"Vitiate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... play-wright who does most harm; and Byron has fewer sins of this nature to answer for than Gay or Schiller, and the modern dramatizers of Jack Sheppard. With the aid of scenery, fine dresses, and music, and the very false notions they convey, they vitiate the public taste, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... have pointed out, and others which we have not pointed out, are only blemishes, and chiefly upon the surface. They mar, but they do not vitiate. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... Priestley. Sir Joseph Banks had especially invited him. But the clergy of Oxford and Cambridge interfered. Priestley was considered unsound in his views of the Trinity; it was evidently suspected that this might vitiate his astronomical observations; he was rejected, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... present, and a just conception of the future, will conduce to the purification of our moral principles. Intermixture with the world, its business and concerns, and those solicitudes which occupy the attention in reference to transactions merely temporal, tend to vitiate the mind. In the pursuits of traffic we seem to live, as if we were destined to live here always. The interests of a moment engross and captivate the passions, and kindle ardours which burn with incessant vigour. The mind is brought ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... said Cooper, "that every art-lover must take. I have said that at present I feel perfectly sure that not a single genuine work has crept in to vitiate my collection. And that is true. But only a few weeks ago I had a very bad quarter of an hour indeed over this spurious Tanagra figurine. It had been bought for a museum not one hundred miles from here by a patron who was a good friend of mine, and who had paid ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... tenfold force upon any French attempt to forestall theirs. They laughed at such a thought; and, while they laughed, she did it. Henceforth the single redress for the English of this capital oversight, but which never could have redressed it effectually, was to vitiate and taint the coronation of Charles VII as the work of a witch. That policy, and not malice (as M. Michelet is so happy to believe), was the moving principle in the subsequent prosecution of Joanna. Unless they unhinged the force ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... and beat the air about before going into the level, and, after a time, went in when the candles could be got to burn by holding them on one side, and teasing out the wick very much. This used to create a great deal of smoke, which tended still further to vitiate the air. When he returned "to grass" his saliva used to be as black as ink. About five years before giving up underground work he had had inflammation of the lungs, followed by blood-spitting, which used to come on when he was at work in what he called "poor ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the Four Gospels, all is easy. Such corruption, inasmuch as it beset the oral and written stories which were afterwards incorporated in the Gospels, would creep into the authorized narrations, and would vitiate them till it was ultimately cast out towards the end of the fourth and in the succeeding centuries. Starting from the very beginning, and gaining additions in the several ways described in this volume by Dean Burgon, it would possess ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... the restorer of his house had been an infant at the aera of his household catastrophe. And if, through such burning examples of patriotism, far remote collateral descendants entered upon the succession, was this a reproach? Was this held to vitiate or to impair the heraldic honours? A disturbance, a convulsion, that shook the house back into its primitive simplicities of standing, was that a shock to its hereditary grandeur? If it had been, there perished the efficient ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... with small-pox is as an ulcer upon a finger to an ulcer in the vitals. Small-pox does not vitiate the blood of a people; this disease does. Its existence in a primary form implies ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... fallacy is an aesthetic fallacy which, through bright pages of criticism, strikes up at times to vitiate a judgment. "I confess," says Mr. Carlyle, "I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men." Could Newton have written the "Fairy Queen?" Could Spenser have discovered the law of gravitation? ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... these caricatures of the real beauty of sensibility, dropping glibly from the tongue, vitiate the taste, and create a kind of sickly delicacy that turns away from simple unadorned truth; and a deluge of false sentiments and over-stretched feelings, stifling the natural emotions of the heart, render the domestic ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... no relation whatever, and in which all married persons whatever have an equal interest, needs no exposure beyond the mere statement of the fact. It will be seen at a glance how such an arrangement tends to vitiate marriage: how it offers impunity to adventurers, and encouragement to every kind of mercenary marriages; how absolute is its oppression of the injured party; and how, by vitiating marriage, it originates and aggravates licentiousness to an incalculable ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the danger from explosion, which is by no means inconsiderable in the use of gasoline and oil stoves, they are not, unless well cared for altogether healthful. Unless the precaution is taken to use them in well-ventilated rooms or to connect them with a chimney, they vitiate the atmosphere to a considerable extent with the products of combustion. Oil stoves, unless the wicks are kept well trimmed, are apt to smoke, and this smoke is not only disagreeable, but extremely irritating to the mucous membrane of the nose and throat. ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... it is to be observed that things are incapable of being acquired through usucapion by a purchaser in good faith, or by one who possesses on some other lawful ground, unless they are free from all flaws which vitiate ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... advantages for which Jasper then was preeminently conspicuous, she willingly associated her fortunes with his own. Gabrielle was one of those incarnations of evil which no city but Paris can accomplish with the same epicurean refinement, and vitiate into the same cynical corruption. She was exceedingly witty, sharply astute, capable of acting any part, carrying out any plot; and when it pleased her to simulate the decorous and immaculate gentlewoman, she might have deceived the most experienced roue. Jasper presented this Artiste to his unsuspecting ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from metals; this also would not succeed with me, although I used only little inflammable air, and much water. He also observed that plants made vitiated air wholesome again. It follows from my experiments that they vitiate air. I kept plants, in the dark as well as exposed to sunlight, in a flask which was filled with vitiated air and carefully secured (which careful securing must really be attended to). I tested a little of this air every 2 days, ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... Commons of the Irish party. The eighty votes from Ireland daunt them. But wise men must look behind votes at facts. The eighty Irish Home Rulers are, it is true, no light matter, even when allowance is made for the way in which corruption and intimidation vitiate the vote of Ireland. But their voice is not the voice of the Irish people; it is at most the mutter or the clamour of a predominant Irish faction. It is the voice of Ireland in the same sense in which a century ago the shouts or yells of the ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... acquainted with some of the agencies which vitiate the quality of the brain, and it is our duty to profit by its results. The principal of them is morbid action in the brain itself, producing, more or less directly, disorder and weakness. But its deteriorating ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... virtuous and praiseworthy? Have I taken in all the instructions of piety, religion, and reason, for no other end, but to be the sacrifice of lust, and abandoned to scorn? Assume yourself, my lord, and do not attempt to vitiate a temple sacred to innocence, honour, and religion. If I have injured you, stab this bosom, and let me die, but not be ruined by the hand I love." The ardency of my passion made me incapable of uttering more; and ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... Art,' in which I find an engraving of my portrait of Peabody. I did not know that it would be there, but I have given Mr. Spielman a sort of general permission to use certain of the photographs. I do not know whether the appearance of the head will vitiate the interest of your proposed publication, but I hope not, as the use of it will be ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... on the morrow there would be the opportunity of private interviews with Dr. Easterby. She longed for the moment, chiefly to free herself from the sense of deception that had all this time seemed to vitiate her religious exercises, deafen her ears, and blow aside her prayers. There was a touch on her shoulder, and one of the Sisters who had received the ladies said, interrogatively, "Miss Vivian? The Mother would be obliged if you ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... barbarous terms and phrases, by which other dictionaries may vitiate the style, are rejected ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... midnight arrived. The 8th of December was beginning. One hour more, and the point of equal attraction would be reached. What speed would then animate the projectile? They could not estimate it. But no error could vitiate Barbicane's calculations. At one in the morning this speed ought to be and would ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... throughout that the idea rose up thus in the course of practical work and shaped itself day by day unconsciously. It might be charged, nevertheless, that I was all the time, whether consciously or unconsciously, simply reading my Theology into my Science. And as this would hopelessly vitiate the conclusions arrived at, I must acquit myself at least of the intention. Of nothing have I been more fearful throughout than of making Nature parallel with my own or with any creed. The only legitimate questions one dare put to Nature ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... was, beyond all question, partially insane. His opinions, wild and extravagant in the extreme, had a strong tendency to vitiate the moral principle; and the Hernhuters having derived from his bounty all that they possessed, would not refuse to listen when he chose to address them, even in their religious meetings. But it is a mistake to attribute ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... years after the events, and by ignorant, superstitious men who have adopted the fables that old women had surrounded Christ with—how does this supposition vitiate the report of Christ's parables? But, on the other hand, they could no more have invented the parables than a man alleging a diamond-mine could invent a diamond as attestation. The ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... might be carried further with results that would be advantageous as well as curious. We degrade and finally vitiate our conscience if we do not respect its behests. Conscience then itself becomes small and timid and humble, shamefaced, and at length a mere whisper. Absolutely silent it ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... Convention been legitimately called and legitimately chosen, this audacious abrogation of the Territorial laws and of the functions of the Territorial officers would in itself have been sufficient to vitiate its authority; but being neither legitimately called, nor legitimately chosen, and outraging the sentiments of nineteen twentieths of the community, the illegal election provided for can be regarded only as the crowning atrocity of the long series ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... moments of forgetfulness, I seldom swerved. At my uncle's, religion was far more tiresome, because they made it an employment; with my master I thought no more of it, though my sentiments continued the same: I had no companions to vitiate my morals: I became idle, careless, and obstinate, but my ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... reckoned among pleasures; for though these things may create some tickling in the senses (which seems to be a true notion of pleasure), yet they imagine that this does not arise from the thing itself, but from a depraved custom, which may so vitiate a man's taste that bitter things may pass for sweet, as women with child think pitch or tallow taste sweeter than honey; but as a man's sense, when corrupted either by a disease or some ill habit, does not change the nature of other things, so neither ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... of the sub-committees would be in private, as the publicity which had been demanded by one of the delegates from Central Africa would vitiate, in this case, the effectiveness ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... than, perhaps, has yet been known, and I am sure to an End much more worthy. Had the vast Sums which have been laid out upon Opera's without Skill or Conduct, and to no other Purpose but to suspend or vitiate our Understandings, been disposed this Way, we should now perhaps have an Engine so formed as to strike the Minds of half a People at once in a Place of Worship with a Forgetfulness of present Care and Calamity, and a Hope of endless ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... will not see that there is a law of tempests in history as in nature. The revilers of war are like the revilers of thunder, storms, and volcanoes; they know not what they do. Civilization tends to corrupt men, as large towns tend to vitiate the air. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... means of basing truth upon objects, upon nature, led to looking at the mind as purely receptive. The more passive the mind is, the more truly objects will impress themselves upon it. For the mind to take a hand, so to speak, would be for it in the very process of knowing to vitiate true knowledge—to defeat its own purpose. The ideal was a maximum of receptivity. Since the impressions made upon the mind by objects were generally termed sensations, empiricism thus became a doctrine of sensationalism—that is to say, a doctrine which identified knowledge ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... laughing-devil sarcasm in ripping up dough-face weakness and compromising hesitation. Its principle and refrain, urged with abundant wit, ingenuity and courage, is simply EMANCIPATION—not on the narrow ground of abolition, but on the necessity of promptly destroying an evil which threatens to vitiate the white race. In the beginning the author points out the inevitableness of the present war, and that our political system has been hitherto a sacrifice to Slavery for the time, but also a running up of arrears ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... particularly, there is no excuse for vague terminology or phrases which do not convey an exact impression of what was done or what is intended. The military vocabulary is laden with words and expressions which sound professional but do not have definite meaning. They vitiate speech and the establishment would gladly rid itself of them if a way could be found. Men fall into the habit of saying "performed," "functioned" or "executed" and forget that "did" is in the dictionary. A captain along the MLR (main line of resistance) notifies his battalion ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... is that the intent be pronounced at nightfall. The traditional ordinances of fasting are, hastening to break the fast at sundown; deferring the fore-dawn meal,[FN317] and abstaining from speech, save for good works and for calling on the name of Allah and reciting the Koran." Q "What things vitiate not the fast?" "The use of unguents and eye-powders and the dust of the road and the undesigned swallowing of saliva and the emission of seed in nocturnal pollution or at the sight of a strange woman and blooding and cupping; none of these things ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... terrific spectres, the fruit of a peevish transport of the brain: there will, however, never be more than a step between them all; the smallest revolution in the machine, a slight infirmity, an unforeseen affliction, suffices to change the course of the humours—to vitiate the temperament—to endanger the organization— to overturn the whole system of opinions of the happiest. As soon as the portrait is found disfigured, the beautiful order of things is overthrown relatively to himself; melancholy grapples him—pusillanimity ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... during the last few decades, both in England and in the United States. All history lies if this be not an evil omen for any civilization. It means, among other things, that more effectively than ever the forces of suggestion and imitation and social pressure are being brought to bear, to vitiate the young girl's natural judgment, deceiving her into the supposition that these things which seem to make other people so happy are the first that must be sought by her. If only she had the merest inkling of what the doctor and the ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... through the five years of piacular sacrifice, why vitiate its efficacy by rebellious repining, that seemed an affront to the divine arbiter of human destinies? She could not escape the cross; and bitterness of heart might jeopardize the crown. Beggared ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... seen with increasing alarm the judicial construction of statutes and the Constitution itself, which all but vitiate and annul the basis of our citizenship; we have seen repeated attempts made to discredit the War amendments to the national Constitution, and some have in all seriousness gone so far even as to question their constitutionality. Every student of our common law has always been sure of the right ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... to its fall; perish &c 162; die &c 360. [Render less good] deteriorate; weaken &c 160; put back, set back; taint, infect, contaminate, poison, empoison^, envenom, canker, corrupt, exulcerate^, pollute, vitiate, inquinate^; debase, embase^; denaturalize, denature, leaven; deflower, debauch, defile, deprave, degrade; ulcerate; stain &c (dirt) 653; discolor; alloy, adulterate, sophisticate, tamper with, prejudice. pervert, prostitute, demoralize, brutalize; render vicious &c 945. embitter, acerbate, exacerbate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... dates does not necessarily discredit the events themselves. It has also to be remembered that the same compilers were required to robe their facts in Chinese costume and that the consequent ill-fits and artificialities do not of necessity vitiate the facts. In the particular case under consideration did the Kojiki stand alone, little doubt would ever have been entertained about the reality of an armed expedition to Korea, under the Empress ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... important,—simplicity, freshness, structure, choice of words, and thoroughness both of preparation and of finish. Yet, in aiming at literary art, it must be remembered that all the cardinal virtues go into a good style, while each of the seven deadly sins tends to vitiate a bad one. What a charm in the merit of humility, for instance, as it is sometimes seen in style, leading to a certain self-restraint and moderation of tone, however weighty the argument! How great the power of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... book, is to show that the externalism of the West, the prevalent tendency to pay undue regard to outward and visible "results" and to neglect what is inward and vital, is the source of most of the defects that vitiate Education in this country, and therefore that the only remedy for those defects is the drastic one of changing our standard of reality and our conception of the meaning and value of life. My reason for making a special study of that ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... portrayed as thus nearly approaching true nobility; otherwise such perfect love from such a nature as Fedalma's were inexplicable, almost impossible. But this was still more needful toward the fulfilment of the author's purpose: the showing how the one deadly plague-spot shall weaken the strongest and vitiate the purest life. Every element of the heroic is there except that one element without which the truly heroic is impossible: he cannot "deny himself." Superficially, indeed, it might seem that self was not the object of his regard, ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... extravagant and monstrous in their Contrivance, but likewise the Exemplars of Vice and Representations of Lewdness: But had the Plays in Spain, at that Time, been as Immoral and Unchaste as the daily Entertainments of the British Theatre, which have a manifest Tendency to vitiate the Taste of the People, fill their Imaginations with obscene Ideas, and their Lives with Levity, Idleness and Luxury; I say, if that great Man, whose Judgment was equal to his admirable Genius, had seen Religion and Vertue so derided, ...
— Essay upon Wit • Sir Richard Blackmore
... of subsidence. It does not seem to me so certain that the kinds of partial movement which we now see going on show us the kind of movement which Europe has been subjected to since the commencement of the Glacial period. These notions are at least possible, and would they not vitiate your argument? Do you not rest on the belief that, as Scandinavia and some few other parts are now rising, and a few others sinking, and the remainder at rest, so it has been since the commencement of the Glacial period? With my notions I should require this to be made pretty probable ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... secret and evil counsellors, combined with a corrupt parliament, robbed the people of their dearest rights, and that they had done a deed more ruinous in its consequences than the levying of ship-money by Charles I., or the dispensing power assumed by James IL, and which deed must vitiate all the further proceedings of the present parliament; it called God and man to witness that the citizens would not be thus cheated of their liberties; and that as they were gained by the stern virtues of their ancestors, so they should be preserved by themselves; and it concluded by praying that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... I am hurt to hear you talk of happiness in the life you at present lead; of finding pleasure in possessing venal beauty; you are in danger of acquiring a habit which will vitiate your taste, and exclude you from that state of refined and tender friendship for which nature formed a heart like yours, and which is only to be found in marriage: I need not add, ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... speaking, the changes should be attributed to those forces which come into action when the antagonist force is withdrawn. But though there is an inaccuracy in saying that the freezing of water is due to the loss of its heat, no practical error arises from it; nor will a parallel laxity of expression vitiate our statements respecting the multiplication of effects. Indeed, the objection serves but to draw attention to the fact, that not only does the exertion of a force produce more than one change, but the withdrawal of a force produces more than one change. And this suggests that perhaps the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... Dr. Gresham, "the Government has put the ballot in his hands. It is better to teach him to use that ballot aright than to intimidate him by violence or vitiate his ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... beside The Cloister and the Hearth, and not one of the twenty approaches it. One only—Griffith Gaunt—is fit to be named in the same day with it; and Griffith Gaunt is marred by an insincerity in the plot which vitiates, and is at once felt to vitiate, the whole work. On everything he wrote before and after The Cloister Reade's essential vulgarity of mind is written large. That he shook it off in that great instance is one of the miracles of literary ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... draughts, too, in the passages, tall, straw-thatched hurdles are set up. In narrow caves the breath of the workmen, the gases given off by fermentation, and the products of combustion of the lamps would soon so vitiate the atmosphere as to render the caves uninhabitable were they not properly ventilated. Indeed, it frequently occurs that caves in which mushrooms have been grown continuously for some years have to be abandoned for a year or two because ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... to interrupt!" sighed my aunt, with a little gesture of her hand. "I have furthermore kept him segregated from all that could in any way vitiate or vulgarise; he has had the ablest tutors and been my constant companion, and to-day—I am told—all this is but his misfortune. Now and therefore. Sir Jervas Vereker, pray ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... will not disparage Heathenism by calling it a Heathen error,—that men could fall into. It is not true; it is false at the very heart of it. A man who thinks so will think wrong about all things in the world; this original sin will vitiate all other conclusions he can form. One might call it the most lamentable of delusions,—not forgetting Witchcraft itself! Witchcraft worshipped at least a living Devil: but this worships a dead iron Devil; ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... diluted and compounded or mixt with other colours, and divers of them are capable of being very much chang'd and heightned, and fixt with several kinds of Saline menstruums. Others of them upon compounding, destroy or vitiate each others colours, and precipitate, or otherwise very much alter each others tincture. In the true ordering and diluting, and deepning, and mixing, and fixing of each of which, consists one of the greatest mysteries of the Dyers; of which particulars, because our ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... things in a straightforward way. It emphasizes more especially the suspicious temper of the work, which makes it, as even a favourable reviewer has said, 'painfully sceptical'—a temper which must necessarily vitiate all the processes of criticism, and which, if freely humoured elsewhere, would render life intolerable ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... that Johnson 'in one night composed, after finishing an evening in Holborn, his Hermit of Teneriffe.' Gent. Mag. for 1784, p. 901. The high value that he set on this piece may be accounted for in his own words. 'Many causes may vitiate a writer's judgment of his own works.... What has been produced without toilsome efforts is considered with delight, as a proof of vigorous faculties and fertile invention.' Johnson's Works, vii. 110. He had said much the same thirty years earlier ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty; and by teaching us a servile insolence, to be our low sport for a few holidays, to make us perfectly fit for, and justly deserving of, slavery through the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... her face? And Lord Fleetwood had read and repeated it. Lord Fleetwood had become the instrument to martyrize her? That might be; there was a hoard of bad stuff in his composition besides the precious: and this was a nobleman owning enormous wealth, who could vitiate himself by disposing of a multitude of men and women to serve his will, a shifty will. Wealth creates the magician, and may breed the fiend within him. In the hands of a young man, wealth is an invitation to devilry. Gower's idea of the story of Carinthia inclined to charge ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... subject of the Atonement I have said almost nothing about the New Testament evidence for the doctrine. This, I admit, is an entire departure from the method usually followed by those who write upon it, and may be thought by some to vitiate my whole argument. But the omission is of set purpose, for I am convinced that New Testament language about the Atonement, especially the language of St. Paul, has been, and still is, the prolific source of most of the mischievous misinterpretations of it which exist in the religious mind. ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... needed, a period of noncontentious politics, of recuperation after long agitation, of constructive {23} administration, and this the Liberal-Conservative majority was for the time better able to give, even though corruption was soon to vitiate ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... decorum are based. No one was better capable of appreciating and indicating with fine touches, delicacy and niceties of taste and feeling in others. Her sympathy with such sensitiveness is a corrective that should render harmless what might vitiate taste if that qualification were absent. And her stories, though including a very few instances where the subject chosen seems to most English minds too repulsive to admit of possible redemption, and the frequent incidental introduction ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... barn, and out-buildings, and barn-yard and drives; to provide ample current for irons, toasters, vacuum cleaners, electric fans, etc.; to do all the cooking and baking and keep the kitchen boiler hot; and to heat the house in the coldest weather with a dry clean heat that does not vitiate the air, with no ashes, smoke or dust or woodchopping—nothing but an electric switch to turn on and off; and to provide power for motors ranging from tiny ones to run the sewing machine, to one of 15 horsepower to do the threshing. A plant ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson
... and inducements of 'possession' are many. One writer affirms that 'the devil being a slender, incomprehensible spirit can easily insinuate and wind himself into human bodies, and cunningly couched in our bowels, vitiate our healths, terrify our souls with fearful dreams, and shake our minds with furies. They go in and out of our bodies as bees do in a hive, and so provoke and tempt us as they perceive our temperature inclined of itself and most apt to be deluded.... Agrippa and Lavater are persuaded ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... Observation which may perswade us, that an over-vehement stroak upon the Sensory, especially if it be naturally of a weak constitution, may make a more lasting impression than one would imagine, which impression may in some cases, as it were, mingle with, and vitiate the action of vivid objects for a long ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... I met you this afternoon," she said. "It must be wonderful living in that atmosphere, the atmosphere of might and power, where men and women aren't governed by the finicking rules which vitiate the ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... words, we are not to feel ourselves turned out of our "habitation" in God by a sense of our moral lapses. Moral lapses are to be regretted, of course; but they do not vitiate our status as the Sons of God. It is possible that no one believes they do; but much of the loose statement current among those who lay emphasis on morals would give that impression. There is a whole vernacular ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... the best work among us. They are sometimes haughty, unsocial, and unsympathetic, and find themselves among us because there is offered better pay for less work than was found in their own neighborhoods. But these do not vitiate the schools; they are exceptions. I think, too, that the faculties of the several schools, together with the boards of trustees, should be as largely composed of competent, worthy Negroes as the interests of the institutions will allow. I am sure that such a policy would both encourage our people ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... categories related to it at the determinate stage of perception cannot be regarded as erroneous. As to the fourth objection Vacaspati replies that the memory of the name of the thing roused by its sight cannot make the perception erroneous. The fact that memory operates cannot in any way vitiate perception. The fact that name is not associated until the second stage through the joint action of memory is easily explained, for the operation of memory was necessary in order to bring about the association. ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... have been engendered than if the matter merely fell together. Again, it could not be overlooked that a host of meteors are falling into the sun, and that this source of energy, though not in itself sufficient to account for all the heat in question, might be sufficient to vitiate utterly any exact calculations. Yet again, Professor Lockyer called attention to another source of variation, in the fact that the chemical combination of elements hitherto existing separately must produce large quantities of heat, it being even suggested that this source alone might possibly ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... plants exhale carbonic acid in considerable quantity, and at the same time evolve heat. In this condition, therefore, they resemble animals as regards their relation to the air; and a number of plants placed in a room would, under these circumstances, tend to vitiate ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... subserviency of the North, he will be constrained to write many a page which will flush the cheeks of our descendants with indignation and shame. He will show the method by which Slavery, after vitiating the conscience and intelligence of the South, contrived to vitiate in part, and for a time, the conscience and intelligence of the North. It will be his ungrateful task to point to many instances of compliance and concession on the part of able Northern statesmen which will deeply affect their fame with posterity, though he will doubtless refuse to adopt to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Third Republic this monstrous recognition of an unscientific emotion would have sufficed to vitiate the scheme, in which case France would have lost the artistic achievements of M. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... the innovation of Osiander was bound to vitiate in every particular the doctrine of justification restored once more by Luther. In fact, his theory was but a revamping of just such teaching as had driven the Lutherans out of the Church of Rome. True, Osiander denied that by our own works we merit justification; ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... speeches in both houses of Congress. In truth, Sir, I must say that, in my opinion, the vernacular tongue of the country has become greatly vitiated, depraved, and corrupted by the style of our Congressional debates. And if it were possible for those debates to vitiate the principles of the people as much as they have depraved their tastes, I should cry out, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Government subsists—let them be criticised without mercy. The salus publica demands the sacrifice. But to make an individual ridiculous merely because he has written a foolish, if it be a harmless book, is not, I think, justifiable on any moral principle ... I repeat my principle. Whatever tends to vitiate our literary taste, our morals, our religious or political principles, may be fairly at the mercy of criticism. So, whatever tends to introduce false science, false history, indeed, falsehood in any shape, exposes itself to the censor's rod. But harmless, inoffensive works should be passed by. ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... They call on the rising generation in France to take a sympathy in the adventures and fortunes, and they endeavor to engage their sensibility on the side, of pedagogues who betray the most awful family trusts and vitiate their female pupils. They teach the people that the debauchers of virgins, almost in the arms of their parents, may be safe inmates in their house, and even fit guardians of the honor of those husbands who succeed legally to the office which the young literators ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... The canonico was prompt in the execution of the command. The master drew out his scales, and desired the canonico to weigh with his own hand five ounces. He groaned and trembled: the balance was unsteady. 'Throw in another piece: it will not vitiate the agreement,' cried the master. It was done. Fear and grief are among the thirsty passions, but add little to the appetite. It seemed, however, as if every sigh had left a vacancy in the stomach of the canonico. At dinner the cook brought ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... of that pretended assembly were written, the Bishop of St. Andrews with his own hand did interline, adde, change, vitiate, direct to be extracted or not extracted, as he pleased: as the scrolls themselves seen, doe show; wherefore the Clerk did not registrat the acts of that Assembly, in the books of Assemblies, as may be easily seen ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... Dominicans and Jesuits; but he is obliged to admit that there is great significance in the fact that the Mexican terrace-pyramid closely resembles the construction of the Temple of Belus. No argument can vitiate the conclusion that as similar myths to that of Genesis abounded in ancient times, it is highly illogical to attach particular importance to any one of them. If one is historic, all are historic. We are justified in holding that the Jewish story of the Tower of Babel is ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... and organized his followers, and led them well disciplined to victory. But on the grander field of statesmanship he was wanting. He was what Bonaparte called an ideologist. A principle, however true, may fail in its application, because other principles, equally true, may then come into action and vitiate the result. These collateral principles Jefferson never deigned to consider. He had no conception of expediency, of which a wise statesman never loses sight. Results he thought must be advantageous, provided processes were according to his principles. His object ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... known to the art of tone production so as to bring happiness to the singer and his enwrapt listeners, be they young or old, rich or poor, sick or dying, in the sanctuary or for the bridal rejoicings. Vitiate not this gift with the lower thought of the art of singing. Strive for the highest ideals and your happiness ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... contains a dozen supercilious letters from a dozen learned and high-salaried professors, each pointing out a dozen distinct and separate precautions which the painstaking observer neglected to take, and any one of which would be quite sufficient to vitiate the whole body of his observations. There might have been germs in the tube in which he boiled the water (germs are very fashionable just at present); or some of the germs might have survived and rather enjoyed the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... gluanta. Visible videbla. Visibly videble. Vision (sense) vido. Vision (apparition) aperajxo. Visit viziti. Visiting-card vizitkarto. Visitor vizitanto. Visor viziero. Visual vida. Vital vivema. Vital necesega. Vitality vivemo. Vitiate difekti. Vitreous vitreca. Vitrify vitrigi. Vitriol vitriolo. Vivacity viveco. Vivid (color) hela. Vivifying viviga. Vixen vulpino. Viz nome, tio estas, t.e. Vizier veziro. Vocabulary vortareto. Vocal vocxa. Vocalist kantisto. Vocation profesio, inklino, emo. Voice ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... which suckling women are subject, and the improper food in which they too frequently indulge. No other ingredients should however be added to this kind of food, such as sugar, spices, or fruits, which tend only to vitiate the diet, and to render it less nutritious. This and other sorts of spoonmeat should be made rather thin than otherwise, and abounding with liquid, whether milk or water. All porridges and spoonmeats that are made thin, and quickly prepared, are sweeter, brisker on the palate, and ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... said, 'Rash and inexperienced traveller, we will now seriously devote ourselves to a little high tension, because if we do not, it is my impression that yonder self-propelling man-of-war with the armour-plated upper deck' (and by this, O Best Beloved, he meant the Crocodile), 'will permanently vitiate your future career. ...
— Just So Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... test and treatment by salvarsan or other arsenical preparations will vitiate this index in future, for the reasons that by the Wassermann test more cases will be diagnosed, and by the use of recent remedies the complete cure of many more cases will be effected, and consequently fewer will develop dementia paralytica. This disability ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... ordinary state of war. In the country which grants them, licences to carry on a pacific commerce are rigidly interpreted, as being exceptions to a general rule; though they are not to be construed with pedantic accuracy, nor will every small deviation be held to vitiate ...
— The Laws Of War, Affecting Commerce And Shipping • H. Byerley Thomson
... the Witwatersrand, where there is a fairly sound assurance of definite life, it is possible to calculate at once the size of plant which by saving of "fixed charges" will be eventually the most economical, but even here the other limitations step in to vitiate such policy of management,—chiefly the limitation ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... shortened into Dabny and Aulnay into Olney. So also many a Brown had been Braun, and several Blacks had once been only Schwartz. Even the universal Smith had absorbed more than one original Schmidt. These rather exceptional cases, however, probably, do not vitiate the general conclusion here made as to the British and non-British element in the population of America, for the Dutch, the German, the French, and the Swedish cognomens are characteristically different from the British. But the differentiation between Irish, Welsh, ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... that this is in great part his own fault. Some perversity or obliquity will be suspected, even if no positive infirmity or deformity can be detected, in his intelligence or in his temperament: some taint or some flaw will be assumed to affect and to vitiate his creative instinct or his spiritual reason. And in the case of John Marston, the friend and foe of Ben Jonson, the fierce and foul-mouthed satirist, the ambitious and overweening tragedian, the scornful and passionate humorist, it is easy for the shallowest and least ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect: that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman. If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to be played with, or even as a means to save you trouble ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... impressions of gaiety and delight, he had once visited this spot, and, though he had passed a long intervening period amidst the vexations and tumults of public affairs, which too frequently corrode the heart, and vitiate the taste, the shades of Languedoc and the grandeur of its distant scenery had never been remembered by him ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... work the new rule, Mr Baron Parke is forced to make the case of murder a double exception—viz. to the adoption of the new rule at the trial, and then to the operation of the new rule before the court of error, which must then hold that a single bad, or a dozen bad counts, will not vitiate a general judgment, if sustained by one good count! Does not all this suffice to show the desperate shifts to which even two such distinguished judges are driven, in order to support the new rule, and conceal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Glump was, but strange whispers respecting Glump were floating about the borough. Trigger was disposed to believe that they, on their side, could prove that Glump had really been employed by Westmacott's people to vitiate the election. He was quite sure that nothing could connect Glump with him as an agent on behalf of Griffenbottom and Underwood. So Mr. Trigger asserted with the greatest confidence; but what was in the bottom of Mr. Trigger's mind on this subject no one pretended to know. As for Glump himself ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... if we dwell upon it and take it seriously, an outrage upon our understandings which common sense alone enables us to brook; granted that it carries with it a distinctly miraculous element which should vitiate the whole process ab initio, still, if we have faith we can so work these miracles as Orpheus-like to charm denizens of the unseen world into the seen again—provided we do not look back, and provided also we do not try to charm half a dozen Eurydices ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... bespatter, debase, deprave, soil, stain, taint, besmear, contaminate, defile, pollute, spoil, sully, vitiate. besmirch, corrupt, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... "that you were not handed over to the inquisitorial brothers, for they would have burned you before you were allowed to import the odour of all the fields of Spanish onions and garlic into the Eternal City. It is a sign of the bad times that are approaching when errant cobblers are allowed to vitiate the precincts of St. Peter's with their pestilential breath. To-morrow you will be regaled with a view—mind, only a view—of his holiness's toe, and then you must depart ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... that through death must lie the one sole peaceful solution of her unhappy and erring life. Some people have most falsely supposed that the case against the brother and sister, whatever might be pronounced upon the four other cases, laboured under antecedent improbabilities so great as to vitiate, or to load with suspicion, the entire case of the Privy Council. But, on the contrary, the shocking monstrosity of the charge strengthens the anti-Boleyn impeachment. As a means for getting rid of Anne, the Rochford case was not at all needed. If it could even in dreams ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey |
