"Degradation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indissolubly connected in his mind with a change in the family fortunes that deprived him of the ordinary advantages and pleasures open to any average boy of even the lower middle classes. It ushered in a period of misery and degradation that he could never recall without acute suffering. The few years of happiness which he enjoyed before he was carried away to London in the stage coach "Commodore", at the age of nine, were divided from a strenuous and successful manhood by so dark a gulf as to concentrate ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... we found the omnibus that did the service de la ville, but the Colonel refused to enter it, and declared he would walk; he cared nothing for the degradation of appearing in the public streets as a prisoner marching between a couple of gendarmes. He gloried in it, he said; his desire was clearly to turn the whole thing into ridicule, and the passers-by laughed aloud at this well-dressed gentleman, ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... of National Council — Hail to Wyoming! — Mrs. Stanton on the Degradation of Disfranchisement; women suffer from the disgrace just as men would, State, Church and Society uphold their subordination, all must be brought into harmony with the idea of equality — Lucy Stone speaks — The Rev. Frederick ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... the view that 'personal correction',as he phrased it, was an insult or a degradation to the boy upon whom it was inflicted; and to accustom young boys to think so appeared to him to be 'positively mischievous'. 'At an age,' he wrote, 'when it is almost impossible to find a true, manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... white-headed old man filled me with a sense of shame and degradation. What had he not done for me? How great his assistance, how kind his regards, how liberal his offices. He had rescued me from the bondage of poverty. He had put forth the hand of help, with a manly grasp of succor ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... good as another to the average convict; as a matter of fact, it is their only consolation in their degradation that all who come here are no better than they. The world may have misused them; but they misuse their confreres in their thoughts. The "holier than thou" attitude, intentional or otherwise, is quite the last ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... have not had five months of gout. Make yourself independent honourably, which you may do by a government. but if you will take my advice, don't accept a ministerial place when you cease to be a minister. The former is a reward due to your profession and services; the latter is a degradation. You know the haughtiness of my spirit; I give you no advice but ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... long-forgotten childhood, once sung by her mother as a cradle song! With her wretched face buried in her hands, she hears it, and clearly the past rises before her: her childhood in its innocence; her girlhood in its purity; her womanhood, her motherhood in its degradation! All the holier part of what was once herself; all that was true and noble, womanly and pure, from the deep waters of oblivion to which that damning appetite has consigned them, rise to haunt her ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... italics the words indicated, evidently to call attention to the poverty and degradation of some of "His Majesty's Justices." He had a high-sounding title to his name, ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... held:—they make men what they are. It seems as though Nature had made man's intellect depend upon their dignity, as she has made his happiness depend upon their virtue. This, then, is the law of eternal justice,—man cannot degrade woman without himself falling into degradation: he cannot elevate her without at the same time elevating himself. Let us cast our eyes over the globe! Let us observe those two great divisions of the human race, the East and the West. Half the old world remains in a state ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... "Darkness," Byron has imagined such a blind and darkling world as these legends depict; and he has imagined, too, the hunger, and the desolation, and the degradation of ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... cheating and usury throughout Hungary, may be traced back to this foul nest in the Marmaros Mountains. It would be well for the credit of the Jewish community in Hungary, as well as elsewhere, if something were done to raise these people out of the utter degradation which ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... miserable effects of this system on the condition of Africa, we will now follow the poor slave through his wretched wanderings, in order to give some idea of his physical suffering, his mental and moral degradation. ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... intellectual faculties Gibeonites, hewers of wood and drawers of water to the will and affections. Wisdom must be sought for its own sake or we shall not find it. Another effect of our misologia is the degradation of reasonable sympathy into sentimentalism, which regards pain as the worst of evils, and endeavours always to remove the effects of folly and wrong-doing, without investigating the causes. That such sentimentalism is often kind only to be ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... above which, with the rapid growth of the ever-growing nuisance, no living thing will breathe with impunity. Look at our scientific machinery, which has destroyed domestic manufacture, which has substituted rottenness for strength in the thing made, and physical degradation in crowded towns for healthy and comfortable country life in the makers. The day would fail, if I should attempt to enumerate the evils which science has inflicted on mankind. I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... his life more proudly and vigorously and freely than the dweller in a corner-country. Do those men ever reflect, who talk so glibly of this government as too large, and as one which must inevitably be sundered, to what a degradation they calmly look forward! No; Union,—come what may,—now and ever. Greatness is to every brave man a necessity. Out on the craven and base-hearted who aspire to being less than the co-rulers of a continent. See how vile and mean are those men who in the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... The English government had issued an order that officers holding the king's commission should rank provincial officers, and that provincial generals and field officers should have no rank when a general or field officer holding a royal commission was present. The degradation of being ranked by every whipper-snapper who might hold a royal commission by virtue, perhaps, of being the bastard son of some nobleman's cast-off mistress was more than the temper of George Washington at least could bear, and when ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... before the commencement of the revolt, he had reached the prime of manhood, a slave, with a soul uncontaminated by the degradation which surrounded him. Living in a state of society where worse than polygamy was actually urged, we find him at this period faithful to one wife—the wife of his youth—and the father of an interesting family. Linked with such tender ties, and enlightened with some degree of education, which ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... person who had risen from nothing and suddenly become possessed of immense wealth, raised the public avidity to a perfect frenzy. At that epoch of scandal and opprobrium, there was no folly or vice in which the high society did not take the lead. The degradation of men's minds was equal to the corruption of their manners. The courtiers, even the princes of the blood, besieged the Regent to obtain shares. He flung them among them with open hands; and soon they were seen mingling in the crowds ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... truth. From the dark ages women had climbed on the slow realization of freedom, honor, chastity. As the future of nations depended upon women, so did their salvation. Women could never again be barbarians. All this modern license was a parody of love. It must inevitably end in the degradation and unhappiness of those of the generation who persisted on that downward path. Hard indeed it would be to encounter the ridicule of girls and the indifference of boys. But only through the intelligence and courage of one could there ever be ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... gazed upon the degradation of woman and the unspeakable bestiality of man till that vile and dusty hell had sickened him ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... permitted to visit, are usually detained ten or a dozen Young Ladies—some of very high Families—sent here by their Parents or Friends for undutiful Deportment, or some other Domestic Offence. They are compelled to wear a particular Dress as a mark of Degradation; are kept apart; forced to work a certain number of hours a day; and are occasionally Whipped. Here, too, upon complaints of Extravagance, Tipsiness, &c., duly proved, can Husbands send their Wives, to be confined and receive the Discipline of the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... solecism was it,' he broke out with energy, 'in the times preceding the empire, to call that a free country which was built upon the degradation and slavery of half of its population. Rome never was a republic. It was simply a faction of land and slave holders, who blinded and befooled the ignorant populace, by parading before them some of the forms of liberty, but kept the power in their own hands. They were a community of petty ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... not receive one penny. So, they now have an interest in prolonging my life." As he spoke he sprang up with an almost frenzied air, and, seizing Pascal by the arm, again continued. "Nor is this all! This woman—my wife—you know—you have heard the extent of her shame and degradation. Ah, well! ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... about me and see this poverty, the ignorance born of lack of opportunity, the suffering, the dirt, and degradation which are in so large a measure no fault of these poor folk, I am overwhelmed at the wealth of opportunities. Here at least every talent one has to offer counts for double what it ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... plenty of speculation, which in those days was novel, now and then a little scepticism. His "Alcestis" is melodrama verging on sentimental comedy, and heralding the sentimental comedy of Menander known to us in the versions of Terence. The chord of pathos he can touch well. His degradation, as the old school thought it, of the drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and what they deemed his pandering to vulgar taste, brought upon him the bitter satire of Aristophanes. Yet he did not win many prizes. Perhaps the vast theatre and the grand choric ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... and endangers a multitude of plant and animal species indigenous to the area; there is a lucrative illegal wildlife trade; air and water pollution in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and several other large cities; land degradation and water pollution caused by improper mining activities; ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... sisters, and any one of half a dozen is always ready without embarrassment to take the lead, discoursing very appropriately from her Turkish Testament. This, I am told, is a rare thing in Turkey, where woman has been so long held in ignorance and degradation." ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... found his highest inspiration in it. Even its pessimism as it faces the cooling of the sun and the return of the ice-caps does not degrade the pessimist: for example, the Quincy Adamses, with their insistence on modern democratic degradation as an inevitable result of solar shrinkage, are not dehumanized as the vivisectionists are. Perhaps nobody is at heart fool enough to believe that life is at the mercy of temperature: Dante was not troubled by the objection that Brunetto could not have lived ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... the sands of the deeper line to the right are tinctured a pale and sickly green by the degradation of the porphyritic traps, here towering in the largest masses yet seen; while the gravel of the left bank is warm, and lively with red grit and syenitic granite. Looking down the long and gently waving line, we feel still connected with the civilized world by the blue and purple screen of Sinai ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... while the arguments of all have little force except as they tend to the same conclusion. The point of controversy between them and their opponents is often represented as being essentially this: Shall the king of Prussia be made as powerless as the queen of England? Against such a degradation of the dignity of the house of Hohenzollern all the convictions and prejudices of the royalists revolt. Such a surrender of all personal power, they say, and say truly, was not designed by Frederick William IV. when he gave the constitution; to ask the king, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... into another." Of heredity he says: "The whole subject of inheritance is exceedingly intricate, working often in a seemingly capricious and fitful way. Qualities, both good and bad, are dropped as well as acquired, and the process ends sometimes in the degradation of the type, and the survival of the unfit rather than the fittest. The most trifling and fantastic tricks of inheritance are quoted in support of the transmutation theory; but little is said of the sudden apparition of powerful original qualities, which almost always rise like ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... and an upset is to them a greater incident than a change of administration. Their only point of interest on the road is to save the time, and see whether the coach keeps the hour. This is surely a miserable degradation of human intellect. Take my advice, my good sir, and disinterestedly contrive that once or twice a quarter your most dexterous whip shall overturn a coachful of these superfluous travellers, IN ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... Thais at the opening of this Act, where he says that he is confident of obtaining his father's consent, provided Pamphila proves to be a citizen; and, indeed, the match between them is rather a reparation of an injury done to her than a degradation ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... but may safely sit down and laugh over it, saying, 'Very likely it is true. If so, it is very amusing; and if not—what matter?'—Then those young people are being bred up in a habit of mind which contains in itself all the capabilities of degradation and slavery, in self-conceit, hasty assertion, disbelief in nobleness, and all the other 'credulities of scepticism': parted from that past from which they take their common origin, they are parted also from each other, and become selfish, ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... his mind," says the author of the Confederation of Kilkenny, "on one grand object—the freedom of the Church, in possession of all her rights and dignities, and the emancipation of the Catholic people from the degradation to which English imperialism had condemned them. The churches which the piety of Catholic lords and chieftains had erected, he determined to secure to the rightful inheritors. His mind and feelings recoiled from the idea of worshipping in crypts and catacombs; he abhorred the notion of a ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... uneasily, suspicious, without knowing why or what. But one thing was clear—to plead further with her would be self-degradation. "I have been tactless," he said to her. "Probably, if I were less in earnest, I should get on better. But, perhaps you will judge me more fairly when you think it over. I'll say only one thing more. I can't give up ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... either enticed to London from wearisomeness of his situation, or banished from home, as it is said, in consequence of his irregularities. There he assumed the profession of a player, which he considered at first as a degradation, principally, perhaps, because of the wild excesses [Footnote: In one of his sonnets he says: O, for my sake do you with fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds, That did not better for my life provide, Than public means which public manners breeds. And in the following:— ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... The idea of Miss Miner in planting a school here was to train up a class of Colored girls, in the midst of slave institutions, who should show forth in their culture and capabilities, to the country and to mankind, that the race was fit for something higher than the degradation which rested upon them. The amazing energy with which this frail woman prosecuted her work is well known to those who took knowledge of her career. She visited the Colored people of her district from house to house, and breathed a new life into them pertaining to the education ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... now annexes an idea of degradation to a residence non-military in France. He would deem himself humbled by the civil place at which you hint, even if you could bring him, which I doubt above all, to submit to its duties. He regards himself, from peculiar circumstances, as an established Englishman ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... Parliament in one section guarding the people of the realm, and securing to them trial by jury and the law of the land, and in the next section depriving Americans of those important rights; and this distinction was pronounced a brand of disgrace upon every American, a degradation below the rank of an Englishman. While the instructions claimed for each subject in America equality of political right with each subject in England, they claimed also for the General Court the dignity of a free assembly, and declared the first object of their labors to be a removal of "those ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... It proves a nobleman may be repulsed When he thinks conquest easy. I believe That woman, in her deepest degradation, Holds something sacred, something undefiled, Some pledge and keepsake of her higher nature, And, like the diamond in the dark, retains Some quenchless gleam of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of this miserable class, each member of which is entitled to grasp any other member's hand, by that vile degradation wherein guilty error has buried all alike. The foul fiend to whom it properly belongs must relieve us of our loathsome task. Let the bond servants of sin pass on. But neither man nor woman, in whom good predominates, will smile or sneer, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... powers were perverted to the worst purposes, and his gross vices were unredeemed, if we are to credit the report of his most respectable contemporaries, by a single virtue. In him the papacy reached its lowest degradation. His pontificate, however, was not without its use; since that Providence, which still educes good from evil, made the scandal, which it occasioned to the Christian world, a principal spring of the glorious ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... not been by multiplication, which would be but a progress in degradation under the now well-recognized laws of evolution; but it has been in integration from a vast multiplicity toward a unity. True, all evolution has not been in this direction. There has often been degradation as exhibited in the ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... environmental problems (urban and rural) typical of an industrializing economy such as soil degradation, desertification, air ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature. In this ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... She was alive but to one idea, and that the most painful that could be suggested to a delicate mind. She had heard herself recommended to the love of a man who was indifferent to her. Could there be such a humiliation—such a degradation? Colonel Lennox's embarrassment was scarcely less; but his mother saw not the mischief she had done, and she continued to speak without his having the power to interrupt her. But her words fell unheeded ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... you had received from him?" I answer, Nature does not admit of so great a change in a wise man. Men do not change from the best to the worst; even in becoming bad, he would necessarily retain some traces of goodness; virtue is never so utterly quenched as not to imprint on the mind marks which no degradation can efface. If wild animals bred in captivity escape into the woods, they still retain something of their original tameness, and are as remote from the gentlest in the one extreme as they are in the other from those which have ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... July 15, 1833, Col. John Milton informed the War Department ... "Many of them [the Indians] are almost starved, and suffer immensely for the things necessary to the support of life, and are sinking in moral degradation. They have been much corrupted by white men who live among them, who induce them to sell to as many different individuals as they can, and then cheat them out of the proceeds."... (p. 81.) Luther Blake wrote to the War Department from Fort Mitchell, Alabama, on September ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... that guilt is still prolific; that the commission of the first ill deed, leads almost surely to the commission of a second, of a third, until the soul is filed and the heart utterly corrupted, and the wretch given wholly up to the dominion of foul sin, and plunged into thorough degradation. ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... still brilliant complexion, while his large, soft, dark eyes, his arched brow, his well-proportioned nose, his small mouth and oval cheek presented altogether one of those faces which, in spite of long centuries of physical suffering and moral degradation, still haunt the cities of Asia Minor, the isles of Greece, and the Syrian coasts. It is the archetype of manly beauty, the tradition of those races who have wandered the least from Paradise; and who, notwithstanding many vicissitudes and much misery, are still ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... rapprochement a etablir entre les classes qui composent le regne animal," Arch. du Museum d'histoire naturelle, Paris, 1812, pp. 73-84.) Of course, it would be necessary to apply a great many restrictions to this formula—for example, to allow for the cases of degradation and retrogression in which the nervous system passes into the background. And, moreover, with the nervous system must be included the sensorial apparatus on the one hand and the motor on the other, between which it acts as intermediary. Cf. ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... and efficiently we might purify and ennoble our social structure if we had developed, instead of abandoning, this method. Think, for instance, of the infinite loss of energy, of health, of lives, the endless degradation of physical and spiritual beauty produced in London alone by the mere failure to prevent a few million chimneys from belching soot on the great city and choking all the activities of the vastest focus of activity ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... to whom suffering is degradation. Sympathy would burn them like caustic. They are dumb on the side which seeks promiscuous fellowship. They love one person, and live or ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... time flowed from his lips in finished state, perfect in all useful knowledge. From his arms next issued the Kshatriya, or warriors; from his breast, the seat of life, came the Vaisya, or producers—shepherds, farmers, merchants; from his foot, in sign of degradation, sprang the Sudra, or serviles, doomed to menial duties for the other classes—serfs, domestics, laborers, artisans. Take notice, further, that the law, so born with them, forbade a man of one caste ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... with his 100,000 men to add weight to their language, and the total helplessness of the older line of the Bourbons had been too evidently displayed to make their return a certainty, so that there is no reason to doubt that a firm-hearted patriot might have saved France from much of the degradation and loss inflicted on her when once the Allies had again got her at their mercy. At-the least the Bourbons might have been deprived of the revenge they sought for in taking some of the best blood of France. Better for Ney and his ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... to save from degradation and punishment accepts the mercy I offer her, and takes warning while there ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... current issues: soil degradation; overgrazing; deforestation (much of the remaining forests are being cut down for fuel and building ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... heart. And should she ever see those dear relatives or that kind friend again? Or if she did, would she be able to look them in the face as a pure and stainless girl, or would she blush in their presence with a consciousness of degradation? But she was interrupted in these painful meditations by the sound of the key turning in the lock; and a moment afterwards Mr. Tickels entered the room, and advanced towards her. On observing her improved appearance, a smile of intense satisfaction ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... knew and pitied all our weaknesses—By him, who has given his word to take compassion on the sinner's tears, I bid you hope for mercy. By that innocence in which you once lived, be comforted—By the sorrows you have known since your degradation, hope, that in some measure, you have atoned——By the sincerity that shone upon your youthful face when I joined your hands, and those thousand virtues you have since given proofs of, trust, that you were not born to die ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... cast upon him. There he stood, trembling, as it were, in the balance, and ready to be carried up or down by this new and most terrible trial—up into a higher sphere of virtue, or down into a deeper degradation than ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... another way to measure it. My sins are deep, my helpless miseries are deep, but they are shallow as compared with the love that goes down beneath all sin, that is deeper than all sorrow, that is deeper than all necessity, that shrinks from no degradation, that turns away from no squalor, that abhors no wickedness so as to avert its face from it. The purest passion of human benevolence cannot but sometimes be aware of disgust mingling with its pity and its efforts, but Christ's ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... people wretched? Only Bulwer in his most pathetic style could describe the miseries of that night—the moaning, the groaning, the cursing, the tumbling, the blistering, the infamous despair and degradation! I heard all the cocks in Jaffa crow; the children crying, and the mothers hushing them; the donkeys braying fitfully in the moonlight; at last I heard the clatter of hoofs below, and the hailing of men. It was three o'clock, the horses were actually come; nay, there were ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... those who murder to rob. And yet, at this present moment, there is as great a distance between me and an assassin, as there is between me and an irreproachable man. Thus, because there are beings a thousand times more degraded than I am, my degradation is to be excused in my eyes! Instead of being able to say, as formerly, I am as honest as the most honest men, I will console myself by saying I am the least degraded of the wretches among whom I am ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... Stops, to which we have already referred, was one of the thunderclaps of the storm; but its morrow brought the peace of Vienna, and the degradation of Austria was the death-blow of the old Germanic organisation. These societies, which had received a mortal wound in 1806 and were now controlled by the French police, instead of continuing to meet in public, were forced to seek new members in the dark. In 1811 several agents of these societies ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... competing for low-priced labour, and who regard want of employment as a crime. But if it were possible for any citizen in need of money to resort to a place of public employment as a right, and there work for a week or month without degradation upon certain minimum terms, it seems fairly certain that no one would work, except as the victim of some quite exceptional ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... common Father, through a common Lord. If ever society is to be regenerated, it is by the agency of living brothers and sisters in the Lord; and every plan, however apparently wise, for recovering mankind from their degradation, and which does not make the personal ministrations of Christian men and women an essential part of it, its very life, is doomed, we think, ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... feared it would be difficult, if not impossible, to meet the wishes of the illustrious strangers in the particular manner spoken of. The male inhabitants of the village were all warriors, to whom work of any description would be an unspeakable degradation. But he would see what could be done. If women, now, would serve the strangers' purpose as well as men, the thing could ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... these complaints. Stanhope even did not dare to deny his fault. He was allowed to demand leave of absence to go home and defend himself. He was badly received, stripped of all military rank in England and Holland, and (as well as the officers under him) was not without fear of his degradation, and was even in ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... condition of its healthy development and maturity. Without it we resort to jejune amusement, and from amusement we are hurried on to dissipation, to the card table and dram shop; and from dissipation we sink to degradation, infamy and wretchedness. Idleness is thus the fruitful mother of vice and misery. Our lives cannot exist in a state of neutrality between active good and active evil. It is, therefore, the duty of the Christian home to prepare her young members for some ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... and rose above the fear, she knew that she could never let fear drive her into bondage. Nothing should make a sacrifice of joy to shame—to save herself she would not bring up her child in the sorrow and degradation of a loveless home.... If she had been strong enough to give up the thought of marriage for the sake of Bertie's liberty and her own self-respect, she could be strong enough now to turn from her only hope of reputation for the sake of the new life which was joy within her. It would be the worst, ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... country and their own people in order to serve the Emperor of France. It was a terrible, heart-rending spectacle presented by Germany during these last years, and which could not but fill the heart of every patriot with shame and despair. And yet this period of degradation was necessary and even salutary, for it blinded Napoleon by the glaring sunshine of his power; it rendered him overbearing and reckless; he dared every thing, because he believed he would succeed in every thing, and that the world had utterly succumbed to his power. He dared all, ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... forth well equipped for the battle of life; some of them becoming ministers, local preachers, Sunday-school workers, and in many ways most useful citizens. The committee of management has the sanction of Conference. This "powerful arm of Christian work" not only rescues helpless little ones from degradation and misery; it undertakes the special training of the workers amongst the children in industrial homes and orphanages; and hence has arisen the institution in 1895 of the order of Methodist deaconesses, which is recommended by Conference to Connexional sympathy and confidence, the deaconesses rendering ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... devote above twenty pages to instances of the superstition and credulity of the Jews about the time of Christ. The contents of these pages would be amusing if they did not reveal such deep mental degradation in a race which Christians regard as sacred, because of God's dealings with ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... its degradation, flashed on the mind of Augusta. Without a question or comment, she motioned to the sofa in the parlor, and her husband was laid there. She locked the street door, and when the last retreating footstep had died away, she turned to the sofa, and stood gazing in fixed and almost stupefied silence ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... foremost in the ranks of the Abolitionists, battled for the freedom and rights of the enslaved race. You have lived, with many compeers, to see the glorious result of your labors in redeeming from the infamy and degradation of chattelism 4,000,000 slaves. That done, your attention was turned to the greater question—in view of numbers—of woman's emancipation from ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... dropped the name of Braddell. She shrank from proclaiming those second spousals, sullied by the degradation to which they had exposed her, and the suspicions implied in the inquest on her husband, until the hour for acknowledging her son should arrive. She resumed, therefore, the name of Dalibard, and by that we will continue to call her. Nor ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with delight a character far beneath his ability. Other actors will not condescend to do this or else fear to let themselves down by doing so. Warren had no timidities about assuming a lesser part, nor did he deem it condescension. Artists of questionable greatness may deem it a degradation to personate any save a leading part. Warren felt that he did not let himself down, he raised the character to his own elevation. From this it follows that no great actor within my recollection had undertaken such a variety ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... be awakened, inspired, concentrated," she went on. "That is the true task of real agitators. One has got to give up one's life to it. The degradation of servitude, the absolutist lies must be uprooted and swept out. Reform is impossible. There is nothing to reform. There is no legality, there are no institutions. There are only arbitrary decrees. There is only a handful ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... colonies, and which had been purchased by our best blood and treasures, and by truckling to the defiance and insult hurled at us by the Americans, cut off those sources of power and opulence, and submit to a degradation from the rank we held in the political system of Europe; or, whether we should, by the full exertion of our power, preserve those advantages, assert our ancient supremacy, restore the authority of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Jesus Christ;" and he speaks of "majesty," "honour," and "glory," which are the appendages of a kingdom, and are to be the characteristics of the second advent of Jesus, in contrast with the meanness, poverty, and degradation of his first appearance in our world. Those, therefore, who say that the transfiguration had a typical reference either to the effusion of the Spirit on the day of pentecost, or to the destruction of Jerusalem, ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... aspects of these Indian customs that are of peculiar interest. In my Ridgeway essay (op. cit. supra) I referred to the means by which in Nubia the degradation of the oblong Egyptian mastaba gave rise to the simple stone circle. This type spread to the west along the North African littoral, and also to the Eastern desert and Palestine. At some subsequent time mariners from the Red Sea ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... number of the choicest favorites of his prince, or whether he were offensive and odious to him, he demeaned himself in neither condition with moderation; but if he was advanced he was intolerably insolent, and in his degradation not submissive and peaceable in his ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... by the Founder of Christianity; the order was never abrogated and yet most Christians are not aware that Sabbath, or "Sawbath," means Saturn's day, the "Shiyar" of the older Arabs. And to complete its degradation "Sabbat" in French and German means a criaillerie, a "row," a disorder, an abominable festival of Hexen (witches). This monstrous absurdity can be explained only by aberrations of sectarian zeal, of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... who has drunk more deeply he is not a man whom I envy. My purse suffered, my character suffered, my constitution suffered, stimulants became a necessity to me, I was a creature from whom my memory recoils. And it was at that time, the time of my blackest degradation, that God sent into my life the gentlest, sweetest spirit that ever descended as a ministering angel from above. She loved me, broken as I was, loved me, and spent her life in making a man once more of that which had degraded itself to the ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... women coming down a path, one of them old, and the other younger, with a child in her arms. Both had faces eaten with famine and hardened with sin, and both had reached that stage of degradation, much lower in a woman than a man, when all care for dress is lost. As they came down they neared a grave, where some pious friend or relative had laid a wreath of immortelles, and put a bell glass over it, as is the custom. The effect of that ring of dull yellow among so many blackened ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... through the war I had seen her at intervals, enjoying life, finding the war a sort of lark, and I had hated her because she didn't care for the death and torture of men, for the possible defeat of her country, or the already achieved economic, moral, and intellectual degradation of the whole of Europe. She had merely profiteered out of it all, and had a good time. I remembered now my anger and my scorn; but I remembered too the squareness and the whiteness of her forehead under her newly-cut hair, that leave when I ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... stood at the edge of the ice beating linen, or did any drudgery she could find to do, in order to earn a little money to pay for herself and her baby at the tinsmith's, that, from her deepest degradation, she had risen at one step to the rank of an exceptionally sought-after and ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... of course—not at all. But it will make all the difference to the atmosphere in which it is conducted. One can imagine how certain persons are already gloating over it—what use they will make of it—how they will magnify and embroider everything. And such an odious story! It is the degradation ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... western third of the island - Haiti. The French colony, based on forestry and sugar-related industries, became one of the wealthiest in the Caribbean, but only through the heavy importation of African slaves and considerable environmental degradation. In the late 18th century, Haiti's nearly half million slaves revolted under Toussaint L'OUVERTURE and after a prolonged struggle, became the first black republic to declare its independence in 1804. Haiti ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... battles with the railroad conductors, and being roughly handled in not a few instances, proscription was at last abandoned; and the "Jim Crow car"—set up for the degradation of colored people—is nowhere found in New England. This result was not brought about without the intervention of the people, and the threatened enactment of a law compelling railroad companies to respect the rights of travelers. Hon. Charles Francis ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed in scattering it into a dozen other forms. We hit slavery through a great civil war. Did we destroy it? No, we only changed it into hatred between sections of the country: in the South, into political corruption and chicanery, the degradation of the blacks through peonage, unjust laws, unfair and cruel treatment; and the degradation of the whites by their resorting to these practices, the paralyzation of the public conscience, and the ever over-hanging dread of what the future may bring. Modern civilization hit ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... be made. Emasculation was a necessary first condition of service in her worship. (Catullus, Attys.) The Latin literature of the silver and bronze ages contains many references to castration. Juvenal and Martial have lavished bitter scorn upon this form of degradation, and Suetonius and Statius inform us that Domitian prohibited the practice, but it is in the "Amoures" attributed to Lucian that we find a passage so closely akin to the one forming a basis of this note, that it is ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... races few things are more important than to preserve them from the terrible physical and moral degradation resulting from the liquor traffic. We are doing all we can to save our own Indian tribes from this evil. Wherever by international agreement this same end can be attained as regards races where ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... South bear in mind that at the North the colour of the skin does not take away the feeling of brotherhood, and though it is a badge of degradation in station and intellect, yet it is oftener regarded with pity and sympathy than with contempt? Cannot the South remember their generous feelings for the Greeks and Poles, and imagine that some such feelings may be awakened for the African race, among a people who do ...
— An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism - With reference to the duty of American females • Catharine E. Beecher
... dollars; thus a hundred dollars worth of bad whiskey, if judiciously traded, would net the white dealer a thousand dollars cash. And the traffic went on, to the depletion of the Indian forests and the degradation of ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... plateau. They have descended in their flight upon the original coast dwellers, adding to the general condition of political disruption, multiplying the number of small weak tribes, increasing the occasions for intertribal wars, and furthering the prevailing degradation. The seaboard lowlands of Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Ivory Coast have all suffered thus In historic times.[516] All this region was the original home of the low, typical "Guinea Nigger" of the Southern plantation. The coasts of Oregon and California showed a parallel to this in their ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... all its phases, the result being a hatred of it, which he hopes and trusts he shall retain till the moment when his spirit quits the body. Popery is the great lie of the world; a source from which more misery and social degradation have flowed upon the human race, than from all the other sources from which those evils come. It is the oldest of all superstitions; and though in Europe it assumes the name of Christianity, it existed and flourished amidst the Himalayan ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... contrast to the sordid misery and degradation of this last refuge of the desperate Hodder saw the lofty, panelled smoking room at Francis Ferguson's, and was listening again to Wallis Plimpton's cynical amusement as to how he and Everett Constable and Eldon Parr himself ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... develop them. In ways so delicate that the most sensitive pride could not resent the favor, these true gentlefolk showed Polly their respect and regard, put many pleasures in her way, and when they paid her for her work, gave her also the hearty thanks that takes away all sense of degradation even from the humblest service, for money so earned and paid sweetens the daily bread it buys, and makes the mutual obligation a ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... come for you?" I whispered, alluding to a story I had told her the last time she had visited me; a story in which a girl, who had waited all her life in rags and degradation for the lordly knight who was to raise her from a hovel to a throne, died just as her one lover, an honest peasant-lad whom she had discarded in her pride, arrived at her door with the fortune he had spent all his days in amassing for ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... after Max Schurz's affair, he felt he had already touched the lowest depths of degradation. He knew now that he had touched a still lower one. Oh! horrible abyss of self-abasement!—he had taken the blood-money. And yet, it was to save Dot's life! Herbert was right, after all: quite right. Yes, yes, all hope was gone: the environment ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... in divine natures possess a fabricative power, but with us they are only gnostic, and no longer demiurgic, through the defluxion of our wings, or degradation of our intellectual powers. For, as Plato says in the Phaedrus, when the winged powers of the soul are perfect and plumed for flight, she dwells on high, and in conjunction with divine natures governs the world. In the Timaeus, he manifestly asserts that the demiurgus implanted these dianoetic forms ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... which in the earlier acts could be superficially good-humoured and sometimes royally courteous. But now the atmosphere of blood, which pervades the whole tragedy, has entered into the man and subdued him to its own nature; and an indescribable degradation, a slackness and puffiness, has overtaken his features. He has breathed the air of carnage, and supped full of horrors. Lady Macbeth complains of the smell of blood on her hand: Macbeth makes no complaint—he has ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is a badge in coat-armour, indicating some kind of degradation or dishonour. It is called ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 13.—Oxford 1-5. We were in the theatre. Ward was like himself, honest to a fault, as little like an advocate in his line of argument as well could he, and strained his theology even a point further than before. The forms are venerable, the sight imposing; the act is fearful [the degradation of Ward], if it did not leave strong hope ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... present to Maurice, drew around him a protecting circle which nothing vile could enter, and, wherever his own eyes turned, it seemed to him that her heavenly eyes followed. Could he profane their holy gaze by fixing his upon scenes of captivating degradation and rose-crowned vice? ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie |
