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More "Degrade" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... belonging to the regular army, and those only upon Indians or those degraded Canadians who go about with them, painted and disguised to resemble their dusky allies. For my part, I think that men who thus degrade themselves deserve ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... of it was that Guy Oscard never attempted to degrade Durnovo from his post of joint commander. This puzzled the half-breed sorely. It may have been that Oscard knew men better than his indifferent manner would have led the observer to believe. Durnovo's was just one of those natures which in good hands might ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... people. This is an unique effort on their part. Like Romanists, in the use of the Latin service, the Mohammedans cling, with deathly tenacity, to their Arabic bible and Arabic worship, foolishly believing that to vernacularize their faith is to degrade and corrupt it. In Madura, where there is a mosque of some pretension, there are only two or three who can pronounce their Arabic Quran. And while they have learned to pronounce, in the ancient tongue, their beloved book, they do not understand the meaning of what ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... left you. I have killed some salmon and plenty of sea trout, though after much apparently hopeless toil, against all the rules as to sun, wind, and cloud. I was recalling examples when the rod was made to quiver again, and this time it was a sea trout of over 1 1/2 lb. I would not degrade D. by allowing him to interfere, but walked back and hauled the fish up a sandy spit, extracted the hook, and weighed him myself, as I generally do. In the next quarter of an hour I got three sea trout of the smaller size, and weighed them en bloc, tied together, ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... necessaries of life as noble, its comforts as honorable, its luxuries as permissible,—thus reversing altogether the usual judgment of rich men, who in general like nothing worse than to leave their hoards to those of their relatives who will degrade them to the purchase of mere bread and cheese, blankets and clothes and coals. But I had no right to go against my husband's feeling. So long as the children had their bread and milk, I would endure with him. I am confident I could have ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... the theft with impunity it was first of all necessary to degrade the great national hero and saint and expose his memory to ridicule. In November 1538 St Thomas was declared a traitor, every representation of him was ordered to be destroyed, and his name was erased ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... catch at any little thing that may pass along for resources. We have a teeming prosperity, an abundant wealth, unending resources, and a people everywhere clamorous for liberal expenditures for adequate mails. Why shall we degrade ourselves by depending upon others for our mail facilities? It alway humbles and mortifies me to see one human being lick the hand of another; one who acknowledges himself a stupid drone that must needs have a master ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... group (the state legislature), to a large and indefinite group of persons (the voters as a class), upon whom responsibility cannot be fixed. By robbing the legislature of power and responsibility, the Initiative and Referendum are said to degrade rather than to improve that body: the best class of men is not attracted to a legislature which has been shorn of dignity and influence, and if the people rely upon the Initiative and Referendum, the voters deem it less necessary ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... thought I was blind because I shut my eyes. Now I have had enough of it. We do not die through the treacheries of a woman of your sort. When they become too monstrous we get out of the way. To inflict punishment on account of them would be only to degrade oneself." ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... the two poor beings who were dependent on him and who suffered like himself. He became familiar with 'viae dolorosae' painted at reduced prices, with male and female saints at so much per gross, even with 'pounced' shop blinds—in short, all the ignoble jobs that degrade painting and make it so much idiotic delineation, lacking even the charm of naivete. He even suffered the humiliation of having portraits at five-and-twenty francs a-piece refused, because he failed to produce a likeness; and he reached the lowest degree of distress—he ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... weak and worldly,—to assert your own will—your own thought and opinion—in the face of the Most High! What! YOU will desert the Church? YOU whose ancestors have for ages been devout servants of the faith? YOU, the last descendant of the Counts Hermenstein, a noble and loyal family, will degrade your birth by taking up with the rags and tags of humanity—the scarecrows of life? And by your sheer stupidity and obstinacy, you will allow your husband's soul to be dragged to perdition with your own! You call it love—to keep ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... intellectually and emotionally from his prejudices and conventions by giving him a wider horizon, a sounder judgment, a firmer and yet a more tolerant point of view. "Our proclivity to details," said Emerson, "cannot quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry." The college seizes upon the liberating instinct of youth and utilizes it for all it is worth. We summarize by saying that the college prepares not merely for "life" but for "living"; so that the society whom the individual ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... admitted, very creditable to him, but he had neither the Age nor the rank to justify the granting him a triumph. To bestow such an honor upon one so young and in such a station, would only bring the honor itself, he said, into disrepute, and degrade, also, his dictatorship ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... there is herein nothing what ever to distress her; no cloud of grief crosses the area of her vision, as she gazes upwards.' He even intimates that, from the stress laid upon immortality by 'modern divines,' they might seem to be 'incarnations of selfishness.' He says it tends to 'degrade religion into a prudential regard for our interests after death'; that 'conscience, the love of virtue, for its own sake, and much more the love of God, are ignored.' Many of the 'spiritual' school agree with him in this; ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... a class of men lecturing upon Phrenology, who have never mastered even the rudiments of the science; who have merely learned the location and nomenclature of the organs of the brain, and who, by flattery and cheap wit, degrade this noble science to the level of mere "bumpology," until the average good citizen who has never investigated the subject has come to look upon the term Phrenologist as signifying one who goes about over the country ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... public, by exaggerating the advantages to be derived from a settlement in the colony, by praising all the good qualities of her people, and by throwing a flattering veil over their defects; but this is not my object, and such servile adulation would do them no good, and degrade me in my own eyes. I have written what I consider to be the truth, and as such I hope it may do good, by preparing the minds of emigrants for what they will really find, rather than by holding out fallacious hopes that ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... hastily adjourning the debate. I sent him a note that evening, filling-in a few of the details of the policy that I had before sketched in outline. Amongst other things I submitted that it would be better for us to exalt Mr. Scandril's opponent than to degrade himself. To this Mr. Masthead reluctantly assented—"sinking the individual," he reproachfully explained, "in the dependent employee—the powerless bondsman!" The next issue of the Thundergust contained, under the heading, "Invigorating Zephyrs," ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... for lower purposes. True, no one can find fault with a physician for making his profession, no matter how exalted, a means of earning an honest livelihood and a decent competency; but to ambition this career solely for its pecuniary remuneration would be to degrade one of the most sublime vocations to which man may aspire. There is unfortunately too much of this spirit abroad in our day. There are too many who talk and act as if the one highest and worthiest ambition of life were to make as large a fortune in as short a time ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... tradesman. A final appeal was made to Delaware; she was implored to consider the situation of her sisters, who had all made more ambitious marriages or were about to make them. Why should she now degrade the family by marrying ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... watch the movements of two men—the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Bolingbroke. Marlborough was beyond question the greatest soldier of his time. He had gone into exile when Queen Anne consented to degrade him and to persecute him, and now he was on his way home, at the urgent entreaty of the Whig leaders, in order to lend his powerful influence to the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... their own dishwashing, sweeping and bed-making. Once three boys about fourteen years old went on strike because the proctor asked them to scrub the dining-room floor on their knees. They thought this work would degrade them, and they started toward the superintendent's office. On the way they met me and told ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... concubine Of Aias, first of all the Greeks for might, How envied once, worn with what service now! So will they speak; and while my quailing heart Shall sink beneath its burden, clouds of shame Will dim thy glory and degrade thy race. Oh! think but of thy father, left to pine In doleful age, and let thy mother's grief— Who, long bowed down with many a careful year, Prays oftentimes thou may'st return alive— O'er awe thee. Yea, and pity thine own son, Unsheltered in his boyhood, lorn of thee, With bitter foes ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... ill-natured reflections; it having been objected that by exhibiting gratuitously through the country when the theatre is closed, they reduce themselves to the level of mountebanks, and thereby tend to degrade the respectability of the profession. Certainly Grimaldi never did this sort of thing; and though Brown, King, and Gibson have gone to the Surrey in vacation time, and Mr. C. J. Smith has ruralised at Sadler's Wells, we find no ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... man nor woman are safe with him; and his arts are such as to over-reach the most cautious. He has words at will; and his wit and invention, which are extraordinary, are employed to entrap, humiliate, degrade and ruin all with whom he has intercourse. His ambition is to gratify his desires, by triumphing over the credulity of the unsuspecting, whom he contemns for their want of his own vices. It was he that, after having seduced me, placed me in the family of the bishop, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... artfully this was put, to insinuate that she was herself in love with him!—she could not accept from Mr. Julian Gray an honor of which she was unworthy. Her gratitude to him and her interest in him alike forbade her to compromise his brilliant future by consenting to a marriage which would degrade him in the estimation of all his friends. She thanked him (with tears); she thanked Lady Janet (with more tears); but she dare not, in the interests of his honor and his happiness, accept the hand that he offered to her. God bless and comfort him; and ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... cripple, the Duchesse du Maine, resolved to have an explanation with my son. She made a sententious speech, just as if she had been on the stage; she asked how he could think that the answer to Fitz-Morris's book should have proceeded from her, or that a Princess of the blood would degrade herself by composing libels? She told him, too, that the Cardinal de Polignac was engaged in affairs of too much importance to busy himself in trifles like this, and M. de Malezieux was too much a philosopher to think of anything but the sciences. For her own part, she said ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... the laws of God to improve the talents he has received from the Creator's hands? So is the other. Is one embraced in the commands search the scriptures? So is the other."[55] He maintained that unless masters could lawfully degrade their slaves to the condition of beasts, they were just as much bound to teach them to read the Bible as to teach any ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... this it appeals least of all, if at all. Generally, also, persons of passionate and really sensitive temperament, easily moved by the other senses, are rather indifferent in regard to this. This very fact, which seems in some measure to degrade the sense of taste, and to make excess in its indulgence more contemptible, leads me, however, to conclude that the surest way to influence children is by means of their appetite. Gluttony, as a motive, is far better than vanity; for gluttony is a natural appetite depending directly ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... sense of shame was vivid; and she tried hard not to let her father see how deeply she loved the man who had gone from her to Miss Somerset. Besides, he had ordered her to fight against a love that now could only degrade her; he had ordered, and it was for ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... Intelligence, how remote the creative conception is from all scholastic and ethical formulae, I am led to think that a healthy mind ought to change its mood from time to time, and come down from its noblest condition,—never, of course, to degrade itself by dwelling upon what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a chance to air and exercise themselves. After the first and second floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... my fate, exulting in my pain, Tho' on thy hills the plenteous Herd should feed, And rich Pactolus roll along thy mead; For thee tho' Science ope the varied store, And Beauty on thy form its graces pour, Ere long shalt thou, while wrongs like these degrade, Droop with my woes, and with my rage upbraid; See on a Rival's brow thy garlands worn, And, with her falsehood, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... more striking changes went others, less revolutionary but equally necessary to complete the new ecclesiastical system. The Saxon bishops had many of them had their seats in unimportant places in their dioceses, tending to degrade the dignity almost to the level of a rural bishopric. The Norman prelates by degrees removed the sees to the chief towns, changing the names with the change of place. Dorchester was removed to Lincoln, Selsey to Chichester, Sherborne to Old Sarum, and Elmham by two removes to Norwich. The new ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... second to Goethe, is clearly a disciple of Buffon, and uses the word "degeneration" in the same sense as Buffon used it many years earlier, that is to say, as "descent with modification," without any reference to whether the offspring was, as Buffon says, "perfectionne ou degrade." He cannot claim, any more than Goethe, to rank as a principal figure in the history ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... I trust always to be. But that is only my calling, not me. I—John Halifax—am just the same, whether in the tan-yard or Dr. Jessop's drawing-room. The one position cannot degrade, nor the other elevate, me. I should not 'respect myself' if ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... never recognized what is most noble and glorious in man; never recognized his equality, his common brotherhood, his natural rights. There was no compunction, no remorse in depriving human beings of their highest privileges. Its whole tendency was to degrade the soul, and cause forgetfulness of immortality. Slavery thrives best, when the generous instincts are suppressed, and egotism and sensuality and pride are the dominant ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... state corresponding to that of our past dark ages into one like that of the Renaissance. In the first case the minds of men are wholly taken up with routine work, and in copying what their predecessors have done; they degrade into servile imitators and submissive slaves to the past. In the second case, some circumstance or idea has finally discredited the authorities that impeded intellectual growth, and has unexpectedly revealed new ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... of his rheumatism. He dined there, but would not undertake the cure," p. 364. This was behaving with a tolerable degree of prudence and good sense. But let not the bibliomaniac imagine that it is my wish to degrade honest old Elias Ashmole, by the foregoing delineation of his weaknesses and follies. The ensuing entries, in the said Diary, will more than counterbalance any unfavourable effect produced by its precursors; and I give them with a full conviction ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... which forbade women to occupy a throne, is founded on the fact that when a woman is on the throne the country is ruled by men, and therefore ruled badly; whereas when a man is on the throne, the country is ruled by women, and therefore ruled well. The suffragets would degrade women from being rulers to being voters, mere politicians, the drudges of the caucus and the polling booth. We should lose our influence completely under such a state of affairs. The New Zealand women have the vote. What ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... to secure improved dwellings, open spaces, cheap baths, and better municipal sanitation for the poor. But improvement in these matters cannot come entirely from without; "the model tenement implies a model tenant." As a London authority puts it: "The condition of the house may degrade its occupants. The careless life and habits of the occupants will spoil the house, and make it filthy and unhealthy." The friendly visitor should try to make the family healthily discontented with unsanitary surroundings, ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... between spirit and matter might be considerably abated? Without this total revolution of the notions now prevalent, the Evolution hypothesis must stand condemned; but in many profoundly thoughtful minds such a revolution has already taken place. They degrade neither member of the mysterious duality referred to; but they exalt one of them from its abasement, and repeal the divorce hitherto existing between them. In substance, if not in words, their position as regards the relation of spirit and matter is: 'What God hath joined together, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... and thus compelled us to resort to this stratagem or else to lose you altogether. Your destiny if you unite with us will be great and glorious. We have not taken you captive to make you prisoners or slaves, or to degrade you in any way from your former position; but to exalt you to positions of high consideration in a new and rising colony;—a colony which is surely destined to become great and powerful, and of which we mean you to be the chief ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... the Nominalists, the Realists had a good deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living. Our proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry. The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy and all the lovely accidents of ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... him and his colleagues, and paying back with usury all that Ewing had said, when everybody thought and believed that he was digging his own grave; for it was known that Ewing would not quietly pocket any insinuations that would degrade him personally. I recollect his reply to Lincoln well. After addressing the Speaker, he turned to the Sangamon delegation, who all sat in the same portion of the house, and said: 'Gentlemen, have you no other champion than this coarse and vulgar ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... enjoy these miscalled festivities. I say miscalled, for, though a loyal subject of her Majesty, and one who hath borne arms at Tilbury Fort in defence of her Majesty, it inflamed my choler, as a plain and blunt man, that her Mightiness should so degrade her dignity. Howbeit, as a man who hath his way to make in the world, I kept mine eyes well upon the anticks of the Great, while my Lord joined the group of maskers and their follies. I recognized her Majesty's presence by her discourse in three languages to as many Ambassadors that were ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... gigantic commonplace—thus ignoring the innumerable deeds of derring-do which distinguished that immortal contest—blinding their eyes to the "lines of empire" in the "infant face of that cradled Hercules," and the tremendous sprawlings of his nascent strength—and seeking to degrade those forests into whose depths a path for the sunbeams must be hewn, and where, lightning appears to enter trembling, and to withdraw in haste; forests which must one day drop down a poet, whose genius shall ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... the common lot—the lot that will be the common lot as long as there are people to be made, by taking advantage of human necessities, to force men and women and children to degrade themselves into machines as wage-slaves. At two dollars a week, double what her income justified—she rented a room in a tenement flat in Bleecker street. It was a closet of a room whose thin, dirt-adorned walls were no protection against sound ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... such domestic tasks and entanglements he writes The Master, and very characteristically gets dissatisfied with the last parts, "which shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning." ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... said, strange stories of flirtations there. I could not doubt what he meant, but I would not seem to understand him: first, because I know not from whom he has been picking up this food for his busy spirit, since no one there appeared collecting it for him ; and secondly, because I would not degrade an acquaintance which I must hope will prove as permanent as it is honourable, by conceiving the word flirtation to be possibly ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... greatness, than the major's reception at the hotel, and this for the very reason that he had outdistanced the rabble. My declining years and gray hairs forbid me envying any man his laurels, but I will not degrade a noble profession by making myself the vassal of every great man who sets foot on these shores. I say, then, that when the cattle and the major reached the door of this spacious pile of white marble, wherein cheap luxury ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... number of brave artists in a pressing time, he nevertheless felt such a repugnance to the foreigner who had intruded into his house, that he could not think well of any of his doings. One ought to employ painters, but not degrade them to paper-stainers; one ought to be satisfied with what they have done, according to their conviction and ability, even if it does not thoroughly please one, and not be perpetually carping at ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... leaving enough wealth to pay his funeral expenses. He did not love bloodshed, even to gain liberty. He had objected to the conspiracy, since freedom was to be gained through murder. Yet this was the man who was to save Thebes and degrade ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... spirit of progress, which would break up their isolation and, with it, the social privileges of her class. However, she kept all her fears on this subject in her heart. Not even to Thora would she talk of them lest she might be an inciter of thoughts that would raise up a class who would degrade her own: "Few people can be trusted with a dangerous thought, and who can tell where spoken words go to." And this idea, she knit, or stitched, into every garment her ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril, and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence. But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or individual exposure this individual principle; it testifies a ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... reckoning on finishing my Elizabeth, and on living more and more as a recluse—indeed, even a little like a bear—but not in the style of those estimable citizens of the woods, whom the impresarii of small pleasures degrade by making them dance in the market-places to the sound of their flutes and drums! I shall rather choose a model ideal of a bear—be sure of that—and the flutes and drums which might lead me into the slightest future ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... and character" were usually too busy in making money and getting clothes, houses, and horses, to attend to "politics," while Patrick was only too glad and ready to develop his political abilities. So it came to pass that a ring of powerful political "bosses"—if we may degrade so good and honest a Dutch word—was formed. Saloons, gambling-houses and dance-halls multiplied, while an oligarchy, ever grasping for more power, nullified the laws and trampled the statutes under its feet. The sins of drunkenness and bribery among policemen, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... of Rome's nationality, that stamp which no nation ever successfully and permanently resisted; and thus the reception of the cult on the part of the state was not only a disgraceful thing, tending to degrade true religion and spread the contagion of Orientalism, but it also made those whose appetite had been aroused eager for other deities, whose cult would have the great additional charm of being unlicensed by the state, and hence savouring ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... of Life.]—On the Judgment of Paris see Miss Harrison, Prolegomena. pp. 292 ff. Late writers degrade the story into a beauty contest between three thoroughly personal goddesses—and a contest complicated by bribery. But originally the Judgment is rather a Choice between three possible lives, like the Choice of Heracles between Work and Idleness. The elements ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... but die—that was the very worst that Fate had in store for us—but die in the body! How infinitely worse that the soul should perish through the selfish sensuousness of cannibalism, which would degrade life itself below dissolution, even if preserved by ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... reckoning here; for it is neatness, housewifery, and a decent appearance, which draws the kindness of the rich and charitable, while they turn away disgusted with filth and laziness: not out of pride, but because they see that it is next to impossible to mend the condition of those who degrade themselves by dirt and sloth; and few people care to help those who will ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... friend, among other grievous misconceptions current among men otherwise well-informed, and which tend to degrade the pretensions of my native land, an impression that there exists no such thing as indigenous modern Irish composition deserving the name of poetry—a belief which has been thoughtlessly sustained and confirmed by the unconscionable literary perverseness of Irishmen themselves, ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... judge. That man, Howbeit, I judge as lost, Whose mind allows a plan, Which would degrade it most; And he treats doubt the best who tries to ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... my profession that is the bar to everything. I have sold the best years of my life, and for what? To see my sister degrade ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction doth no more agree to the king than the power of ecclesiastical order: his power is civil and temporal, not spiritual and ecclesiastical. Dr Field also confesseth,(1129) that none may judicially degrade, or put any one, lawfully admitted, from his degree and order, but the spiritual guides of ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... he took out his revolver and loaded every chamber. In the set of his lips was menace to the next employer who dared to insult and degrade him. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... the change in your income. Be comforted, my dear sir; we shall not feel the want of those luxuries, which others value so highly, since we never had a taste for them; and poverty cannot deprive us of many consolations. It cannot rob us of the affection we have for each other, or degrade us in our own opinion, or in that of any person, whose opinion we ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... three thousand years, and of nations that have risen to wealth and power, in a great variety of situations, all terminating with a considerable degree of similarity, discovers the great outline of the causes that invigorate or degrade the human mind, and thereby raise or ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... are naturally more passionate than tender, would be at once the wife and the mistress. With the soul of a Heloise and the passions of a Saint Theresa, you slip the leash on all your impulses, so long as they are sanctioned by law; in a word, you degrade the marriage rite. Surely the tables are turned. The reproaches you once heaped on me for immorally, as you said, seizing the means of happiness from the very outset of my wedded life, might be ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... the world we know," Latimer said, his harsh voice unsteady; "the world's sorrow—the world's pain—the world's power to hurt and degrade itself. That is what seems to concern us—if we dare to say so—we, who were thrust into it against our wills, and forced to suffer and see others suffer. The man who was burned at the stake, or torn in the arena ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to the effects of preventable causes, it is merely apparent. Thus, for instance, let us imagine for a moment a populous quarter, where pauperism is rampant and the poor will fight for a piece of bread; where dirt, drinking-shops and civic neglect degrade the inhabitants; where all, men and women alike, give way readily to vice. Our sole impression of such people at the moment is: "What wicked people!" On the other hand, let us take the modern quarter of an industrious city, where the houses of the people are hygienic, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... which we ought to aspire, and discourages us by the very loftiness of the standard. It tells us in the same breath that we are sinners, and that we ought to be angels. It seems at the same time to elevate and degrade us. It elevates us by giving a great object to life, and making it serious and earnest; but it degrades us by making us constantly ashamed of ourselves, and keeping us in a perpetual state of humiliation. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... seek her spell to decompose Or to its source each rill of influence trace That feeds the brimming river of her grace? The petals numbered but degrade to prose Summer's triumphant poem of the rose: Enough for me to watch the wavering chase, Like wind o'er grass, of moods across her face, Fairest in motion, fairer in repose. Steeped in her sunshine, let me, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... all, injure none," wrote Fowler, "whilst infidelity, selfishness and disorder curse some, delude others and degrade all. I therefore want all of my people encouraged to cultivate religious feeling and morality, and punished for inhumanity to their children or stock, for profanity, lying and stealing." And again: "I would that every human being have the gospel preached ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... honour which he has enjoyed for ages was inspired by that which seems to be his first and literal meaning? And more, will they venture to impute that literal meaning to him? can they suppose that the divine soul of Homer could degrade itself to write of actual and physical feastings, and nuptials, and dances, actual nightly thefts of horses, actual fidelity of dogs and swineherds, actual intermarriages between deities and men, or that it is this seeming vulgarity ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... know that this passage refers to Rear-Admiral Maxse, yet, well as we may know our man, we have him presented like an awkward, silly, comic puppet from a show. The professor of slang could degrade the conduct of the soldiers on board the Birkenhead; he could make the choruses from Samson Agonistes seem like the Cockney puerilities of a comic news-sheet. It is this high-sniffing, supercilious slang that I attack, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... beauty unto gold degrade, And mix one bliss with many a woe and shame? Tears, quarrels, curses were the gifts he made; And Love bears now a very ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... excitedly to protest against the last speaker's proposals, which he declared were an insult to their common Guyhood. They might have come down in the world, but hitherto, whatever might be said of them, they had, at least, never rendered themselves publicly ridiculous. Now they were asked to degrade themselves by accepting the ignominious position of London Statues! Was there a Guy who would ever hold up his head again, after such an infamous surrender of his self-respect and independence? He felt it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 5, 1892 • Various
... Youth) I thought you had a better opinion of me, than to imagine I would so abjectly degrade myself as to consider my Father's Concurrence in any of my affairs, either of Consequence or concern to me. Tell me Augusta with sincerity; did you ever know me consult his inclinations or follow his Advice ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... running away, and begging his excellency to accept the head, and consider it as a proof of the writer's attachment to the crown. With the first successes of the court the work of punishment began. The judge at Ischia said it was necessary to have a bishop to degrade the traitorous priests before he could execute them; upon which Troubridge advised him to hang them first, and send them to him afterwards, if he did not think that degradation sufficient. This was said with the straightforward feeling of a sailor, who cared as little for canon-law ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... call me a Cynic—why, what a monstrous Cynicism it is, which you and the rest of you men of the world admit! I'd rather live upon raw turnips and sleep in a hollow tree, or turn backwoodsman or savage, than degrade myself to this civilisation, and own that a French cook was the thing in ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not what I seem. I do not need to blush for my birth—rather I may glory in it. If I dared to betray the secrecy imposed upon me, for reasons of state, I could prove to you that most illustrious blood runs in my veins. Whoever may love me, noble though she be, will not degrade herself. But I have already said too much—my lips are sealed. I shall never be other than the humblest, most devoted of your slaves; even though, by one of those strange coincidences that happen sometimes in real life, I should come to be recognised ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... attention, and he had laid the case before the law officers, who had reported to him that there were no grounds for any legal proceedings against them. 'How, therefore,' said the Lord-Lieutenant, 'could I degrade men against whom my law officers advised me that no charge could be brought?' This was one offence; and another, that he had countenanced Lord Cloncurry, who, being a member of the Association, was unworthy to receive the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... she interrupted, looking up at him with eyes like dark stars. "No! No! No! I wouldn't degrade even a worthless cowboy." ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... extraordinary in Florence. The expulsion of some of the patrician families was absolute. Others were allowed to participate with the plebeians in the struggle for civic honors, and for the wealth earned in commerce, manufactures, and handicraft. It became a severe and not uncommon punishment to degrade offending individuals or families into the ranks of nobility, and thus deprive them of their civil rights. Hundreds of low-born persons have, in a single day, been declared noble, and thus disfranchised. And the example of Florence was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... this miserable country appears in nothing so much as in dooming the female, the widow, to be burnt alive with the putrid carcase of her husband. The Hindoo legislators have sanctioned this immolation, showing herein a studied determination to insult and degrade woman. She is, therefore, in the first instance, deluded into this act by the writings of these bramhuns {u-caron}; in which also she is promised, that if she will offer herself, for the benefit of her husband, on the funeral pile, she shall, by the extraordinary merit of ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... generation, but still in a way unnatural to our race and status. At first I thought I would let my daughter grow up in a state of complete ignorance, that she should be Nature's child. But as time went on, I saw the folly and the wickedness of my plan. I had no right to degrade her to the level of the savages around me, for if the fruit of the tree of knowledge is a bitter fruit, still it teaches good from evil. So I educated her as well as I was able, till in the end I knew that ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... I can so describe them of the royal household, but for obvious reasons I will not describe the style of their dancing. It was barbarism run mad, and our chief feeling was disgust that human beings should so degrade themselves. ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... to the window, and stood there with her back toward me. Was the wretch taking advantage of my helpless condition? I stretched out my hand to ring the bell, and have her sent away—and hesitated to degrade Susan's mother, for Susan's sake. In my state of prostration, how could I arrive at a decision? My mind was dreadfully disturbed; I felt the imperative necessity of turning my thoughts to some other subject. Looking about me, the letters on the table attracted my attention. Mechanically, ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... all. When the war left them free, they simply said, "Poor fellows!" as they would of a dog without a master. When the blacks were entrusted with the ballot, they said again, "Poor fellows!" regarding them as the blameless instrument by which a bigoted and revengeful North sought to degrade and humiliate a foe overwhelmed only by the accident of numbers; the colored race being to these Northern people like the cat with whose paw the monkey dragged his chestnuts from the fire. Hesden had only wondered what the effect of these things would be upon "the South;" meaning by "the South" that ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... We must degrade the noblesse and attribute it to an odious origin, establish a germ of equality which can never exist but which will flatter the people; [we must] immolate the most obstinate, burn and destroy their property in order to intimidate the rest, so that if we cannot entirely destroy ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... and destroy his self-respect. Even those pleasures which would be most likely to have a civilizing effect are forbidden to him, merely on the ground that they are pleasures, while much of the suffering inflicted is of a kind which can only brutalize and degrade still further. I am not speaking, of course, of those few penal institutions which have made a serious study of reforming the criminal. Such institutions, especially in America, have been proved capable of achieving the most remarkable results, but they remain everywhere exceptional. ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... admission into his house. Had the Doctor not been dead, we should have given him a severe rowing and blowing-up for this vulgar folly; but as he is dead, we have only to hope that the readers of the Oracle who intend to travel will not degrade themselves, and disgust "authors of eminence," by thrusting their ugly or comely faces—both are equally odious—into the privacy of gentlemen who have done nothing to exclude themselves from the protection of the laws of civilised society—or subject their fire-sides to be infested ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... need for its ruin. As I have told you before, in talking like that you degrade yourself and ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... daughters virtuous, and unless he be besotted by intemperance, or given over to courses of shame, will quietly and joyfully yield to the remonstrance of a virtuous wife or daughter against patronizing scenes which degrade, and against permitting the mind and heart to give welcome to thoughts which pollute. True men desire to love, and to be influenced by pure, tender, ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... a very insignificant existence. Public taste inclined to the gross and the sensual, and welcomed as enjoyable, what the present discards as disgusting. Ladies of the highest rank sat through plays of which the purpose and effect was to degrade their own womanhood, to remove from the minds of the men who sat about and watched their countenances at each new obscenity, whatever respect for the sex might have lingered there. Some wore masks to hide the blushes which might have been looked for as a drama proceeded, ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... to—to—to degrade your rank. That is the truth. If I be your cousin, and the head of your family, I have a right to speak as such. What you told ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... kinds: it is like those neutral forces of faith and thought, which depend for their result upon the direction in which they are turned. Inspiration can uplift, but it may also degrade. We ourselves by the tuning of our own thoughts determine which it shall accomplish. Like can only answer to like: anger can never play echo to love, for their vibrations are so far apart in attunement ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... young clergyman] is actually a member of every 'push' in his neighbourhood, and the effect has been not to degrade the pastor, but to sweeten ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... act as an autonomous sovereign, displayed little zeal in accommodating himself to the new order of things. There was so much uncertainty as to the leanings of the Persian guard of Orcetes, that Darius did not venture to degrade the satrap officially, but despatched Bagseus to Sardes with precise instructions, which enabled him to accomplish his mission by degrees, so as not to risk a Lydian revolt. His first act was to show the guard a rescript ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... would our mother, though she seems to be dismayed at his serving as a common soldier. I adore Jack; I think him the finest, the most perfect nature after my father's—that lives. But I give him up gladly, because to keep him would be to degrade him. We know that he may fall; that he may come back to us a cripple or worse. But, as you see, we make no sign. Not a line of routine has been changed in the house. Jack will march away and never ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... most sacred rights guaranteed under the law is that of not being compelled to give evidence against ourselves or to testify to anything which might degrade or incriminate us. Now, this is all very fine for the chap who has his lawyer at his elbow or has had some similar previous experience. He may wisely shut up like a clam and set at defiance the tortures of the third ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... "An honest fear is sometimes expressed 'that women would degrade politics, and politics would degrade women,'" and the writers answer: "As the influence of woman has been uniformly elevating in new civilizations, in missionary work in heathen lands, in schools, colleges, literature, and general society, it is fair to suppose that politics would prove no exception." ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... call an idea in any speech or writing of ——'s. Those enormously prolix harangues are a proof of weakness in the higher intellectual grasp. Canning had a sense of the beautiful and the good; —- rarely speaks but to abuse, detract, and degrade. I confine myself to institutions, of course, and do not mean personal detraction. In my judgment, no man can rightly apprehend an abuse till he has first mastered the idea of the use of an institution. ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... took from him the cowl, and left them with only some short cassocks such as are worn by clergymen. They delivered them to the bishop, who was already prepared for the degradation. He immediately began to degrade them, and then delivered them over to the secular arm. They were taken to jail by the strong guard of soldiers that had been in the church ever since the criminals had been removed from the prisons to hear the sentence. But it was possible ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... dart their hissing tongues high up the sand: In hearing of the ocean, and in sight Of those ribbed wind-streaks running into white. If I the death of Love had deeply planned, I never could have made it half so sure, As by the unblest kisses which upbraid The full-waked sense; or failing that, degrade? 'Tis morning: but no morning can restore What we have forfeited. I see no sin: The wrong is mixed. In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... to have the same were-gild (the lower, of course, the intent being to degrade all the conquered to one level, and to allow only the lowest were-gild of a freedman, fifty pieces, probably, in ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... It is not death that matters, but the fear of death. It is not killing and dying that degrade us, but base living, and accepting the wages and profits of degradation. Better ten dead men than one live slave or his master. Men shall yet rise up, father against son and brother against brother, and kill one another for the great Catholic ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... decree which showed to what extent the confidence of Roguin's clients had been betrayed. A concordat was held. For the honor of your petitioner, we call attention to the fact that his proceedings were remarkable for a purity not found in any of the scandalous failures which daily degrade the commerce of Paris. The creditors of Birotteau received the whole property, down to the smallest articles that the unfortunate man possessed. They received, gentlemen, his clothes, his jewels, things of purely personal use,—and not only his, but those of ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... humble, and degrade, and scourge those who are taken in its toils. From the threshold of the house of guilty pleasure there may issue the song and laugh of boisterous mirth; but those who enter within shall find disgrace ...
— The Runaway - The Adventures of Rodney Roverton • Unknown
... prejudices, a barbarous law, a sense of insecurity in the possessions they know were obtained by plunder, combine to sink them into the mischievous and unholy belief that it is their interest as well as their duty to degrade, and wrong, ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... us of the name and existence of Homer, does too much violence to that inward emotion, which makes our whole soul yearn with love and admiration for the blind bard of Chios. To believe the author of the Iliad a mere compiler, is to degrade the powers of human invention; to elevate analytical judgment at the expense of the most ennobling impulses of the soul; and to forget the ocean in the contemplation of a polypus. There is a catholicity, so to speak, in the very name of Homer. Our faith in the author of the Iliad ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... to punish him for heresy, rather than for treason. He was cited by the pope to stand his trial at Rome; and though he was known to be kept in close custody at Oxford, he was, upon his not appearing, condemned as contumacious. Bonner, bishop of London, and Thirleby of Ely, were sent to degrade him; and the former executed the melancholy ceremony with all the joy and exultation which suited his savage nature.[*] The implacable spirit of the queen, not satisfied with the eternal damnation of Cranmer, which she believed inevitable, and with the execution of that dreadful sentence to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... has a vice—a vice which may be rather ruinous, but which one cannot give up. As to the others, those who have nothing to use their money for, no vice, no wife, no children, and who sell themselves, ruin themselves, bow down, humiliate, enrich, and degrade themselves—ah! I'd give all such ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... been a bad wife, the Code allowed him to send her away, while he kept the children and her dowry; or he could degrade her to the position of a slave in his own house, where she would have food and clothing. She might bring an action against him for cruelty and neglect and, if she proved her case, obtain a judicial ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... present a disgraceful occupation on an amiable, almost a sentimental side, rather than in its own proper deformity. [Footnote: This tendency of men to throw the mantle of an honourable word over a dishonourable thing, or, vice versa, to degrade an honourable thing, when they do not love it, by a dishonourable appellation, has in Greek a word to describe it, [Greek: hypokorizesthai], itself a word with an interesting history; while the great ethical teachers of Greece frequently ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... called its fundamental attributes, those which lie nearest to the constant and successful prosecution of mundane affairs, and, consequently, I also establish the fact of her absolute and inevitable dependence in such sense on man. But do I thus degrade her, or in effect annul this asserted superiority? Because man, and the strength, amplitude, and stability of his more practical nature, form a sure basis upon which she may rest, do I any the less make her the very crown and perfection of God's ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... I trembled. I knew well that the King, particular in courtesies, never forgot to call his servants by their titles save in two cases: when he indicated by the error, as once in Marshal Biron's affair, his intention to promote or degrade; or when he was moved to the depths of his nature and fell into an old habit. I did not dare to reply, but I listened greedily ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... so numerous were opposed by one single objection!—where virtue, beauty, education and family were all unexceptionable,—Oh cruel clause! barbarous and repulsive clause! that forbids my aspiring to the first of women, but by an action that with my own family would degrade ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... reproaching the [132] Animadverter with the Character of a Wit, tho join'd with such ill-favour'd Epithets, as his witless Malice has thought fit to degrade it with, as that he is a spiteful Wit, a wrangling Wit, a satirical Wit, and the WITTY, subtle, good-natur'd Animadverter, &c. the Dr. says, that tho there be but little Wit shewn in making such Charges; yet if Wit ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... better feelings of my nature recoil from such an act of villainy—how often was my project abandoned, how often resumed at the alternate bidding of passion and of virtue! I will not repeat the idle sophistry which served to complete my wilful blindness; nor dare I degrade myself in your eyes by a confession of the tissue of contemptible fraud and hypocrisy into which I was necessarily betrayed by the execution of my dark designs. Oh! Helen—this heart of mine was once honest, once good and true as thine ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... sleep. Don't let us discuss anything solemnly. I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don't degrade me into the position of giving you useful information. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... suicide. The king was not allowed the use of a razor to remove his beard; and the luxury of a barber to perform that essential part of his toilet was an expense which his foes could not incur. It was the studied endeavor of those who now rode upon the crested yet perilous billows of power, to degrade royalty to the lowest depths of debasement and contempt—that the beheading of the king and the queen might be regarded as merely the execution of a male and a female felon dragged from the loathsome dungeons ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... your streets those traps of hell Into whose gilded snares I fell. Oh! freemen, from these foul decoys Arise, and vote to save the boys. Oh, ye who license men to trade In draughts that charm and then degrade, Before ye hear the cry, Too late, Oh, save the boys from ...
— Poems • Frances E. W. Harper
... divided against itself cannot stand. It is said that (1) there must be some one authority in a household and that this should be the man; (2) woman will neglect the home if she is left free to enter politics or a profession; (3) politics will degrade her; (4) when independent and self-asserting she will lose her influence over man; and (5) most women do not want to vote or to ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... nor is he fit to be called chief in a nation which he has outraged and oppressed. A worse choice for such an office in a new commonwealth than that of a deposed tyrant could not possibly be made. But to degrade and insult a man as the worst of criminals, and afterwards to trust him in your highest concerns as a faithful, honest, and zealous servant, is not consistent with reasoning, nor prudent in policy, nor safe ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Julia's pride and self-respect now co-operated. Relieved of her great terror, she felt her insult to her fingers' ends: "I'll never degrade myself so far as to pine for another lady's lover," she said. "I'll resume my duties in another sphere, and try to face the world by degrees. I am not quite alone in it; I have my ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... almost all the vices and misery that are seen in civil society to human institutions. Political regulations and the established administration of property are with him the fruitful sources of all evil, the hotbeds of all the crimes that degrade mankind. Were this really a true state of the case, it would not seem a hopeless task to remove evil completely from the world, and reason seems to be the proper and adequate instrument for effecting so great a purpose. But the truth is, that though human institutions ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... he is," replied Miss Gladden quickly, "but I can not conceive of a man being quite so low as to be without even animal instincts; I cannot believe that a father would insult and degrade his own daughter as he has Lyle, and as he would continue to do, if he were not restrained ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... that which turns a man into a thing—with indignation and abhorrence. Not to cherish these feelings would be recreancy to principle. They who desire me to be dumb on the subject of Slavery, unless I will open my mouth in its defence, ask me to give the lie to my professions, to degrade my manhood, and to stain my soul. I will not be a liar, a poltroon, or a hypocrite, to accommodate any party, to gratify any sect, to escape any odium or peril, to save any interest, to preserve any institution, or ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... Town stands upon eleven Arches, under every one of which there are Shops, which degrade it to a meer Exchange. Nevertheless, the Stairs by which you ascend up to the Guard Room (which is very spacious too) are stately, large, and curious. So soon as you have pass'd the Guard Room, you enter into a long and noble Gallery, the right Hand whereof leads to the King's Apartment, the left ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... adherence or welcome from the rest more than from poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They out of ages are worthy the grand idea ... to them it is confided and they must sustain it. Nothing has precedence of it and nothing can warp or degrade it. The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots. The turn of their necks, the sound of their feet, the motions of their wrists, are full of hazard to the one and hope to the other. Come nigh them awhile and though they neither ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Dr. Rylance, earnestly, with an admiring look in his blue-gray eyes. They were somewhat handsome eyes when they did not put on their cruel expression. 'Not for you. Nothing could degrade, nothing could exalt you. You are superior to ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... all good men. The whole Church of God, from the days of Christ to the present, has been ever held in shame and contempt by men of this world. Proud men have reasoned against its Divine origin; crafty men have attempted to degrade it to political purposes: still it has lasted for many centuries; it will last still, through the promised help of God the Holy Ghost; and that same promise which is made to it first as a body, is assuredly made also to every one of us who seeks grace from God through ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... speculations; and with a generous appreciation of the various forms of truth and beauty, it will not fail to expose such instances of false sentiment, perverted taste and erroneous opinion, as may tend to vitiate the public mind or degrade the individual character. Nor will the literary department of the Harbinger be limited to criticism alone. It will receive contributions from various pens, in different spheres of thought, and, free from dogmatic exclusiveness, will accept all that in any ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... was only a flood of tears. He then retreated into his library and locked the door. An aged domestic told me all. Laura had abandoned her parental roof, and voluntarily entered one of those sinks of pollution that so much degrade human nature! I stood upon an awful abyss. The whirlpools of deceit, ingratitude, indifference, and calumny, howled around me, and the dark floods of sensual corruption roared below. Turn whithersoever I might (alas, ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... to this, political and social changes had been long modifying the structure of society in a way tending to degrade the general condition. As the lesser Kingdoms were merged into one large one, the wider dominion of the king removed him further from the people; every succeeding reign raising him higher, depressing them lower, until the old English ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... our heavy atmosphere, which induces gloomy thoughts and fancies; while moralists assign as its cause, the sanguinary spirit of our laws, our brutal exhibitions of hanging, drawing and quartering, of gibbettings, whippings, brandings, and torturings, which degrade men's natures, and give them a relish for scenes of blood ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... clasped in your arms, I hold my soul secured by virtuous intentions, very different from yours, as you will see if you attempt to carry them into effect by force. I am your vassal, but I am not your slave; your nobility neither has nor should have any right to dishonour or degrade my humble birth; and low-born peasant as I am, I have my self-respect as much as you, a lord and gentleman: with me your violence will be to no purpose, your wealth will have no weight, your words will have no power to deceive me, nor your sighs or ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... and an indefinite series of past generations. We are like the coral insects, who can add but a hair's breadth to the structure which has been raised by their predecessors. Yet the little which we can do is something; and we will neither degrade ourselves nor our race. As measured by an absolute standard, man may be infinitesimal, but the absolute is beyond our powers. Science tells us that our little individuality might be swept out of existence without appreciable injury to the world; but it adds that the world is built up of ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... Fearfulness of the Deer and the CUNNING OF THE FOX—I had almost overlookd the Fidelity of the Dog. But I forbear to indulge my rambling Pen in this Way lest I should be thought chargeable with a Design to degrade the Dignity of our nature by comparing Men with Beasts. Let me just observe that I have mentiond only the more excellent Properties that are to [be] found among Quadrupeds. Had I suggested an Idea of the Vanity of the Ape the Tameness ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... legitimate way, is worth all that it has cost us. We needed a severe lesson, and we have had it. It falls heavily upon some who are innocent. Let us, in kindness to these, find a balm for our own trials. And, now, let us not degrade ourselves by hot words and impotent resentments. They can do no good. Let us be men—Christian men, with detestation of the rascality from which we suffer, but with pity for the guilty man, who, sooner or later, will certainly ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... incorporated in The Dunciad. And its incorporation is by no means equivalent to the pollution of epic. That, Harte hints, is the achievement of scribblers like Blackmore (p. 12). It is they who inadvertently write mock-epics, parodies which degrade their great models; Pope, nominally writing mock-epic, actually ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... serving a cause and end by taking possession of it so completely that, from being its servants, they become its masters. Instead of being men of a cause, they make the cause that of a man, and they degrade the most sacred realities to the paltry level of ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... part of the maintenance of a system, and religion is applied to that end, it becomes farcical; and while it must combine all the imperfections of the performer, necessarily tends to confine the ignorance of those it seeks to degrade, within the narrowest boundary. There are different ways of destroying the rights of different classes; and as many different ways, after they are destroyed, of wiping out the knowledge of their ever having had ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... yet to tell her that, and a dozen other equally simple facts, for her own sake, and for the sake of that coming Demos which she is to bring into the world; a Demos which, if we can only keep it healthy in body and brain, has before it so splendid a future: but which, if body and brain degrade beneath the influence of modern barbarism, is but too likely to follow the Demos of ancient Byzantium, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... the doctor. "In work of that kind you get into every variety of place; and some of it is new to you. Never mind! No one can contaminate you. It is the law that only a man can degrade himself. Knowing things will not harm you. Doing them is a different matter. What you know will be a protection. What you do ruins——if it is wrong. You are not harmed, you are only disgusted. Think it over, and in a few days come back and get your money. It is strictly honest. ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... had collected have been sullied by a conquering soldiery; and their leader has waged a vulgar warfare on the noble womanhood his currish spirit could not gaze upon without a fruitless effort to degrade. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... be laid waste as conquered territory when the Union is restored. They shall return as our brethren to live with us in peace and good will with the curse of Slavery lifted from them and their children. Nor will I permit the absorption of this black blood into our racial stock to degrade our National character. When free, the negro must return to ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... intelligent. They are ingenious, but not creative. They are cunning in expedients, but deficient in tact. In love they are simply barbarous. They purchase their wives openly, and not constructively by attorney. By offering small sums for their sweethearts, they degrade ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... collected from the flowers of the field. It is not so recorded; but doubtless the nameless one in question was by profession a maker of opium pipes, for this person has observed from time to time how that occupation, above all others, tends to degrade the mental faculties, and to debase its followers to a lower position than that of the beasts of labour. Learn therefrom, O superficial Wang Yu, that wisdom lies in an intelligent perception of great principles, and not in a slavish imitation of details which ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... the home is the great school for the formation of character among the young, and it is on character that conduct depends. In proportion as this school of character is improved, in the same proportion will crime decrease. But how is it to be improved when the tendencies of industrialism are to degrade the women who stand by nature at the head of it? Indifferent mothers cannot make children good citizens; and the present course of things industrial is slowly but surely tending to debase the fountain head of the race. At the International Conference concerning ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... your inopportune mirth! What in God's name have I if I haven't hope? Take that from me and what would I be? Why, the very fate I have been fighting off with tooth and nail would overwhelm me. I'd sink into unimportance—my unparalleled misfortunes would degrade me to a level with the commonest! No, sir, I've never been without hope, and though I've fallen I've always got up. What Fentress has is based on money he stole from me. By God, the days of his profit-taking are at an end! I ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... auld gnarled oak can be twisted as easily as the young sapling. Can I forget that I have been branded as an outlaw—stigmatised as a traitor—a price set on my head as if I had been a wolf—my family treated as the dam and cubs of the hill-fox, whom all may torment, vilify, degrade, and insult—the very name which came to me from a long and noble line of martial ancestors, denounced, as if it were a spell to ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... other, thinking it vain, in those days of lawless proscription, to contest a point of this nature with one who commanded twelve legions, obeyed the requisition. Upon some motive, now unknown, he was persuaded even to degrade himself farther; for he actually officiated at the marriage in character of father, and gave away the young beauty to his rival, although at that time six months advanced in pregnancy by himself. These humiliating concessions were extorted from him, and yielded (probably at the instigation ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... fruits than conceit and affectation, or vanity and pride. Nor could he conceive that all these preparations, all this previous talk, all this previous consultation, about the fashions, added to the employment itself of the decoration of the person, could tend to any thing else than to degrade the mind, and to render it light and frivolous. He would be obliged to acknowledge also, that minds, accustomed to take so deep an interest in the fashions and vanities of the world, would not only loath, but be disqualified for serious reflection. But if he ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... "how, at these words, ambition, burning in thy soul, breaks out uncontrollable! Probity, honor, treaties, duty: feeble considerations these, to a heart letting loose its flamy passions; determining to rob the generous Germans of their liberties; to degrade thy equals; to extinguish 'Schism' (so called), and set up despotism on ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... was immediate, despite such criticisms as that of the "Athenaeum" that "Lyell's object is to make man old, Huxley's to degrade him." By the middle of February it reached its second thousand; in July it is heard of as republished in America; at the same time L. Buchner writes that he wished to translate it into German, but finds himself forestalled by Victor Carus. From another ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... and which requires of some classes a time suitable for probation and preparation. To give it indiscriminately to a new class, wholly unprepared by previous habits and opportunities to perform the trust which it demands, is to degrade it, and finally to destroy its power, for it may be safely assumed that no political truth is better established than that such indiscriminate and all-embracing extension of popular suffrage must end at last ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... of nasty mysterious dribbles that help to degrade Rock Creek and can undoubtedly be found in even more profusion along every other metropolitan watercourse. Such of them as issue from storm sewers will be eliminated when a solution turns up for the problem ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... spaces towards Central and South America. The letter also foreshadows the decisive conflict which is here to be waged between the elements of freedom and slavery, between social and political systems that will rescue and exalt humanity, and those which depress and degrade it. In the phraseology of that age, it was to be determined whether—the Old World, in the language of Twiss, "being almost at an end"—a "light" should be "set up" here to usher in the "kingdom ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... young, as yet uncorrupted by scepticism, prepare the way for its realization; and may they, in the name of our national tradition and the future, unceasingly protest against all who seek to immobilize human life in the name of a dogma extinct, or to degrade it by diverting it from the eternal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... a folly," replied the nephew, "to degrade such a creature as that;" and he attempted to kiss the baby; but, swift as thought, she had turned her face away, and was clinging ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... but I beg to tell the Senator that if the word "traitor" is in any way applicable to those who refuse submission to a Tyrannical Usurpation, whether in Kansas or elsewhere, then must some new word, of deeper color, be invented, to designate those mad spirits who could endanger and degrade the Republic, while they betray all the cherished sentiments of the fathers and the spirit of the Constitution, in order to give new spread to Slavery. Let the Senator proceed. It will not be the first time in history, that a scaffold erected for punishment ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... and laws; He's now the same Montrose was then, But that the sword is turn'd a pen, A pen of so great power, each word Defends beyond the hero's sword." Now words grew high—we can't suppose Immortals ever come to blows, But lest unruly passion should Degrade them into flesh and blood, An angel quick from Heaven descends, And he at once the contest ends: "Ye reverend pair, from discord cease, Ye both mistake the present case; One kingdom cannot have pretence To so much virtue! so much sense! Search ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... think. They seem to see and realize the necessity of rules, and very seldom complain, if they violate them, at the punishment that is sure to follow. Our punishments are of such a character that they do not degrade. Kansas, when she established her penitentiary, prohibited corporal punishment. She is one of the few States that by law prohibits the use of the whip and strap; taking the position that it is better ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... refusing to degrade you, has placed in doubt the crime that has been imputed to you; the Government, by surrounding your trials with mystery and shadows, causes the belief that there was some error, committed in fatal moments; and all the Philippines, by worshiping your memory ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... a heavy responsibility rests upon every colored leader, moral and civic, in these northern States to take an especial interest in their newly arriving brethren. You must teach them not to take their liberty to be ladies and gentlemen for license to degrade themselves and their race here. You must urge them to avoid the deadly vice and wasting extravagance of the unhealthy congested city. They should find their homes and rear their families in the suburbs, where they can buy their own homes and properly ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... I don't deny it; but I didn't her it. If she really said it I think she only meant she would take off his official head —degrade him from his command. It was not like her to threaten a comrade's life. She did have her doubts of her generals, and was entitled to them, for she was all for storm and assault, and they were for holding still ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... been very different,' which Brougham unaccountably took for a threat against the Government—was levelled at his own Tory friends for not supporting him. On the third reading they mean to have another fight about it. I understand the lawyers that the Bill is very objectionable, and calculated to degrade the profession. I sat by Talleyrand at dinner the day before yesterday, who told me a good deal about Mirabeau, but as he had a bad cold, in addition to his usual mode of pumping up his words from the bottomest pit of his stomach, it was next to impossible to understand him. He said Mirabeau was ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... affection will not be turned aside. We are literally in the dust, we grovel, we would fling away self-respect if we could; we would adopt for a model the creature preferred to us; we would humiliate, degrade ourselves; we cry for justice as if it were for pardon . ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this hateful writer has conceived any thought of an uncommon malignity, a thought which tends, in a more particular manner, to excite the love of liberty, animate the heat of patriotism, or degrade the majesty of kings, he takes care to put it in the mouth of his hero, that it may be more forcibly impressed upon his reader. Thus Gustavus, speaking of his tatters, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... of diurnal Lepidoptera which have hitherto, by almost universal consent, held the first rank in the order; and though this position has recently been denied them, I cannot altogether acquiesce in the reasoning by which it has been proposed to degrade them to a lower rank. In Mr. Bates's most excellent paper on the Heliconidae, (published in the Transactions of the Linnaean Society, vol. xxiii., p. 495) he claims for that family the highest position, chiefly because ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... reformers; but it cannot be in the destructive spirit displayed by some who, in the prophet's language, amid darkness on the earth, "fret themselves, and curse their King and their God, and look upward." Poverty cannot degrade, nor ignorance bedwarf, nor persecution crush, nor dungeon enthral the free, glad spirit of a child of God, erect in its regenerate strength, and rich in its eternal hopes and heritage. And this hopeful and ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... children are. Who are more criminal than English boys? and yet they grow up decent, law-abiding men. Almost the only confirmed criminals have been made so by punishment, by that punishment which some consider is intended to uplift them, but which never does aught but degrade them. Instead of cleansing the garment, it tears it, and renders it ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... suffering alone. Oh, it has all crept upon us, this great, great love! It was fate, and it was useless to struggle against it. Only we must not let it be the reason of our doing wrong—that would be to degrade it, and love should not live in an atmosphere of degradation. I could not go away with you, could not have you for my lover without breaking a bargain—a bargain over which I have given my word. Of course I did not know what love meant when I was ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... nothing which can aid the growth and purity of the religious sentiment, beyond advancing its social relations; while symbols, in the proper sense of the term, and propitiatory rites, as necessarily false and without foundation, always degrade and obscure religious thought. Their prominence in a cult declines, as it rises in quality; and in a perfected scheme of worship they ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... allowed the use of a razor to remove his beard; and the luxury of a barber to perform that essential part of his toilet was an expense which his foes could not incur. It was the studied endeavor of those who now rode upon the crested yet perilous billows of power, to degrade royalty to the lowest depths of debasement and contempt—that the beheading of the king and the queen might be regarded as merely the execution of a male and a female felon dragged from ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... (though they found it a sore battle), they refused the evil and chose the good? It is true, again, that their great deeds may be more or less explained, attributed to laws, rationalised: but is explaining always explaining away? Is it to degrade a thing to attribute it to a law? And do you do anything more by 'rationalising' men's deeds than prove that they were rational men; men who saw certain fixed laws, and obeyed them, and succeeded thereby, ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... of knowledge is not general: it is confined to a chosen few of every age. How far these are better than their neighbours, we may examine by and bye. The mass of mankind is composed of beasts of burden, mere clods, and tools of their superiors. By enlarging and complicating your machines, you degrade, not exalt, the human animals you employ to direct them. When the boatswain of a seventy-four pipes all hands to the main tack, and flourishes his rope's end over the shoulders of the poor fellows ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... more year, with its masses that prayed For the daily bread that so seldom came; With its lives whom sinning could never degrade, Till the canker of want brought guilt and shame. Gone one more year, with its noble souls Who raised up the weary in hours of need; With its crowds that started for wished-for goals, And drooped ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... ready to support a serious attempt at playwriting. I claim that a play may do something more than amuse—it may interest. There is a wide difference, you will see. To be an amusement merely is to degrade our stage to the level of a Punch-and-Judy show. I am sorry for tired men and weary women, but as a dramatist I can't afford to take their troubles into account. I am writing for those who are mentally alert and willing to support plays that have at least the dignity ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Allied flags under whose protection the conspiracy was carried on. By this time the French and British detectives had usurped the powers and inverted the functions of the police organs;[10] and the French and {128} British agents, after fomenting those fatal differences which divide and degrade a people, had developed into directors of ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... a last, and as he had imagined, a certain resource, he had promised the price of his ransom should be paid by the first of his countrymen that he might meet with, on the best of all securities, to be thus refused and dishonoured by him, would, he knew, degrade them sadly in the opinion of the natives, if it did not ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... religious subjects, which by mere puffing in magazines and newspapers have had an immense sale, and some of which are now in their tenth or twelfth editions. I have for some time past thought that the trick of puffing, as it is now practised both by authors and publishers, is likely to degrade the literary character, and to deprave the public taste, in a frightful degree. I really think that we ought to try what effect satire will have upon this nuisance, and I doubt whether we can ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... each stick to our several stations, and not degrade ourselves by learning the evil and discontented habits of human beings, each one of whom ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... of all kinds: it is like those neutral forces of faith and thought, which depend for their result upon the direction in which they are turned. Inspiration can uplift, but it may also degrade. We ourselves by the tuning of our own thoughts determine which it shall accomplish. Like can only answer to like: anger can never play echo to love, for their vibrations are so far apart in attunement that the one cannot influence the other. But anger answers to anger, and love to ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... must remind you again that Lady Hope is my only sister, and in these insults you degrade her." ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... fancies; while moralists assign as its cause, the sanguinary spirit of our laws, our brutal exhibitions of hanging, drawing and quartering, of gibbettings, whippings, brandings, and torturings, which degrade men's natures, and give them a relish for scenes of blood ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... says 'at the moment of faith.' I am not going to be tempted into controversial paths now, for my purpose is a very different one, but I cannot help just a word about the former of these two answers. 'Given in baptism,' say our friends, and I venture to think that they thereby degrade Christianity into a system of magic, bringing together two entirely disparate things, an external physical act and a spiritual change. I do not say anything about the disastrous effects that have followed from such a conception of the medium by which this greatest of all Christian ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... however, but looked at him fearlessly. It was impossible for her to humble herself before the latent insolence of his look. It seemed to degrade her out of all consideration. He felt the courage of her defiance, and it moved him. Yet he could but speak ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... history they regard as a gigantic commonplace—thus ignoring the innumerable deeds of derring-do which distinguished that immortal contest—blinding their eyes to the "lines of empire" in the "infant face of that cradled Hercules," and the tremendous sprawlings of his nascent strength—and seeking to degrade those forests into whose depths a path for the sunbeams must be hewn, and where, lightning appears to enter trembling, and to withdraw in haste; forests which must one day drop down a poet, whose genius shall be worthy of their age, their vastitude, the beauty which they inclose, and the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... not but have many enemies at court. They combined, and easily persuaded Ferdinand, who had also been insulted by his arrogance, again to degrade him. Wallenstein, informed of their machinations, endeavored to rally the army to a mutiny in his favor. Ferdinand, alarmed by this intelligence, which even threatened his own dethronement, immediately dismissed Wallenstein from the command, and dispatched officers from Vienna to seize his person, ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... what you mean, sir. Mr. Monson, that would be degrading lawful wedlock to the level of a bet—a game of cards—a mercenary, contemptible bargain. No, sir—nothing shall ever induce me to degrade this honorable estate ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... dear life. So heavenly love shall outdo hellish hate, Giving to death, and dying to redeem, So dearly to redeem what hellish hate So easily destroyed, and still destroys In those who, when they may, accept not grace. Nor shalt thou, by descending to assume Man's nature, lessen or degrade thine own. Because thou hast, though throned in highest bliss Equal to God, and equally enjoying God-like fruition, quitted all, to save A world from utter loss, and hast been found By merit more than ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... illustrated by the following extract: "Perception, consciousness, cognition, we continue to be told, are qualities which cannot appertain to matter; there must hence be a thinking and an immaterial principle; and man must still be a compound being. Yet, why thus degrade matter, the plastic and prolific creature of the Deity, beyond what we are authorized to do? Why may it not perceive, why not think, why not become conscious? What eternal and necessary impediment prevents? or what self-contradiction and absurdity is ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... Pitt afterwards assured the House of Commons that Maret had not made the smallest communication to Ministers.[189] Evidently they looked on him as an unofficial emissary, to which level Chauvelin had persistently endeavoured to degrade him. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... incapable of working. For the grand moving power we have an undefined, and consequently unintelligible doctrine of Ideas, of supposed spiritual and directing agency; the admission of which would destroy the responsibility of a human being both here and hereafter, and degrade his ennobled condition to the instinct of the speechless brute. To endow these insubstantial and reflected phantasms with some activity and mimic play, a theory of the association of Ideas has been erected, without having previously established that they are capable ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... drop; depress, reduce; decrease, diminish, fall, humble, humiliate, degrade, abash, detrude, dishonor; frown, scowl, glower, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... princes; in 'Nathan,' against the priests." But, although the subjects of these works of Lessing were small, his object in writing was always great and national. He never condescended to amuse a provincial court by masquerades and comedies, nor did he degrade his genius by pandering, like Wieland, to the taste of a profligate nobility. Schiller, again, was a poet truly national and truly liberal; and although a man of aspirations rather than of actions, he has left a deeper impress on the kernel of the nation than either Wieland ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... this nefarious business was conducted mainly through one channel; for, spite of man's inclination to vice and crime, there are but few men, thank God, so low in the scale of humanity as to be willing to degrade themselves by doing the dirty work of four-legged bloodhounds. Yet such men, actuated by the love of gold and their own base and brutal natures, were found ready for the work. These fellows consorted with constables, police-officers, aldermen, and even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... attend me, you shall be my very first esquire, Paul," said the prince emphatically; "and we will ride through the world together, seeking adventures which shall make all men wonder when they hear of them. And when I am king you shall be my first counsellor and greatest lord. I will degrade from office and dignity those proud nobles who have been traitors at heart to my kingly father, and to you I will give their broad lands and high titles. We will thus be comrades and friends through life. You would never desert ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... own eyes monarchy compelled to degrade itself, and to inflict its death-wound with its own hand; he saw the throne that base courtiers had dragged through the mire defiled by the grip of parricidal hands, and buried, fathoms deep, beneath a sea of blood; he saw the best of kings expire upon a scaffold, the victim not less of other men's ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... dogmatical and insolent, but without refinement or point. He calls people names, and tries to transfix a character with an epithet, which does not stick, because it has no other foundation than his own petulance and spite; or he endeavours to degrade by alluding to some circumstance of external situation. He says of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, that "it is his aversion." That may be: but whose fault is it? This is the satire of a lord, who is accustomed ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... bitter, of the attempt to present a disgraceful occupation on an amiable, almost a sentimental side, rather than in its own proper deformity. [Footnote: This tendency of men to throw the mantle of an honourable word over a dishonourable thing, or, vice versa, to degrade an honourable thing, when they do not love it, by a dishonourable appellation, has in Greek a word to describe it, [Greek: hypokorizesthai], itself a word with an interesting history; while the great ethical teachers ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... further, and appointed him his carver. He then said aloud in the hearing of many persons, "Let them now go and pay their court to my carver." Vexed at this insult, Lysander remonstrated with him, saying, "Truly, Agesilaus, you know how to degrade your friends." "Ay, to be sure," answered he, "those among them who want to appear greater than I am."[176] "Perhaps," replied Lysander, "you have spoken the truth, and I have not acted rightly. Bestow on me, however, some ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... those who do not believe that to give to women common rights and privileges will degrade them, but on the contrary I believe it will ennoble them; and I believe further that to put them on an equality in the matter of rights and privileges with men will enhance their charms and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... "Remember what you suffered during a seven-years' war with the satellites of George the Third (and I hope the last). Recollect the services rendered by your allies, now contending for liberty. Blush to think that America should degrade herself so much as to enter into any kind of treaty with a power, now tottering on the brink of ruin, whose principles are directly contrary ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... a manly and royal decision in the great emergency, it would be indispensable for him to come before that odious body, the Parliament of Great Britain, and ask for money. It would be perhaps necessary for him to take them into his confidence, to degrade himself by speaking to them of the national affairs. They might not be satisfied with the honour of voting the supplies at his demand, but were capable of asking questions as to their appropriation. On the whole it was more king-like and statesman-like to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... is a picture of one whom vagrancy assuredly did not degrade:—"I had not the least care for the future, and I awaited the answer [as to the return of Madame de Warens to Savoy], lying out in the open air, sleeping stretched out on the ground or on some wooden bench, as tranquilly as on a bed of roses. I remember ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... first rock in her path, if they attempted to carry her further. The stanch refusal embarrassed her Mahometan conductor, inasmuch as his country's law forbade him to use extraordinary compulsion, or degrade the ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... cellmate?—Possibly; but even a beast seeks privacy at certain junctures; and to deny all privacy tends to bestialize human beings. It is a part of the "put-the-fear-of-God-in-his-heart" principle—to break, humiliate, degrade the man, and render him unfit for human association. There are a washbasin and a toilet seat at the foot of the cot, facing the barred door. What difference can it make to a convict if the guard, or any other passer-by, watches him ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... will do. Why else should he want to have her there? With his ideas he would think it the best thing he could do utterly to degrade us all. He has no idea of the honour of his brothers. How should he, when he is so anxious to sacrifice his own sister? As for me, of course, he would do anything to break my heart. He knows that I ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... then turned to go away with the ambassadors, as a stranger might not be present at the deliberations of the Senate. His old friends pressed him to stay and give his opinion as a senator who had twice been consul; but he refused to degrade that dignity by claiming it, slave as he was. But, at the command of his Carthaginian masters, he remained, ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... accepted literature, Sir Joshua Reynolds has given to art a better position. Would that there were no counteracting circumstances which still keep it from reaching its proper rank! Some there are, which materially degrade it, amongst which is the attempt to force patronage; the whole system of Art Unions, and of Schools of Design, the "in forma pauperis" petitioning and advertising, and the rearing innumerable artists, ill-educated in all but drawing, and mere ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... which may be rather ruinous, but which one cannot give up. As to the others, those who have nothing to use their money for, no vice, no wife, no children, and who sell themselves, ruin themselves, bow down, humiliate, enrich, and degrade themselves—ah! I'd give all ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... each way, said to have been made by foreigners, asked me to explain what it was. He also showed me a musical-box and a spy-glass, asking many questions. From all I could learn by my visit to this pretender there was nothing in their religion to elevate, but everything to degrade. With them to rob and murder were virtuous deeds. "Slay the imps" was their watchword. Gordon found in this fanatic a foe of no mean order. But he soon found too that courage and faith in God had done and would still lead to victory. In a letter ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... to have assumed that the paper was a general discussion on reinforced concrete design. The idea in pointing out that a column having longitudinal rods in it may be weaker than a plain concrete column was not to exalt the plain concrete column but to degrade the other. A plain concrete column of any slenderness would manifestly be a gross error. If it can be shown that one having only longitudinal rods may be as bad, or worse, instead of being greatly strengthened by these rods, a large amount of life and ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... tended, he cryed with a loude voyce, saying: Fie, on falshoode: Fye on false friers, reuealers of confession: after this day, let no man euer trust any false Friers, contemners of God's word and deceiuers of men. And so they proceding to degrade him of hys small orders of Benet and Collet, he sayd with a loud voyce, take from me not onely your owne orders, but also your owne baptisme, meaning thereby, whatsoeuer is besides that which Christ hymselfe instituted, ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... you fit to do so, messire. Believe me, there is not a lackey in this realm—no, not a cut-purse, nor any pander—who would not in meeting you upon equal footing degrade himself. For you have slandered that which is most perfect in the world; yet lies, Messire de Montors, have short legs; and I design within the hour to insure the ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... Hone records that: "Bennett, the editor of the Herald, is on a tour through Great Britain, whence he furnishes lies and scandal for the infamous paper which has contributed so much to corrupt the morals and degrade the taste of the people of New York." In one of the last entries of the Diary, a few months before Hone's death, allusion is made to a personal attack on the editor by the defeated candidate of the Locofoco party for the ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... mutual pledge, "As yours, so mine, demands our mutual care. "But rightly still affairs if we design, "What you lament will no injustice prove; "Love only. Sure, a son-in-law like him, "Can ne'er degrade, will you consent but yield. "Grant nought beyond,—'tis no such trivial boast, "Jove's brother to be call'd! How then, if more "I claim pre-eminence from chance alone! "Still, if so obstinate your wish remains "For separation, go,—let ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... little more than a sturdy peasant, who, in destroying Gessler, follows only a personal revenge, and feels the remorse of a common assassin. If this were historic truth, it was not the part of the poet to be the first to discover and proclaim it. Was he to degrade the character below the rank which ordinary historians assigned to it? We do not want a drama to frame the portrait of a Lincolnshire farmer; it is the place, if place there is, for the representation of the higher ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... a soulful poetess at dinner one night, and that dreamy one turned her sad eyes upon him. "Have you no other ambition, Mr. Herford," she demanded, "than to force people to degrade themselves by laughter?" ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... troops were defeated and she fled to England. Throwing herself on Elizabeth's mercy she found prison and finally, after nineteen years, the scaffold. An inquiry was held concerning her case, but no verdict was rendered because it did not suit Elizabeth to degrade her sister sovereign more than was necessary. Not for the murder of her husband, but for complicity in a plot against Elizabeth, was Mary finally condemned to die. In spite of the fact that she did everything possible to disgrace herself more deeply than ever, such as pensioning the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... good Father. Have you not offered me, what is to me beyond all price, that I should again be in the arms of my husband? Can I degrade myself to a lie? not for life, or liberty ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Asia Minor also, where Orcetes, accustomed, in the absence of Cambyses, to act as an autonomous sovereign, displayed little zeal in accommodating himself to the new order of things. There was so much uncertainty as to the leanings of the Persian guard of Orcetes, that Darius did not venture to degrade the satrap officially, but despatched Bagseus to Sardes with precise instructions, which enabled him to accomplish his mission by degrees, so as not to risk a Lydian revolt. His first act was to show ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... found funny or contemptible. The simplicity and earnestness which give dignity to any phraseology come from the humanity behind it. We are well reminded that divergences from the common use of language, never held to degrade the meaning in Milton or Shakespeare, need not render thought despicable when the negro uses identical forms. If he calls a leopard a "libbard," he only imitates the most sublime of English poets; and the first word ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... support it. It is a privilege of honourable persons that they are excused from swearing, and that their verbum honoris passeth in lieu of an oath: is it not then strange, that when others dispense with them, they should not dispense with themselves, but voluntarily degrade themselves, and with sin forfeit so ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... scorned to ask you to wed him. Now he would degrade the heiress of my wealth by seeking to ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... could not support a wife, as a consistent democrat he could not oppose a fairly prosperous tradesman. A final appeal was made to Delaware; she was implored to consider the situation of her sisters, who had all made more ambitious marriages or were about to make them. Why should she now degrade the family by marrying a ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... the degraded and irreverent feelings of mystery and shame that have been attached to the genital and excretory organs. The former have been regarded, like their corresponding mental passions, as something of a lower and baser nature, tending to degrade and carnalize man by their physical appetites. But we cannot take a debasing view of any part of our humanity without becoming degraded ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... the imagination has its use, it has its abuse also. If visions of truth and beauty can exalt, visions of vice can debase and degrade. In that picture where Faust and Satan battle together for the scholar's soul, the angels share in the conflict. Plucking the roses of Paradise, they fling them over the battlements down upon the heads of the combatants. When the roses ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... existence in England were in Latin, and it was a "great" library which contained fifty copies of these. There was a great objection to the use of the vernacular in the Holy Scriptures, as tending to degrade them by its uncouth jargon; but the Venerable Bede had rendered the Gospel of St. John into the Anglo-Saxon, together with other extracts from holy Scripture; and there were versions of the Psalter in the vulgar ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... our eyes against reason, we must basely degrade our understanding, not to see the folly of what is called monarchy. Nature is orderly in all her works; but this is a mode of government that counteracts nature. It turns the progress of the human faculties upside down. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Romans should have been born on Spanish soil seems to have passed with little remark, and this very absence of notice is significant. Trajan's first care as emperor was to write to the Senate an assurance like that which had been given by Nerva, that he would neither kill nor degrade any senator. He ordered the establishment of a temple and cult in honor of his adoptive father, but he did not present himself at Rome for nearly two years after his accession. Possibly he had taken measures before ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... to stand his trial at Rome; and though he was known to be kept in close custody at Oxford, he was, upon his not appearing, condemned as contumacious. Bonner, bishop of London, and Thirleby of Ely, were sent to degrade him; and the former executed the melancholy ceremony with all the joy and exultation which suited his savage nature.[*] The implacable spirit of the queen, not satisfied with the eternal damnation of Cranmer, which she believed inevitable, and with the execution ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... remote the creative conception is from all scholastic and ethical formulae, I am led to think that a healthy mind ought to change its mood from time to time, and come down from its noblest condition,—never, of course, to degrade itself by dwelling upon what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a chance to air and exercise themselves. After the first and second floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their holiday, and the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... means of promoting the one aim which held them together—the undermining of Clarendon's power. For this object they were all alike prepared to support the pretensions, and flatter the vanity, of the shameless and grasping courtesan, to ruin the happiness of the wife, to degrade the honour, and send to slumber the scruples, of the King, and to besmirch that Crown, which a flood of unselfish loyalty had restored, only two years before, to the love and reverence ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... the Guilty. This proves His heroism; but no more does away man's guilt than a schoolboy's volunteering to be flogged for another would exculpate the dunce from negligence, or preserve him from the Rod. You degrade the Creator, in the first place, by making Him a begetter of children; and in the next you convert Him into a Tyrant over an immaculate and injured Being, who is sent into existence to suffer death for the benefit ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... chance to flow. The elevation of the colored man can only be completed by the elevation of the pure descendants of Africa; because to deny his equality, is to deny in a like proportion, the equality of all those mixed with the African organization; and to establish his inferiority, will be to degrade every person related to him by consanguinity; therefore, to establish the equality of the African with the European race, establishes the equality of every person intermediate between the two races. This established ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... eye to see, no hand to pluck, Mother Nature delights in profusion, seemingly because she is made that way and cannot help it. And yet, in this little Rose-garden of ours—the Human Soul -we tramp down the flowers, plant loathsome weeds and poisons that kill and degrade and besot us, set up the tables of the money-changers, drive out the doves of Hesperides, and turn the temple into a shambles for wild beasts. "Nothing pays." "Let us ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... degrade man to a lower state. Every evil deed, word, or thought lowers us in moral being. If some one has done evil toward us, he has lowered himself by that act; and for us to decide to "get even" by a similar act toward him is for us to decide that we will lower ourselves to his level. To ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... and which it may be well enough to mention here. I have seen frequent instances where one of the very best jacks in the country had been put to mares of good quality and spirit. Putting them to such contemptible animals seemed to degrade them, to destroy their natural will and temper. The result was a sort of bastard mule, a small-legged, small-footed, cowardly animal, inheriting all the vices of the mule and none of the horse's virtues— the very meanest of ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... impossible for a man to use alcoholic drinks regularly without laying the foundation for both physical and mental diseases, and, at the same time, lessening his power to make the best of himself in his life-work; while beyond this lies the awful risk of acquiring an appetite which may enslave, degrade and ruin him, body and soul, as it is degrading and ruining ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... species of men whom the ladies generally mention with terror and aversion under the name of scholars, but whom I have found a harmless and inoffensive order of beings, not no much wiser than ourselves, but that they may receive as well as communicate knowledge, and more inclined to degrade their own character by cowardly submission, than to overbear or oppress us with ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... moral purpose; only as there is stitched into the cloth the diviner thread of hopeful love; only as the deed gathers the aroma of an aspiring human life, is it a dignified transaction. But when you make of the laborer a slave, degrade his work to a mere fight for bread, harass him by continual debt, put him in a vile tenement house that smothers all holy ambition, labor has no longer dignity, it smells rather of ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... of Shakespeare;—even the letters of women of high rank in his age were often coarser than his writings. If he occasionally disgusts a keen sense of delicacy, he never injures the mind; he neither excites, nor flatters, passion, in order to degrade the subject of it; he does not use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carries on warfare against virtue, by causing wickedness to appear as no wickedness, through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate. In Shakespeare vice never walks as in twilight; nothing is purposely ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... receive Octavius. He spoke her fairly, but she was wise enough to see that all her charms were lost on him, and that he proposed to degrade her by making her walk as a ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... gradually took the form of a system somewhat like that of the bondage of the Hebrews, modified in the case of Mauritius, however, according to the requirements of the temper and habits of the natives and the situation of the planters. There was no regard for the comfort of the slaves and they tended to degrade to the lowest depths. Yet the slaves were not considered altogether as chattels, convertible at the will of their masters. In the second stage, however, the bondage of the Negro reached the darkest age of irresponsibility to law and cruelty absolutely intolerable. A few ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... open spaces, cheap baths, and better municipal sanitation for the poor. But improvement in these matters cannot come entirely from without; "the model tenement implies a model tenant." As a London authority puts it: "The condition of the house may degrade its occupants. The careless life and habits of the occupants will spoil the house, and make it filthy and unhealthy." The friendly visitor should try to make the family healthily discontented with unsanitary surroundings, ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... passer-by if I can possibly fish out the way for myself. It isn't rational of course. Sometimes I could save a detour if I would stop and ask; but I prefer to plunge on and make a mistake rather than admit that a mere man on legs can teach me anything I don't know. It seems somehow to degrade the automobile." ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... his attitude remained exactly what it had been in 1909, when at the Manchester Martyr celebration he had appealed to his audience never to degrade themselves by entering the British Army, telling them that if ever they wished to fight they ought to wait for the prospect of a German invasion ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... the skipper said, but I tell you at once I'm not going to stoop to do anything of the kind. Do you think I'm going to degrade myself by ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... conceived that I mean to degrade or vilify the literary character, when I would only separate the Author from those polluters of the press who have turned a vestal into a prostitute; a grotesque race of famished buffoons or laughing assassins; or that populace of unhappy beings, who are driven to perish ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... ordinary course of events they would be relieved from bondage and entitled to exercise powers of their own; but that the inferiority of the Slave was not such as to place him outside the pale of the Family, or such as to degrade him to the footing of inanimate property, is clearly proved, I think, by the many traces which remain of his ancient capacity for inheritance in the last resort. It would, of course, be unsafe in the highest degree to hazard conjectures ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... 3000 men, which I refused, preferring to trust myself to French honour. I have not had reason to complain of that confidence from Fontainbleau to Avignon; but between that town and this, I have been insulted, and have been in great danger. The Provencals degrade themselves. Since I have been in France, I have not had a good regiment of Provencals under my orders. They are good for nothing but to make a noise. The Gascons are boasters, but at least they are brave."—At these words, one of the ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... she had none. Her father had left her nothing. Kayser was poor and in debt. She had no occupation. To run about giving private lessons on the piano, seemed to Marianne to degrade her almost to the level of domestic service. Those who wished to pose for the Montyon prize might ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... have them; the force of the [Greek: menis] and [Greek: mneme] with which we seek after them, does, indeed, make them powerful to us for actual good or evil; and it is thus granted to us to create not only with our hands things that exalt or degrade our sight, but with our hearts also, things that exalt or degrade our souls; giving true substance to all that we hoped for; evidence to things that we have not seen, but have desired to ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... though she seems to be dismayed at his serving as a common soldier. I adore Jack; I think him the finest, the most perfect nature after my father's—that lives. But I give him up gladly, because to keep him would be to degrade him. We know that he may fall; that he may come back to us a cripple or worse. But, as you see, we make no sign. Not a line of routine has been changed in the house. Jack will march away and never see a tear in my eye or feel my pulse tremble. It is not in our Northern blood to give ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... Canon was more impressive,—"here indeed is an object-lesson in the effects of crime! Is it possible that to this Man's passions can degrade his divinely inherited features? Were it not altogether too horrible, I would have this picture framed and glazed and hung up in every cottage ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... exceedingly difficult to do so. It seems impossible to elevate a body of slaves, remaining such, to honesty and purity. The reekings of slavery will almost inevitably taint the institutions of religion, and degrade the standard of piety. Accordingly the ministers of every denomination in Antigua, feel that in the abolition of slavery their greatest enemy has been vanquished, and they now evince a determination to assume higher ground than they ever aspired to during the reign of slavery. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... necessity of surrounding and defending their precarious advantages. But she was not called upon, she thought, to unveil her sister's original history—it would restore no right to any one, for she was usurping none—it would only destroy her happiness, and degrade her in the public estimation. Had she been wise, Jeanie thought she would have chosen seclusion and privacy, in place of public life and gaiety; but the power of choice might not be hers. The money, she thought, could not be returned without her seeming ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the when, the how, And all particulars that dull brains require To constitute the spiritless shape of Fact, They bow to, calling the idol, Demonstration. A whipping to the Moralists who preach That misery is a sacred thing: for me, I know no cheaper engine to degrade a man, Nor any half so sure. This Stripling's mind Is shaken till the dregs float on the surface; And, in the storm and anguish of the heart, He talks of a transition in his Soul, And dreams that he is happy. We dissect The senseless body, and why not the mind?— These are strange sights—the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... and yourselves, an idea of the uncertainty of your independence, which would never be effectual, and derogate, by consequence, explicitly from the 2d, 3d, 8th and 9th articles of your treaty of alliance with France, so justly admired; would degrade your power, your credit, your dignity; would open the door to distrust, to dissensions, to corruption and treachery among yourselves, to combinations against you in Europe; would put you under the necessity of keeping a standing army, &c. &c. &c. God preserve the United States from this Pandora's ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... generally read, than any other." September 2, 1843, Hone records that: "Bennett, the editor of the Herald, is on a tour through Great Britain, whence he furnishes lies and scandal for the infamous paper which has contributed so much to corrupt the morals and degrade the taste of the people of New York." In one of the last entries of the Diary, a few months before Hone's death, allusion is made to a personal attack on the editor by the defeated candidate of the Locofoco party for the District-Attorneyship. "I should be ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... been made,—in Mississippi, for example,—with the "understanding" clause, hold out a temptation for the election officer to perjure and degrade himself by too often deciding that the ignorant white man does understand the Constitution when it is read to him, and that the ignorant black man does not. By such a law, the state not only commits a wrong against its black citizens; ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... to glorify or degrade the body. If we worship it or pamper it, when it fails us, we are engulfed and buried in its ruins; if we misuse it, and we can misuse it alike by obeying it and disregarding it, it becomes our master and tyrant, or it fails us as an instrument. We must regard ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Where yet the title stands in tarnish'd gold; These all a sage and labour'd work proclaim, A painful candidate for lasting fame: No idle wit, no trifling verse can lurk In the deep bosom of that weighty work; No playful thoughts degrade the solemn style, Nor one light sentence claims a transient smile. Hence, in these times, untouch'd the pages lie, And slumber out their immortality: They HAD their day, when, after after all his toil, His morning study, and his midnight oil, ...
— The Library • George Crabbe
... make sick, and cure whom he list. Homer and Stesichorus were both made blind, if you will believe [4646]Leon Hebreus, for speaking against his godhead: and though Aristophanes degrade him, and say that he was [4647]scornfully rejected from the council of the gods, had his wings clipped besides, that he might come no more amongst them, and to his farther disgrace banished heaven for ever, and confined to dwell ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the soft inner bark of the sugar maple, and the tufts of sweet grass. There is a propriety and justice in his endin' his days smothered in sweets; but the wild duck, suh, is bawn of the salt ice, braves the storm, and lives a life of peyil and hardship. You don't degrade a' oyster, a soft shell crab, or a clam with ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... it by writing for the press. "If I could think for a moment that I had any right to it as a means of expression!" she reflected. "But I haven't. It is an art for others. And it is an art, as sacred as mine. I have no business to degrade it to my uses." Her mental position when she went to see Frank Parke was a cynical compromise with her artistic conscience, of which she nevertheless sincerely ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... excellent in its place; and the instinct of self-love is the root of a man, which will develop into sacrificial virtues. But all the virtues are means and uses; and, if we hinder their tendency to growth and expansion, we both destroy them as virtues, and degrade them to that rankest species of corruption reserved for the most noble organizations. For instance,—non-intervention in the affairs of neighbouring states is a high political virtue; but non-intervention ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... in 1762, the Poet was to degrade or to sublimate into the Politician, at the bidding of that gay magician, Jack Wilkes. That this man was much better than a clever and pre-eminently lucky scoundrel, is now denied by few. He had, indeed, immense pluck and convivial pleasantry, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... Dorgan, where people paint their lies, or write them, or act them; where they lift money all right from men's pockets, but lift their souls and their lives, too, away from the things that trouble and bore and—and degrade. ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... so have all good men. The whole Church of God, from the days of Christ to the present, has been ever held in shame and contempt by men of this world. Proud men have reasoned against its Divine origin; crafty men have attempted to degrade it to political purposes: still it has lasted for many centuries; it will last still, through the promised help of God the Holy Ghost; and that same promise which is made to it first as a body, is assuredly made also to every one of us who seeks grace from God through it. The grace of our Lord ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... progress, which would break up their isolation and, with it, the social privileges of her class. However, she kept all her fears on this subject in her heart. Not even to Thora would she talk of them lest she might be an inciter of thoughts that would raise up a class who would degrade her own: "Few people can be trusted with a dangerous thought, and who can tell where spoken words go to." And this idea, she knit, or stitched, into every ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... said, "though I am too poor to-day to buy a pair of cotton gloves, I would rather go in rags than degrade my womanhood by accepting anything at your hands!" And off she went, to try her fate in some other place and way, absolutely sure that in some unknown manner she was to wrest success from the future. Young, inexperienced, penniless, and with few friends, ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... which can aid the growth and purity of the religious sentiment, beyond advancing its social relations; while symbols, in the proper sense of the term, and propitiatory rites, as necessarily false and without foundation, always degrade and obscure religious thought. Their prominence in a cult declines, as it rises in quality; and in a perfected scheme of worship they would have no ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... continue barbarous—Not a tyrant, for terrible as are the evils of irresponsible authority, with whomsoever it may be vested, in her hands it becomes the most tremendous instrument that Providence in its indignation can employ to crush, degrade, and utterly to paralyze the nations within its reach. The former position will readily be conceded; and the history of Rome under the Emperors, or of France during the last century, affords but too striking ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... six years, and then left for no reason but that I could not continue to pay him. I liked him so much that one day, after flogging a boy in hot blood, and while (as usual) feeling sick with the revulsion of it, I then and there resolved that, however much this trade might degrade me, this Mr. Simcox should be spared the degradation whilst in my employ. I went to his class-room and asked to have a look at his punishment-book. He answered that he kept none. 'But,' said I, 'when you ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... difficulty lies in this, that this wish to do right camouflages all their wishes, no matter what their essential character. Thus the contestants on either side of any controversy color as right their opposing wishes, and cruelties even if they burn people at the stake for heresy, kill and ruin, degrade and cheat, lie and steal. Thus has arisen the dictum, "The end justifies the means." The good desired hallows the methods used, and all kinds of evil have resulted. Practical wisdom believes that up to ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... succeeded, largely by the aid of labor unions, in forcing through Congress bills by which no American seaman can any longer be forced against his will into this servitude nor any foreign seaman on domestic voyages. Another evil tending to degrade and enslave the sailor was the allowance made by law of three months' advance wages on beginning a voyage. This apparently harmless and, to the credulous and inexperienced legislator, beneficial provision ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... virtuous intentions, very different from yours, as you will see if you attempt to carry them into effect by force. I am your vassal, but I am not your slave; your nobility neither has nor should have any right to dishonour or degrade my humble birth; and low-born peasant as I am, I have my self-respect as much as you, a lord and gentleman: with me your violence will be to no purpose, your wealth will have no weight, your words will have no power to deceive ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... if I could trust their taste, they should have had my secrets long ago. But they are mere money-makers, and it is better that they should enrich themselves with the tasteless rubbish they make in their furnaces, than degrade our art by cheapening what should be rare and costly. Am ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... of those ideas which degrade mankind, naive as a child, he lived like a sea-bird, a gull, or a flower, prodigal of the treasures of poetic imagination, and possessed of a divine knowledge, the fruitful extent of which he contemplated in solitude. ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... every man two ways of doing work, of reading a book, of loving a woman. He who keeps his spiritual life pure and high finds that in all these things there is a noble path. He who yields to his lower self will prostitute and degrade them all, and the tragedy that leads on to the mad scene at the close, where the cries of Margaret have no parallel in literature except those of Lady Macbeth, is the inevitable result of ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... whom the whole of this oration, which was garnished with words that we can hardly set down in print, or degrade ourselves by suggesting, was about as intelligible as if it had been Hebrew, thought it better to make no reply, and sorrowed inwardly to find that such a nice man as Mr Cripps should possess so short a temper. But the landlord of the Cockchafer soon recovered ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... be so and so qualified, before it is lawful for them to enter into, or for others to put them in such places and relations, as he has done, with regard to magistracy. This is indeed the scope and end of their whole scheme, to derogate from, degrade and lessen the dignity of this great ordinance of magistracy, allowing it no more than what is common to men in general, in other inferior states and ordinary business of life, alleging, "That these qualifications (which they grant God has prescribed in his word) are only ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... the multitude of nasty mysterious dribbles that help to degrade Rock Creek and can undoubtedly be found in even more profusion along every other metropolitan watercourse. Such of them as issue from storm sewers will be eliminated when a solution turns up for the problem of runoff water. The others, and they are numerous, will not. ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... that takes up its lodgings in a cat's ear'(2) has a mansion of peace to him: he dreads every hint of an objection, and least of all, can forgive praise mingled with censure: to doubt is to insult; to discriminate is to degrade: he dare hardly look into a criticism unless some one has tasted it for him, to see that there is no offence in it: if he does not draw crowded houses every night, he can neither eat nor sleep; or if all these terrible inflections are removed, and he can 'eat his meal in peace,' he then becomes ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... to the playhouse; and have not only made as much noise out of the clouds as any predecessor of mine in the theatre that ever bore that character, but have also descended, and spoke on the stage as the Bold Thunderer in 'The Rehearsal.' When they got me down thus low, they thought fit to degrade me further, and make me a ghost. I was contented with this for these last two winters; but they carry their tyranny still further, and not satisfied that I am banished from above ground, they have given me to understand that I am wholly to depart from their dominions, and taken from me ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... They were, first, the Samurai-dokoro, which term, according to its literal rendering, signified "samurai place" and may be appropriately designated "Central Staff Office." Established in 1180, its functions were to promote or degrade military men; to form a council of war; to direct police duties so far as they concerned bushi', to punish crime, and to select men for guards and escorts. The president (betto) obviously occupied a post of prime ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... her mission, accomplish'd, is o'er. The mission of genius on earth! To uplift, Purify, and confirm by its own gracious gift, The world, in despite of the world's dull endeavor To degrade, and drag down, and oppose it forever. The mission of genius: to watch, and to wait, To renew, to redeem, and to regenerate. The mission of woman on earth! to give birth To the mercy of Heaven descending on earth. The mission of woman: permitted ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... we teach our babies, and also shame. The child is pure, innocent, natural. One of the first efforts of nursery culture is to smear that white page with our self-made foulness. We labor conscientiously and with patience, to teach our babies shame. We degrade the human body, we befoul the habits of nature, we desecrate life, teaching evil and foolish falsehood to our defenceless little children. The "sex-taboos" of darkest savagery, the decencies and indecencies of primitive convention, we have preserved throughout the ages in our guarded ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... of Sicily, and the other was to obtain, when he should set him at liberty at last, a large sum of money for a ransom. When he told Richard what sum of money he would take, Richard refused the offer, saying that he would die rather than degrade his crown by submitting to such terms, and impoverishing his kingdom in ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... approve in yourself when I am far removed from Italy. For have you not a noble mind? And are you not a son of the Marquis della Porretta? Permit me to observe, that passion will make a man exalt himself, and degrade another; and the just medium will be then forgot. I am afraid I have been thought more lightly of, than I ought to be, either in justice, or for the honour of a person who is dear to every one present. My country was once mentioned ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... sheltering that lofty ideal of genuine female perfection which you seem so pertinaciously ambitious to sully and degrade." ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... good man, Ariosto! your terrors are better than Dante's; for they warn, as far as warning can do good, and they neither afflict humanity nor degrade God. ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... read passages aloud, use the tone of voice which would be appropriate if this was a new book not bound in leather. Read it for pleasure as one would read a literary masterpiece—not because opinion might frown on you if you had not read the classic. Does someone object that that would be to degrade the Bible to the level of secular writings? You cannot degrade a literature; it makes its own level and our labels do not affect it. Certain it is that a pious tone of voice will not protect the Bible from the secular level. But to use it unnaturally will degrade ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... coward, that, woman as I am, I would scorn to take the life of an unarmed enemy. I was only trying you to ascertain how low you would degrade and how debasingly demean yourself to beg for mercy. I would have made you swear to take me from this place, but I knew you would perjure yourself the moment an opportunity afforded, and I did not care to burden your guilty soul with another crime. For the same reason ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... deal more. He is quite an ogre, and lives in a miserable hovel. How Katherine can degrade herself by grovelling there with him for the sake of what she can get passes ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... made a great mistake, since nothing could have been more simple, and yet in keeping with true greatness, than the major's reception at the hotel, and this for the very reason that he had outdistanced the rabble. My declining years and gray hairs forbid me envying any man his laurels, but I will not degrade a noble profession by making myself the vassal of every great man who sets foot on these shores. I say, then, that when the cattle and the major reached the door of this spacious pile of white marble, wherein cheap ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... yet nearly excluded from the possession of landed property by the tyrannous operation of the penal laws. Justly has a celebrated Irish patriot (Theobald Wolfe Tone) spoken of these laws as "an execrable and infamous code, framed with the art and malice of demons to plunder and degrade and brutalize the Catholics of Ireland. There was no disgrace, no injustice, no disqualification, moral, political, or religious, civil or military, which it has not ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... been many reasons given, first and last, why women should not vote, but I desire to say, in the full light of a ripe experience, that some of them are fallacious. I refer more particularly to the argument that it will degrade women to go to the polls and vote like a little man. While I am not and have never been a howler for female suffrage, I must admit that it is much more of a success than prohibition and ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... children and kinsmen to be attacked with impunity, how much less will God sit by quiet when Israel is assailed God the Ruler over all things, over the powers in heaven above and on earth beneath, over the spirits and the souls God with whom it lies to exalt and to degrade, to slay and ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... darkness and lust. Every profound vision of the world must recognise these two equally essential aspects of Nature and of Man; every vital religion must embody both aspects in superb and ennobling symbols. A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... introduced luxury, wealth, pride, and avarice, which degrade while they elevate. Successful war created great generals, and founded great families; increased slavery, and promoted inequalities. Meanwhile the great generals struggled for supremacy; civil wars followed in the train of foreign ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... readily and more certainly between the cases where the distance has degraded the size, and the cases where the size being really less, has caused an exaggeration of the distance: or again, where the size being really less, yet co-operating with a distance really greater, may degrade the estimate, (though travelling in a right direction,) below the truth; or again where the size being really less, yet counteracted by a distance also less, may equally disturb the truth of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... eyes of the people than he deserves to be; for he was personally far more tolerant than the great majority of his contemporaries, and the penal code was chiefly enacted under his successors. It required, indeed, four or five reigns to elaborate a system so ingeniously contrived to demoralize, to degrade, and to impoverish the people of Ireland. By this code the Roman Catholics were absolutely excluded from the Parliament, from the magistracy, from the corporations, from the bench, and from the bar. They could ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... the earl with a terrible imprecation, and starting to his feet. "You refuse me. Be it so. But think not that you shall escape me. No, you are in my power, and I will use it. You shall be mine and without the priest's interference. I will not degrade myself by an alliance with one so lowly born. The strongest love is nearest allied to hatred, and mine has become hatred—bitter hatred. You shall be mine, I tell you, and when I am indifferent to you, I will cast you off. Then, when you are neglected, despised, shunned, you ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... interview with Ashton and told him, in language we will not repeat, for it was more energetic than select, that it was a shame for a man with his intelligence and refinement to so degrade himself, and then he added: "You are killing your wife, and if you do not desist from drinking it is very little use for me ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... my knowledge and my memory, No less than my real, deeper life, my love. I will not fool, degrade myself to trust In less than that which maketh me say Me, In less than that causing itself to be. Then art within me, behind, beneath, above— I will be thine because ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... of his excessive allowance. He has a fine contempt, which he never fails to express, for those boys who attempt to cultivate their minds by the reading of books, and, naturally, does not hesitate to degrade his own by the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... pathologically determined is subordinate, and is really, and even specifically, distinct from the latter, so that even the slightest admixture of the motives of the latter impairs its strength and superiority; just as in a mathematical demonstration the least empirical condition would degrade and destroy its force and value. Reason, with its practical law, determines the will immediately, not by means of an intervening feeling of pleasure or pain, not even of pleasure in the law itself, and it is only because it can, as pure ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... a distance, with a bitter heart, had no thought against her. Was it not natural for so beautiful a girl to have a lover? But that this fellow—this foreigner—should degrade her by treating her as if she were a nursery-maid flirting with one of the soldiers from the barracks down there, this filled him with bitterness and hatred. He turned and walked away with a firm step. He had no ill thoughts of her, whatever message she might send ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... against reason, we must basely degrade our understanding, not to see the folly of what is called monarchy. Nature is orderly in all her works; but this is a mode of government that counteracts nature. It turns the progress of the human faculties ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... is mine, and what's mine's me own,"' observed Bundy, and during the laughter that greeted this definition Slyme was heard to say that Socialism meant Materialism, Atheism and Free Love, and if it were ever to come about it would degrade men and women to the level of brute beasts. Harlow said Socialism was a beautiful ideal, which he for one would be very glad to see realized, and he was afraid it was altogether too good to be practical, ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... elevated by the ideal which he exalts, and serenely dwelling in a glorious existence with the images born of his imagination,—in looking round for some such man, my thoughts rested upon you. Afar from our turbulent cabals; from the ignoble jealousy and the sordid strife which degrade and acerbate the ambition of Genius,—in your Roman Home, you have lived amidst all that is loveliest and least perishable in the past, and contributed with the noblest aims, and in the purest spirit, to the mighty heirlooms of the future. Your youth has been devoted to ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and that you'll dine with any, provided you get a stalled ox to feed on? You call me a Cynic—why, what a monstrous Cynicism it is, which you and the rest of you men of the world admit! I'd rather live upon raw turnips and sleep in a hollow tree, or turn backwoodsman or savage, than degrade myself to this civilisation, and own that a French cook was the thing in ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... author and agency for law and order for the world. St. Augustine, first archbishop and lawgiver of Canterbury, himself of African descent, the son of Monica and Patricius of Carthage, had left the Anglo-Saxon from semi-barbarism to his position of world renown. Would this Anglo-Saxon ever degrade the sons of women ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... I thought I would let my daughter grow up in a state of complete ignorance, that she should be Nature's child. But as time went on, I saw the folly and the wickedness of my plan. I had no right to degrade her to the level of the savages around me, for if the fruit of the tree of knowledge is a bitter fruit, still it teaches good from evil. So I educated her as well as I was able, till in the end I knew that in mind, as in body, she was in no way inferior to her ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... distinguish the Sabbath from the week-day, and no social intercourse of a natural kind, (for a society of men only is not natural), to elevate them above the lower animals, and with only drinking and gambling left to degrade them below these creatures; and this for forty or fifty years of their lives, with, in too many cases, neither hope ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... Art thou weary Of the heavenly vision, that thou seekest To deface its chosen vessel, wouldst degrade To common dust the Maid whom God has sent thee? Ye blind of heart! O ye of little faith! Heaven's brightness is about you, before your eyes Unveils its wonders; and ye see in me Nought but a woman. Dare a woman, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... that air bestowed upon him by his rank and position, and which could never for a moment be mistaken, was altogether one of the best specimens of his class. He had neither those assumptions of hateful condescension, nor that eternal consciousness of his high birth, which too frequently degrade and disgrace the commonplace and vulgar nobleman; especially when he makes the privileges of his class an offence and an oppression to his inferiors, or considers it a crime to feel or express those noble sympathies, which, as ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... might he must be Earl Scroope of Scroope, and the woman so married must be the Countess of Scroope. There was already a Lady Neville about the world whose existence was a torture to them; and if this young man chose also to marry a creature utterly beneath him and to degrade the family, no effort on their part could prevent him. But if, as seemed probable, he were yet free, and if he could be got to come again among them, it might be that he still had left some feelings on which they might work. No doubt there was the Neville obstinacy ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... own seigneurs were entirely proscribed. Except in the boroughs or cities these classes had no chance of election. A paper called the Canadien, had been published, and industriously circulated in the country, for three or four years, to degrade and vilify the officers of government, under the title of gens en place; and to bring the government itself into contempt, by alluding to the Governor as a ministere, open to their animadversions. Nothing calculated to mislead the people ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... having its revenge by baffling its old enemy at sea; and that, while gunpowder robbed land warfare of nearly all its picturesqueness to give even greater stateliness and sublimity to a sea-fight, armour bids fair to degrade the latter into a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... to our several stations, and not degrade ourselves by learning the evil and discontented habits of human beings, each one of whom thinks his ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... delighted faces which surround the Polchinello of Naples, and you will see how universal is the passions in mankind for theatrical representations. But though we cannot eradicate the desire for this gratification, we may degrade its tendency, and corrupt its effects. We may substitute stimulants to the senses for elevation to the principle, or softening of the heart. By abandoning its direction to the most volatile and licentious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... should recognize him. He would not be identified as the poor creature who went out of Dalton with one hope, and only one,—that the first day's engagement might see him lying among the unnamed and unknown dead. But if the neighbors and his wife exposed to him relations which he swore he would not degrade himself so far as to resume, what was to become of his daughter? That was more easily managed. He could send her away from home to school, if he could find a lady in the land who would compassionate that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... why you take his side. You cheapen and degrade yourself and you bring shame upon your brother and me by your disgraceful affair with this ruffian. Don't look shocked! You meet him secretly, I know—how much farther you have gone with him I don't know. It is enough ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... Nowhere are there such habitual liars, and nowhere are there so many oaths. Every traveller there knows that, and sees how true is Christ's filiation of the custom of swearing from the custom of falsehood. But these poisonous weeds of speech not only tended to degrade plain veracity in the popular mind, but were themselves parents of immoral evasions, for it was the teaching of some Rabbis, at all events, that an oath 'by heaven' or 'by earth' or 'by Jerusalem' or 'by my head' did not bind. That further relaxation of the obligation of truthfulness ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Legislation shifts lawmaking from a definite group (the state legislature), to a large and indefinite group of persons (the voters as a class), upon whom responsibility cannot be fixed. By robbing the legislature of power and responsibility, the Initiative and Referendum are said to degrade rather than to improve that body: the best class of men is not attracted to a legislature which has been shorn of dignity and influence, and if the people rely upon the Initiative and Referendum, the voters deem it less necessary to ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... humanity to the level of the barn-yard," this is merely a catch-phrase intended to arouse prejudice and to obscure the facts. The reader may judge for himself whether the eugenic program will degrade mankind to the level of the brutes, or whether it will ennoble it, beautify it, and ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... such verse as we can read! Their own strict judges, not a word they spare That wants or force, or light, or weight, or care, Howe'er unwillingly it quits its place, Nay, though at court, perhaps, it may find grace: Such they'll degrade; and some-times, in its stead, In downright charity revive the dead; Mark where a bold expressive phrase appears, Bright through the rubbish of some hundred years; Command old words that long have slept to wake, Words that wise Bacon or brave Rawleigh ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... ought not to have been ordered by the Directors, but upon grounds that would have fully authorized the recall of the gentleman in question. This prosecution, supposing it to have been seriously undertaken, and to have succeeded, must have tended to weaken the government, and to degrade it in the eyes of all India. On the other hand, to intrust a man, armed as he was with all the powers of his station, and indeed of the government, with the conduct of a prosecution against himself, was altogether inconsistent and absurd. The same letter in which they give ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... after her; gossip is liable to degenerate into evil speaking and then I think it tends to degrade and belittle the mind to dwell on the defects and imperfections of our neighbors. Learn to dwell on the things that are just and true and of good report, but I am sorry for Annette, ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... Welsh, Scotch, and Irish of "Henry V.," and Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade "the humour" into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later, "The ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... said; "it is impossible that I can degrade myself by quarrelling with Mr. Vimpany. I only wait here to know what you propose to do. You have Mrs. Vimpany ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... explanation with my son. She made a sententious speech, just as if she had been on the stage; she asked how he could think that the answer to Fitz-Morris's book should have proceeded from her, or that a Princess of the blood would degrade herself by composing libels? She told him, too, that the Cardinal de Polignac was engaged in affairs of too much importance to busy himself in trifles like this, and M. de Malezieux was too much a philosopher to think of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... walking near, wondered how her daughter could be so much at ease with a "man of the people." She found it impossible to speak to him otherwise than stiffly. She felt as if a great gulf lay between her caste and his, and that to cross it or meet him half-way would be to degrade herself. She gently asked Caroline, "Are you not afraid, my dear, to converse with that person so unreservedly? He may presume, and ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... will kill him? Shame after shame, threat upon threat. Marry me, or you are dishonoured; marry me, or your brother dies: and this is man's honour! But my honour and my pride are different. I will encounter all misfortune sooner than degrade myself by an unfaithful marriage. How should I kneel before the altar, and vow to reverence as my husband you, you who ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... her father and brother, and loving her with all his great honest heart for these very things. And Denas lay dreaming of Roland. And Roland, even while he was talking with Elizabeth about Burrell Court, was holding fast to his intention to degrade Denas. For the singing, dancing, fiddling life which he was to lead with her suited his tastes exactly; he felt it would be the absolutely necessary alterative to the ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... writer on this valuable product spoke truly when he remarked: "All the American travellers have written such panegyricks, that I should degrade this royal liquor if I should offer any; yet several of these curious travellers and physicians do agree in this, that the cocoa has a wonderful faculty of quenching thirst, allaying hectick heats, of ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... must degrade the noblesse and attribute it to an odious origin, establish a germ of equality which can never exist but which will flatter the people; [we must] immolate the most obstinate, burn and destroy their property in order to intimidate the rest, so that if we cannot entirely destroy this ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... atoned for and forgiven; but insults admit of no compensation. They degrade the mind in its own esteem, and force it to ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... were defeated and she fled to England. Throwing herself on Elizabeth's mercy she found prison and finally, after nineteen years, the scaffold. An inquiry was held concerning her case, but no verdict was rendered because it did not suit Elizabeth to degrade her sister sovereign more than was necessary. Not for the murder of her husband, but for complicity in a plot against Elizabeth, was Mary finally condemned to die. In spite of the fact that she did everything possible to disgrace herself ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Southern States—a fungus growth of military tyranny superinduced by the fostering of Loyal Leagues, the abrogation of our civil laws, the habitual violation of our national Constitution, and a persistent prostitution of all government, all resources and all powers, to degrade the white man by ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... have fallen, by not yielding at once to your supplications! Friendship, gratitude, generosity, all the good feelings I had, have been consumed by this execrable love. There is nothing left but love for her. For her, I forget everything. I degrade and debase myself. And what is worse than all, is that I know all this and yet I ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... of that? It is not death that matters, but the fear of death. It is not killing and dying that degrade us, but base living, and accepting the wages and profits of degradation. Better ten dead men than one live slave or his master. Men shall yet rise up, father against son and brother against brother, and kill one another for the great Catholic ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... where I am reckoning on finishing my Elizabeth, and on living more and more as a recluse—indeed, even a little like a bear—but not in the style of those estimable citizens of the woods, whom the impresarii of small pleasures degrade by making them dance in the market-places to the sound of their flutes and drums! I shall rather choose a model ideal of a bear—be sure of that—and the flutes and drums which might lead me into the slightest future temptation of cutting capers ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... down horses, and his perils in the chace. In short, whatever order of mankind we contemplate, we shall perceive that the portion of vanity allotted us by nature, when it is not corrected by a sound judgement, and rendered subservient to useful purposes, is sure either to degrade ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... that "a nation may be too proud to fight." The country gasped for breath when it read those words, which seemed to be the official statement of the President of the United States that foreign nations might out rage, insult, and degrade this nation with impunity, because, as the rabbit retires into its hole, so we would burrow deep into our pride and show neither resentment nor sense of honor. As soon as possible, word came from the White House that, as the President's ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... once, "that the yonder is never here." Go deep enough into every wrong and sin and you find at its root this selfishness. So many of us degrade life into a heartless scramble. We fight each other because each man, dissatisfied himself, is convinced that his neighbour is getting more than his share. It may be doubted whether there has ever been a day in the Western world when ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... Islander, in hours of danger and necessity 'yearns after the gods,' and has present in his heart the idea of a father and friend. This is the religious element. The same man, when he comes to indulge his fancy for fiction, will degrade this spiritual friend and father to the level of the beasts, and will make him the hero of comic or repulsive adventures. This is the mythical or irrational element. Religion, in its moral aspect, always traces back to ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... cessation of action is said to be the means. When one is no longer attached to the objects of the senses, nor to actions, and when one renounces all resolves, then is one said to have risen to devotion. One should raise (his) self by self; one should not degrade (his) self; for one's own self is one's friend, and one's own self is one's enemy.[193] To him (only) who has subjugated his self by his self is self a friend. But to him who has not subjugated his self, his self behaves ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... toward materialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek a support in all this tissue of fables.... And, in fact, pride, after rejecting the Creator of all things and proclaiming man independent, wishing him to be his own king, his own priest, and his own God—pride goes so far as to degrade man himself to the level of the unreasoning brutes, perhaps even of lifeless matter, thus unconsciously confirming the Divine declaration, WHEN PRIDE COMETH, THEN COMETH SHAME. But the corruption of this age, the machinations ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... ladies generally mention with terror and aversion under the name of scholars, but whom I have found a harmless and inoffensive order of beings, not no much wiser than ourselves, but that they may receive as well as communicate knowledge, and more inclined to degrade their own character by cowardly submission, than to overbear or oppress us with their ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... free performance, then begged that before Herrick condemned the bears to starve on acorns, he should give them a farewell drink, and Herrick, who was slightly rattled, replied excitedly that he had not ransomed the animals only to degrade them. The argument was interrupted by the French chef falling out of a tree. He had climbed it, he explained, in order to ...
— The Nature Faker • Richard Harding Davis
... leading star in that Elysium, to be aware that, with five hundred a-year, unembarrassed and punctually paid, he might shine as a prince indeed. He would go at once to that happy foreign shore, where the memory of no father would follow him, where the presence of no sister would degrade and irritate him, where billiard-tables were rife, and brandy cheap; where virtue was easy, and restraint unnecessary; where no duties would harass him, no tenants upbraid him, no duns persecute him. There, carefully guarding ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... sorts of knowledge, but men recognised for their proficiency in special branches of learning. Where there is much competition, there must be sooner or later an inclination to lower the standard, and degrade the value of the diplomas issued at the close of a college course. Theoretically, it seems preferable that in a great province like Ontario, the diplomas should emanate from one Central University authority rather than from a number of colleges, ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... exercise in scientific methods, it is impossible to view our own kind impersonally, as we do the creatures of lower nature. Furthermore it seems to many that an analysis of human life and biological history, even if it is possible, must alter or degrade mankind in some degree; this is no more true than that a knowledge of the principles of engineering according to which the Brooklyn Bridge has been constructed renders that structure any different or unsafe for travel. Man remains man, whether we are in utter ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... imposing display of our power. The new queen, who has assumed the name of Rahoserina, is but a puppet in the hands of the council of nobles, of which Rainivoninahitriniony is the chief. Formerly all honors were held subject to the pleasure of the king, who could degrade his servants at pleasure; but this power is now declared to be abrogated. The powerful tribe of Saccalaves, always independent until the accession of Radama II, refuses to acknowledge his successor. It may be necessary to negotiate different treaties, perhaps, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... being who would do mischief without a material motive, simply for the sake of mischief and the pleasure he found in the despair of a fellow-being: you did not believe that there are men who will afflict the innocent with pain and sorrow, who will degrade, socially and morally humiliate you, and then laugh you in the face and make game of you. Stay here, move in our society, and you will find out your mistake! Why, what a sight it will be to have the great debater, the candidate-elect, ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... and afterwards sending them adrift without the means of getting work.—To fancy a thing is cheap because a low price is asked for it.—To say that a man is charitable because he subscribes to an hospital.—To keep a dog or a cat on short allowance, and complain of its being a thief.—To degrade human nature in the hope of improving it.—To praise the beauty of a woman's hair before you know whether it did not once belong to somebody else.—To expect that your tradespeople will give you long credit if they generally see you in shabby clothes.—To arrive at the age of fifty, and be surprised ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... Blanche, but it suits me, for you see I am housemaid here, and clear my own table and wash my own silver and china. Dorothy is old and has the rheumatism in her feet, and I must help; so, Mr. Aristocrat, if you do not wish to see me degrade myself, just go and take a walk, and when you come back the obnoxious apron shall be laid aside and we will practice ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... Hellish hate, Giving to death, and dying to redeeme, So dearly to redeem what Hellish hate 300 So easily destroy'd, and still destroyes In those who, when they may, accept not grace. Nor shalt thou by descending to assume Mans Nature, less'n or degrade thine owne. Because thou hast, though Thron'd in highest bliss Equal to God, and equally enjoying God-like fruition, quitted all to save A World from utter loss, and hast been found By Merit more then Birthright Son of God, Found ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... her the whole circumstances—tell her that, by marrying Sir William, she allies herself with an unhappy gentleman in the power of a criminal son who makes his life a burden to him by perpetual demands upon his purse; who will increase those demands with his accession to wealth, threaten to degrade her by exposing her husband's antecedents if she opposes his extortions, and who will make her miserable by letting her know that her old lover was shamefully victimized by a youth she is bound ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... circumstances, would have presented a fine appearance. Even in his prison garb, somewhat ragged and squalid, he looked the gentleman and something more. For there was that in his air and physiognomy, which proclaimed him no common man. Captivity may hold and make more fierce, but cannot degrade, the lion. And just as a lion in its cage seemed this man in a cell of the Acordada. His face was of the rotund type, bold in its expression, yet with something of gentle humanity, seen when searched for, in the ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... to abuse his academical position, to compromise the dignity of Harvard University, to draw down universal contempt upon the "profession" which he prostitutes to the uses of mere professional jealousy or literary rivalry, and to degrade the honorable office of professor in the eyes of all who understand that a weak argument is not strengthened, and a false accusation is not justified, by throwing "professional warnings" as a make-weight into the scales of reason. I affirm emphatically that no professor has ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... all to hold firm to the Gospel, and never to despond as long as they leaned upon it. "What is done from the best motives will be misrepresented by falsehood and slander. Thus it had been said here and there yesterday evening that we would now degrade the body and blood of Christ into sleeping-cups. No!"—cried he—"no one certainly wishes to do this." Tears interrupted his speech and many other were heard to weep. "If God will"—said Leo Judae—"we will all stand by the Gospel, and cheerfully will I, if need be, lay down my life for ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... back to the consulting-room. A sudden revulsion of feeling swept over his mind. Had the woman left an infection of wickedness in the house, and had he caught it? What devil had possessed him to degrade himself in the eyes of his own servant? He had behaved infamously—he had asked an honest man, a man who had served him faithfully for years, to turn spy! Stung by the bare thought of it, he ran out into the hall again, and opened the door. The servant had disappeared; it was too ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... money and getting clothes, houses, and horses, to attend to "politics," while Patrick was only too glad and ready to develop his political abilities. So it came to pass that a ring of powerful political "bosses"—if we may degrade so good and honest a Dutch word—was formed. Saloons, gambling-houses and dance-halls multiplied, while an oligarchy, ever grasping for more power, nullified the laws and trampled the statutes under its feet. The sins of drunkenness and bribery among policemen, who ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... a piece of music shall be a model of arithmetical adjustment. This is probably a graver error than apparent formlessness. Design and logic and unity there must surely be; but any obtrusive evidence of mathematical calculation must degrade music to the ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... "Shall we then take it at its marked price for our property," he again replies, "No," explaining that their enemies had received the paper at a discount, and that, to receive it at par from them, would "give them voluntarily and with one eye open just that advantage over us to oppress, degrade and depress us." This combined financial and spiritual adviser closes his article by urging the brethren to set apart a portion of their time to the service of God, and a portion to "the study of the science of our government and the news ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... compasses. All these difficulties were at last smoothed over; and Gibson was also permitted to drape the queen's statue in Greek costume, for in his artistic conscientiousness he absolutely refused to degrade sculpture by representing women in the fashionable gown of the day, or men in swallow-tail coats ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... hand, offend any such child, that is to say, hinder, or mislead, spoil or degrade him in any way; do anything to rob a child of any of these Divine gifts, rob him of his innocence, or trustfulness, or his guileless heart, and sow the seeds of evil habits or tastes in their place, and you know the denunciation or curse which the Divine voice has laid upon you ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... not want damages—I want revenge. I do not want to touch his pocket—I want to ruin his life. Yes—and hers! I want to dishonor, degrade and utterly ruin them both! And I have evidence enough to do this," she said, resuming her summing up, ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
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