"Debasing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in his sense of unspeakable masculine superiority, and in his fine contempt for what is only sanctioned by antiquity and common consent, he had imagined that, at the first hint, men would arise and shake off the debasing tyranny. He found himself wrong, and he showed that he could be moderate in his own fashion, and understood the spirit of true compromise. He came round to Calvin's position, in fact, but by a different way. And it derogates nothing from the merit ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Court, in the maintenance of its dignity and in the interest of the Commonwealth found it necessary to visit upon you punishment of great severity and incarcerate you in the gaol usually reserved for the most depraved malefactors. Intemperance is one of the most debasing of vices. It impairs the intellect and undermines the constitution. To the inhibition of Holy Writ is added the cumulative if inferential prohibition of the Law, which declines to consider inebriety, though extreme enough in degree to impair if not destroy the reasoning faculty, ...
— The Sheriffs Bluff - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... was founded in 1832 "to give equal advantages to whites and blacks, and to give education to women as well as to men." Other objects were "to establish universal liberty by the abolition of every form of sin" and "to avoid the debasing association of the heathen classics and make the Bible a text book in all departments of education." The traditions of Oberlin are strongly religious, and from Charles Grandison Finney, revivalist ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... others; and if the most common and approved way of growing rich is to gain by the ruin and loss of those who are in necessity, why should not a man be allowed as well to make himself appear great by debasing those that are below him? For insolence is no inconsiderable way of improving greatness and authority in the opinion of the world. If all men are born equally fit to govern, as some late philosophers affirm, he only has the advantage of all others who has the best opinion of his own abilities, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... suffer that any other saue my selfe should enter in thither to gouerne there. (M536) Thus we see how the good name of the most honest is oftentimes assayled by such, as hauing no meanes to win themselues credit by vertuous and laudable endeauours, thinke by debasing of other mens vertues to augment the feeble force of their faint courage, which neuerthelesse is one of the most notable dangers which may happen in a commonwealth, and chiefly among men of warre which are placed in gouernment. For it is ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... that there is a more debasing evil than jealousy, nor one which fills the soul with more degrading thoughts. Even to console me Leila scorned to lie. Besides, her conduct was incomprehensible. I do not forget to whom I am speaking, and I shall be careful not to offend the ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... Particular influences, such as companionship (good or bad), literature (wholesome or pernicious), places of amusement (elevating or debasing), special opportunities for ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... all-blest Priam? And now all her city is overthrown by the spear, but she a captive, aged, childless, lies on the ground defiling her ill-fated head with the dust. Alas! alas! I too am old, but rather may death be my portion before I am involved in any such debasing fortune; stand up, oh unhappy, raise thy side, and ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... do his own thinking, even in conflict with the whole world. Sincere thought, even if it does run counter to that of others, is still a service to mankind; for humanity demands that those who love her should oppose, or if necessary rebel against her. You will not serve her by flattery, by debasing your conscience and intelligence, but rather by defending their integrity from the abuse of power. For these are some of her voices, and if you betray yourself you ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... members of the gallinaceae afford examples, and so does the female phalarope, whose maternal instincts are completely atrophied. Another illustration may be drawn from the debased position of the Athenian women, where the sharp separation between the sexes led, without doubt, not only to the debasing of the marriage relationship, but to the establishment of the hetairae, and also to the common practice ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... NATIONALITY IT WAS NOT: i.e. nationalism—patriotism—it was not. Cf. Revolt of the Tartars, Riverside ed., Vol. XII, p. 4; Masson's ed., Vol. VII, p. 370, where De Quincey speaks of the Torgod as "tribes whose native ferocity was exasperated by debasing forms of superstition, and by a nationality as well as an inflated conceit of their own merit absolutely unparalleled." Cf. also footnote, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... and debasing of all the acts of the Bureau, in the eyes of those who love to term themselves "the South," was the fact that its officers and agents, first of all, allowed the colored man to be sworn in opposition to and in contradiction of the word of ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... which arises from confounding two very different things; namely, justification and final salvation. We have seen that the consequences of sin are twofold—external and internal. The inward consequence of sin is separation from God; the external is the weakening and debasing of the soul. The first consequence is removed by faith; the second, by obedience. Every act of sin pollutes, darkens, and ruins the soul; every act of obedience strengthens, elevates, and saves it. Obedience, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... life broke down his manhood. Hard as he sometimes struggled to rise above the debasing appetite that had enslaved him, resolution snapped like thread in a flame with every new temptation. He stood erect and hopeful to-day, and to-morrow lay prone and despairing under ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... Hath he saved any other kingdom at his own expense, to give him a title of reimbursing himself by the destruction of ours? Hath he discovered the longitude or the universal medicine? No. But he hath found out the philosopher's stone after a new manner, by debasing of copper, and resolving to force it upon ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... we are too much taught to be on our guard against imagination, I hold it, with Captain Roland, to be the divinest kind of reason we possess, and the one that leads us the least astray. In youth, indeed, it occasions errors, but they are not of a sordid or debasing nature. Newton says that one final effect of the comets is to recruit the seas and the planets by a condensation of the vapors and exhalations therein; and so even the erratic flashes of an imagination really healthful and vigorous ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... over him—your influence will do what his mother's never could accomplish. But whatever reasons I may have to complain of him, this is not the time to state them—you will connect him with me. At all events, he is a man of honour and a gentleman; and as he is not, thank Heaven! under the debasing necessity of considering fortune in the choice of a wife, he is, at least in this respect, worthy of my dear ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... the most vulgar and debasing that can be described or imagined; and it was curious to watch the expressions on the faces of my companions. They wore the air of trained doctors or nurses, watching some disagreeable symptoms, with a sort of trained and serene compassion, neither shocked nor grieved. Then the situation was ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... thinking of your friends," he pleaded, "they are more likely to be proud of the woman who had the courage to break away from a debasing union. Every one realises—what your husband is. He has been unfaithful not only to you but to every ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "crowd of us," as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Greatly, and above all else, had Jules despised their dissoluteness: how could they be other than the poor devils they were, with those debasing habits which they cherished? "He could never," had said Lutwyche to Gottlieb, "be supercilious enough on that matter. . . . He was not to wallow in the mire: he would wait, and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... makes the King tell Strafford in this interview that he has dissolved the Parliament. He represents Strafford as horrified by the news and driven in this extremity to suggest the desperate measure of debasing the coinage as a means of obtaining funds. Strafford actually counseled this, when all else failed, namely, the proposed loan from the city, and one from the Spanish government, but, according to history, he himself voted for the dissolution of Parliament, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... of the jeweller in the "Count of Monte Cristo," or those with the Squelette in the "Mysteres de Paris," appeal to instincts which are as common to all mankind as those of thirst and hunger, and which are only debasing in the exaggerated condition consequent upon the dulness of other instincts higher than they. And the persons who, at one period of their life, might take chief pleasure in such narrations, at another may be brought into a temper of high tone and acute ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... Through ages of debasing oppression suffered by these people at the hands of their native rulers, they come legitimately by the attitude and language of fawning and flattery, and one must remember this in mitigation when passing judgment upon the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ruler, priest and king; her religion of contradictions, at once pure and corrupt, lovely and cruel, ennobling and debasing; her laws, wherein wisdom is so perversely blended with blindness, enlightenment with barbarism, strength with weakness, justice with oppression; her profound scrutiny into mystic forms of philosophy, her ancient culture of physics, borrowed from the primitive speculations of Brahminism;—Siam is, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... question: Can the propagation of mental defect by mental defectives and the debasing of the race thereby be greatly checked if not completely prevented? The answer is assuredly, Yes, ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... as these variations were never withheld, it would prove that the sanction of an all-wise and all powerful Being has been given to that which the highest human minds consider to be trivial, mean, or debasing." (p. 290)[18] ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... narrow limits. The country then assumes a dim and dubious shape in the eyes of the citizens; they no longer behold it in the soil which they inhabit, for that soil is to them a dull inanimate clod; nor in the usages of their forefathers, which they have been taught to look upon as a debasing yoke; nor in religion, for of that they doubt; nor in the laws, which do not originate in their own authority; nor in the legislator, whom they fear and despise. The country is lost to their senses, they can neither discover it under ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... education and morality has not been at all so rapid as in wealth. The freed slave could not at once escape from the debasing influences of years of bondage, and the planters have deliberately set themselves against any system of popular education. Crimes against property, Sewell says, are rife, especially thieving; petty acts of anger and cruelty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... of emotions which I was mapping out she was profoundly indifferent to. My experiences to her would have been debasing. As she would not come to me, I went to her, ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... his father, gently, looking at him with grave eyes, "a fortune is a great blessing in the hands of the man who knows how to spend it. But riches considered as something to possess or to display is one of the most despicable and debasing of all the aims ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... heartily desire to see, and to be more deeply and powerfully convinced of your own vileness and sinfulness, of your own weakness and wretchedness, and of your wants and unworthiness? and that, in order to your deep and spiritual humiliation and self-debasing, that you may be more vile in your own eyes, and Jesus Christ and free grace more precious and excellent, more high and honorable, and more sweet and desirable, that your hearts may be melted into godly sorrow, and that you may be moved thereby ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... the Spirit of God in them. This does not mean for a moment that the universe is God, but it does mean that the universe is maintained in its being by the immanence of God in it. This is the great and solemn truth that lies at the foundation of the awful and debasing perversions of Pantheism in ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... coffee occasioned a loss to the revenue of three hundred thousand pounds sterling a-year, besides its mischievous effect in adulterating and debasing a popular beverage when used in such large and undue proportions for admixture, and sold at the ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... find another vehicle I turned into the first place I found open. It was an all-night cafe. It was packed to suffocation with German soldiers and the feminine underworld of Berlin. There was a glorious orgy of drunkenness, nauseating and debasing amusement, and the incoherent singing of patriotic songs. The other sex appeared to have thrown all discretion and womanliness to the winds. A soldier too drunk to stand was assisted to a chair which he mounted with difficulty. Here he was supported on either side by two flushed, hilariously-shouting, ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... Limited to association with children of the neighborhood, they form an affection for their playmates, which may lead to good or evil results, as these playmates are moral or vicious in their tendencies. Therefore, at the formative period of character children should be guarded from the debasing influences of improper companions, as well as such institutions as saloons and low dance-halls which are generally found to be the local ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... a much more serious one, is of the Devil's own contriving—(and remember I am always quite serious when I speak of the Devil,)—namely, that the most current and authoritative names are apt to be founded on some unclean or debasing association, so that to interpret them is to defile the reader's mind. I will give no instance; too many will at once occur to any {6} learned reader, and the unlearned I need not vex with so much as one: ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... to describe the fight between Myles Falworth and Walter Blunt. Fisticuffs of nowadays are brutal and debasing enough, but a fight with a sharp-edged broadsword was not only brutal and debasing, but cruel and bloody ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... who receive as much as six thousand dollars a year, and the majority are paid from twelve hundred to three thousand a year. This does not make for independence. I am no believer in great wealth as an incentive to activity, but certainly solvency makes for emancipation from the more debasing ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... nature of a boy. First of all, he is no longer frank and open. He becomes shifty and suspicious and will not look you squarely in the face. A boy cannot become a slave to this habit without it affecting his mind. He invites debasing thoughts,—the old pure and clean method of thought and living no longer satisfy. His imagination even becomes corrupt and his moral nature and moral sense is perverted until he no longer seems to be able to tell the difference between right and wrong. He has ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... mistake when she touches on a question of law; and—unconsciously perhaps to herself—the woman of the World warps the facts in her narrative so as to save the personal dignity of the hero, who has captivated her interest, not from the moral odium of a great crime, but the debasing position of a prisoner at the bar. Allen Fenwick, no doubt, purposely omits to notice the discrepancy between these two statements, or to animadvert on the mistake which, in the eyes of a lawyer, would discredit Mrs. Poyntz's. It is consistent with some of the objects ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the community consists of the common activities of its people. There can be no community where there is no devotion to a common cause. The cause may be now one thing, now another, it may be worthy or debasing, but in so far as the people of a locality are acting together in the support of various common causes they are living as a community. Just as the character of an individual is determined by his life purposes and the degree to which he conforms ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... this country truly great and truly free, how to keep it free from the sordid things, the cruel things, the unjust, the unclean, the loathsome things that have debased and degraded the older nations, that are debasing and degrading even your young, great nation. Ah, to be a missionary with a tongue of fire, with a message of light! A missionary to my people to help them to high and worthy living, to help them to God! ONLY a missionary! What would ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... 'do you think I would marry my daughter to a beggar? No, no, sir, the affair is ended between you—and I insist upon its being utterly broken off.' Such was the action of the heartless gambler, rendered callous to all sentiments of real honour by his debasing pursuit. ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... caressed and hated as their superior. A majority of the male passengers, owning no actual or prospective matrimonial subjection to those charming toad-eaters, I am afraid continued to enjoy a mild and debasing equality among themselves, mitigated only by the concessions of occasional gallantry. To them, Mrs. Brimmer was a rather pretty, refined, well-dressed woman, whose languid pallor, aristocratic spareness, ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... the citadel she confided to their keeping. Her preservation is dearer to them than their lives; but fate seems to be on the side of their destroyer. Fresh insults have been heaped upon their heads and new hardships have been imposed upon them. To prevent all deliberations on this debasing treaty, they are not only surrounded by foreign troops, and dared with hostile messages, but they have been violated by the arrest of their prime members, whilst those who are still suffered to possess a personal freedom have the most galling ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... less than the absorption into the body politic of the nation of a colored population equal to one-sixth of all the inhabitants of the country, as the census reports will show. Four millions of the population so to be amalgamated have been just set free from a servitude, the debasing influences of which have many a time been vividly depicted in the anti-slavery speeches of the very men who are the most prominent champions of this new ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... might take of my Absence. For these accursed Algerines are most cruel in their Punishments. Trials are very swift, and Sentence is always executed within half an hour afterwards. Small Offences are punished with the Bastinado, or the Rhinoceros Whip. For Clipping or Debasing the Public Coin the old Egyptian punishment of cutting off the Hands is inflicted, although the Dey, in one of his Furies, has been known to have the Base Money melted and poured down the Coiner's Throat. If a Jew or a Christian is guilty of Murder, he is Burnt ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... who cannot find in this and other branches of natural history a salutary exercise for his mental faculties, inducing a habit of observation and reflection, a pleasure so easily obtained, unalloyed by any debasing mixture—tending to expand and harmonize his mind, and elevate it to conceptions of the majestic, sublime, serene, and beautiful arrangements instituted by the God of nature, must possess an organization ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... the operations of commerce by debasing the coin of the realm to meet the exigencies of the state, was always in want of money. His cupidity was excited by the wealth of the order of Knights Templars, and, emboldened by his successes over the spiritual power, he now ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... disagreeable things to encounter in Carlingford, but she felt so sure that nothing could really humiliate her, or pull her down from her real eminence, that the knowledge conveyed no fears to her mind. When this confidence in her own superiority to all debasing influences is held by the spotless princess in the poem, it is the most beautiful of human sentiments, and why it should not be equally elevated when entertained by a pink and plump modern young woman, well up in ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... me the superficial attention of a preoccupied man, smiled frankly at the utterance of this name. "Of course, she had nothing to do with such a debasing piece of business," ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... sociological subjects. But there is very high precedent for such a practice. Quite recently the fact has been brought to light that the great founder of modern astronomy once prepared for the government of his native land a very remarkable paper on the habit of debasing the currency, which was so prevalent during the Middle Ages. [1] The paper of Copernicus is, I believe, one of the strongest expositions of the evil of a debased currency that had ever appeared. Its tenor may be judged by the opening sentence, of ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... that culture—if more than a veneer—is a refinement that can be attained only by direct participation in social life. Such contact with the world may bring embarrassment, temptation, and failure, as well as their opposites; but all of these, instead of debasing, are the very experiences that purify and make gentle; they are the fire without which the refining process could not take place. Culture means to these people the ennobling effect of such actual struggles upon a person's whole outlook on life and ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... expression was gone. The thickened and protruding eyelids half closed the leaden eyes, and the swollen lips and cheeks gave to his countenance a look of all predominating sensuality. True manliness had bowed itself in debasing submission to the bestial. He talked loudly, and with a pompous dogmatism—mainly on political subjects—but talked only from memory; for any one could see, that thought came into but feeble activity. And yet, ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... myself, I blushingly confess, a very strong partiality for notes of the governor and company of the Bank of England and sovereigns of full weight and fineness; the other, that the very best and fiercest discourse I ever heard fulminated against the debasing love of gold, especially characteristic, it is said, of these degenerate days, was delivered by a gentleman who, having lived some seventy useful and eloquent years at the rate of about three hundred a year or thereabout, was found to have died worth upwards of L.60,000, all secured by ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... the character of the slave, promote kindly feelings between him and his master, and ultimately prove profitable to both. But where Christianity, used by irreligious persons, whose very acts destroy the vitality of the means, is made the medium of enforcing superstition, and of debasing the mind of the person it degrades into submission, its application becomes nothing less than criminal. It is criminal because it brings true religion into contempt, perverts Christianity-makes it a mockery, and gives to the degraded whites of the South a plea for discarding its precepts. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... presumed, are doing the devil's work. Republicans under Tammany cannot serve two masters. A Republican has a right to serve Tweed if he chooses. But he ought not at the same time to be taken into the confidence of Republicans who wage war against Tammany for debasing the bench, the bar, and every channel ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... from all scholastic and ethical formulae, I am led to think that a healthy mind ought to change its mood from time to time, and come down from its noblest condition,—never, of course, to degrade itself by dwelling upon what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a chance to air and exercise themselves. After the first and second floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their holiday, and the cotton velvet ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... near the school, and thus the debasing habit of unsocial besotment is not brought under the eyes of his superior. The drain is his sole luxury; if it be suspected, it is thought to be his sole vice. He goes through the ordinary routine of tuition with average credit; his spirit of ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to be expected that the colony would quietly submit. An address, signed by Meredith and several other magistrates, animadverted on the measure with just severity. They declared that the restrictions imposed were needless, unconstitutional, and debasing: that they were an insult to the colony; contrary to the implied engagements of the crown, when emigration was invited. The reply of Arthur asserted, that so long as this was a place for the reception of convicts, the press could not be free: that it was dangerous to authority, ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... which I had just witnessed was contagious; in my sublime admiration of it my soul soared far above and beyond the reach of so debasing a feeling as fear, and in my turn I met the cruel sinister gaze of the crafty savage with one as calm as ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... neglect is a great and important feature in anthropology. It obtains everywhere in more or less degree, and accounts for some of the apparently unaccountable facts in savage society, where we are frequently encountered by a comparatively high degree of culture associated with a cruel and debasing system of rites and practices which belong to the lowest savagery. Dr. Haddon has usefully suggested the term "differential evolution" for this phenomenon in the culture history of man,[310] and as I find ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... Moneyage was also a general land-tax of the same nature, levied by the two first Norman kings, and abolished by the charter of Henry I. [d]. It was a shilling paid every three years by each hearth, to induce the king not to use his prerogative in debasing the coin. Indeed it appears from that charter, that though the Conqueror had granted his military tenants an immunity from all taxes and talliages, he and his son William had never thought themselves bound to observe that rule, but had levied impositions at pleasure on all the landed estates ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... books on materia medica I find are gradually being reduced in number to a possible forty or fifty, and one doctor makes the radical statement that they can be cut down to the 'six or seven real drugs.' Still further light has been thrown upon the debasing nature of the drugging system by a member of the Philadelphia Drug Exchange, in a recent hearing before the House Committee on municipal affairs right here. He is reported as saying that it makes little difference what a manufacturer puts into a patent medicine, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... into a detail of some of the stirring events relating to the period of his father's career in arms against the British; some of these were of a thrilling character, and strongly depicted the miseries of war, presenting a lamentable picture of the debasing influence of sanguinary struggles on the human mind. The barbarous mode of harassing the British troops, by picking off stragglers, which the lower orders of Americans pursued, in most instances for the sake of the wretched clothing ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... literature; it contains thrills; it sells papers. However, aside from the fact that the publication of details concerning human folly and misfortune is often cruel and unjust to the sufferers, its influence upon the public is debasing in the same way, if not in the same degree, as ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... Christians had been spreading in Rome, where it had gained many adherents among the humbler and more moral section of the population. The Christians were far from popular. They were accused of secret and evil practices and debasing superstitions, and on this despised sect Nero determined to turn the fury ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... breath. And the impulse that babies give to life, the challenge that they make to the father is always a noble one. It is not so as to women; less, as to ourselves. We are urged to courses that are petty, unworthy, selfish, debasing, supine, and brutal by our own natures or those of our mates. But for the child we act nobly, its call to us is always to our finer side, and so gradually we are lifted higher. Did any man in history ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... increase of material prosperity generates as many evils as it destroys; it may diminish offences against property, but it augments offences against the person, and multiplies drunkenness to an alarming extent. While it is an undoubted fact that material wretchedness has a debasing effect both morally and physically, it is also equally true that the same results are sometimes found to flow from an increase of economic well-being. An interesting proof of this is to be found in the recent investigations of M. Chopinet, a French military ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... and, with a constantly increasing volume of currency, there was an equally constant increase of price in all objects of investment. This effect stimulated purchase by the apparent certainty of profit, and a spirit of speculation was thus fostered, which had so debasing an influence and such ruinous consequences that it became our highest duty to remove the cause by prompt and ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... nothing mean and debasing. It leads a man forth among scenes of natural grandeur and beauty; it leaves him to the workings of his own mind, operated upon by the purest and most elevating of external influences. Such a man may be simple and rough, but he cannot be vulgar. The man of refinement, therefore, finds nothing ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... work as distinct forces, a study in the vagaries of the human reason is presented in the motives offered to the public by these two organizations. The Albany remonstrants would protect the sweet womanly dignity of Oklahoma women from the debasing influence of politics. The Saloonkeepers' League would save the debasing influence of politics from the sweet womanly dignity of Oklahoma women. So these Albany women, who never fail to inform the public of their devotion to the church, join hands with the Oklahoma saloonkeepers, who ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... clouds. Amiable, gentle, of unbounded charity, with strong affections, which were not suffered to flow in a legitimate channel, she became devotedly attached to Lord Hervey: her heart was bound up in him; his death drove her into a permanent retreat from the world. No debasing connection existed between them; but it is misery, it is sin enough to love another woman's husband—and that sin, that misery, was the lot of the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... the whole nation had gradually become bound by an iron system of caste. The country was split up into little sections, each governed by some petty despot, and harassed by internecine feuds. Religion had become a debasing ritualism, with charms and incantations, fear of the influence of the stars, and belief in dreams and omens. The idea of the existence of a soul was supplemented ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... "These are debasing terms for chivalry, sir Hector," interrupted the Rover, laying his hand on the little riding whip, which had been thrown carelessly on the cabin table, and, tapping the shoulder of the tailor with the same, as though he were a sorcerer, and would disenchant the other ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... it has established an unethical morality as its result. Until the human being has learnt to see that effort, striving, development of power, are their own reward, life remains an unbeautiful affair. The debasing effects of vanity and ambition, the small and great cruelties produced by injustice, are all due to the idea that failure or success sets the value to ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... by the habits of their profligate and debasing employment, such was the ascendancy of manly truth and and moral feeling over them, that for a minute or two they quailed under the indignant glance of Harman. Steele drew back his gun, and looked round on his companions to ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... opened also to the effect of her characters on the audiences that assembled night after night to hear her, and she began to be troubled by the thousands of young girls who flocked to her matinees. "Is it possible that what I call 'my art' is debasing to their bright young souls?" she asked herself. "Is Mr. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... shearing pens of the "System" each year, voluntarily chloroform themselves, so that the "System" may go through their pockets, and then depart peacefully home to dig and delve for more money that they may have the debasing operation repeated ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... for our own sake, for the sake of innocent children in our homes, for the sake of other women's children and other homes, and for the sake of society at large, in order to lead men and women, as best we may, towards all that is pure and holy, and away from all that is debasing and evil, ought we not to give our influence and our active help to this ...
— Why and how: a hand-book for the use of the W.C.T. unions in Canada • Addie Chisholm
... laws, threatened by the movement in behalf of female suffrage, it is not probable that the patriarchal institution of polygamy will be regarded otherwise than as debasing to both sexes; but perhaps a greater latitude of divorce will be sought as not inconsistent with public morality. Looking at the question abstractly, and apart from all religious and social prejudice, it certainly seems the height of cruelty and absurdity to compel parties to keep up the relations ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... the wretched task of mending his boots, and who devotes his life to the concealment of his poverty,—he is your descendant, your son! If the gaze of his fellow-men tortures him, before you at least he is not ashamed of debasing toil! glorious ancestry! you have fought the foes of your native land with sword and pen; but I,—I have to contend with unmerited shame and mockery, without a hope of ultimate triumph or glory; my weary soul sinks under its burden, and the world has nothing in ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... to quench even the impure motions of my sleep! Thou wilt increase, Lord, Thy gifts more and more in me, that my soul may follow me to Thee, disentangled from the birdlime of concupiscence; that it rebel not against itself, and even in dreams not only not, through images of sense, commit those debasing corruptions, even to pollution of the flesh, but not even to consent unto them. For that nothing of this sort should have, over the pure affections even of a sleeper, the very least influence, not even such as a thought would ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... him that since he persisted in dissipation we must separate; that I was going North, and that I should never live with him again, at least until I had good evidence of his reform. He was rapidly debasing himself, and although I was willing to work for him, I was not willing to share his degradation. Poor man; he had his faults, but over these faults death has drawn a veil. My husband is now sleeping in his grave, and in the ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... constitute one series of answers to critics who charged Pope with debasing true epic. But Harte also addressed himself to such critics more directly. Although Aubrey Williams (p. 54) has clearly demonstrated Harte's awareness that the world of The Dunciad does in one sense sully epic beauties, at the same time, I think, Harte knew that the epic poems to which ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... English fur-trader was the representative of his race; and as they gradually found themselves no match for his methods or his morals, their simple faith in the white man's honesty, their debasing fear of his prowess, their reverence for him as a superhuman being, little by little died out. They saw themselves wronged, despoiled, and abused, with less and less power to assert their rights and maintain their independence; and their hearts became ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... of free schools was entertained. The Canadians were deplorably ignorant, and their children, it was designed, should be free from that reproach. It is only now, however, that they are emerging from the most debasing state of mental darkness, into something like enlightenment. Example has done that which force would have failed ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... plus c'est la meme chose. But the changes from the crab apple to the pippin, from the wolf and fox to the house dog, from the charger of Henry V to the brewer's draught horse and the race-horse, are real; for here Man has played the god, subduing Nature to his intention, and ennobling or debasing Life for a set purpose. And what can be done with a wolf can be done with a man. If such monsters as the tramp and the gentleman can appear as mere by-products of Man's individual greed and folly, what might we not hope for as a main product of ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... the woman movement, though a few signs of progress are worthy of note. The Catholic cantons lag behind those that have adopted Protestantism, and the latter are led by Geneva. Though subject to the Napoleonic code, Geneva has never known that debasing law of the tutelage of women which existed for so long a time in the other cantons, even in the intelligent canton of Vaud, where it was abolished only in 1873. It was not until 1881 that a federal statute put an end to the law throughout all Switzerland. Geneva has always ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... son before that son was born?'—'No.' 'Then God could have no son before that son was begotten, &c.'—that he was mingling up the idea of Time with the idea of that Eternal God who created Time, and debasing to the accidents of before and after that Timeless and Eternal Generation, of which it is written, 'Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.' Still less could Ulfilas, or his Goths, have known, that the ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... been taught to look upon the worship of the Aztecs as monstrous; but the witnesses against them were themselves monsters, who were seeking for a pretense to excuse their own brutality in reducing the Indians to the most debasing slavery, while they appropriated to their own use the best looking of the squaws, and kept such swarms of supernumerary wives that each Spaniard had to brand them with a red-hot iron in order to know his own family. The fathers of the present mixed-breed population of Mexico tell us that the Aztecs ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... charitable explanation of this self-debasing account of Josephus is that he was driven to invent some story to extenuate his resistance to the Romans, and had to blacken his reputation as a patriot to save his skin. The fact that he was kept prisoner some time by Vespasian ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... heritage of Christian chivalry. The discovery of a new world, peopled by barbarians, opened a fresh field to Spanish missionary zeal, in which the kingdom of God upon earth was to be extended and countless souls rescued from the obscene idolatries and debasing cannibalism which ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... lest he fall. One would think this truth so obvious, from daily observation, as to be undeniable; but it is now the fashion to laud human nature, to paint flattering pictures only. Humility is thought debasing; but Truth alone is honourable, and Humility is Truth. You will find the actions of those who acknowledge this truth, more honourable to the human race, than the deeds of those who deny it. The true dignity of human nature consists, ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... spontaneously from soil blasted by slavery, is nothing strange. It is only the statement of the truism in moral and in political economy, that true prosperity can never grow up from wrong and wickedness. That pauperism, and ignorance, and vice, that reckless habits, and debasing customs, and barbarous manners should come of an organized degradation of labor, and of cruelty and injustice crystallized into an institution, is an inevitable necessity, and strictly according to the nature of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... ranches for the night. No wonder that the Pacific coast is a foreign land to visitors from the Eastern States, for each race contributes something of its own. Even the despised Chinese have taught the youth of California, none indeed of their virtues, but the debasing use of opium. And chief among these influences is that of ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by some good angel sent To make me with a quiet life content. The question shall no more my bosom irk, To go to Washington or go to work. From Fame's debasing struggle I'll withdraw, And taking up the pen lay down the law. I'll leave this rogue, lest my example make An honest man of him—his heart would break. (Exit ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... he will be better off in a quiet hour of family conversation and reading at home. That means the application of parents to this hour.[33] It banishes the monstrous Sunday supplement with its hideous, debasing pictures. It substitutes conversation in the whole group, reading aloud of stories and poems, biblical and otherwise, and songs, hymns, or at times the walk in the fields or parks. Fortunately the better type of Sunday school is more and more to be found; children ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... be relied upon with accuracy. The whole revenue of the state was nominally sixteen or seventeen millions of dollars, but the greater portion of that income was pledged for many coming years to the merchants of Genoa. All the little royal devices for increasing the budget by debasing the coin of the realm, by issuing millions of copper tokens, by lowering the promised rate of interest on Government loans, by formally repudiating both interest and principal, had been tried, both in this and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... strong feelings and vivid conceptions in regard to the agency of supernal powers in the control of human affairs, but who clothed their conceptions in uncouth forms, and worshipped their deities with absurd and debasing rites. Some of these remains being known to Mr. Wilson, on the evidence of the only pair of eyes in the universe which, in his estimation, have the faculty of seeing, he cannot treat them, according to his usual method in such cases, as fabrications of Spanish priests and lying ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... young happiness. Optimism had been born in him in a twinkling, and set aside a knowledge of his parents and their habits of thought and life that should have warned him. He might have known that his father could have overlooked anything but this—the debasing of the Foote blood by mingling with it a plebeian, boarding-house strain; he might have comprehended that his mother, Mrs. Bonbright Foote VI, no less, could have excused crime, could have winked at depravity, but could never ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... "New England conscience." One of the effects of a Puritanical bringing-up is a belief that pleasure is unworthy, especially in the sex field and even in marriage. Now and then one meets a patient caught between perfectly proper desire and an obsession that such pleasure is debasing; and a feeling of self-disgust and self-hatred results that is the more ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... marking time, waiting for something to turn up. Since the last visit of the McKaye ambassador she had not altered her determination to exist independent of financial aid from the McKaye women or their father,—for according to her code, the acceptance of remuneration for what she had done would be debasing. Nan had made this decision even while realizing that in waiving Mr. Daney's proffer of reimbursement she was rendering impossible a return to New York with her child. The expenses of their journey and the maintenance of their brief ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... home and for himself an assured place in the Blackwater Mills. His children fell into the hands of a teacher with a true vocation for his great work and a passion for young life. Under his hand the youth of the rapidly growing mill village were saved from the sordid and soul-debasing influences of their environment, were led out of the muddy streets and can-strewn back yards to those far heights where dwell the high gods of poesy and romance. From the master, too, they learned to know their own wonderful woods out ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... accomplished women, associate with these vicious and miserable beings, destroying thereby all those exquisite and delicate sensibilities whose existence cold-hearted worldlings have denied; annihilating all genuine passion, and debasing that to a selfish feeling which is the excess of generosity and devotedness. Their body and mind alike crumble into a hideous wreck of humanity; idiocy and disease become perpetuated in their miserable offspring, and distant generations suffer for the bigoted morality ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... in during the protracted disquietudes of the civil wars. It is true that during this time Augustus was also establishing the system of Imperialism, which contained in itself the germs of tyranny, with all its brutal excesses on the one hand, and its debasing influence upon the subject nation on the other. But we who have seen into what it developed must remember that these baneful fruits of the system were of lengthened growth; and Horace, who saw no farther into the future than the practical politicians of ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... principles of the party might eventually have fared, the party itself would have been so far triumphant. It was indeed, probably, the despair of ever obtaining admission for Whiggism, in its unalloyed state, into the councils of the Sovereign, that reconciled Mr. Fox to the rash step of debasing it down to the Court standard by the Coalition—and, having once gained possession of power by these means, he saw, in the splendid provisions of the India Bill, a chance of being able to transmit it as an heir-loom to his party, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... guilty of it. Nevil certainly provoked, and he required, hard blows; and his uncle Everard might be right in telling her father that they were the best means of teaching him to come to his understanding. Still a foul and stupid squib did appear to her a debasing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... salutary in Mahometanism; certainly it embodies in it some ancient and momentous truths, and is undeniably beneficial so far as their proper influence extends. But, after all, looked at as a religion, it is as debasing to the populations which receive it as it is false; and, as it arose among barbarians, it is not wonderful that it subserves the reign of barbarism. This it certainly does in the case of the Turks; already three great departments of intellectual ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... and that by the hand of Mr. No-truth, the image of Shaddai was defaced. He likewise gave order that the same Mr. No-truth should set up in its stead the horrid and formidable image of Diabolus; to the great contempt of the former King, and debasing of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan |
