"Depravity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... imprecations, play an important part in the ceremonies of initiation. In some quarters there has been some recrudescence of the Shakti cultus, with its often obscene and horrible rites, and the unnatural depravity which was so marked a feature in the case of the band of young Brahmans who conspired to murder Mr. Jackson at Nasik represents a form of erotomania which is certainly much more common amongst Hindu political fanatics than ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... cat, The Gossip was hunting all Tringham thorough, As if she meant to canvass the borough, Trumpet in hand, or up to the cavity;— And, sure, had the horn been one of those The wild Rhinoceros wears on his nose, It couldn't have ripped up more depravity! ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... state of depravity, to which the human mind is subject, by force of tradition, more than the unnatural and absurd notion of enhancing future bliss, by beholding fellow creatures of the nearest connexion in a state of indescribable misery, there to ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... To shew the Depravity of human Nature, and how apt the Mind is to be misled by Trinkets and false Appearances, Mrs. Two-Shoes does acknowledge, that after she became rich, she had like to have been too fond of Money; for ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... Jonson—and of these, only Spenser and Jonson died in their beds, and Ben had killed his man in a duel. The student of Elizabethan history and biography will find stranger contrasts than in the lives of these poets, for crime, meanness, and sexual depravity often appear in the closest juxtaposition with imaginative idealism, intellectual freedom, and ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... years of age or over, as above remarked, usually an appalling desire to destroy things is manifested. Dolls will be torn to pieces, the toy bank smashed, and if a hammer can be had, nothing is too sacred to be knocked to pieces. This is not depravity in the child, much as it seems to be, it is a legitimate desire to investigate, to satisfy his curiosity, and to find a means of satisfying his increasing power to do something. Up to this time an object is to the child merely the activity for which it stands; a ball ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... I'VE been the brain that lit thy dull concavity! The human race Invest MY face With thine expression of unchecked depravity, Invested with a ghastly reciprocity, I'VE been responsible for thy monstrosity, I, for thy wanton, blundering ferocity - But ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... legislators were wont to congratulate the Assembly on the good working of their system; which meant that the negroes were quiet, the mulattoes kept under, and the crops promising; but under this "good working" there were the heart-burnings of the men of colour, the woes and the depravity of the slaves, and the domestic fears and discomforts of the masters, arising from this depravity. Now, when there was no oppression and no slavery, the simple system of justice was truly "working well"; not only in the prospect of the crops, and the external quiet of the proprietors, but in ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... Colophonian Oracle of Apollo Clarius, the Household Gods of the Germans, Gotarzes, Bardanes and, above all, Nineveh. IV. The estimate taken of human nature by the writer of the Annals the same as that taken by Bracciolini. V. The general depravity of mankind as shown in the Annals insisted upon in Bracciolini's Dialogue "De ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... masters in the mysteries of common life. In all these cases the tone of the artist's mind is felt throughout his work: what he paints, or sings, or writes, conveys a lesson while it pleases. On the other hand, depravity in an artist or a poet percolates through work which has in it nothing positive of evil, and a very miasma of poisonous influence may rise from the apparently innocuous creations of a tainted soul. Now Correggio is moralised ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... to lessen it; but, to be sure, it was grown to a sauciness that did call for a decenter veil. I do not think they have found out a good cure; and I am of opinion, too, that flagrancy proceeds from national depravity, which tinkering one branch will not remedy. Perhaps polished manners are a better proof of virtue in an age than of vice, though system-makers do not hold so: at least, decency has seldom been the symptom of a ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... and night; and, for more than a fortnight, would not go to his bed unless it was laid under his pillow. But for me I could not bide the sight of it, knowing whose hands it had been in, and reminding me as it did of the depravity of ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... sir, you have heard the particulars of my history. You will do me the justice to believe that I have been reduced to my present unfortunate position, more through the influence of circumstances, than on account of any natural depravity.—True, I am now what is termed a woman of the town—but still I am not entirely destitute of delicacy or refinement of feeling. I am an admirer of it in others. My parents I have never seen, since the day I quitted their ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... helplessly silent. What could he say? He knew a great deal better than she the essential depravity of her mother, and he felt keenly the cruelty of fate which had plunged a fine young spirit into this swamp ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... consequence, a government founded upon two domestic elements, corruption and terrorism. No language can describe the state of that capital after the civil wars. The accumulation of power and wealth gave rise to a universal depravity. Law ceased to be of any value. A suitor must deposit a bribe before a trial could be had. The social fabric was a festering mass of rottenness. The people had become a populace; the aristocracy was demoniac; ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... reluctant use of undiscriminating customers. You are the paradigmatic whore, Weener, and I weep for the physiological accident which condemns you to sell your servility rather than your vulva. Ah, Weener, it restores my faith in human depravity to have you around to attempt your petty confidence tricks on me once more; I rejoice to find I had not overestimated mankind as long as I can see one aspect of it embodied in your 'homely face ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... able to maintain a fixed heart. As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood, they will be found not to have a fixed heart. And if they have not a fixed heart, there is nothing which they will not do in the way of self-abandonment, of moral deflection, of depravity, and of wild license. When they have thus been involved in crime, to follow them up and punish them, is to entrap the people. How can such a thing as entrapping the people be done under the rule of ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... especially the anarchist in the United States, is merely one type of criminal, more dangerous than any other because he represents the same depravity in a greater degree. The man who advocates anarchy directly or indirectly, in any shape or fashion, or the man who apologizes for anarchists and their deeds, makes himself morally accessory to murder before the fact. The anarchist is a criminal whose perverted instincts lead him ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the world, reduce to poverty those who should practice them, laying down laws of conduct which the law of self-preservation compelled men to break. Looking on the inhuman spectacle of society, these worthy men bitterly bemoaned the depravity of human nature; as if angelic nature would not have been debauched in such a devil's school! Ah, my friends, believe me, it is not now in this happy age that humanity is proving the divinity within ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... speak of the depravity of human nature; but I could not have believed Herman Brudenell capable of so black a crime," said Mr. ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... President. There was no gratitude for any so-called leniency of the North, no repentance for the war, no desire for humiliation, for sackcloth and ashes, and no confession of wrong. The insistence of the radicals upon obtaining a confession of depravity only made things much worse. Scarcely a measure of Congress during reconstruction was designed or received in ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... ought to have respected the delicacy of female honour, and, as a relation, should have protected mine! But, to utter falsehoods on so nice a subject—to repay the openness, and, I may say with honest pride, the propriety of my conduct, with slanders—required a depravity of heart, such as I could scarcely have believed existed, such as I weep to find in a relation. O! what a contrast does her character present to that of my beloved father; while envy and low cunning form the chief traits of hers, his was distinguished by benevolence and philosophic ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... and merriment. The king endeavored to be merry; but the peculiar deep tone of that messenger of woe still sounded in his ears; and, with all his efforts, he could not forget it. In the midst of his depravity and wickedness, he still at times had some dread of that God whom he daily insulted. He sought to drown his unpleasant thoughts in mixed wines, but the King of Judah felt a presentiment of some awful calamity near at hand. With desperation he struggled against ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... organ of our humanity which, when touched, does not find a sympathetic vibration in the mighty range and scope of our Lord's being, saving, of course, the jarring discord of sin. But sin is not a necessary and integral part of unfallen human nature. We speak of natural depravity, but, in reality, depravity is unnatural. God made Adam upright and perfect; sin is an accident; it is not necessary ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... (Lacretelle, Histoire de France pendant le 18me Siecle (Paris, 1819) i. 271.) but contents himself with partridges and grouse. Close-viewed, their industry and function is that of dressing gracefully and eating sumptuously. As for their debauchery and depravity, it is perhaps unexampled since the era of Tiberius and Commodus. Nevertheless, one has still partly a feeling with the lady Marechale: "Depend upon it, Sir, God thinks twice before damning a man of that quality." (Dulaure, vii. 261.) These people, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... it is one thing to tolerate an evil, quite another to adopt it as a good. And we declare that never in the world's history was there an attempt so shameless and audacious as that to found a government on slavery as a cornerstone! Is it possible to conceive of more ungoverned depravity or a madness ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... creatures making these foul and devilish declarations, known by her to be utterly and wickedly false; and the fact that they were believed by the deputy, the council, and the assembly,—were more than she could bear. Her soul sickened at such unimaginable depravity and wrong; her nervous system gave way; she fainted, and sunk to the floor. The manner in which the girls turned the incident against her shows how they were hardened to all human feeling, and the cunning art which, on all occasions, characterized their proceedings. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... author. How nature, to whom all sores lay siege, can so emphatically express nature in its greatest perfection, I shall not endeavour to explain. The meaning I take to be this: Brother, when his fortune is inlarged, will scorn brother; for this is the general depravity of human nature, which, besieged as it is by misery, admonished as it is of want and imperfection, when elevated by fortune, will despise beings of nature ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... a girl condemned to die for murdering an illegitimate child, a crime seldom committed in this country. She is since married, and become the careful mother of a family. This might be given as an instance, that a desperate act is not always a proof of an incorrigible depravity of character, the only plausible excuse that has been brought forward to justify the ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... citizen. Perhaps this wisdom was attested by the large share of excellence which he really possessed; and that his character was not unblemished proved only that no exertions could preserve him from the vices that are inherent in wealth and rank, and which flow from the spectacle of universal depravity. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... abandoning her empire for this Villiers de l'Ile Adam, whose servant she would rather be than reign of Christendom. The English cardinal remonstrated with the pope that this love for one, in the heart of a woman who was the joy of all, was an infamous depravity, and that he ought with a brief in partibus, to annul this marriage, which robbed the fashionable world of its principal attraction. But the love of this poor woman, who had confessed the miseries of her life, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... uncle[07] took a glimpse at these scenes, he did not see there any of our red brethren, as Mr. Jefferson kindly called them, who formed a considerable part of the gathering at the time of his graduation, forty-two years before; but he must have seen exhibitions of depravity which would disgust the most untutored savage. Near the close of the last century these outrages began to disappear, and lessened from year to year, until by public opinion, enforced by an efficient ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... such instances of human ignorance and depravity are, I have to inform your Grace that a small party of those very people, some short time after, actually contrived to make their escape, and after travelling for many weeks through the country, made shift to reach the sea-coast, near ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... of the best theological teachers to the majority of their opponents that they substantially recognise these realities of things, however strange the forms in which they clothe their conceptions. The doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately revealed ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... over all and under all, a close affinity of spirit; and there is no question, aside from the frailties and objections which the writer of the romance has introduced, that there was a marriage of the soul, superseding all after ties which worldliness and depravity might have consummated, that overshadows sin, and may not pass into our reckoning. Not only such a marriage, but one, though secret, actually sanctioned by the laws of the land, she is known to have declared a fact previous to ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... young or old, to enlighten her innocent perplexity; and with each illumination she shrank a little less aloof from this shabby wisdom gilded with "art," which she could not choose but accept as fact, but the depravity of which she never was ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... sparingly used; and the hope and possibility of recovering esteem, must always be kept alive. Those who are excluded from hope, are necessarily excluded from virtue; the loss of reputation, we see, is almost always followed by total depravity. The cruel prejudices which are harboured against particular classes of people, usually tend to make the individuals who are the best disposed amongst these sects, despair of obtaining esteem; and, consequently, careless about deserving it. There can ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... nevertheless make an effort to understand the delights of robbery considered as a fine art. Some cynics there are who will tell us that the only reason we are not all thieves is because we have not pluck enough; and there must certainly be some fascination, apart from natural depravity or original sin, to make a man prefer to run countless risks in an unlawful pursuit sooner than do an honest day's work. And in this sentence we have the answer: It is precisely the risk, the uncertainty, the danger, the sense of superior skill and ingenuity, that attract ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... men born of Indian women by white fathers. This race has much of the depravity of civilisation without the virtues of ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... girl weeping," said the Moon; "she was weeping over the depravity of the world. She had received a most beautiful doll as a present. Oh, that was a glorious doll, so fair and delicate! She did not seem created for the sorrows of this world. But the brothers of the little girl, those great naughty ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... advances, and I greatly fear I may have cause to repent it. But you know him as well as I do, who would not have thought his piety sincere?—who would not still think so? And notwithstanding all you have said, I still hesitate to feel serious alarm; I am unwilling to believe in such utter depravity." ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... to be groundless, have moved him with such excess of passion. We must indeed estimate the virtue of these people, by the conformity of their conduct to what in their opinion is right; but we must not hastily conclude that theft is a testimony of the same depravity in them that it is in us, in the instances in which our people were sufferers by their dishonesty; for their temptation was such, as to surmount would be considered as a proof of uncommon integrity among those who have more knowledge, better principles, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... years of his life were one uninterrupted schooling in hypocrisy, brutality, and depravity. A debauchee in his youth, a sodomite in later life, a hater of women and a despiser of men, a bully to his subordinates, a monster of ingratitude, revelling in filth so continuously in his written ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... prince. "Is there such depravity in man, as that he should injure another, without benefit to himself? I can easily conceive, that all are pleased with superiority: but your ignorance was merely accidental, which, being neither your crime nor your folly, could ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... By heaven, sir! What it was before is nothing to what I feel now! That in his depravity he should have stolen was bad enough; but that now, to cover his tracks, he should accuse and defame a defenceless woman is infamy! Look at his story, and tell me could anything be more pitiful and mendacious? Her handkerchief was found in his bureau the night of the robbery. ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... young women, and occasionally one of them gets nervous, what we call hysterical, and then that girl will begin to play all sorts of pranks,—to lie and cheat, perhaps, in the most unaccountable way, so that she might seem to a minister a good example of total depravity. We don't see her in that light. We give her iron and valerian, and get her on horseback, if we can, and so expect to make her will come all right again. By-and-by we are called in to see an old baby, three-score ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... Christ, and x and y respectively for God and man. But what do we mean by x and y? Let us face our facts. What do we know of man apart from Jesus Christ? Surely it is only in him that we realize man—only in him that we grasp what human depravity really is, the real meaning and implications of human sin. It is those who have lived with Jesus Christ, who are most conscious of sin; and this is no mere morbid imagination or fancy, it rests on a much deeper exploration of human nature than men ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... profession, namely to contribute some work of permanent value to its literature." At that early period a discriminating critic bears testimony, "that his piety, pure, deep, tender, serene and warm, took hold of positive principles of light and beneficence, not the negative ones of darkness and depravity, and—himself a child of light—he preached the religion ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... money who wanted to educate their sons sent them out, at what seems to us a very tender age, to travel and tramp the earth alone. They were remittance-men who shifted from university to university, and took lessons in depravity, being educated ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... tresses, which at last is kindled by the hot and fiery anger of the Supreme Heavenly Judge." He adds that it is probably only through the prayers and tears of Christ that this blazing monument of human depravity becomes visible to mortals. In support of this theory, he urges the "coming up before God" of the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah and of Nineveh, and especially the words of the prophet regarding Babylon, "Her stench and rottenness ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... that of the innocent babe, whose little form lay roasted and charred, on the fatal and bloody hearthstone of the drunkard! Victims all, of an intoxicated husband and father! When the guilty man saw the mangled remains of his household, he only increased his depravity by trying to make others responsible for the wicked deed,—exclaiming in feigned anguish, "my dear wife! my poor children! I was afraid they would murder you! Oh, my lost family!" &c. Community was soon alarmed; Severin, arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to suffer the extreme ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... required. These parents were severe, exacting, imperious—not bad nor exactly cruel—simply "consistent." They believed that man was a worm of the dust, and stood by the traditions. They believed in the dogma of total depravity and lived up ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... alternate scarcity and comparative abundance of provisions;—the arrival or departure of ships from the harbour;—the commission of the first murder in the colony, and other sad accounts of human depravity and its punishment;—the gradual improvement and extension of the colony;—the first sale by auction of a farm of twenty-five acres for the sum of 13l.:—these and similar subjects occupy the history of New South Wales, not merely during the three years that elapsed between Governor ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... to the outer door, the girl backed away from him, her face colourless with horror. Very probably he was lying to frighten her; very possibly (she feared desperately) he was not. What she knew of him was hardly reassuring; the innate, callous depravity that had poisoned this man beyond cure might well have caused the death-in-life of other souls. What he was capable of, others might be; and what she knew him to be capable of, she hardly liked to dwell upon. Excusably ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... feet on the side rung of Castro's chair, puffed a large gray cloud, and half closed his eyes. He then, for three-quarters of an hour, in a low, musical voice, discoursed upon the dignity of the administration and the depravity of the offenders. When his brethren were beginning to drop their heads and breathe heavily, Alvarado politely interrupted him and referred ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... unbounded jealousy, with which all reasoning must be vain. The sincere friends of liberty, who give themselves up to the extravagancies of this passion, are not aware of the injury they do their own cause. As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than ...
— The Federalist Papers
... said, she never once counted on Hurstwood. She could only approach that subject with a pang of sorrow and regret. For a truth, she was rather shocked and frightened by this evidence of human depravity. He would have tricked her without turning an eyelash. She would have been led into a newer and worse situation. And yet she could not keep out the pictures of his looks and manners. Only this one deed seemed strange and miserable. It contrasted ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... man's, I am glad to pay ten per cent to interest him in their sale; but that terra cotta cow that he sold you, 'twas a sad piece of business," and he looked at us as a Mackenzie might have looked upon some artless victim to man's depravity! Whereupon a new light seemed all at once to break in upon us, and we resolved to get at the truth, if we could, by a ruse which should throw him off his guard; so, in place of appearing put out by the discovery, we merely said—"Well, if ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... generally popular—stiff, hard, unsympathetic, people called him. From one point of view, and one only, he perhaps deserved the epithets. If a woman lost his respect she seemed to lose his pity too. Like a mediaeval monk, he looked upon such rather as the cause than the result of male depravity, and his contempt for them mingled with anger, almost, as I sometimes thought, with hatred. And this attitude was, I have no doubt, resented by the men of his own class and set, who shared neither his faults nor his virtues. But in other ways he was not hard. He could love; I, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... remarkable that the men do not seem to object much to their brides having had a child or two by various fathers before marriage. The women do not lose reputation unless they become utterly depraved, but in that case they are condemned pretty strongly by public opinion. Depravity is, however, rare, for all require more or less to be wooed before they are won. I did not see (although I mixed pretty freely with the young people) any breach of propriety on the praias. The merry-makings ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... out, the false doctrine that it is the masses, the crowd, the compact majority, that have the monopoly of broad-mindedness and morality—and that vice and corruption and every kind of intellectual depravity are the result of culture, just as all the filth that is draining into our Baths is the result of the tanneries up at Molledal! (Uproar and interruptions. DR. STOCKMANN is undisturbed, and goes on, carried away by his ardour, ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... safety, formed no part of the pirate's plan. The guilty man had reached that state of depravity which, especially among the natives of that region, borders close on insanity. While the inhabitants of the village were hunting far a-field for him, Baderoon lay concealed among some lumber in rear of a hut awaiting his opportunity. It was not very ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... twenty feet high, tapering up from a base three feet in diameter, and known as the Spring Room Sentinel, because the Spring of Youth is just behind it although not directly connected with the Auditorium; it being the first chamber on the left in Total Depravity Passage, a wet and dangerous way of which next to nothing is known, but the entrance to which is a fine arch a few feet west of the Sentinel. The Spring of Youth is reached by climbing through a window-like opening, and is very ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... 1872, contains the following bitter criticisms of the new double bridge:—"With Blackfriars Bridge," says the writer, "we find the public thoroughly well pleased, though the design is really a wonder of depravity. Polished granite columns of amazing thickness, with carved capitals of stupendous weight, all made to give shop-room for an apple-woman, or a convenient platform for a suicide. The parapet is a fiddle-faddle of pretty cast-iron arcading, out of scale with ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... men in this country, as by the Jews, when Moses was leading them to the promised land, everything has been done that inherited depravity could do, to hinder the promise of Heaven from its fulfilment. The cross, here as elsewhere, has been planted only to be blasphemed by cruelty and fraud. The name of the Prince of Peace has been profaned by all kinds of injustice toward the Gentile whom he said he came to save. But I need not speak ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... intervene) no stopping in the slope on which he glides, albeit there may be precipices. He that rushes in his sledge down the artificial ice-hills of St. Petersburgh, skims along not more swiftly than Jennings, from the altitude of infant innocence, had sheered into the depths of full-grown depravity; but even he can fall, and reach, with startling ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... arising from this scene of depravity, and floating away into the still evening air, made the evening, at any point which they just reached fitfully, mellowed by the distance, more still by contrast. Such was the stillness of the evening to Eugene Wrayburn, as he walked by the river ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... be acknowledged in the past. But between dethroning a prince and punishing him, there is another very wide interval; and it were not strange, if even men of the most enlarged thought should question, whether human nature could ever, in any monarch, reach that height of depravity, as to warrant, in revolted subjects, this last act of extraordinary jurisdiction. That illusion, if it be an illusion, which teaches us to pay a sacred regard to the persona of princes, is so salutary, that to dissipate it by the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... touches of feeling, if a woman had not bestowed them with her heart. No, the woman who called into existence such a man was not a cynical courtesan, but rather a fallen Heloise—an Heloise fallen by love and not by vice or depravity. I appeal from Rousseau the morose old man, calumniating human nature, to Rousseau, the young and ardent lover; and when I go, as I often do, to muse at Les Charmettes, I seek a Madame de Warens far more touching and attractive in my ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... to my mind the ghastly words of Obermann in his gloomy elegy, which I wish I had never read, "Roots slake their thirst in foulest streams." Since I took to this diet, the sickness has ceased, and I feel much stronger. This depravity of taste must have a meaning, for it seems to be part of a natural process and to be common to most women, sometimes going ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... by perils and endurance, calm, sagacious, resolute, grave even to severity, a valiant and redoubted soldier, Coligny looked abroad on the gathering storm and read its danger in advance. He saw a strange depravity of manners; bribery and violence overriding justice; discontented nobles, and peasants ground down with taxes. In the midst of this rottenness, the Calvinistic churches, patient and stern, were fast gathering to themselves the better life of the nation. Among and around them tossed the surges of ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... garret in the silence of despair. She went slowly down the steep stair, supporting herself against the wall, her round-toed shoes creaking solemnly as she went, took refuge in the ga'le-room, and burst into a violent fit of weeping. For such depravity she was not prepared. What a terrible curse hung over her family! Surely they were all reprobate from the womb, not one elected for salvation from the guilt of Adam's fall, and therefore abandoned to Satan as his natural prey, to be led captive ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... distinguished by their respective signs painted against the walls, one of which, in particular, was the Cardinal's Hat; and a small court, now or till lately called Cardinal's Hat Court, still exists on the Bankside, and probably shows the precise site of the mansion of depravity. In like manner we find on Bankside, Pike Garden, Globe Alley, and in the vicinity a public-house with the sign of the Globe. On Bankside also stood an ancient Hall and Palace of the Bishops of Winchester, stated to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... husband, not only ceased to instruct, but had set her face against my being instructed by any one else. It is due, however, to my mistress to say of her, that she did not adopt this course of treatment immediately. She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though I were ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... for an example of clemency and kindness, but his path all the way descended until at sixty-eight he became a suicide. If eight hundred years did not make antediluvians any better, but only made them worse, the ages of eternity could have no effect except prolongation of depravity. ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... probably be more or less troubled by the pretensions of that parody of mediaeval theology which finds its dogma of hereditary depravity in the doctrine of psora, its miracle of transubstantiation in the mystery of its triturations and dilutions, its church in the people who have mistaken their century, and its priests in those who ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... speak to Aunt Susan," retorted the monster of infant depravity, slipping his bare toes through a rent in the rug, and doubling up ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... us by the Parliament of Great Britain without our consent, and the men on whose opinions and decisions our properties liberties and lives, in a great measure depend, receive their support from the Revenues arising from these taxes, we cannot, when we think on the depravity of mankind, avoid looking with horror on the danger to which we are exposed? The British Parliament have shewn their wisdom in making the Judges there as independent as possible both on the Prince ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... speak for themselves, and has no more reason to be surprised by references to vice in some of them than by the language of virtue in many others. Confucius said, indeed, in his own enigmatical way, that the single sentence, 'Thought without depravity,' covered the whole 300 pieces[1]; and it may very well be allowed that they were collected and preserved for the promotion of good government and virtuous manners. The merit attaching to them is that they give us faithful pictures of what was good and what was bad in the political ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... cannibalism, and the one which deserves discussion here, is genuine perversion or depravity of the appetite for human flesh among civilized persons,—the desire sometimes being so strong as to lead to actual murder. Several examples of this anomaly are on record. Gruner of Jena speaks of a man by the name of Goldschmidt, in the environs ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... closely related to ideas of fertility and reproduction, indeed, but it appears to have been especially as gods of the rains, the harvests, and the food supply generally. The Spanish writers were eager to discover all the depravity possible in the religion of the natives, and they certainly would not have missed such an opportunity for their tirades, had it existed. As it is, the references to it are not many, ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... throughout the world; it was necessary that their minds should have remained unpolluted by the notions of the extravagant and degrading idolatries, which were in practice among almost all the ancient nations; and that their hearts should have remained untouched by the contagion of universal depravity. The soil to which any seed, however good, is to be committed, would never respond to the expectations of the husbandman, if it were not cleared from weeds and thistles. Those individuals had, therefore, to be drawn aside from the general society of men; and from their ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... compression of the lips indicated that she had received the full effect. Certain degrees of badness in jokes stamp the joker as a natural inferior in the eyes of even the most rabid of social levelers. Scarcely any possible exhibition of depravity gives quite the sickening sense of disappointment in the perpetrator imparted by a genuinely bad or stale joke. Two or more similar sensations coming near together are multiplied by mutual reverberations ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... "monstrous depravity—poor old Gustard's!" And still laughing that dangerous laugh, she turned on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of Caligula, and the son of Drusus and Antonia, was not bad, but weak. He was a student and a recluse in his habits. His favorites and nearest connections were unprincipled. The depravity of his wife, Messalina, was such that he did right in sanctioning her death. The immoral and ambitious Agrippina, whom he next married, had an influence less malign. But she was unfaithful to her husband; and this fact, together with the fear she felt that Nero, her son by her first ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... these unfittest put it to me. It was a piece of scientific humbug that cost the age which listened to it dear. "Causes that operate sociologically" are the opportunity of the political and every other kind of scamp who trades upon the depravity and helplessness of the slum, and the refuge of the pessimist who is useless in the fight against them. We have not done yet paying the bills he ran up for us. Some time since we turned to, to pull the drowning man out, and it was time. ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... time, saying that Italy of that date "presents some peculiarities that shed over her civilization a curious and deadly irridescence." How one thinks of Ingalls and his "honesty in politics is an iridescent dream." To resume our Morley. "Passions moved it in strange orbits. Private depravity and political debasement went with one of the most brilliant intellectual awakenings in the history of the western world. Another dark element is the association of merciless selfishness, violence, craft and corruption with the administration of sacred things. If politics ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... after reading Mrs. Catherick's extraordinary narrative, was to destroy it. The hardened shameless depravity of the whole composition, from beginning to end—the atrocious perversity of mind which persistently associated me with a calamity for which I was in no sense answerable, and with a death which ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... being then Pemberton's Yard. How the name of London 'Prentice Street came to be given to the delectable thoroughfare is one of "those things no fellow can understand." At one time there was a schoolroom there, the boys being taught good manners upstairs, while they could learn lessons of depravity below. With the anxious desire of putting the best face on everything that characterises the present local "fathers of the people," the London 'Prentice has been sent to the right-about, and the nasty dirty stinking thoroughfare is now called ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... the coroner. "You have heard the boy. 'Can't exactly say' won't do, you know. We can't take THAT in a court of justice, gentlemen. It's terrible depravity. Put the boy aside." ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... at the Cossack, while the Count was vainly attempting to recover possession of the pin which had fastened his collar, and which he evidently suspected of having slipped down his back, with the total depravity peculiar to all inanimate things when they are most needed. But the second porter, having broken the chair, upset a table covered with unused saucers for beer glasses, and otherwise materially contributing ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... the debauches and excesses that excited these temporary manias, in the recklessness of life and property they fostered, and in their disastrous effects on mind and body, are depicted more than in any other one trait the thorough depravity of the race and its tendency to ruin. In the quaint words of one of the Catholic fathers, "If the old proverb is true that every man has a grain of madness in his composition, it must be confessed ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... a man were to amuse himself by telling children complacently that there is an age in adolescence when the soul, not yet having found its balance, is capable of crimes, and suicide, and the worst sort of physical and moral depravity, and were to excuse these things—at once these offenses would spring into being. And even with men it is quite enough to go on telling them that they are not free to make them cease to be so and descend ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... depravity, never a more dangerous corruption, never a blacker soul serve to the accomplishment of a project of higher morality, or of a more equitable end; ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... has been held in the past, and is still held, that monotheism was the primitive form of religion and that the worship of many spirits or many gods is a corruption of primitive thought due to man's intellectual feebleness or to his moral depravity. It is urged that such a monotheistic system was the natural one for unsophisticated man. The view has been widely held also that it was the result of a primitive divine revelation to men. It is obvious that neither of these ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... have the "Preachers of righteousness," of the present day? Do not these pious and good men, and pious and good they generally speaking undoubtedly are, do they not feel themselves obliged to tell you, that such is the depravity of human nature, that "teaching and preaching are all in vain;" that they are wearying themselves in "throwing pearls before swine," who receive them with a grunt, and ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... expression of countenance; then, stretching forth his hand, he continued, in an excited tone: "Brazil does not want energy; it has only one want,—it wants the Bible! When a country is sunk down in superstition and ignorance and moral depravity, so that the people know not right from wrong, there is only one cure for her,—the Bible. Religion here is a mockery and a shame; such as, if it were better known, would make the heathen laugh in scorn. The priests are a curse to the land, not a blessing. Perhaps they are better in other ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... outcome of hardly more than a century of government by the people! Behold the superstructure whose foundations our forefathers laid upon the unstable overgrowth of popular caprice surfacing the unplummeted abysm of human depravity! Behold the reality behind our dream of the efficacy of forms, the saving grace of principles, the magic of words! We have believed in the wisdom of majorities and are fooled; trusted to the good honor of numbers, and are betrayed. ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... all this and grew more than ever afraid of her. He tried to understand, to make out things a little in the darkness, but she was right after all; he took these things too seriously in his way. With all her vulgar depravity, Barbro was not worth a single earnest thought. Infanticide meant nothing to her, there was nothing extraordinary in the killing of a child; she thought of it only with the looseness and moral nastiness that was to be expected of a servant-girl. ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... were framed with malignant cunning so as not to be limited in specific form of words to the negro race, but they were exclusively confined to that race in their execution. It is barely possible that a white vagrant of exceptional depravity might, now and then, be arrested; but the negro was arrested by wholesale on a charge of vagrancy which rested on no foundation except an arbitrary law specially enacted to fit his case. Loitering around tippling-shops, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... arms on her flat chest and gave vent to a groan. Already, with her gloomy views on Kindergarten regeneration versus innate depravity, she foresaw the contamination of every half-subjugated small masculine ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... however, one excuse, or rather palliation, for the superstition of that time. In periods of great public depravity—and few epochs have been more depraved than that in which Calmet lived—Satan has great power. With a ruler like the regent Duke of Orleans, with a Church governor like Cardinal Dubois, it would appear that the civil ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... sort: just the cursed depravity of inanimate things. Every man concerned worked hard and in good faith. It was luck. No one of us happened to have a rabbit's foot in ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not." Lu. xiii, 34. Their failure was not because the Spirit did not strive with them as it did with others who were saved. "God is no respecter of persons." Neither was it on account of inborn depravity. For if any were corrupted in their moral nature by Adam's sin, all were corrupted alike. So that each one would be in this respect equally hard to overcome. But why bring up inborn corruption and helplessness? Is not the Spirit of God able for any task which is in its own ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... stamp yourself as an amateur; you add to the crowd of futilities that choke the market; and, if you have it in you to write a novel which shall be a good piece, you are handicapping yourself by placing a bad novel on your record. People sin out of thoughtlessness, as well as depravity, and we would not say that every amateur novelist is, ex officio, infamous, nefarious, and felonious. He or she may be only rather ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... to you like real depravity," he concluded, "but it's a fact in nature that a man has to blow the steam off his chest about every so often. I have got drunk in Cariboo Meadows, and I have raised all manner of disturbances there, partly out of pure animal spirits, and mostly because ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair |
