close to his heart. "The public schools constitute a godless sink of pollution!" he replied heatedly. "They are nurseries of vice! They are part of an immoral and vicious system of education which is undermining the religion of American children! I have always contended that we, the Holy Catholic Church, must control education! I hold that education outside of the Church is heresy of the most damnable kind! We have heretofore weakly ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... labor. Corporation and labor union alike have come to stay. Each if properly managed is a source of good and not evil. Whenever in either there is evil, it should be promptly held to account; but it should receive hearty encouragement so long as it is properly managed. It is profoundly immoral to put or keep on the statute books a law, nominally in the interest of public morality that really puts a premium upon public immorality, by undertaking to forbid honest men from doing what must be done under modern business conditions, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... sporting days had passed away, and nothing was left but ceaseless toil, these essentially combative people, to whom violent and continuous excitement was the very breath of life, became, for a while at least, knavish and immoral, sunk almost to one dead social level, and totally uninteresting because, in their new life of peaceful tillage—a life far more suited to their English law-givers than to themselves—they were apparently incapable of maintaining ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... reproduce the precepts respecting prayer, simply because immoral men among the heathen worshipped their gods as devoutly as moral men did. He did not reproduce the Lord's prayer, because he would not consider that it belonged to the heathen, or the promises that God would hear prayer, simply because these ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... native Californian is a distinctive type; as far from the Easterner in psychology as the extreme Southerner is from the Yankee. He is easy going, witty, hospitable, lovable, inclined to be unmoral rather than immoral in his personal habits, and easy to ...
— The City That Was - A Requiem of Old San Francisco • Will Irwin
... moral faith before the eyes of all London. But Alan pointed out to her the many practical difficulties, amounting almost to impossibilities, which beset such a course; and Herminia, though it was hateful to her thus to yield to the immoral prejudices of a false social system, gave way at last to Alan's repeated expression of the necessity for prudent and practical action. She would go with him to Italy, she said, as a proof of her affection and her confidence in his judgment, though ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... they determine what evidence shall be admitted. The ancient oaths, it will be observed, say nothing about "according to the evidence." They obviously take it for granted that the jury try the whole case; and of course that they decide what evidence shall be admitted. It would be intrinsically an immoral and criminal act for a jury to declare a man guilty, or to declare that one man owed. money to another, unless all the evidence were admitted, which they thought ought to be admitted, for ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... innocent expletives—imaginative phrases wherewith to round off a sentence. When he said "I'll bet you so and so," nobody ever thought of taking him up; but still I could not help thinking it my duty to put him down. The habit was an immoral one, and so I told him. It was a vulgar one—this I begged him to believe. It was discountenanced by society—here I said nothing but the truth. It was forbidden by act of Congress—here I had not the slightest ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... we should watch and pray, [Matt. 26:41] avoid idleness, evil company, bad books and papers, indecent songs and pictures, immoral plays, intemperance in eating and drinking, and all that would incite to impurity. We should keep our minds occupied with good thoughts and desires, so that we have no room ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... Genesis, does not destroy the force of the golden rule and the ten commandments. Parts of the Bible are so true, so grand, so beautiful, that it is a pity it should have been bound in the same volume with sentiments and descriptions so gross and immoral. ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... him to die by a horrible disease or relegates him to insanity. Suicide is only a symptom of a certain pitch of mental distress: its incidental result is death, but so it is of many practices not immoral. ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the Dutch in Orange State, in Natal, in Cape Colony will unite against us; (2) that an attack on us in retreat from Candahar, where Mr. Gladstone has 'insanely' continued war, if moderately successful, may make even yet new 'vengeance' of Afghans seem 'necessary to our prestige'—such are the immoral principles dominant among Whigs as well as Tories; (3) any such embroilments may animate Ireland to insurrectionary defiance; (4) further Afghan fighting may lead to Indian revolt.... The nation has found ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... to every question. If thou hast genius and poverty to thy lot, dwell on the foolish, perplexing, imprudent, dangerous, and even immoral, conduct of promise-breach in small things, of want of punctuality, of procrastination in all its shapes and disguises. Force men to reverence the dignity of thy moral strength in and for itself,—seeking no excuses ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... abnormally developed in a single direction. His one object is to out-manoeuvre in a game of desperate and immoral chances. The tactical spirit in him has none of the higher ambition. It has felt itself in the degree only ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... some twinges also. But her doughnuts could not minister to the mind she had diseased. Old Man Shaw took them up; carried them to the pig-pen, and fed them to the pigs. It was the first spiteful thing he had done in his life, and he felt a most immoral satisfaction ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... DAVIES (trying to defend himself from a charge of ignorance,) 'I mean genteel moral characters.' 'I think (said Hicky,) gentility and morality are inseparable.' BOSWELL. 'By no means, Sir. The genteelest characters are often the most immoral. Does not Lord Chesterfield give precepts for uniting wickedness and the graces? A man, indeed, is not genteel when he gets drunk; but most vices may be committed very genteelly: a man may debauch his friend's wife genteely: he may cheat at cards genteelly.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... in the "Essay upon Satire," for the management of an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur. He bore, however, the attack, without resenting it, until he was again assailed by Sir Richard in his "Satire upon Wit," written expressly to correct the dissolute and immoral performances of the writers of his time. With a ponderous attempt at humour, the good knight proposes, that a bank for wit should be established, and that all which had hitherto passed as current, should be called in, purified in the mint, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... bad; very unpatriotic; very immoral," declared Lord Carse. "Such people must be dealt ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... not deny, that I knew the trade was immoral; but so is smuggling; and I viewed them pretty much as the same thing, in this sense. I am now told, that the law of this country pronounces the American citizen, who goes in a slaver, a pirate; and ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... may mean a private society or a chartered company for the improvement of human live stock. But for the present it is far more likely to mean a blatant repudiation of such proposals as indecent and immoral, with, nevertheless, a general secret pushing of the human will in the repudiated direction; so that all sorts of institutions and public authorities will under some pretext or other feel their way furtively towards ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... been hardly aware, in her girlhood, of differing from others in this respect. In the well-regulated well-fed Summers world the unusual was regarded as either immoral or ill-bred, and people with emotions were not visited. Sometimes, with a sense of groping in a topsy-turvy universe, Anna had wondered why everybody about her seemed to ignore all the passions and sensations which formed the stuff of great ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... an age so universally immoral as scarcely to be termed immoral, since immorality may be defined as a departure from the morals that obtain a given time and in a given place. So that whilst from our own standpoint the Cinquecento, ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... comes it that the myths are so often absurd and even immoral?' For the usual purpose of mystery and allegory; in order to make people think. The soul that wishes to know God must make its own effort; it cannot expect simply to lie still and be told. The myths by their obvious falsity and absurdity ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... and impossible to hold for an instant before a steady gaze. I have no wish to justify myself when I write that I preferred to keep my eyes averted, enjoying perhaps just such a measure of vision as would enter at a corner of them. This may or may not have been immoral under the circumstances—the event did not prove it so—but for urgent private reasons I could not be the person to destroy the idyll, if indeed its destruction were possible, that flourished there in the corner of my eye. Besides, ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... privation. We shall have a view of some of the residents in this renowned place of fashionable resort; the interior of which perhaps exhibits a spectacle far more diversified, and if possible more immoral and vicious, than the exterior. There are quondam gentlemen of fortune, reduced either so low as not to be able to pay for the Rules, or so unprincipled and degraded as to have no friend at command who could with safety ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Plants. Here the fiction is puerile, and built on a system which is itself in danger of vanishing into air. At the end of the second canto, the Muse takes a dish of tea, which I think is the only thing of any consequence that is done throughout. The second part has been charged with an immoral tendency; but Miss Seward has observed, with much truth, that it is a burlesque upon morality to make the amours of the plants responsible at its tribunal; and that the impurity is in the imagination of the reader, not in the pages of the poet. For these amours, he might have found a better ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... singular freshness of the bodies. He had been struck again and again by the hang-dog, abominable looks of the ruffians who came to him before the dawn; and putting things together clearly in his private thoughts, he perhaps attributed a meaning too immoral and too categorical to the unguarded counsels of his master. He understood his duty, in short, to have three branches: to take what was brought, to pay the price, and to avert the eye ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... evidence of the divinity of Christianity," says one, "the master-evidence, the evidence with which all other evidences will stand or fall, is Christ Himself speaking by His own word." But if you add to His words foolish fancies, or revolting absurdities, or immoral speculations of your own, you destroy that ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... Socialists, on the side of the propertyless. Not only are the owners of property objectionable in their persons, being "drones and parasites" who squander the earnings of the poor on riotous living, as we have learned in the foregoing pages, but private property as an institution is immoral in itself and ought to be abolished. No man has a right to be rich; no man can become rich honestly. Hence it follows that all rich men are robbers, thieves, and swindlers. "The poor owe no duty to the rich, unless it be the duty which an honest man owes to the thief who has robbed him. The rich ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... States were insincere and vacillating, that Alcibiades stood forth as a party leader. He was thirty-one years of age, belonged to an ancient and powerful family, possessed vast wealth, had great personal beauty and attractive manners, but above all, was unboundedly ambitious, and grossly immoral—the most insolent, unprincipled, licentious, and selfish man that had thus far scandalized and adorned Athenian society. The only redeeming feature in his character was his friendship for Socrates, who, it seems, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... admit I had a weak moment. Yes, sir; for a brief spell I was all too human. Or I guess what it was. I was all blinded up with immoral designs, this here snake-blooded Timmins having put things over on me in stock deals from time to time till I'd got to lying awake nights thinking how I could make a believer of him. I wanted him to know there is a God, even if it hadn't ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... the gallows. Another proof of his ill will to me, was the manner in which the French journals criticized my romance of Delphine, which appeared at this time; they thought proper to denounce it as immoral, and the work which had received my father's approbation was condemned by these courtier criticks. There might be found in that book, that fire of youth, and ardour after happiness, which ten years, ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... said Marcus, in mock horror. "To think that one whom I thought so good can prove so immoral. Do you then wish to tempt me from ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... the clitoris is very similiar to that of circumcision in the male and is performed for similar causes. Many a woman who has been nervous all her life, owes her condition to a hooded clitoris, which a very simple operation would correct. A hooded clitoris also may have something to do with the immoral life of some girls. The other day I received a letter from an aged physician who, in discussing the tendency to immoral practices, says: "You say in one of your articles, 'What is the remedy? Educate!' Well, perhaps, but if you would let me circumcise the girl early in life, I believe it ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... his work at a point or two, leaving the proof of my sayings mostly to the honesty of the reader. It will not require so great an effort of his honesty now, as it once would, to own that Zola's books, though often indecent, are never immoral, but always most terribly, most pitilessly moral. I am not saying now that they ought to be in every family library, or that they could be edifyingly committed to the hands of boys and girls; one of our first publishing houses is about to issue an edition even of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... large scale, is, we think, indisputable. But whether he deserves all the invectives which have been uttered against him on that account may be questioned. No man ought to be severely censured for not being beyond his age in virtue. To buy the votes of constituents is as immoral as to buy the votes of representatives. The candidate who gives five guineas to the freeman is as culpable as the man who gives three hundred guineas to the member. Yet we know that, in our own time, no man is thought wicked ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... felon are always confined in separate places; as indeed one should suppose every where to be the case, for, as Sir George Staunton has observed, "To associate guilt with imprudence, and confound wickedness with misfortune, is impolitic, immoral, and cruel[27]." ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... save thee would think of acting thus?' Then that foremost king of Bharata's race eyed with pity that perpetrator of wicked deeds, and believing that he had lost his senses, said, 'Mayst thy heart grow in virtue! Never set thy heart again on immoral deeds! Thou mayst depart in peace now with thy charioteers, cavalry and infantry.' Thus addressed by Yudhishthira, the prince, O Bharata, was overpowered with shame, and bending down his head, he silently and sorrowfully wended his ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... He had been distressed by the lax morals of some of his colleagues in the agitation for Reform, and he pauses to deplore that "not all who are zealous in this cause are as conspicuous for purity of morals as for ability." He cannot reconcile himself to the idea of an immoral patriot, and begs that they will at least hide their vices. The old man finds his peroration in Simeon's prayer. He had seen the great salvation. "I have lived to see thirty millions of people indignant and resolute, spurning ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... going on amongst the workmen. They'd got wind of it somehow. No one ever knows how these things begin. Then I met young King from Professor L——'s camp, and he told me the whole story. He knew Millicent very well. He said she's not what you could call an immoral woman so much as a woman without morals. He confesses he never met anyone in the least like her before, and he rather prides himself on his knowledge of the world—he would have us believe that he has seen a devil ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... Nay, further, he will be taught that when utility and right are in apparent conflict any amount of utility does not alter by a hair's-breadth the morality of actions, which cannot be allowed to deviate from established law or usage; and that the non-detection of an immoral act, say of telling a lie, which may often make the greatest difference in the consequences, not only to himself, but to all the world, makes none ...
— Philebus • Plato
... than Byron from his humour being misapprehended. His letters abound with jests and jeux d'esprit, which were often taken seriously as admissions of an immoral character. We gladly turn to something pleasanter—to some of the few humorous pieces he wrote in ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... forms into the inner meaning of which he does not greatly vex his soul by entering; nor his airy way of ridiculing what he has no intention of helping to overthrow; nor his light unconcern in the question whether he is, or is not, an immoral writer. Or, at least, in all of these things he has no share in qualities and tendencies, which influences and conflicts unknown to and unforeseen by him may be safely said to have ultimately made characteristic of Englishmen. But he IS English in his ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... existence, and when they are not assured, the contrary is true. Among savages, infanticide and parricide are not only permitted but are obligatory and sanctioned by religion if the tribe inhabits an island where food is scarce (for instance, in Polynesia), and they are immoral and criminal acts on continents where the food supply is more abundant ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... he finally concluded, "ourselves created an immoral or unmoral social environment. To undo its inevitable results we must reverse our course. We must see that all our economic legislation, all our social reforms, are in the very opposite direction to those hitherto adopted, and that they tend in the direction of one or other ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... new and immoral methods into business, Mr Iver. It must be painful to you after all these years." Harry laughed good-humoredly. "I shall corrupt the Major ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... "In the worst books you could possibly read—the only really immoral books written in ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... The immoral newspaper stops not at the unclean advertisement. It is so much for so many words, and in such a sheet it will cost no more to advertise the most impure book than the new edition of Pilgrim's Progress. A book such as no decent man would touch was a few months ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... boys seemed to act upon the principle, that nothing is disgraceful but that which is immoral and improper. ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... 14th. Talk with James Teare on the immorality of drinking. Query:—Is it per se a sin to drink a little? He does not affirm it in pure abstract, but says that no action can be purely abstract; and that as to uphold an immoral system is immoral, as the drinking system is immoral, as moderate draughts uphold the drinking system, and, in fact, cannot be drunk by the community without giving birth to drunkenness—ergo, ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... efficacy; but he rejoiced greatly when his mother was restored to soundness of mind. Daniel says: "When I was about nineteen years of age, I gave myself up to many wicked practices, and my conduct for many months was very immoral. Our family was poor, and I determined to leave Singonahully for some place where I might get on a little better in the world. But one of my uncles, who was a wealthy man, interposed, and took me to his house. He set me to work in his fields, ...
— Old Daniel • Thomas Hodson
... waited upon much become selfish. They soon become grafters, expecting and taking everything and giving nothing. This is immoral, for life is a matter of compensation, and consists in giving as well as in taking. Children should be taught consideration for others, and should not be allowed to order the servants around; not that it harms the servants, but it has a ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... led to actual immorality, but the fact can hardly be doubted. Sexual intercourse before marriage, Sir H. Risley says, is tacitly recognised, and is so generally practised that in the opinion of the best observers no Oraon girl is a virgin at the time of her marriage. "To call this state of things immoral is to apply a modern conception to primitive habits of life. Within the tribe, indeed, the idea of sexual morality seems hardly to exist, and the unmarried Oraons are not far removed from the condition of modified promiscuity which prevails among many of the Australian tribes. Provided ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... religious teaching which by explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme law for the guidance of conduct and would replace the more than dubious precepts of pseudo-religion and pseudo-science with the immoral conclusions deduced from them ...
— A Letter to a Hindu • Leo Tolstoy
... [Footnote: Ibid. ii. 208.] This is, of course, not intended as a complete description, but shows that the spirit of the earlier SÌ£ufism was profoundly ethical. Count Gobineau, however, assures us that the SÌ£ufism which he knew was both enervating and immoral. Certainly the later SÌ£ufi poets were inclined to overpress symbolism, and the luscious sweetness of the poetry may have been unwholesome for some—both for poets and for readers. Still I question whether, for properly trained readers, ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... though he did not talk to her, he touched her foot with his and pressed her hand a little. Evidently that was all he wanted, that she should be married; and it was evident that he despised her and that she only excited in him an interest of a special kind as though she were an immoral and disreputable woman. And when the feeling of triumph and love for her husband were mingled in her soul with humiliation and wounded pride, she was overcome by a spirit of defiance, and longed to sit on the box, to shout and ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... man of obscure rank was sometimes included in the royal collections, but the name of the author never. And indeed some of the distinctive quality of Japanese poetry is undoubtedly due to the air in which it flourished. It is never religious, and it is often immoral, but it is always suffused with a certain hue of courtliness, even gentleness. The language is of the most refined delicacy, the thought is never boorish or rude; there is the self-collectedness which we find in the poetry of France and Italy during the Renaissance, and in England during ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... way immoral, for morals are the best traditions and ways of each race, and here the eating of enemies was authorized by every teaching of priest and leader, by time-honored custom and ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... the texts that state it and wilfully blink the texts that hint it. Whether this be a proper and sound method of proceeding in critical investigations any one may judge. To us it seems equally unmanly and immoral. We know of but one justifiable course, and that is, with patience, with earnestness, and with all possible aids, to labor to discern the real and full meaning of the words according to the understanding ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... disused, he exercised an arbitrary but legal authority over the conduct of every rank in the state; by which he could degrade senators and knights, and inflict upon all citizens an ignominious sentence for any immoral or indecent behaviour. But nothing contributed more to render the new form of government acceptable to the people, than the frequent distribution of corn, and sometimes largesses, amongst the commonalty: for an occasional ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... conditions? The sanctity of an oath is a fine thing for theological subtlety. I had no such subtlety. I knew that the argument in favour of wrong is pleasing to the mental palate; and I put it from me, believing that the breaking of my bond would put me upon the immoral plane of the men to whom it had ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... is immoral or unjust and how can I, a lover of truth and justice, support it? (2) Even if the claim be just in theory, the Turk is hopelessly incapable, weak and cruel. He does not deserve ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... would break a promise or betray a confidence. How rare such qualities were at that day among the politicians of any country the readers of the annals of Queen Anne do not need to be told. The Regent's principal adviser at this time was a man quite as immoral, and also quite as able, as himself—the Abbe Dubois, afterwards Cardinal and Prime-minister. Dubois had a profound knowledge of foreign affairs, and he thoroughly understood the ways of men. {156} He had fought his way from humble rank to a great position in Church and State. He had trained ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... at all?' some grown reader asks. Because this volume is meant for you as well as for children, and if you have gone ever so little into the world with open eyes, you must have seen, yes, every day, things much more shocking. Because there is nothing immoral in their spirit. Because they are intrinsically valuable, as illustrating manners and traditions, and so could not well be left out. Because they complete the number of the Norse originals, and leave none untranslated. And last, though ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... pie, that is almost a passion, O passion immoral, for pie! Unknown are the ways that they fashion, Unknown and unseen of the eye, The pie that is marbled and mottled, The pie that digests with a sigh: For all is not Bass that is bottled, And all is not pork that ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... eternal good, by bringing him to a civilized and Christian country, would be regarded as of any weight, so, none of the excuses offered for slaveholding in this country are worthy of the least consideration. The act, in both cases, is essentially the same—equally inhuman, immoral, piratical. Oppression is not a matter of latitude or longitude; here excusable, there to be execrated; here to elevate the oppressor to the highest station, there to hang him by the neck till he ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... and not in the precepts of the Sunday-school. That was the trouble with the so-called "reform" campaigns, they were conducted on lines of Sunday-school morality; the people worked themselves up into a sort of revivalist frenzy, an emotional state which, if the truth were told, was thoroughly immoral, unreasonable and hypocritical: like all frenzies, as a matter of course it died down after the campaign was over. Moreover, the American people had shown that they were unwilling to make any sacrifices for the permanent betterment of conditions, and as soon ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Whisper fills a Patron's Ear, Who smiles unpleas'd, and mourns without a tear.[43] Persuasive, tho' a woful Blockhead he: Truth dies before his shadowy Sophistry. For well he knows[44] the Vices of the Town, The Schemes of State, and Int'rest of the Gown; Immoral Afternoons, indecent Nights, Enflaming Wines, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... they are men bent on advancing legitimate commerce and the improvement of the people. It would be a comfort if we could think of all as having this for their object; but tares, we fear, will always be mingled with the good seed; and if there have been travelers who have led immoral lives and sought their own amusement only, and traders who by trafficking in rum and such things have demoralized the natives, they have only shown that in some natures selfishness is too deeply imbedded to be affected ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... utilitarianism, and, I might well add, the hypocrisy of the Anglo-Saxon. It may sound odd to speak of the morality of the French, if not of the hypocrisy of the English; but this seeming paradox impresses me as a deep truth. I saw many things in Paris which were immoral according to English standards, but the absence of hypocrisy, the absence of the spirit to do the thing if it might only be done in secret, robbed these very immoralities of the damning influence of the same evils ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... me as a most immoral game," said the Lady, who had been a sympathetic spectator from a corner, doubtful of the ginger-ale, horrified at the pipe, and delighted at the complete absorption of ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... persevere in their false custom, Immoral ditties are their delight; Vain and tasteless praise they recite; Falsehood at all times do they utter; The innocent persons they ridicule; Married women they destroy, Innocent virgins of Mary they corrupt; As they pass their lives away in vanity; Poor innocent ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 3 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... code in modern ethics that would condemn an action of this kind, and yet it seems to us that the time may come when a man who made his fortune by supplying men with arms for the purpose of killing each other will be looked upon as one engaged in a highly immoral enterprise." Is it not a terrible indictment of the so-called Christian church to say, "There is no code in modern ethics that would ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... Atonement disappear at once. 'God so loved ... that He gave.' But some people say that when we preach that Jesus Christ died for our sins, that God's wrath might not fall upon men, our teaching is immoral, because it means 'Christ came, and so God loved.' It is the other way about, friend. 'God so ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... horribly immoral in me to sit here and talk in this way about a married man? It's a wonder it doesn't turn the color of the cushions. If you hear of my having the brougham relined, Ruth, you will know why. Ruth, I am so miserable at times it seems to me that I shall die. ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And if exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the slough of selfishness, they do not answer "immoral," let the morality of the principle of utility ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... and other laws fixing a low price for a certain number of seats at the theatres, or obliging the managers to give one free performance every month, as the law does in Paris, and should then forbid indecent and immoral plays— ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... clergy to withdraw the minds of the people from the profane and immoral buffooneries to which they were accustomed, ecclesiastics did not hesitate to join in the performance, and even to permit the representation to take place in churches and chapels. Afterwards the ordering and arrangement of them fell into the hands of the gilds, or different ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... our surroundings. It would be hard to say which of these modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but the latter is surely the more constant. Conduct is three parts of life,[8] they say; but I think they put it high. There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not immoral, but simply a-moral; which either does not regard the human will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy relations; where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... requisites all centre in Tentaillon's boarders. They are painters, therefore they are continually lounging in the forest. They are painters, therefore they are not unlikely to have some smattering of education. Lastly, because they are painters, they are probably immoral. And this I prove in two ways. First, painting is an art which merely addresses the eye; it does not in any particular exercise the moral sense. And second, painting, in common with all the other arts, implies the dangerous quality ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there were any good to be done by it, it would be different, of course; but, as it is, Ideala is simply sacrificing herself for nothing—and worse, she is setting a bad example by showing men they need not mend their manners since wives will endure anything. It is immoral for a woman to live with such a husband. I don't understand Ideala's meekness; it amounts to weakness sometimes, I think. I believe if he struck her she would say, 'Thank you,' and fetch him his slippers. I feel sure she thinks some unknown defect in herself is ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... a quart bottle of champagne, shut the door and struck a light. Then he opened the bottle of fizz and poured it out into a deep, enamelled starching-dish, and Billy MacLaggan drank thereof, and then raised his head, with his immoral-looking beard hanging in a sodden point like a wet deck-swab, and asked for more. That is, he asked as well as any Christian and civilised goat could ask, by standing up on his hind legs like a ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... Under the influence of this feeling I dashed off "Delilah," which I meant to be an expression of the powerful fascination of such a woman upon the memory of a man, even as he neared the hour of death. If the poem is immoral, then the history which inspired it is immoral. I consider it my ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... deservedly roasted by the newspapers—well, nothing is now too good for him. So, you see, the people Aunt Abby insists on entertaining are apt to be a rather dubious lot. I don't mean she'd pick up with anybody openly immoral, you know; but she certainly manages to fill her houses—she's got several—with a wild crew of adventurers and—esses—to call ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... hundred specimens of their handwriting. These he studied with that energy which was equalled only by his patience. In a surprisingly short time he first of all began to perceive the differences between a moral and an immoral signature. Afterwards he proceeded to study the occupation, age, habits, temperament, and all the other characteristics of the writers, and in this he was equally successful. If this be doubted by any, let him collect a number of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... dear mother. If you tell her the truth, which of course I should do did I tell her anything, my request is virtually frustrated, and I shall be the talk of the county. You, I know, don't think telling fibs is immoral when it happens to be convenient, as it would be in ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... truth, was always perspicacious and just, revelatory of an instinct for reasoning and common sense. The man's realistic criticism was not always to Manuel's taste, and at times the boy would make bold to defend a romantic, immoral thesis. Senor Custodio, however, would at once cut him short, refusing to let ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... lie in. And be the rule and law of my remaining days to shun all men, be blind to all men, scorn all men. Friendship, hospitality, society, compassion—vain words all. To be moved by another's tears, to assist another's need—be such things illegal and immoral. Let me live apart like a wolf; be ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... question, she would have extricated them and herself (as she once proposed* to her mother) from all difficulties as to Lovelace: that she, if any woman ever could, would have given a glorious instance of a passion conquered, or at least kept under by reason and by piety; the man being too immoral to be ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... the reminiscence of his lost "pony" was rankling in Forrester's mind, or if he was only affected by the presence of Sir Henry Fallowfield—an immoral Upas, under whose shadow the most flourishing of good resolutions were apt to wither and die; but certainly, after dinner, he broke through the cautious reserve which he had always in public maintained toward Miss Raymond since ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... be not infrequent. A man was complaining to the Mayor that his daughter, a lovely child of eight years old, had none of the faults common to children of her age, and, in fact, seemed absolutely deficient in immoral sense. She never told lies, had never stolen so much as a lollipop, never showed any recalcitrancy about saying her prayers, and by her incessant obedience had filled her poor father and mother with the gravest anxiety as regards her future well-being. He feared it would ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... the demands of all art, and, besides this, their tendency is of the lowest and most immoral. What then signifies the great fame these works have enjoyed for more ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... Plato is complete and unanswerable: "Plato never represents the Sophists as teaching a lax morality to their disciples. He does not make sophistry to consist in holding wicked opinions; he represents them as only too orthodox in general,[906] but capable of giving utterance to immoral paradoxes for the sake of vanity. Sophistry rather tampers and trifles with the moral convictions than directly attacks them." The Sophists were wanting in deep conviction, in moral earnestness, in sincere love of truth, in reverence for goodness and purity, and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... friend told me that Wigurd was a good man in the main, though he had been as much hated by some as if his conduct had been immoral, instead of his opinions merely being singular. "He not long ago," added the Brahmin "wrote a book against marriage, and soon afterwards wedded, in due form, the lady you saw at his table. She holds as strange tenets as he, which she ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... hesitated; then I passed on my way. I protest I was not on Bill's side; but then, neither was I on the Vicar's, and there was something in this immoral morning which seemed to say that perhaps, after all, Bill had as much right to the biscuits as the Vicar, and would certainly enjoy them better; and anyhow it was a disputable point, and no business of mine. ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... old-fashioned canons of decorum renders "American girlhood" synonymous with flippant pertness. Moulded by two women who were imbued with the spirit of Richter's admonition: "Girls like the priestesses of old, should be educated only in sacred places, and never hear, much less see, what is rude, immoral or violent"; the pate tendre of Leo's character showed unmistakably ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... amount of arguing, you were forced to admit that the subject was interesting and that the writer dealt with it in an interesting manner. What more can you expect from an author? Believe me, this hankering after purity, this hypersensitiveness as to what is morbid or immoral, is by no means a good sign. A healthy man refuses to be hampered by preconceived notions of what is wrong or ugly. When he reads a book like that the either yawns or laughs. That is because he is sure of himself. I could give you a long list of celebrated statesmen, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... citizen could say and think what he pleased; as President he was compelled to make Mr. Bryan Secretary of State. As Mr. Bryan knew nothing of history and less of European politics and had a superb disdain of diplomacy—diplomacy according to the tenets of Bryanism being an unholy and immoral game in which the foreign players were always trying to outmaneuver the virtuous and innocent American—he was provided with a political nurse, mentor, and guardian in the person of John Bassett ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... talking immoral nonsense!" he said, angrily. "Let him go, indeed! Divorce your husband! What are we coming to? In my day marriage was binding. No respectable husband or wife ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... owned by C. Eason & Co., Limited, and in December asked them for Napoleon and the Fair Sex, by Masson. The librarian informed me Mr. Eason had decided not to circulate it, as it contained improper details, which Mr. Eason considered immoral. A copy was also refused to one of the best-known pressmen in Dublin, a man of ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... protruded from battered sheathings. To some minds all this might have spelled a certain sort of poetry; to the curious group assembled at the junction it spelled eccentricity and, what was worse, a fixed and immoral shabbiness ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... such a lack of proportion? In the selection you have made I find that only two pages are given to George P. Morris, while you haven't given E. P. Roe any space at all! Yet, look here—you've blocked out fifty pages for Balzac, who was nothing but an immoral Frenchman!" ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... is nothing dearer to the heart of the English middle classes and working men than the belief that every woman with a dress allowance of more than L200 a year is a courtesan. The suggestion that these immoral Phrynes were bartering their charms for power to thwart the will of the people was just the sort of thing to ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... Beauvais, Reims, and even from so far as Touraine and Berry;[2179] which was information enough to burn ten heretics and twenty witches. Devilries were discovered which filled the priests with horror: the finding of a lost cup and gloves, the exposure of an immoral priest, the sword of Saint Catherine, the restoration of a child to life. There was also a report of a rash letter concerning the Pope and there were many other indications of witchcraft, heresy, and religious error.[2180] Such information was not to be included among the documents ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... which we forbid the representation of in Berlin, because it portrays a fellow who made love to two women at once, playing the double role of lover to his wife and his paramour, while he had a grown-up daughter! It is an immoral piece, which excites the tear-glands, and ends as 'Werther,' by the hero blowing his brains out. It is directed against all morals, and against marriage; therefore it was forbidden." [Footnote: The tragedy of "Stella" was represented in Berlin with great applause, and denounced by the king as immoral, ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... Zealots as would sacrifice one half of their Country to the Passion and Interest of the other; as also such infamous Hypocrites, that are for promoting their own Advantage, under Colour of the Publick Good; with all the profligate immoral Retainers to each Side, that have nothing to recommend them but an implicit Submission to their Leaders; we should soon see that furious Party-Spirit extinguished, which may in time expose us to the Derision and Contempt of all the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... To be without work in life is selfishness and sloth. But if a man or woman is so entangled in routine duties as never to command leisure, we have a right to say to such persons that they are leading an immoral life. Such an individual has no claim to the title of a working man, he is a slave. It may be cruel circumstances that have thus absorbed him in business, but that does not alter the fact: slavery was a misfortune rather than a fault to those ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... are!" said Sir Peter. "Finicky and immoral, that's what I call it! That's the way trouble begins, the more children the less nonsense. Why don't you have more children instead of sitting sneering at me ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... always mean Life. We can trace the connection with the Sirens: the absolute resignation to the senses is license, is destruction; we may say the same thing of the opposite, the absolute suppression of man's sensuous being is simply his dissolution. Hence the extremes appear; the moral and the immoral extremes land us in the same place; they are the two mighty rocks which may smite together and crush the poor mortal who happens to get in between the closing surfaces. If we understand the image, it holds true ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... diversions of Quebec. The Marquis de Tracy's ball far back in 1667 had given grievous offence to the Jesuits, and the unholy acting of plays was now declared an open profanity. Nicomede and Mithridate were condemned as immoral; but when Tartuffe, Moliere's mordant satire upon religious hypocrisy, was put upon the boards, the limits of endurance were reached ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... discovery for himself, it is certain that he holds an act for the reclamation of fugitive slaves to be "contrary to the divine law." It is certain that he agrees with his constituents, who, in the petition referred to, pronounced every such act "immoral," and contrary to the law of God. But let us look at this passage a little, and see if these abolitionists, who thus plant themselves so confidently upon "a higher law," even upon "the divine law" itself, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... depended. Marriages were also arranged at this feast, probably because men had now more leisure and more means for entering upon matrimony. Possibly promiscuous love-making also occurred as a result of the festival gladness, agricultural districts being still notoriously immoral. Some evidence points to the connection of the feast with Lug's marriage, though this has been allegorised into his wedding the "sovereignty of Erin." Perhaps we have here a hint of the rite of the sacred marriage, for the purpose of magically fertilising the ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... was—a fire in the veins, a divine affliction, a passion, a frenzy, a madness. The love he knew was the love of the body of flesh and blood, the love that engenders, the love that kills. At the bottom of it is sex, and sex is not ugly or immoral, for sex is the root of life. The woman is fair because man shall love her body; her lips are red and passionate that he may kiss them; her hair is beautiful that he may take it in his hands—a river of ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... the world is abandoned by man, the members of those impious gatherings passed their nights in mysterious conclave. Fancy can paint the scene: weak-minded men of every shade of unbelief, men of dishonest and immoral sentiments, men who, if justice had her due, should have swung on the gallows or eked out a miserable existence in some criminal's cell, joined in league to trample on the laws and constitution of order, and, in the awful callousness of intoxication, ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... beer-drinking and duelling club will receive the true direction of his life. War in itself is a good thing. God will see to it that war always recurs. The efforts directed toward the abolition of war must not only be termed foolish, but absolutely immoral. The peace of Europe is only a secondary matter for us. The sight of suffering does one good; the infliction of suffering does one more good. This war must be conducted ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... satisfaction of valuable demands. Psychological laws can also be helpful in fraudulent undertakings or in advertisements for unfair competition. The psychotechnical scientist cannot be blamed if the results of his experiments are misused for immoral purposes, just as the chemist is not responsible if chemical knowledge is applied to the construction of anarchistic bombs. But while psychology, as we have emphasized before, cannot from its own ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... Whitman as immoral; religionists have deplored his lack of a religious creed; literary critics have denied his claim to high rank in the world of literature; but Walt Whitman is unquestionably without a peer in the roundness of his genius; in the simplicity of his ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... good—or at least that there is some end in view. With a self-complacent age, in which every one was shouting "Forward!" and no one was expected to inquire "Whither?" he was necessarily out of sympathy. To the shouters he seemed irrational and irrelevant. They called him "immoral" when they were solemn, and "whimsical" when they were merry; and "whimsical" is the epithet with which we are tempted to label him, if labelled he must be. Genius makes strange bedfellows; and Peacock's intellectual ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... War Office with a letter. She packed the drawings in a portfolio—having signed her own and Nicky's name on the margins—and sent them to Captain Drayton with a letter. She said she had no doubt she was doing an immoral thing; but she did it in fairness to Captain Drayton, for she was sure he would not like Nicky to make so great a sacrifice. Nicky, she said, was wrapped up in his Moving Fortress. It was his sweetheart, his baby. "He will never forgive me," she said, "as long as he lives. But I simply had ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... Why, 'The Times' has intellect, but no conscience. 'The Times' is the most immoral of journals, as well as the most able. 'The Times,' on this very question of the Conspiracy Bill, has swerved, and veered, and dodged, till its readers may well be dizzy if they read every paragraph ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... tact, took their illustrations from the familiar atmosphere of song and story and national tradition in which their readers lived. A secondary purpose, which they obviously had in view, was also to remove from certain of the popular tales the immoral implications which still clung to them from their heathen past, and to reconsecrate ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... to familiarize the conscience with political dishonesty without tainting the moral man in ordinary matters pertaining to life. Once break down the barrier which separates the right from the wrong, that success may come of it, and every principle of restraint to immoral or dishonest conduct is swept away. For this reason men of stern integrity never make good politicians. They are very often the reliable Statesmen, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... sum to me, and it is not the fault of stakes or of winnings that everywhere men can be found winning, can be found depriving their fellows of something, just as they do at roulette. As to the question whether stakes and winnings are, in themselves, immoral is another question altogether, and I wish to express no opinion upon it. Yet the very fact that I was full of a strong desire to win caused this gambling for gain, in spite of its attendant squalor, to contain, if you will, something intimate, something sympathetic, ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... or even married love unless it be specially bound up, as it is in Browning's poem of By the Fireside, with ante-nuptial love—but poems expressing the isolating passion of one sex for the other; chiefly in youth, or in conditions which resemble those of youth, whether moral or immoral. These celebrate the joys and sorrows, rapture and despair, changes and chances, moods, fancies, and imaginations, quips and cranks and wanton wiles, all the tragedy and comedy, of that passion, which is ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... conscious—and who of his class ever are?—of the effects of the life he was leading—the tightening of this chain of immoral habits, the searing of what conscience he had, the freezing of all that was generous and good ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... that!" returned Ferrari, with some impatience. "He was the most moral man in immoral Naples, if you care for that sort of thing. Studious—philosophic—parfait gentilhomme—proud as the devil, virtuous, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... act that brings human beings into existence, with uncounted results both to such beings themselves and to others who are equally irresponsible for their appearance in the world, then the position is recklessly immoral, and it is, moreover, wholly repugnant ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... attack or defence. An oath was certainly to be taken, verbally forbidding Roman Catholics from harming the establishment; but they must be more or less than men to be enabled to keep such an oath. It was even immoral to present it to them: it established a war between words and principles, oaths and conscience: and which of these would finally prevail needed no explanation. That Roman Catholics once seated in the house should not feel disposed to lessen the influence, and finally to destroy a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... "good repute, temperate;" and the two youngest are given simply as "unmarried." This family seems to have had as high an average mentally and morally as any family in the whole tribe, only one in six being distinctly immoral. In the next generation, the eldest son had two children, the eldest daughter four, and the third daughter, who married a first cousin, had one child. It would be of great interest to know more of this last marriage, the third generation ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... to reply to the main ground on which you and your coadjutors rely for the overthrow of our system of slavery. Failing in all your attempts to prove that it is sinful in its nature, immoral in its effects, a political evil, and profitless to those who maintain it, you appeal to the sympathies of mankind, and attempt to arouse the world against us by the most shocking charges of tyranny and cruelty. You begin by a vehement denunciation of "the irresponsible power of one man ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... about it, the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras were under suspicion. They were being followed, and watched. What for? Madame made a shrewd guess. "They want to say we are immoral foreigners," she said. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... name of the revolution, the Anarchists serve the cause of reaction; in the name of morality they approve the most immoral acts; in the name of individual liberty they trample under foot all the ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... strong enough to condemn the men who sold their conscience for place or gold. Public opinion, he said, has always sanctioned in governments the use of a different morality from that binding on individuals. In all ages an extreme indulgence has been shown towards immoral acts which brought about great political results. He conceded, for the sake of argument, that such indulgence might be a fatal error; but he insisted that if Pitt's character was to be blackened because he used parliamentary corruption, the same censure ought ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... me two very remarkable poems, both highly moral in their tendency, but in their several motives so unreservedly natural and true, that they are of the kind which the world styles immoral. On this account he keeps them to himself, and does not ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... They are exercises of muscular energy, expenditure of nervous power, the effecting of molecular change, and there the matter ends. But surely, you would urge, the scientist would discriminate between those two acts. Most assuredly. The one he would reprobate as immoral, and the other he would approve as lawful. But, be it carefully noted, he would do this, not as a scientist, but as a citizen respecting law and order and upholding good government based on morality ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Fitz-Willieboy was so blase, He burned a Transcript up one day! The Orchids fashioned all their style On Flubadub's infernal guile. That awful Boston oath was his— He used to 'jaculate, "Gee Whiz!" He showed them that immoral haunt, The dirty Chinese Restaurant; And there they'd find him, even when It got to be as late as ten! He ate chopped suey (with a fork) You should have heard the villain talk Of one reporter that he knew (!) An artist, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... expresses himself seeking to arouse Filipino hatred against the Japanese, to create suspicion first and trouble afterwards, is a stranger, and in the language in which he himself writes are written the theatrical works and the immoral novels that come to the Philippines. [3] In his language, too, were promulgated those laws and regulations in our country instituting cockfighting, lottery, billiard, created as sources of revenue for the State—things ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... they 're awfully handsome. Ella Maclane is dying to come to Baden-Baden. I wish you 'd write to her. Her father and mother have got some idea in their heads; they think it 's improper—what do you call it?—immoral. I wish you would write to her and tell her it is n't. I wonder if they think that Mrs. Vivian would come to a place that 's immoral. Mrs. Vivian says she would take her in a moment; she does n't seem to care how many she has. I declare, she 's only too kind. You know I 'm in Mrs. Vivian's care. ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... lovers. Their fancy must be taken, and their favour must be earned. Mr. Borrow quotes, in proof of their virtue, one trait which does honour to his own, and especially to his simplicity: he declares that an immoral man of his acquaintance offered several gold ounces to a pretty gitana, and offered them in vain. An Andalusian, to whom I retailed this anecdote, asserted that the immoral man in question would have been far more successful if he had shown the girl two or three piastres, and that to offer ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... morrow.' Ask the Successful Merchant; interrogate your own heart; and you will have to admit that this is not only a silly but an immoral position. All we believe, all we hope, all we honour in ourselves or our contemporaries, stands condemned in this one sentence, or, if you take the other view, condemns the sentence as unwise and inhumane. We are not then of the 'same mind that was in Christ.' We disagree ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... furious, and in his fury, frank. In a preceding speech he had pronounced slavery "an evil regretted by every man in the country."[28] He now said: "A large majority of the people in the Southern states do not ... believe it immoral to hold human flesh in bondage. Many deprecate slavery as an evil; as a political evil; but not as a crime. Reflecting men apprehend, at some future day, evils, incalculable evils, from it; but it is a fact that few, very few, consider it as ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... the Austrian note was directed against Servia alone. On July 24 the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs told the British Ambassador at St. Petersburg that Austria's conduct was provocative and immoral; that some of her demands were impossible of acceptance; that Austria would never have taken such action unless Germany had first been consulted; that if Austria began military measures against Servia, Russia would probably mobilize. The Russian Minister hoped that England would ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... She may, indeed, insist that only upright and honorable men of refined mind and manner are gentlemen, and she may also maintain that only men of truly lofty and royal souls are princes; but there will still remain crowds of immoral ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... school-teaching when you can buy better ones already made that have real style. It tickles me that some women have learned that it's weak-minded to massage and paraffine their wrinkles out—those things, Sylvia, strike me as downright immoral. What I've been wondering is whether I can do anything for the kind of girls we have at Elizabeth House beyond giving them a place to sleep, and I guess you've struck the idea with that word efficiency. No girl born ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... however, Camillo received an anonymous letter, which called him immoral and perfidious, and warned him that his adventure was known to all. Camillo took fright, and, in order to ward off suspicion, began to make his visits to Villela's house more rare. The latter asked him the reason for his prolonged ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... limited, and that in consequence he had suffered through weakness of the heart; that he had intended to stay longer in a place where there was every comfort of life, and that nothing would have induced him to leave but the immoral conduct of his twin brother; that Bailie MacConachie, he was sorry to say, being his brother, was fearfully given to drink, and that he, James MacConachie, could no longer stay with him; that he, his brother, ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... obliging, but subtle, deceitful, dangerous, capable of nursing the blackest thoughts and of sanctioning the worst actions for the advancement of his cause. The Lettres Provinciales of Pascal first stamped on public opinion the idea that the Jesuit was necessarily immoral and venomous; the implacable hatred of Michelet and Symonds has brought them as criminals before the bar of history. On the other hand they have had their apologists and friends even outside their own order. Let us neither praise nor blame, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith |
