"Debased" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... existence; lofty mountains, magnificent rivers and broad lakes, and many curious and interesting objects, not more wonderful, however, than those of other parts of the globe, while the inhabitants in every direction, though often savage and debased, differ in no material degree from the ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... times. Collin d'Harleville drew mirth from the infirmities and follies of old age in Le Vieux Celibataire (1792); Fabre d'Eglantine moralised Moliere to the taste of Rousseau by exhibiting a Philante debased by egoism and accommodations with the world; Louis Laya, during the trial of the King, satirised the pretenders to patriotism in L'Ami des Lois, yet escaped ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... with scorn and anger by the whole theological and metaphysical tribe, the masters and the scholars; he would be despised as a plebeian philosopher, and railed at as an infidel. It would be sounded high that he debased human nature, which has a "cognation," so the reverend and learned Doctor Cudworth calls it, with the divine; that the soul of man, immaterial and immortal by its nature, was made to contemplate higher ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... foundation of good taste—instead of frankness and urbanity, youth will engraft on its real ignorance the dulness of affected stupidity—will assume an air of selfish calculation—of arrogance at one time and servility at another—debased itself, and debasing all around it. When, on the contrary, whatever may be their real sentiments, the external demeanour of men to each other is such as benevolence, gratitude, and equity would dictate—and we do mean this phrase to include Russian manners—where, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... hardened by contact with this debased age, was also stirred to his depths; his face was flushed, and he seized me ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... cold and horrid fact that today, all around us, and sometimes close at hand, men are committing a long list of revolting crimes such as even the most debased and cruel beasts of the field never commit. I refer to wanton wholesale murder, often with torture; assault with violence, robbery in a hundred cruel forms, and a dozen unmentionable crimes invented ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... down. They point out that if the Irish are allowed to pay their own members, and even to send to America for money for that purpose, the pernicious system will soon spread to England, and the House of Commons will be utterly debased. Some irritation against America is also expressed. Of course, the Tories say, they could expect nothing better from the Irish in America; but of those Americans who promoted or patronized the fund, they speak in terms of both sorrow and anger. The St. ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... during the night, and the rafters serve to suspend the fish, which are dried by the smoke in its lengthened course through the interstices of the roof and walls. In their superstitions, theatricals, dances, and songs they have much similarity to the natives of Polynesia. Debased now, and degraded even beneath their former portrait—fast fading away before the more genial sun of the fortunes of the White man—the Indians on the southern coast are no longer free and warlike, and being in subjection ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... fictitious descendants of Mahomet and Ali is honored with the appellation of sheiks, or sherifs, or emirs. In the Ottoman empire they are distinguished by a green turban; receive a stipend from the treasury; are judged only by their chief; and, however debased by fortune or character, still assert the proud preeminence of their birth. A family of three hundred persons, the pure and orthodox branch of the caliph Hassan, is preserved without taint or suspicion in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... lack of independence the service which he sought to render his people. In his account of their past he was often false to their fundamental ideas of God and history. Whether he was really under the influence of the debased Greco-Roman culture of the day, which consigned mankind to the dominion of fatality, or whether he deliberately masked his own standpoint to please his audience, he presented the history of the Hebrew nationality in the light of ideas of fate strange to it. He has ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... COST.—Who shall estimate the cost of a priceless reputation—that impress which gives this human dross its currency—without which we stand despised, debased, depreciated? Who shall repair it injured? Who can redeem it lost? Oh, well and truly does the great philosopher of poetry esteem the world's wealth as "trash" in the comparison. Without it gold has no value; birth, no distinction; ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... found it there, it must be indigenous to the spot? Look at that girl, and tell me if there is one trace in feature, in form, in manner, or in speech, of plebeian blood, and then will you tell me that she is in any way connected with people such as these? They are not merely plebeian, they are low, debased, criminal. They are criminals of the deepest dye, not only capable of any villainy, but already guilty, and to such a degree that their guilt has made ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... the stamp of the human greatness which approaches most nearly to divine greatness, and of which the undefinable expression beautifies the most ordinary features." In "Les Paysans" we have another fine portrait, L'Abbe Brossette, who is doing his work nobly among debased and cunning peasants. "To serve was his motto, to serve the Church and the Monarchy at the most menaced points; to serve in the last rank, like a soldier who feels destined sooner or later to rise to generalship, by his desire to do well, and ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... and indeed all the writers of merit, belong to the English or Anglified section of the population. The Dutch section is practically disqualified by its language (which, be it remembered, is not the language of Holland, but a debased dialect) from literary composition, even were it otherwise disposed to authorship. Literature will always, I think, remain English in character, bearing few or no traces of the Dutch element in the people. But otherwise things ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... Deserting the school is no more thought of than any other form of suicide. If, by any chance, a boy should desert the school, he would be a pariah in that community and could not live among the people in any degree of comfort. He would be made to feel that he had debased himself and cast aspersion upon society. The looks that the people would bestow upon him would sting more than flagellation. He would be made to feel that he had expatriated himself, and neither himself ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... face, slightly swollen and pasty in the shadows, bore the same, heedless unrestraint. Her dark, widely-opened eyes, an insignificant nose and shortly curved, scarlet lips, held almost the fixed, painted impudence of a cynically debased doll. She turned and surveyed Jasper Penny with a petulant, silent inquiry, and whatever gaiety was in progress abruptly terminated as he advanced ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... world, and the degradation which every Englishman will experience, on learning that the flag of England, first prostituted by supplying the traffickers in Christian slaves with all the necessaries for their horrid purposes, is now further debased by a traffic in the slaves themselves. I send you an Ionian vessel, full of women violated in their persons, and who, with their children, had been reduced to slavery, in order that the British public ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... and delicate and highly perfumed, and now takes the lead in the market. But honey is honey the world over; and the bee is the bee still. "Men may degenerate," says an old traveler, "may forget the arts by which they acquired renown; manufactories may fail, and commodities be debased, but the sweets of the wild-flowers of the wilderness, the industry and natural mechanics of the bee, will ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... end of the tube. The other extremity is more elaborately guarded, the anterior segment being fringed with a frontal membrane, while the second segment forms a disc, the minute mouth orifice with the true tentacles and gills being debased to ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the licentiousness that reigned before them. What happened? Nobody dared to write in contradiction to the severity established; and very few had abilities to rival their masters. insipidity ensues, novelty is dangerous, and bombast usurps the throne which had been debased by a race of fain'eants. This rhapsody will probably convince you, Sir, how much you was mistaken in setting ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... myself, and so the adventure ended. But one thing remains to be told, and that is concerned with seven years after. Among the effects of my friend, at that time just deceased, was found, carefully preserved, a gilt statuette representing Mercury, labelled 'Debased Roman.' No record was attached to explain how it came into his possession. The figure was bequeathed to the ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... sober earnest and in as unprejudiced a spirit as it is possible for any sincerely patriotic—using the word in its true and not in its debased meaning—Irishman to feel when he is thoroughly acquainted with all the niceties of the national history for ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... building, and stocked it with Paris furniture, and made it modern and comfortable. One is always divided in spirit over these restorations. The castle needed help painfully; it had been badly used by the Revolution; and it had been debased to a barrack by Napoleon's troops, who "stabled their steeds in the courts and made their drunken revelry resound in the chambers of Marguerite of Angouleme." Dismantled, half-roofless, its great halls, unsheltered and unsheltering, it was wasting fast under the elements ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... "levelling down" is sure to follow when the poet finds himself absorbed in the common emotions of common life, and speaking to the common man. But there need not necessarily be that coarseness of sentiment, that crudity of thought, that bigotry of limited sympathy, mis-called patriotism, which has debased the level of so much of Mr. Kipling's writing. I should say that Mr. G.K. Chesterton owes more than he supposes to the influence, direct or indirect, of Mr. Kipling; that though his opinions, his sympathies, his conclusions are all diametrically opposed to those of the elder writer, still ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... of the day were filled with histories and observations upon it. No subject engrossed the conversation of the polite and play-going part of the community but Lord Byron, The Doge of Venice, and Mr. Elliston. They were all bepraised and beplastered—exalted and debased—acquitted and condemned; but it was generally allowed on all hands, that the printed Tragedy contained many striking beauties, notwithstanding its alleged resemblance to Venice Preserved. We are, however, speaking of the acted Tragedy, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... It was the first time she had ever worn the clothes of a woman. When she had attired herself in the silken robe which had been so fatal to the fortunes and life of Judith Pacewalk, it had been slipped on in masquerade fashion, debased from its high position to a mere protection from spilt milk. Miriam had thought of the purple silk when Miss Panney was telling her story, and had said to herself that if the stall in the cow-stable had been ever so much darker and dirtier, and if the milk ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... is the age of fraud, imposture, substitution, transmutation, adulteration, abomination, contamination, and many others of the same sinister ending, always excepting purification. Every thing is debased and sophisticated, and "nothing is but what is not." All things are mixed, lowered, debased, deteriorated, by our cozening dealers and shopkeepers; and, bad as they are, there is every reason to fear that they are "mox daturos progeniem vitiosiorem." We wonder at the increase of bilious ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... of universal duration. Disregarding, one is forced to say wilfully, the fact that every single one of their own arguments in favor of anthropoid descent for man would equally support a theory that the anthropoids are debased offshoots of human stocks,[45-*] biology still demands such a lapse of time for its physical evolution that its adherents oppose and belittle to the utmost every bit of evidence of any antiquity even for the physical frame of man. We have, ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... Shelley can only be called an Atheist, in so far as he maintained the inadequacy of hitherto received conceptions of the Deity, and indignantly rejected that Moloch of cruelty who is worshipped in the debased forms of Christianity. He was an Agnostic only in so far as he proclaimed the impossibility of solving the insoluble, and knowing the unknowable. His clear and fearless utterances upon these points place him in the rank of intellectual heroes. But his own soul, compact ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... to prevent the blacks from plundering, or from any other excess it pleased them to commit. The Old Dominion, the last State of the thirteen to be swept over by the foe, was harried as the Jerseys had been, but by troops made less merciful by many a fierce conflict, and by its own servitors, debased by slavery to but one degree above the brute. Only with death did the people forget the enormities of those few months, when Cornwallis's army cut a double swath from tide water almost to the mountains, and ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... the tyranny of corrupt administrations, and secure hereafter the first monarchy in Europe from the possibility of sinking under weak Princes, by whom the royal splendour of France has too often been debased into the mere tool of vicious and mercenary noblesse, and sycophantic courtiers. A King, protected by a Constitution, can do no wrong. He is unshackled with responsibility. He is empowered with the comfort of exercising the executive authority for the benefit ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... in spite of the wife's heroic efforts to accomplish the reform of a reprobate. She had struggled nobly till the last, and had died broken-hearted, leaving the helpless children to the mercy of a wretch whose nature had become utterly debased and brutalized. ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... did not appear. He walked steadily on. As he passed the low arched door of the mission church and saw a faint light glimmering from the side windows, he had indeed a weak human desire to go in and oppose in his own person a debased and idolatrous superstition with some happily chosen question that would necessarily make the officiating priest and his congregation exceedingly uncomfortable. But he resisted; partly in the hope of meeting ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... value: bad money drives out good money. Sir Thomas Gresham (whose name has but recently been given to this so-called law), explained the principle to Queen Elizabeth when counseling her regarding the recoinage of the debased money of the realm as was done in 1560. He showed that when old, worn coins were in circulation and the mint began putting out full-weight coins, the old lighter ones remained as money, while the new ones, being heavier, were picked out by jewelers and by ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... on his voyage across the Pacific, we will give a short account of the wretched natives of Tierra del Fuego, and of the general appearance of their country. These wretches, who were as miserable and debased as possible, subsisted upon the raw flesh ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... "Septimius," is tapestried with spider-webs; a particularly virulent spider which dangles over his head, as he sits at his writing-desk, being made to assume the aspect of a devilish familiar. On the other hand, his is a far richer and less debased nature than that of Portsoaken. Hawthorne appears subsequently to have divided him, straining off from the rank sediments which settle into the character of Dr. Portsoaken the clear sweetness of good Grandsir Dolliver. This "grim doctor," as he is almost invariably styled in the manuscript, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... hoped the committee would attend to the latter part of the assertion of Captain Smith. Yes:—this trade, while it injured the constitutions of our sailors, debased their morals. Of this, indeed, there was a barbarous illustration in the evidence. A slaveship had struck on some shoals, called the Morant Keys, a few leagues from the east end of Jamaica. The crew ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... them were lined by groups of colossal bulls. These are sculptured with considerable spirit, but art, in the sense that the Greeks understood it, did not exist. In the ordinary appliances of life the Assyrians were probably on a par with the Egyptians; but they were debased by savage passions and degrading superstitions. They have left nothing for subsequent ages to use. Nothing which has contributed to civilization remains of their existence. They have furnished no models ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... shrank as the preacher said "hell." He gave a maudlin cry, and almost whimpered, "No, sir, no, preacher, I am a-goin' to reform." John had known what note to touch in this debased nature. Not love, nor hope, nor shame, would move Tom Davis, but fear stung him into a semblance of sobriety. "I'll come along wi' you," he went on, swaying back and forth, and steadying himself with a hand on the lumber ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... had Debased the savage kind, And they this most unhappy lad Before (and eke behind) Designed In ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... fidelity is exacted from her with the greatest rigour. It may therefore be alleged, that as the New Zealanders place no value on the continence of their unmarried women, the arrival of Europeans among them does not injure their moral characters in this respect; but we doubt whether they ever debased themselves so much as to make a trade of their women, before we created new wants by shewing these iron tools, for the possession of which they do not hesitate to commit an action, that, in our eyes, deprives them of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... exterior change, this tender twilight of principle. He wouldn't as yet face the sterner fact that most people who are condemned by society, whether they are condemned justly or not, are by the very gregariousness of man's nature debased, and that a law or custom that stamps you as bad makes you bad. A great state should have high and humane and considerate laws nobly planned, nobly administered and needing none of these shabby little qualifications sotto ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... message in effect was this. "You are going into the proximate danger of capture, and if captured you must expect not justice, but every refinement of misrepresentation. You will be asked crooked questions, and your answers to them will be published in some debased form. Be sure that whatever then comes through to the outer world will come out poisoned and perverted. Let me therefore urge you to write now, and to leave in safe custody, what you would wish to have published then, in case infamous rumours should be put about during your incarceration, ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... what do you expect? Here is a whole class,—debased, uneducated, indolent, provoking,—put, without any sort of terms or conditions, entirely into the hands of such people as the majority in our world are; people who have neither consideration nor self-control, who haven't even an enlightened regard to their own interest,—for that's the case ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... self-culture have been the trend of thought and action. And this has not been altogether an effort in the individual for his own personal advancement, but for the advancement of the race. Men have undergone sacrifices, humbled and almost debased themselves, that the succeeding generation might live on a higher plane, physically, morally and spiritually, than they themselves enjoyed. I do not know of any act of humanity that calls forth louder praise ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... and other taxes unauthorized by law and the traditions of the feudal system; not only was he unjust and cruel towards the Templars in order to appropriate their riches; but he committed, over and over again, that kind of spoliation which imports most trouble into the general life of a people; he debased the coinage so often and to such an extent, that he was everywhere called "the base coiner." This was a financial process of which none of his predecessors, neither St. Louis nor Philip Augustus, had set him an example, though they had quite as many ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... turned away from God, who would be mad enough to say that the natural gifts in man remain unimpaired? That would be practically saying that man's nature is unimpaired and good even now, whereas we have overwhelming evidence in our knowledge and experience that it is debased ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... the natives, which I have not mentioned. I do not say that they are more savage, or rather fierce, than people of other parts of the world; indeed, in some respects they are less so, but their barbarism is the result of their ignorance and debased condition. They have no religion—properly so called—their only belief is in what we denote fetishism, which is a word taken from the Portuguese feticeira or witch. They have idols, but they can scarcely ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... lust that mastered him. She tried to tear herself from contact with his body, as from something base, unclean, revolting. His kisses held her. She was powerless to resist the passion that swept over her. Once more she surrendered,—and then came the shame, the overwhelming shame. She was debased, defiled! She put her hand to his face and pushed frantically to release herself from those ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... surely right in noticing that the rich man is said to have fared sumptuously every day, as though faring sumptuously might have no significance, but the constantly faring sumptuously was what had degraded and debased the man below the level of the beggar at his gate. I feel that to be luxurious occasionally is no bad thing, if we can keep our self-control, and return constantly to simple habits. There is something very natural in the prayer which a little child was overheard to ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... what sort of a race is this, so despised and ill-treated, so poor and ignorant, that in a brief time on our shores can build the finest temple to God which this country has yet seen? What will the people, to whom we have described this race as sunk in papistical stupidity, debased, unenterprising, think, when they gaze on this absolute proof of ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... brought him now to the Conclusion of the Affair: Having gone through his Catechizing of the Nobility, in which indeed they of his own Party appeared of a Temper patient and debased, below the true Spirit of Noblemen; (at least, God be praised, below the ancient Temper and Gallantry of the Nobility of Great Britain) Having come now to the Day for the Choice, which was the 10th Day of their Sixth Month, but as I suppose November: There appeared at the Place 33 Noblemen, ...
— Atalantis Major • Daniel Defoe
... contemptible—the colours pass from dirty red into brown and black. These certainly are the worst wall-paintings I have ever met with, worse even than the coarsest painted shrines on the waysides of Italy; indeed no Church save the Greek Church would tolerate an art thus debased. A year after my journey to Kief I travelled through the Tyrol on my way from the Ammergau Passion Play. The whole of this district abounds in frescoes, many being on the external walls of private dwellings. This village art of the Bavarian Highlands, though often the handiwork of simple ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... have been brought up to it, you plod on like beasts of burden, thinking only of the day and its pain—yet is there a man among you who can believe that such a system will continue forever—is there a man here in this audience tonight so hardened and debased that he dare rise up before me and say that he believes it can continue forever; that the product of the labor of society, the means of existence of the human race, will always belong to idlers and parasites, to be spent ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... character, and if the bodies of Isaiah, and Paul, and John must be seraphic, to correspond with their experience and attainments, what must the bodies of the wicked be! They will have spent centuries in sinning, and suffering, debased in every part, the image of God supplanted by the image of him whose service they preferred to that of a holy God and Saviour. What a moment will that be, when the sinner's grave is opened by the last trumpet, and a hideous form rises to ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... state of thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on their mercy. The desire of having some one below them descends to those who are the very lowest of all,—and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose footman's instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... Ancien Regime. There are flies which, by feeding on putridity, become poisonous themselves, as did Marat: but even they owe their vitality and organisation to something higher than that on which they feed; and each of them, however, defaced and debased, was at first a "thought of God." All true manhood consists in the defiance of circumstances; and if any man be the creature of circumstances, it is because he has become so, like the drunkard; because he has ceased to be a man, and sunk ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... individuality, and considers its own being, not as appertaining solely to itself, but as a portion of the universal Ego. All important good resolutions of character are brought about at these crises of life; and thus it is our sense of self which debases and keeps us debased." ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... Davis, of New York: "Republican government can never rest safely, it can never rest peacefully, upon any foundation save that of the intelligence and virtue of its subjects. No government, republican in form, was ever prosperous where its people were ignorant and debased. And in this Government, where our fathers paid so much attention to intelligence, to the cultivation of virtue, and to all considerations which should surround and guard the foundations of the republic, I am sure that we would do dishonor to their memory ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... condition would be pitiable indeed. All others would be equally miserable. The human race would multiply, until the fruits of the soil would be insufficient for its support; and earth would be filled with degenerate beings, starved in body and debased in mind—all clinging to an existence utterly without joy. Life is dark to me, but not to others: these are matters beyond you, and it is presumptuous in one of your condition to attempt to comfort me ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... sounding clarion summoned, as is wont, His troops to arms; nor trumpet blare betrayed Their nightly march: but rapidly he seized All needed instruments of blood and war. Of Latian race the most part of his train, Yet to barbarian customs were their minds By long forgetfulness of Rome debased: Else had it shamed to serve the Pharian King; But now his vassal and his minion's word Compel obedience. Those who serve in camps Lose faith and love of kin: their pittance earned (21) Makes just the deed: and for their sordid pay, Not for themselves, they threaten Caesar's life. Where finds ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... was unable to free his brain altogether from the idola specus which haunted the cell of the bookworm. The poor student, knowing nothing of women, save from books or from contact with the most debased, repeated, with the pruriency of a boy, the falsehoods about women which, armed with the authority of learned doctors, had grown reverend and incontestable with age; and even after the Reformation more than one witch-mania proved ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... Again it is ordained that silence is to be observed by parties of the three sacrificial classes when a Sudra enters to remove their natural defilements, and thus the servile position of the Sudra is recognised. [15] Here it appears that the Sudra is identified with the sweeper or scavenger, the most debased and impure of modern Hindu castes. [16] In the Dharmashastras or law-books it is laid down that a person taking a Sudra's food for a month becomes a Sudra and after death becomes a dog. Issue begotten after eating ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... individuals are informed of the nature of the transaction, there is an expression of real or pretended surprise that any one should deem that act improper, much more guilty; nay, in spite even of the solemn warnings of the physician, they will resort to the debased and murderous charlatan, who, for a piece of silver, will annihilate the life of the foetus, and endanger even that of ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... to religion, continue such as at present; but it must be admitted, on the other hand, that their habits, as to the way of spending Sundays, re-act powerfully on their sentiments; and that the minds of the lower orders, in particular, are much debased by the want of what have been emphatically called "these precious breathing times for the labouring part ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... without credit, jealous of one another, armed for mutual aggression, loaded with taxes to pay armies and leaders, seeking aid against each other from foreign powers, insulted and trampled upon by the nations of Europe, until, harassed with conflicts and humbled and debased in spirit, they would be ready to submit to the absolute dominion of any military adventurer and to surrender their liberty for the sake of repose. It is impossible to look on the consequences that would inevitably follow the destruction ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... me to write a tragedy on my own account; which, while following Shakespeare in his good points, should avoid his weaknesses, which should embody the best features of the nursery rhymes, and which should avoid like poison the shockingly debased ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... unfortunate encounter between Zulus and Boers by which the latter lost over fifty of their numbers under deplorable circumstances. This portion of the Transvaal has only recently been annexed, and is inhabited by warlike Zulus, who are very different from the debased Kaffirs of the rest of the country. These men had a blood-feud against the Boers, which was embittered by the fact that they had lost heavily through Boer depredations. Knowing that a party of fifty-nine men were sleeping ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... expressions, the general vulgarity of the scene, could have had no other effect than to break down that purity of thought and word which women have, and which conservative and radical are alike sedulous to preserve. And yet the actual presence of women at political meetings has not debased them but has raised the other sex. Coarseness has not become diffused through both sexes but has fled from both. To put the whole matter in a short phrase: The association of the sexes in the family circle, in society, and in business, having improved both, there is neither history, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... his work, Dr. Tuckerman sought out all who were in need of his services, without distinction of nationality, color, creed, social position, or moral condition. If he gave the preference to any, it was those who were the most wretched and debased. "It is the first object of the ministry at large, never to be lost sight of," he wrote, "and to which no other is to be preferred, as far as shall be possible to extend its offices to the poor and the poorest, ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... and horny: they have faces somewhat like those of men, but coarse, hideous and furrowed with the lines of exposure. They speak, they have a language, but their words are few and relate only to the heavy drudgery which is before them. These humble and debased animals are women. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... which is due to such men alone. Would you dash out the signature of one who declares you his trustee for a legacy to your children? No, you would not. Neither will you reject the proofs of high esteem, however manifested, which England, however debased, is anxious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... race sank so low that the apes branched off from it, and afterwards the lower Vertebrates. When this theory of degeneration was consistently developed, its supporters were bound to hold that the entire animal kingdom was descended from the debased children of men. ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... holds good even though it be shown that a bad man may write a poem. As motives short of the purest lead to actions intrinsically good, so frames of mind short of virtuous will produce a partial and limited poetry. But even where it is exhibited, the poetry of a vicious mind will be inconsistent and debased; i. e. so far only such, as the traces and shadows of holy truth still remain upon it. On the other hand, a right moral feeling places the mind in the very centre of that circle from which all the rays have their origin and range; whereas ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the burden of the Negro in 1914 we may include Caucasian arrogance, hatred and prejudice of race, injustice of attitude and treatment, personal fear for life and property, improperly requited toil, unrewarded ambition, unmerited disfavor and debased self-respect. What profound pathos in the love which he ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... here, is either that of Portugal, consisting chiefly of thirty-six shillings pieces; or pieces both of gold and silver, which are struck at this place: The pieces of silver, which are very much debased, are called petacks, and are of different value, and easily distinguished by the number of rees that is marked on the outside. Here is also a copper coin, like that in Portugal, of five and ten ree pieces. A ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... brethren the name of Minors, and to their superiors that of Ministers, in order that their very name should cause them to be humble. These are the maxims by which he used to impress this upon them:—"The Son of God debased Himself in coming from the bosom of His Father to us, to teach us humility by His example and by His word, as our Lord and Master." "What is exalted in the eyes of man is an abomination before God." "Man is nothing but what he is before God, and is nothing more. It ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... of them exclaimed, "it is frightful to murder this young man, whose only offence is resistance to insult from his debased half-breed keeper. Is ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... substitute reflection for passion. There is no other way. By these remarks, I do not mean to charge on the laboring class all the passionateness of the country. All classes partake of the madness, and all are debased by it. The fiery spirits are not confined to one portion of the community. The men, whose ravings resound through the halls of Congress, and are then circulated through the country as eloquence, are not taken ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... me that she had read the Scriptures misunderstandingly all her life; that she had taken their truths to her in affright; that their majesty had, instead of raising her up to their height, debased her even below herself. I saw in all from the first, even had friend Afton not told me, that what is called religion had wrecked her mind, and in my own manner of understanding the Lord's way I could scarcely ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... decreasing reserve on her part. He shamed himself more than once for deploring the fact that her ankle was mending with uncommon rapidity, and that in a few days she would be quite able to walk without support. And he actually debased himself by wishing that the Rushcroft company might find it imperative to go on rehearsing for weeks ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... together in a hut; Young Rustick, where a corner seemed to jut; A bed of rushes for the novice placed, Since sleeping on the floor had her debased, Who, yet unused to hardships, much must feel: 'Twas best that these should on her senses steal. A little fruit, and bread not over fine, She had for supper:—water too for wine. The hermit fasted; but the lady fed, And ate with appetite ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... the Graeco-Roman tragedy as tedious, and it was replaced by a more sensuous and sensational form of entertainment. The intenser passions and emotions were not banished from the stage, but survived in the salticae fabulae and a peculiar species of dramatic recitation. Infinitely debased as were these substitutes for true drama, the forms assumed by the decomposition of tragedy are yet curious and interesting. The first step was the separation of the cantica from the diverbia. Lyric scenes or even important iambic monologues were taken from their setting and sung as solos ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... foliage from the touch of a coarse finger. He had never before been associated with the faintest rumour of it,—his life had been too simple, too austere, and too far removed from all the trumpery shows and petty intrigues of society. He felt himself now in a manner debased by having had to listen with enforced patience to Bainton's rambling account of the gossip going on in the neighbourhood, and despite that worthy servitor's disquisition on the subject, he could not imagine how it had arisen, unless his quarrel with Putwood Leveson were the cause. It was all ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Christian or civilised principle, to torture prisoners. Unless the end justifies the means, in which case there is no morality, the rack was an abomination, and those who applied it to extort either confession or evidence debased themselves to the level of the Holy Inquisitors. Froude did not, I grieve to say, stop at an apology for the rack. In a passage which must always disfigure his book he thus describes the fate of Antony Babington and those who suffered with ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... southern face of "the Supreme," and everywhere else—near Abousir, at Saqqara, at Dahshur or in the Fayum—the majority of the royal pyramids attracted around them a more or less numerous cortege of pyramids of princely foundation often debased in shape and faulty in proportion. The materials for them were brought from the Arabian chain. A spur of the latter, projecting in a straight line towards the Nile, as far as the village of Troiu, is nothing ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... addicted to the vices in which she had been initiated by his superlative perfidy and craft, until she was quite abandoned by decency and caution. Her father's heart was torn with anguish, while his wife rejoiced in her fall; at length her ideas were quite debased by her infirmity; she grew every day more and more sensual and degenerate, and contracted an intimacy with one of the footmen, who was kind enough to take her to wife, in hope of obtaining a good settlement ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... other evidences of a struggle for reform along the line of least resistance, as though in the unavoidable future conflict between timidly propounded theories and politico-social forces the former had any serious chance of surviving. In politics, as in coinage, it is the debased metal that ousts ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... or debased himself. In addition to manifesting his servant form in becoming man and faring as an ordinary human being, he went farther and made himself lower than any man. He abased himself to serve all men with the supreme service—the gift of his life in ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... replied that in order to bring down his thoughts from their almost painful elevation to the sober regions of life, he was obliged to think of the ham and beef shop near St. Martin's Lane. Lamb says that after such a holiday he finds his office work very strange. "I feel debased; but I shall soon break in my mountain spirit." The last two words were a recollection of his ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... character, possibly—tearful, humbled, supplicating. No; his instincts told him that not even the last extremity of danger would force a tear from those proud eyes, nor bow that haughty head an inch. How this wild, fierce worship maddened him! So longing, yet so slavish—so reckless, so debased, yet all the while cursed with a certain leavening of the true faith, that drove him to despair. But come what might, in a few minutes he would see her again. Even at such a time, there was something of repose ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... instilled into her veins the rippling laughter of water and sunshine and the song of the winds, and whose every breath had been the rapturous breath of freedom, viewed life from a different standpoint than that of men debased by centuries of servitude. The world of their creation was trifling in comparison to that of God's which to her was all sufficing and enabled her to look upon their doings with the same equanimity and indulgence as that with which the parent regards ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... In the centre of the piazza, women—saffron and poppy-coloured handkerchiefs tied round their dark heads—washed, with a fine impartiality, soiled linen and vegetables in an iron trough, grated for a third of its length, before a fountain of debased and flamboyant design. Their voices were alternately shrill and gutteral. It was perhaps as well not to understand too clearly all which they said. On the left came a break in the high, painted house-fronts, off which in places the plaster scaled, and from ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... had reddened and reddened with successive rushes of blood until it was now purple, lost all self-control at Marmaduke's commiserating tone. "I will see whether I cannot put him in the wrong," he burst out, in the debased voice of an ignobly angry man. "Do you think I will let him tell the world that I have been thrown over ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... its genial unbent look into formality as he turned to her,—"the place itself I do not understand to be very disagreeable; it is the character of the population which must make it a hard place to live in. They are exceedingly debased. Vile people!" ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... justice, and that with rigour; the best maxim which a prince in that age could follow. Stealing was first made capital in this reign [e]; false coining, which was then a very common crime, and by which the money had been extremely debased, was severely punished by Henry [f]. Near fifty criminals of this kind were at one time hanged or mutilated; and though these punishments seem to have been exercised in a manner somewhat arbitrary, they were grateful ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... Nothing in all history indicates the ability of a savage people to pass of itself from the savage state to the civilized. But the primitive man, as described by Horace in his Satires, and asserted by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others, is far below the savage. The lowest, most degraded, and most debased savage tribe that has yet been discovered has at least some rude outlines or feeble reminiscences of a social state, of government, morals, law, and religion, for even in superstition the most gross there is a reminiscence ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... Smith to the present time, Moslem girls have been taught to read and write and sew, and there are many now learning in the various American, British and Prussian schools. But it will be long before any true idea of the dignity of woman enters the debased minds of Arab Mohammedans. The simple fact is that there is no moral purity or elevation among the men, and how can it be expected among the women. The Moslem idea of woman is infinitely lower than the old Jewish idea. Woman in the time of Christ was highly ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... Imbecility which shows itself in the inability to see any person or any thing save in a halo of the debased effluvium which the imbecile creature himself exudes, and in the firm conviction—that is where the Imbecility comes in—that the halo pertains not to himself but to the object he gazes at. Law, necessary as it is, powerfully aids these manifestations, and the Policeman is the accepted ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... either the Constitution must by degrees work itself clear by its own innate strength and the virtue and resolution of the community, or the laws of impartial Providence would avenge on their posterity the injury done to a class of unhappy men debased ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... measure, the expiring dignity of letters, the mystery of books. Day by day the wonderfulness of life is becoming lost to us. The sanctities of religion are defiled, the 'fairy tales' of science have become commonplaces. Christian mysteries are debased in the streets to the sound of drum and trumpet, and the sensitive ear of the telephone is but a servile drudge 'twixt speculative bacon merchants. And Books!—those miraculous memories of high thoughts and golden moods; those magical shells tremulous with the secrets ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... France are upon the public mind. I still misbelieve it. I have not the slightest doubt that the Decembriseur is full of treachery towards the North, and that his Imperialist lackeys blow brimstone against the Northern principles. But are the French people so debased as to submit? We shall see. Let that crowned conspirator begin a war of treason against the North. Before long the French people will put an end to the war ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... has no future, save one contingent upon the interruption of the American supply, of which there does not appear much danger. But it must be borne in mind that the fall in the value of silver so far is a direct gain to native productions. The planter and manufacturer alike pay in the debased currency and sell the product as far as it is exported for gold, upon which they realize a handsome premium. America needs a continuance of low rates for transportation to counterbalance this advantage of ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie |
