"Degrading" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will be doomed to the undying contempt of those who cultivate the mysterious and the sublime—Mr. Blotton, we say, with the doubt and cavilling peculiar to vulgar minds, presumed to state a view of the case, as degrading as ridiculous. Mr. Blotton, with a mean desire to tarnish the lustre of the immortal name of Pickwick, actually undertook a journey to Cobham in person, and on his return, sarcastically observed in an oration at the club, that he had seen the man ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... misguided Jackson? Why had Douglas leaped to the defense of Jackson in this community, like a fice coming to the aid of a mastiff? Why, if not to get a bone for his own hungry stomach? Everything in the way of a taunt, a slur, a degrading image, a mockery of youth's ambition, an attack upon obscurity trying to rise, were thrown by Wyatt at Douglas. All the while Douglas sat imperturbed, his head at a slight angle, which gave him the appearance ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... showed a petulant, foolish temper, quite unworthy of you, in turning your back on Uncle John, and saying in effect, 'I don't intend to take your advice, I intend to take my own way, even though it lead me to a Fife fishing village—and a degrading love affair." ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... why, Gussy. Simply because you get a kick out of insulting us with sardonic ideas. If we take one of them seriously, you think we're degrading ourselves, and that pleases you even more. Like making someone laugh at a ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... circumstance stamped itself on my memory. I was obliged to be present at a flogging parade—the only one, I am glad to say, I have ever had to attend, although the barbarous and degrading custom of flogging in the army was not done away with until nearly thirty years later.[5] A few years before I joined the service, the number of lashes which might be given was limited to fifty, but even under this restriction the ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... very presence, and he had seen his mother sold to the negro-trader. An only sister had been torn from him by the soul-driver; he had himself been sold and resold, and been compelled to submit to the most degrading and humiliating insults; and now that the woman upon whom his heart doted, and without whom life was a burden, had been taken away forever, he felt it a ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... and who have never mingled much with persons of their own age, are guarded from low vices by the romantic and beautiful ideal of life, which they formed in solitude. The coarse reality is so shocking and degrading, so repugnant to taste and good feeling, and all their preconceived notions upon the subject, that they cannot indulge in it without remorse and a painful sense of degradation. This was so completely my case, that I often fled to solitude as a refuge ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... scarlet with excitement. "Well, sir, we naturally resent this, as we are proud of our horse service, and do not want some lout with interest to back him, foisted upon us. It would be degrading, but I tell you frankly that we ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... in far more definite terms, he perceived the injustice of the world toward women. Here with Berrie, as in ages upon ages of other times, the maiden must bear the burden of reproach. "In me it will be considered a joke, a romantic episode, in her a degrading misdemeanor. And yet what ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... not aristocratic. But what business is? I cannot draw the line between the baker of hard tack—such is the familiar term we employ—and the seller of the material for our product, by the barrel or the cargo. From the point of view of a Chylde, all avocations for the making of money seem degrading, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... comes in, feed him with every unwholesome dainty he fancies, and feel myself honored by his acceptance of these services. I think it is for him to rise and offer me a seat, because I am a woman and his wife; and that a silly subservience on my part is degrading to him and to myself. And I am afraid I make known these sentiments to her in a ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... one centre, two are impossible.... How have you repaid me?" he went on. "Our marriage has been nothing but your proving to me all the time, every hour, that I am a nonentity, a fool, and even a rascal, and I have been all the time, every hour, forced in a degrading way to prove to you that I am not a nonentity, not a fool at all, and that I impress every one with my honourable character. Isn't that ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... generally first noticed in the use of the hands, might be trained into right and ennobling habits, rather than be allowed to degenerate into wrong and often degrading ones, Froebel arranged his charming set of finger-games for the mother to teach her babe while he is yet in her arms; thus establishing the right activity before the wrong one can assert itself. In such little songs as ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... were valueless. All that, in her earlier girlhood, Sibyll's ambition had coveted, when musing on the brilliant world, seemed now well-nigh fulfilled,—her father protected by the first noble of the land, and that not with the degrading condescension of the Duchess of Bedford, but as Power alone should protect Genius, honoured while it honours; her gentle birth recognized; her position elevated; fair fortunes smiling after such rude trials; and all won without servility or abasement. But her ambition having once exhausted itself ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... four horses prancing under their studded harness. Lionel and his wife of a few days descended from it, when they found themselves in the midst of this unexpected crowd. They had cause, those serfs, to shout out a welcome to their lord; for never again would they live in a degrading position, if he could help it. The various improvements for their welfare, which he had so persistently and hopefully planned, were not only begun, but ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... current issues: air pollution from power plant emissions results in acid rain; acidification of lakes and reservoirs degrading water quality and threatening aquatic life; Japan's appetite for fish and tropical timber is contributing to the depletion of these resources in Asia and elsewhere natural hazards: many dormant and some active volcanoes; about 1,500 seismic occurrences (mostly tremors) every year; tsunamis international ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... my light dresses another time! From this out, I shall dress more in keeping with you. I boasted that I should live to comfort and console you, to recompense you for the past, and what have I been doing? Wearying and degrading you!" ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... dwelling here for some little time, thou shalt again become a Brahmana; and even now, I consider thee to be a Brahmana, there is no doubt about this. For the Brahmana who is vain and haughty, who is addicted to vices and wedded to evil and degrading practices, is like a Sudra. On the other hand, I consider a Sudra who is always adorned with these virtues,—righteousness, self-restraint, and truthfulness,—as a Brahmana. A man becomes a Brahmana by his character; ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... sanctuary of the Hollow Needle, I have sacrificed my treasures, my power, my pride—I will sacrifice everything—I don't want to be anything more—but just a man in love—and an honest man, because she can only love an honest man. After all, why should I not be honest? It is no more degrading ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... sacred hymns;" then he comes to this conclusion: "Egypt, in possession of an admirable fund of doctrines respecting the essence of God, and the immortality of the soul, did not for all that defile herself the less by the most degrading superstitions; we have in her, sufficiently summed up, the religious history of all antiquity."[12] As regards the civilization which flourished in India, M. Adolphe Pictet, in his learned researches on the subject of the primitive ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... petty advantage, regardless of any prospect of future benefit, however great, to their country or to themselves. To give you an idea of the character of men suddenly emancipated from a state of the most degrading and abject slavery, in which state cunning, deception, and fraud, if not absolutely requisite, were convenient and profitable, of their present arrogancy, ignorance, despotism, and cruelty, when safe opportunity offers for revenge, would require that a diary should be ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... case requiring immediate action; and, secondly, because it would be cheaper to purchase the friendship of Algiers by paying a money-tribute, as had been done for some time by European nations, or to purchase the protection of those nations. It appears strange that suggestions so degrading to the character of a free and independent nation should not have been met ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... would be very profitable to themselves. He overcame their prejudice against labour by showing them that an occupation to which we powerful and rich white men were glad to devote ourselves could be neither degrading nor burdensome. They were not to suppose that we intended them to grub about in the earth, like the barbarous negroes, with wretched spades; the hard work would be done by oxen; they need only walk behind the implements, which ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... because it was a cruelty to which she was accustomed. If the sport had been unknown in Dinwiddie, and she had read of it as the peculiar activity of the inhabitants of the British Islands, she would probably have condemned it as needlessly brutal and degrading. But with that universal faculty of the human mind to adjust its morality to fit its inherited physical habits, she regarded "the rights of the fox" to-day with something of the humorous scorn of sentimental rubbish with which her gentler ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... Ann!" exclaimed Mrs. Carey to Nancy in despair. "She makes us these generous presents, yet she cannot possibly have any affection for us. We accept them without any affection for her, because we hardly know how to avoid it. The whole situation is positively degrading! I have borne it for years because she was good to your father when he was a boy, but now that she has grown so much more difficult I really think I must ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Essay xiii.] But a glance at the context will show that what Goldsmith had in mind was not "nature to advantage dressed", not nature with any adornments added by man; but nature stripped of all that to man has degrading associations; nature, to adopt the words used by Wordsworth on a kindred subject, "purified from all lasting or rational causes of dislike or disgust". It may well be that Goldsmith gave undue weight to this reservation. It may well be that he did not throw himself on nature ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... vessel was knocked to pieces by its new owner, who used the timber to construct a shanty, a stable, and a pig-pen, for his family and other live-stock. Before this degrading transmutation was begun, the original proprietor of the now abandoned craft removed to the commodious cabin of an elegant barge, provided by the courtesy of Wilkinson. In this convenient vessel, navigated by a select crew under command of a faithful sergeant, the sole passenger embarked ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... as he would have appeared at the Battle of Buena Vista. This monument is intended as a weathercock to crown the new dome of the Capitol at Washington. By this happy contrivance, the horse will be freed from the degrading necessity of touching the earth at all,—thus distancing Mr. Mills by two feet in the race for originality. The pivot is to be placed so far behind the middle of the horse, that the statue, like its original, will always indicate which way the wind blows ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... their nature will be coloring all their activities. It will beautify their arts, and erotically confuse their religions. It will lend a little interest to even their dull social functions. It will keep alive degrading social evils in all their great towns. Through these latter evils, too, their politics will be corrupted; especially their best and most democratic attempts at self-government. Self-government works best among those who ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... which affected the rights of the crown itself. Occasion was therefore taken of this fact to propose that these sections at least should be omitted from the proclamation. By this means the king might, it was argued, be relieved from these obnoxious and degrading articles by a happy expedient; the national liberties of the Netherlands might be advanced as the pretext for the omission, and the name of the republic lent to cover this encroachment on the authority of the synod. But the king had caused the decrees to be received and enforced in his ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... joyous banquet share, Nor e'er let Gothic grandeur dare, With scowling brow, to overbear, A vassal's right invading. Let Freedom's conscious sons disdain To crowd his fawning, timid train, Nor even own his haughty reign, Their dignity degrading. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... come, with the blood of merchants, pioneers and heroes in your veins, to a normal battle. But for me, my forebears were savages two hundred years ago. My people learn to know civilization by the lowest and most degrading contact with it, and thus equipped or unequipped I tempt, an abnormal contest. Can't you ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... discreditable to Rupert's compliance, for her own womanly tenderness, long and deeply rooted attachment, made it appear to her eyes more as an act of compliance with her own last behest, than as the act of degrading meanness it would unquestionably appear to be, to all the ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... to diplomacy at Washington. The attempt to prove that the fur-seals are domestic animals, and the property of the United States when a hundred miles out in the Pacific Ocean was a humiliating reflection on the intelligence of both parties to the dispute, and showed abject and degrading subserviency to the corporation controlling the seal monopoly. Added to this was the disgrace of forgery, detected, unfortunately, not at Washington, but in London, and indicating that, while Washington officials were doubtless innocent of complicity ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... of the war, the first stampede which overwhelmed us had a touch of comedy unless one's imagination were shocked by the panic of great crowds, in which always and for whatever cause there is something degrading to the dignity of human nature. It was the panic rush of the world's tourists suddenly trapped by war in the pleasure haunts of Europe. They had come out to France, Switzerland, Italy and Egypt with well-lined purses, for the most part, and with the absolute conviction ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... two strong men. In point of intellect and aspiration they were far beyond the people they governed—so far, indeed, that they were almost isolated. There was a multitude of slaves and consequently there was a feeling everywhere that useful work was degrading. The tendency of the slave-owner is always toward profligacy and conspicuous waste. To do away with slavery was out of the question—that was a matter of time and education—the ruler can never afford to get ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... beef, a dish of pigeons, a pudding, cheese and coffee. I was so over-eaten after this 'hunger and burst' that I could scarcely move; and it was my sad fate that night in the character of the local author to eloquute before the public - 'Mr. Stevenson will read a selection from his own works' - a degrading picture. I had determined to read them the account of the hurricane; I do not know if I told you that my book has never turned up here, or rather only one copy has, and that in the unfriendly hands of -. It has therefore only been ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Third. In the play, Margaret embraces the offer without a moment's hesitation:[95] we are disgusted by her versatile policy, and a meanness of spirit in no way allied to the magnanimous forgiveness of her terrible adversary. The Margaret of history sternly resisted this degrading expedient. She could not, she said, pardon from her heart the man who had been the primary cause of all her misfortunes. She mistrusted Warwick, despised him for the motives of his revolt from Edward, and considered that to match her son into the family of her enemy from mere policy was a ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... length upon the sand and turned to consult with his companions, he instantly regained command of his temper. Here was a momentary respite; ere they began again to torture him, he might have found some method to escape from this degrading and fatal misadventure. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... act, for which nothing in her previous conduct has in any way prepared her friends, is now said to have been due to the shock of hearing, some time during her wedding-day, that a sister whom she had supposed dead was really alive and in circumstances of almost degrading poverty. As this sister had been her own twin the effect upon her mind was very serious. To find and rescue this sister she left her newly made husband in the surreptitious manner already recorded in the papers. That she is not ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... Oxford that tradition had, on the Conservative side, given way earlier. Another tradition gave way with it, one which I at least did not regret, the tradition that an University seat should be a seat for life. It sounded degrading when a proposer of Mr. Gladstone stooped to appeal to the doctrine, "ut semel electus semper eligatur." But be that rule wise or foolish, it was on the Conservative side that it was broken down. It gave way to the rule that Mr. Gladstone was always to be opposed, and that it did not matter who ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... the American gentlemen. They become too absorbed in their business. They forget their duty to our sex in their selfish devotion to affairs in which we are debarred from joining them, and yet they wonder that we prefer the society of men who are removed by birth, tradition, and position from this degrading ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... is this point to remember. Whilst during the Christian centuries, the devotion to a supernatural and extramundane aim has been engendering, as a recent writer has observed with indignation, a degrading 'pessimism as to the essential dignity of man,'[3] the world which we have been to a certain extent disregarding has been changing its character for us. In a number of ways, whilst we have not been perceiving it, its objective grandeur has been dwindling; and the imagination, when ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... fertility and generation, as was done in agricultural rites all through the Aegean area, is in itself an intelligible and not necessarily a degrading practice. But when those emblems are somehow humanized, and the result is an anthropomorphic god of enormous procreative power and innumerable amours, a religion so modified has received a death-blow. The step that was meant to soften its grossness has ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... was immediately taken out and flogged; and that was the last seen of him in that region. He went off and never came back. The latter part of the sentence, however, was supererogatory; for there was something so degrading in a public whipping, that I have never known a man thus whipped who would stay longer than he could help, or ever desire to return. However this may have been, the sense of justice of the community was satisfied. No blood had been shed; there had been no hanging; yet a severe public example ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... stating that you, sir, hold the certificate or rather the license warranting the marriage, and that you will espouse and aid in prosecuting her iniquitous claims. My son is now a reformed and comparatively happy man, but should this degrading and bitterly repented episode of his collage life be thrust before the public, and allowed to blacken the fair escutcheon we are so jealously anxious to protect, I dread the consequences. Only horror ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... despised him. And he would thus have become a disgrace to his parents and friends, instead of a blessing to his country and the world. No boy, who has one particle of that noble spirit which George Washington had, will tell a lie. It is one of the most degrading of sins. There is no one who does not regard a liar with contempt. Almost always, when a lie is told, two sins are committed. The first is, the child has done something which he knows to be wrong. And the second is, that ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... in his Putney lodging, he reviewed the expense, anxiety, and weariness of his adventure; when he beheld the ruins of his last good trousers and his last presentable coat; and above all, when his eye by any chance alighted on the Tyrolese hat or the degrading ulster, his heart would overflow with bitterness, and it was only by a serious call on his philosophy that he maintained the dignity of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer's ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... effects, the analysis of results, scientific so called; whereas it was the folk-lorist, and such like, who with their dreams and prayers were all the time on the path of real knowledge, the trail of causes; that the one was merely adding to the mechanical comfort and safety of the body, ultimately degrading the highest part of man, and never advancing the type, while the other—but then I had never yet believed in a soul—and now was no time to begin, terror or no terror. Clearly, my thoughts ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... originally been a cook in the service of Madame Catherine, and was famous for his talent for larding poultry, but he had subsequently entered the household of Henry, where he had been employed in the most degrading service which one ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... one complete harmonious whole, disturbed only by the dread approach of death. But it is we ourselves who disturb such harmony by our own distorted conception of life. We have branded as bestial our physical desires; we have become ashamed of them; we have shrouded them in degrading forms and trammels. Those of us who by nature are weak, do not notice this, but drag on through life in chains, while those who are crippled by a false conception of life, it is they who are the martyrs. The pent-up ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... was an answer framed not in words, but in deeds. It said, "We have come to an end. We have been robbed of the rights guaranteed to us by the Kansas-Nebraska bill. We have been robbed of the rights of American citizens. We have been given the alternative of abject and degrading submission or of extermination. And now we make our answer. We will return blow for blow, wound for wound, stripe for stripe, and burning for burning. Murder shall be paid back with murder, robbery with ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... become thoroughly attached to his grandfather: they desired to secure the prejudice of the future baronet for his own people. At the same time, by developing in him the workman, they thought to give him a better chance against further dishonouring and degrading his race, than his wretched father had ever had: the breed of Lestranges must, they said, be searched back for generations to find an honest man in it. A landlord above the selfishness, and free from the prejudices of his class, would be a new ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... take on trust from his officials. As it was, he chose to take Bentinck's reckless aspersion at its highest, and the combat lasted for weeks and months. Bentinck got up the case with his usual industrious tenacity; he insisted that the Queen's name stood at that moment in the degrading position of being prefixed to a proclamation that all her subjects knew to recite and to be founded upon falsehood; he declared that the whole business was a job perpetrated by the outgoing ministers, to fill up a post that was ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... speculations have long since gone the way of all shams; and his charlatanism as a writer was not redeemed by his character as a man. Nothing could be worse than his private life; he was addicted to the most degrading vices. He was no hypocrite, however, and he cannot be charged with showing that respect for appearances which constitute the homage paid by vice to virtue. Such a man was well qualified for earning notoriety by insulting Washington. Only a thorough-paced rascal could ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... He made one stride forward, and faced his son with blazing eyes. "Do you think I will put up with it?" he said, between his teeth. "Do you suppose I shall stand calmly by and see you degrading and ruining me? I may never be my old self again, but I don't mean to play into your hands for all that. You can't always keep me here, and wherever I go I'll tell my tale. I know you, you clumsy rogue, you haven't the sense to play your part with common intelligence ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... self-assertion, that grew boastful as it grew distrustful of its claims and could bring less proof in support of them; the energy degenerated into impudence, evading the shame of spendthrift bankruptcy to-day by shifts that were sure to bring a more degrading exposure tomorrow; and the whole ended at last in a suicide whose tragic pang is deadened to us by the feeling that so much of the mixed motive that drove him to it as was not cowardice was a hankering after melodramatic effect, the last throb of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... had degrading consequences for Dinah, who believed in a revival of his love. The mother, alas, gave way to the mistress with shameful readiness. She felt herself a mere plaything in the man's hands, and at last ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... interfering more and more in the affairs of state. She was proposing to disband a force of troops that had been created, the Kunrentai, and placed under Japanese officers. It was reported that she was contemplating a scheme for usurping all political power by degrading some and killing other Cabinet Ministers favourable to Japan. Miura agreed. She was ungrateful. Disorder and confusion would be introduced into the new Japanese organization for governing the country. ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... remotely; but listen. I was about to add that women admire reckless courage and excessive animal spirits. But let that courage lead a man to shed another's blood for a jest, or let that animal spirit draw a man into degrading and bestial advice—presto! ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... never fulfilled them, but treated me even as badly as all the others. One of them was assigned a seat next to me at table. He would eat scarcely anything, and when done with that he would draw his chair away and pretend to be imposed upon in the most degrading manner possible. The other practised similar manoeuvres whenever we fell in at any formation of company or section. They both called me "nigger," or "d—d nigger," as suited their inclination. Yet this ought, I verily believe, to be attributed ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... that the atmosphere of culture, of which we have just spoken, has disappeared. We thus reach an Ireland which, in a sense, has neither culture nor language, a country in which the Gaelic spoken by a people humiliated and deeply demoralized by an anti-Catholic legislation, which was both savage and degrading, tended to coalesce with an English already condemned to death. It is from the moment when the Catholics had finally triumphed over persecution that we must date the beginning of that political struggle with which we are familiar, a struggle which has resulted in absorbing all ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... flung at the Church in all free lands to-day. Father Hecker's blood fairly boiled that the Church of Christ, the very home of Christian freedom, and the nursing-mother of all civil well-being, should be thus assailed, while Calvin's and Luther's degrading doctrines should be paraded as alone worthy ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... religious work. It is true that a stone is only a stone, whatever it may have been used for, but a peculiar sanctity is in most minds associated with the grave, and we ought not to run the risk of shocking tender-hearted people by degrading even the dead memorial of the dead to profane and secular purposes. And yet, what has become in too many cases of the old gravestones? The very old ones we may perhaps account for, but where are the middle-aged ones of the eighteenth ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... in a cloak to promote perspiration, and was asleep, when a party of Moors entered the hut, and pulled away the cloak. He made signs that he was sick, and wished to sleep, but his distress afforded sport to these savages. "This studied and degrading insolence," says Mr. Park, "to which I was constantly exposed, was one of the bitterest ingredients in the cup of captivity, and often made life itself a burthen to me. In these distressing moments I have frequently ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... hesitates not to stupify those noble faculties which he cannot hope to extinguish, and with which he has been endowed by the God of nature, for wise and benevolent purposes. And will you, gentlemen, by precept and example, longer sanction such a course of conduct,—conduct so degrading to us as intelligent beings, and as conservators ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... Kollander rambled on. For the third time Rhoda came back to comment upon the fact that Grant Adams had quit working in the printing office—a genteel trade, and had stopped delivering papers for Mr. Brotherton's newspaper stand—a rather high vocation, and was degrading himself by learning the carpenter's trade, when Mary Adams cut into the current ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... he had known but very few cases of slaves being ill-treated or even flogged during his six years' residence there: still no one can condemn more strongly than he does the whole system, as lowering and degrading the moral tone, both of the white and the ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... and England to-day offer terrifying examples of the despotism of an unenlightened and vulgar public opinion in all the highest concerns of man—in art, in literature and in religion. There is no despotism on earth so soul-destroying to the artist: it is baser and more degrading than anything known in Russia. The consequences of this tyranny of an uneducated middle class and a barbarian aristocracy are shown in detail in the trial of Oscar Wilde and in the savagery with which he was treated by ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... seen on farms to-day. Threshing and winnowing machines have taken its place. The father of Robert Burns declared threshing with a flail to be the only degrading and stultifying work on a farm; but I never knew another farmer who deemed it so, though it was certainly hard work. Last autumn I visited the "Poor Farm" on Quonsett Point in old Narragansett. In the vast barn of ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... already been very much tried. The decay of this worthy family was lamentable; but in spite of all, yesterday even, they endured their fate with resignation. Yes! the economy, the degrading drudgery, the old, mended gowns—they accepted all this without a murmur. A noble sentiment sustained and gave them courage. All three—the old mother in a linen cap doing the cooking and the washing, the elder sister giving lessons at forty sous, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... you pretend, Lucy," Mr. Nowell wrote on one occasion, "you would speedily exchange this degrading slavery for liberty and happiness with me, and would be content to leave the future utterly in my hands, without question or fear. A really ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... Majesty's approbation, or enable me to stand with confidence in his Royal presence on the happy day of his recovery;—and, on the contrary, that those who, under color of respect and attachment to his Royal person, have contrived this project for enfeebling and degrading the executive authority of the realm, will be considered by him as having risked the happiness of his people and the security of the throne itself, by establishing a fatal precedent which may hereafter be urged against his own authority, on as plausible pretences, or revived against the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... been recognised as a potent factor in the formation of character, and the Negro pulpit is not an exception to the general rule. Its influence may be elevating or degrading. The character and the ability of the man in the pulpit will ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... repose of Herbert's soul; and it was she who heard the letters which Colette wrote every evening to her absent husband, relating her life and the way she spent her days. All mourning, however rigid, involves attention to material details which are degrading to grief but demanded by society. Liveries must be ordered, trappings provided for horses and carriages, and the heartbroken mourner must face the hypocritical sympathy of the tradesman. All these duties ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... can be followed in daily life, that can be translated into terms of the home. We can not expect to be relieved from toil, but we do expect to divest it of degrading conditions. Work is honorable; it is entitled to an honorable recompense. We must strive mightily, but having striven there is a defect in our political and social system if we are not in general rewarded with ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Calvin Coolidge • Calvin Coolidge
... reached the conviction that it would be degrading to think longer of the man who, in return for the most ardent love, offered nothing but alms in jingling coin; yet her poor heart would not cease ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... with the King of Hanover in London, and in every way took his social and personal position firmly. In Parliament he crossed swords with Palmerston, refused his support to Peel's Coercion Bill in relation to Ireland, characterizing it as one of those measures which to introduce was degrading, and to oppose disgraceful; later he maintained that as revolution was the only remedy for the wrongs of Ireland, and as her connection with England prevented revolution, therefore it was the duty of England to effect by policy what revolution would effect ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... a slave of the most degrading superstition. Instead of worshipping the true, free, living God, who governs all things by His Providence, he bows before the horrid phantom of blind chance or inexorable destiny. He is a man who obstinately ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... were required, it was painful to comply with the dictates of his own reason, it was still more so to endure the harsh and superfluous restrictions of his teachers. He felt it hard enough to be driven from the enchantments of poetry by the dull realities of duty; but it was intolerable and degrading to be hemmed-in still farther by the caprices of severe and formal pedagogues. Schiller brooded gloomily over the constraints and hardships of his situation. Many plans he formed for deliverance. Sometimes he would escape in secret to catch a glimpse ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... treated almost as badly as by Mr. Geffeson, who thought her a devil, far less tenderly than we should have expected. Her "amours" are spoken of, though with the limitation that "they were not numerous, scandalous, or degrading." We gather that Talleyrand believed her to have been guilty in a special instance named, and that Madame Champan had confessed it to him. At the same time her person is not very ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... Wilhelm, others have come at various times until there is a considerable colony there. These people are poor. They come from the splendid stock of Waldenses who have been so potent a factor in freeing thousands in France and Italy from the degrading superstitions of Romanism. As all our readers know, the Waldenses have stood for religious freedom from first to last The fibre of their character has been tested through many a conflict. Dr. Edward Everett Hale, who told the story of the Waldensean heroism and devotion in the beautiful ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 48, No. 10, October, 1894 • Various
... know you,' he said; 'it's a degrading sort of business to go round the country persuading men to do their duty, but since there are so many shirkers in the country, some one's obliged to do it. We shall need all the strength of England, and of the Empire, before we've done, ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... characteristic of youth. He looks upon his school as his prison, and his master as his gaoler, and as he grows up to manhood, hates and despises the man who has flogged him. Corporal punishment is revolting, disgusting, and demoralising to the boy; and is degrading to the schoolmaster as a man and ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... disgrace. Like Nero, William II has been cruel to his mother; he is cruel to his sister, the Princess of Greece. He hates England, just as Caligula hated Brittany. With a mind like that of Nero, William II derives the greatest pleasure from the thought of degrading the French people by making them receive him with acclamation. What a triumph it must be for this grandson of William I (who defeated us but left us our honour) thus to bring us to dishonour: us, the descendants of the France of 1789, republicans in ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... hate each other do yet visit and keep up an intercourse, according to set forms, purposely to conceal their hatred, it being a hideous and degrading vice, of which all men are more or less either ashamed or afraid. To preserve these appearances, or perhaps from the impulse of vanity, the rector admitted of my excursions to Mowbray Hall. For my own part, I found ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... most other princes would have considered as degrading, and not without a sense of amusement, the Monarch of France waited till his Life Guardsman had satisfied the keenness of a youthful appetite. It may be supposed, however, that Quentin had too much ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... very much in marriage—modern, upper-class marriage," she repeated. "And, just precisely on that account, it seems to me all the more degrading and shameful that a girl should risk marrying the wrong man. People talk about a broken engagement as though it was a disgrace. I can't see that. An unwilling, a—a—loveless marriage is the disgrace. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... substances, nor anything really inhering in substances, nay, to admit that they are the necessary conditions of the existence of all things, and moreover, that they must continue to exist, although all existing things were annihilated— we cannot blame the good Berkeley for degrading bodies to mere illusory appearances. Nay, even our own existence, which would in this case depend upon the self-existent reality of such a mere nonentity as time, would necessarily be changed with it into mere appearance—an ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... to laugh that laugh with the crowd? Must she gain knowledge of the unclean, the vicious, the degrading things of life by actual contact? Was it not enough for her to know that those things were in the world as she knew that there was fever in the marsh lands; or must she go in person into the muck and mire of ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... sound of loud and angry altercation, and, as the sleepers started up, the Emir was seen grasping the bridle of the horse on which the Sheik sat downcast and abject under the storm of fierce indignant words hurled at him for thus degrading his tribe and all Islam by breaking his ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... three days. The expense of the committee, including witnesses, shorthand-writers, and printing, was about L60 a day, but it never occurred to any one of the number to get up and declare with indignation, that such a waste of money and time on so palpably absurd a scheme was degrading, and to demand an immediate close of their labours. It all went smoothly to the end, and Mr. Nogo walked off from his task with the approving conscience ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... the countess, "most degrading experience of all, Hatszegi no longer attempts to conceal from his wife his outrageous liaisons with pretty peasant women. The thing has long been a byeword, though his wife knew nothing of it—but she knows it now. Nor is this all, my dear Vamhidy. Poor Henrietta's heart ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... He stoop To whelm the world, and heave the floors o' the deep, Of purpose to pursue me from my place? And since I gave men knowledge, must He take Their length of days whereby they perfect it? So shall He scatter all that I have stored, And get them by degrading them. I know That in the end it is appointed me To fade. I will not ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... derived no benefit from his labors. He had no adequate support, no relief from the most sordid and worrying cares of life. He found himself almost forced into competition that was degrading. Had he entered into it he would have thrown down with his own hand the structure he had spent his life in rearing. He was alternately warmed by the admiration and love of a few and chilled by general ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... are far, far from gay, and what pleasure they do take, they take entirely in the society of their equals. So determined are they to drink delight of tennis with their peers, and with nobody else, that even the Clergy are excluded, ex officio, and in their degrading capacity of ministers of Religion, from the County Lawn Tennis Club. As we all know how essential young curates fresh from college are to the very being of rural lawn-tennis, no finer proof can be given of the inaccessibility of the County people around Chipping Carby, and of the ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... for freedom in the human soul, has been glowing more and more brightly since you have emerged from boyhood, and now her glances kindle it into a flame. For her dear sake, you long to be a free man, with power to protect her from the degrading incidents of a slave-girl's life. Wages acquire new value in your eyes, from a wish to supply her with comforts, and enhance her beauty by becoming dress. For her sake, you are ambitious to acquire skill in the ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child
... actions accord with those principles, both in word and deed. The irregularities only not universal among the young men of my standing, which I always knew to be wrong, I then learned to feel as degrading; learned to know that an opposite conduct, which was at that time considered by us as the easy virtue of cold and selfish prudence, might originate in the noblest emotions, in views the most disinterested and imaginative. It is not however from grateful recollections ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... scientific mind, this incongruous mixture of proof and trust be fraught with danger, what must it be to the indiscriminate audience which. Mr. Mozley addresses? In calling upon this agency he acts the part of Frankenstein. It is a monster thus evoked that we see stalking abroad, in the degrading spiritualistic phenomena of the present day. Again, I say, where the aim is to elevate the mind, to quicken the moral sense, to kindle the fire of religion in the soul, let the affections by all means be invoked; but they must ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... elevation, and make itself familiar to the comprehension even of a child. Strength must let the Graces bind it, and the arbitrary lion must yield to the reins of love. For this purpose taste throws a veil over physical necessity, offending a free mind by its coarse nudity, and dissimulating our degrading parentage with matter by a delightful illusion of freedom. Mercenary art itself rises from the dust; and the bondage of the bodily, at its magic touch, falls off from the inanimate and animate. In the aesthetic state the most slavish tool is a free citizen, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... monk at all was an assertion of self-will and independence, whether for good or evil, so their reverence for their abbots was a voluntary loyalty to one who they fancied had a right to rule them, because he was wiser and better than they; a feeling which some have found not degrading, but ennobling; and the parent, not of servility, but of true freedom. And as for the obsolete virtue of humility, that still remains true which a voice said to Antony, when he saw the snares which were spread over the whole earth, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... for these thoughts were sordid, humiliating, and degrading. They were unbidden, but still they came. They came from some dark fountain within herself. She really wanted—her idealistic self wanted—to be all that she knew she looked, a flower in life and thought. But, oh, it was hard, hard for her to be what she wished! Why ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the senior, a member of "Pop," and an athlete of many colours, found himself one day the object of an almost idolatrous worship on the part of a skinny little being, discreditably clever at Latin verses, and given over to the degrading habit of solitary piano practicing on half-holidays. He was embarrassed but touched by a devotion which was quite incomprehensible to him; and he encouraged it furtively. When Geoffrey left Eton the friends did not see each other again for some years, though they watched each other's ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... loyalties. And yet precisely that must be done with every advance in liberality. Admiration and passion lag behind reason; are forever backsliding and debauching themselves among the companions of their youth. But man's salvation lies not in degrading his reason to the level of his loyalties, nor in allowing the two to drift apart, but in acquiring a finer loyalty. And while one cannot extemporize the symbols and imagery of devotion, these will surely grow about ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the Marquis, "you may be confident; I myself felt the delicacy of the matter too much to place a gentleman nearly connected with my house in a degrading or dubious situation with these Ashtons. But I pointed out all the advantages of their marrying their daughter into a house so honourable, and so nearly related with the first of Scotland; I explained the exact degree of relationship ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... not have maintained my degrading self-control—it is all that redeems me in my own estimation to know that I could not—if he had still continued to keep his eyes on my face. His wife's tigerish jealousy came to my rescue and forced his attention away from me the moment he possessed himself of my hand. Her cold ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... ice, half hysterical, partly from the sense of the degrading, ludicrous plight I was in, partly from intense yet painful delight at being thus once more with him, seeing some recognition in his eyes again, and hearing some cordiality in ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... reckoned one of the liberal arts, and undoubtedly is so; but to be piping or fiddling at a concert, is degrading to a man of fashion. If you love music, hear it; pay fiddlers to play to you, but never fiddle yourself. It makes a gentleman appear frivolous and contemptible, leads him frequently into bad company, and wastes that time which ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... contingent advantage, which perhaps Henry Gowan had not foreseen, that both Mr and Mrs Meagles were more liberal than before to their daughter, when their communication was only with her and her young child: and that his high spirit found itself better provided with money, without being under the degrading necessity of knowing ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... would never be repeated should be coldly discouraged, and the nationalist movement allowed to proceed unchecked, until every colonist of British blood had surrendered the hope of remaining a citizen of the Empire for the degrading necessity of securing for himself and his children a tolerable position in the United States of South Africa by a timely alliance with the more progressive Dutch. From the presence of this danger Lord Milner was now relieved, since, as he instantly foresaw, the whip-lash of this frank appeal ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... has been a great deal of unfavorable criticism directed against the modern dances. There have been newspaper articles condemning the "latest dance fads" as immoral and degrading. There have been speeches and lectures against "shaking and twisting of the body into weird, outlandish contortions." There have been vigorous crusades against dance halls. And all because a few ill-bred, fun-loving, carefree young people wrongly interpreted ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... fact of any sort to impeach his disinterestedness, and yet not be able to express a generous or just sentiment in behalf of his fellow-creatures, without laying himself open to suspicions that are as degrading to those who entertain them, as they are injurious to all independence of ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... thus reached the height of our folly and made nothing by it, we addressed ourselves to the descent, no wiser for our pains. Descent is always harder than ascent, for divine ambitions are stronger and more prevalent than degrading passions. And when Katahdin is befogged, descent is much more perilous than ascent. We edged along very cautiously by remembered landmarks the way we had come, and so, after a dreary march of a mile or so through desolation, issued into welcome sunshine and warmth at our point of departure. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... overpowered by feelings of the most disagreeable kind the first time I used a palanquin. I could not help feeling how degrading it was to human beings to employ them as beasts ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... in the degrading fact which perverts all humanity. There is a strong social movement to-day against the white slave traffic; and at the same time the science of eugenics has arisen which tends to protect ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... he pursued his studies gave great umbrage to his friends as well as to his relations. He was reproached for having abandoned the profession of the law; his astronomical observations were ridiculed as not only useless but degrading, and, among his numerous connexions, his maternal uncle, Steno Bille, was the only one who applauded him for following the bent of his genius. Under these uncomfortable circumstances he resolved to quit his country, ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... confess, in this doctrine; which, even if it were true, would lead to a result directly opposite to that desired. For, if capacities are equal, whatever be the degree of their power (as no one can be coerced), there are functions deemed coarse, low, and degrading, which deserve higher pay,—a result no less repugnant to equality than to the principle, TO EACH CAPACITY ACCORDING TO ITS RESULTS. Give me, on the contrary, a society in which every kind of talent bears a proper numerical relation to the needs of the society, and which ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... you.... But you killed my son whom I entrusted to you. He was as your own son." Gordon: "Well, well, I killed my own son. There is an end of it." Zebehr: "And then you brought my wives and women and children in chains to Khartoum, a thing which for my name in the Soudan was most degrading." ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... child"—Him in whom all nations of the world were blessed—was placed in his rude cradle at Bethlehem: in commemoration of whose advent—and this is one secret of their pathos, waking high thoughts in the soul, too long brooding over and degrading itself with the mean cares and hopes of this life—the humble musicians make night tuneful, "scraping the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... was there too! So degrading! Last night he was talking to me about books, and I'm sure he thought I was quite grown up. The table was between us, you know, so he couldn't see my legs. I was enjoying myself so much, and saying that I thought Thackeray much over- rated, when mother ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and elsewhere produced a reluctant suspension of massacre and pillage, the murderers and plunderers were still left unpunished, and even caressed and rewarded for their crimes; and whilst protestants in France suffered the most cruel and degrading pains and penalties for alleged trifling crimes, catholics, covered with blood, and guilty of numerous and horrid ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... will be lightened by their being employed by some parvenus, elevated from the dregs of the people by a revolution which sets floating to the top the worst ingredients of the reeking caldron from which it is formed, instead of owning the more gentle and infinitely less degrading sway of those born to, and ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... pigeons, a pudding, cheese and coffee. I was so over-eaten after this "hunger and burst" that I could scarcely move; and it was my sad fate that night in the character of the local author to eloquute before the public—"Mr. Stevenson will read a selection from his own works"—a degrading picture. I had determined to read them the account of the hurricane; I do not know if I told you that my book has never turned up here, or rather only one copy has, and that in the unfriendly hands of ——. It has therefore only been seen by enemies; and this combination of mystery and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on September 11, 2001. Our strategy involved destroying the larger al-Qaida network and also confronting the radical ideology that inspired others to join or support the terrorist movement. Since 9/11, we have made substantial progress in degrading the al-Qaida network, killing or capturing key lieutenants, eliminating safehavens, and disrupting existing lines of support. Through the freedom agenda, we also have promoted the best long-term answer to al-Qaida's agenda: the freedom and dignity that ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - September 2006 • United States
... was the man who, with thoughts intent on his last and most degrading makeshift, was forging his way up Second Avenue, the mantilla—the veriest film of old Salamanca lace—pressed into a small wad and ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... that fell from the creator's spear when he had finished his main work? And do not the later annals prove that true valour belongs to the Japanese knight alone, whereas foreign countries—China and Europe alike—are sunk in a degrading commercialism? For the inhabitants of "the Land of the Gods" to take any notice of such creatures by adopting a few of their trifling mechanical inventions is an act ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... with you about the fun,' Borrodaile objected. 'That's why I'm glad they've had their lesson. I should say there was almost nothing more degrading than this public spectacle of——' Borrodaile lifted his high shoulders higher still, with an effect of intense discomfort. 'It never but once came my way that I remember, but I'm free to own,' he said, 'there's nothing that shakes my nerves ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... at being obliged to keep up an ineffectual chase after my Columbine through whole pantomimes; to see her carried off in the vigorous arms of the happy Harlequin; and to be obliged, instead of snatching her from him, to tumble sprawling with Pantaloon and the clown; and bear the infernal and degrading thwacks of my rival's weapon of lath; which, may heaven confound him! (excuse my passion) the villain laid on with a malicious good-will; nay, I could absolutely hear him chuckle and laugh beneath his accursed mask—I beg pardon for growing ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... seek for the glorification of his own name, settling everything by sacerdotal authority, and issuing every day, concerning ceremonies, faith, and all else, new decrees which he sought to make as sacred and authoritative as the laws of Moses. (14) Religion thus sank into a degrading superstition, while the true meaning and interpretation of the laws became corrupted. (15) Furthermore, while the high priests were paving their way to the secular rule just after the restoration, they attempted ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza
... was declared by the clergy to be brutal, degrading, atheistic, and anti-Christian, is now included as ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... seized so strongly on those who live by the sweat of the brow as among ourselves. Here it is nothing rare to meet the union of intellectual culture and self-respect with hard work. Here the prejudice against labor as degrading has very much given way. This, then, is the place where the subject which I have proposed should be discussed. We ought to consider in what the true elevation of the laboring portion consists, how far it is practicable, and how it may be helped onward. The subject, I am ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... question, so Mr. Hinsdale constructed a litter, and at exorbitant prices obtained men from a distant village to carry it. She had to be repeatedly laid upon the ground, while he rode far and near to find four men willing to perform the degrading service of carrying a woman. At length the sun became so hot, that they could travel only by night. Their troubles were somewhat relieved by the services of a man, whom Mr. Rassam had kindly sent to meet them. On the 7th of July, they entered Mosul, and were cordially welcomed ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... person. In his personal conversations with Oliver Cromwell, or in his letters to him as protector, or in his letters to the parliament, or to king Charles the second, or to any other personage, he discovered his usual boldness of character, and never lost, by means of any degrading flattery, his dignity as ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... a ton, when it should be twenty. Commercial brigandage was still given letters of marque. Bureaus were fighting among themselves for greater power, and in the turmoil Alaska was still chained like a starving man just outside the reach of all the milk and honey in a wonderful land. Pauperizing, degrading, actually killing, the political misrule that had already driven 25 per cent of Alaska's population from their homes was to continue indefinitely. A President of the United States had promised to visit the mighty land ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... while they clapped their hands in cadence, and burst at intervals into a barking laugh. I could not find any thing very amusing in this entertainment; on the contrary, it had the effect of making me feel very melancholy, as displaying these good people in a very idiotic and degrading light. ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... ample room for increase that domestic servants are allowed at least four times as much per head as those working people who value, more than any other class, the cheerful refreshingness of tea, but who, stinted in its use by the exorbitant duty, are tempted and almost driven to the use, instead, of degrading drinks. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... on all mankind?" Christians! wonder at this heathen, and profit by his example! in his last days he enlarged upon the wicked crime of suicide, which he reprobated with an acrimony not usual with him, declaring it to be an inexpiable offence to the gods, and degrading to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... remuneration, enables the department to play off one against the other, for the existence of a lower paid class makes it increasingly difficult for the Men Clerks to substantiate a claim for better pay themselves. The standard of their work is raised by the "moving-down" or "degrading" of duties, without any improvement in pay such as they would probably be able to obtain if women were not involuntarily undercutting them. Women fully sympathise with their male colleagues, whose prospects are injured in this way, but they insist that ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... sheer cruelty has, however, been supplanted by brutal sport. The bull-fights of Spain are true Colosseum spectacles, and whilst the danger-thrills which throb through a human concourse at the assaults of an infuriated bull may not be as degrading as mere gloating over pain, what can we say of the disembowelling of the horses which is such a feature of that sport. And the modern prize fight and boxing championship has something of the gladiatorial spirit. The enormous interest in the Dempsey-Carpentier contest is evidence of ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... when the captain coming from his cabin, and observing the master-at-arms leading Israel about in this indefinite style, demanded the reason of that procedure, adding that it was against his express orders for any new and degrading punishments to be invented ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... Bosenna, dropping knife and fork and clasping her hands. "Yes, to be sure, the vastness of it—the great distances! . . . And so you met my late husband in a boxing tent? Sport of all kinds appealed to him. But isn't boxing a-er—more or less degrading exhibition?" ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... little time for studies, nowadays, but it seemed to him that the trend of feeling was in the direction of Old Testamentary ideals. Men were growing tired of offering their other cheek to be smitten; they found it degrading, as do the Arabs. Why not import some of these sterner conceptions into our morality, as we import their peppery curries and kouskous and pilaffs ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... could not but feel for him, and in the intense mortification she anticipated for herself, she earnestly wished that in some manner he might escape the degrading penalty of ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... The entire island is a mass of granite with the exception of a patch of metamorphic slate near the center, and no doubt owes its existence with so considerable a height to the superior resistance this granite offered to the degrading action of the northern ice sheet, traces of which are here plainly shown, as well as on the shores of Siberia and Alaska, and down through Behring Strait, southward, beyond Vancouver Island. Traces of the subsequent partial glaciation ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... answered Isabella, stammering between a consciousness that he had guessed her thoughts justly, and the shame as well as fear which forbade her to acknowledge a suspicion so degrading and ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... screeching in the embrace of big, blond Germans. The girl who was watching was only a schoolgirl then. She knew very little of the evil of life, but enough to know that there was something in this scene degrading to womanhood and to France. She turned from the window and flung herself on her ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... took lodgings at Meudon, then a lovely suburb of Paris, hired a piano and sat down to compose his Dutchman. He gives a graphic account of his tremors whilst awaiting the piano: he feared that during the degrading struggle for bread the power of composing might have deserted him. The instrument arrived, he sat down, and shouting for joy, struck out the sailors' chorus. In seven weeks the draft was complete—it is dated September 13, 1841. Want of funds compelled him to leave Meudon and resume his treadmill ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... was, it was certainly a most horrible punishment; for Cain was compelled to bear it during his whole life as God's penalty for the awful murder which he had committed. Rendered conspicuous by this degrading mark, hateful and abominable in the eyes of all, Cain was sent away—banished from his home by his parents. And although the life he asked of God was granted him, yet it was a life of ignominy, branded with an infamous mark of homicide; not only that he himself might be perpetually ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... bacchanalian orgies among the Greeks, and of the frantic, dervish-like gestures and cuttings with knives and lancets which we read of among Asiatic races. In our own day and country (thank God) these extraordinary and degrading spectacles are scarcely ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... night before; an accumulated mail and many matters demanding decisions were awaiting him; and his sudden departure seemed an act directed personally against her, in the nature of a retaliation, since she had offended and repulsed him. Through Lise's degrading act she had arrived at the conclusion that all adventure and consequent suffering had to do with Man—a conviction peculiarly maddening to such temperaments as Janet's. Therefore she interpreted ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... coadjutor bishops, who had brought his lordship down, as it were, in a box, and were about to handle the wires as they willed. This in itself was a terrible vexation to the archdeacon. Could he have ignored the chaplain and have fought the bishop, there would have been, at any rate, nothing degrading in such a contest. Let the Queen make whom she would Bishop of Barchester; a man, or even an ape, when once a bishop, would be a respectable adversary, if he would but fight, himself. But what was such a person as Dr. Grantly ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... to accumulate riches, cooperating with a spirit of luxury and injustice, seems to be the leading cause of this peculiarly degrading and ignominious practice. Being once accustomed to subsist without labour, we become soft and voluptuous; and rather than afterwards forego the gratification of our habitual indolence and ease, we countenance the infamous violation, and sacrifice at the shrine ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... for the purposes of mental prostitution. My books breed moral pestilence and spiritual disease. The unholy filth I write fouls the minds and pollutes the imaginations of my readers. I am an instigator of degrading immorality and unmentionable crimes. Work! No, young man, I don't work. Just now, I'm doing penance in this damned town. My rotten imaginings have proven too much—even for me—and the doctors ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... was confided to the Reverend Lawrence Veal, a private pedagogue who "prepared young noblemen and gentlemen for the Universities, the Senate, and the learned professions; whose system did not embrace the degrading corporal severities still practised at the ancient places of education, and in whose family the pupils would find the elegances of refined society and the confidence and affection of a home," as his ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... smattering of education, because their ranks are recruited from a class where education is not in vogue. They are not, as a rule, disgusted with their mode of living—most of them consider it as a means to an end, and in no measure degrading or polluting. Most of them look forward to marriage and a certain state in society as their ultimate lot. Many of these women reside in the most fashionable apartment houses up-town, and successfully conceal their shame from the inquisitive eye of the respectable matron. They may ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... the father, went on toward Rome. So far as his character and his story were known among the surrounding nations, he was the object of universal obloquy, both on account of his previous career of degrading vice, and now, still more, for this ignoble flight from the difficulties in which his vices and ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... in the Note on the "Revolt of Islam". (While correcting the proof-sheets of that poem, it struck me that the poet had indulged in an exaggerated view of the evils of restored despotism; which, however injurious and degrading, were less openly sanguinary than the triumph of anarchy, such as it appeared in France at the close of the last century. But at this time a book, "Scenes of Spanish Life", translated by Lieutenant Crawford from ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... against the tyranny of men they lose all historical sense, just as an American does when he describes a mediaeval crime as if it had been committed by a European with a twentieth-century conscience. They charge men with keeping half humanity in a degrading state of slavery, and attribute all the sins of civilisation to the enforced ignorance and helplessness of women. Their contempt for their masters is almost beyond the German language to express, eloquently as they use it. They demand equality of education and opportunity, but ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... should hardly be here at this moment," she suggested. "You don't seem to apprehend to what degrading depths you ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... those rare natures in which the passion that we know by the generic term of love, approached as near perfection as is possible in our human hearts. For there are many sorts and divisions of love, ranging from the affection, pure, steady, and divine, that is showered upon us from above, to the degrading madness of such a one as George Caresfoot. It is surely one of the saddest evidences of our poor humanity that, even among the purest of us, there are none who can altogether rid the whiteness of the love ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... respective heads of 'The Inn,' 'The Hustings,' 'The Chairing,' and 'The Dinner.' 'Although,' said the writer, in his preface, 'there are some great improvements in the manner in which elections are now conducted, still the immoral and degrading principles that accompany them appear to remain nearly the same.' According to this earnest and ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... that it was a scandalous shame that an escaped Cossack like Pugasceff should be in a position to conquer a fourth of Russia in Europe, to disgrace the Russian troops time after time, to condemn the finest Russian officers to a degrading death, and now even to bombard Orenburg ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... frustrated,) with the expectation of receiving a few pieces of silver for betraying his country. Whatever was his recompense in this way I know not, but I am certain he was despised as long as he lived, and his memory will for ever be pointed at as contemptible and degrading by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various |
