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More "Obscenity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... giggled and gave pretty screams, and cried, 'Oh, fie!' and 'lor!' and then the visitors all laughed together? Then Miss ——, a little bolder, hissed at the lunatics herself, and poked them with a stick—and then there was a fresh storm of tears and howls and blasphemy and obscenity; and the keepers, rushing in with heavy cudgels, beat the 'patients' right and left like cattle—and it was all 'so horrible!' Bad, think you? These were the ladies and gentlemen of the old school—the Grandisons and Chesterfields and their ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... noble minds some dregs remain, Not yet purged off, of spleen and sour disdain; Discharge that rage on more provoking crimes, Nor fear a dearth in these flagitious times. 530 No pardon vile obscenity should find, Though wit and art conspire to move your mind; But dulness with obscenity must prove As shameful sure as impotence in love. In the fat age of pleasure, wealth, and ease, Sprung the rank weed, and thrived with ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... in setting is an anecdote concerning the amours of a shepherd and shepherdess, told with broad humour in the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles and elaborated with characteristic gusto and extraordinarily graphic art by Pietro Fortini. The crude obscenity of the subject alone serves to show how free the writer was from any influence of the pastoral of polite literature.[71] Numerous other stories concerning shepherds or villani might be cited, from Boccaccio to Bandello, the point of which, whether openly licentious or ostensibly moral, is brought ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Aristophanes is the abounding comic force and verve of his style. It resembles an impetuous torrent, whose swift rush purifies in its flow the grossness and obscenity inseparable from the origin of comedy, and buoys up and sweeps along on the current of fancy and improvisation the chaff and dross of vulgar jests, puns, scurrilous personalities, and cheap "gags," allowing ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... repeat (p. xiv.) there is another element in The Nights and that is one of absolute obscenity utterly repugnant to English readers, even the least prudish. It is chiefly connected with what our neighbours call le vice contre nature—as if anything can be contrary to nature which includes all things.[FN357] ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... not know her. I knew her only as an animal, and an animal nothing can or should restrain. And now I remember their faces on Sunday evening, when, after the 'Kreutzer Sonata,' they played a passionate piece, written I know not by whom, but a piece passionate to the point of obscenity. ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... under-current of taint and desolation! Think of them, starved, beaten, driven into crime not merely by necessity, but by the very hands of their parents! and think of them this night, cuddling in rags, shivering on straw, cradled in reeking filth, drinking in blasphemy and obscenity and cunning policies of sin, under that dark canopy that shuts out social sympathy, and hides the very Face of God. And if you have, I will not say parental hearts, but human souls, you will ask if there ought not to be some remedy, and will say that all ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... this were its whole effect, might very often be desirable. Sedition, or obscenity, might be no greater crimes in the opinion of other electors, than in that of the freeholders of Middlesex; and many a wretch, whom his colleagues should expel, might come back persecuted into fame, and provoke, with harder front, a ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... Briton, of which the first number appeared in June. It was brought out by John Wilkes, member for Aylesbury, a clever and dissipated man of fashion, with literary tastes, great courage, an excellent wit, too often employed in obscenity, and a remarkably ugly face. He was incorrupt and his political professions were probably sincere. Behind him stood Temple, ever ready to instigate others to stab the objects of his hate. The court party was strengthened by grants ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... you, pray what sort of Men are they? I answer'd, their Lives and Doctrine were of a-piece, their Example differing nothing from their Precepts: That Hypocrisy, Avarice, Ambition, litigious Suits, Lying, Revenge, and Obscenity, were Vices known to 'em by Name only: That they were a mortify'd Set of Men, who look'd upon nothing transitory worth their Concern; and having their Thoughts always employ'd on Meditations of a future Happiness, neglected every thing on Earth but their Duty; and for this Reason, they often ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... popular or dangerous person." Though extremely choleric, he was honest, and not at all malicious. It was said of him that "his Latin and his dissimulation were both alike," equally bad, and that "his custom in swearing and obscenity in speech made him seem a worse Christian than ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... then in working for the organization, Ronny Bronston had never been in the Octagon Building. He'd seen photographs, Tri-Di broadcasts and he'd heard several thousand jokes on various levels from pun to obscenity about getting around in the building, but he'd never been there. For that matter, he'd never been in Greater Washington before, other than a long ago tourist trip. Population Statistics, his department, had its main ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... scrupulously conform to Mr. Johnson's rules of true orthography.' Johnson, in the last year of his life, at a time of great weakness and depression, defended the roughness of his manner. 'I have done more good as I am. Obscenity and impiety have always been repressed in my company' (post, June ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... to the others are just those with the most distorted and vicious ideas, whose discourse abounds in obscene detail and ribald jest. Your child must learn either from ignorant, unclean minds, or be taught in a clean, sacred way, which will rob sex of secrecy and obscenity; learn he will; if you will not teach your ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... twelve years of his life. Irons and fetters were used to prevent escape, while those who could not obtain the means of subsistence from their friends, suffered the horrors of starvation. Over-crowding, disease, riot, and obscenity united to render these ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... advance, and to do this they feel that it is essential that the same moral influence which enabled them to become men should be continued. This influence moves almost unconsciously among the industrial plants. For instance, we do not find here the tendency to obscenity which we find in any ordinary factory or workshop. Environment in these plants is all-powerful as an uplifting condition. Cleanliness is encouraged in the dormitory and kitchen. Respectful attention is paid ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... its contents seemed to one official not good for the public would sanction withdrawal of the second-class rate tomorrow from another periodical whose social or economic views seemed harmful to another official. The validity of the obscenity laws is recognized that the mails may not be used to satisfy all tastes, no matter how perverted. But Congress has left the Postmaster General with no power to prescribe standards for the literature or the art which a mailable periodical disseminates."[241] ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... have to learn German, then, I 'm afraid. It is still in circulation in Germany, I believe, on its merits as a serious book. I haven't a copy of the edition in English. THAT was all exhausted by collectors who bought it for its supposed obscenity, like Burton's 'Arabian Nights.' Come this way, and I will ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... to the credit of Webster that he spoke out plainly concerning the obscenity of what was extorted from the witches. No one who has not read for himself can have any notion of the vile character of the charges and confessions embodied in the witch pamphlets. It is an aspect of the question which has not been ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... Taxil was printed in Latin and English, with an interleaved French version in manuscript. As presented by its discoverer, there is no doubt that it is an execrable production, involving the practice in open lodge of obscenity, diabolism, and sacrilege. Passing over the first three grades, and beginning "at the point of bifurcation," we find it stated in the ritual of the fourth degree of Elect that the New and Reformed Palladium has been instituted "to impart a new force to the traditions ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... that in the inside they are good for nothing," be of so penetrative an insight as it is apt to suppose, and whether the truth be not rather that to the empty all things are empty. Swift's diseased eye had the microscopic quality of Gulliver's in Brobdingnag, and it was the loathsome obscenity which this revealed in the skin of things that tainted his imagination when it ventured on what was beneath. But with all Swift's scornful humor, he never made the pitiful mistake of his shallow friend Gay that life was a jest. ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... insensible of misconduct, in speech and action, as a parrot or an automaton. This is more particularly the case with respect to indecorums, such as the defender is accused of; for a man can no more be held a common swearer, or a habitual talker of obscenity, because he has been guilty of using such expressions when intoxicated, than he can be termed an idiot, because, when intoxicated, he has spoken nonsense. If, therefore, the defender can extenuate the guilt of his intoxication, he hopes that its ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... a 'tec,'" one man whispered to another. So the card-playing was not thrust on her as a round-about form of plunder, and the stories told were more those derived from the spicy columns of the sporting papers, in words of double meaning, than the outspoken, stable obscenity characteristic of the ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... up. "I don't think I need the lecture. I admire their tenacity. I admire their ambition. I admire their blasphemous, consignatory, obscenity attitude of acting as if the Great Creator had concocted the whole glorious Universe for their own playground. Yes," said the chief wearily, "singly they aren't bad traits. Boiled down into the self-esteem of a single race, I don't ...
— Instinct • George Oliver Smith
... was vain and domineering, and it was strange that he had notwithstanding a shyness which made him dislike people who were not quite of his kidney. He judged others, naively, by their language, and if it was free from the oaths and the obscenity which made up the greater part of his own conversation, he looked upon them with suspicion. In the evening the two men played piquet. He played badly but vaingloriously, crowing over his opponent when he won and losing his temper when he lost. On rare occasions ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... rattlesnake dragged its loathsome length from under a mesquite. The dried carcass of a steer, whose parchment skin drew tight across its bones, rattled in the breeze. Here and there rock ridges showed with the obscenity of so many skeletons, exposing to the hard, cruel sky the earth's nakedness. Thirst, delirium, death, hovered palpable in the wind; dreadful, ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... chemists on analysis would find the genuine nobility) of a Norman house, and his Grace shall not be able to say nay to the infamous alliance. There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution through every order of society up to the proudest of the proud and to the highest of the high. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... hindrances to their brains or hands, and that they should not lose themselves in their feasts, but bid them be soberly merry, and wisely free. I also advise them to get friendly Thrift to be there Caterer, and Temperance to carve at the board, and be very watchful that obscenity, detraction and scurrility be banisht the table; but let their discourse be as savoury as the meat, and so feed as though they did live to eat, and, at last, rise as full of thankfulness, as of food; this hath, this is, and this ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... that it moves them the other way. When Tom replied gently to Zeigler, and asked him privately why he annoyed him without cause, the fellow sneered the more at him. He took pains to indulge in profanity and obscenity before Tom, and received the full reward he sought when he saw how much ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... possible an infinitely wider range of personal liberty than is possible in some other things, individual liberty must ultimately be governed by the liberty of others. A fanatical religious sect practicing human sacrifice, for instance, could not be tolerated by any civilized society. Obscenity in art ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... suggestive and the possibly obscene we are bound to suppress the whole world, beginning with the human race, for if we once enter on that path there is no definite point at which we can logically stop. The truth is, as Mr. Theodore Schroeder has so repeatedly insisted,[217] that "obscenity" is subjective; it cannot reside in an object, but only in the impure mind which is influenced by the object. In this matter Mr. Schroeder is simply the follower, at an interval, of St. Paul. We must work not on the object, but on the impure mind affected by the object. ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... have had a dance of its own. Dances in honour of Venus were common, she was the patroness of proper and decent dancing; on the contrary, those in honour of Dionysius or Bacchus degenerated into revelry and obscenity. The Epilenios danced when the grapes were pressed, and imitated the gathering and pressing. The Anteisterios danced when the wine was vatted (figs. 8, 9, 10), and the Bahilicos, danced to the sistrus, cymbals, and ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... shoulders, with a purple robe thrown on his shoulders, there sat a brawny, grinning, bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage eyes, and satyr's leer: the creature of greed, of lust, of obscenity, of brutality, of avarice, of desire. This thing the people followed, rejoicing exceedingly, content in the guide whom they had chosen, victorious in the fiend for whom they spurned a deity; crying, with wide open ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Guimi, Kanoldt, Kandinsky, Utrello—a good street effect; Werefkin and several Frenchmen were in evidence. The modelling was both grotesque and indecent. The human figure as an arabesque is well within the comprehension of the average observer, but obscenity is not art—great art is never obscene. The blacks and whites that I saw in Munich at this particular show were not clever, only bestial. I only wish that German art of the last decade had not gone over, bag and baggage, to the side of vulgar license. Certainly Matthew Arnold could say of it, as ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... are justly imputed to this poet, which very much obscure, if not entirely efface, his glory. These are, low buffoonery, and gross obscenity; and it has in vain been attempted to offer, in excuse for the first of these faults, the character of his audience; the bulk of which generally consisted of the poor, the ignorant, and dregs of the people, whom, however, it was as necessary to ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... readers be surprised or shocked, if, in the course of these adventures, I should display some of the fruits of that fatal seed, so early and so profusely sown in my bosom. If, on my first coming into the ship, I shrank back with horror at the sound of blasphemy and obscenity—if I shut my eyes to the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, it was not so long. By insensible degrees, I became familiarised with vice, and callous to its approach. In a few months I had become nearly as corrupt as others. I might indeed have resisted longer; but though the fortress of virtue ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... that is what it comes to) compels us to accept it from those adults among whom political and theological discussion does as a matter of fact lead to the drawing of knives and pistols, and sex discussion leads to obscenity, it has no application to children except as an imperative reason for training them to respect other people's opinions, and to insist on respect for their own in these as in other important matters which are equally dangerous: for example, money. ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... copied letters from ten to seven, with an interval of three-quarters of an hour for dinner. In all three of these men, as in the case of Clark's companions, there had been developed, partly I suppose by the circumstance of enforced idleness of brain, the most loathsome tendency to obscenity. This was the one subject which was common ground, and upon which they could talk. It was fostered too by a passion for beer, which was supplied by the publican across the way, who was perpetually travelling to and fro with cans. ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... trick of it. And the trick of it is in the accent and intonation, and not so much in any peculiar form of words. They have a peculiar way of dropping their voices, too, which is sometimes disconcerting. But it is a clean wholesome language, undefined by the disgusting and childish obscenity which is too often a disgrace to other districts in England. It reminds me a little of the Scottish tongue, but rather more of the country speech in the northern parts of Yorkshire, but in some ways it is all its very own. It must ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... Irving, and a very good imitation it would be—with soft music. He would leave the Signallers thrilled and silent. The lights flashed up, and "Spot" darted off on some catchy doggerel of an almost talented obscenity. In private life Spot was the best company imaginable. He could not talk for a minute without throwing in a bit of a recitation and striking an attitude. I have only known him serious on two subjects—his master and Posh. He would pour out with the keenest delight little stories of how his master ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... be extremely unfair to let it be supposed that the fabliaux contain nothing but obscenity, or that they can offer attractions to no one save those whom obscenity attracts. As in those famous English followings of them, where Chaucer considerably reduced the licence of language, and still more considerably increased the dose of wit—the Reeve's and Miller's sections of the Canterbury ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... of curious Discoveries; and as it is my immediate Business to trace every Particular for an ample Dissertation on the Nature of Hermaphrodites, (which obliges me to a frequent Repetition of the Names of the Parts employ'd in the Business of Generation) so, I hope, I shall not be charg'd with Obscenity, since in all Treatises of this Kind it is impossible to finish any one Head compleatly, without pursuing the Methods ...
— Tractus de Hermaphrodites • Giles Jacob
... the author. Fourteen copies alone were printed, one of which the ministry had bribed the printer to give up. Lord Temple then objected to the manner of obtaining it; and Bishop Warburton, as much shocked at infidelity as Lord Sandwich had been at obscenity, said, "the blackest fiends in hell would not keep company with Wilkes when he should arrive there." Lord Sandwich moved to vote Wilkes the author; but this Lord Mansfield stopped, advertising the House that ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... thus: 'Perhaps it has been of advantage, as it has given weight to what you said: you could not, perhaps, have talked with such authority without it.' JOHNSON. 'No, Sir; I have done more good as I am. Obscenity and Impiety have always been repressed in my company.' BOSWELL. 'True, Sir; and that is more than can be said of every Bishop. Greater liberties have been taken in the presence of a Bishop, though a very good man, from his being milder, and therefore ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... scourging them with serpents, or driving them with tridents, or dragging them with chains into the flaming mouth of hell. Even in the most hidden and sacred places of the medieval cathedral we still find representations of Satanic power in which profanity and obscenity run riot. In these representations the painter and the glass-stainer vied with the sculptor. Among the early paintings on canvas a well-known example represents the devil in the shape of a dragon, perched near the head of a dying man, eager to seize his soul ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... orthodoxy, but the chiefs only knew the aim of the Order, 817-m. Templar secret object the rebuilding of the Temple on the model of Ezekiel, 816-u. Templar Secret Order had princes as Grand Masters, 823-l. Templarism lived under other names, governed by unknown chiefs, 821-u. Templars accused of impiety, obscenity and the worship of Baphomet, 820-m. Templars and Hospitallers took vows of obedience, chastity, poverty, 802-u. Templars arrested and imprisoned by Clement the Fifth and Philip le Bel, 820-m. Templars, at the origin, were opposed to the tiara of Rome and the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Lady Henry Somerset that when the first set of children came down from London for a fortnight's holiday in the country, she was much startled and shocked by the obscenity of the games they played amongst themselves. Being a sound psychologist, Lady Henry wisely refrained from appearing surprised or from attempting any direct method of reproof. "I saw," she said, "that the 'goody' element would have ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... she does not so readily resort to the great vice—the crime of falsehood—as do her companions of the other sex. I call falsehood the great vice, because, if this were unknown, tardiness, truancy, obscenity, and profanity, could not thrive. Holmes has well said that "sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle that ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... eloquence of the Marseilles demoniac, they tried obscenity in its stead. It was a hideous thing to see these girls give full vent in public to their sensual fury, on the plea of scolding their pretended devils. Thus indeed it was that they managed to swell their audiences. People flocked to hear from ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... suddenly the sound of many feet shuffling, as if men were carrying a heavy weight, and presently the smell of ether began to come to them through the key-hole. And they heard groans, and a dull, passionless voice that spoke words of blasphemy and obscenity. ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... Captain, a jolly blade; the Lieutenant and Midshipman, fellows of the same description; the Chaplain, the most profane; the Surgeon, a dabbler in surgery, or in medicine, or anything else; the Ensign, the tallest member of the class; the Boatswain, one most inclined to obscenity; the Drum Major, the most aristocratic, and his assistants, fellows of the same character. These constitute the Band. Such are the general rules of choice, but they are not always followed. The remainder of the class who have had ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... them, still in apparent possession of all their faculties, voluntarily exposed themselves to sufferings which on ordinary occasions would have been sufficient to deprive them of life. The scenes that occurred were a scandal to civilisation and to religion—a strange mixture of obscenity, absurdity, and superstition. While some were praying on bended knees at the shrine of St. Paris, others were shrieking and making the most hideous noises. The women especially exerted themselves. On one side of the chapel there might be seen a score of them, all in convulsions; ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... one time so popular as to be generally esteemed, and at another so formidable as to be universally detested, he observed that his acquisitions had been small, or that his capacity was narrow, and that the whole range of his mind was from obscenity to politics, and from ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... seen many wantonly cruel men. I have known numbers of mates of Mississippi river steamers—a class which seems carefully selected from ruffians most proficient in profanity, obscenity and swift-handed violence; I have seen negro-drivers in the slave marts of St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans, and overseers on the plantations of Mississippi and Louisiana; as a police reporter in one of the largest cities in America, I have come ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... religion while I relate it. I have, in one hour, heard more blasphemy and more lewd language at the table of one of these clergymen of the established church, than ever polluted the walls of my house in all my life. I have heard more obscenity flow from the lips of one of these hoary-headed dignified pastors of the church of England, aye, one who resides in this county too, than I ever heard come from the lips of all the reformers I was ever acquainted with in my life. I can ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... the Studious how to banquet. That Thriftiness with Jocoseness, Chearfulness without Obscenity, and learned Stories, ought to season their Feasts. Iambics are bloody. Poets are Men of no great Judgment. The three chief Properties of a good Maid Servant. Fidelity, Deformity, and a high Spirit. A Place out of the Prologue of Terence's Eunuchus is illustrated. Also Horace's Epode ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... disillusionment this was to the young officer. What depths of cruelty and obscenity it revealed in the Parisian rabble. What folly to treat them with the Christian forbearance shown by Louis XVI. How much more suitable was grapeshot than the beatitudes. The lesson was stored up for future use at a somewhat similar crisis ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... quickened this feverish excitement, which the press constantly instilled into the veins of the people. Its language already bordered on delirium, and borrowed from the population even their proverbs, their love of trifles, their obscenity, their brutality, and even their oaths, with which the articles were interlarded, as though to impress more forcibly its hatred on the ear of its foes. Danton, Hebert, and Marat were the first to adopt this tone, these gestures, and these exclamations of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... philosophers, prophets and poets for their guidance. But morality is not dependent on censorship for protection. It is already powerfully fortified by the magistracy and the whole body of law. Blasphemy, indecency, libel, treason, sedition, obscenity, profanity, and all the other evils which a censorship is supposed to avert, are punishable by the civil magistrate with all the severity of vehement prejudice. Morality has not only every engine that lawgivers can devise in full operation for its protection, but also that enormous weight ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... the dance are sometimes in imitation of those of animals,[218] sometimes spontaneous, and sometimes from our point of view indecent. The indecency and obscenity originated and has continued in a period when no moral element entered into such performances—they simply follow animal instincts and impulses, are controlled by them, and appear usually not to affect the customs relating to marriage and chastity (so in the Areoi festivities ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... was merely with that plodding spirit with which men of adust temperament follow up any track of study, merely because it is denominated learning; indifferent to its intrinsic nature, whether it be the illustration of the wisdom, or of the ribaldry and obscenity of antiquity. He had poured over these old volumes so intensely, that they seemed to have been reflected into his countenance indeed; which, if the face be an index of the mind, might be compared ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... manner and phrase that many a cad will pass for something better. Well, here is the test. Unvarnish your man; make him drink, and listen. That was my procedure with P. G. Esquire. I listened to his outpouring of inanity and obscenity and, listening sympathetically, like some compassionate family doctor, could not help asking myself: Is such a man to be respected, even when sober? Be that as it may, he gave me to understand why some folk are rightly afraid of exposing, under the influence of drink, the bete humaine ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... talk, added fuel to the slowly smoldering fire. At home, but more particularly among the miners, in the camp or at the Y, Maverick expressed his views regarding Houston in language abounding with profanity and obscenity, and many were the muttered threats of what he would do should the object of his hatred ever cross ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... century. Not only does he descend thus to the very depths of anti-religious and anti-social doctrines, with logical and paradoxical rigidity, more impetuously and more obstreperously than d'Holbach himself; but again he falls into and sports himself in the slime of the age, consisting of obscenity, and into the beaten track of declamation. In his leading novels he dwells a long time on salacious equivocation, or on a scene of lewdness. Crudity with him is not extenuated by malice or glossed over by elegance. He is neither refined nor pungent; is quite incapable, like the younger ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... trick of it is in the accent and intonation, and not so much in any peculiar form of words. They have a peculiar way of dropping their voices, too, which is sometimes disconcerting. But it is a clean wholesome language, undefined by the disgusting and childish obscenity which is too often a disgrace to other districts in England. It reminds me a little of the Scottish tongue, but rather more of the country speech in the northern parts of Yorkshire, but in some ways it is all its very ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... first Friday of July, in the evening, she may be found near the Bald-faced Hind, dressed in a red cloak and a large beaver; her appearance is bold and reckless—she is dukkering low tradesmen and servant girls behind the trees at sixpence a head, or is bandying with the voice of a raven slang and obscenity with country boors, or with the blackguard butcher-boys who throng in from Whitechapel and Shoreditch to the Gypsy Fair. At Goodwood, a few weeks after, you may see her in a beautiful half-riding dress, her hair ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... you would have expected from his appearance—dull and gross. He was chiefly distinguished among men of birth for general obscenity of speech and morphological ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... wretched man gave vent to his boiling passion in a torrent of curses. He shrieked imprecation upon Burgess, Troke, and North. He cursed all soldiers for tyrants, all parsons for hypocrites. He blasphemed his God and his Saviour. With a frightful outpouring of obscenity and blasphemy, he called on the earth to gape and swallow his persecutors, for Heaven to open and rain fire upon them, for hell to yawn and engulf them quick. It was as though each blow of the cat forced out of him a fresh burst of beast-like ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... that the crew of the Molly were little better than a den of thieves, their whole thought being of plunder, their whole ambition the winning of gold. Blair blushed for the honor of his country, to find such men among her avowed defenders. Oaths and obscenity made even more hateful the rough narratives in which each strove to prove himself more hardened and abandoned than the last speaker. Blair's soul recoiled with horror from the taint of such companionship; yet ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... conform to Mr. Johnson's rules of true orthography.' Johnson, in the last year of his life, at a time of great weakness and depression, defended the roughness of his manner. 'I have done more good as I am. Obscenity and impiety have always been repressed in my company' (post, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... excellences; their lines are always a little blurred. Still, it shows that ten years before Clinker, Smollett had learned to combine the contradictory elements of life in something like their right proportions. If obscenity and ferocity are found in his fourth novel, they are no longer ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... men's shoulders, with a purple robe thrown on his shoulders, there sat a brawny, grinning, bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage eyes, and satyr's leer: the creature of greed, of lust, of obscenity, of brutality, of avarice, of desire. This thing the people followed, rejoicing exceedingly, content in the guide whom they had chosen, victorious in the fiend for whom they spurned a deity; crying, with wide ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... life I have seen many wantonly cruel men. I have known numbers of mates of Mississippi river steamers—a class which seems carefully selected from ruffians most proficient in profanity, obscenity and swift-handed violence; I have seen negro-drivers in the slave marts of St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans, and overseers on the plantations of Mississippi and Louisiana; as a police reporter in one of the largest cities in America, I have come in contact with thousands ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... This day is observed with mirth, in imitation of the old Roman celebration of the days when the goddess Flora was worshipped. The Roman floral games began on the 28th April, and continued a few days. At one time these celebrations were conducted with obscenity, but by degrees the amusements became more moral. It was customary during the middle ages for rich and poor to go out on May-day, with music and other signs of joy and merriment, to gather flowers, and sip the dew before sunrise. ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... been a boon coinpanion; but it was merely with that plodding spirit with which men of adust temperament follow up any track of study, merely because it is denominated learning; indifferent to its intrinsic nature, whether it be the illustration of the wisdom or of the ribaldry and obscenity of antiquity. He had pored over these old volumes so intensely that they seemed to have been reflected into his countenance; which, if the face be indeed an index of the mind, might be compared to ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... pray what sort of Men are they? I answer'd, their Lives and Doctrine were of a-piece, their Example differing nothing from their Precepts: That Hypocrisy, Avarice, Ambition, litigious Suits, Lying, Revenge, and Obscenity, were Vices known to 'em by Name only: That they were a mortify'd Set of Men, who look'd upon nothing transitory worth their Concern; and having their Thoughts always employ'd on Meditations of ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... rustic for labourers, others of shepherds, etc. Every locality seems to have had a dance of its own. Dances in honour of Venus were common, she was the patroness of proper and decent dancing; on the contrary, those in honour of Dionysius or Bacchus degenerated into revelry and obscenity. The Epilenios danced when the grapes were pressed, and imitated the gathering and pressing. The Anteisterios danced when the wine was vatted (figs. 8, 9, 10), and the Bahilicos, danced to the sistrus, cymbals, and tambour, often ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... who hanged himself." He related in his prosy way vulgar anecdotes of Piron, a poet who passes for a prodigy among the bourgeoisie. Matifat, a passionate lover of the stage, had a slight leaning to obscenity. It was even said that, in imitation of Cadot and the rich Camusot, he kept a mistress. Sometimes Madame Matifat, seeing him about to relate some questionable anecdote, would hasten to interrupt him by screaming out: "Take care what you are saying, old man!" She called him habitually ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... he had many brave gentlemen that followed him; yet not taken for a popular or dangerous person." Though extremely choleric, he was honest, and not at all malicious. It was said of him that "his Latin and his dissimulation were both alike," equally bad, and that "his custom in swearing and obscenity in speech made him seem a worse Christian than ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... whom poverty excludes from the higher ranks of life, who are doomed to seek the converse of those, who are in a measure corrupted, and, by associating with them on public occasions, often in taverns and alehouses, are soon involved in habits of dissipation and obscenity. Man is a social being, loves society, and, rather than spend his life in solitude, will seek the converse of ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... ideal of the graceful craft I had sketched, and compromised on a flat bottom. Observe how the ways of deception lead to transgression: I recalled the cast-off lumber pile of Jarvis, the carpenter, a good-natured Englishman, coarse and fat: in our neighbourhood his reputation for obscenity was so well known to mothers that I had been forbidden to go near him or his shop. Grits Jarvis, his son, who had inherited the talent, was also contraband. I can see now the huge bulk of the elder Jarvis as he stood in the melting, soot-powdered snow in front of his shop, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... may be repeated. One winter's morning a stately matron entered St. Gudule's at Brussels to attend mass. The heels of her shoes were caked with snow, and on the smooth pavement of the church she slipped up. As she fell, there escaped from her lips a single word, of mere obscenity. The bystanders helped her to her feet, and amid their laughter she slunk away, crimson with mortification, to hide herself in the crowd. Nowadays great ladies have not ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... "Oh, obscenity! Is that what it's about?" Rand exclaimed in disgust. "Yes, Gresham told me about that. He didn't have the drink, and he wasn't smoking a cigar in the shop, and he left a little after nine. He got home at nine twenty-two. I can testify to that, myself; I was there ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... based on imitations ... it does not resign the likeness of the truth, since the charm of imitation is probability."[35] As a result of his naturalism, Plutarch admitted as appropriate poetical material immorality and obscenity as well as virtue, because these things are in life. If the copy is good, the poem is artistic and praiseworthy, just as a painting of a venomous spider, if a faithful representation of its loathsome subject, is praised ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... home, I couldn't tell which. Then everything—sky and woods and field and all—fused and ran together in a great spatter of red flame and white smoke, and the earth beneath our feet shivered and shook as the twenty-one-centimeter spat out its twenty-one-centimeter mouthful. A vast obscenity of sound beat upon us, making us reel backward, and for just the one-thousandth part of a second I saw a round white spot, like a new baseball, against a cloud background. The poplars, which had bent forward as if before a quick wind-squall, stood ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... drunk not only profited the house, but paid in commissions for their own cosmetics and other little gratifications. On entering the place O'Iwa shrank back to the wall in horror; to shrink away in turn from the filth and obscenity to be seen on that support. She would have fled, but the entering crowd pressed her further in. It was a long room. The entrance formed a sort of parlour or place to sit. The rest of the apartment was divided longitudinally ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... kidney who find Harry Champion vulgar. His is the robust, Falstaffian humour of old England, which, I am glad to think, still exists in London and still pleases Londoners, in spite of efforts to Gallicize our entertainments and substitute obscenity and the salacious leer for honest fun and the frank roar of laughter. If you want to hear the joy of living interpreted in song and dance, then go to the first hall where the name of Harry Champion is billed, and hear him sing "Boiled Beef and Carrots," "Baked ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... the eloquence of the Marseilles demoniac, they tried obscenity in its stead. It was a hideous thing to see these girls give full vent in public to their sensual fury, on the plea of scolding their pretended devils. Thus indeed it was that they managed to swell their audiences. People ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... public, and at the same time establish his importance among the copy-purchasers in town. With this view, he worshipped the muse; and, conscious of the little regard which is in this age paid to every species of poetic composition, in which neither satire nor obscenity occurs, he produced an imitation of Juvenal, and lashed some conspicuous characters, with equal truth, spirit, and severity. Though his name did not appear in the title-page of this production, he managed matters ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Utrello—a good street effect; Werefkin and several Frenchmen were in evidence. The modelling was both grotesque and indecent. The human figure as an arabesque is well within the comprehension of the average observer, but obscenity is not art—great art is never obscene. The blacks and whites that I saw in Munich at this particular show were not clever, only bestial. I only wish that German art of the last decade had not gone over, bag and baggage, to the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... debauchery. With these men the regent used to shut himself up, after the hours of business, and excluding all graver persons and graver concerns, celebrate the most drunken and disgusting orgies; where obscenity and blasphemy formed the seasoning of conversation. For the profligate companions of these revels, he invented the appellation of his roues, the literal meaning of which is men broken on the wheel; intended, no doubt, to express their broken-down characters and dislocated fortunes; although a ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... conscious of any transgression of a moral law, for no such law was recognised, but he detested himself because he had been drawn into close contact with a miserable wretch simply in order to satisfy a passion, and in the touch of mercenary obscenity there was something horrible to him. It was bitter to him to reflect that, notwithstanding his aversion from it, notwithstanding his philosophy and art, he had been equally powerless with the uttermost fool of a young aristocrat to resist the attraction of the commonest ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... 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, which represented every female character on the stage as little better than an animal, using such ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... the skull-cap declared that while he could not bring himself to tell a smutty story himself, he was "as good as any man in appreciating one." He then offered a box of cigars for the most daring anecdote, and there ensued an orgy of obscenity that kept us shouting (I could not help thinking of similar talks at the cloak-shops). Loeb suggested that the smoking-room be dubbed "smutty room" and was applauded by the little Chicagoan. The prize was awarded, by a vote, to a man who had told his story in the gravest tone ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... idea of the moral tendency of their drama, than was conveyed by the offensive, libidinous scene, exhibited by the ladies in the concluding part. The language of the song, no doubt, corresponded with the obscenity of their actions; which were carried to a degree of extravagance that were calculated to produce nothing but disgust, even to the ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... and this simplicity made him keenly alive to the proximity of the sublime to the ridiculous or the exquisite to the grotesque. Though he had little of the animal in him, and was never troubled by his appetites, he was quite free from prudery. If obscenity moved him at all, it was to frank laughter or to grim contempt; he never dwelt upon it, either in the way of enjoyment or loathing. "For rules of ascetic discipline," says a friend, "he had no need. The view of life suggested by so much of the best French literature, that ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... face of the cattleman Dave read the ghastly fear of his own soul. Doble was capable of terrible evil. His hatred, jealousy, and passion would work together to poison his mind. The corners of his brain had always been full of lust and obscenity. There was this difference between him and Shorty. The squat cowpuncher was a clean scoundrel. A child, a straight girl, an honest woman, would be as safe with him as with simple-hearted old Buck Byington. ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... instance) is not fine, but dirty; his peasant is not assured, but stupid; his droll is not jocose, but ridiculous; and his lover is not gay, but lewd. So that to me the man seems not to have written his poesy for any temperate person, but to have intended his smut and obscenity for the debauched and lewd, his invective and satire for ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... coating of manner and phrase that many a cad will pass for something better. Well, here is the test. Unvarnish your man; make him drink, and listen. That was my procedure with P. G. Esquire. I listened to his outpouring of inanity and obscenity and, listening sympathetically, like some compassionate family doctor, could not help asking myself: Is such a man to be respected, even when sober? Be that as it may, he gave me to understand why some folk are rightly afraid of ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... transfigured into harmony and sublimity; an exchange unquestionably for the better: but in certain stages, or only perhaps in a single stage of it, we frequently find humour and reality supplanted by realism and obscenity; an exchange undeniably for the worse. The note of his earliest comic style was often a boyish or a birdlike wantonness, very capable of such liberties and levities as those of Lesbia's sparrow with the lip or bosom of his mistress; as notably in the parts of Boyet and Mercutio: and indeed there ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... an imitation of Mr H.B. Irving, and a very good imitation it would be—with soft music. He would leave the Signallers thrilled and silent. The lights flashed up, and "Spot" darted off on some catchy doggerel of an almost talented obscenity. In private life Spot was the best company imaginable. He could not talk for a minute without throwing in a bit of a recitation and striking an attitude. I have only known him serious on two subjects—his master ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... assure your self that the Virgin Particles of Your Modesty shall never be Agitated by the Amorous Transparancy of Pasquin's Obscenity. (Mimicking her) ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... of his, that great oceanic avalanche of learning and piety and obscenity and gigantic merriment, smells ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... parents-in-law's house, where she was living in the absence of her husband, who had been mobilized. One of the Germans held M. X., the father, in front of the door while the other, threatening the young woman with his rifle, committed acts of revolting obscenity upon her in the presence of the mother-in-law. When he had accomplished his crime he took the place of his comrade, mounting guard over M. X., while the former in his turn outraged ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... letters. The upper classes were coarse, drunken, and ill-mannered. Bribery and corruption on the grossest scale were the principal means for getting into Parliament. Mr. Dowdeswell, M.P. for Worcestershire, said to the Commons, "You have turned out a member for impiety and obscenity. What halfdozen members of this House ever meet over a convivial bottle, that their discourse is entirely free from obscenity, impiety, or ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... their homes. This festival is said to be the most ancient of any known, and during the earlier and purer ages of human faith was celebrated in honor of returning spring. In later ages, however, after passion had become the only recognized god, May-day was celebrated with "all manner of obscenity and lewdness." ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... on a Wedding," the best parts of this are by common consent incomparable. Side by side by these are to be found, as in Lovelace, pieces that will not even scan, and, as not in Lovelace (who is not seldom loose but never nasty), pieces of a dull and disgusting obscenity. But we do not go to Suckling for these; we go to him for his easy grace, his agreeable impudence, his scandalous mock-disloyalty (for it is only mock-disloyalty after all) to the "Lord of Terrible Aspect," whom all his elder contemporaries ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... with an interval of three-quarters of an hour for dinner. In all three of these men, as in the case of Clark's companions, there had been developed, partly I suppose by the circumstance of enforced idleness of brain, the most loathsome tendency to obscenity. This was the one subject which was common ground, and upon which they could talk. It was fostered too by a passion for beer, which was supplied by the publican across the way, who was perpetually travelling to and fro with cans. My horror when ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... how far this is merely due to defective education and therefore modifiable, and how far it is based on an eradicable tendency of the human mind. Of course the forms of obscenity vary in every age, they are varying every day. Much which for the old Roman was obscene is not so for us; much which for us is obscene would have made a Roman smile at our simplicity. But even savages sometimes have obscene words not fit to ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... portraiture of the private and public life of the degenerate Romans, there was much to call for the hand of a master in satire. And we find in the glowing sketches of our author, all the vigor and point of a Juvenal, without his vulgarity and obscenity; all the burning indignation which the Latin is so peculiarly capable of expressing, with all the vigor and stateliness by which the same language is equally characterized. Tacitus has been sometimes ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... and not unlike one another. To enliven which weary stuff in rattled the Prince of the power of the air, and an imp that kept molesting him and buffeting him with a bladder, at each thwack of which the crowd were in ecstasies. When the Vices had uttered good store of obscenity and the Virtues twaddle, the celestials, including the nine Muses went gingerly back to heaven one by one; for there was but one cloud; and two artisans worked it up with its supernatural freight, and ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... without undergoing the influences of the unbelief prevailing in those regions, where, on the strength of a little knowledge of the human frame, cartloads of puerile ignorance and anile vulgarity, not to mention obscenity, are uttered in the name of truth by men who know nothing whatever of the things that belong to the deeper nature believed in by the devout and simple, and professed also by many who are perhaps yet farther from a knowledge of its affairs than those who thus treat them with contempt. When therefore ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... sermon at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, on Sunday, February 7, 1909, said that "the stage is worse today then it was in the days of paganism." He added: "We see today men and women—old men and old women—who ought to know better bringing the young to these orgies of obscenity. Instead of that they should be exercising a supervision over the young and should look carefully ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... necessary for the understanding of their meaning; when understood, they are fully equal to ours in shrewdness, wit and expression. Krauss emphasizes the fact that everywhere riddles tend to coarseness and even to obscenity and discusses the reasons. What is true elsewhere is true here; a considerable number of Filipino riddles are coarse; we have introduced them but emphasize the fact that any scientifically formed collection of German or English riddles would contain ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... Its first aim is to take the question straight to Congress and repeal the Federal statute which prohibits the circulation of contraceptive knowledge. All the restrictive state laws are modeled on this Federal obscenity statute. If that is repealed, the state laws can easily be made ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... control in the splendid gin palaces of the city, and when they recover their consciousness find themselves in a hot, close room, filled with the vilest and most depraved wretches. The noise, profanity, and obscenity, are fearful. All classes, all ages, are represented there. Even little children are lost forever by being immured for a single night in such horrible company. The females are confined in a separate part of the prison. No entreaties or explanations are of the least avail. All must ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... allegorically, but rather literally, of the foul "den" in which he passed a good twelve years of his life. Irons and fetters were used to prevent escape, while those who could not obtain the means of subsistence from their friends, suffered the horrors of starvation. Over-crowding, disease, riot, and obscenity united to render these places ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... shocking obscenity of word and act to which the 'Records' bear witness is another ugly feature which must not quite be passed over in silence. It is true that decency, as we understand it, is a very modern product, and it is not to be looked for in any society in the barbarous stage. At the ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... gray, frowsy streets spring, summer, autumn, winter were all the same to the grey, frowsy people. It is true that youth laughed—pale, animal boys, and pale, flat-chested girls. But it laughed chiefly at inane obscenity. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... many feet shuffling, as if men were carrying a heavy weight, and presently the smell of ether began to come to them through the key-hole. And they heard groans, and a dull, passionless voice that spoke words of blasphemy and obscenity. ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... inundation, toward the deserted palace. The doors were forced open, and the interior of the palace was instantly filled with the swarming multitudes. The mob from the streets polluted the sanctuaries of royalty with every species of vulgarity and obscenity. An amazon market-woman took possession of the queen's bed, and, spreading her cherries upon it, she took her seat upon the royal couch, exclaiming, "To-day it is the nation's turn to take their ease." One of the caps of the queen was placed in derision upon the head of a vile girl of the street. ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... apparent possession of all their faculties, voluntarily exposed themselves to sufferings, which on ordinary occasions would have been sufficient to deprive them of life. The scenes that occurred were a scandal to civilization and to religion — a strange mixture of obscenity, absurdity, and superstition. While some were praying on bended knees at the shrine of St. Paris, others were shrieking and making the most hideous noises. The women especially exerted themselves. On one side of the chapel there ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... horse about sixty yards from the rocks. He shouted a profane order. The purport of it was that Beresford had better come out with his hands up if he didn't want to be dragged out by a rope around his neck. The man's speech crackled with oaths and obscenity. ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... new work; they wish to see the Army advance, and to do this they feel that it is essential that the same moral influence which enabled them to become men should be continued. This influence moves almost unconsciously among the industrial plants. For instance, we do not find here the tendency to obscenity which we find in any ordinary factory or workshop. Environment in these plants is all-powerful as an uplifting condition. Cleanliness is encouraged in the dormitory and kitchen. Respectful attention is paid at meals while grace is being said. The reading room is frequented, while the ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... superintending these bathing and scrubbing operations I talked cheerfully and pleasantly to the fellows, giving them such names as Tom, Bob, Joe, Snowball, and so on, to which they readily answered, instead of abusing them and ordering them about with brutal oaths and obscenity, as was the habit of the crew; and although the poor wretches understood not a word of what was spoken to them either by the crew or by myself, yet they readily enough distinguished the difference of manner, and not only so, ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... traced by Hogarth's genius from the homes of London's luxury to her dens of hidden crime; to study the more refined, if somewhat weaker, social satire of Henry William Bunbury; to admire those magnificent political cartoons of James Gillray—colossal and overwhelming, even in their brutality or obscenity; and finally, to lose ourselves in the luxuriant and living growth of Thomas Rowlandson's pencil, recreating for us the features of an age that was, like himself, vigorous, buoyant, and expansive,—that true ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... turned into the street, mocked and gibed at by every passer-by. He saw them locked up in prison-cells, under the charge of jailers that were half brute, half fiend; he saw Fred and Minnie carried off by an Italian padrone to a den reeking with filth, and loud with oaths and obscenity. With a hoarse shout of rage he would spring up to avert blows that were bruising their little forms; he saw his wife turn her despairing eyes from heaven and curse the hour of their union; he saw Mildred, writhing and resisting, dragged from her home by great dark hands that were ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... Marianne was calculated to make his rivals in the field of fiction jealous. Perhaps no one felt more keenly than did Crebillon fils the growing popularity of a novel the purity of which but enhanced the obscenity of his own writings. To this feeling may be attributed his attack upon Marivaux's style in a very free and tiresome story, entitled Tanzai et Neadarne, ou l'Ecumoire, in which his rival's muse is represented as a mole. The mole relates her life, in a most ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... publication today because its contents seemed to one official not good for the public would sanction withdrawal of the second-class rate tomorrow from another periodical whose social or economic views seemed harmful to another official. The validity of the obscenity laws is recognized that the mails may not be used to satisfy all tastes, no matter how perverted. But Congress has left the Postmaster General with no power to prescribe standards for the literature or the art which a mailable periodical disseminates."[241] In Donaldson v. Read Magazine,[242] ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... chief attraction of Aristophanes is the abounding comic force and verve of his style. It resembles an impetuous torrent, whose swift rush purifies in its flow the grossness and obscenity inseparable from the origin of comedy, and buoys up and sweeps along on the current of fancy and improvisation the chaff and dross of vulgar jests, puns, scurrilous personalities, and cheap "gags," ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... opprobrium and disgust. The Paris of enjoyment, the bourgeoisie which held all wealth and power, which would relinquish naught of either, though it was surfeited and gradually wearying of both, simply hastened to the place in order that obscenity and insult might be flung in its face. Hypnotised, as it were, while staggering to its fall, it felt a need of being spat upon. And what a frightful symptom there lay in it all: those condemned ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... which new religions found a way into the chambers of the great and wealthy. In spite of some signs of moral vigour, society was cankered with pride of class and with self-indulgence. It possessed no regenerating force capable of checking the repulsive vice which was encouraged by the obscenity of actors and the ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... Bergerac (1619-1655) plagiarised 'Cymbeline,' 'Hamlet,' and 'The Merchant of Venice' in his 'Agrippina.' About 1680 Nicolas Clement, Louis XIV's librarian, allowed Shakespeare imagination, natural thoughts, and ingenious expression, but deplored his obscenity. {348a} Half a century elapsed before public attention in France was again directed to Shakespeare. {348b} The Abbe Prevost, in his periodical 'Le Pour et Contre' (1733 et seq.), acknowledged his power. But it is to Voltaire that his countrymen owe, as he himself boasted, their ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... public foe of vice, when he himself has acknowledged that he satirized only to gratify his resentment; for it was his opinion, that writing satires without being in a rage, was like killing in cold blood. Was his conversation instructive whose mouth was full of obscenity; and was he a friend to his country, who diffused a dangerous venom thro' his works to corrupt its members? in which, it is to be feared he has been but too successful. Did he never smooth the face of prosperous villainy, as, Mr. Wolsely expresses it, the scope of whose ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... if in noble minds some dregs remain, Not yet purged off, of spleen and sour disdain; Discharge that rage on more provoking crimes, Nor fear a dearth in these flagitious times. No pardon vile obscenity should find, Though wit and art conspire to move your mind; But dullness with obscenity must prove As shameful sure as impotence in love. In the fat age of pleasure, wealth, and ease, Sprung the rank weed, and thrived with large ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... friends of liberty. One of these bills was designed to add to the stringency of the present obstructive medical law; the other was designed to assist the labors of Anthony Comstock in interrupting the circulation of popular physiological literature, under pretence of suppressing obscenity. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... the Deity. There she was elevated on a high altar, and received the adoration of all present, while the young women, her attendants, whose alluring looks already sufficiently indicated their profession, retired into the chapels around the choir, where every species of licentiousness and obscenity was indulged in without control, with hardly any veil from the public gaze. To such a length was this carried, that Robespierre afterward declared that Chaumette deserved death for the abominations he had permitted on that occasion. Thenceforward that ancient edifice was called ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... furnishing patients to the quack practitioners in whose interest the place is run. Thousands—we might have said millions—of copies of disgusting little books on "Marriage," or the "Philosophy of Marriage," or some cognate obscenity are distributed gratis, and it is no unusual sight to see a score of nervous, ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... the Hindus or the profound depth of the philosophic reach of the Upanishads, those sublime "guesses at truth," or the great excellence of the Bhagavad-Gita which is the gem of all Hindu literature. And yet the puerilities of many and the obscenity of others of the Vedic songs and prayers are well-known. So are the strange vagaries and the rambling character of many parts of the Upanishads. And as for the Bhagavad-Gita it is simply a dialogue whose gist is the argument of Krishna—"the Supreme ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... debauchery. Together with him, they formed the Dilettanti Club in Palace Yard, and they also revived the Hell-Fire Club of the days of the Duke of Wharton, at Medmenham Abbey, Bucks, where they revelled in obscenity, and made everything that was moral or religious, a subject of their scorn and derision. Over the grand entrance of this abbey was inscribed, Fays ce que voudras, "Do what you like;" and the jokes of the members of the club consisted principally in wearing ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... wholesale slaughter, not only of the men on the battlefield, but of innocent women and children, destroying their cities and making their lands desolate. A humane person reading these books for the first time without any glamour of divine inspiration, would shudder at their cruelty and blush at their obscenity. ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... them leisure, could find no way of amusing themselves so effectually as by attempting to call up the devil of lust. Allusions that were evidently their common-place table talk, and that approached as nearly as they durst venture to obscenity, were their pastime. With these they tickled their fancy till it gurgled in their throats, applied to Miss Wilmot to give it a higher gusto, and, while they hypocritically avoided words which the ear could not endure, they taxed their dull wit ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... raising one foot slightly from the ground in the manner of a limping animal. The agent disappeared into the station, locking the door after him. The boy gave expression to a violent obscenity directed upon the vanished man. When that individual emerged again, he handed the grizzled man a box of ointment and tossed a packet of tobacco to the evil-faced boy. Both were quick with their thanks. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... would not have done more good if he had been more gentle. I proceeded to answer myself thus: 'Perhaps it has been of advantage, as it has given weight to what you said: you could not, perhaps, have talked with such authority without it.' JOHNSON. 'No, Sir; I have done more good as I am. Obscenity and Impiety have always been repressed in my company.' BOSWELL. 'True, Sir; and that is more than can be said of every Bishop. Greater liberties have been taken in the presence of a Bishop, though a very good man, from his being milder, and therefore not commanding such awe. ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... spirits or wine. This meeting with no attention, a Dutch concert began of songs in every possible, style—hunting songs, sea songs, jovial songs, love songs, comic songs, political songs, together with the lowest obscenity and ribaldry; all which, floated on the breeze through the sinuous labyrinths: of the mountains in company with the Catholic chaunts and anthems which attended the body of Captain le Harnois. Never man had merrier funeral. Singing being over, then ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... Poetical Feast teaches the Studious how to banquet. That Thriftiness with Jocoseness, Chearfulness without Obscenity, and learned Stories, ought to season their Feasts. Iambics are bloody. Poets are Men of no great Judgment. The three chief Properties of a good Maid Servant. Fidelity, Deformity, and a high Spirit. A Place out of the Prologue of Terence's Eunuchus is illustrated. Also Horace's ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... the head of whom was Legendre the Butcher. Every rank recess of prostitute pollution in Paris was ransacked to furnish materials for the celebration of their impure and impious orgies. The ode to Atheism, and the song of Blasphemy, were succeeded by the applauding yells of Drunkenness and Obscenity. ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... is neither an affectation, nor a prejudiced fable, nor a piece of stupidity. The German woman, quoted by Mr. Bryce, found her American compeer furchtbar frei, but she had at once to add und furchtbar fromm. "The innocence of the American girl passes abysses of obscenity without stain or knowledge." She may be perfectly able to hold her own under any circumstances, but she has little of that detestable quality which we call "knowing." The immortal Daisy Miller is a charming illustration of this. I used sometimes to get into trouble with American ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... performances were perpetually pandering to the depraved appetites of the age. It is not, therefore, wonderful that all true Christians viewed the theatre with disgust. Its frivolity was offensive to their grave temperament; they recoiled from its obscenity; and its constant appeals to the gods and goddesses of heathenism outraged their religious convictions. [321:1] In their estimation, the talent devoted to its maintenance was miserably prostituted; ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... might. O when I read those excellent things of thine, Such strength, such sweetness couched in ev'ry line, Such life of fancy, such high choice of brain, Nought of the vulgar wit or borrow'd strain, Such passion, such expressions meet my eye, Such wit untainted with obscenity, And these so unaffectedly exprest, All in a language purely flowing drest, And all so born within thyself, thine own, So new, so fresh, so nothing trod upon: I grieve not now that old Menander's vein Is ruin'd to survive in thee ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... them. Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph, instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt, succeed to sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth new food, which it devours ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... mind, such as Combativeness, Destructiveness, Desperation, Turbulence, Hatred, and Revenge. If unrestrained, these culminate in violent and criminal acts; if regulated, they are employed in personal defense. When unduly excited, they lead to dissipation, obscenity, swearing, rowdyism, and licentiousness; when perverted, they are the source of recklessness, quarrels, frauds, falsehoods, robberies, and homicides. They are unlike instinct, inasmuch as they are not self-limiting. The intimate relation which they sustain to the stomach and ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... The rabbi's declaration, that he who enters a circus commits murder, is offspring of the same holy zeal that dictates Tertullian's solemn indignation: "In no respect, neither by speaking, nor by seeing, nor by hearing, have we part in the mad antics of the circus, the obscenity of the theatre, or the abominations of the arena." Such expressions prepare one for the passion of another remonstrant who, on a Sabbath, explained to his audience that earthquakes are the signs of ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... disarm a foe, there are some ingrates so constituted that it moves them the other way. When Tom replied gently to Zeigler, and asked him privately why he annoyed him without cause, the fellow sneered the more at him. He took pains to indulge in profanity and obscenity before Tom, and received the full reward he sought when he saw how much his course ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... know or even faintly imagine the other side of the picture? Surely not, for no clean human mind can compass all the horror, all the brutal, grotesque obscenity of a modern battlefield. Therefore I propose to write plainly, briefly, of that which I saw on my last visit to the British front; for since in blood-sodden France men are dying even as I pen these lines, it seems only just that those of us for whom they are giving their lives should at least ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... Councillor glared at the Commander. "The undertaking you propose, sir, will require a massive diversion of our capacities from defense. That means losing ground at an increasing rate to the obscenity crawling over our planet. That same potential applied to direct offensive measures may yet turn the balance in our favor. Against this, the possibility of a scouting party stumbling over the remains of a colony the location ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... war. Here are multitudes of men far from home, shut out from the society of all good women, taken away from their church and its surroundings, weary and wet with marching and drilling, often lonely and dejected, in an atmosphere of profanity and obscenity in the cheerless barrack rooms, and tempted by the animal passions which are always loosed in war-time. The men need all the help we can give them now, and ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... stand on their heads. All means of picturesque representation are made use of, including the introduction of certain North Italian dialects. Often the place of wit is taken by mere insolence, clumsy trickery, blasphemy, and obscenity; one or two jokes told of Condottieri are among the most brutal and malicious which are recorded. Many of the 'burle' are thoroughly comic, but many are only real or supposed evidence of personal superiority, of triumph over another. How much people were willing to put up ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... boys in your family know of it—if you could get them to tell you. My two sons studied at a State university, and they would bring me home what they heard—the gossip, the slang, the horrible obscenity. Fourteen fellows in one dormitory using the same bathroom—and on the wall you saw a row of fourteen syringes! And they told that on themselves, it was the joke of the campus. They call the disease a 'dose'; ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... sprawled in the sun, repulsive. A rattlesnake dragged its loathsome length from under a mesquite. The dried carcass of a steer, whose parchment skin drew tight across its bones, rattled in the breeze. Here and there rock ridges showed with the obscenity of so many skeletons, exposing to the hard, cruel sky the earth's nakedness. Thirst, delirium, death, hovered palpable in ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... 'Julius is somewhat insane. On the one hand he's had religious mania, and on the other, he is fascinated by obscenity. Either he is a pure servant, washing the feet of Christ, or else he is making obscene drawings of Jesus—action and reaction—and between the two, nothing. He is really insane. He wants a pure lily, another girl, with a baby face, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Hindustani, kitchen Kaffir. dog Latin, macaronics^, gibberish; confusion of tongues, Babel; babu English^, chi-chi. figure of speech &c (metaphor) 521; byword. colloquialism, informal speech, informal language. substandard language, vernacular. vulgar language, obscene language, obscenity, vulgarity. jargon, technical terms, technicality, lingo, slang, cant, argot; St. Gile's Greek, thieves' Latin, peddler's French, flash tongue, Billingsgate, Wall Street slang. pseudology^. pseudonym &c (misnomer) 565; Mr. So-and-so; wha d'ye call 'em^, whatchacallim, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... outre politeness. Notwithstanding the complacent grimaces of his face, the self-sufficiency of his looks, his systematically powdered and dressed hair, his showy dress, his counted and short bows, and his presumptuous conversation, teeming with ignorance, vulgarity, and obscenity, he cannot escape even the most ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... patience, fortitude and real heroism I have met with in my acquaintances among the poor. Strength in time of trial, virtue amidst obscenity, suffering long drawn out and perpetual self-denial are characteristics that abound in many of my poorest friends, and in some of the chapters that are to follow I shall tell more fully of them, but just now I am amongst neither sinners nor saints, but with my ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
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