"Degenerate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... talent of the craftsman. The manner of the oldest weavers was to produce a fabric not too thick, flexible rather—for was it not meant to hang in folds?—and of an engagingly even surface. It was not too fine, yet had none of the looseness associated with the coarse, hurried work of later and degenerate times. It was more like the even fabric we associate with machine work, yet as unlike that as palpitating flesh is like a graven image. It was the logical production of honest workmen who counted time well spent if spent ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... for their wealth, hated because they had dared to keep their rights and treaties and sell goods to the enemies of Germany, and despised because the Germans believed them too rich and cowardly, too fat and degenerate, to fight in the great war for the mastery of ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... and sole takes place, and the arch of the sole bends down under the pressure until the ground surface of the hoof becomes flat or convex, bulging down even lower than the cruel iron that clamps its edge. This is the condition of a drop sole. This degenerate state of the foot has other complications. Active inflammation is often present and all the wretchedness of a pumiced foot—the despair of owner and veterinary—is experienced. The smith, whose clumsy contrivance has been the cause of all the woe, has abundant reasons to offer for the disease, ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... take what was offered us, and be thankful that it was no worse. Often many of our poor fellows had not the bare necessaries of life, and it was only by great exertion that I was able to procure them, as I have described, for myself and a few of my more intimate friends. I had not supposed that so degenerate a race of Frenchmen existed, for when they saw us all rapidly sickening and advancing towards the grave, instead of relaxing their system of tyranny, they only increased their ill-treatment, and made us believe that they really wished to put us to ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... and with a decisive word opened the gates of happiness for millions and closed them upon millions more: how different nations pioneered in art and knowledge and broke ground for the mightier growths of coming ages; how civilization underwent as it were, the holocaust of a degenerate age, and rose again, like the Phoenix, among the nobler sons of the North; and how by liberty, tolerance and education the great and the wise have opened the way for the ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... person readily acknowledges that far greater weight ought to be attached to the finding of this Commission than to the declarations of the complainants, who contradicted one another in nearly every particular, and who caused the whole enquiry to degenerate into a farce." ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... observation that the beavers of the present day seem to be a degenerate race, as they neither fell huge trees not construct great dams, while their progenitors cut down trees two feet in diameter and dammed up rivers a hundred feet in width. The change in the habits of the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... or more the old wolf sat there, challenging his degenerate mates in every silence, calling the tame to be wild, the bound to be free again, and listening gravely to the wailing answer of the dogs, which refused with groanings, as if dragging themselves away from overmastering temptation. Then the shadow vanished from the big rock on the mountain, the huskies ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... followed the dusty road and examined the telegraph poles, for the woodpecker of these latter days has departed from the ways of his fathers, deserted the cool and fragrant woods, and taken up his abode in degenerate places, a fitting change of residence to follow his change of habit from digging his prey out of the tree-trunks to ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... her a cripple, or an invalid, or an imbecile, or tuberculous, everybody would cry out with horror, and she would become a social outcast. But if she inflicts these injuries on her granddaughter, by marrying her daughter to a drunkard, in the hope of reforming him, or to a wealthy degenerate, or an imbecile baron, no one says a word, provided the marriage ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... fashion that sets back old Turnspit into the remotest corner under the backstairs of the Dark Ages. I have alluded to his alleged descendants, as pointed out to my observation in boyhood; but they were an effete and degenerate race, purposeless, and wallowing much with the pigs, whom their grandsires would have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... Anthony appeared to the convention like Minerva, goddess of wisdom. Her advent was with thunders, not of applause, but of the scorn of a degenerate masculinity. The great Horatio said, with infinite condescension, that he held in his hand a memorial of the women of the United States. The name of Miss Anthony was greeted with a yell such as a Milton might imagine to rise from a conclave of the damned. "She asked to plead the cause of her ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... of the senses, indulging in these alone; whereas the natural pour forth into the world all things of the will and understanding, covetously and fraudulently acquiring wealth, and regarding no other use therein and thence but that of possession. The above-mentioned adulteries change men in these degenerate degrees, one into this, another into that, each according to his favorite taste for what is pleasurable, in which taste his ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... contempt of pain and death, this noble contempt, so universal amongst the men of that time, deprived cruelty of its sting. Our degenerate race has scarcely a conception of the strength which made the men of past times find a pleasure even in pains, since they spurred their courageous souls to the highest pitch of heroism; since in such moments they felt themselves able to be more ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... into town on the Fourth of July, and has Chinese crackers and fiery serpents cast under his heels. One evening, in particular, they asked me to play the game of Comparisons (a proverbially odious game, that could exist only in an effete and degenerate civilization), in which the entire company tried to see how Funny they could be; and because I made stupid answers, I was laughed at by the ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... where are they? and where art thou, My country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands like mine? ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... of September, 1809, Governor Harrison called all the tribes that claimed certain lands between the White and Wabash rivers to a council. Only a few of the weak and degenerate tribes answered the summons. Nevertheless, he went through the ceremony of making a treaty by which the United States government claimed three million acres ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... honours? IDA, once your own, When Probus fill'd your magisterial throne; As ancient Rome fast falling to disgrace, Hail'd a Barbarian in her Caesar's place; So you degenerate share as hard a fate, And seat Pomposus, where your Probus sate. Of narrow brain, but of a narrower soul, Pomposus, holds you in his harsh controul; Pomposus, by no social virtue sway'd, With florid jargon, and with vain parade; With ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... in thought. "You know," he broke out, suddenly, "this war has been a revelation to me—the most horrible you could imagine. It's as if you loved a woman, and saw her go insane before your eyes, or turn into some sort of degenerate. For I believed in the Christmas-tree Germany; I loved it, and I argued for it, I just couldn't bring myself to believe what I read in the papers. Now I look back, and it seems like a trap that the German war-lords had set for my mind—reaching way ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... shew-picture is a last year's Valentine, and whither the fame of the last ten Scotch novels has not yet travel'd (marry, they just begin to be conscious of the Red Gauntlet), to have a new plasterd flat church, and to be wishing that it was but a Cathedral. The very blackguards here are degenerate. The topping gentry, stock brokers. The passengers too many to ensure your quiet, or let you go about whistling, or gaping—too few to be the fine indifferent pageants of Fleet Street. Confining, room-keeping thickest winter is yet more bearable here than the gaudy months. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the vitalising and nourishing principles in maritime sands under the effects of heat, light, and moisture, it is necessary to retrace our steps and walk round the sandspit to the transfigured and degenerate mouth of that once mangrove-creek known to the blacks by a name signifying that a boy once tethered in it a sucking fish (Remora). Obstructed by a bank, the creek is dead and dry save when the floods of the wet season co-operate with high tides and effect ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... turning black on the distant hills, and the silent stars were slowly coming into view. Clean, health-giving Baden-Baden, in the Valley of the Oos, with its beauty and its pure air, was holding out her arms to all the disease and filth that degenerate ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... not that our builders are degenerate, but that their art is a trade, occupies only their hands, not their minds, and this by no fault in them or in anybody, but by the natural progress of the world. In each age by turn some one mental organ is in a state of hypertrophy; immediately that becomes the medium of expression,—not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... cold at the calm pride of this degenerate fiend, had it not been boiling at the reference to Helene. He crept nearer to them, along the wall. He lay down on the floor, below the level of the first bullet paths. Then he drew his automatic and the bulb light, ready for ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... Horrible sympathy! And leagued with these Each petty German princeling, nursed in gore! Soul-hardened barterers of human blood![116:1] 180 Death's prime slave-merchants! Scorpion-whips of Fate! Nor least in savagery of holy zeal, Apt for the yoke, the race degenerate, Whom Britain erst had blushed to call her sons! Thee to defend the Moloch Priest prefers 185 The prayer of hate, and bellows to the herd, That Deity, Accomplice Deity In the fierce jealousy of wakened wrath Will go forth with our armies and our fleets To scatter ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... opinion of Christendom has not altogether condemned passionate friendships between persons of the same sex, but has certainly not encouraged them, because though innocent in themselves in a few temperaments they are liable to degenerate into fearful evil. Pausanias is very earnest in the defence of such loves; and he speaks of them as generally approved among Hellenes and disapproved by barbarians. His speech is 'more words than matter,' and might have been composed by a pupil of Lysias or of Prodicus, although ...
— Symposium • Plato
... O degenerate Italy! exclaims Dante; land without affections, without principle, without faith in any one good thing! here was a man who could not hear the sweet sound of a fellow-citizen's voice without feeling his heart gush towards him, and there are no people now in any ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... flavour and attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... their attraction for each other. One can imagine that their state presented an example of the way in which people of abnormal instincts tend to drift together: Arthur, the a-moral prodigy, and Gabrielle, the last offshoot of the decayed house of Hewish, daughter of the definitely degenerate Sir Jocelyn. But I do not think that there was anything abnormal or decadent in Gabrielle's composition. Her nature was gay and uncomplicated, in singular contrast to her involved and sombre fate. One is forced to the conclusion that the Payne miracle was the result of nothing more uncommon ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... historical facts related in the Bible, in order that those believers who were unable to read might in this way instruct themselves in sacred history, but that great care must be taken that such a practice might not degenerate into idolatry. ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... wonderfully. As a doctor had roughly expressed it, this girl of fourteen, at a critical period of her life, already ravaged, too, by asthma, was, after all, simply an exceptional victim of hysteria, afflicted with a degenerate heredity and lapsing into infancy. If there were no violent crises in her case, if there were no stiffening of the muscles during her attacks, if she retained a precise recollection of her dreams, the reason was that her case was peculiar to herself, and she added, so to say, a new and very curious ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... and interfused that to human eyes they seem to coalesce into a multitude of individualities. This is in course of years, the real, the hidden condition of a nation, which has been bathed in Christian ideas, whether it be a young vigorous race, or an old and degenerate; and it will manifest itself socially and historically in those characteristics, sometimes grotesque, sometimes hideous, sometimes despicable, of which we have so many instances, medieval and modern, both in this hemisphere and in the western. It is, I say, the ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... those who are addicted to that vice, every impediment should be put in the way. Drinking is a vice, the disposition to which grows with its gratification; most other avocations (for drinking in moderation is only such) have no tendency of the sort. Those enjoyments which have a tendency to degenerate into vice should be kept under some check; those which have no such tendency ought to be encouraged; for, where the main and general mass of the population of a country is corrupted, it is impossible to prevent its decline. If it remains uncorrupted, ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... unsurpassed,— For England's sake, For our dear Sovereign's sake,— We cry all shame on traitors, high and low, Whose word let no man take, Whose love let no man seek throughout the land,— Traitors who strive, with most degenerate hand, To bring about ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... consternation, from the lookouts on the boldest of its headlands, to those on the turrets of Windsor Castle. But I was born without nobility of twenty generations to corrupt my blood and deaden my soul, and am not trusted by the degenerate wretches who rule the ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... as a sister of my own to whom a maternal uncle had left a fabulous fortune. She herself had suggested her being sheltered under my aunt's roof as a singularly welcome "paying guest." She herself, too, had suggested the visit to Paris and had hired the house from a degenerate Duc de Luynes who preferred the delights of an appartement in ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... the number of nearly one-twentieth of the whole amount of her slaves in that year. To learn whether your native Virginia clung in the year 1787 to the inter-state traffic in human flesh, we must take our post of observation, not amongst her degenerate sons, who, in 1836, sold men, women, and children, to the amount of twenty-four millions of dollars—not amongst her President Dews, who write books in favor of breeding human stock for exportation—but amongst her Washingtons, and Jeffersons, and Henrys, and Masons, who, at ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... an enemy. The Tsar, on the other hand, he considered cowardly, false, and despicable. It was a proof of the incapacity of the bourgeois that they had tolerated such a Tsar. Monarchs were all of them more or less degenerate; he could not understand how anyone could accept a form of government which involved the risk of having a degenerate ruler. I answered him as to this, that a monarchy had first of all one advantage, that there was at least one place in the state ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... Europe stood aloof from her, she drew her stores of provisions from the Moslem ports, and was thus enabled successfully to resist the pressure which she suffered from the interdict. She foresaw, too, the growing power of the Turks, and perceived that in the future they would triumph over the degenerate Greek empire at Constantinople. She had spent her blood and treasure freely in maintaining that empire; but the weakness and profligacy of its emperors, the intestine quarrels and disturbances which were forever going on, and the ingratitude with which she had always treated ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... Behaviour, all outward Show of Virtue, and Abhorrence of Vice, are carefully avoided by this Set of Shame-faced People, as what would disparage their Gayety of Temper, and infallibly bring them to Dishonour. This is such a Poorness of Spirit, such a despicable Cowardice, such a degenerate abject State of Mind, as one would think Human Nature incapable of, did we not meet with frequent Instances of ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Gonzaga's features lack distinction this portrait shows fine qualities and good breeding. Nothing could better illustrate how minute are the plastic details which will revolutionise a countenance; how easily noble and handsome features can degenerate into what is sordid and vulgar. In this bust the chin, though receding, is far from weak; the lips are full but not sensual; the nose has the faint aquiline curve of distinction. There is benevolence in the eyes, meditation in the brow, dignity ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... at the first glance to invest it, and takes rank, without any straining, among the other processes of selection. It seems to me that, from the facts that sterile animal forms can adapt themselves to new vital functions, their superfluous parts degenerate, and the parts more used adapt themselves in an ascending direction, those less used in a descending direction, we must draw the conclusion that harmonious adaptation here comes about without the cooeperation of the Lamarckian principle. This conclusion once established, ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... handful of earth, he trimmed the plant frequently, he pulled at it to lengthen it and hasten its growth, he grafted on it cedars and oaks, until one day the little tree died, leaving the man convinced that it belonged to a degenerate species, attributing the failure of his experiment to everything except the lack of soil and his ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... the opinion of many grave divines concerning the gospel's fleeting westward. Sometimes I have had such thoughts, Why may not that be the place of the New Jerusalem? But you have handsomely and fully cleared me from such odd conceits. But what, I pray? Shall our English there degenerate, and join themselves with Gog and Magog? We have heard lately divers ways, that our people there have no hope of the conversion of the natives. And, the very week after I received your last letter, I saw a letter, written from New England, discoursing of an impossibility ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... it, anyhow, and I'll play the game for them. If I ever had had a father I'd like to talk politics with him. He must have had some decency in him, or I'd have been all bad, like my mother. Or maybe I'm a throw-back from two degenerate parents. Well, we'll end ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... It is transmitted with difficulty to sheep and goats, and cattle seem to be entirely immune. It runs a variable course and usually produces the death of the animal affected with it. It is characterized by the formation of neoplasms, or nodules, of connective tissue, which degenerate into ulcers, from which exude a peculiar discharge. It is accompanied with a variable degree of fever, according to the rapidity of its course. It is subject to various complications of the lymphatic glands, of the lungs, of ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... was one of this breed. But it was supposed by many to have become extinct soon after the disappearance of the last wolf in Ireland, and it was the endeavour of Captain Graham to demonstrate that specimens, although admittedly degenerate, were still to be found, and that they were capable of being restored to a semblance ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... condition of things sometimes results from a confusion of those factious tyrannies into which kings, aristocrats, and democrats are apt to degenerate. For thus, from these diverse elements, there occasionally arises (as I have said before) a new kind of government. And wonderful indeed are the revolutions and periodical returns in natural constitutions of such alternations and vicissitudes, which it is the part of the wise politician to investigate ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... not through its fault, But his who fills it basely), he besought, No dispensation for commuted wrong, Nor the first vacant fortune, nor the tenth), That to God's paupers rightly appertain, But, 'gainst an erring and degenerate world, Licence to fight, in favour of that seed, From which the twice twelve cions gird thee round. Then, with sage doctrine and good will to help, Forth on his great apostleship he far'd, Like torrent bursting from a lofty vein; And, dashing 'gainst ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... points the way to new ideas of, the primitive relations of different organic systems in respect of their function and topography. One of the most puzzling features in its structure, and, at the same time, one of the greatest obstacles to the view that it is essentially primitive and not merely a degenerate creature, is the entire absence of the paired organs of special sense, olfactory, optic and auditory, which are so characteristic of the higher vertebrates. Although it is true that there is a certain amount of gradation in the degree of development to which ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... unenvious, and unambitious. Meaner men, their contemporaries or successors, raved of high art with incoherent passion; arrogated to themselves an equality with the masters of elder time, and declaimed against the degenerate tastes of a public which acknowledged not the return of the Heraclidae. But the two great—the two only painters of their age—happy in a reputation founded as deeply in the heart as in the judgment of mankind, demanded no higher function than that of soothing ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and reserve and repression are parts of the dignified office of the preacher, but carried too far may degenerate into weak and unproductive effort. Perfection of English style, rhetorical floridness, and profundity of thought will never wholly make up for lack of appropriate action in the work ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... air of displeasure, reprehended Ferdinand for yielding his confidence to those idle alarms, which he said were the suggestions of a timid imagination. 'Alarms,' continued he, 'which will readily find admittance to the weak mind of a woman, but which the firmer nature of man should disdain.—Degenerate boy! Is it thus you reward my care? Do I live to see my son the sport of every idle tale a woman may repeat? Learn to trust reason and your senses, and you will then be worthy of ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... that He alone was the righteous seed of David; for although Hezekiah and Josiah were legitimate successors, yet, when we look to others, they were, as it were, monsters. Except three or four, all the rest were degenerate and covenant-breakers." The words: "I raise unto David a righteous Branch" are here, as well as in chap. xxxiii. 15, not by any means equivalent to: a righteous Branch of David. On the contrary, David is designated as he to whom the act of raising belongs, for whose sake it is undertaken. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... is this, and I feel that it is just the holiest thing in matrimony, and its greatest justification—that love should never degenerate into softness, that each should consciously stimulate the better part of the other and discourage the worse, that there should be a discipline in our life, and that we should brace each other up to a higher ideal. The love ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... off. Like tired dogs, we still creep into our holes. The youngest were moaning and tossing, as they have done every night for weeks past—shaking off sleep like a harmful narcotic, because the poison of fighting is too strong for most blood in these degenerate days. What sounds have I not heard during the past two months—what sighs, what gasps, what groans, what muttered protests! When men lie asleep, their imaginations betray ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... ought alone to be inculcated; and that the exceptions, which are rare, ought seldom or never to be mentioned in popular reasonings and discourses. Nor is there any danger that mankind, by this prudent reserve, should universally degenerate into a state of abject servitude. When the exception really occurs, even though it be not previously expected and descanted on, it must, from its very nature, be so obvious and undisputed, as to remove all doubt, and overpower the restraint, however great, imposed by teaching ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... pustules. At their first appearance they are commonly of a palish blue, or rather of a colour somewhat approaching to livid, and are surrounded by an erysipelatous inflammation. These pustules, unless a timely remedy be applied, frequently degenerate into phagedenic ulcers, which prove extremely troublesome[2]. The animals become indisposed, and the secretion of milk is much lessened. Inflamed spots now begin to appear on different parts of the hands of the domestics ...
— An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae • Edward Jenner
... nice distinctions, admits that Burns was not a man of degraded genius, but a degraded man of genius. Burns was neither the one nor the other. In spite of the occasional excesses of his later years, he did not degenerate into drunkenness, nor was the sense of his responsibilities as a husband, a father, and a man less clear and acute in the last months of his life than it had ever been. Had he lived a few years longer, we should have seen the man mellowed by sorrow and suffering, braving life, not as ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... placid disposition, so danger and war are a pleasure to the Alani, and among them that man is called happy who has lost his life in battle. For those who grow old, or who go out of the world from accidental sicknesses, they pursue with bitter reproaches as degenerate and cowardly. Nor is there anything of which they boast with more pride than of having killed a man: and the most glorious spoils they esteem the scalps which they have torn from the heads of those whom ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... contemporaries had suffered from, but which he was certain involved enormous dangers not only for himself but also to the next and subsequent generations (see Note B., where "pity" is mentioned among the degenerate virtues). Later in the book we shall see how his profound compassion leads him into temptation, and how frantically he struggles against it. In verses 31 and 32, he tells us to what extent he had to modify himself in order to be endured by his fellows ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... meeting, as I am obliged to return hither on Saturday the 2nd of January. This is really a curious way of employing you; however, you will gain something by it; you will acquire a particular exactness in knowing the days of the month, a science too much neglected in these degenerate days, but a science which was cultivated with a glorious ardour in Greece and Rome, and was no doubt the cause of their flourishing so ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... dishwashing of the country. And note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children—for all of which things the community has naturally to pay. And now consider that in each of my little free communities there would be a machine which would wash and dry the dishes, and do it, not merely to ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... 'solemn' that day! I made my agonized protest on the spot, but it fell unheeded, and with satisfied sneer Eliza knit on, and the young Californian continued making the rosebuds. I gazed into space, and, when alone, wept for my degenerate countrywoman. I not only was 'solemn' that day, but I am profoundly 'solemn' whenever I think of that queenly woman and that cotton wash rag. (One can buy a whole dozen of these useful appliances, with red borders ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... to the further life-history of hydatids, the living elements of the cyst may die and degenerate, or the cyst may increase in size until it ruptures. As a result of pyogenic infection the cyst may be converted ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... with love and pride, and the father was a gentleman, like Falstaff, a pure gentleman. The daughter-in-law also peered out to look at Il Giovann', who was evidently a figure of repute, in his sordid, degenerate American respectability. Meanwhile, this figure of repute blew himself red in the face, producing staccato strains on his cornet. And the crowd stood desolate and forsaken in the ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... products. But they come from a comprehensible idea; and the new woman comes from nothing and nowhere. It is right to have an ideal, it is right to have the right ideal, and these two have the right ideal. The slum mother with her funerals is the degenerate daughter of Antigone, the obstinate priestess of the household gods. The lady talking bad Italian was the decayed tenth cousin of Portia, the great and golden Italian lady, the Renascence amateur of life, who could ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... along the wall for support. Was this a dream, some ghastly, soul-terrifying nightmare! Danglar! Those working lips! That callous viciousness, that leer in the degenerate face. It seemed to bring a weakness to her limbs, and seek to rob her of the strength to stand. She could not even hope against hope; she knew that Danglar was in deadly earnest. Danglar would not have the slightest compunction, let alone hesitation, in carrying out his threat. Terrified ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... Indians present with Cortes, Malinal alone could speak two languages. The Tabascans spoke a sort of degenerate Maya, with which, as she had lived among them so long, she was of course perfectly familiar, at the same time she had not forgotten her native Mexican. It would have been impossible for Cortes to have communicated with ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the most pernicious things in the world. The stunted man is a retrogression in the human race: he throws a shadow over all succeeding generations The tendencies and natural purpose of the individual science become degenerate, and science itself is finally shipwrecked: it has made progress, but has either no effect at all on life or ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Indians at his speech, because such attractions are rare in Belleville, and the Indian would come to see what it is that stirs up so much his white friend and brother. Of course, the Indian in his degenerate days, would take the chance to get drunk, and, being in a whiskey stupor, he naturally supposed that Mr. Grayson was chanting a chant of victory, and quite as naturally he chanted in return his own chant, and also quite as naturally this chant was about the deed that he ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... cannot stand the touch-stone of truth; there are mean plebeians, who sweat and struggle to maintain the appearance of gentlemen; and, on the other hand, there are gentlemen of rank who seem industrious to appear mean and degenerate; the one sort raise themselves either by ambition or virtue, while the other abase themselves by viciousness or sloth; so that we must avail ourselves of our understanding and discernment in distinguishing ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... family a right, who have been always eminent in the support and favour of our religion and liberties. And if the promises of your youth, your education at home, and your experience abroad, deceive me not, the principles you have embraced are such, as will no way degenerate from your ancestors, but refresh their memory in the minds of all true Englishmen, and renew their lustre in your person; which, my lord, is not more the wish, than it is the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... admirer of quality, grew in a short time to be very intimate, and imagining that she may one day make her market of the girls, has much ingratiated herself with them. She introduced me—I drank, and abused this degenerate age with the father—promised wonders to the mother for all her brats—praised her gooseberry wine, and ogled the daughters, by which means in three days I made the progress I related ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... with their traditions of slavery and dark beginnings in the experimental pens of the older race, continued to insist that across the sea—on the unknown western continent—Those Others still held onto the remnants of a degenerate civilization. Thus the explorers from Homeport went out by ones and twos and used the fauna of the land as a ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... the Prince had died prematurely at the age of fifty, and with him the Ciceronian traditions had ended in Casa Conti, and their place had been taken by the caprices of the big, healthy, indolent, extravagant Polish woman, by the miserable weaknesses of a degenerate heir, and the fanatic ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... laudable to grasp at wealth and power even when they were within our reach? Were not these the two great sources of depravity? What security had he, that in this change of place and condition, he should not degenerate into a tyrant and voluptuary? Power and riches were chiefly to be dreaded on account of their tendency to deprave the possessor. He held them in abhorrence, not only as instruments of misery to others, but to him on whom they were conferred. Besides, riches were comparative, ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... as a model for schools to be founded in East Anglia by Felix.[9] It is an interesting question whether these were the missionary schools, or whether they were schools which kept up the traditions of Roman education in a degenerate form like the schools in Gaul. On the ground that our oldest document is a Code of the first converted king, it has been too easily inferred, that before this time the Saxons were wholly destitute of literary appliances. Were the fact more certain, than it is, the conclusion would ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... returned Bermudo, "with the affection of one, who centres his whole bliss only in the enjoyment of his selfish and degenerate passion. But she spurned him; stratagem and force prevailed. Madness—despair—must I say it? death ensued. Enough—the circumstances of the horrid tale 'tis needless to relate: I have said thus much to convince you of the impossibility of my harming a woman whose fate bears ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... imaginative sadness in his nature, no morbid dread of undefined evil, no melancholy to dye the days black; for melancholy is more often an affliction of the very strong in body or mind than of the weak, or of average men and women. Marcello was delicate, but not degenerate; he seemed gentle, cheerful, and ready to believe the world a very good place, as indeed it is for people who are not too unlike their neighbours to enjoy it, or too unlucky to get some of its good things, or too weak to work, fight, and love, ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... there exists an unsupported mother or a suffering child; so long as we rely on hospitals and prisons, penitentiaries and the police, to minister to the correction and regeneration of the unfit and degenerate; so long as we tolerate grafting politicians and deprive the poor of breathing spaces, sanitary appliances, and a hygienic environment; so long as war and pestilence deprive posterity of the best of the race for parenthood; so long as ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... of the "manifest destiny" type seem to imagine oar country necessary to the designs of Providence. So thought the Hebrews, and on far more plausible grounds, of their commonwealth; but, rather than fulfil to such degenerate descendants the promise made to their great ancestor, "God is able," said the divine Teacher. "of these stones to ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... his less known, but remarkable, story "Moll Flanders," picaresque as it is and depicting the life of a female criminal, has yet considerable character study and gets no small part of its appeal for a present-day reader from the minute description of the fall and final reform of the degenerate woman. It is comparatively crude in characterization, but psychological value is not entirely lacking. However, with Richardson it is almost all. It was of the nature of his genius to make psychology paramount: just there is found his modernity. Defoe and ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... made the instructor will proceed to the exercises at will, by which is meant assaults between two men, each endeavoring to hit the other and to avoid being hit himself. Fencing at will should not be allowed to degenerate into ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... are on a wrong tack there. There is nothing weak-minded or degenerate about Miss Howard. She is an excellent specimen of well-balanced English beef and brawn. She is ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... most part, figured. Foreign trees, though locally established, are not figured. Trees may be occasionally spontaneous over a large area without really forming a constituent part of the flora. Even the apple and pear, when originating spontaneously and growing without cultivation, quickly become degenerate and show little tendency to possess themselves of the soil at the expense of the native growths. Gleditsia, for example, while clearly locally established, has with some hesitation been accorded ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... and it ended with "yours truly." "—Yours truly—mine truly—and how kind to write at all!" Now it so happened that Vaudemont, having never merged the art of the penman into that rapid scrawl into which people, who are compelled to write hurriedly and constantly, degenerate, wrote a remarkably good hand,—bold, clear, symmetrical—almost too good a hand for one who was not to make money by caligraphy. And after Fanny had got the words by heart, she stole gently to a cupboard and took forth some specimens ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the Doge and Senate, which lost nothing in its recital before that august body. At the close a few senators called out, "Let us fight": but the spirit of the Dorias flickered away with these protests; and the degenerate scions of mighty sires submitted to the insults of an aide-de-camp and the dictation ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... cases, however, there is some danger lest the beauty and appropriateness of the conception should entice us to receive it on insufficient evidence. The fact that some plants in certain adverse circumstances tend to degenerate, and in certain favourable circumstances to attain a higher type, is well known in natural history; but it seems questionable whether these changes ever take place to such an extent, and in such a uniform ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... so-called classical art, historical, genre and landscape painting, all showing the same conventional black grease. The works reeked of uniform mediocrity, they were characterised by a muddy dinginess of tone, despite their primness—the primness of impoverished, degenerate blood. And the friends quickened their steps: they ran to escape from that reign of bitumen, condemning everything in one lump with their superb sectarian injustice, repeating that there was nothing in the place worth looking at—nothing, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... virtue, deeper in knowledge, more strictly temperate, exercise a greater degree of brotherly kindness and godliness, and enjoy more of heaven's pure love in our hearts. Neglect the proper Scriptural culture of the spiritual life and the Christian will degenerate into a few irksome duties of cold formality. By the writers of the New Testament we are urgently exhorted, yea, commanded, to attend to certain duties necessary to keep us in the love of God. Of these especially important are reading the Scripture, prayer, fasting, ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... black eyes looked surly and wrathful, and one versed in children's grievances could easily see what the matter was,—she was turning a sheet! Perhaps, happy young female reader, you don't know what that is,—most likely not; for in these degenerate days the strait and narrow ways of self-denial, formerly thought so wholesome for little feet, are quite grass-grown with neglect. Childhood nowadays is unceasingly feted and caressed, the principal difficulty of the grown people seeming to ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... A bully, a degenerate, a thug of the city, a brigand of the country, a horse thief of the western plains, attacks a weaker and unprepared victim. A man with red blood in his veins sees the assault, and attacks the attacker with strength enough to save the victim, arrest the disturber of the peace, ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... republic has given us more to apprehend from what they call their virtues than we had to dread from the vices of other men. Avowedly and systematically, they have given the upperhand to all the vicious and degenerate part of human nature. It is from their lapses and deviations from their principle that alone we ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... suspect that we are some of those that degenerate from the Institutions of our Founder; we are strict Observers ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... two sides of a question is usually a virtue, but it may degenerate into a vice. Thus, a visitor found his bachelor friend glumly studying an evening waistcoat. When inquiry was ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... snows, the vaudeville resorts, whose highest priced "talent" is some voluptuous female, who has cultivated the art of draping nudity with suggestiveness and singing immoral songs, all tend to give youth a false impression of the reality of life and to make the path of the degenerate easy and profitable. The rich are growing richer, and their children are pampered and overfed and underrestrained. Time hangs heavily on their hands and their only mental effort is to devise new methods and new ways of satisfying the lust of liberty ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... very brave man himself, said now in great anger: The more base and degenerate in you to take such means for her as you have done, and leave her on such slight conditions.' Then turning to Valentine, he said: 'I do applaud your spirit Valentine, and think you worthy of an empress's love. You shall have Silvia, for you have well ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the enormous weight could raise; Such men as live in these degenerate days. Iliad, Bk. V. HOMER. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... possible, still more essentially requisite; there being nothing eminent, in that case, to compensate for the want of them, or preserve the person from our severest hatred, as well as contempt. A high ambition, an elevated courage, is apt, says Cicero, in less perfect characters, to degenerate into a turbulent ferocity. The more social and softer virtues are there chiefly to be regarded. These are always good and amiable [Cic. de Officiis, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... modes of honorable warfare, supplying the place of a conquering force by attempts to disorganize our political society, to dismember our confederated Republic. Happily, like others, these will recoil on the authors; but they mark the degenerate counsels from which they emanate, and if they did not belong to a series of unexampled inconsistencies might excite the greater wonder as proceeding from a Government which founded the very war in which it has been so long engaged on a charge against the disorganizing ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson
... was strong within them. True, the assignable lands in Japan continued to grow smaller, but what reason was there for stifling the reproductive instincts of a vigorous people in a great unused world half populated by a degenerate humanity? ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... These names are used in Binh-Thuan to make a distinction, but Banis and Kaphirs alike are all Chams.... In Cambodia all Chams are Mussulmans." (E. Aymonier, Les Tchames, p. 26.) The religion of the pagan Chams of Binh-Thuan is degenerate Brahmanism with three chief gods, Po-Nagar, Po-Rome, and Po-Klong-Garai. (Ibid., p. 35.)—H.C.] The books of their former religion they say (according to Dr. Bastian) that they received from Ceylon, but they were converted to Islamism by no ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... too full of repose, and the Ottoman race has become too degenerate through indulgence, to exhibit many striking specimens of physical beauty. The face is generally fine, but the body is apt to be lank, and with imperfect muscular development. The best forms I saw in the baths were those ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... John Ryder's outward appearance to justify Lombroso's sensational description of him: "A social and physiological freak, a degenerate and a prodigy of turpitude who, in the pursuit of money, crushes with the insensibility of a steel machine everyone who stands in his way." On the contrary, Ryder, outwardly at least, was a prepossessing-looking man. His ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... to refer to both men in a future chapter, when I shall examine the degenerate growths of metaphysical eroticism; for the ardour of their souls was frequently kindled by sexual imaginings; in the case of emotional mystics it is often difficult to distinguish between sensual conceptions and the pure love of God (a fact which does not, however, justify the superficial opinion ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... involuntary explorer two planet years ago! The beast things which had lived in the dark of the desert world the Terrans' wandering galactic derelict had landed upon. Yes, the beast things whose nature they had never been able to deduce. Were they the degenerate dregs of a once intelligent species? Or were they animals, akin to man, but ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... myself as comfortable as I could in his house, and to enjoy myself thoroughly in it for the next fortnight to come, at the very least. It may have been that, in considering my faults as those of the degenerate age in which I lived—which age, however, be it known, lived afterwards to recover its character, and to be held up as a model of propriety and virtue to the succeeding generation—the merciful doctor was willing to merge my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... sorrow exhibit for children who have not. Reading him again, however, last night, after the long interval of fever and unrest which the war has enforced, I found his pessimism troublesome. Sussex, so far as I know it, is not so degenerate as he seems to have found it; and surely since the war began he must have changed his mind. It is hard to remember 1898, or 1913 for that matter, but I happen to know that Sussex emptied itself of its young manhood, and voluntarily, because I went to live there ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... has gained in condensation and copiousness)—I read with sedulous accuracy the Minnesinger (or singers of love, the Provencal poets of the Swabian court) and the metrical romances; and then laboured through sufficient specimens of the master singers, their degenerate successors; not however without occasional pleasure from the rude, yet interesting strains of Hans Sachs, the cobbler of Nuremberg. Of this man's genius five folio volumes with double columns are extant in print, and nearly an equal number in manuscript; ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... air and exercise! What did my grandmother do? Why, she did all her own work, and made grandfather's ruffled shirts besides, with the finest stitching and gathers; and she found exercise enough, I warrant you. Women of this day are miserable, sickly, degenerate creatures." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... beneath him. A little group of high- born Chinese ladies in holiday attire are seated in a garden of potted plants on the river's bank, drinking tea, flirting their fans, and doubtless talking over the latest Court gossip. Nearby is a willow, not the stiff, ugly tree now seen upon tame and degenerate imitations of real old China pottery, but a graceful weeping-willow, whose drooping branches sweep the opposite shore, as sublimely indifferent to distance as ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... Englishman. Shall that victorious hand be feebled heere, That in your Chambers gaue you chasticement? No: know the gallant Monarch is in Armes, And like an Eagle, o're his ayerie towres, To sowsse annoyance that comes neere his Nest; And you degenerate, you ingrate Reuolts, You bloudy Nero's, ripping vp the wombe Of your deere Mother-England: blush for shame: For your owne Ladies, and pale-visag'd Maides, Like Amazons, come tripping after drummes: Their thimbles into armed Gantlets change, Their Needl's to Lances, and their gentle hearts ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... capable of making temporary as of registering irrevocable decisions. And though Locke admits that monarchy, from its likeness to the family, is the most primitive type of government, he denies Hobbes' assertion that it is the best. It seems, in his view, always to degenerate into the hands of lesser men who betray the contract they were appointed to observe. Nor is oligarchy much better off since it emphasizes the interest of a group against the superior interest of the community as ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... senses muffle Common Sense! And more and more with pleasing objects strive To dull his judgment and pervert his will To their behests: who, were he not so wrapp'd I'the dusky clouds of their dark policies, Would never suffer right to suffer wrong. Fie, Lingua, wilt thou now degenerate? Art not a woman? dost not love revenge? Delightful speeches, sweet persuasions, I have this long time us'd to get my right. My right—that is, to make the senses six; And have both name and power with the rest. Oft have I season'd savoury ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... grow out of her little heretic prejudices, and learn to love her mother's staunch friends, the champions of Holy Church, and the representatives of true knighthood in these degenerate days. Ah, child! couldst thou but see a true Spanish caballero, or again, could I but show thee my noble cousin of Guise, then wouldst thou know how to rate these gross clownish English mastiffs who now turn thy silly little brain. Ah, that thou ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had passed and repassed before the window—Sorenson's figure, of course. Brute, coward, degenerate he was, and to be dealt with as such. Not only as such, indeed, but as a wretch who had dared to touch Janet Hosmer against her will, to drag her from her home to this lonely spot by violence for ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... almost uneatable, and at times so plentiful and easily caught that the blackfellows scarcely trouble to get them, which is rarely the case elsewhere. The Australian native is a man with an unknown history whether he is an improvement on his remote ancestors or a degenerate descendant it is impossible ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... refuge in the bosom of the grave; he will voluntarily return to his ancestors whom he has worshipped as gods. In the late war between China and Japan, in which China was vanquished, some of her generals committed suicide. It presents, alas, a degenerate side of human nature. It is most pathetic. Better far to live under the smart of defeat and bear its shame, carry the cross, endure the stings of conscience, and meet the frowns of the world, than flee from the path ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... Philosophy as his mistress in The Fisher, and in a case where he is in fact judge as well as party, has no difficulty in getting his claim established. He is for ever reminding us that he loves philosophy and only satirizes the degenerate philosophers of his day. But it will occur to us after reading him through that he has dissembled his love, then, very well. There is not a passage from beginning to end of his works that indicates any real comprehension of any philosophic system. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Her brother Charles—a degenerate, pettifogging barrister, with all his father's faults and none of his grandfather's virtues—for whom Mary had advanced money so that he could go to college, came to her in her dire extremity and proffered help. But it was on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... [Occonestoga, the degenerate son of the Yemassee chief Sanutee, has been condemned, for befriending the whites, to a fate worse than death. The totem of his tribe, an arrow branded upon the shoulder, is to be cut and burnt out by the executioner, Malatchie, and he is to be declared accursed from his tribe ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... of war and self-defence developed a Roman populace more fierce and savage and degenerate, while the growing importance of their pope beyond the city's walls brought wealth and splendor to his office. The result was that some very unsaintly popes were elected amid unseemly squabbles. The conditions surrounding the high office became so bad that they were felt as a disgrace ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... ill-conduct of subjects, but of the ill-conduct of officials. The 91st article of his code puts the matter thus plainly, even as regarded the Shogunate: "When punishments and executions abound in the Empire, it is a proof that the military ruler is without virtue and degenerate." He devised particular enactments to protect the peasantry and the poor from the cruelty or the rapacity of powerful lords. The great daimyo were strictly forbidden, when making their obligatory journeys to Yedo, "to disturb ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... were figures whose white bodies glowed red in its reflected light as they floated on black wings high above; the light of those hidden fires blazed and died intermittently. There death was waiting, while these demons—these degenerate half-men, living products of a dying race—whipped the air in a frenzy of expectation as they darted above those chasms that were like rifts in the ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... the gems of India's gaudy zone, And plunder piled from kingdoms not their own, Degenerate trade! thy minions could despise Thy heart-born anguish of a thousand cries: Could lock, with impious hands, their teeming store, While famish'd nations died along the shore; Could mock the groans of fellow men, and bear The curse of kingdoms, peopled with despair; Could stamp disgrace on man's polluted ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of to-day is the degenerate son of the conquering warriors of a thousand years ago. Once his name carried terror to the shores of the Midland Sea. Now those who do not like him can say with some truth that he lives the life of an animal, mating rather than marrying, his warlike ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... always prided herself on her good constitution, and despised doctors and dentists as people who pandered to the fads and fancies of a degenerate generation—a generation who, according to her creed, weakened their backs and ruined their health by lounging on sofas and easy chairs, while, for her part, though seventy years of age, she was thankful ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... bound to protest in favour of the English press against the assertions of those who would judge the opinions of a great liberal nation by the wretched specimens which are under our eyes. Heaven be praised. The civilized world is not so degenerate that the ignoble conduct of Prussia fails to elicit universal reprobation." We have had two more pigeons, but Gambetta either cannot or will not let us know anything of importance. These two messengers confirm the news of the "victory of Orleans," and inform us that public ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... heavenly origin by its amazing adaptation to man's nature, and by its almighty tendency to promote his improvement and perfection; by the light, the life, the blessedness it gives; by the love it kindles; by the glorious transformations which it effects in depraved individuals and degenerate communities; by the peace, the hope, the joy it inspires; and by the courage and strength it imparts both in life ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... eighth century, but one whose sentiments indicate a Saxon origin, thus laments the degenerate ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... seven figures. Another, more striking still, also mentioned by Dr. Clarapede in his paper on the learned horses, is that of a man blind from birth, an inmate of the lunatic-asylum, at Armentieres. This blind man, whose name is Fleury, a degenerate and nearly an idiot, can calculate in one minute and fifteen seconds the number of seconds in thirty-nine years, three months and twelve days, not forgetting the leap-years. They explain to him what a square root is, without telling him the conventional method ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the stage from the outside, in the light of prejudice and misrepresentation, believe the calling of the actor to be one morally dangerous and intellectually contemptible; one in which it is equally easy to succeed as an artist and degenerate as an individual. She begins by telling me that she has a "fancy for the stage," and has "heard a great many things about it." Now, for any man or woman to become an actor or actress because they have a "fancy for ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... now, because our life is narrower and more monotonous. I know, talking so much over our work, we have terrible temptations to gossip; but I can't bear to think that we should ever lower our standard, ever degenerate into the feeble girlishness we abhor. We never used to talk about young men, Nan, except Dick; and that did not matter. Of course we liked them in their places, and had plenty of fun, and tormented them a little; but you never made such a speech ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... of the universe, which, according to our original intention, has now been brought down to the creation of man. Completeness seems to require that something should be briefly said about other animals: first of women, who are probably degenerate and cowardly men. And when they degenerated, the gods implanted in men the desire of union with them, creating in man one animate substance and in woman another in the following manner:—The outlet for liquids they connected with ...
— Timaeus • Plato |
