"Degraded" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... altogether ridiculous; and somewhat enraged, I told her who I was. She started, regarded me for a moment with a scrutinizing look, and burst into tears, saying—'It is so, indeed! My punishment is just; I am humbled and degraded before the very menial I despised. Take, me, Simpson; do with me as you will; crime levels all ranks. Yet stay; I am still feeble; delay the consummation of your triumph for one week. During that period I shall regain the strength ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... low social type. There may be a just distribution of food among a shipwrecked crew, but the attainment of such justice would not satisfy all their wants. The abolition of misery, the elevation of a degraded class to a higher stage is a good thing in itself, unless it can be shown to involve some counterbalancing evil. I only argue that the ideal society would have this, among other attributes, and, therefore, that to secure such equality is ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Degraded state of the Manyuema. Want of writing materials. Lion's fat a specific against tsetse. The Neggeri. Jottings about Merere. Various sizes of tusks. An epidemic. The strangest disease of all! The New Year. Detention at Bambarre. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... bad thing arises like a weed in the night and blights the land where freedom is dead; and the aspect of that land and the soul of that people become spectacles of disgust, revolting and terrible, terrible for the high things degraded and the great destinies imperilled. It would be less terrible if an earthquake split the land in two, and sank it into the ocean. To avert the moral plague of slavery men fly to arms, notwithstanding the physical consequence, and those ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... walked out of the study a very different being from what I was on entering it. I had gone in with the air of a professor about to deliver a lecture; I came out like a student who had failed in his examination, and been degraded in ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... a thought came to him that he felt degraded him, but of which he could not rid himself, try as he would. What did he know of Fenzile, barring that she was young and strong and beautiful? Nothing. Of what was she thinking in those dreamy eyes, green of the ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... influence has issued in one long misconception of the metaphysical status of natural entities. The entity has been separated from the factor which is the terminus of sense-awareness. It has become the substratum for that factor, and the factor has been degraded into an attribute of the entity. In this way a distinction has been imported into nature which is in truth no distinction at all. A natural entity is merely a factor of fact, considered in itself. Its disconnexion from the complex of fact is a mere abstraction. It ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... thoughtful, even in the midst of those pleasures that are ordinarily most enchanting to one of her sex and age. But as she never was elated with the respect paid to her supposed condition, so she never was mortified with the consciousness of her real one, to a behaviour such as might have degraded the highest birth; neither appearing to expect it, or be covetous of honours, nor meanly ashamed of accepting them when offered. And while by this prudent management she secured herself from any danger of being insulted whenever it should be known who ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... accused, criminally prosecuted, degraded, and—mark this—transported beyond the frontier, as a special favor. My estates were confiscated to the minister, and Amelia remained in the clutches of the tiger, where she weeps and mourns away her life, while my vengeance must ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... creditors. A man might conspire with his father with the object of doing this fraudulently, as Captain Scarborough was no doubt thought to have done by most of his acquaintances. All this he might do and not become so degraded but that his friends would talk to him and play cards with him. But to have sat down to a whist-table and not be able to pay the stakes was held to be so foul a disgrace that men did not wonder ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... contrary, it gives me a just Indignation, to see a Person whose Action gives new Majesty to Kings, Resolution to Heroes, and Softness to Lovers, thus sinking from the Greatness of his Behaviour, and degraded into the Character of the London Prentice. I have often wished that our Tragoedians would copy after this great Master in Action. Could they make the same use of their Arms and Legs, and inform their Faces with as significant Looks and Passions, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Jones, otherwise a model of generosity, openness, and manly spirit, mingled with thoughtless dissipation, is unnecessarily degraded by the nature of his intercourse with ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... is a sufficient evidence that one is so,—a sentiment not more certainly the result of ignorance of human nature in its present condition, than it is the potential source of almost every immorality and mischief that have degraded or destroyed our species. But conceding entirely the principles contended for by Dr H., it may be demonstrated, that a directly contrary conclusion is their proper legitimate issue, and that too, independent of any consideration of other parts of our moral system, which, however, it will be ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... "it would be miserable to think that I had secured this gold at the price of a man's life, no matter how degraded that man may be. No, I would not want the ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... with indignation, said, "I had flattered myself, Sir, that both my character and my conduct, independent of my situation in life, would have exempted me at all times from a proposal which I shall ever think myself degraded by ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... me, and we went down the valley along the craggy ridges of the winding creek. The woodland on the opposite bank was vocal with the chirp and croak and chatter of Australian birds,—all mirthful, all songless, save that sweetest of warblers, which some early irreverent emigrant degraded to the name of magpie, but whose note is sweeter than the nightingale's, and trills through the lucent air with a distinct ecstatic melody of joy that dominates all the discords, so ravishing the sense, that, while it sings, the ear scarcely heeds the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rigidly toward her. If they touched her she would be degraded for ever. Yet she was incapable of flight, her throat refused the cry which she had been debating; alternate waves of revulsion and stoical resignation passed over her with chills of acute terror. Yet she managed to preserve an unstirred exterior; and that, she observed, ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... way, see after him! there is not left any vestige of despair or misanthropy or cunning or exclusiveness, or the ignominy of a nativity or colour, or delusion of hell or the necessity of hell; and no man thenceforward shall be degraded for ignorance or weakness ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... less disturbed than his wife was. He had a strong suspicion that he was not the head of the family; that Mrs. Taylor had actually usurped his powers and prerogatives; that she dared to think and act for herself and her son without much, if any, regard to him. He felt belittled and degraded; not because he was a drunkard, and neglected to provide for his family, but because he was not in fact, as he was in name, the head of the house. He was thirsty and hankering for rum, and this condition made him ugly. He had not a cent in his pocket, and his credit at the saloon was ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... of his ministers, to treat all his uncles as his enemies, and he sent his officers with armies at their back to depose them, and bring them as prisoners to his court. Five of his uncles were thus summarily dealt with, one committed suicide, and the other four were degraded to the rank of the people. But the Prince of Yen was too formidable to be tackled in this fashion. Taking warning from the fate of his brothers, he collected all the troops he could, prepared to ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... highest form of social life; that subjection to authority, even slavery, may, in given conditions, be for a time better than freedom to the slave of any complexion. Let him learn that slavery, like all evils, has its corresponding and greater good; that the Southern slave, though degraded compared with his master, is elevated and ennobled compared with his brethren in Africa. Let the Northern man learn these things, and be wise to cultivate the spirit that will harmonize with his brethren of the South, who are lovers of liberty ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... are at the end of your work. Why, you are only beginning. Now comes the real brain work; invention. Now are craniology and you upon your trial. But you are quite right about weekly salary. Invention must not be so degraded, but paid by the piece. Life, Labor, and Capital are upside down in this place, are they? Then you shall be the man to set them on ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... of paganism and of Christianity, founded on their respective idealistic and realistic tendencies. (2) The divining or necromantic faculties have been generally regarded in the East as honourable properties; whereas in the West they have been degraded into the criminal follies of an infernal compact. The magical art is a noble cultivated science—a prerogative of the priestly caste: witchcraft, in its strict sense, was mostly abandoned to the lowest, and, as ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... local situation gave the author, in his youth, an opportunity of seeing a little, and hearing a great deal, about that degraded class who are called gipsies; who are in most cases a mixed race, between the ancient Egyptians who arrived in Europe about the beginning of the fifteenth century, and ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... experience! My love is engaged [lit. interests itself] against my own honor. I must avenge a father and lose a mistress. The one stimulates my courage, the other restrains my arm. Reduced to the sad choice of either betraying my love or of living as a degraded [man], on both sides my situation is wretched [lit. evil is infinite]. O heaven, the strange pang [or, difficulty]! Must I leave an insult unavenged? Must I ...
— The Cid • Pierre Corneille
... behooved every true Southron to stand firm against the abhorrent tide of radicalism, to maintain the supremacy and purity of his all-pervading, all-conquering race, and to resist by every available means the threatened domination of an inferior and degraded people, who were set to rule hereditary freemen ere they had themselves scarce ceased ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... condition of American literature is obvious. The great fact is that there is an enormous crowd of readers, and the great hope is that they will eventually work their way up through Miss Laura Jean Libbey to heights of purer air. America has not so much degraded a previously existing literary palate as given a taste of some sort to those who under old-world conditions might never have come to it. In American literature as in American life we find all the phenomena of a transition period—all the symptoms that might be expected from the extraordinary ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the coarser races would be less capable of such aversions than the half-civilized, but the contrary is true. In Australia nearly every tribe is the deadly enemy of every other tribe, and according to Chapman a Bushman woman would consider herself degraded by intercourse with anyone not belonging to her tribe. "Savage nations," says Humboldt, in speaking of the Chaymas ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to be; and there was nothing for it but to look out the Wolf in the Noah's Ark there, and put him late in the procession on the table, as a monster who was to be degraded. O the wonderful Noah's Ark! It was not found seaworthy when put in a washing-tub, and the animals were crammed in at the roof, and needed to have their legs well shaken down before they could be got in, even there— and ...
— Some Christmas Stories • Charles Dickens
... languish without a word of intelligence as to his alleged offense, and without the slightest opportunity to meet the accusers who in the dark had convicted him without trial, subjected him to cruel punishment, and exposed him to the judgment of the world as a degraded criminal. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the oldest man in the two crews, and the most experienced sealer. It happened that he had once passed a winter at Orange Harbour, in the immediate vicinity of Cape Horn. It is true, that is an inhabited country, if the poor degraded creatures who dwell there can be termed inhabitants; and has its trees and vegetation, such as they are. The difference between Orange Harbour and Sealer's Land, in this respect, must be something like that which all the travelling ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... our own feelings would be, if, in the "development of the mammalia" some baser but more powerful race than man were to appear upon this planet, and we and our wives and children at our own happy firesides were degraded from our freedom, and became to them what the lower animals are to us, we can perhaps realize the feelings of ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... their appearance; a strange-looking set of red-skinned, black-eyed Indians, wrapped in dirty, many-colored blankets. The men were hard-featured, and degraded in their bearing, not at all resembling the description we have received of their warlike ancestors, before the fatal "fire water," as they call rum, had become known to them; but some of the women ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... state had been of no account in Europe. The King at Arms, who proclaimed William and Mary before Whitehall Gate, did in truth announce that this great struggle was over; that there was entire union between the throne and the Parliament; that England, long dependent and degraded, was again a power of the first rank; that the ancient laws by which the prerogative was bounded would henceforth be held as sacred as the prerogative itself, and would be followed out to all their consequences; that the executive administration would be ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... condition of Ireland between the years of Swift's birth and death—between, say, 1667 and 1745—could rise from that study in no unprejudiced mood. It would be difficult for him to avoid the conclusion that the government of Ireland by England had not only degraded the people of the vassal nation, but had proved a disgrace and a stigma on the ruling nation. It was a government of the masses by the classes, for no other than selfish ends. It ended, as all such governments must inevitably end, in impoverishing ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... celebrated Buccaneering Voyage in the year 1688, visited that part of the North-West Coast, to which the name of Cygnet Bay has been attached: of this place he gives a faithful and correct account, particularly with respect to its productions, and the savage and degraded state of its inhabitants: the same navigator afterwards (in 1699) visited the West and North-west Coasts in His Majesty's ship Roebuck, in the description of which he has not only been very minute and particular, but, as far as we could ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... any one upon a moment's reflection. Officers, whose only offence may be their belonging to the Volunteer Service, are too frequently subjected to the tender mercy of a Board of Martinets;—men of long service and tried ability, degraded by the fiat of a court composed of officers as tender in intellect as in years, and whose only recommendation to be members of the court, is their recent transfer from lessons in gunnery and drills;—with patent leather knapsacks, ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... the common soldier. The revolution and conscription has leveled all those distinctions. Many a youth of good birth and education is made to bear his musket in the ranks, and does not elevate his comrades to his standard, but is soon degraded to the level of their sentiments and habits. Many a French general, for instance Junot, has been raised from the ranks. Military merit or accident has elevated them to command without a corresponding elevation of sentiment ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... the public in a direction where the despised favourite has produced a strong impression. They are thus thrown upon the alternative of supposing that he has had "the luck" denied to them, or that the public taste is degraded and prefers trash. Both opinions are serious mistakes. Both injure the mind ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... to Paris, which degraded and obscured the king, at once made the queen the foremost person in the State. Those days of October are an epoch in her character as well as in her life, and we must turn our thoughts to her, who had so much influence and so much ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... nineteenth century) had of classical and of early Christian history, ideas whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken, oral, degraded, unrecognisable, and alive. Another Combray person whom I could discern also, potential and typified, in the gothic sculptures of Saint-Andre-des-Champs was young Theodore, the assistant in Camus's shop. And, indeed, Francoise ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... party; saw a vulgar-looking, fat man with spectacles, and a mincing, rather pretty pink and white woman, his wife. The man was Napoleon's nephew, the woman Washington's granddaughter. What a host of associations, all confused and degraded! He is a son of Murat, the King of Naples, who was said to be 'le dieu Mars jusqu'a six heures du soir.' He was heir to a throne, and is now a lawyer in the United States, and his wife, whose name I know not, Sandon told me, was Washington's granddaughter. (This ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... at the thought that her husband, the man whom it was her duty to honour and obey, should be degraded by such humiliating precautions; and yet there was no help for it. He had brought himself to this pass. This is the end of ambrosial nights, the feast of reason, the flow of soul, wit drowned in whisky, satire stimulated by brandy ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... sea. We had been totally spoiled for our proper sphere, and could not get into a better; the indifference of our inferiors mortified us, and the familiarity of our equals disgusted us—our potentiality was gone, and we were so much degraded that a puppy of a fellow had the impertinence to ask Jenny if she was going to one of the Old Ship balls. "Of course," said the coxcomb, "I don't mean the 'Almacks,' for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... played fives for the house, and that was all. He was bad at cricket, and had given up football by special arrangement with Allardyce, on the plea that he wanted all his time for work. He was in for an in-school scholarship, the Gotford. Allardyce, though professing small sympathy with such a degraded ambition, had given him a special dispensation, and since then Sheen had retired from public life even more than he had done hitherto. The examination for the Gotford was to come off towards the ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... and irregular passions, are essentially vulgar, mean, and cowardly. Our baronet was, beyond question, a striking proof of this truth. Had he possessed either dignity, or one spark of gentlemanly feeling, or self-respect, he would not have degraded himself from what ought to have been expected from a man in his position, by his violence to the worthless wretch, Crackenfudge, who was slight, comparatively feeble, and by no means a match for him in a personal contest. ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... is a degraded South Sea Islander making a crude intoxicant from a sugary plant, a Japanese preparing his favorite alcoholic beverage from the fermentation of rice by means of a fungus plant grown for the purpose, a farmer of this country making cider from fermenting apple ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... outhouses; for the English built no stone houses, and burnt down those of their Roman predecessors. Trade seems to have been confined to the south coast, and few manufactured articles of any sort were in use. The English degraded their Celtic serfs to their own barbaric level; and the very memory of Roman civilization almost died out of the land for a hundred ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... figure, a proportion, a harmony, beyond the reach of art. 13. The natives of Ceylon build houses of the trunk, and thatch roofs with the leaves, of the cocoa-nut palm. 14. Richelieu exiled the mother, oppressed the wife, degraded the brother, and banished the confessor, of the king. 15. James and John study and ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... in the star. But thirdly, it is certain, that neither A nor B is the abiding law: and next it becomes an object by science and by instruments to distinguish more readily and more certainly between the cases where the distance has degraded the size, and the cases where the size being really less, has caused an exaggeration of the distance: or again, where the size being really less, yet co-operating with a distance really greater, may degrade ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... person to allow himself to be degraded, robbed, deceived, and exploited might be the diffidence of ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... are whites. Mestizoes, mulattos, and negroes are numerous also. But we are here concerned with the jibaro of European descent only, whose redemption from a degraded condition of existence it is to the country's interest should ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... Valley. My maturer feelings were all colored with the strong repulsion we Dutch felt for the English rule, which so scornfully misgoverned and plundered our province, granting away our lands to court favorites and pimps, shipping to us the worst and most degraded of Old-World criminals, quartering upon us soldiers whose rude vices made them even more obnoxious than the convicts, and destroying our commerce by selfish and ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... ambition to acquire sudden pre-eminence, disturb public tranquillity, when a country has long enjoyed the blessings of plenty and repose. Previous to the commencement of that great rebellion, which tore the crown and mitre from the degraded shield of Britain, our forefathers, as we are informed by the noble historian of his country's woes and shames[1], experienced an unusual share of prosperity. During the early part of the reign of King Charles the First, he tells us, "this nation enjoyed the greatest calm, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... day that a degraded priest, a short, stout little bald-headed man in a torn cassock, chanced on Ignat, and stuck to him, just as a piece of mud will stick to a shoe. An impersonal, deformed and nasty creature, he played the part of a buffoon: they smeared his bald head with mustard, made him go upon all-fours, drink ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... order. Filth, vice, and poverty, held high carnival the whole year round. In the day time crowds of tattered roughs played rudely with one another in the streets, and after dark, drunken soldiers, sailors, and wharf men, made night hideous with their degraded revelry ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... do of a lower kind than self-extermination; what was there less noble, more in keeping with his present degraded position? He could get drunk. Of course that was it; he had forgotten. Drinking was the regular, stereotyped resource of the despairing worthless. He began to see now why some men boozed at inns. He struck down the hill northwards ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... "I'm Archibald, Marquis of Argile, and under the cope and canopy of heaven this January night there's not a creature of God's making more down in the heart and degraded than I? If the humblest servant in my house pointed a scornful finger at me and cried 'Coward,' I would bow my head. Ay, ay! it's good of you, sir, to shake a dissenting head; but I'm a chief discredited. I know it, man. I see it in the faces about me. I saw ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... well as furniture for such splendid rooms. When we see a perfection of modern finish around them, we recognize that most of these statues have been thrown down from their pedestals, hundreds of years ago, and have been battered and externally degraded; and though whatever spiritual beauty they ever had may still remain, yet this is not made more apparent by the contrast betwixt the new gloss of modern upholstery, and their tarnished, even if immortal grace. I rather think ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... administer it? Why do not Blannerhasset, Dayton, &c. demand private and comfortable lodgings? In a country where an equal application of law to every condition of man is fundamental, how could it be denied to them? How can it ever be denied to the most degraded malefactor? The enclosed letter of James Morrison, covering a copy of one from Alston to Blannerhasset, came to hand yesterday. I enclose them, because it is proper all these papers should be in one deposite, and because you ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... from saying that their religion is dying or dead. And why? Because it cannot stand the light of day. The worship of {S}iva, of Vish{n}u, and the other popular deities, is of the same, nay, in many cases of a more degraded and savage character than the worship of Jupiter, Apollo, and Minerva; it belongs to a stratum of thought which is long buried beneath our feet: it may live on, like the lion and the tiger, but the mere air of free ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... she now knew, was a mockery. She was the sum of all that she had thought and acted. She was a disillusioned and degraded and unscrupulous woman, steeped in enormities so dark that it appalled and sickened her even to recall them. She was only the empty and corroded shell of a woman, all that once aspired and lived and hoped in her eaten away by the acid currents of that underground world into ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... perpetuated the term. But if, by the term, it is designed to consider them as of that part of India, which is filled with the Hindoo race, there is but little resemblance beyond mere physical traits. Of the leading idea of the multiform incarnations of the terrible, and degraded Hindoo deities—of the burning of widows at the funereal pile—of infanticide—of the gross idolatry rendered to images, like those of Vishnoo and Juggernaut, there is nothing. The degraded forms of superstition ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... many parts of the country. He was a very fine man, the head of an old and distinguished county family; an ideal squire, and one of the few large landowners I have had the happiness to meet who was not devoted to that utterly selfish and degraded form of sport which consists in the annual rearing and subsequent slaughter of a ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... whose life was more than a tragedy, the architect with his wonderful but never accepted designs, the broken artist with his pictures, the educated but non-sober lady who could convert plaster models into marble statuary are all with me. The unspeakably degraded parson smoking cigarettes, his absence of shirt hidden by a rusty cassock, lolls in my easy-chair; my burglar friend who had "done" forty years and was still asking for more, they are all around me! ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... and inflamed by pulque and bad liquor, was to do its work, and that, too, without pity. Men, untamed by kindness of those above them, were now the masters of the lives and property of all, and there was no remedy. Fear had held the common people in a degraded position, but they feared no longer. Those who had lorded it over the poor instead of laboring to elevate their condition, were now to suffer the consequences ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... boasted reforms, our great social changes, and our far-reaching discoveries, human beings continue to be sent to the worst of hells, wherein they are outraged, degraded, and tortured, that society may be "protected" from the phantoms of ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... him not to punish his wife. It was very difficult for him to obey. This bitterness against the degraded wretch was roused to its highest pitch by her last outbreak. If she would only die out of his life—die in any sense, so that he might hear and see her no more—he would not ask for her punishment. If she would cease to be his wife, and ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the ultras go for both abolition and amalgamation, show that their object is to unite in marriage the laboring white man and the laboring black man, and to reduce the white laboring man to the despised and degraded ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... OBTAINING MANY PARTS OR ORGANS, all excellently adapted for their functions." "All this," he adds, "seems to me quite compatible with certain forms fitted for simple conditions, remaining unaltered, or being degraded." (Ibid. Vol. II. page 177.) But the great question is, if the conditions of life will in the long run favour "improvement" in the sense of differentiation (or harmony of differentiation and integration). Many beings are best adapted to their conditions of life if they have ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... remove next year to some land provided for them west of the Mississippi, a little way beyond St. Louis. He described his negotiation to me, and their reluctance to go, exceedingly well. They are a fine people, but degraded and broken down. If you could see any of their men and women on a race-course in England, you would not know them ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the Indian, he is a game animal, not to be degraded by useful or menial toil. It is enough that he exposes himself to the hardships of the chase and the perils of war; that he brings home food for his family, and watches and fights for its protection. Everything else is beneath his attention. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... nothing has been more impossible and futile than this very sortie which has brought him into contact with it. People nowadays allow infinitely too little for the psychological sense of victory as a factor in affairs. Then he was attacking the degraded but undoubtedly victorious Quin; now he is attacking the interesting but totally ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... sat within him, and revelled with full dominion over his soul: there was then no feeling left akin to humanity to give him one chance of escape; there was no glimmer of pity, no shadow of remorse, no sparkle of love, even though of a degraded kind; no hesitation in the will for crime, which might yet, by God's grace, lead to its eschewal: all there was black, foul, and deadly, ready for the devil's deadliest work. Murder crouched there, ready to spring, yet afraid;—cowardly, ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... done wrong. Society has used me cruelly; I owe nothing to Society. I have a right to take any advantage of it if I can. I deny that I have injured you. How was I to know that you would come to life again? Have I degraded your name and your character? I have done honor to both. I have won everybody's liking and everybody's respect. Do you think Lady Janet would have loved you as she loves me? Not she! I tell you to your face I have filled the false position more ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... the only cause of such a fatal falling away. The portals of chivalry had been opened to too many unworthy candidates. It had been made vulgar! In consequence of having become so cheap the grand title of "knight" was degraded. Eustace Deschamps, in his fine, straightforward way, states the scandal boldly and "lashes" it with his tongue. He says: "Picture to yourself the fact that the degree of knighthood is about to be conferred now upon babies of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... Southern element there wanted to make it a slave State. The Northerners, including both Whigs and Democrats, wanted it free. They did not want to be brought in competition with slave labor in the mines, and have their occupation degraded in that way. Their pride, as well as interest, was at stake, and there was great feeling on the subject. Meetings were called all through the mines and addresses made and candidates nominated. The average of intelligence there was away above any other ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... shocking thing which we know as Comstockery, goes back into the centuries for its origin; being, indeed, the perfect flower of that asceticism, which was engrafted on the degraded Christianity which took its name from Christ without in the least comprehending the spirit ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... to meet a special case. In either form it was the law of the land, and no privilege or prescriptive right could be pleaded against it. All officers of state, all judges and magistrates, hold their offices entirely at the imperial pleasure. They can be dismissed, degraded, punished, without reason assigned and without form of trial—even without knowing by whom or of what they are accused. The monarch has an advisory council, but he is not bound by its advice, nor need he pretend that he is acting by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... dictators, which the allied powers specifically covenanted among themselves to destroy, has ended, probably for ever. When the war closed with the death of Lopez, chaos prevailed in Paraguay, and the people were both bankrupt in fortune and degraded in morals. The reign of outlaws commenced, and it was dangerous to go beyond Asuncion and into the interior. But the Brazilians and the Argentines occupied the capital with a force strong enough to maintain order, and to convince the Paraguayans ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... the bare outlines of the story, as told by Don Hermoso, but there were details of words said and deeds done that caused Jack Singleton to "see red", and to wonder how it was that a man, made in God's image, could ever become degraded to a condition so much lower than that of the beasts that perish; and how it was that such fiends in human form were permitted to live and to work their wicked will upon others. "However," he comforted himself by saying, "such atrocities as Senor Alvaros has committed ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... for your letter of the 19th instant, and for the almanac it contained. Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that Nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing only to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America. I can add, with truth, that no one wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition, both of their body and mind, to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence, and other ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... exaggeration in the work of that major poet, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie. His violence and vehemence, his extremity, are generally signs not of weakness but of power; and yet once he reaches a breaking-point that power should never know. This is where his Judith holds herself to be so smirched and degraded by the proffer of a reverent love (she being devoted to one only, a dead man who had her heart) that thenceforth no bar is left to her entire self-sacrifice to the loathed enemy Holofernes. To this, too, the prim rebuke is the just one, a word ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... whatsoever things are beautiful, whatsoever things are of good report," these seek, say, and do, but when the man who would discover a continent robs a merchant ship or steals a cargo of slaves, or when a poet teaches gross vulgarity, then the thinker is hemmed and degraded by criminality. It is the glory of our age that it is washing white much of old thought. What is the emancipation of woman but the filtration of old thought? Did not Columbus study and read and think, and then go out and load his ship with slaves? ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... himself, begged of her husband not to tease their darling, and he was at last obliged to give way to her importunities, when Antony again sunk into his former destructive effeminacy. The strength of his body declined, in proportion as his mind was degraded ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... hospitality. The reason is plain; you have a horror of the needy. You invite us—and when we come you treat us justly enough, but as if we were numbers, criminals, beneath contempt—as if we had inflicted a personal injury on you; and when we get out again, we are naturally degraded." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... girl, she began to scour her cooking utensils with much energy, and soon commenced a song. Considering that she was compelled to constantly endure the company of a degraded officer, who had been expelled from the service with ignominy, she was absurdly contented. Indeed, with the happy inconsequence of youth, she quickly threw all care to the winds, and devoted her thoughts to planning ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... bit of round matting used by the poor as a seat. The Wazir thus showed that he had been degraded to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... feared to be a victim, was obliged to serve as an informer and vilify himself by becoming a spy. The rapidity with which parties followed and destroyed each other made the criminals as numerous as the sufferings of honour and loyalty innumerable; and I am sorry to say few persons exist in my degraded country, whose firmness and constancy were proof against repeated torments and trials, and who, to preserve their lives, did not renounce their ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... any such step as that. He was a man who considered that by doing an outrage to God's work an offence would be committed against God which admitted of no repentance. He must live through it to the last. But he must live as a man who was degraded. He had made his effort, but his effort would be known to all Alresford. Mr Montagu Blake ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... hands and hearts before its sacred flame; that halcyon land, the Ultima Thule of our fond imaginings, wherein true freedom reigns; wherein the legalized tyranny of the chartered libertines of a so-called learned profession shall be finally relegated, in common cause to the limbo of a sordid and degraded past. For these are they who seek to maintain a strangle-hold on science, who paralyze the arm of individual research and, even in this advancing age, still block the path of progress and of peace, of universal freedom and equality ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... is, that degraded and sensual men have an instinctive aversion to religious truth, and a still greater distaste for religious restraint. The carnal man is at war with God. When will this great truth, so loudly proclaimed in every page of the gospel, be practically acknowledged and acted upon? ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... and incalculable. Often she stood at the window, looking out, as if she wanted to go. Sometimes she went, she mixed with people. But always she came home in anger, as if she were diminished, belittled, almost degraded. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... hoped I should make the blood come. It would indeed be some recompense for the miseries, the humiliations, the heart-sickening disgusts which I have endured in my profession, if, by its exercise, I had awakened a spirit of poetry whose influence would elevate, ennoble, and adorn our degraded drama. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... not particularly esteem colonial Bishops, and still less Sisterhoods or devotion to missionary efforts, especially among the Australian blacks, whom her old geography book had told her were the most degraded and hopeless of natives, scarcely ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... to Be Done" is the story of a young girl who, with the greatest improbability, is represented as being of the purest, most lofty character and sentiments, yet the daughter of two phenomenally (almost impossibly) degraded people. Instead of marrying the rich and not otherwise undesirable man whom her parents urge on her, and who is deeply in love with her, she runs away with her teacher, and stipulates in advance for life in three rooms. She is only seventeen, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... his cabinet against his wishes to insult and defy him, and Stoneman, quick to see the way by which the President of the Nation could be degraded and made ridiculous, introduced a bill depriving him of the power to remove his own cabinet officers. The act was not only meant to degrade the President; it was a trap set for his ruin. The penalties were so fixed that its violation ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... and sparkling eye is as characteristic of a pleased or amused state of mind, as is the retraction of the corners of the mouth and upper lip with the wrinkles thus produced. Even the eyes of microcephalous idiots, who are so degraded that they never learn to speak, brighten slightly when they are pleased.[12] Under extreme laughter the eyes are too much suffused with tears to sparkle; but the moisture squeezed out of the glands during moderate laughter or smiling may aid in giving them lustre; though ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... vicious than self-righteousness, and the want of charity it engenders) are numbered, and men are beginning to distinguish between the exaggerations of fanaticism and the meek toleration of pure Christianity. I can safely say that the lowest, the most degraded, and the most vulgar wickedness, both as to tone and deed, and the most disordered imaginations, that it has ever been my evil fortune to witness, or to associate with, was met with at school, among the sons of those ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and disastrous to the hopes and happiness of home, than such relaxation of discipline. "A child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame." How many mothers have bitterly experienced this, and wept bitter tears over the memory of their degraded and wretched offspring! It is ruinous to the parent. He will both curse and despise thee. Your unlawful indulgence, therefore, is infanticide. Your cruel embraces are hugging your child to death. The sentiment of love should never crush the reason and violate ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... to Italy with our ideas fully formed about everything on heaven and earth, naturally say to ourselves, "Great heart alive, what sadly degraded frescoes! To think the art of Raphael and Andrea del Sarto should degenerate even here, in their own land, to such a childish level!" But we are wrong, for all that. It is Raphael and Andrea who rose, not my poor nameless Sasso artists who sank and degenerated. Italy was capable of producing ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... than any tribe now existing upon the earth, we cannot even entertain conjecture. Plato (Laws) and Aristotle (Metaph.) may have been more right than we imagine in supposing that some forms of civilisation were discovered and lost several times over. If we cannot argue that all barbarism is a degraded civilization, neither can we set any limits to the depth of degradation to which the human race may sink through war, disease, or isolation. And if we are to draw inferences about the origin of marriage from the practice ...
— The Republic • Plato
... type which James Chalmers desired. He longed to be a missionary to the heathen; but it was not until he had spent ten years at Rarotonga that his desire was gratified by his being appointed to New Guinea, then a comparatively unknown land, the people of which were savages of the most degraded type. ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... those four walls. I rose and walked the room back and forth, without fear of being over-heard, on the soft carpet of velvet roses. What revelations had been made known to me since I had quitted that room! How low I had been degraded,—how royally exalted! A child unentitled to her father's name!—a maiden, endowed with a princely heart! I walked as one in a dream, doubting my own identity. But one master ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the humiliating language of Christianity. From it we learn that man is an apostate creature, fallen from his high original, degraded in his nature, and depraved in his faculties; indisposed to good, and disposed to evil; prone to vice, it is natural and easy to him; disinclined to virtue, it is difficult and laborious; that he is tainted with sin, not slightly and superficially, but radically and to the very core. These ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce |
