"Debased" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... do you expect? Here is a whole class,—debased, uneducated, indolent, provoking,—put, without any sort of terms or conditions, entirely into the hands of such people as the majority in our world are; people who have neither consideration nor self-control, who haven't even an enlightened regard to their own interest,—for that's ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... have been a vessel without sail or rudder, driven to diverse ports, estuaries, and shores by that hot blast, the breath of grievous poverty; and I have shown myself to the eyes of many who perhaps, through some fame of me, had imagined me in quite other guise, in whose view not only was my person debased, but every work of mine, whether done or yet to do, became of less account."[30] By the election of the emperor Henry VII. (of Luxemburg, November, 1308), and the news of his proposed expedition into Italy, the hopes of Dante were raised to the highest pitch. Henry entered Italy, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... worked more slowly here than on the mainland. The richest and most elaborate work was built at this period. Finally the Renaissance took the place of Gothic; and the later palaces, built in this style, show strongly the debased condition into which the art of Venice fell ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, 1895 • Various
... the chief lessons he left them wrought well for the casting out of all with which the feudal system had debased the patriarchal; and the poverty shared with the clan had powerfully helped: it was spoken against the growing talionic regard of human relations—that, namely, the conditions of a bargain fulfilled on both sides, all is ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... condition of morals, though the influence of the former has of late years been much curtailed, both in Spain and in Cuba. The young women are the slaves of local customs, as already intimated, and cannot go abroad even to church without a duenna,—a fact which in itself proves the debased standard of morals. The men appear to have no religion at all, but the women very generally attend early mass and go periodically to confessional. No one seems to think it strange for a white man to have a colony of mulatto children, even though he be also ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... overturned in spite of the legions which surround it. Let us not insult the free and gallant citizens of America with the suspicion, that they would be less able to defend the rights of which they would be in actual possession, than the debased subjects of arbitrary power would be to rescue theirs from the hands of their oppressors. Let us rather no longer insult them with the supposition that they can ever reduce themselves to the necessity of making the experiment, by a blind and ...
— The Federalist Papers
... taste of his time to desire, if not solicit patronage. In our opinion literature is degraded by patronage, while it is honored by the friendship of the good and great. Nothing is so loathsome in the history of letters as the debased dedications which men of mind some years ago laid at the feet of the so-styled "patron!" Literature in our days has only to assert its own dignity, to be true and faithful to the right, to avoid ribaldry, and preserve a noble and brave independence; and ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... it neither utter folly, nor propagate slander. Let the daughters of Eve imitate their mother in her state of unfallen rectitude, when she shone in all the purity of innocence, and in all the summer of her charms; but let them avoid that course which tarnished her glory, debased her nature, and withered her paradise. It is indisputable that society is materially affected by the character of women; and in very important respects the moral state, as well as the social comfort of the world, is at their disposal. Let them beware of the delusions to which they are exposed, and ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... what grass and trees are, and never finding out what woman is, though they may have encountered a painted spectre which they took for her. A country owes much to human beings whose bodies she has worn out and whose immortal part she has left undeveloped or debased, as we tied them here; and having wasted an idle paragraph upon them, let me now suggest that old men have a kind of susceptibility to moral impressions, and even (up to an advanced period) a receptivity of truth, which often appears to come to ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the piastre is of two kinds, metallic (debased silver) and non-metallic. Government pays in the former, which is called Sagh ("coin"); and the same is the term throughout Egypt. The value fluctuates, but 97-1/2 may be assumed one sovereign (English), and one hundred to the Egyptian "lira." The second kind, used for small ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... Sylvia, "all that sounds well, but it has no meaning. I have been robbed of my 'innocence,' and I know that it has not debased me. It has only fitted me to deal with the realities of life. And it will do the same for any girl who is taught by earnest and reverent people. Now, as it is, we have to tell Celeste, but we ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... a man to principles, which every day's experience was so fatally for himself contradicting. To see the human mind in one of the most enlightened nations of the world, and after a lapse of some thousand years, debased by such a fermentation of disgusting passions, of fear, cruelty, malice, revenge, ambition, madness, and folly as would have disgraced the most savage nation in the most barbarous age must have been such a tremendous ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... sir, look at him now sir'—Toastmaster was weakly contemplating the coats and hats—'do you not find it difficult to keep your hands off him sir, he ought to have his head knocked against the wall sir,—and he should sir, I assure you sir, if he was not in too debased a condition to be aware of it ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... bread-line, he would surely have gone back to the commonplaceness for which every one except Bone Stillman and Henry Frazer had been assiduously training him all his life. They who know how naturally life runs on in any sphere will understand that Carl did not at the time feel that he was debased. He lived twenty-four hours a day and kept busy, with no more wonder at himself than is displayed by the professional burglar or the man who devotes all his youth to learning Greek or soldiering. Nevertheless, the work itself ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... proud Indian is at the feet of his ensnarer; disease has relaxed his iron sinews; drunkenness has debased his mind; and the myriad crimes and vices of civilized Europe have combined to sweep the aborigines of the soil from the face of the forest earth. The forest groans beneath the axe; but, after a few years, the scene ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... two-thirds being delivered of a superior quality; and it is added that this relaxation has taken place simply from the distresses of the colonies, and in the hope of introducing specie, there being nothing in use at present but a debased copper coin. This measure would add to the trifling free produce ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... wonder to us or yourselves that Dadney merchants do not come forward to contract with the Company, that the manufactures find their way through foreign channels, or that our investments are at once enormously dear and of a debased quality. It is evident, then, that the evils which have been so destructive to us lie too deep for any partial plans to reach or correct; it is therefore our resolution to aim at the root of those evils, and we are happy in having reason to believe that in every just and necessary regulation we shall ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the number of priests increased, they became the ones who ruled the masses in place of the spirits. The priesthood, then, wherever it has developed a great system, has exercised an almost superhuman power over the ignorant, the debased, and the superstitious. It was the policy of kings to cultivate and protect this priesthood, and it was largely this which enabled them to have power over the masses. Having once obtained this power, and the military spirit having ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... absolute lack of the sense of responsibility made it impossible for him to adjust himself effectively to the world about him. He next tries matrimony, and the same story reasserts itself. His conjugal life is characterized by repeated desertions; and thus he becomes steadily more debased, more depraved, sinks to the level of the professional gambler and finally even this becomes too strenuous for him, and he turns to a life of crime. At the age of forty we find him with a record of numerous ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... outlaws, that the village itself was a nest for them. That two of his servants, having gone into the village to purchase food, had been set upon, beaten and robbed; that the conflagration had been caused by the fire from a gun that one of the debased villagers had poked through a hole in the roof ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... the ninth and eighth centuries, instead of standing together against the threatening might of Assyria, sought heathen alliances, and wasted their strength in mutual contention. Against these hopeless alliances, and against the idolatry and the formalism which debased the people, the prophets contended with intense earnestness and unflinching courage. Amos, called from feeding his flocks, inveighed against frivolity and vice, misgovernment and fraud, in Israel. Hosea warned Menahem (743-737 B.C.) against invoking the help of ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... An insurrection has consequently begun, of science, talents, and courage, against rank and birth, which have fallen into contempt. It has failed in its first effort, because the mobs of the cities, the instrument used for its accomplishment, debased by ignorance, poverty, and vice, could not be restrained to rational action. But the world will recover from the panic of this first catastrophe. Science is progressive, and talents and enterprise on the alert. Resort may be had to ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... repeated them over and over again until the words have lost their tremendous significance. And it behooves us now and again to revive the old substance in a new form,—to come afresh to a self-consciousness of our function. It is not good for any man to hold a debased and inferior opinion of himself or of his work, and in the field of schoolcraft it is easy to fall into this self-depreciating habit of thought. We cannot hope that the general public will ever come to view our work in the true ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... the dreadful trophies of their success. But I should not have described those scenes at all, were it not to afford you a true picture of savage life, not as it is painted by romance writers, but as it really is, debased, and wretched, and hopeless. We soon reached the camp and recommenced our return to the settlements as rapidly ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... about noon in a small village, seemingly composed of one wide street lined on both sides with cafs and restaurants. There was also a very conspicuous modern church in a fantastic and debased, but showy, style of architecture. It was densely crowded, and the shine of innumerable candles was seen through the open doors. The whole street was likewise crowded with people, who had come from ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... chanced to be the chapter in St. Luke, which contained the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican; and while she read, a great compunction smote her; a remorseful sense of having scorned as utterly unclean and debased, her ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Regime. There are flies which, by feeding on putridity, become poisonous themselves, as did Marat: but even they owe their vitality and organisation to something higher than that on which they feed; and each of them, however, defaced and debased, was at first a "thought of God." All true manhood consists in the defiance of circumstances; and if any man be the creature of circumstances, it is because he has become so, like the drunkard; because he has ceased to be a man, and sunk downward ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... action could raise a Negro from his debased condition? the road to glory and honor is impassible to him: What then should he write for? Besides, the blacks have reason to detest the sciences, for their oppressors cultivate them but they do not ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... themselves more plainly in 1770. Frederick began to throw out hints of claims on certain Polish districts; he obliged the Polish Prussians to furnish his troops with horses and corn in exchange for debased money, which was either forged Polish silver coin, only one-third of its nominal value, or false Dutch ducats, 17 per cent. under the proper value. By this disgraceful species of swindling it is calculated he gained seven ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... Scheld, three great forms of religion—the sanguinary superstition of the Druid, the sensuous polytheism of the Roman, the elevated but dimly groping creed of the German, stood for centuries, face to face, until, having mutually debased and destroyed each other, they all faded away in the pure ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... church at Constantinople had been preserved from the reproach of image worship, and still later it made strenuous efforts against it; but the churches of the north of Africa, and the Asiatic portion of the Eastern empire, had become greatly debased, and worshipped saints and images. And while the territories of these were speedily subverted to Mohammedanism, and became a part of the Arabian empire, the east of Europe was wonderfully preserved from ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... Though from the first, up to the period of her acquaintance with Harry Benedict, she had led him on to love her by every charm she possessed, and every art she knew, she had always refused to be debased by him in ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... citizenship of this country should not be debased. It is vital that we should keep high the standard of well-being among our wage-workers, and therefore we should not admit masses of men whose standards of living and whose personal customs and habits are such that they tend to lower the level of the American wage-worker; and above ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... appear. What part did myth and music play in modern society, wherever they had not been actually sacrificed to it? They shared very much the same fate, a fact which only tends to prove their close relationship: myth had been sadly debased and usurped by idle tales and stories; completely divested of its earnest and sacred virility, it was transformed into the plaything and pleasing bauble of children and women of the afflicted people. Music had kept itself alive among the poor, the simple, and the isolated; the German musician ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... finally, having parted at a prodigious profit, with nearly his whole, stock, paid himself out of a large and heavy purse, which the portly father, in his utter inability to comprehend the complicated accounts and the debased currency, with great frankness deposited in the hands of the master of the stall, desiring him ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... Characters described; Pleasure and Instruction here always go hand in hand: Vice and Virtue are set in constant Opposition, and Religion every-where inculcated in its native Beauty and chearful Amiableness; not dressed up in stiff, melancholy, or gloomy Forms, on one hand, nor yet, on the other, debased below its due Dignity and noble Requisites, in Compliment to a too fashionable but depraved Taste. And this I will boldly say, that if its numerous Beauties are added to its excellent Tendency, it will be found worthy ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... Valancourt had leisure for reflection, and cause for repentance; here, too, the image of Emily, which, amidst the dissipation of the city had been obscured, but never obliterated from his heart, revived with all the charms of innocence and beauty, to reproach him for having sacrificed his happiness and debased his talents by pursuits, which his nobler faculties would formerly have taught him to consider were as tasteless as they were degrading. But, though his passions had been seduced, his heart was not depraved, nor had habit riveted the chains, that hung heavily on his conscience; and, as ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... who may expect to find here the Troilus, the Cressida, and the Pandarus of Shakspeare's play. It is to no trivial gallant, no woman of coarse mind and easy virtue, no malignantly subservient and utterly debased procurer, that Chaucer introduces us. His Troilus is a noble, sensitive, generous, pure- souled, manly, magnanimous hero, who is only confirmed and stimulated in all virtue by his love, who lives for his lady, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Debased Roman sculptural forms were used in Italy during the fourth and fifth centuries. Then Justinian introduced the Byzantine which was grafted upon the Roman, producing a characteristic and fascinating though barbaric combination. This was the Romanesque, ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... things in the Western States and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children, only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old. The atmosphere in which they are brought up is one of greed, godlessness, and frequently of profanity. Consequently these ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... until she asked him to kiss her. "When you are my wife," he said, evasively. And then—she must have loved him—she burst out into passionate sobs and fell at his feet in the quiet cabin and told him of her debased life in Fiji. "But, as God hears me, Will, that is all past since your last letter. I was mad. I loved money and did not care how I got it. I left Fiji to come here, intending to return to Australia. But, Will, dear Will, if it is only to throw me overboard, take ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... people are ignorant, stupid, debased, corrupt, exposed to violence within and danger without, the power necessary for a government to possess in order to preserve society against anarchy and destruction becomes greater and greater, and individual liberty, less and less, until the lowest condition is reached, when absolute ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... understand that I thought immediately—what has lasted nine thousand years may last eleven thousand. From that instant I had only one aim: to find the possible descendants of the Atlantides, and, since I had many reasons for supposing them to be debased and ignorant of their original splendor, to inform them ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... of tongues, of flaming, burning, illuminating speech, of heart-compelling speech! To tell my people how to make this country truly great and truly free, how to keep it free from the sordid things, the cruel things, the unjust, the unclean, the loathsome things that have debased and degraded the older nations, that are debasing and degrading even your young, great nation. Ah, to be a missionary with a tongue of fire, with a message of light! A missionary to my people to help them to high and worthy living, to help them to God! ONLY ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... mysterious has, in these pages, recorded the terrifying aspects of the Manchurian campaign, which one could not have foreseen in all of its horror. He has shown in a lasting manner the poor human creature torn from his home, debased to the role of a piece of mechanism. Not knowing where he is being led to, he goes, making murderous gestures, the meaning of which he does not know, without even having the illusory consolation of possible personal bravery, being killed by the shots of an invisible enemy, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... wife. A thinker whose far-piercing care perceives His nation goes the road that ends in shame. A gracious woman whose reserve denies The power to utter what consumes her heart. Such instances (and some a loss to know, Which steadfast reticence will shield from those, Debased or garrulous, whose hearts corrupt, But learn the gloomy secrets of their kind To poison-tip their wit, or grope and grin With pharisaic laughter at disgrace)— Such instances as these demand no guide To thrid the dismal issues from ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... to frame a mental picture of Dad's inamorata. Black, squat, squint; a forehead a finger deep, a voice that would carry a mile. Mackenzie had seen that cross of Mexican and Indian blood, with a dash of debased white. They were not the kind that attracted men outside their own mixed breed, but he hadn't a doubt that this one was plenty good enough, and handsome enough, ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... known respectively as Nephites and Lamanites. The former cultivated the arts of industry and refinement, and preserved a record embodying both history and scripture, while the latter became degenerate and debased. The Nephites suffered extinction about 400 A.D., but the Lamanites lived on in their degraded course, and are today extant upon the ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... enthralling the imagination, rousing in the heart that passion which inspires the mind to regions where it throbs in harmony with the Divine, and touches—as might some dying desert-waif with his parched lips a cooling fountain—the very source of love itself. But the most of human love—how debased and debasing, how vile! God, for purposes of His own, links for mankind the Aphroditic passion to the love Divine. The two are separable, and man assuredly separates them. True love may be witnessed as low in the scale ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... you out of pure malignity, who would rather injure you than not, who, perhaps, have an old, by you long-forgotten, grudge, and become your apparent friends to pay you back—these are few. Human nature, with all its depravity, is seldom so completely debased. But there are many who are only selfishly your friends. When you most need their friendship, where is it? When some great calamity sweeps over you, and, bowed and weakened, you would lean on this friendship, though it were but a 'broken reed,' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... is constantly placed before the eyes of "the temperamental youth" is a debased form of dramatic art, and a vulgar type of music, for the success of a song in these theaters depends not so much upon its musical rendition as upon the vulgarity of its appeal. In a song which held the stage of a cheap theater in Chicago for weeks, the young singer ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... stood on before, to meet himself face to face, as it were! I go to the great city in which my early life was spent, and I love to indulge myself in this whim. The only thing I care about is that portion of the city which is connected with myself. I don't think this passion of reminiscence is debased by the slightest taint of vanity. The lamp-post, under the light of which in the winter rain there was a parting so many years ago, I contemplate with the most curious interest. I stare on the windows of the houses in which ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... would have had no right, on any Christian or civilised principle, to torture prisoners. Unless the end justifies the means, in which case there is no morality, the rack was an abomination, and those who applied it to extort either confession or evidence debased themselves to the level of the Holy Inquisitors. Froude did not, I grieve to say, stop at an apology for the rack. In a passage which must always disfigure his book he thus describes the fate of Antony Babington and those who suffered with him in 1586. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... the honor of Massachusetts, nor because you are Boston boys, but because you are men, and because honorable and generous men always love fair play." The mob was conquered. Free speech and fair play were secured. Public opinion can do what it has a mind to in this country. If it be debased and demoralized, it is the most odious of tyrants. It is Nero and Caligula multiplied by millions. Can there then be a more stringent public duty for every man—and the greater the intelligence the greater the duty—than to take care, by all the influence ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... to realize a fact that has been evident enough for ages: that the current of civilization can never rise higher than the springs of motherhood. Given the ignorant, debased mothers of the Turkish harem, and the inevitable result is a nation destitute of truth, honor or political position. All the power of the Roman legions, all the wealth of the imperial empire, could not save the throne of the ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... the eighteenth century, when projects of Church Comprehension had come to an end, a great deal of angry controversy in Parliament, in Convocation, and throughout the country at large was excited by the practice of occasional conformity. Never was a question more debased by considerations with which it ought not to have had anything to do. In itself it seemed a very simple one. The failure of the schemes for Comprehension had left in the ranks of Nonconformity a great number of moderate Dissenters—Presbyterians and others—who were separated ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... affirm that the Colonization Society lives upon the malignity of the whites—but it is true that it lives upon the voluntary degradation of the blacks. I do not say that the colored people are more debased than the white people would be if persecuted, oppressed and outraged as are the colored people. But I do say that they are debased, deeply debased; and that to recover themselves they must become ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... apologies and indignation. He regretted more than words could tell that the American gentlemen who deigned to patronize his restaurant had been put to annoyance. The garcon—here he turned and burned up that individual with a fiery sideglance—was a debased idiot and the misbegotten son of a yet greater and still more debased idiot. The cashier was a green hand and an imbecile besides. It was incredible, impossible, that the overcharging had been done deliberately; that ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... own clergy only, with some other measures of relief. But he began to play the despot very soon. The Commons voted him the large subsidy of 20,000 l. He doubled the amount by his own mere motion. He established a bank, and by his own authority decreed a bank monopoly. He debased the coinage, and fixed the prices of merchandise by his own will. He appointed a provost and librarian in Trinity College without the consent of the senate, and attempted to force fellows and scholars on the university contrary to the statutes. ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... harmonious. United in the same pursuits, the emulation was kind and honorable. The tone and purity was superior to low and debasing vices, and these and their concomitants were unknown. There were few dram-shops or places of low resort, and these only for the lower and more debased of the community. Fortunately, fifty years ago, there were but few such characters, no meetings for gaming or debauchery, and the social communion of the people was chaste and cordial at their hospitable ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... dates 1443 and 1668. The nave has north and south aisles with five bays, and Early English arches and columns, the plinths of these columns being unusually high—over three feet, and those on the south being slightly higher than those on the north. The aisle windows are debased. The timber beams in the roof are of strong good oak; plain, except a central floriated device; the general boarding being of pine. The east window has five lights, with fourteen divisions above, within the low arch. The register ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... of the river, and close by the falls of Tumwater, the Indians were gathered to the number of several hundred, awaiting him,—some squatting, Indian fashion, on the ground, others standing upright, looking taller than human in the dusky light. Mingled with the debased tribes that made up the larger part of the gathering, Cecil saw here and there warriors of a bolder and superior race,—Yakimas and Klickitats, clad in skins or wrapped in blankets woven of the ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... of this den of captives, debased and punished by pain, I make out the big mass of a hospital attendant whose heavy shoulders rise and fall like a knapsack carried crosswise, and whose stentorian voice reverberates at speed through the cave. "You've been meddling with your ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... knew very well that many an elegant Phrase becomes improper for a Poet or an Orator, when it has been debased by common Use. For this Reason the Works of Ancient Authors, which are written in dead Languages, have a great Advantage over those which are written in Languages that are now spoken. Were there any mean Phrases or Idioms in Virgil and ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Essays, to expunge everything that savoured of democratic tendencies. But the passage just quoted shows that this was no recantation, but simply a confirmation, by his experience of one of the most debased periods of English history, of those evil tendencies attendant on popular government, of which, from the first, he ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... both cases may readily be pointed out. An extraordinary development has taken place in the human intellect within a few thousands, or tens of thousands, of years, yielding the difference which exists between the cultivated man of to-day and the debased savage who probably preceded him, and whose counterpart still exists. This has undoubtedly been due to influences of the highest potency. If we can show that influences of equal potency acted upon man's ancestor, we ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... is already much discontented; it considers itself debased, because it sees itself mixed with so ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... has to give? I have a longing to take you by the hand and unburden my heart by saying, "Sir, I honour you as a man who supports the dignity of human nature, amid an age when frivolity and avarice have, between them, debased us below the brutes that perish!" But, alas, Sir! to me you are unapproachable. It is true, the Muses baptised me in Castalian streams; but the thoughtless gipsies forgot to give me a name. As the sex have served many a good fellow, the Nine have given me a great deal of pleasure; ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... and I belonged emphatically to the Sixties. We had never been debased by trade, and a mesalliance was not known in our family. To be sure, my father had lost a fortune instead of making one in any way; but that did not alter his position or mine. We belonged to the aristocracy ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... Fouquet, where twenty 'qualified' players, such as the Marshals de Richelieu, de Clairembaut, &c., assembled together, with a dash of bad company, to play for lands, houses, jewels, even for point-lace and neckties? There she would have seen something more than gold staked, since the players debased themselves so low as to circumvent certain opulent dupes, who were the first invited. To leave one hundred pistoles, ostensibly for 'the cards,' but really as the perquisite of the master of the lordly house; to recoup him when he lost; and, when they had to deal with some unimportant ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... out of the world, and alone with a giant nature, surrounded by faint traditions of a bygone race; and the feeling is not diminished, when the silence is broken by the footstep of the passing Indian, the poor and debased descendant of that extraordinary and mysterious people, who came, we know not whence, and whose posterity are now "hewers of wood and drawers of water," on the soil where ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... of common mirth and sportful divertisement are mean and petty matters; anything at least is by playing therewith made such: great things are thereby diminished and debased; especially sacred things do grievously suffer thence, being with extreme indecency and indignity depressed beneath themselves, when they become the subjects of flashy wit, or the entertainments of frothy merriment: to sacrifice their honour to ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... curious result of the Gateshead fire that several tons of lead, whilst flowing in a molten state, came in contact with a quantity of volatilized sulphur. Thus the lead became re-converted into lead-ore, or a sulphuret of lead, which as it required to be re-smelted, was thereby debased in value from some twenty-two to fifteen ...
— Fires and Firemen • Anon.
... dull, thick, silent-looking lips, of purplish red scarce redder than the red skin; pale blue eyes tending to a watery greyness, leaden, vague, sad, but with angry streakings of red; something inexpressibly sad, gloomy, helpless, vacant and debased in the whole face: such was the man who awaited Louise of Stolberg in the Compagnoni-Marefoschi palace at Macerata, and who, on Good Friday the 17th of April 1772, wedded her in the palace chapel and signed his name in the register as Charles III., ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Great Over Soul, the source and center of all life: That, in fulfilling the law of life, by sojourning in the flesh for a brief period, it cannot be lost, or become totally depraved; although the body, which is but its earthly expression, may become so debased by poverty, selfishness and sin, as to momentarily thwart ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... pathetically ordinary that most of us are debased by acquaintance with similar, to this girl was fresh, and striking her in all its inexcusable barbarity without any extenuating gloze, made her furious with ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... foundation of the world' (c. v). Generally I think it may be said that the doctrine of the Incarnation, the typology, and the use of the Old Testament prophecies, approximate, most distinctly to the Johannean type, though under the latter heads there is of course much debased exaggeration. The soteriology we might be perhaps tempted to connect rather on the one hand with the Epistle to the Hebrews, and on the other with those of St. Paul. There may be something of an echo of ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... a secluded place in the mines, with the faint light of my miner's lamp falling on his hideous face, the cool, deliberate manner in which he related his atrocious doings, the fiendish spirit he displayed, led me to regard him as one among the most debased and hardened criminals I had met in the mines—a human being utterly devoid of moral nature—a very devil ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... fifty pence. He was probably a rich man, which might appear from the generous entertainment he made. He was a respectable man. The sect to which he belonged was the most celebrated and influential among the Jews; and when not debased by positive crime, a Pharisee was always esteemed for his learning and his piety. He had some interest in Christ, either in his mission or his character,—an interest beyond mere curiosity, or he would not have invited him to dine with him. He betrays a sincere friendliness, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... was marked with the most scrupulous exactness, and its dignity was displayed in a variety of trifling and solemn ceremonies, which it was a study to learn, and a sacrilege to neglect. The purity of the Latin language was debased, by adopting, in the intercourse of pride and flattery, a profusion of epithets, which Tully would scarcely have understood, and which Augustus would have rejected with indignation. The principal officers of the empire were saluted, even by the sovereign himself, with ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... to the spot? Look at that girl, and tell me if there is one trace in feature, in form, in manner, or in speech, of plebeian blood, and then will you tell me that she is in any way connected with people such as these? They are not merely plebeian, they are low, debased, criminal. They are criminals of the deepest dye, not only capable of any villainy, but already guilty, and to such a degree that their guilt has made ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... practical, undemonstrative, knowing nothing of pageantry and spectacle. It is hidden in the lives and hearts of the people; a stranger would hardly know of its existence as a distinct faith. Indeed, other faiths and better ones (one of them having some resemblance to a debased form of Christianity) co-exist with it, sometimes in the same mind. Cynolatry is tolerant so long as the dog is not denied an equal divinity with the deities of other faiths. Nevertheless, I could not think of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... cheap this year. T. Dear Mullinix, I now lament My precious time so long mispent, By nature meant for nobler ends: O, introduce me to your friends! For whom by birth I was design'd, Till politics debased my mind; I give myself entire to you; G—-d d—n the ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... honoured, for he believes in the proverb "the goods of friends are common property,"[440] and thinks it ought to apply to nothing more than to friends; but the false and spurious and counterfeit friend, knowing how much he debases friendship, like debased and spurious coin, is not only by nature envious, but shows his envy even of those who are like himself, striving to outdo them in scurrility and gossip, while he quakes and trembles at any of his betters, not by Zeus "merely walking on foot by their Lydian chariot," but, to ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... that excited the lads' commiseration and horror, and caused them inwardly to register a solemn and awful vow of vengeance upon the human fiends around them should the opportunity ever arise. No, terrible as was that sight, there were others—horrors that only the most debased and cruel imagination could possibly invent, and to which no pen could possibly do justice, even were any good purpose to be achieved by the attempted recital of them—that caused the lads' souls to revolt at once and for ever against a people that ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... be able to hold up her head among her sister towns for very shame." (Momentary blank, for somebody has got on the stove again, a scuffle going on there.) "I see it all now," says the Squire—(marvel of perspicacity!) "Jethro Bass has debased and debauched this town—" (blank again, and the squire points a finger of rage and scorn at the unmoved offender in the chair) "he has bought and intimidated men to do his bidding. He has sinned against heaven, and against the spirit of that most immortal of documents—" (Blank again. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... not be told the character of the king, whose inertness, and the habit of long-suffering, has debased his dignity and the fortunes of his house beyond the power of retrieving either the one or the other. Whilst his personal repose is undisturbed, he will prefer to live in the meanest state of indigence, under the rule ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... good or bad. They brought with them neither architects, painters, nor poets. They were all soldiers, and when fixed in Italy employed Italian artists; but as in that country, good taste was much on the decline, it now became more debased, notwithstanding the efforts made by the Goths to ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... present; but it must be admitted, on the other hand, that their habits, as to the way of spending Sundays, re-act powerfully on their sentiments; and that the minds of the lower orders, in particular, are much debased by the want of what have been emphatically called "these precious breathing times for the labouring ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... may assert, that the shell was weaker, the kernel stronger, crime more frequent, want of principle rarer. For he who acts according to his convictions, be they ever so faulty, can never be entirely debased; whereas nothing kills the soul more surely than appealing to the written law when it is at variance with one's own sense of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... here in 1786 from the corner of the old Rues aux Fers (now the widened Rue Berger) and St. Denis, where it had been designed and decorated by Lescot and Goujon to celebrate the solemn entry of Henry II. in 1549. The beautiful old fountain has been considerably modified and somewhat debased. The longer side has been divided to make a third, and a new fourth side has been added by Pajou. The whole has been elevated much too high by the addition of the terrace steps, and an unsightly dome has been added. Five of the exquisite reliefs of the Naiads by Goujon still remain, and ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... The debased taste and the unfeeling ignorance of restorers have been employed, as so often in Italy, to spoil and desecrate the memorials of the past; and the munificence of Pius, Munificentia Pii IX., is placarded on the inner walls. One is too frequently reminded at Rome of the old and new ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... contents of Darwin's book. I may be permitted to conclude by quoting the magnificent final words of "The Descent of Man": "We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man, with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... breast of every honourable man throughout the civilized world, and the degradation which every Englishman will experience, on learning that the flag of England, first prostituted by supplying the traffickers in Christian slaves with all the necessaries for their horrid purposes, is now further debased by a traffic in the slaves themselves. I send you an Ionian vessel, full of women violated in their persons, and who, with their children, had been reduced to slavery, in order that the British public and the world ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... but significant it seemed to me. He changed his workroom from the library, as we call it, to the sitting-room. He said all his characters became wrong and terrible in the library; they altered, so that he felt like writing tragedies—vile, debased tragedies, the tragedies of broken souls. But now he says the same of the smoking-room, and he's ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... but his riches did not keep pace with his spendthrift habits. The value of the abbey lands which Henry seized amounted, a century after his death, to six million pounds. The lands of the abbey of St. Alban's alone rented for two hundred thousand pounds. The king debased the coin, confiscated chapels and colleges, as well as monasteries, and raised money by embargoes, monopolies, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... were incapable of self-government and so must be looked after. Later we quit selling British slaves, but began to buy and trade in African humanity. We silenced conscience by saying, "It's all right—they are incapable of self-government." We were once as obscure, as debased, as ignorant, as barbaric, as the African is now. I trust that the time will come when we are willing to give to Africa the opportunity, the hope, the right to attain to the same blessings that we ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... visitor to the master of the college, pointing to its dark front. "Oh, no," was the master's reply, "the colour deceives you; that building is not more than two hundred years old." In invidious contrast to this mass, debased but imposing in its style, the pedantic mania for pure Gothic which marks the Neo-catholic reaction in Oxford, and which will perhaps hereafter be derided as we deride the classic mania of the last ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... repudiating State; A.G. McNutt, the first repudiating Governor; and Jefferson Davis, the first repudiating Senator. As another evidence of the incredible extent to which the public sentiment of that day was debased, I quote the following passage from Governor McNutt's message of 1840, proposing to repeal the bank charters, and to legalize the forgery of their notes—'The issuing of paper money, in contravention of the repealing act, could be ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Before this, their knowledge of Europeans had been limited to men of the Hudson's Bay posts and the few black-robed Fathers of the missions. The priests had told the Indians that in the outside world French was the accepted language of the white man and that only the degraded and debased spoke English. Most of the Northern Indians who speak English will tell you that they got their first lessons from the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... out the word Shamrock at her bow, and on careful inquiry identified her as the very vessel on which he had travelled to England as a boy; but alas! a Shamrock fallen on evil days, dilapidated by doubtful adventures in distant seas, and debased to the low ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... humorous, obscene, fanciful myths which are in flagrant contradiction with the religious character of that belief. That belief is what we call rational, and even elevated. The myths, on the other hand, are what we call irrational and debasing. We regard low savages as very irrational and debased characters, consequently the nature of their myths does not surprise us. Their religious conception, however, of a "Father" or "Master of Life" seems out of keeping with the nature of the savage mind as we understand it. Still, there the religious conception actually ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... had befallen her, to think in terms of beauty; to feel the miracle of her state and the age-old throbs that make maternity sublime. The sense of her aversion debased while it immersed her. She reasoned how valiantly whole eternities of women had gone down to meet motherhood and how proudly those eternities of women had worn the moment. Her mother. Mrs. Kemble. The concept awed her, but then memory came scourging out of that ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... causes). In some instances, Wealth acquired has been productive of evil. Other things again than Wealth (such as fasts and vows) have led to the acquisition of Virtue. As regards this topic, therefore, a dullard whose understanding has been debased by ignorance, never succeeds in acquiring the highest aim of Virtue and Wealth, viz., Emancipation. Virtue's dross consists in the desire of reward; the dross of Wealth consists in hoarding it; when purged of these ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... massy piers and semi-circular arches: these are evidently of Norman workmanship, and are probably part of the church erected by Henry.—All the rest is comparatively modern.—The western front is of a debased Palladian style, singularly ill adapted to a Gothic cathedral. It is flanked with two towers, one of which ends in a cupola, the other in a short cone.—The central tower, which is comparatively plain and surmounted by a high spire, was built about the middle of ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... worn-out condition, as becomes them? Is it not common now-a-days, for parents to be brought into bondage and servitude by their children? For parents to be under, and children above; for parents to be debased, and children to lord it over them. Nor doth this sin go alone in the families where it is; no, those men are lovers of their ownselves; covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemous, that are disobedient to their parents. This is that the prophet means, when he saith, 'The child shall behave ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... vice, with the introduction of which the world is staggered; or is it the old in modern dress? No, it is neither. It is simply the old vice, in the old form, doing the same old terrible work of enslavement of pure young womanhood, for the gratification of the debased and degraded passions of men. Lust knows no mercy, yea, it finds some degree of satisfaction in the cruelty inflicted on the victims of its ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... the Emperor Constantine, and those left behind were dissolute and abandoned. Thus true men and every sort of virtue perished at the same time; laws, habits, names and tongues suffered change, and these varied misfortunes, collectively and singly, debased and degraded every fine spirit and every lofty soul. But the most harmful and destructive force which operated against these fine arts was the fervent zeal of the new Christian religion, which, after long and sanguinary strife, ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... exceptionally fitted to increase the welfare and augment the happiness of the community, and the men and women who perform these acts will undoubtedly be rewarded by the plaudits and the love of their comrades. Indeed, we with our debased standards are incapable of conceiving how dear to them this reward will be. It is because I believe that this love of one's fellows under Socialism will be a joy far exceeding in intensity any pleasure ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... empire or the great Thsin, as the Chinese called it, and that he wished to establish commercial relations with it. But however uncertain this may be, there can be no doubt that he inflicted a most material injury on Rome, for before his legions fled the Huns, who, less than four centuries later, debased the majesty of the imperial city, and whose leader, Attila, may have been a descendant of that Meha at whose hands the Chinese suffered ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... of such debased intelligence that they believe the place of their birth to be the most delightful under the sun, to prefer their own peculiar tongue, and to believe that it was that of Adam. But we whose country is ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... whole century will explain the lowered position of this great house during the reigns of Louis XIII. and Louis XIV., when the sudden death of MADAME told all Europe the infamous part which a Chevalier de Lorraine had debased himself to play. ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... Zenith, "is probably because you have allowed it to become debased. We read in our histories of such a period here. Indeed, for a long time both the play and the opera were abolished, our advancing civilization having given them up under the impression that the good in them was overbalanced by the evil. But when the era of a more noble ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... gladdened the prospect and eye; I have eased the hot forehead of fever and pain; I have made the parched meadows grow fertile with grain. I can tell of the powerful wheel of the mill, That ground out the flour, and turned at my will. I can tell of manhood debased by you, That I have uplifted and crowned anew. I cheer, I help, I strengthen and aid; I gladden the heart of man and maid; I set the wine-chained captive free, And all are better ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and middlemen made enormous profits, rents were doubled and trebled. Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Limerick and Belfast flourished exceedingly on war prices and war profits. But there is no evidence that the mass of the people in their degraded and debased condition shared to any extent in this prosperity. It was at this very period that Arthur O'Connor spoke of them as "the worst clad, the worst fed, the worst housed people in Europe." Whiteboyism, outrage ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... ruthless leader into the ward, carrying the water-pitcher in her unsteady hand, for she had not reached the hardened audacity of her preceptress, and there was something in the scene to make even a debased ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... his health and strength and enjoy existence; lofty mountains, magnificent rivers and broad lakes, and many curious and interesting objects, not more wonderful, however, than those of other parts of the globe, while the inhabitants in every direction, though often savage and debased, differ in no material degree from the other ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... learn from books, but I presume the same would be said by an intelligent Asiatic, were he to study our sacred books and then compare results with much of the religion which calls itself Christian in the West. And yet for the study even of the most debased forms of Christianity in South America or Mexico, let us say, we must needs begin with our sacred books. And so it is with debased Buddhism in Japan. The Buddhism of Ceylon and of the books is unknown to this people, and when it is used as the basis of argument or exposition we do not hit the ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... prospect of these north-western tribes remaining in their present primitive state, indeed of their gradual improvement, for nothing can induce them to touch spirits. They know that the eastern Indians had been debased and conquered by the use of them, and consider an offer of a dram from an American trader as an indirect attempt upon their life ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... little Bill empowering the Mint to manufacture coins worth something less than their weight in silver aroused the wrath of Professor OMAN. The last time, according to his account, that the coinage was thus debased was in the days of HENRY VIII., whose views both on money and matrimony were notoriously lax. Other Members were friendly to the project, and Mr. DENNIS HERBERT, in the avowed interest of churchwardens, urged the Government to seize the opportunity to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... is current here, is either that of Portugal, consisting chiefly of thirty-six shillings pieces; or pieces both of gold and silver, which are struck at this place: The pieces of silver, which are very much debased, are called petacks, and are of different value, and easily distinguished by the number of rees that is marked on the outside. Here is also a copper coin, like that in Portugal, of five and ten ree pieces. A ree is a nominal coin of Portugal, ten of which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... That in view of the necessity of battling for the first principles of Republican government, and against the schemes of an aristocracy, the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed or man debased, we will cooeperate and be known as "Republicans" ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... I have lost the power of being thought true. My words can only be considered so many counterfeits. I have so often debased the true metal of sincerity that anything I say must ring false—that anything I may give cannot be taken. What I said sounded fraudulently in my own ears. I could not forget the many, many times when I had spoken so nearly in the same way without meaning or belief, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... imitation of Macaulay—the most easily parodied of all prose writers—to the judgment of my readers. It was written by the late Abraham Hayward. Macaulay is contrasting, in his customary vein of overwrought and over-coloured detail, the evils of arbitrary government with those of a debased currency:— ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... strain, her father rushed into her room almost frantic with rage, exclaiming: "Oh, Ambulinia! Ambulinia!! undutiful, ungrateful daughter! What does this mean? Why does this letter bear such heart-rending intelligence? Will you quit a father's house with this debased wretch, without a place to lay his distracted head; going up and down the country, with every novel object that many chance to wander through this region. He is a pretty man to make love known to his superiors, and you, Ambulinia, have done but little credit to yourself by honoring his visits. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... passionately; and as her body trembled with the sudden upheaval of emotions long dormant or indulged only in debased, hateful ways, she burst into tears. She knew, even in that moment of passion, that she did not love him; but not love itself can move the heart more deeply than gratitude and her bruised heart was so grateful for his words and ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... knew the distressing family affairs of the maids; how many were the ignoble progeny of the elevator-man, and what his plebeian wife did for their croup; how much rent the hall-boy's low-born father paid for his mean two-story dwelling in Jersey City; and how many hours a day or night the debased scrub-women devoted to ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... minister. Somerset suffered from the unpopularity of the new religious policy in some quarters and from that following the peasants' rebellion in others. As usual, the government was blamed for the economic evils of the time and for once, in having debased the coinage, justly. Moreover the Protector had been {316} involved by scheming rivals in the odium more than in the guilt of fratricide, for this least bloody of all English ministers in that century, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... changed, is the judgment corrupted and the mental strength impaired. In the present male mind this relation is changed by giving the greater cultivation to the intellect, and less to the moral sense and the heart. So his judgment is impaired and the moral dignity of his soul debased. He is a less man than he ought to be; is deformed in his mental growth, like a tree grown in a shady place where the light could reach it from only one quarter. He has less power of mind than he would have with the same amount of cultivation ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... thought, a fair face enough, yet not devoid of savage cruelty. Her presence brings me some rays of hope, making me feel I may have less to fear in the future than you. If a woman, however debased and barbarous, rules these savages, she will not be altogether without heart to the supplications of ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... available as the scene of European enterprise, and will enable its people to take a place among the nations of the earth, thus securing the happiness and prosperity of tribes now sunk in barbarism or debased by slavery; and, above all, I cherish the hope that it may lead to the introduction of the blessings of ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... followed Henry Fenn about the streets laughing; Henry Fenn, drunken and debased, whose heart was bleeding. It was late in the afternoon when he appeared in the Amen Corner. His shooting stars were all exploded from their rocket and he was fading into the charred papier-mache of the reaction that comes from over exhilaration. So he sat on the walnut bench, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... distorts the natural lines of the figure, and gives an appearance of uncertainty and unsafeness.... Men seldom take to wife a girl who has too small a waist, whether natural or artificial." "In architecture, a pillar or support of any kind is called debased and bad in art if what is supported be too heavy for the thing supporting, and if a base be abnormally heavy and large for what it upholds. The laws of proportion and balance must be understood. In a waist of fifteen inches both are destroyed, and the corresponding effect is unpleasant ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... who were steady, industrious, and hard-working men, who were frugal and thrifty, every single one of them, without an exception, owns the house in which he lives and has something laid by, the interest on which, with his house, would carry him through many a rainy day. When a man becomes debased with gambling, rum, or drink, he does not care; all his finer feelings are crowded out. The poor women at home are the ones who suffer—suffer in their tenderest emotions; suffer in their affections for those whom they love better ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... of inspired truth till all the inspiration is driven out, were all probably to be heard and witnessed in the early Christian days at Rome. Not all the converts were saints,—and none of them were such saints as the Catholic painters of the last three centuries have prostituted Art and debased Religion in producing. The real St. Cecilia stood in the beauty of holiness before the disciples at Rome far purer and lovelier than Raphael has painted her. Domenichino has outraged every feeling of devotion, every sense of truth, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... Greek medical learning was gradually laid before the student. That mass contained much dross, material that survived from early as from late Greek times which was hardly, if at all, superior to the debased compositions that circulated in the name of medicine in the middle centuries. But the recovered Greek medical writings also contained some material of the purest and most scientific type, and that material and the spirit in which it ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... partly as an instance of Florentine spite against Siena, partly as showing that in Italy great munificence was expected from the carpet-knights who had not won their spurs with toil, and partly as proving how the German Emperors, on their parade expeditions through Italy, debased the institutions they were bound to hold in respect. Enfeebled by the extirpation of the last great German house which really reigned in Italy, the Empire was now no better than a cause of corruption and demoralisation to Italian society. The conduct ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... before a jury half a dozen times, but the devil knows the law and pleads his own case with a tongue that twists the hearts out of the stupid jurors. You see? No common man. And this is the leader of the group of which Lester is one of the most debased members. He had no sooner been shot than Lord Nick himself appeared. He had his followers with him. He saw Jack Landis, threatened him with death, and made Jack swear that he would hand over half ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... for woman suffrage were given in the most intelligent cities, and in the best precincts of each city, while the heavy majorities against it were in the precincts controlled by the debased and lawless classes, and the lowest grade of machine politicians, who rely on herding the depraved vote—showing that these elements dreaded the effect of woman suffrage, and realized the falsity of the argument that it would increase the immoral ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... are not so debased as you might think. Though cannibals, they do not kill for the sake of eating 'long pig,' like the cannibals of the South Seas. Neither do they eat the whole body. Only the hands and feet of their dead enemies are devoured. These are carefully cooked and eaten as ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... the law, and through us participates in the gifts of the spirit; to the rich are offered the priceless treasures of art and learning. Now look abroad: east and west wandering tribes roam over the desert with wretched tents; in the south a debased populace prays to feathers, and to abject idols, who are beaten if the worshipper is not satisfied. In the north certainly there are well regulated states, but the best part of the arts and sciences which they possess they owe to us, and their altars ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... extinguisht race, Who once o'er that foamy flood, When fair Ioulis[14] by the light Of golden sunset on the sight Of mariners who sailed that sea, Rose like a city of chrysolite Called from the wave by witchery. This ruin—now by barbarous hands Debased into a motley shed, Where the once splendid column stands Inverted on its leafy head— Formed, as they tell in times of old The dwelling of that bard whose lay Could melt to tears the stern and cold, And sadden mid their mirth the gay— Simonides,[15] whose fame ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... understand why he said little of the purpose that took him to Europe. Although she waited anxiously for any word he might let fall on that subject, she respected his natural reticence in the matter. He was a criminal, low and debased enough, it was true; but he was a criminal of such apparent largeness of mind and such openness of spirit that his very life of crime, to the listening woman, seemed to take on the dignity of a Nietzsche-like abrogation of ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... that, and my condition would be pitiable indeed. All others would be equally miserable. The human race would multiply, until the fruits of the soil would be insufficient for its support; and earth would be filled with degenerate beings, starved in body and debased in mind—all clinging to an existence utterly without joy. Life is dark to me, but not to others: these are matters beyond you, and it is presumptuous in one of your condition to attempt to comfort me ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... the united efforts of a corrupt and unprincipled government, of extravagant fanaticism, want of education, perversion of religion, and the influence of ill-instructed teachers, whose hearts and understandings were estranged and debased by the illapses of the wildest enthusiasm, the liberty of the people was all but extinguished, and the bonds of society nearly dissolved. Revolting as all this is to the Patriot, it affords fertile ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... he said, perusing the parchments further. "Charles consents to the fall of Luxembourg. I did not sign all this. I see it all: Louis's ambition to rule the world, England's King debased by promises won and royal contracts made with a clever woman—forgery mixed with truth. Sweet Heaven, ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... may therefore be alleged, that as the New Zealanders place no value on the continence of their unmarried women, the arrival of Europeans among them does not injure their moral characters in this respect; but we doubt whether they ever debased themselves so much as to make a trade of their women, before we created new wants by shewing these iron tools, for the possession of which they do not hesitate to commit an action, that, in our eyes, deprives them of the very shadow of sensibility. It is unhappy enough, that the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... blend all into harmony. Romeo and Juliet are not poetical beings placed on a prosaic background; nor are they, like Thekla and Max in the Wallenstein, two angels of light amid the darkest and harshest, the most debased and revolting aspects of humanity; but every circumstance, and every personage, and every shade of character in each, tends to the developement of the sentiment which is the subject of the drama. The poetry, too, the richest that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... indeed, that the minds of this unhappy species must be debased by a servitude, from which they can hope for no relief but death, and that every motive to action but fear, must be nearly extinguished in them. But do you think they are so perfectly moulded to their state as to be insensible that a better exists? Will the galling comparison between ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan |
