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Prostitution   Listen
noun
Prostitution  n.  
1.
The act or practice of prostituting or offering the body to an indiscriminate intercourse with men; common lewdness of a woman.
2.
The act of setting one's self to sale, or of devoting to infamous purposes what is in one's power; as, the prostitution of abilities; the prostitution of the press. "Mental prostitution."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Prostitution" Quotes from Famous Books



... kind-hearted policeman, were admitted, suspiciously enough, by the landlady, who ushered them into a large garret where twenty or thirty people of all ages and both sexes lay and dosed away the day, choosing the evening and night for their trades of beggary, thieving, or prostitution. ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... in the local, and from the Socialist papers which came each week and from the many speakers he heard. These speakers were men and women of burning sincerity and with a definite and entirely logical point of view. Whether they talked about war, crime, prostitution, political corruption, or any other social evil, what they wanted was to tear down the old ramshackle structure, and to put in its place something new and intelligent. You might possibly bring them to admit slight differences between capitalist governments but when it came ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... Think of our child labour, of our police graft and our political corruption, of our food adulteration and of our slavery of the daughters of the poor. When I was a Son of the Mountain and a Son of the Bull, prostitution had no meaning. We were clean, I tell you. We did not dream such depths of depravity. Yea, so are all the lesser animals of to- day clean. It required man, with his imagination, aided by his mastery of matter, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... in praise of their virtues, expose themselves to the belchings of their beer, the fumes of their tobacco, the grossness of their familiarity, and the impertinence of their conversation, I cannot help despising him, as a man guilty of the vilest prostitution, in order to effect a purpose equally ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... possess some slight touch of this higher power, are nevertheless so absolutely destitute of all right feeling in connection with it as to use it for the most sordid ends—actually even to advertise themselves as "test and business clairvoyants!" Needless to say, such use of the faculty is a mere prostitution and degradation of it, showing that its unfortunate possessor has somehow got hold of it before the moral side of his nature has been sufficiently developed to stand the strain which it imposes. A perception of the amount ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater

... invigorate the intellect; and it was now rapidly losing its hold on the consciences of the multitude. The high places of idolatrous worship often exercised a most demoralising influence, as their rites were not unfrequently a wretched mixture of brutality, levity, imposture, and prostitution. Philosophy had completely failed to ameliorate the condition of man. The vices of some of its most distinguished professors were notorious; its votaries were pretty generally regarded as a class of scheming speculators; and they enjoyed neither the confidence nor the respect of the ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... because, although you might delay marriage, you cannot restrain those instincts which are implanted in human nature, and people will have the gratification and satisfaction of passions powerfully implanted, if not in one way, in some other way. So you have the evils of prostitution substituted for the evils of over-population. Now, what says Dr. Knowlton? There being this choice of evils—there being this unquestioned evil of over-population which exists in a great part of the civilised world—is the remedy proposed by Malthus so doubtful that probably it would lead ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant

... significance of religion, and the practical application to life of ethical principles, the application of moral obligations in business, the upright, God-fearing life of the Americans, unless one has lived among them. They have neither prostitution, foundling hospitals, nor hospitals for venereal diseases. A European is not accustomed to see empty prisons and hospitals in densely settled localities—to come upon cities where there is nothing for the police, the Judges, and the doctors to do he finds startling. They have attained ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... free. Love's favor is a free granting, a giving and taking without speculation. No prostitution; for the economic and social power of one person over another exists no longer, and with the falling off of external oppression many an internal serfdom of feeling will be done away with, which often is only the reflex of hard external compulsion. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... criticism of the preposterous self-sacrifice on which melodrama, which is the most popular non-literary form of play-writing, is commonly based; Mrs. Warren's Profession made a brave and plain-spoken attempt to drag the public face to face with the nauseous realities of prostitution; Widowers' Houses laid bare the sordidness of a Society which bases itself on the exploitation of the poor for the luxuries of the rich. It took Mr. Shaw close on ten years to persuade even the moderate number of men and women who make up a theatre audience that his plays were ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... daughter—which is rare. The Nights abound in tales of concubines, but these are chiefly owned by the Caliphs and high officials who did much as they pleased. The only redeeming point in the system is that it obviated the necessity of prostitution which is, perhaps, the greatest evil known ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... sorts, in palace building, in the exquisite confections of costly feminine adornment, in the luxurious binding of books, in the cooking of larks, in the distinguished portraiture of undistinguished persons, in the various refinements of prostitution, in the subtle accommodations of mystic theology, in jewellery. It is quite conceivable that in such departments Socialism will discourage and limit aesthetic and intellectual effort. But no mercantile plutocracy could ever have produced a Gothic cathedral, a folk-lore, a gracious natural type ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... seen, was only seventeen, unformed and wild, full of youthful passion and social despair, on the verge of what we call prostitution; reckless, hopeless, with a deep touch of sullenness and hatred. She was working at the time in the house of one of Terry's brothers. Katie, too, was employed there; although she lived with Nick, her husband, she still occupied herself at times with her old occupation; and, as ever, she watched ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... offer sacrifices out of the hire of a woman who is a harlot [17] for the Deity is not pleased with any thing that arises from such abuses of nature; of which sort none can be worse than this prostitution of the body. In like manner no one may take the price of the covering of a bitch, either of one that is used in hunting, or in keeping of sheep, and ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... good kiss;" wherefore his transition was made to the theme under consideration: "an increase of my salary." But it is needless to continue illustrations of the almost universal dearth of preaching. One hardly knows whether to laugh at its absurdity or weep over its prostitution. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... century were not especially high, and in the reaction from Puritan control and strict religious observances the great mass of the people degenerated into positive irreligion and gross immorality. Drunkenness, rowdyism, robbery, blasphemy, brutality, lewdness, and prostitution became very common. This moral decline of the people the Church of England seemed powerless ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... early world are, as I say, sufficiently patent to every inquirer. But it IS necessary to try to understand the rationale of this connection. To dispatch all such cases under the mere term "religious prostitution" is no explanation. The term suggests, of course, that the plea of religion was used simply as an excuse and a cover for sexual familiarities; but though this kind of explanation commends itself, no doubt, to the modern man—whose religion is as commercial as his sex-relationships are—and though ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... you want to hear it or not; that is, that I consider the bad pictorial literature of the day as most tremendous for ruin. There is no one who can like good pictures better than I do. But what shall I say to the prostitution of this art to purposes of iniquity? These death-warrants of the soul are at every street corner. They smite the vision of the young with pollution. Many a young man buying a copy has bought his ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... in this thieves' quarter, where no doors are needed, there being nothing to steal. Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors gather in stinking pools. Here live the poorest of the poor, the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction, and those who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to resist ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... writings after the publication of the first Edinburgh edition. Twice he declined journalistic work for a London paper. Poetry was the great consolation of his life, and even in his severest financial straits he refused to consider the possibility of writing for money, regarding it as a kind of prostitution. ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson

... fact, immorality was nowhere so flagrant as in the temples of Astarte, whose female servants honored the goddess with untiring ardor. In no country was sacred prostitution so developed as in Syria, and in the Occident it was to be found practically only where the Phoenicians had imported it, as on Mount Eryx. Those aberrations, that were kept up until the end of paganism,[40] probably have their explanation ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... Catullus's mistress had, it seems, run away from him to a common brothel, in front of which it was the custom, not only for women but even for men, to sit down and offer themselves for prostitution. ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... and beautiful talents, of which the possession commands a certain sort of admiration, but of which the exercise, for the sake of gain, is considered, whether from reason or prejudice, as a sort of public prostitution. The pecuniary recompence, therefore, of those who exercise them in this manner, must be sufficient, not only to pay for the time, labour, and expense of acquiring the talents, but for the discredit which attends ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... the church in this work, still on the whole it was mainly the influence of the early church that reconstituted the family life. From the first the church worked to abolish divorce, and fought as evil such vices as concubinage and prostitution, that came to flourish to such an extent in the Pagan world. Only very slowly did the early leaders of the church win the mass of the people to accepting their views as to the permanency of the marriage bond. In order to aid ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... the Insurance Bill, and so on. And when we've made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves into a society for doing it. . . . I'm certain that if people like ourselves were to take things in hand instead of leaving it to policemen and magistrates, we could put a stop to—prostitution"—she lowered her voice at the ugly word—"in six months. My idea is that men and women ought to join in these matters. We ought to go into Piccadilly and stop one of these poor wretches and say: 'Now, look here, I'm no better than you are, and I don't pretend to be any better, ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf

... more than brothels, in each of which a dozen or more young Bayaderes are kept for the purpose of increasing the revenues of the gods and their priests. Religious prostitution and theological licentiousness prevailed also in Persia, Babylonia, Egypt, and other ancient civilized countries. Commenting on a series of obscene pictures found in an Egyptian tomb, Erman says (154): "We are shocked at the morality of a nation which could supply ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... dedications themselves. They had, however, this absurdity, that in freely exposing the servile practices of dedicators, the writer was himself indulging in that luxurious sin, which he so forcibly terms "Public Prostitution." This early management betrays no equivocal symptoms of that traffic in Dedications, of which he has been so severely accused,[152] and of that paradoxical turn and hardy effrontery which distinguished his after-life. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... pay the jujur; or, if he chooses to keep his daughter, the seducer must make good the difference he has occasioned in her value, and also pay the fine, called tippong bumi, for removing the stain from the earth. Prostitution for hire is I think unknown in the country, and confined to the more polite bazaars, where there is usually a concourse of sailors and others who have no honest settlement of their own, and whom, therefore, it is impossible to restrain from promiscuous concubinage. At these places vice generally ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... indignation at the crime is frequently lost in wonder; for the Galician robbers are seldom satisfied with booty, and unlike their brethren in other parts generally mutilate or assassinate those who are so unfortunate as to fall in their hands; prostitution is carried on to an enormous extent, and although loathsome concustant [sic] diseases stare the stranger in the face in the street, in the market-place, in the church, and at the fountain; 'Drunken as a Galician' is a proverb; and superstitions forgotten, abandoned ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow

... instigator of so many bad authors and actors—THOU, who from my infancy seldom hast forsaken me, still abide with me. I will not complain of any hardship thy commands require, so thou dost not urge my pen to prostitution. In all thy rigour, oh! do not force my toil to libels—or what is equally pernicious—panegyric on ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald

... Parramatta, in former times, was a mart of women. Thither the laboring man went in search of a wife, and often, after a general survey, selected one on the spot. These marriages were not always a failure, but far the greater number ended in intemperance and prostitution. ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West

... undermined by dutiful submission. The consulting rooms of specialists are full of such cases. There are marriages which for the ignorant girl preached into dutiful submission, whose "innocence" has been carefully preserved for the purpose, mean prostitution as absolute, as repugnant, as cruel, and as contrary to nature as that of the streets. Beth's marriage was one of those. Until she went to Ilverthorpe, she had never heard that there was a duty she owed to herself as well as to her husband; and, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... will have to chase your own balls! And don't, in your amusement over this illustration, lose sight of the serious nature of what I am talking about—the horrible economic lunacy which is known as poverty, and which is responsible for most of the evils we have in this world to-day—for crime and prostitution, suicide, insanity and war. My purpose is to show you, not by any guess of mine, or any appeals to your faith, but by cold business facts which can be understood in Wall Street, that this economic lunacy is one which can be cured; that we have the remedy in our hands, and lack ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair

... the price, of her estates, contributed to alleviate the misfortunes of exile and captivity. But even the family of Proba herself was not exempt from the rapacious oppression of Count Heraclian, who basely sold, in matrimonial prostitution, the noblest maidens of Rome to the lust or avarice ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... villainy in Sydney are not surpassed by those in Melbourne; but, with regard to drunkenness and prostitution, the latter place is far worse than Sydney. The Theatre Royal contains within itself four separate drinking-bars. The Cafe de Paris, in the same building, has two bars. In the theatre itself there is a drinking public every night, especially when the ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... Lord." Now the sentence of the Church is God's sentence, according to Deut. 1:17: "You shall hear the little as well as the great: neither shall you respect any man's person, because it is the judgment of God." Therefore even those who are guilty of the prostitution of unbelief which is spiritual prostitution, should ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... too often, the unwelcome child is ushered into being, the fruit of a prostitution more base than any which is called by that name, because sanctioned and shielded by a covenant of holiness. If any children are illegitimate such are. If any mothers are to be condemned, they are those, who, vain and foolish, filled with worldly ambition, angrily regret that ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams

... to the highest bidder, fighting irrespectively of principle or patriotism, and passing with the coldest equanimity from the camp of one master to that of his worst foe. It was impossible that true military spirit should survive this prostitution of the art of war. A species of mock warfare prevailed in Italy. Battles were fought with a view to booty more than victory; prisoners were taken for the sake of ransom, bloodshed was carefully avoided, for the men ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... pelves, large mammae, and the general marks of womanhood, and bore living children. It has been remarked of 3 very markedly precocious cases of pregnancy that one was the daughter of very humble parents, one born in an almshouse, and the other raised by her mother in a house of prostitution. The only significance of this statement is the greater amount of vice and opportunity for precocious sexual intercourse to which they were exposed; doubtless similar cases under more favorable conditions would never ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... to be less admirably straight than as to the beauty of everything else. That was another reason why I mustn't write about his new line: Mr. Bousefield was not to be too definitely warned that such a periodical was exposed to prostitution. By the time he should find it out for himself the public—le gros public—would have bitten, and then perhaps he would be conciliated and forgive. Everything else would be literary in short, and above all I would be; only Ralph Limbert wouldn't—he'd chuck up the whole thing sooner. ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James

... his horns into his head, then his body into his shell, so your Church adapts itself to its surroundings. Let me give you a case in point—it touches on our present discussion. I have heard often enough the cheaper forms of prostitution decorously alluded to; but when did I ever hear dealt with, either for approval or reprobation, the established practice among the unmarried youth of our aristocracy ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... these excesses. Augustin goes too far when he makes the gods responsible for this riot of sensuality. What is true is that they did nothing to hinder it. And it is also true that the lechery, which he flings so acridly in the face of the pagans, the gross stage-plays, the songs, dances, and even prostitution, were all more or less included in the essence of paganism. The theatre, like the games of the arena and circus, was a divine institution. At certain feasts, and in certain temples, fornication became sacred. All the world knew what took place at Carthage in the courts and under ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... out within me: "Love him! Tell him you love him. Now, now! He is going away. To-morrow will be too late. Go to him. This will be your true marriage. The other was only legalised and sanctified prostitution." ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... knowledge of the world consists in servility, selfishness, and the practice of deceit, I hope I never shall know it.'—'You strangely forget yourself, Mr. Trevor!'—'I am not of that opinion, my lord. I rather think, it was the man who could suppose me capable of holding the pen of prostitution that ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... Athenians called it Catapygon or sodomite and the Romans digitus impudicus or infamis, the "medical finger"[FN380] of Rabelais and the Chiromantists. Another sign was to scratch the head with the minimus—digitulo caput scabere Juv. ix. 133).[FN381] The prostitution of boys was first forbidden by Domitian; but Saint Paul, a Greek, had formally expressed his abomination of Le Vice (Rom. i. 26; i. Cor. vi. 8); and we may agree with Grotius (de Verit. ii. c. 13) that early Christianity did much to suppress it. At last the Emperor ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... to see the fact of prostitution advertised so unblushingly as a public spectacle, his hatred and contempt breaking over the heads of the swine-faced men who followed the harlot, and picked their livelihood out ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... slavery in another form, may I be allowed to cite a parallel? That Anti-slavery War was undertaken against a Law introduced into England, which endorsed, permitted, and in fact, legalized, a moral and social slavery already existing—a slavery to the vice of prostitution. The pioneers of the opposition to this law saw the tremendous import, and the necessary consequences of such a law. They had previously laboured to lessen the social evil by moral and spiritual means, but now they turned their whole attention to obtaining the abolition of ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler

... schools are supposed to, moments sacred to education and growth. They are not subjected to the test of cooerdination in the world of industry. They give the children a respect for productive enterprise that should be invaluable later in effecting their resistance to the prostitution of their creative power. They do not give them experience in the administrative side of industry for which the children of high school age are ready and in need. But in an admirable way they subordinate training in technique to purpose and give the children the experience of exercising ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot

... naturalization; and we poison the sources of our national character and strength at the fountain, if the privilege is claimed and exercised without right, and by means of fraud and corruption. The body politic can not be sound and healthy if many of its constituent members claim their standing through the prostitution of the high right and calling of citizenship. It should mean something to become a citizen of the United States; and in the process no loophole whatever should be ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... happiness. Everywhere he has set up his own lustful desires as the rule and right of life in his relationship to woman, destroying the spiritual sacrament of marriage; and by his selfishness and greed of power, he has reduced her to a condition of prostitution. He outrages the helpless ones who have confided their honor, and their lives to his keeping, and the law—the vile, cursed, man-made law—upholds him in this slaughter of all that should make his heaven ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... with just indignation of the Anglo-Saxon custom of selling female servants, either to public prostitution, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... change of manners the disgraceful plague of public prostitution will perish of itself. It is especially at the time when the man possesses the frankness and timidity of adolescence, that in his pursuit of happiness he is competent to meet and struggle with great and genuine passions of the heart. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... Jews are by everybody in the streets, and in the bazaar, insulted, spat upon, the women often compelled to prostitution, it is to be marvelled that any honesty at all is ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... Bridewell, white females of every grade of character, from the innocent who is in the end acquitted, down to the basest wretch that ever disgraced the refuges of prostitution, are crowded into the same abandoned abode. With the white male prisons, the case is little altered.... And so it is with the colored prisoners of both sexes. Hundreds are taken up and sent to these places, who, after remaining frequently ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... the benefits. If free, independent women of God were as scarce in America as in Hong Kong the same moral conditions would prevail here, without regard to climate, for, if women could be bought and sold and reduced by force to prostitution, there are libertines enough, and they have propensities strong enough to enter at once upon the business, even in America. That which has elevated women above this slave condition is the development ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell

... fact, the symptoms were certain and obvious. The houses of prostitution disappeared, and as soon as one of them closed, a ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... and spoke to him for a long while. Glogowski frowned and said: "First of all, I haven't the money for it, for it would cost a great deal and, in the second place, I am not at all anxious to be 'one of our well-known and celebrated,' for that is a prostitution of one's talent!" ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont

... and soon hanged himself. The news was soon spread about the neighbourhood, and reached the inn, where both lovers, now as weary of their purchase as desirous of it before, advised her to go to London, with which she complied, and in all probability followed there the trade of prostitution ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber

... two evils of which I have now spoken, together with the physical effects of masturbation, young men become powerless to face the sexual temptations of manhood; and many, who in all other relations of life are admirable, sink in this matter into the mire of prostitution or the less demoralising, but far ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly

... think to pay this debt in any superficial way. She cannot pay it with palliatives—with child-labor laws, prohibition, regulation of prostitution and agitation against war. Political nostrums and social panaceas are but incidentally and superficially useful. They do not touch the source ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... The leaders of the Opposition immediately imposed silence upon their party; every thing passed without the least debate—in short, all were making their bargains. One has heard of the corruption of courtiers; but believe me, the impudent prostitution of patriots, going to market with their honesty, beats it to nothing. Do but think of two hundred men of the most consummate virtue, setting themselves to sale for three weeks! I have been reprimanded by the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... undoubtedly at this time, when revolt was in the air and man was preoccupied with his primal right to liberty of existence, that art was given the bad name of a luxury. Until its long prostitution throughout the seventeenth century, its mission had been noble; but now, coincident to the fall of the old regime, the people, from an ignorance which was more their misfortune than their fault, confounded art with luxuries more than questionable, in which their whilom ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various

... decrease &c 36. degeneracy, degeneration, degenerateness; degradation; depravation, depravement; devolution; depravity &c 945; demoralization, retrogression; masochism. impairment, inquination^, injury, damage, loss, detriment, delaceration^, outrage, havoc, inroad, ravage, scath^; perversion, prostitution, vitiation, discoloration, oxidation, pollution, defoedation^, poisoning, venenation^, leaven, contamination, canker, corruption, adulteration, alloy. decline, declension, declination; decadence, decadency^; falling off &c v.; caducity^, decrepitude. decay, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... had just heard of it, 'he is Mawas Pasha.' I won't translate—but it is a terrible epithet when uttered in a tone which gives it the true meaning, though in a general way the commonest word of abuse to a donkey, or a boy, or any other cattle. The wages of prostitution are unclean, and this tax renders all Government salaries unlawful according to strict law. The capitation tax too, which was remitted for three years on the pasha's accession to the people of Cairo, Alexandria, Damietta and Rascheed, is now called for. Omar will have to pay about 8 pounds ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... we shut the leaves, and, with Dante's lovers, read no more that day. It were well if the effect of intrusion were simply co-extensive with its presence; but it mars all the good hours afterwards. These scratches in appearance leave an orifice that closes not hastily. "It is a prostitution of the bravery of friendship," says worthy Bishop Taylor, "to spend it upon impertinent people, who are, it may be, loads to their families, but can never ease my loads." This is the secret of their gaddings, their visits, and morning calls. They ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... for "the Glory of God!" Think of it! And think of the feeling that must have been aroused in the mystic mind of Jesus at this horrible sight. How His soul must have been outraged at this prostitution of the sacred rite! And what would have been His thoughts had He known that centuries after, a great religion would stand, bearing His name, the followers of which would be carried away with this same false idea of sacrificial blood, which would be voiced in hymns ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... sacrifice their hair had to give themselves up to strangers on a certain day of the festival, and the money which they thus earned was devoted to the goddess. A Greek inscription found at Tralles in Lydia proves that the practice of religious prostitution survived in that country as late as the second century of our era. It records of a certain woman, Aurelia Aemilia by name, not only that she herself served the god in the capacity of a harlot at his ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... is true, after all, whether in Piccadilly or in the Yoshiwara. All prostitution is just ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... disgrace upon him in respect to his wife. And it really aims at adultery, because among the Jews it was ordained and commanded that every one must be married. Therefore also the young were early provided for [married], so that the virgin state was held in small esteem, neither were public prostitution and lewdness tolerated (as now). Therefore adultery was the most common form ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther

... women in England are still telling our young girls that motherhood is, for every woman, the worthiest goal, without suspecting that the doctrine they preach is dangerously conducive to that legal prostitution euphemistically known as loveless marriage, if not to greater evils.' . . . 'How can any girl who has been taught that maternity is woman's only destiny dare to run the risk of ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby

... true scholar and honest man requires arguments of this kind? A thousand or two years ago, any king's daughter, any young lady, anybody walking in a lonely spot, was in danger of being kidnapped and sold to prostitution or slavery. Philosophers, poets, and artists were owned by brutal wretches; pious priests purchased gentlemen of noble birth for slaves. The pirate's galley swept every coast to steal any human being. Time rolled on, and slavery ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... that a day is approaching when the alternatives between celibacy or a life of economic dependence and physical subordination to a man who has chosen her, and upon whose kindness her happiness depends, or prostitution, will no longer be a satisfactory outlook for the great majority of women, and when, with a newly aroused political consciousness, they will be prepared to exert themselves as a class to modify this situation. It may be that this is incorrect, and that in devotion ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... follow; but surely they have something in their power, were they to exert themselves. They ought never, by a silent approbation, to encourage looseness and profligacy among the men, and thus be accessary to the prostitution of numbers in the lower rank of their own sex; and if they have it not in their power to reform their gallants altogether, they can at least make them throw the mask of decency ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous

... man who was at once gambler, rumored owner or controller of a series of houses of prostitution, rumored maker of mayors and aldermen, rumored financial backer of many saloons and contracting companies—in short, the patron saint of the political and social underworld of Chicago, and who was naturally ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... engaged to meet were assembled in Fleet Street. He had walked some time along the Strand, amidst a crowd of those wretches who wait the uncertain wages of prostitution, with ideas of pity suitable to the scene around him and the feelings he possessed, and had got as far as Somerset House, when one of them laid hold of his arm, and, with a voice tremulous and faint, asked him for a pint of wine, in a manner more ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie

... harbors any such girl in a brothel, shall (until the contrary be proved) be deemed to have obtained possession of such girl with the intent or knowledge in clause one of sub-section one mentioned." This clause reads: "with the intent that such girl shall be used for the purpose of prostitution," and the penalty, "liability to imprisonment for a term not exceeding one year, or to a fine not exceeding $500, or to both." If that law failed because of what would pass as proof to the contrary, at any rate ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell

... should have read, "the judge may"; instead, it read, "the judge must." Far more difficult to deal with is the opposition of the people who believe that the moral sense of the community would be jeopardized by any laws suggesting that prostitution is unavoidable. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells

... stags nor bulls were in existence in Carthage. Hamilcar asked the Ancients for the hair of their wives; all sacrificed it, but the quantity was not sufficient. In the buildings of the Syssitia there were twelve hundred marriageable slaves destined for prostitution in Greece and Italy, and their hair, having been rendered elastic by the use of unguents, was wonderfully well adapted for engines of war. But the subsequent loss would be too great. Accordingly it ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... disingenuous as they are upon the subject of Socialism."[26] A leading Socialist organ complained: "Our opponents decline to deal with the fundamental principles of Socialism—its unanswerable indictment of the capitalist system, with all its concomitants of wage-slavery and slumdom; prostitution and child murder—and prefer instead to indulge in calumniation and misrepresentation of Socialism. We need not complain about that. It is a tribute to the soundness of the Socialist position, to the irrefutability of its principles, the impregnability of the rock of ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... above alluded to, were disclosed in a private letter from Hamilton, who said: "This man (Arnold) is in every sense despicable. In addition to the scene of knavery and prostitution during his command in Philadelphia, which the late seizure of his papers has unfolded, the history of his command at West Point is a history of little as well as great villainies. He practiced every dirty act of peculation, and even stooped to connections with the sutlers ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... by putting the blame on society at large. The desire seems to be, if possible, to make scapegoats of those who are fortunate. It is this sentiment that has given rise to investigations into the cooperative stores in order to charge their managers with responsibility for the prostitution of some of their employees because of the wages they pay. As the investigation shows, there never was a more unfounded charge, but the very fact that it was used is an indication of what I mean. ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft

... because the lurid subjects with their appeal to the low instincts, and therefore with their sure commercial success, could here escape the condemnation of police and decent public as they were covered by the pretence of social reform. How far the writers of the play of prostitution prostituted art in order to share the commercial profits in this wave of sexual reform may better ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... them were certainly written by George Sand. The seventh is one of these, and also the twelfth. The latter was written with a view to drawing the attention of the public to the wretched lot of the women and girls of the lower classes, who were reduced to prostitution by the lowness of their wages. Their virginity is an object of traffic," we are told, "quoted on the exchange of infamy." The sixteenth Bulletin was simply an appeal for revolt. George Sand was looking ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic

... god Pan reward thee for that good Thou hast given thy poor Shepherd: fairest Bud Of Maiden Vertues, when I leave to be The true Admirer of thy Chastitie, Let me deserve the hot polluted Name Of the wild Woodman, or affect: some Dame, Whose often Prostitution hath begot More foul Diseases, than ever yet the hot Sun bred through his burnings, whilst the Dog Pursues the raging Lion, throwing Fog, And deadly Vapour from his angry Breath, Filling the lower World with Plague and Death. ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... as the anti-Socialist reformer might have done. He says that three of the four chief objects of Socialism are the organization of society, first "to prevent that overwork and unemployment which lead to drunkenness, pauperism, prostitution, and crime"; second, "to preserve the resources of the country"; and third, "to produce with the greatest economy, with the greatest efficiency."[70] Yet Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, as well as Mr. Roosevelt, agree to all three of these policies. They ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... work" and "Those that cannot work" have been completed, and form a valuable book; but the discontinuance of the third part is no loss at all, for in commencing upon "Those that will not work," Mr. Mayhew began with a history of prostitution in ancient and modern times, a subject which did not possess the novelty or originality of his other divisions, and consequently his readers fell off so fast that he was forced first to raise the price of, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various

... by inability to earn a living, or by fear of starvation, to have recourse to a trade which most of them loathe, many regard with indifference, and some few follow in obedience to the laws of their constitution. But on the brink of the gulf of prostitution in Paris, the young girl of sixteen, beautiful and pure as the Madonna, had met with Castanier. The old dragoon was too rough and homely to make his way in society, and he was tired of tramping the boulevard at night and of the kind of conquests made there by gold. For some time ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac

... Hegel, Rechtsphilosophie, 67. Even the use of a corpse as manure, or for any mercantile purpose, is repugnant to our feelings, "because of the dignity of personality." (Schaeffle, National OEkonomie, 1860, 28.) In this respect, prostitution is a remnant of slavery. Schaeffle is right, when he says that to repay personal services with material commodities which do not afford as much food etc., as the former have cost in expenditure of vital ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... of conduct for alien residents or to govern private relations with them. Purporting to enforce the above distinction, the Court, in 1909, held void a statutory provision which, in prohibiting the importation of "any alien woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution," provided further that whoever should keep for the purpose of prostitution "any alien woman or girl within three years after she shall have entered the United States" should be deemed guilty of a felony and punished therefor.[1082] Three Justices, however, ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... nation really lives and moves, and forms the mainspring of practical progress and improvement; it is the awful profanation of public religion, by its notorious alliance in the governing powers with the violation of every moral rule under the stimulants of fear and vengeance; it is the perfect prostitution of the judicial office which has made it, under veils only too threadbare and transparent, the degraded recipient of the vilest and clumsiest forgeries, got up wilfully and deliberately, by the immediate advisers of the Crown, for ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook

... justified that Uruk was one of the centers—perhaps the center—of the obscene rites to which Herodotus[876] has several references. Several other incidental allusions in cuneiform literature to the sacred prostitution carried on at Babylonian temples confirm Herodotus' statement in general,[877] although the rite never assumed the large ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow

... must depend upon the people whose plighted faith one to another it represents, to maintain the social contract. To the old-time patriot there was nothing incongruous in the spectacle of the symbol of the national unity floating over cities reeking with foulest oppressions, full of prostitution, beggary, and dens of nameless misery. According to the modern view, the existence of a single instance in any corner of the land where a citizen had been deprived of the full enjoyment of equality would turn the flag into a flaunting lie, and the people would demand with indignation that it ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... arise spurious Mysteries, in names, forms, and pretensions partially resembling the genuine ones, under the control of the most unprincipled persons, and in which unquestionably the excesses of unbelief, drunkenness, and prostitution held riot. These depraved societies were foreign grafts from the sensual pantheism ever nourished in the voluptuous climes of the remote East. They established themselves late in Greece, but were developed at Rome in such unbridled enormities as compelled ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... your dearest rights crushed to the earth! See your sons murdered, and your wives, mothers, and sisters, doomed to prostitution! In the name of the merciful God! and by all that life is worth, let it no longer be a debateable question, whether it is better to ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet

... an' equal member of a liberty-loving nation, a nation whose standard is, now and forever, 'Gimme liberty or gimme det', a nation that stands for all the conceivable benefits that mankind may enjoy, a nation that scintillates pyrotechnically over the prostitution ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford

... shop on the long winter evenings; he who shared her crust of bread moistened with the sweat of her brow, and her love at once sublime and poor; he, that same man, after having abandoned her, finds her after a night of orgie, pale and leaden, forever lost, with hunger on her lips and prostitution ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... aggravate the offence; and that, if they allow a man so convicted to escape, in consequence of his high position in life, every humble man found guilty and executed for the same crime—is murdered. They will tell us it would be a prostitution of the prerogative of the Crown to connive at crime in the rich and punish it in the poor. And, again, there's the devil of it; your beggarly want of hospitality in the first place, and the cursed swaggering ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... worship their weaknesses. He palliated the infamous vices of the great Frederic, and brought philosophy on its knees before the mistresses of Louis XV. Like the courtezan of Thebes, who built one of the pyramids of Egypt from the fruits of her debaucheries, Voltaire did not blush at any prostitution of genius, provided that the wages of his servility enabled him to purchase enemies against Christ. He enrolled them by millions throughout Europe, and especially in France. Kings were reminded of the middle ages, and of the thrones outraged by the popes. They did not see, without umbrage ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... the light of political economy, is far less of an evil than the enforced maternity of wretched and discordant families, which becomes the fountain of an endless flow of crime, while prostitution shows its evils only in the parties immediately concerned, and effectually purifies society in time by arresting the propagation of its most worthless members. In the same manner it may be said that some epidemics are an advantage to society, by cutting off the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various

... husk and excuse for a virtue be without its kernel prostitution, or the kernel prostitution without this husk of a virtue? I wonder the women of the town do not form an association, like the Society for the Suppression of Vice, for the support of what may be called the 'King, Church, and Constitution' of their order. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... Preceptorium, Luther's Precepts of the Church Preparation for the mass Preparatotia "Prevail against the gates of hell," Prierias Priest vicar of God arrogance of Priesthood of believers reforms suggested to Private confession Princes, duties of Promises of God Prostitution Protests against Indulgences Proverbs quoted Providence ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther

... ordinances by the existence of bawdy-houses and the selling of liquor in prohibited hours and on Sundays. The captain of the precinct came out with a public statement that these men were liars; that the law was observed and prostitution did not exist. As between Dr. Parkhurst and the captain of the precinct, the public was inclined to ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine

... them they would see that the "evils" which had been published broadcast were merely the symptoms of that disease which had come upon the social body through their collective neglect and indifference. They held up their hands in horror at the spectacle of a commercial, licensed prostitution, they shunned the prostitute and the criminal; but there was none of us, if honest, who would not exclaim when he saw them, "there, but for the Grace of God, go I!" What we still called "sin" was largely the result of lack of opportunity, and the active principle of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... its wars of extermination against the Canaanites and Phoenicians, is to be found in a careful study of the foul and cruel types of heathenism which those nations carried with them wherever their colonies extended. A religion which enjoined universal prostitution, and led thus to sodomy and the burning of young children in the fires of Moloch, far exceeded the worst heathenism of Africa or the islands of the Pacific. The Phoenician settlements on the Mediterranean have not even yet recovered from the moral blight of that religion; and had such a ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... intoxicated to spend the night in houses of ill-fame. When we happened to find those places already tenanted by other men, we forced them by violence to quit the premises, and defrauded the miserable victims of prostitution of the mean salary the law allows them, after compelling them to yield to our brutality. Our scandalous proceedings often exposed us to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... want that I haven't got—and your millions can't buy it. I want decent love. You had me schooled into a Circe and you almost killed my soul. Thank God, some one came in time, some one whose thoughts are above sordid conquest. Some one who wanted to save me from the legalized prostitution of a loveless marriage. And because he has said to your face what all men say in your absence, you talk of crucifying him." She broke off ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... Moab, a more honourable embassy is immediately despatched, and greater rewards proposed. Then the iniquity of his heart began to disclose itself. A thorough honest man would without hesitation have repeated his former answer, that he could not be guilty of so infamous a prostitution of the sacred character with which he was invested, as in the name of a prophet to curse those whom he knew to be blessed. But instead of this, which was the only honest part in these circumstances that lay before him, he desires the princes ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler

... delayed until a convoy could attend them. These hindrances were frequent, when this colony was founded. Both male and female prisoners were commonly forwarded together: the officers and soldiers selected companions for the voyage, and a sentence of transportation included prostitution. It is not incredible that modest women rejected life on such terms, or preferred a public execution to the ignominy of a floating brothel. These practices were first tolerated as inevitable, and afterwards ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West

... Baron of Man. Then as head of the Church he had powers over offences which were once called offences against common law. Irregular behaviour, cursing, quarrelling, and drinking, as well as transgressions of the moral code, adultery, seduction, prostitution, and the like, were punishable by the Church and the Church courts. The censures of Bishop Wilson on such offences did not err on the side of clemency. He was the enemy of sin, and no "gentle foe of sinners." He was a believer in witchcraft, and for suspicion ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine

... impartial judgment of them cannot be ecclesiastical. One fact is indisputable,—that they were unfavorable to professional vice; and in many of the larger fortified towns,—the seats of princes,—no houses of prostitution were suffered to exist. When all things are fairly considered, it will be found that Old Japan might claim, in spite of her patriarchal system, to have been less open to reproach even in the matter ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... life of the men and women who, in mediaeval France and Germany, did the work which had been taught by Hesiod and Virgil. About all these tragedies the literature of the Middle Ages, ready to show us town vice and town horror, dens of prostitution and creaking, overweighted gibbets, as in Villon's poems, utters not a word. All that we can hear is the many-throated yell of mediaeval poets, noble and plebeian, French, Provencal, and German, against the brutishness, the cunning, the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... the Montanist and the Novatian sects condemned them absolutely, on the ground that if God has removed a wife or husband he has thereby signified his will to end the marrying of the parties; Tertullian calls second marriage a species of prostitution.[244]Jerome expresses the more tolerant and orthodox view: "What then? Do we condemn second marriages? Not at all; but we praise single ones. Do we cast the twice-married from the Church? Far from it; but we exhort the once-married ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker

... results. Those who could restrain their impulses would still be considered as following the best way; but for the majority who could not do so, the authorised method and degree of intimacy laid down by him would prevent such evils as prostitution, connubial unfaithfulness, and the secret liaisons of widows, resulting in practices like abortion. The prevalence of such a custom would, however, certainly do more to injure social and family life than all the evils which it was designed to prevent, and it is not surprising ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... of his remains except his name, and only one letter ever addressed to him, is in some way connected with the religious turn which his posterity took, in whose eyes there would be much to be lamented in what they must, I fear, have considered a prostitution of the noble talents ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various

... portrait of the Saviour, purged of all impurities, Nietzsche rendered military honours to a foe, which far exceed in worth all that His most ardent disciples have ever claimed for Him. In verse 26 we are vividly reminded of Herbert Spencer's words "'Le mariage de convenance' is legalised prostitution." ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... ends of greater equality of demand in the marriage relation. The tendency on the whole is toward a higher conception of what marriage should be and what it should do for both parties in the bond. The statistics of illegitimacy, of commercialized prostitution, of venereal disease, of infant mortality, of early death or life-long invalidism of wives and mothers, of marital unhappiness and parental neglect which are found by honest investigation in states and nations in which no divorce is allowed do not lead to ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... Guiccioli was the daughter of an impoverished noble. At the age of sixteen, she was taken from a convent, and sold as third wife to the Count Guiccioli, who was old, rich, and profligate. A fouler prostitution never profaned the name of marriage. A short time afterwards, she accidentally met Lord Byron. Outraged and rebellious nature vindicated itself in the deep and devoted passion with which he inspired her. ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... make us wholly sympathise with his paeans in her praise. It seems psychologically impossible for a woman to sin so repeatedly as Trilby, and so apparently without any overwhelming temptation, and yet at the same time to retain her essential purity. It is a prostitution of the word "love" to excuse Trilby's temporary amourettes ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... prostitution, from the middle class apartments, scattered in the most respectable streets, to the damp, ill-smelling dens which cast out their wares at night on the Calle de Peligros, circulated the story of a certain gentleman, provoking shouts of laughter. He always ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... for priests and publicists to cease launching foolish anathemas and useless statutes at prostitution long enough to inquire what is driving so many bright young women into dens of infamy,—for those good souls who are assiduously striving to drag their fallen sisters out of the depths, to study the causes of the disease before attempting a cure. I say disease, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... has not yet been to purge this vast lazar-place, for prostitution long since made it its headquarters. It is, perhaps, a good thing for Paris that these alleys should be allowed to preserve their filthy aspect. Passing through them by day, it is impossible to imagine what they become ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... dropped the noble for the confidential, "I have got things to say, things that are vital to me. I couldn't put them in my other work. How could I? It would have seemed—you will think me ridiculous—a kind of prostitution." ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco

... measure broken up; many of the monks had become disorderly and even licentious, and one of them robbed the shrine of St. Oswald of a number of jewels, and other valuable articles, for the purpose of paying a woman in the town the wages of her prostitution. Others gave themselves up to bacchanalian riots in a neighbouring tavern, and, instead of devoting their nights to "prayer," gave themselves up to the vulgar "company of dancers and ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips

... have either one day, or fifty cents cash, each week, as an allowance for food and clothing. This is quite insufficient. Many of the females seem obliged to resort to theft or to prostitution to obtain a support. Two girls were brought before Mr. Hill while we were with him, charged with neglect of duty and night-walking. One of them said her allowance was too small, and she must get food in some ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... love. Ascertain, my dear mamma, if Madame de Rochefide is in Paris, for if she is, I shall stay in Brittany. Poor Mademoiselle des Touches might well repent of her share in our marriage if she knew to what extent I am taken for our odious rival! But this is prostitution! I am not myself; I am ashamed of it all. A frantic desire seizes me sometimes to fly from Guerande and ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... society receives them with open arms, and legalized prostitution is upheld by the majesty of the law and encircled by the ...
— Wise or Otherwise • Lydia Leavitt

... prefers it. I proceeded to the prison and found he had been released. One of our elections comes off in a few days. The approach of such an event is sure to find him at large. I sought him in all the drinking saloons, in the gambling dens, in the haunts of prostitution-in all the low places where our great politicians most do assemble and debauch themselves. He was not to be found. Being of the opposite party, I despatched a spy to the haunt of the committee of the party to which he belongs, and for which he cribs. ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... beautiful women, and as many boys, of every rank, and of every province; and, wherever the arts of seduction proved ineffectual, the brutal lover had recourse to violence. The ancient historians [29] have expatiated on these abandoned scenes of prostitution, which scorned every restraint of nature or modesty; but it would not be easy to translate their too faithful descriptions into the decency of modern language. The intervals of lust were filled up with the basest amusements. The influence of a polite ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... a curious fact that in all the Daimio's castle-towns, with the exception of some which are also seaports, open prostitution is strictly forbidden, although, if report speaks truly, public morality rather suffers ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford

... with a Catholic power, the Catholics were obliged to reimburse the damage done by the enemy's privateers. The Legislature, it is true, did not venture absolutely to suppress their worship, but it existed only by a doubtful connivance—stigmatized as if it were a species of licensed prostitution, and subject to conditions which, if they had been enforced, would have rendered its continuance impossible. An old law which prohibited it, and another which enjoined attendance at the Anglican worship, ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.

... character and constitution at the same time. Depravity of thought and secretion go together. Degradation of mind and corruption of the body are concomitants. There is a very close affinity between mental and moral perversion and physical prostitution, of which fact too many are unconscious. Nervous influence preserves the fluidity of the blood and facilitates its circulation, for it appears that simple arrestment of this influence favors the coagulation of the blood in the vessels; clots being found in their ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... station where I go down the steps, pick from the floor a flower—wondering if it is all right,—reach a restaurant in which seventy have that night been served and where I lose my flower, symbolizes a house of prostitution mentioned in Chicago's famous report where one woman served sixty men in one night and was said to have seven thousand dollars in the bank. Beneath convention strange unconvention lurks. A young woman ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... unless God performs a miracle to prevent it, the ruin of that soul is sealed. She has drunk in the poisonous cup filled by "the mother of harlots," and she has found the wine of her prostitution sweet. She will henceforth delight in her spiritual and ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy

... of these deities are often of a questionable character and include dances by naked women and offerings of spirituous liquors and blood. Similar features are found in other countries. Prostitution formed part of the worship of Astarte and Anahit: the Tauric Artemis was adored with human sacrifices and Cybele with self-inflicted mutilations. Similarly offerings of blood drawn from the sacrificer's own body are enjoined in the Kalika Purana. Two stages can be distinguished ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... is sometimes punished amongst the Crees in the manner above described, yet it is no crime, provided the husband receives a valuable consideration for his wife's prostitution. Neither is chastity considered as a virtue in a female before marriage, that is, before she becomes the exclusive property of ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin

... songs either above or below price; for they shall be absolutely the one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, &c., would be downright prostitution of soul." ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... the paragraph upon which the Reverend Doctor Morgan Dix and other clerical defenders of the economic conditions that cause marital and non-marital prostitution pounced ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... ill-mannered; only when you go afoot do you grow in the grace of gentleness and humility. But no good can come out of this walking mania that is now sweeping over the country, simply because it is a mania and not a natural and wholesome impulse. It is a prostitution of the noble pastime. ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... gives us, viz., that it was "publickly acted by the students in Saint John's College, Cambridge."[25] The merits and characters of our old poets and actors are censured by the author with great freedom; and the shameful prostitution of Church preferment, by the selling of livings to the ignorant and unworthy, laid the foundation of Dr Wild's "Benefice, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... luxurious fire which sparkles in Matilda's! Oh! sweeter must one kiss be snatched from the rosy lips of the First, than all the full and lustful favours bestowed so freely by the Second. Matilda gluts me with enjoyment even to loathing, forces me to her arms, apes the Harlot, and glories in her prostitution. Disgusting! Did She know the inexpressible charm of Modesty, how irresistibly it enthralls the heart of Man, how firmly it chains him to the Throne of Beauty, She never would have thrown it off. What would be too dear a price for this lovely Girl's affections? What would I refuse ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis

... of India are phallic worshipers, and, in the practice of their religion, Priapus saves many a girl who would be, otherwise, offered up on the bloody altars of their divinities. The pregnant woman is sacred, hence, religious prostitution is exceedingly prevalent. But it frequently happens that some unfortunate creature, who is not pleasing to the shamans, is seized, tied to the stake and butchered.[45] As the blood flows down and deluges the ground, "the divine spirit enters into the priest and ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... population, and instinctive patriotism, are all vital elements of American liberty, nationality, and upward and onward progress. Foreign immigration, foreign Catholic influence, and sectional factions nourished by them—and breeding demagogues in the name of Democracy, by a prostitution of the elective franchise—have already corrupted our nationality, degraded our councils, both State and National, weakened the bonds of union, disturbed our country's peace, and awakened apprehensions of insecurity and progressive ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow

... Dr. Valeria H. Parker, chairman. Resolutions recommended and adopted on the abolition of commercialized prostitution: (a) The abolition of all segregated or protected vice districts and the elimination of houses used for vicious purposes. (b) Punishment of frequenters of disorderly houses and penalization of the payment of money for prostitution as well as its receipt. (c) Heavy penalties for pimps, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... purpose. Indeed, all such brutal lusts and affections are to be greatly subdued, if not totally eradicated, before the vessel can be said to be consecrated to honour. To marry with a view of gratifying those inclinations is a prostitution of that holy ceremony, and must entail a curse on all who so lightly undertake it. If, therefore, this haste arises from impatience, you are to correct, and not give way to it. Now, as to the second head ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding

... of them were absent together on a sealing excursion, they often exchanged wives for the time, as a matter of friendly convenience; and, indeed, without mentioning any other instances of this nature, it may safely be affirmed, that in no country is prostitution carried to greater lengths than among these people. The behaviour of most of the women when their husbands were absent from the huts, plainly evinced their indifference towards them, and their utter disregard of connubial ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... religious sentiment, by the aid of which he had grown into a respect, not only for the Romish faith, but for Christian faith of whatever degree. And now he encountered what seemed to him its gross prostitution. The old Doctor then was right: this Popish form of heathenism was but a device of Satan,—a scarlet covering of iniquity. Yet, in losing respect for one form of faith, he found himself losing respect for all. It was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... vitality left to cut his way through the whirlpool of licentiousness to the solid rock of Christian character. From the harem life of promiscuous and unnameable sins of slavery, some of which were the natural and fatal growth of pagan vices, others the fruit of prostitution, to the making of one clean, beautiful, noble and divine family and home, covers a period of intense, moral, spiritual and intellectual development, more significant than the geologic transformation of ages. Be it ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... unless it serve, or function for, or express the relations of, some higher aggregate. So Science functions for and serves society at large, and would, from society at large, receive no support, unless it did so divert itself or dissipate and prostitute itself. It seems that by prostitution ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... self-respecting writers reject. I glean the stinking materials for my stories from the sewers and cesspools of life. For the dollars they pay, I furnish my readers with those thrills that public decency forbids them to experience at first hand. I am a procurer 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 ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright

... go to explain his enormous productiveness as an author. But I doubt whether the allegory can be pushed into such details. Defoe's fancy was quick enough to give an allegorical meaning to any tale. He might have found in Moll Flanders, with her five marriages and ultimate prostitution, corresponding to his own five political marriages and the dubious conduct of his later years, a closer allegory in some respects than in the life of the shipwrecked sailor. The idea of calling Robinson Crusoe an allegory was in all probability an after-thought, perhaps suggested ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto

... the maintenance of law and order. Iniquity can go no further. By this time nobody who knows the figures of the distribution defends them. The most bigoted British Conservative hesitates to say that his king should be much poorer than Mr. Rockefeller, or to proclaim the moral superiority of prostitution to needlework on the ground that it pays better. The need for a drastic redistribution of income in all civilized countries is now as obvious and as generally admitted ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... series he called Caprices. It is worth remembering that Delacroix was one of the first artists in Paris who secured a set of these rare plates. The witch's sabbaths and the modern version of them, prostitution and its symbolism, filled the brain of Goya. He always shocks any but robust nerves with his hybrid creatures red in claw and foaming at mouth as they fight in midair, hideous and unnamable phantoms of the dark. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... glad of his protection; but for the past three years he had fallen a prey to one of those unconquerable passions which sometimes invade the whole being of a man between fifty and sixty years of age. It was roused by a magnificent creature known as la belle Hollandaise in the annals of prostitution, for into that gulf she was to fall back and become a noted personage through her death. She was originally brought from Bruges by a client of Roguin, who soon after left Paris in consequence of political events, presenting her to the notary in 1815. Roguin bought a house for her ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac

... clear that all those who have talked about the "White Slave Traffic" have been quite sure what they meant by the term. Some people, indeed, have seemed to think that it meant prostitution in general. That is, of course, an absurd misapprehension. We are concerned with a trade which flourishes on prostitution, but that trade is not itself the trade or (as some prefer to call it) the profession of prostitutes. Indeed, the prostitute, under ordinary ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... presence. In such an hour of artistic convulsion and renewal of thought thou wast, and thou wast a magnificent rallying point for all comers; it was thou who didst theorise our confused aspirations, and by thy holy example didst save us from all base commercialism, from all hateful prostitution; thou wast ever our high priest, and from thy high altar turned to us the white host, the ideal, the true and living God of ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... describes a period in the annals of the British marine which has happily passed away,—a hard life in little stifling holds or forecastles, with hard fare,—a base life, for the sailor, oppressed on shipboard, was the prey of vile women and land-sharks when on shore. What pictures of prostitution and indecency! what obscenity of language! what drunken infernal orgies! We may shun the book as we would shun the company, and yet the one is the exact ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... the results were negligible because the men were unable to employ their capacities. There were sensational features, like the production of "Parsifal" and "Salome," but there were humiliating ones, like the prostitution of a great establishment for the performance of "Die Fledermaus" and "Der Zigeunerbaron" to deck out the Herr Direktor's benefits. The blight of commercialism had fallen on the institution. On February ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... of the attractions of an atheistic and materialist philosophy, of a voluptuous, often, and demoralizing literature and poetry, of an unimaginable prostitution of art to the vilest passions, which the relics of Pompeii ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... the walk lasted the King spoke only to Bergheyck and to Bernard, leading them everywhere, and showing them everything with the grace he so well knew how to employ when he desired to overwhelm. I admired, and I was not the only one, this species of prostitution of the King, so niggard of his words, to a man of Bernard's degree. I was not long in learning the cause of it, and I admired to see how low the greatest ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... primitive stage, condemned. Men and women thus expelled went to swell the numbers of that small class of outcasts already noted. With men the result, as we have seen, was a kind of slavery; with women it was prostitution; and it is curious to see that the same penalty, entailing such a result, was visited alike upon unseemly frailty and upon refusal to marry. In either case the sin consisted in rebellion against the clan's standards of proper or ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... no red-light sign of houses of prostitution, and on making inquiries I was informed that there were no houses of prostitution in Eurasia, for as soon as information was given to any Magistrate the law required him or her to issue an order for the arrest ...
— Eurasia • Christopher Evans

... patient should know the truth and the doctor should operate. Modern society is the patient, and death-dealing sex crimes are the cancerous growth, which must be operated upon. Whenever we allow a neighborhood to maintain houses of prostitution, thus regulating and in a way sanctioning the evil, we are granting a sort of corporation charter for an industry which is run upon business methods. And business, you know, is based upon filling the 'demand,' with the necessary 'supply.' And the manufacturers, ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball

... my uncle, will any affronts, that happen to them, call forth my tears. But I think the act too violent and too serious, and dipped in a deeper dye than I like in politics. Squabbles, and speeches, and virtue, and prostitution, amuse one sometimes; less and less indeed every day; but measures, from which you must advance and cannot retreat, is a game too deep; one neither knows who may be involved, nor where may be the end. It ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... already marked by vice, on the threshold of crime, and the reasons were plain—ignorance and indigence. Another showed the stamp of original goodness, obliterated by social pressure, and turned to hate. On the face of an old woman he saw starvation; on that of a girl, prostitution. The same fact, and although the girl had the resource of her youth, all the sadder for that! In the crowd were arms without tools; the workers asked only for work, but the work was wanting. Sometimes a soldier came and seated himself by the workmen, sometimes a wounded ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... perhaps more than reason, laughing, or looking asquint, by which they distinguish man from beasts; and the less men have of it the nearer they approach to the nature of brutes. Modesty is but a noble jealousy of honour, and impudence the prostitution of it; for he whose face is proof against infamy must be as little sensible of glory. His forehead, like a voluntary cuckold's, is by his horns made proof against a blush. Nature made man barefaced, and civil custom has preserved him so; but he that's impudent does wear a vizard more ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... of the house of prostitution shortly afterwards by a patriot without prejudice, who loved her for her brave act, and then, having loved her for herself, married her and made of her a lady as ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant



Words linked to "Prostitution" :   whoredom, vice crime, house of prostitution, prostitute, harlotry



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