"Degraded" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... does not seem to have been aware that there were any different abodes upon earth. Of David's mother we know nothing. She was probably a mere household drudge, crushed by an unfeeling husband, without sufficient sensibilities to have been aware of her degraded condition. ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... desert, in the very centre of a sterility that would put the labor and the art of man at defiance for a century. In the midst of this terrific picture of want sat a cretin, with his semi-human attributes, the lolling tongue, the blunted faculties, and the degraded appetites, to complete the desolation. Issuing from this belt of annihilated vegetation, the scene became again as pleasant as the fancy could desire, or the eye crave. Fountains leaped from rock to rock in the sun's rays; the valley was green and gentle; the mountains began to show varied and pleasing ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... supposed, most of these figures have suffered much by the rude attacks of Time; but in spite of his indelible impression, the unpolished hand of the sculptor is still distinguishable, and betrays the degraded state of the arts during the darkness of the middle ages. ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... invisible; but these pursuits soon became to me distasteful as the rest. Ever and ever I felt that I was born for something nobler than the greed of gain,—that life may be made equally worthless, and the soul equally degraded by the icy lust of avarice, as by the noisier passions. A higher ambition never ceased to torment me. But, but," continued Glyndon, with a whitening lip and a visible shudder, "at every attempt to rise ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... slavery and freedom. The owner of serfs had rarely any common interest with his people, and his chief business was to make the most out of his human property. Serfdom was degrading to master and serf, just as slavery degraded owner and slave. The moujik bore the stamp of servility as the negro slave bore it, and it will take as much time to wear it away in the one as the other. Centuries of oppression in Russia could not fail to open a wide gulf between the nobility and those who obeyed them. Thanks to ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... wars? Who would create wealth? Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if woman were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children? The race, the race! shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the priest. The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a mere machine,—and the marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex awakening of woman. But in vain these frantic efforts to maintain a state of bondage. In vain, too, the edicts of the Church, the mad attacks of rulers, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... devotion is implied and assumed, it is that of the doctor. It happens that on the morning when this chapter was drafted, I came upon the paragraph that follows; it seemed to me to supply just one striking concrete instance of how life is degraded by our present system, and to offer me a convenient text for a word or so more upon this question between gain and service. It is a little vague in its reference to Mr. Tompkins "of Birmingham," and I should not be surprised if it were a considerable exaggeration ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... sight worse than what we've got now. I'd rather be mastered by Gerald Barlow, if it comes to mastering, than by Job Arthur Freer—oh, SUCH a lot! You'll be far less free with Job Arthur for your boss than ever you were with Gerald Barlow. You'll be far more degraded.—In fact, though I've preached socialism in the market-place for thirty years—if you're going to start killing the masters to set yourselves up as bosses—why, kill me along with the masters. For I'd rather die with somebody who has one tiny little spark of decency left—though it IS a little tiny ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... awaited them; not callous to her sufferings, but resigned, as he thought, to endure what could not be prevented. Having resolved to humor her, he went from the extreme of resistance to the extreme of submission, and hardened his heart to endure what galled and humiliated and degraded him. Then anger seized him once more,—anger at Marion, anger at himself, anger at Thursby, anger at circumstances, chance and destiny: blinding and suffocating anger. To have been brought to this shameful state, to lie there watching ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... XIV. had returned, of which La Bruyre said: "Nothing so disfigures certain courtiers as the presence of their Prince; I can sometimes scarcely recognize them, so altered are their features, so degraded their faces. The proud and haughty ones are the most disturbed, for they change the most; and the upright and modest man comes out best; he has nothing to change." The Duchess of Abrants, recalling the ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... Mrs. Shelby both felt annoyed and degraded by the familiar impudence of the trader, and yet both saw the absolute necessity of putting a constraint on their feelings. The more hopelessly sordid and insensible he appeared, the greater became Mrs. Shelby's dread of his succeeding ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... A poor, degraded, downtrodden, ignorant, superstitious people, they were; accustomed for generations to the heel of first one invader and then another and in the interims, when there were any, the heels of their feudal lords ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and now at another, Iris had heard of Lord Harry's faults and failings in fragments of family history. The complete record of his degraded life, presented in an uninterrupted succession of events, had now forced itself on her attention for the first time. It naturally shocked her. She felt, as she had never felt before, how entirely right her father had been in insisting on her resistance to an attachment ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... carved panelling for firewood in the war of 1808, and the college was too poor to restore it. His righteous indignation waxed hot again when we came to the beautiful sculptured pulpit of the chapel, where all the delicate details are degraded by a thick coating of whitewash, which in some places has fallen away and shows the gilding of the time ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... may find escape, The grasping in the gross and greedy swine, The cunning in the sly and prowling fox, The cruel in some ravening beast of prey; While those less hardened, less depraved, may gain Rebirth in men, degraded, groveling, base.[1] ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... care not how obscene my words are—but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity. We discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature. In earlier ages, in some countries, every function was reverently spoken of and regulated by law. Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... clause for emancipation. This supposition would not be true. There were persons there, who wanted neither the virtue to propose, nor talents to enforce the proposition, had they seen that the disposition of the legislature was ripe for it. These worthy characters would feel themselves wounded, degraded, and discouraged by this idea. Mr. Jefferson would therefore be obliged to M. de Meusnier to mention it in some such manner as this. 'Of the two commissioners, who had concerted the amendatory clause for the gradual emancipation of slaves, Mr. Wythe could not be present, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... attention to the various weights and measures, examined the laws and regulations, and restored the degraded officials, good government ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... some of the most degraded portions of London by her improved tenement houses for the poor. One place, called Nova Scotia gardens,—the term "gardens" was a misnomer,—she purchased, tore down the old rookeries where people slept and ate in filth and rags, and ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... replied Belotti. "Her father has torn her from his heart, and calls Henrica his only daughter. Happiness abandons those who are burdened by a father's curse, and she certainly did not find it. Don Luis is said to have been degraded to the rank of ensign on account of some wild escapades, and who knows what has become of the poor, beautiful signorina. The padrona sometimes sent money to her in Italy, by way of Florence, through Signor Lamperi—but I have heard nothing of her during ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Christ. On these three superposed stories the three gradual distortions of antique art appear; but, distorted or intact, it is always antique art. A significant feature, this, throughout the history of Italy; she did not become Germanic. In the tenth century the degraded Roman still subsisted distinct and intact side by side ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... from eternity to go down to earth to awake men and save them for a life of bliss with God. He felt that the power of God had been given Him to judge souls. The devils fled before Him, He was subject to no human power. He broke with the history of His degraded people; He annulled the ancient writings, falsified by priests and learned men. He recognised that in His unity with the Heavenly Father and Eternal God, He was Lord of all power ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... could save him; he was found guilty of misprision of treason, and degraded from his office, and all ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... restrict their activity should it take a wrong political turn or should an excessive increase in the number of monks seem a public danger. The Chinese Imperial Government successfully claimed the strangest powers of ecclesiastical discipline, since it promoted and degraded not only priests but deities. In both China and Japan there has often been a strong current of feeling in the official classes against Buddhism but on the other hand it often had the support of both emperors and people, and princes not infrequently joined the clergy, especially when it was desirable ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... husband! Is it possible that a man can be guilty of treachery so deep? Would that I had died ere I had known his faithlessness, or ever seen him! Shame—shame upon it! to introduce his paramour into my very presence; an attendant on my person! Holy Virgin, that I should be so degraded! Sure a wife, young and beautiful, was never treated as I have been. Lowered in the eyes of my own servants; insulted by him who ought to have guarded me from insult; laughed at—ridiculed ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... took away his bride, with the two thousand pounds she had received from her father, and for a long time he was seen no more in his native county. After an absence of some twenty years, however, he returned, broken in constitution, and degraded in rank. Mrs. Dutton brought with her one child, the beautiful girl introduced to the reader, and to whom she was studiously imparting all she had herself acquired in the adventitious manner mentioned. Such ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... falls, unnoticed all his worth— Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth: While Man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven, And claims himself a sole exclusive Heaven. Oh Man! thou feeble tenant of an hour, Debased by slavery, or corrupt by power, Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust, Degraded mass of animated dust! Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat, Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit! By nature vile, ennobled but by name, Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame. Ye! who perchance behold this simple urn, Pass on—it honours none you wish to mourn: To ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... Lady Unknown. It is impossible at this lapse of time to identify the original of this portrait. No doubt she belonged to a short-lived and somewhat degraded class known as "professional beauties." In one hand she holds an instrument called an opera-glass, which was used in the last century at trials for murder at the Old Bailey. The hair she wears on her head is evidently false, and has ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... ingenious because he could not be quiet, and wrote his attacks on religion from a want of something to do. At any rate it has fared strangely with his works. The world had well nigh become persuaded, that Spinoza was but a name for a degraded atheism, and now we have him zealously defended, and in fact we have seen him denominated a saint.[5] So near are extremes: the ridiculous borders on the sublime; and the same man is denounced as a parricide of society, and again extolled as ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... calm state of things succeeds a violent revolution, the leaders of society seem suddenly to disappear, and the powers of the human mind to lie concealed. Society is convulsed by great parties, by minor ones it is agitated; it is torn by the former, by the latter it is degraded; and if these sometimes save it by a salutary perturbation, those invariably disturb it ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... appointed by the commander of the fort to take charge. Here we struck the plains proper, or the great American desert, as it was often called, the home of the desperate Indians, degraded half-breeds, and the squaw man—white men with Indian wives—who were at that time either French or Spanish; also the fearless hunters and trappers with nerves of steel, outdoing the bravest Indian in daring and the toughest grizzly in endurance. It is a matter of record that ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... and missionaries reported the practice of cannibalism in our own day? It is difficult, therefore, not to believe, although the fact cannot perhaps be very distinctly proved, that the first inhabitants of Europe degraded as were the conditions of their existence, did eat human flesh and acquire a depraved taste for it; impelled thereto not only by the pangs of hunger, but also by a ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... movement of the hand interpreting a crushing sense of the futility of human passion, Lanyard relaxed, drew back from standing over his antagonist, abstractedly found a handkerchief and dried his hands, of a sudden so inexpressibly shamed and degraded in his own sight that he dared not look the girl's way, but stood with hang-dog air, avoiding ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... I, 'you poor, contaminated adjunct of a sprinkling-pot and degraded household pet, what did you go and do it for? Look at you, all decent and unriotous, and only fit to sit on juries and mend the wood-house door. You was a man once. I have hostility for all such acts. Why don't you go in the house and count the tidies or set the clock, and ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... father, without an interregnum being adopted, as on former occasions, without any election being held, without the suffrages of the people, or the sanction of the fathers, he had taken possession of the kingdom by the gift of a woman; that so born, so created king, a strong supporter of the most degraded class, to which he himself belonged, through a hatred of the high station of others, he had deprived the leading men of the state of their land and divided it among the very lowest; that he had laid all the burdens, which were formerly shared by all alike, on ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... splendid description, we can scarcely persuade ourselves that we are reading of times in which the annals of England and France present us only with a frightful spectacle of poverty, barbarity, and ignorance. From the oppressions of illiterate masters, and the sufferings of a degraded peasantry, it is delightful to turn to the opulent and enlightened States of Italy, to the vast and magnificent cities, the ports, the arsenals, the villas, the museums, the libraries, the marts filled with every article of comfort or luxury, the factories swarming ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... glance upon her, withered up the woman's soul in her, and left only a hard despairing obstinacy. But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man; and to Adam, this pale, hard-looking culprit was the Hetty who had smiled at him in the garden under the apple-tree boughs—she was that Hetty's corpse, which he had trembled to look at the first time, and then was unwilling to turn away ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... deities. The marvel was why men should ever have deserted them. But man had deserted them, and man was unhappy. All, Eva, Tancred, his own consciousness, the surrounding spectacles of his life, assured him that man was unhappy, degraded, or discontented; at all events, miserable. He was not surprised that a Syrian should be unhappy, even a Syrian prince, for he had no career; he was not surprised that the Jews were unhappy, because ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... Ministers of State, upright and venal deputies, enthusiastic and cautious candidates for power, together with social theoreticians of various schools. And the blase, weak-minded man of fashion is here, as well as the young "symbolist" of perverted, degraded mind. The women are of all types, from the most loathsome to the most lovable. Then, too, the journalists are portrayed in such life-like fashion that I might give each of them his real name. And journalism, Parisian journalism, is flagellated, shown ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... and righteous provisions made for the restraint of the licentiousness and brutishness of man in the primeval days of our commonwealth; and wherein it has since sunk away from these original organic laws the people have only weakened and degraded themselves, and hindered that virtuous and happy prosperity which would otherwise in far larger degree than now ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... the boy, "and let me go hence with the consciousness that I have not been degraded to the point of accepting alms. If my poor services can be placed against the expense of my apparel and my maintenance, I only remain debtor to you for my life, and that alone is a debt which I can never repay; put up then that purse, and only say, instead, ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... it is evident that man's original state was not one of savagery. Indeed there is abundant evidence to show that man has been degraded from a very much higher stage. Both the Bible and science agree in making man the crowning work of God, and that there will be no higher order of beings here on the earth than man. We must not forget that while man, from one side of his nature, is linked to the animal ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... bloody arm where George's teeth had reached their mark. It was hardly more than a scratch, but it had been close. George had his lesson and Kennon felt oddly degraded. He sighed, dragged George back into the ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... the waters by my single arm. There, without being able to analyse my feelings, I was a spirit guiding a little world; and now, at this table, and in company with rational and well-informed beings, I felt humiliated and degraded; my heart was overflowing with shame, and at one unusual loud laugh of the little Sarah, the heaped up measure of my anguish overflowed, and I burst into a passion of tears. As I lay with my head upon the table-cloth, regardless of those decencies I had so ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... truth and fact, at least the common courtesies and charities of life, as to attribute to the military profession an unequal share of immorality and crime. We are declared not only parasites on the body politic, but professed violators of God's laws—men so degraded, though unconsciously, that "in the pursuit of justice we renounce the human character and assume that of the beasts;" it is said that "murder, robbery, rape, arson, theft, if only plaited with the soldier's ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... used a language half Scythian and half Greek. We follow this people down to the times of Mala and find them fully barbarous, using the skins of those slain in battle as coverings both for themselves and their horses. The Copts, of our times, are degraded descendants of the ancient Egyptians. In North and South America the descendants of the Spanish conquerers are poor representatives of those Castilians who, under Pizarro and Cortez mastered the Peruvian and Mexican kingdoms, and planted the civilization ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... to do than to cross the street, and Sir Edmund hurried her through the flagged and dirty yard, and the dim, foul hall, filled with fumes of smoke and beer, where melancholy debtors held out their hands, idle scapegraces laughed, heavy degraded faces scowled, and evil sounds were heard, up the stairs to a nail-studded door, where Anne shuddered to hear the heavy key turned by the coarse, rude-looking warder, only withheld from insolence by the presence of a magistrate. Her escort tarried outside, and she saw Charles, his ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... intellect. It was to thunder the terrors of the law into the ears of his converts, or, in his own words, to "shake them over hell until they smelt brimstone right strong," and make them see the fearful condition in which they lay by reason of their sin. Man was to him a wretched, degraded creature, and the only way to bring him to God was to drive him there by the terrors of the law. Our preacher had very little faith in the quieter, more persuasive means of grace. His first effort was to give the souls ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... recognizable as the hamlet described in Our Village, but it was saddening to look at the cottage in which Mary Russell Mitford lived and was on the whole very happy with her flowers and work for thirty years of her life, in its present degraded state. It has a sign now and calls itself the "Mitford Arms" and a "Temperance Hotel," and we were told that you could get tea and bread and butter there but nothing else. The cottage has been much altered since Miss Mitford's time, and the open space once occupied by the beloved ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... sake.[1] Who for love of us not only became subject to the Blessed Virgin and to St. Joseph, but made Himself obedient to death and to the death of the Cross, submitting Himself in His Passion to the most sinful and degraded of the earth, uttering not a cry, even as a lamb under the hand of him who shears it and slays it. It is by this universal obedience to every creature that we become all things to all men in order that we may win all to Jesus Christ. It is by ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... next remark, that the further we remove from the original centre of the race, the more degraded and sunk do we find the several varieties of humanity. We must set wholly aside, in our survey, the disturbing element of modern emigration. Caucasian man has been pressing outwards. In the backwoods of America, in Southern Africa, in Australia, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... unhappy, in spite of all, as I had been on my first enlisting in Ireland. At least, thought I, if I am degraded to be a private soldier there will be no one of my acquaintance who will witness my shame; and that is the point which I have always cared for most. There will be no one to say, 'There is young Redmond Barry, the descendant or the Barrys, the fashionable young blood ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial theory, and this ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... near-thoroughbred Maid, carrying the blood of "old" Lexington, Morella, and a streak of the super-enduring Morgan, could run, walk, and work my unregistered Outlaw into the ground; and that was the very precise reason why such a paragon of a saddle animal should not be degraded by harness. ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... usages of the kingdom. Let those who have the trust of political or of natural authority ever keep watch against the desperate enterprises of innovation: let even their benevolence be fortified and armed. They have before their eyes the example of a monarch insulted, degraded, confined, deposed; his family dispersed, scattered, imprisoned; his wife insulted to his face, like the vilest of the sex, by the vilest of all populace; himself three times dragged by these wretches in an infamous triumph; his children torn from him, in violation ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... up and recognized the rustic bacchanalian for the first time. He had always had a peculiar antipathy to this young gentleman; but at this moment it was intensified into a loathing. How could he ask assistance from such a degraded creature as this? ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... to work for themselves on Saturday; the second had only the last-named indulgence; the third were only allowed Saturday afternoon; the fourth and fifth were "refractory and disorderly characters—to work in irons;" the sixth were "men of the most degraded and incorrigible character—to be worked in irons, and kept entirely separate from the other prisoners;" while the seventh were the refuse of this refuse—the murderers, bandits, and villains, whom neither chain nor ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... farrago of miscellaneous subjects is treated in a frank, uncompromising spirit of criticism and satire, a spirit of broad fun, side-splitting laughter and reckless high spirits. Whatever lends itself to ridicule is instantly seized upon; odd, eccentric and degraded personalities are caricatured, social foibles and vices pilloried, pomposity and sententiousness in the verses of the poets, particularly the tragedians, and most particularly in Euripides—the pet aversion and constant butt of Aristophanes' satire—are ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... delight; the most disagreeable objects of nature become the most worshipped treasures of art; and we emulate each other in testifying our exaltation of taste by contending for the pictured vulgarities by which taste itself is the most essentially degraded. In fact, too, the meaner the object, the more certain it is with us of becoming the rage. In the theatre, we run after the farce; in painting, we worship ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Maurier," I replied, "I feel hurt—seriously, irrevocably. I shall always feel degraded in your eyes. Of course you are the victim of ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... invitation had been instigated by the young girl. A week before he would have rejoiced at it; a month ago he would have accepted it if only as a relief to his degraded position, but in the pique of this new passion he almost rudely declined it. An hour later he saw Nelly, becomingly and even tastefully dressed,—with the American girl's triumphant superiority to her condition and surroundings,—ride past in her father's smart ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... off with Safti, my faithful one-eyed Arab guide, and after three long days of riding and talking—as I had feared—Maeterlink and Tolstoy, Henley and Verlaine (this last being utterly condemned by Marnier as a man of weak character and degraded life) we saw the towers of Beni-Kouidar aspiring above the shifting sands, the tufted summits of the thousands of palm-trees, and heard the dull beating of drums and the cries of people borne to us over the spaces of which silence is the ...
— Desert Air - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... apology, she started up, and glowing with indignation, said, "I had flattered myself, Sir, that both my character and my conduct, independent of my situation in life, would have exempted me at all times from a proposal which I shall ever think myself degraded by having heard." ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... is of the solemn earlier kind, not yet degraded into the worldling whom Goethe has immortalised. Marlowe's Mephistophilis is essentially the idealist, and it is his Faust who is determined for the world. One feels about Mephistophilis that he is a kind of religious character, although under ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... country as to merit the gratitude and reverence of every loyal American; a man who has spent the best years of his life in fighting his country's battles and in studying and obeying her laws, was insulted and degraded by men who, so far as true moral worth is concerned, are unworthy to sit at the ...
— The Battle of the Big Hole • G. O. Shields
... again into that writhing breast. I wish I had never seen it. In fact I could not see clearly, for every thing grew misty from the sick shuddering that fell upon me. I shivered down in my seat and shut my eyes, degraded and full of self contempt, that any thing should have brought me to that ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... and I was nearly twenty-one years of age, there were few more degraded sights in the parish than I. My clothes had become worn out, and my whole appearance was more that of a savage than of anything else. People said, too, that the look of a devil shone from my eyes, and I saw that people avoided me. And as I brooded over this, and remembered that I owed it all ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... than civilization, and that the progress of modern times has proceeded upon a misconception of the true ideal perfection of the human race. As no one can be found who will admit that his happiness has been marred, his powers limited, or his life degraded, by education, so there is no process of logic that can commend to the human understanding the doctrine that bodies of men are either less happy or virtuous for the culture of the intellect. I am not aware of any human experience that conflicts with this view; for individual cases of criminals ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... important than any of these is the temple at Evora, now without any reason called the temple of Diana. During the middle ages, crowned with battlements, with the spaces between the columns built up, it was later degraded by being turned into a slaughter-house, and was only cleared of such additions a few years since. Situated near the cathedral, almost on the highest part of the town, it stands on a terrace whose great retaining wall still shows the massiveness ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... disgustingly sensual. Among a population grossly ignorant and uneducated, sensualism prevails in its most appalling forms. The man is a sensualist, simply because he knows no higher pleasures. He is degraded, because he has no motives to be otherwise. He is barely above a brute. The amount of crime, of the coarsest and most debasing character, among the uneducated peasantry of England, is almost incredible. Here is a description of an English ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... Colonel Procter, whom Brock had placed in command of the fort at Amherstburg. Procter's name is infamous in the annals of the war. The worst traditions of Indian atrocity, uncontrolled and even encouraged, cluster about his memory. He was later promoted in rank instead of being degraded, a costly blunder which England came to regret and at last redeemed. A notoriously incompetent officer, on this one occasion of the battle of the Raisin he acted with decision and took advantage of ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... power of compelling her to remain at Welmingham? The person unquestionably from whom she derived the means of living. She had refused assistance from her husband, she had no adequate resources of her own, she was a friendless, degraded woman—from what source should she derive help but from the source at which report pointed—Sir ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... and heard the apprehensions that an epidemic might spread from the fortress. This had, in fact, been debated by the town council; and Lachmann was eventually responsible for a commission of inquiry. But Hegedues, although he was degraded and condemned to prison, made a successful appeal, for his father-in-law was ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... self-culture may be degraded is by regarding it too exclusively as a means of "getting on." Viewed in this light, it is unquestionable that education is one of the best investments of time and labour. In any line of life, intelligence will enable ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... line. The captain afterwards said he did this to rouse the admiral; it had the effect of perplexing him and alarming the whole fleet. The absurdity of such an act shows what was the state of the Spanish navy under that miserable government by which Spain was so long oppressed and degraded, and finally betrayed. In reality, the general incapacity of the naval officers was so well known, that in a pasquinade, which about this time appeared at Madrid, wherein the different orders of the state ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... of in the manner already described, the next step taken by the inhabitants of the town of Fulton was to place the lady under a most degraded surveillance. True, she was to continue in her father's house, but so overpowering had the mob-spirit become, that the mobocrats commanded (and were obeyed!) that no communications should be sent to her or from her, unless they had been ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen
... is very degraded in its present state, you can still see the Doric and Ionic pilasters in couples, and the heavy circular tops alternating with triangles above the windows; and though all those parts of the decoration which jutted out have been destroyed, there is still a massive dignity ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... found him making desperate love to a common servant,—and after that her confidence, naturally, was at an end. One discovery led to another,—and the husband around whom she had woven her life's romance, sank degraded in her sight, never to rise again. She was of far too dignified and proud a nature to allow her sense of outrage and wrong to be made public, and though she never again lived with D'Agramont as his wife, she carried herself through all her duties as mistress of the household and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... St. Bartholomew the Great, or St. Bat's as it was called, in the heart of London, had long been a hived village. Not only were houses clustered thickly around its outside walls and the space of ground named its close; but the inside, degraded from its first use, was parceled out to owners and householders. The nave only had been retained as a church bounded by massive pillars, which did not prevent Londoners from using it as a thoroughfare. ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... is a degraded South Sea Islander making a crude intoxicant from a sugary plant, a Japanese preparing his favorite alcoholic beverage from the fermentation of rice by means of a fungus plant grown for the purpose, a farmer of this country making cider ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... could only be equalled by his love of virtue, had extended his mercy; but however flattering the prospect of preserving life might be to a man in a different situation; yet that he, now he was sunk and degraded in society, was totally insensible of the blessing. Life was no longer an object with him, as it was utterly impossible that he could be joined in union with the person who was dearer to him than life itself. Under such circumstances, although he was truly sensible of his Majesty's goodness and ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... Mr. Swinburne calls the "stronger sex." Another evening we went to see a native dance or "corrobboree" as it is called. There are not many natives now left in South Australia, and what there are have become very degraded. The law forbids the sale to them of intoxicating liquors. Spirits not merely make them drunk, but drive them mad. As a sort of compensation they come down to Adelaide at stated times for blankets, which are distributed to them by the Government. On these occasions they are accustomed to exhibit ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... the elector's death, soon afterward, the theologians renewed the attack, threw Isenbiehl out of his professorship and degraded him. One insult deserves mention for its ingenuity. It was declared that he—the successful and brilliant professor—showed by the obnoxious interpretation that he had not yet rightly learned the Scriptures; he was therefore ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... ancestors chose as lawgivers a Solon, a Themistocles, and a Pericles, thinking that the laws would be like those who proposed them, while you (chose) a Tisamenus, son of Mechanion, and a Nicomachus, and other under-clerks; and you think offices are degraded by such men, and yet trust in them. 29. Here is the strangest thing of all; the same man may not be under-clerk twice in the same year, but you allow the same men to be in charge of the most important matters for a long time. And finally you chose Nicomachus commissioner of traditional laws, who ...
— The Orations of Lysias • Lysias
... felt it myself; it speedily wears off. I think none the worse, I think the more of you, for this engaging frankness. And in the meanwhile, what are you to do? You find yourself, if I interpret rightly, in very much the same situation as Charles the Second (possibly the least degraded of your British sovereigns) when he was taken into the confidence of the thief. To denounce me, is out of the question; and what else can you attempt? No, dear Mr. Somerset, your hands are tied; and you find yourself condemned, under pain ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... of the outer world, they need now our help to uplift and enthuse and save them. Schools, churches, industrial instruction, mental and spiritual training, help for the poor and the ignorant and the degraded is sorely needed. This is comparatively a new field of work, and is still largely unexplored and obscure. There is much to be done, and it should be done now. The results of a very few years of work are encouraging. ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 4, April, 1889 • Various
... squander everything we have. But what I DO mind is that you who have loved me, you who have taught me to love you, should pass from the love that is given to the love that is bought. Oh, it's horrible! [Sits on sofa.] And it is I who feel degraded! YOU don't feel anything. I feel stained, utterly stained. You can't realise how hideous the last six months seems to me now—every kiss you have given me is tainted in ...
— Lady Windermere's Fan • Oscar Wilde
... interests are committed to my charge; for, gentlemen, upon the issue of this question, with reference to them, depends whether they are to hold the situation in society which they have hitherto held, or whether they are to be completely degraded ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... more against you. They are not to be taken in that way—they will not be baulked in the spite they have to you. They only set to work with redoubled alacrity, to lessen the favour or to blacken your character. They feel themselves like a degraded caste, and cannot understand how the obligations can be all on one side, and the advantages all on the other. You cannot come to equal terms with them—they reject all such overtures as insidious and hollow—nor can you ever calculate ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... but one with which one's relations have become frequent and intimate. Like the king who shows himself at his toilet, Death is still powerful, but it has become familiar and slightly degraded. ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... century. The structure is square, and is surmounted by a gilt dragon. It contains a chime of bells, and a huge bell weighing five tons. The records of the city were formerly kept in the lower part of the building, which is now degraded into a prison. The entrance to the tower is through a shop, and the view from the ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... was not the light in which he held his fatal secret. True, he knew what she had done, and that his young queen, his ideal, was a murderess, who, if the truth were made public, would be degraded below the level of the poorest wretch that had kept an honest name; but he felt himself more accursed than she, in that he had been the means whereby she had gotten both her knowledge and the power to use it. He was the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... this day. Imagine what any one holding my office would think when one who endeavoured to rob their Highnesses, and who has done so much evil and mischief, is honoured and favoured, while he who maintained it at such risks is degraded. ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... the march for the nation, he put them into formal custody, placed a captain's guard over them, and in this manner hurried them to the frontiers. Whatever may have been the merits of this movement as a mere military precaution, it was of very bad policy in a civil point of view. It not only degraded the Indian chiefs in their own, but in the eyes of their people. His captives deeply and openly resented this indignity and breach of faith; and, brooding in sullen ferocity over the disgrace which they suffered, meditated in silence those schemes ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... sensibility than to behold its favorite scene and subject fail in awakening others to that emotion which it has inspired in ourselves. We turn away in haste, lest the object of our worship should become degraded by a longer survey. Enthusiasm recoils at a denial of sympathy; and all the worth of our companion, in a thousand other respects, fails to reconcile us ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... the unhorsed horseman, suddenly degraded into a pedestrian, just as ashamed as a cavalry officer degraded to a ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... complain of them while I can reply to them so easily," said Mary gayly. "He who knows how much a well-ordered household contributes to the cultivation of domestic virtues and family affections, will not think a woman degraded who sacrifices somewhat of her tastes and pleasures to the deeper happiness of procuring such ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... things, again and again putting her own life upon the hazard to save theirs and the honour of another woman? As he asked himself the question Godwin felt the red blood rise to his face. Because she hated Sinan, who had murdered her parents and degraded her, she said; and doubtless that had to do with the matter. But it was no longer possible to hide the truth. She loved him, and had loved him from the first hour when they met. He had always suspected it—in that wild ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... so lost, so guilty, so despairing, that this truth, once received, has not had power to redeem, regenerate, and disenthrall. Christ so presented becomes to every human being a friend nearer than the mother who bore him; and the more degraded, the more hopeless and polluted, is the nature, the stronger comes on the living reaction, if this belief is really and vividly enkindled with it. But take away this appropriative, individual element, and this legend of Jesus's death has no more power than any ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... had failed in the ordeal there was a choice of punishments. If his offence was a slight one, a fine was deemed sufficient. If it was a very disgraceful one, such as secret murder, he was put to death or was degraded to slavery, in most cases he was declared to be a 'wolf's-head'—that is to say, he was outlawed and driven into the woods, where, as the protection of the community was withdrawn from him, anyone might kill him without ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... pike. I represented to them (as she clung to me for protection), that although of noble descent, she had reduced herself to my level by marrying a citizen barber. After a short consultation, they agreed that she was sufficiently degraded to live. They contented themselves with breaking open my cellar, that they might drink my health, and departed. But, your highness, I had soon cause to repent of my folly. Cerise was a charming woman, and an affectionate wife in adversity, but prosperity was her ruin, as well as mine. She ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... sink into the insignificance of the grave—a degraded, defeated, emasculated People, frightened by the results of one battle, and scared at the visions raised by the imagination of the Senator from Kentucky on this floor? No, Sir! a thousand times, no, Sir! We will ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... carried on among the Pennsylvania Germans by means of a superstitious practice known as "Pow-wow." A book called The Sixth Book of Moses, or Black Art is said to be the basis of the practice. The practitioners are usually women of the most ignorant, degraded, and, not infrequently, immoral class, and in harmony with this, a firm belief in witchcraft is entertained by them. Notwithstanding this, they are employed at times by intelligent and respectable people, even by those whose ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice. Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. There are limits to what a mule or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be degraded until his vileness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that they themselves are forced to ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... nine-tenths of our happiness depends upon health alone. With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable; even the other personal blessings,—a great mind, a happy temperament—are degraded and dwarfed for want of it. So it is really with good reason that, when two people meet, the first thing they do is to inquire after each other's health, and to express the hope that it is good; for good health is ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... great a favourite with him as he afterwards became with his son, Nuseer-od Deen Hyder, and he abused his master's favour in the same manner. The minister, Aga Meer, finding his interference and vulgar insolence intolerable, took advantage one day of the King's anger against him, had him degraded, seized, and sent off forthwith to one of his creatures, Taj-od Deen Hoseyn, then in charge of the Sultanpoor district, where he was soon reduced almost to death's door by harsh treatment and want of food, and made to disgorge all the wealth he had accumulated. Four years after ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... not contemplate his purpose without a feeling of dread, and yet he did not pause nor seriously consider its abandonment. His movements, as he elbowed his way among the outcasts who infested this degraded region, were those of a man ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... poor-houses usually empty. Let them turn to the other hand, and they see the same race in a state of freedom at the North; but, instead of the comfort and kindness they receive at the South, instead of being happy and useful, they are, with few exceptions, miserable, degraded, filling the penitentiaries and poor-houses, objects of scorn, excluded in some places from the schools, and deprived of many other privileges and benefits which attach to the white men among whom they live. And yet they insist that elsewhere an institution which has proved ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... discussed the wretched public taste and the wretched actors that pandered to it. The slap-stick comedy, they held, degraded a fine and beautiful art. Merton was especially severe. He always felt uncomfortable at one of these regrettable exhibitions when people about him who knew no better laughed heartily. He had never seen anything to laugh ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... windows with boards and the gaping doorways with rags, and occupying now an entire princely flat and now a few small rooms, according to its taste. Horrid-looking linen hung drying from the carved balconies, foul stains already degraded the white walls, and from the magnificent porches, intended for sumptuous equipages, there poured a stream of filth which rotted in stagnant pools in the roads, where there was ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... treated than among most Indian tribes. Their occupations are entirely domestic—they manufacture cloth, cook, tend the house, and look after the children, but from all we hear and see, their morals are degraded ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... offering Be still unpaid when th' evening's sun has sunk Behind the western mountain to his rest, My curse shall smite thee." Speaking words like these The Brâhman left him; and the king, o'ercome With fear—a fugitive—robbed of his wealth— Degraded to unfathomable depths— The victim of his evil creditor— Heard once again the counsel of his wife: "O king! sell me! nor let the fiery curse Dissolve thy being!" Urged repeatedly, The king at length replied: "Most loving one! What the most wicked man could hardly do, That same will ...
— Mârkandeya Purâna, Books VII., VIII. • Rev. B. Hale Wortham
... who wished to save his life on account of his own pledged honour. But all these efforts could not move the faith nor firmness of this pious and heroic man; and on the 6th of July, A.D. 1415, he was unanimously condemned, ignominiously degraded from the office of a priest, and burned alive the same day. His ashes were ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... defrauded by a lawyer she had trusted, and was plunged into debt by his non-payment of the sums that should have passed through his hands to others; my own bright life had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The smooth brightness of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... was a First-Class Civil Servant; and one was justified in imagining confidential papers inside, or, at any rate, home-work of the first importance. But nowadays there are too many of them for that. The attache-case has been degraded; it is universal. This might be because there is practically no male person alive just now who has not been an adjutant at one time or another, and pinched at least one attache-case from the orderly-room. But most of the cases in the Tube are carried by females, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... confined her co-wives tell her it is the custom to bind the eyes of women in her condition, to which she submits, and after she has borne the wonderful boy she promised to do, they tell her she has been delivered of a stone. The king degraded her to the condition of a kitchen servant and never spoke to her. The nurse takes the baby in a box and buries it in the jungle. But the king's dog had followed her, and when she went off he took the box out of the earth and swallowed the baby. Six months after ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... makes a man a slave, takes away half his worth; and, in fact, he loses every impulse to action, but that low and base one of fear. In this kind of government human nature is not only abused and insulted, but it is actually degraded and sunk into a species of brutality. The consideration of this made Mr. Locke say, with great justice, that a government of this kind was worse than anarchy: indeed it is so abhorred and detested by all who live under forms that have a milder appearance, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and most oppressive stage of history, had precisely the same foundation in truth as the love of the French court during the days of the Regency for a shepherd's life and child-like rural pleasures. A wicked and degraded age seeks for relief in contemplating its opposite; a healthy one—like the Greek—glories in itself, and strives to raise self to the highest standard of truth and beauty. None of the symbolisms of the middle ages grew directly from Nature—it was based on second-hand reveries, and on ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... never been a time when I would not have gone to you at a word, at your slightest expressed desire. However I may have despised you in my secret heart, I remained loyal outwardly, and would have gone to you in response to the call of duty. There is no such duty now. You have openly insulted and degraded me; you have accused me before the world; you have dragged my name in the muck; you have attempted to dethrone my womanhood. The past is over; it is over forever. The law may continue to hold me as your wife, but I am not your wife. The records of the church may ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... on from bad to worse, until he had become the degraded creature of whom his wife had caught a momentary glimpse under the glare of gas lamp on her departure from the Amity street lodgings. The woman who supposed herself to be his wife had informed him that a strange lady had ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... be but a city of streets, of dull and dreadful stones, against which the tide of life beat remorselessly for ever. And such life! For very pity the child's heart grew heavy within her often as she looked upon the stream of humanity in these poor streets, on the degraded, hopeless faces, the dull eyes, the languid bearing of those who appeared to have lost interest in, and respect for, themselves. She believed it wholly sad. Standing on the outside, she knew nothing of the homely joys, the gleams of mirth, the draughts of happiness possible to the ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... they should thus dole out my clothes as if I were a convict in some penitentiary. They mean to degrade me. It can't be done. No man can be degraded by unmerited insult heaped upon the helpless. Such acts can only degrade their perpetrators. The day will come when the people will blush at ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... found his way up the rivers, even to Cambridge, and there remains. The rivers by which he came up, the land through which he passed, ages and ages since, have been all swept away; and he has never found his way back to his native salt-water, but lives on in a strange land, degraded in form, dwindling in numbers, and now fast dying out. The explanation may be strange: but it is the only one which I can offer to explain the fact—which is itself much more strange—of the burbot being found ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... human life seemed that evening—after all the fierce imaginings in which she had lived so long! In the great towns beyond the hills, women were still starved and sweated,—still enslaved and degraded. Man no doubt was still the stupid and vicious tyrant, the Man-Beast that Gertrude Marvell believed him. But here in this large English village, how the old primal relations stood out!—sorrow-laden and sin-stained often, yet how touching, how worthy, in the main, ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to perform. He had come to redeem humanity—to go down to the very lowest depths to seek and to save the lost; and, therefore, He had to make close acquaintance with human nature in its worst specimens and its extremest degradation. He was to be the Saviour of sinners as bad and degraded as even these soldiers; and, therefore, He had to come in contact with them and see what ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... trade of twisting their bodies like apes," he said. "Contortionists and ballet-dancers and clowns and harlequins—" he rattled all the names over with a good deal of uncalled-for sharpness, I thought, calling them "dissolute and degraded, the very offal of humanity." I could not understand his heat until he added, "I never could comprehend your interest and sympathy for that especial ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... higher than might have been expected. The moment he began to contemplate this object of his faith, and sought to clothe it with attributes, it became finite, and commonly ridiculous. The Creator of the World stood on the level of a barbarous and degraded humanity, while a natural tendency became apparent to look beyond him to other powers sharing his dominion. The Indian belief, if developed, would have developed into a ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... selfish, sensual joy; His wife may weep, his starving children groan, And Poverty with cruel gripe annoy. He neither hears, nor heeds their famish'd moan, The glorious wine-cup owns no base alloy. Surrounded by a low, degraded train, His fiendish laugh defiance bids to pain; He hugs the cup—more dear than friends to him— Nor sees stern ruin from the goblet rise, Nor flames of hell careering o'er the brim,— The lava flood that glads his bloodshot eyes Poisons ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... thing which has been said from time immemorial by the slave owners of their slaves. First they degrade human beings by denying them the opportunity to develop their better nature: no schools, no teaching, no freedom, no outlook; and then, as if in mockery, they point to the degraded condition of their victims as a reason why they should never be ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... "I suppose her prejudice in favour of this man was natural, but all I can say is that, under similar circumstances, I should act to-day precisely as I did on the night when I found him about to sell a woman's honour, for money to minister to the degraded pleasures ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... occupations are all of a domestic nature, and good behaviour is rewarded by kindness and confidence, which raises them in the community to which they belong. The term gholam, or slave, in Mahomedan countries, is not one of opprobrium, nor does it even convey the idea of a degraded condition. The Georgians, Nubians, and Abyssinians, and even the Seedee, or Caffree, as the woolly-headed Africans are called, are usually married, and their children, who are termed house-born, become, in a manner, part of their master's family. They are deemed the most attached of his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various
... who write and read about those wondrous scenes should have to condemn our own species as the most degraded of all the works of the Creator there! Yet so it is. Man, exercising his reason and conscience in the path of love and duty which his Creator points out, is God's noblest work; but man, left to the freedom of his own fallen ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... with some of the distrust and hatred which the unconstitutional tyrants of Athens had aroused. Just as the later chansons de geste of France, the poems written in an age of feudal opposition to central authority, degraded heroes like Charles, so rhetorical, republican, and sophistical Greece put its quibbles into the lips of Agamemnon and Helen, and slandered the stainless ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... 213: Speaking of these humiliations of the gods, Grote, Hist. t. i. p. 78, well observes: "The god who serves is for a time degraded; but the supreme god who commands the servitude is in the like proportion exalted, whilst the idea of some sort of order and government among these super-human beings ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... as many sovereigns as there were cities. The system of giving a separate dominion to every son of a grand prince had ruined Russia. These small potentates were constantly at war, confusion reigned supreme, Kief was taken and degraded and a new capital, Vladimir, established, and Moscow, which was to become the fourth capital of Russia, was founded. Such was the state of affairs when Batou, with his vast horde of savage horsemen, fell on ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... fellow, but you do not understand these things as an English officer would. If I gave my word to the rajah, I should be obliged to keep it, and it would be a disgrace. I might have a grand position in the rajah's army, but I should be degraded from my own, and be a traitor in training men to fight against our flag. No; I cannot promise the rajah, and I shall have to refuse him again. The next thing will be that he is fiercely angry, and I shall be imprisoned—if he spares my life," I said sadly. ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... his confidential disclosures—a prince who, not satisfied with introducing excesses until then unheard of among his nobles, was not ashamed to bestow the royal bounty upon the professed head of the degraded women whom he allowed to accompany the ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... chance—no, it may have been the odour of iris. I am mad over perfume. I think it a neglected art, degraded to the function of anointment. I have often dreamed of an art by which a dazzling and novel synthesis of fragrant perfumes would be invented by some genius, some latter-day Rimmel or Lubin whom we could hail as a peer of ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... obeyed me and went in. I stood at the shop-door, watching the increasing crowd, and pitying, with that pity mixed with shame that every honest man must feel towards a degraded woman, the wretched object of their jeers. Half-frightened, she still kept up that set smile, skipping daintily from side to side of the pavement, darting at and peering into every carriage that passed. ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... officers too attending the Court. Sir John Lenthall moving in the House, that all that had borne arms against the King should be exempted from pardon, he was called to the bar of the House, and after a severe reproof he was degraded his knighthood. At Court I find that all things grow high. The old clergy talk as being sure of their lands again, and laugh at the Presbytery; and it is believed that the sales of the King's and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... means grasshopper soup. It is Indian, and suggestive of Indians. They say it is Pi-ute—possibly it is Digger. I am satisfied it was named by the Diggers—those degraded savages who roast their dead relatives, then mix the human grease and ashes of bones with tar, and 'gaum' it thick all over their heads and foreheads and ears, and go caterwauling about the hills and call ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... been in the midst of a vigorous crusade against organized vice. Too long neglected by the authorities and the public, the so-called levee districts of the city had fallen into the hands of grafting police officials, who, working with the lowest of degraded of men, had created an open and most brazen vice syndicate. Without going into details, it is enough to say that conditions finally became so scandalous that all Chicago rose in horror and rebellion. The police department was thoroughly overhauled, ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... this purpose were criminals, a sort of settlers that may do well in an unpeopled country, where there is nothing to do but to reclaim the land, but that must do ill where there are many and savage natives, because they either become degraded to the savage level themselves, if they continue friends, or, if not, they are apt to practise such cruelties and injustice as disgust the natives, render colonisation difficult, and if they teach any thing, it is all the worst part of the ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... men. Sometimes I shall take Abraham, sometimes Tugendheim, sometimes the Turk. This time I shall take the Turk, and before dawn I shall be gone. Let it be known that the best behaved of those I leave with you shall be promoted to ride with me—just as my unworthy ones shall be degraded to march on foot with you. That will ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... hospitality. The reason is plain; you have a horror of the needy. You invite us—and when we come you treat us justly enough, but as if we were numbers, criminals, beneath contempt—as if we had inflicted a personal injury on you; and when we get out again, we are naturally degraded." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Michael Amory said. "I want to let people know how wonderfully beautiful life can be, even without wealth and worldly power, and why it is beautiful. I want them to realize the essence of things, to let those poor, crowded, degraded wretches in London know the sweetness of work in God's open spaces. I feel that I must do my little bit in helping things forward. I want to let in a few chinks ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... makes it clear that he was amongst them. To begin with, he had been in the second class at the Kreuzschule. The more effectually to imbue him with the Nicolai ambition of becoming a scholar, i.e. a pedant, and a complete, if sausage-munching, German gentleman of the period, they degraded him to the third. No doubt there were protests: one cannot believe that Wagner the boy any more than Wagner the man could refrain from declamation under a grievance; but with such impervious skulls and thick hides protests would be unavailing. The ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... the Christian ages it was converted into a church, and dedicated to St.-Etienne the Martyr; and in the eleventh century it was used as the Hotel-de-Ville. It was then given to a certain Pierre Boys, in exchange for a piece of ground to erect a new hotel-de-ville; and he, after having degraded it by using a portion of it as a party-wall to a mean dwelling he erected adjoining it, disposed of it to a *Sieur Bruyes, who, still more barbarous than Pierre Boys, converted it into a stable. In 1670, it was ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... but it is a feast for me to contemplate my revenge. Raise her to the dignity of wife to share my social honours and triumph. No; elle sera ma maitresse; and I shall cast her off among the worthless and degraded ones of her sex." Then Marie's father entered with the liquor, and pledged his fealty to Monsieur with many "salutes" and "bonne santes" After M. Riel had taken sufficient liquor to make him thoroughly daring, he said with a ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... shallow local myth about St. Nicholas, and the corruption of that into a mere comic supplement character; a bulbous benevolent goblin, red-nosed and gross, doing impossible tricks with reindeers and chimneys, and half the time degraded to a mere adjunct of nursery government? Why do we think it beautiful? Or interesting? Or beneficial? The children like ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... I to Polly, "leave this degraded creature to ply his pernicious trade alone. I have some very important ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... power of administering the sacraments belongs to the spiritual character which is indelible, as explained above (Q. 63, A. 3). Consequently, if a man be suspended by the Church, or excommunicated or degraded, he does not lose the power of conferring sacraments, but the permission to use this power. Wherefore he does indeed confer the sacrament, but he sins in so doing. He also sins that receives a sacrament from such a man: so that he does not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... our great social changes, and our far-reaching discoveries, human beings continue to be sent to the worst of hells, wherein they are outraged, degraded, and tortured, that society may be "protected" from the phantoms of ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... pain all forgot, the confusion all vanishing, was on his feet. It was as though a curtain that for months had hung between him and the blessed light of clear understanding had suddenly been rent in twain by her words. The woman stood revealed. All the baseness of her tribe, all the degraded savagery of a degenerate race, all the capabilities for wrong, for sordid treachery, that lay dormant in her, leaped to life at this unguarded moment, and in that new light, that now at last she had herself let in, stood pitilessly ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... all over now. They've kept out of sight of the police all this time, and sent messages to me from where they were in hiding, and I've had to come and pay them. I've been like a slave to them, and they've degraded me till I've felt as ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... among the convicts as rum, their favourite liquor; and, rather than not make money, the officers began to import large quantities of that spirit, thus deliberately assisting to demoralise still further the degraded population which they had been sent to reform. So enormous were the profits made in this debasing trade that very few of the officers could refrain from joining it. Soon the New South Wales Corps became like one great firm of spirit merchants, engaged in the importing and retailing of rum. ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... coat!" she sobbed. "Poor man, he fears disgrace and dreads the loss of preferment and of a royal decoration, perhaps. He will have to feign sickness as an excuse for his absence; but I hope he realizes now how degraded and unhappy I must feel with my last year's gowns and made-over millinery—and your poor sister's ancient bonnets, I dare not look ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... associated with you in your good works. So long as State constitutions say that all may vote when twenty-one, save idiots, lunatics, convicts and women, you are brought down politically to the level of those others disfranchised. This discrimination is a relic of the dark ages. The most ignorant and degraded man who walks to the polls feels himself superior to the most intelligent woman. We should demand the wiping out of all legislation ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... sun. At every step he took he seemed to be advancing deeper into a horrid, phantom-haunted nightmare; it was as if he saw a yawning, gaping gulf before him toward which he was inevitably tending; it meant that he was suffering himself to be degraded to the level of the miserable beings by whom he was surrounded, that he was prostituting his talents and his position as a man ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... which are at the opposite pole from the accurate (i. 12): 'When I speak of the Vedic Rishis as primitive, I do not mean what Mr. A. Lang means when he calls his savages primitive.' But I have stated again and again that I don't call my savages 'primitive.' Thus 'contemporary savages may be degraded, they certainly are not primitive.' {93a} 'One thing about the past of [contemporary] savages we do know: it must have been a long past.' {93b} 'We do not wish to call savages primitive.' {93c} All this was written in reply to the very proper caution of Dr. Fairbairn that 'savages ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... thoughts that surged like troubled waters through her brain. The dominant idea was, that her self-respect had been wounded; the shock to her maidenly modesty, and the shame attendant upon the fact, affected her physically, as if she had been belittled and degraded by a personal stain; and this downfall caused her deep humiliation. By slow degrees, however, and notwithstanding this state of abject despair, she felt, cropping up somewhere in her heart, a faint germ of gladness, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... soldier, the most degrading on earth, has not degraded you. You are engaged in the most infamous and sordid war that was ever fought, and yet you have remained uncontaminated—there is no honour or decoration in all the armies of the world good enough ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... humid England, and unlike Wolsey, who just missed the glory of canonization, Becket became a widely venerated saint. But less kind to St. Thomas of Canterbury than to St. Swithin, the Reformation degraded Becket from the saintly rank by the decision which terminated the ridiculous legal proceedings instituted by Henry VIII. against the holy reputation of St. Thomas. After the saint's counsel had replied to the Attorney-General, who, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... It is polluted, but many parts of it are not nearly as dirty as people are sometimes led into believing by a look at the summertime estuary at Washington. The fabled and scenic German Rhine, for instance, is much more degraded in its main flowing reaches than is the Potomac, and so are a majority of the other rivers in the northeastern United States and many elsewhere in the country. Industrialization on the Potomac and its tributaries has been spotty so far, and there are no really big ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... factions which, no more satisfied with the speeches of the tribune, filled the streets with blood and wounds. The revolution had entered into a new phase, the Legislative Assembly had become the Constituent Assembly, which despoiled the monarchy of the last appearance of power and degraded it to a mere insignificancy. The Girondists, those ideal fanatics, who wanted to regenerate France after the model of the states of antiquity, had seized the power and the ministerial portefeuilles. ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... roundness of its handsome folds aided her in looking prosperous and fit for all social occasions. She lived alone, and was a busy and unprocrastinating housekeeper. She may have made less raspberry jam than in her earlier days, but it was always pound for pound; while her sponge-cake was never degraded in its ingredients from the royal standard of twelve eggs. The honest English and French stuffs that had been used in the furnishing of the captain's house so many years before faded a little as the years passed by, but they never wore out. Yet one cannot keep ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... very sweet to him. It had never seemed to him that she had disgraced herself by loving Tregear—but that a great misfortune had fallen upon her. Silverbridge when he had gone into a racing partnership with Tifto, and Gerald when he had played for money which he did not possess, had—degraded themselves in his estimation. He would not have used such a word; but it was his feeling. They were less noble, less pure than they might have been, had they kept themselves free from such stain. But this girl,—whether she should live and fade by his side, or whether she ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... explanation and sophistical argument, but always with a singular prolixity and reiteration that spoke of incessant self-consciousness and self-abstraction. Of that dashing self-sufficiency which had dazzled his friends and awed his enemies there was no trace! At last, even the set smile of the degraded recipient of these confidences darkened with a dull, bewildered disgust. Then, to his relief, a step was heard without. The major's ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte |
