"Demoralizing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a simpler and wholesomer life. That passage in the career of Miss Gertrude White somewhat puzzled Janet Macleod. If it were the case that the ambitions and jealousies and simulated emotions of a life devoted to art had a demoralizing and degrading effect on the character, why had not the young lady made the discovery a little earlier? What was the reason of her very sudden conversion? It was no doubt very noble on her part, if she really were convinced that this continual stirring up of sentiment without leading ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... fact, a good bit of it, and Tom sat back in his chair and listened, outwardly respectful, inwardly hot-hearted and contemptuous. Was this smooth-spoken, oracular prince of the market-place a predetermined hypocrite, shaping his words to fit the money-gathering end without regard to their demoralizing effect? Or was he only a subconscious Pharisee, self-deceived and complacent? Tom's thought ran lightning-like over the long list of the Vancourt Hennikers: men of the business world successful to the Croesus mark, large and liberal benefactors, founders of colleges, libraries and hospitals, gift-givers ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... intrusted with the public money strictly and promptly to account. Nothing should be presumed against them; but if, with the requisite facilities, the public money is suffered to lie long and uselessly in their hands, they will not be the only defaulters, nor will the demoralizing effect be confined to them. It will evince a relaxation and want of tone in the Administration which will be felt by the whole community. I shall do all I can to secure economy and fidelity in this ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... the international Socialist movement. We unreservedly reject the policy of those Socialists who supported their belligerent capitalist governments on the plea of 'national defense,' and who entered into demoralizing compacts for so-called civil peace with the exploiters of labor during the war and continued a political alliance ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... you are as well aware as I am that the subject has been mixed with a heap of nonsense both by Jews and Christians. And as to the connection of our race with Palestine, it has been perverted by superstition till it's as demoralizing as the old poor-law. The raff and scum go there to be maintained like able-bodied paupers, and to be taken special care of by the angel Gabriel when they die. It's no use fighting against facts. We must look where they point; that's what I call rationality. The most learned and liberal ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... with a realization of their significance, in the early part of our war experience would, no doubt, have been hopelessly demoralizing, but now the calmness and fortitude with which we took it demonstrated the fact that four years of such schooling had seasoned us to meet unflinchingly the most desperate situations. When broad daylight came we had the opportunity of seeing some of the heterogeneous elements ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... weight, the smallest influence of gold or spleen; and in the most critical epoch of an empire, the poising of his tremendous influence—the influence of so much earnestness and magical power—was the accident of an accident. We admit for him, in palliation, the demoralizing influence of terrific example, and of maddening oppression; but where is the worth of a morality that, in a man of heroic mould, will not stand assay? and what is virtue but a name, if she may be betrayed ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... indifferent, but ipsis Anglicis Angliciores, as if at the circumference the patriotic spirit was more alive than at the centre. There was a general sense that our affairs were being strangely mismanaged.' The men who think and talk like this are not struggling for place and power amid the demoralizing surroundings of modern Parliamentary life. They are able to take a cool and dispassionate view of us and our affairs, and they begin to think that public life has degenerated into a mere scramble for the spoils of office. Their indignation, when Gordon was deserted by the Government which he ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... she should not be allowed to remain with or to talk to the other employee or employees who are still on duty. When her work is finished, she ought to leave her employer's house. The non-observance of either of these two points produces a demoralizing effect. ...
— Wanted, a Young Woman to Do Housework • C. Helene Barker
... instead of being the rewards of partisan activity, are awarded to those whose efficiency promises a fair return of work for the compensation paid to them. To secure the fitness and competency of appointees to office and remove from political action the demoralizing madness for spoils, civil-service reform has found a place in our public policy and laws. The benefits already gained through this instrumentality and the further usefulness it promises entitle it to the hearty support and encouragement of all who desire to see our public service ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... made in the rigid Scottish Highlands that I was demoralizing Christian worship by giving organs to churches. The very strict Presbyterians there still denounce as wicked an attempt "to worship God with a kist fu' o' whistles," instead of using the human God-given voice. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... spirit of family alliances and ungodly bargains; or, in other words, to turn her into a mass of bribes—a base appendage to the authority of the British minister, who used her as the successful medium of at once enslaving and demoralizing the country, instead of elevating and civilizing it. It is for this great neglect of national duty, and for permitting ourselves to be imbued with the carnal and secular spirit, which has led us so far from practical truth and piety, that the church is now suffering. We have betrayed our ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... intervals the best and most enterprising men have been tempted to their ruin by excessive bank loans of mere paper credit, exciting them to extravagant importations of foreign goods, wild speculations, and ruinous and demoralizing stock gambling. When the crisis arrives, as arrive it must, the banks can extend no relief to the people. In a vain struggle to redeem their liabilities in specie they are compelled to contract their loans ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... general belief that the officers of the road are often in possession of criminating facts but do not consider it to be any of their business to inform the authorities that the law is being defied. The entire result of this evasion of responsibility on the part of those who are responsible is demoralizing to every young man connected with the road. The editor of the News recalls the statement made by a prominent railroad official in this city a little while ago, that nearly every clerk in a certain department of the road understood that large sums of money were made by shrewd violations ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... lodging- or boarding-houses,—numbering be it remembered between 11,000 and 12,000 girls and women,—two thirds of them lack the use of a sitting-room and must entertain men as well as women in their bedrooms. Not a few indications were seen in the course of the investigation of the demoralizing results of this practice. Many of the young women in lodgings were young and were friendless and were earning very low pay. Eighteen per cent of those who were reported without the use of a sitting-room were under twenty-five. The housing ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... frowned, recalling the incidents of the crisis at the suggestion let fall by the two outgoing lobbyists. "And so much of this dog-watch as isn't sickeningly demoralizing is deadly dull, as Crenshawe puts it. If I had anywhere to go, I'd ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... became another hell, on a day of great battle—September 14, 1916—when for the first time tanks were used, demoralizing the enemy in certain places, though they were too few in number to strike a paralyzing blow. The Londoners gained part of High Wood at frightful cost and then were blown out of it. Other divisions followed them and found ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... demoralizing to both students and teachers. I refer to the inevitable outcome of such a system; some students (sometimes few and sometimes many) develop considerable skill in "working the Prof." Teachers offering elective ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... away and went into the hut. He was in the hardest moment of his trial. It was the inability to fight, the lack of freedom, of weapons, the sense of helplessness, that had come nearer to demoralizing Menard than a hundred battles. He had been trusted with the life of a maid, and, more important still, with the Governor's orders. He was, it seemed, ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... when there was so much room! And the Second question is—Why did you select the town eight miles from the landing-place? Answer—Because we preferred being away from the nasty sailors, and thought it better not to be annoyed with the demoralizing influence of ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... from the immediate past: a well-furnished treasury, a nation in the enjoyment of peace, a firmly established throne, and a satisfactory state of foreign relations. These comfortable conditions seem to have exercised demoralizing influence. The bonds of discipline grew slack; fierce quarrels on account of women involved fratricide among the princes of the blood, and finally the life of an Emperor was sacrificed—the only instance of such a catastrophe in ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Constitution and laws of the United States, their loyalty will be given unreservedly to the Government; whose leniency they cannot fail to appreciate, and whose fostering care will soon restore them to a condition of prosperity. It is true, that in some of the States the demoralizing effects of war are to be seen in occasional disorders; but these are local in character, not frequent in occurrence, and are really disappearing as the authority of the civil law is extended and sustained. * * * From all the ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... us!! all, to cease dreading us. In the language of a powerful journalist, (the Spectator,) opposed on most points to the present Government, "the late Ministers commenced a career, perilous in the extreme to all the best interests of the nation—demoralizing public opinion, wasting public resources, and entangling the country in quarrels alike endless and aimless; and all this with a labouring after melodramatic stage effect, and a regardlessness of consequences perfectly unprecedented." We were, in the words of truth and soberness, fast losing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... destroy discipline and efficiency. So to keep the peace in a college means to remove the necessary causes of disturbance and disorder. If young Sardanapalus, by his extravagance and riotous profusion and dissipation, constantly thwarts the essential purpose of the college, demoralizing the students and obstructing the peaceful course of its instruction, he ought to be dismissed. The college must judge the conditions under which its work may be most properly and efficiently accomplished, ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... maritime; while the gradual withdrawal of the great French fleets, by leaving the allied navies without enemies on the sea, worked in the same way. Furthermore, the efficiency of the English navy, which was double in numbers that of the Dutch, was at this time at a low pitch; the demoralizing effects of the reign of Charles II. could not be wholly overcome during the three years of his brother's rule, and there was a yet more serious cause of trouble growing out of the political state of England. ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... Raymond. "You will head a clerical crusade against the turf, but I do not think it just to compare it with those ferocious sports which were demoralizing in themselves; while this is to large numbers simply a harmless holiday and excuse for an outing, not to speak of the benefit to the ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is this demoralizing mode of amusement to our country! Degrading to the greatest degree, it is nevertheless pursued with avidity by all classes of people; and large bets are often depending on these brutal exercises. Gentlemen, noblemen, and ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... his individuality. But she was determined to hate all the antecedents of his life, as though those antecedents, and not the laxity of his own principles, had brought about his ruin. She was prepared to live entirely for the future, and to look back on her London life as bad, tasteless, and demoralizing. England to her was no longer a glorious country; for England's laws had made a felon of her husband. She would go to a new land, new hopes, new ideas, new freedom, new work, new life, and new ambition. 'Excelsior!' there was no longer an excelsior left for talent and perseverance ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... cider-brandy and New England rum, his scant locks of white lying in confusion over his wrinkled forehead and cheeks, his whole air squalid, hopeless, and degraded,—not so much by the poverty of vice as by its demoralizing stamp penetrating from the inner to the outer man, and levelling it even below the plane ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Mr. Buchanan and his opening policy in Kansas, soothed the irritation, and was rapidly demoralizing the new Party, when the Pro-Slavery Party in Kansas perpetrated, and the President and the South accepted, the Lecompton fraud, and again united the North more resolutely in resistance to that invasion of the ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... boat had to invite a torpedo as a preliminary to real business. Officers and men alike deserve all the gratitude their nation can give them, not only for their courage in action, but also for their patience when spending dreary months without getting to grips with the enemy. Few things are more demoralizing than to wait to be attacked and to find no one kind enough to accommodate you; but even during all these long periods of inaction the discipline and keenness of the "Q" boat crews never relaxed. Lieut.-Commander AUTEN has done a great service in telling us of these astounding achievements ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... temptation for illicit trade than at present exists. There is reason to believe that these laws are in some respects quite insufficient for the proper security of the revenue and the protection of the interests of those who are disposed to observe them. The injurious and demoralizing tendency of a successful system of smuggling is so obvious as not to require comment, and can not be too carefully guarded against. I therefore suggest to Congress the propriety of adopting efficient measures to prevent this evil, avoiding, however, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... proceeded to Tahlequah and to Park Hill and there, under the direction of Colonel William F. Cloud, had seized John Ross and his family, their valuables, also official papers and the treasury of the Cherokee Nation.[520] The departure of the Principal Chief had had a demoralizing effect upon the Cherokees; for, when his restraining influence was removed, likewise the Federal support, political factions, the Pins, or full-bloods, and the Secessionists, mostly half-breeds, had been able to indulge their ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... that a considerable proportion of his recruits had been drawn from among the convicts of the French jails. Had the colony been then established, the mixture of such an element must have tainted its very source, and exercised an utterly demoralizing influence on its future. But God had designs of special mercy on Canada, so the day of her visitation was deferred, only that it might rise at a later period with a steadier, a clearer, and a more enduring light. Although Jacques ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... family a man was always safe. She remembered something that Gora had once said to the same effect....Yes, she could have forgiven the theft of an outsider, for at least she would be spared this sickening suffocating sensation of contempt. It was demoralizing. She hated herself as much as she hated him. Moreover there would have been some compensation in sending an outsider ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... phases of evolution and considering only that part of the system which robs man of the dignity conferred upon him by separate creation, when God breathed into him the breath of life and he became the first man, I venture to call attention to the demoralizing ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... equally apparent that a merchant would make a better bargain for himself when he could have things all his own way than when his enterprise and industry were shackled by the impertinent and selfish interposition of the interests of others. In conclusion there was an eloquent description of the demoralizing consequences of smuggling, and a pungent attack on the tendencies of taxation in general. I have written and said some good things in my time, as several of my dependents have sworn to me in a way that even my natural modesty cannot repudiate; but I shall be excused for ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... part of the plan; but when he had nearly reached Monmouth, he found, to his amazement, that Lee had gone there, but had done no fighting at all, and was now actually retreating, and coming in his direction. As it would be demoralizing in the highest degree to his own command, if Lee's armed forces in full retreat should come upon them, Washington hurried forward to prevent anything of the sort, and soon met Lee. When the latter was asked what was the meaning of this strange proceeding, he could give ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... clothes, those he had been wearing at the time of the accident. Somebody had been thoughtful enough to have them cleaned and pressed; from which he argued that the plunging fall on the wet asphalt had been demoralizing in more ways than one. Continuing the experimental venture, he walked back and forth and up and down until he could do it without clutching at the bed-rails to save himself from falling. Then he reshot the door-bolts and went back to ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... are to be tabooed from this moment. You must not say, 'How tired you look!' or 'How pale you are!' It is not manners at the Friary, and it is demoralizing. I am ten times more tired this minute than I was before you told ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... of human freedom made reasonable allowance for a man brought up under such demoralizing influences as Thomas Hughes had been, they of course felt less confidence in him, than they would have done had he sought to obtain liberty by some more commendable process. Being aware of this, ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... affected by it. His sons and his grandsons have, perhaps, made better matches than they might, had the old man been at peace with all the world, during the time that he has been desolating one district by his atrocities, and demoralizing all those around it by his example, and by inviting the youth to join him occasionally in his murderous enterprises. Neither age nor sex is respected in their attacks upon towns or villages; and no Muhammadan can take more pride and pleasure in defacing idols—the most monstrous idol—than a 'bhumiawati' ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... occurred to me that being a soldier, and belonging for the time being to Uncle Sam, I was a species of government property, which it was my duty to protect at all hazards. That settled the question, and conscience and honesty withdrew. Without going into the demoralizing details, suffice it to say that I stole a blanket from some hapless victim belonging to another company, and thus safeguarded the health and military efficiency of a chattel of the Nation. How the other fellow got along, I ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... Justice is its name. But what is justice? I suppose we all possess some kind of natural rights, according to our stations; justice, I take it, would consist in our being permitted to enjoy those rights. If this is correct, then—ah, Monsieur, the demoralizing effects of poverty, of non-justice, on a man like myself; how it lowers your self-respect and makes you capable of actions that you would reprobate, in ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... allegiance to the French, the English, or the Americans, were in their turn the means of bringing a neighboring tribe into subjection. Thus began a new era in the history of the Indian, inaugurating a kind of warfare that was cruel, relentless, and demoralizing, since it was based upon the desire to conquer and to despoil the conquered of his possessions—a motive ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... and either the mysteries, or the philosophy, of Greece? What proof that it was the office of the tragic poet, under a disguise of the sacerdotal religion, mixed with the legendary or popular belief, to reveal as much of the mysteries interpreted by philosophy, as would counteract the demoralizing effects of the state religion, without compromising the tranquillity of the state itself, or weakening that paramount reverence, without which a republic, (such I mean, as the republics of ancient Greece ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... to be rejected. It will hurt some of these Russian subscribers more than it will me, because it is only a question of when I shall read it, not of whether I shall read it at all. I wonder that so many demoralizing things do not affect the officials. However, that is not the point; pray keep for your own use anything which you regard as deleterious to me. I am obliged to you for your consideration. But you have no right to spoil three or four articles; and ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... literature. Of course the main source of knowledge of the more important events that are going on in the world is the daily or weekly newspaper; and yet there is scarcely any reading so utterly demoralizing to good mental habits as the ordinary daily paper. More than three-fourths of the matter printed in the "great city dailies" is not only of no use to anyone, but it is a positive damage to habits of mental application to read it. It is a waste of time even to undertake to sift the ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... impulse, which was that he and his father break away into the country in a touring car, not knowing where they were going to stop until hunger overtook an inn. This, too, he dismissed as a milder form of the same demoralizing order of heresy, bound to be disturbing to the new filial relations springing from the night when he had told his desert story over the coffee, which, contrary to the conventional idea of an exchange of confidences clearing the mind of a burden, had only provoked ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... the contrary. If good music has all those wonderful powers which have been ascribed to it from time immemorial, it follows necessarily that bad music must exert equal powers in an opposite direction. In fact, bad music is even a more demoralizing agent than, for instance, a miserable newspaper. The latter is once hastily read through and then thrown away, while a poor musical composition is apt to be preserved in the parlor—perhaps, neatly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... are declared to be equal (which man never will permit his fellow to be if he can prevent it), the only source of distinction is wealth, and thus the desire of wealth becomes the ruling passion of the whole body, and there is no passion so demoralizing. The other is, that where the people, or, more properly speaking, the mob govern, they must be conciliated by flattery and servility on the part of those who would become their idols. Now flattery is lying, and a habit equally demoralizing to the party who gives ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... and disaster among the princes of wealth in this country. Mr. Carnegie has said that a man who dies rich dies disgraced, but there is even greater reason to believe that to be born rich is to be born damned. The inheritance of vast fortunes is always demoralizing. ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... her family and social position, the more wretched is her life. Married women are so afraid of resembling the professional dancing girls, that they cannot be persuaded to learn anything the latter are taught. If a Brahman woman is rich her life is spent in demoralizing idleness; if she is poor, so much the worse, her earthly existence is concentrated in monotonous performances of mechanical rites. There is no past, and no future for her; only a tedious present, from which there is no possible escape. And this only if everything be well, if her family be not ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... near Nuwaybi', and still visible. They also refused, without preliminary "bakhshish," to show or even to tell where certain ruins, concerning which they spoke or romanced, are found in their hills. And yet there are theologians who would raise Poverty, the most demoralizing of all conditions, to the rank of ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... strange to me that any one who was not born a slaveholder, and steeped to the very core in the demoralizing atmosphere of the Southern States, can in any way palliate slavery. It is still more surprising to see virtuous ladies looking with patience upon, and remaining indifferent to, the existence of a system that ...
— Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom • William and Ellen Craft
... they would be free from his depredations. If the $1,750 in the bank had been meant as a bribe or a stipend for good behavior, such as was formerly paid to Italian brigands, it certainly could not have been more demoralizing in its effect; for all agreed that, since Lars Moe's death, Bruin misbehaved ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... take to laying in supplies of whatever is within reach, and surrounding themselves with plates heaped with the substance of future courses, it is first unfair and next demoralizing. If one man hogs the available supply for merely later use, he teaches his neighbor to do the same in self-defense. And so you can watch the proof of the old copy-book motto ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... of the preliminary British bombardment was most demoralizing to the enemy. The first German prisoners taken were in a completely dazed state as a result of the terrific bombardment they had undergone, and other Germans were seen to flee to the rear, deserting their posts as the ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... for her acquaintance, as she understood it, was humiliating, and, in a certain sense, demoralizing. Her other suitors had imagined that she had good traits back of her beauty, and hitherto she had been carelessly content to believe that she could display such traits in abundance should the occasion require them. Here was one, ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... had a purpose, a matter that lies near his heart. This new country and the lack of fixed rules are demoralizing, and it will be a good thing when there is a convent for the proper training of girls. But lawless as Rose has grown, he has asked her in marriage. We wanted you to ratify the consent I have given. He will make arrangements for the marriage a few ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... influence on society and modified the character of the city itself. Fifteen years of abnormal excitement, with gains and losses incredible in amount, unsettled the stability of trade and orderly business and proved a demoralizing influence. Speculation became a habit. It was gambling adjusted to all conditions, with equal opportunity for millionaire or chambermaid, and few resisted altogether. Few felt shame, ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... not endowed with such discrimination, and his works, till very recently, were excluded from the shelves of libraries which were catholic enough to embrace the writings of the earliest saints and the latest productions of Zola—on the ground that his poetry was too demoralizing ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... bewilderment. The baby was again covering one twinkling eye with its spread, pink palm, and was saying "Pik-k?" and laughing with the funniest little squint to its nose that Bud had ever seen. It was so absolutely demoralizing that to relieve himself Bud gave the squaw a shake. This tickled the baby so much that the chuckle burst into a rollicking laugh, with a catch of the breath after each crescendo tone that made it absolutely individual ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... earnest manner that he had been thinking deeply, and that the subject of his remarks was a matter of no ordinary importance. It was John Henry Wichern, founder of the Rough House, near Hamburg. He had just returned from his laborious tour through the districts of Silesia, which, in addition to the demoralizing revolutionary excitement, were stricken by famine and fever. Whole villages were depopulated, not enough inhabitants being left alive to bury the dead. Grief and despair reigned everywhere. The number of orphans had grown so large that Wichern and his few ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... be the result not only of the ruthless command from the official higher up but also of the de-souling, materialistic influence of Socialism on the common people of Germany during the past twenty-five years? Is not the viciousness of Prussian militarism plus the demoralizing influence of ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... this, and to allow private bargaining with the natives for land, has always been very strong, especially in the Auckland district. Repeated experience has, however, shown that the results are baneful to all concerned—demoralizing to the natives, and by no means always profitable to the white negotiators. When Fitzroy proclaimed that settlers might purchase land from the natives, he imposed a duty of ten shillings an acre upon each sale. Then, when this was bitterly complained of, he reduced ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... have gone on repeating it ever since, principally because these spirited little beasts have remained just what it pleased Providence to make them, have preserved their primitive freedom through centuries of effete and demoralizing civilization. Why, I wonder, should a great many good men and women cherish an unreasonable grudge against one animal because it does not chance to possess the precise qualities of another? 'My dog fetches my slippers for me every ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... early settlers' instant appreciation of the financial and economic potentialities of the fishing-trade. The Spaniard sought for gold in the new country, or contented himself with the fluctuating fur trade with its demoralizing slack seasons. But the New Englander promptly applied himself to the mundane pursuit of cod and mackerel. Everybody fished. As John Smith, in his "Description of New England," says: "Young boyes and girles, ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... cutting each other's throats—literally and without restraint. A strong hand was needed—a hand that could weld the warring elements into one, and push Russian trade far down from Alaska to New Spain, driving off the field those foreigners whose relentless methods—liquor, bludgeon, musket—were demoralizing the Indian ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... failed to find out, and the management sent to Chicago for a real live detective who would not be predisposed to accept the "mystery" as such, but would do his utmost to find the cause of a phenomenon that was not only interrupting traffic but demoralizing the whole service. ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... or in the state, are always dangerous and demoralizing; but while we unequivocally condemn the tyrant in our story, we cannot always approve the conduct of his pupils. One evil gives birth to another; but even a righteous end cannot justify immoral means, and we beg to remind our young and enthusiastic readers that Ernest Thornton ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... never, and in nothing, the famine, perhaps, that we imagine it. Much more probably it is a surfeit, and what we suppose are the pangs of hunger are really the miseries of repletion. More people are suffering from too much than from too little. Especially are the good things here in a demoralizing profusion. Ask any large employer of labor, and he will tell you that what ails the working-classes is an excess of pianos and buggies and opera-boxes. Ask any workman what ails his employer, and he will say that it is the ownership of the earth, with a mortgage on planetary ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the short lane that ended at the gate of Holly Court, and joyous and chattering men and women to come in to tea. Nancy loved this, and to see a group of men standing about his blazing logs filled Bert's heart with pride. It was rather demoralizing in a domestic sense, dinner was delayed, and their bedtime consequently delayed, and Dora, the cook was disgruntled at seven o'clock, when it was still impossible to set the dinner table. But Nancy, rather than disturb her guests, got a second servant, an enormous Irishwoman ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... that has less tendency to soften a man than long columns of figures. I think the figures you work at are quite as demoralizing as the minerals I have spent ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... passion, and such deadening of the conscience through interest, as would have prevented their discussing either the moral or the political aspects of Slavery, and precluded them from uniting in any effort to make the relation between master and slave less demoralizing to the one and less ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... pencils. With a roar of consternation, the tall man rushed into the street, flourishing his arms, and begging some one—any one—to "Take it away! Take it away!" He finally collided with the head end of the dragon, demoralizing that half of the chink procession as completely as the latter half ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... see, and understand how directly the government is concerned in this effort at demoralizing and enslaving the Chinese, the following extract ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... abused Whistler as he was dying—the second occurrence of the kind.... The thefts of food by Henry, and his execution, formed a culmination to the dissensions, though it did not entirely stop them. Never was there a more terrible example of the demoralizing effects of the conditions of Arctic life and privations upon men who in other circumstances were able to dwell at peace ...
— Henry Hudson - A Brief Statement Of His Aims And His Achievements • Thomas A. Janvier
... and State can be as demoralizing to religion as it is disastrous to good government seems sufficiently established by Philippine incidents like this, in which politics was substituted for piety as the test of a good Catholic, making marriage impossible and denying decent burial to the families ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... rather disappointing, for many of them show a strong element of Chinese blood. This seems to have developed an unfortunate combination of the worst characteristics of both races. Even where there is no real mixture, their contact with the Chinese has been demoralizing, and they will rob and steal at every opportunity. The headdresses of the southern women are by no means as elaborate as ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... truths, by the innate imperfections of the same. Both propose a reward for mere belief, and a penalty for simple unbelief; rewards and punishments being, by the way, very disproportionate. Thus they reduce everything to the scale of a somewhat unrefined egotism; and their demoralizing effects become clearer to ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... pinning belief solely on verification by physical phenomena, when they alone are in question; and for mankind generally, though possibly not for an exceptional man like Huxley, an impotent suspension of judgment on such issues as a future life or the Being of God is both unsatisfying and demoralizing. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... arms are almost valueless in the hands of weakhearted soldiers, no matter what their number may be. On the contrary, the demoralizing power of rapid and smokeless firing, which certain armies still persist in not acknowledging, manifests itself with so much the more force as each soldier possesses greater valor ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... bookseller is very demoralizing to the intellect," he went on after a pause. "He is surrounded by innumerable books; he cannot possibly read them all; he dips into one and picks up a scrap from another. His mind gradually fills itself with miscellaneous ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... religion is demoralizing; and how are you to get there? On the efforts of another. You are to be perpetually a heavenly pauper, and you will have to admit through all eternity that you never would have got here if you hadn't got frightened. "I am here," you will say, "I have these wings, I have this musical ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the one I cared for most was written by an old political friend of his who was then editor of a great Chicago daily. He wrote that while there were doubtless many members of the Illinois legislature who during the great contracts of the war time and the demoralizing reconstruction days that followed, had never accepted a bribe, he wished to bear testimony that he personally had known but this one man who had never been offered a bribe because bad men were ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... enmities and capricious friendships,—our hatred and contempt of Leigh Hunt, we say, is not so much owing to these and other causes, as to the odious and unnatural harlotry of his polluted muse. We were the first to brand with a burning iron the false face of this kept-mistress of a demoralizing incendiary. We tore off her gaudy veil and transparent drapery, and exhibited the painted cheeks and writhing limbs of the prostitute. We denounced to the execration of the people of England, the man who had dared to write in the solitude of a cell, whose walls ought to have ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... benefited the public. The future historian of American society will probably attribute enormous influence to the trolley car in linking urban community with urban community, in extending the radius of the modern city, in freeing urban workers from the demoralizing influences of the tenement, in offering the poorer classes comfortable homes in the surrounding country, and in extending general enlightenment by bringing about a closer human intercourse. Indeed, there is probably no single influence that has contributed ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... God that these soul-blasting and hope-killing exposures—so degrading to the criminal, so demoralizing to the community,—these foul, in-human blots on our fair and dearly loved Puritan Lord's Day, were never frequent, nor did the form of punishment obtain for a long time. In 1681 two women were sentenced to sit during service on a high stool in the middle alley of the Salem meeting-house, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... slates and to devise means for grasping with eager hands the spoils of government. Young men anxious for places in the gift of the government found that winking at Frank Miller's vices and conforming to the demoralizing customs of his place were passports to political favors, and lacking moral stamina, hushed their consciences and became partakers of his sins.[4] Men talked in private of his vices, and drank his liquors and smoked his cigars in public. His place was ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... lotus-eating land of the kind should have produced inhabitants to match. A few only of the Paraguayans had had the advantage of travelling in Europe, and on their return to their native land its atmosphere very seldom permitted them to remain for long without the local and somewhat demoralizing influences. ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... not say that all wreckers were guilty of such crimes, but many of them were so, and their style of life, at the best, had naturally a demoralizing influence upon ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... by an extraordinary exhibition of wearing apparel of divers colors, fluttering on lines like a display of bunting on ship-board, and whose flapping in the breeze was like irregular discharges of musketry. It was evident also that the court exercised a demoralizing influence over the whole neighborhood. A sanguine property-owner once put up a handsome dwelling on the corner of our street, and lived therein; but although he appeared frequently on his balcony, clad in a bright crimson dressing-gown, which made ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... mode" from which the "Ionic" was derived was still more demoralizing; it was counted "orgiastic," and proper only in ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... the public morals. Mr. Freeman adduced the instance of a father having a right to disinherit one son and prefer the other. This is not a parallel case. The parallel would be a rich man leaving his fortune to found an Institution of demoralizing tendency—say to teach you the art of cheating! The laws would annul such a bequest. Society has an original, inherent right to defend itself from all evil—and that gaming is an evil, whether played with cards, lotteries, dice, stocks, ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... quite a fair game, but I'm sure, without even seeing him, that he plays a diabolically good game and I know I shall cut against him. Mrs. Shelley? Every one's always a success with her; talking to her is as demoralizing as cracking jokes from the Bench. Mrs. O'Rane wants me to write her a duologue—just as one draws a rabbit for a child . . . . That only leaves you. And you capitulated more completely even than Poynter, without the '63 port ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... had made his great speech on the preceding day, wherein the grievous expensiveness and hideous immorality of Standing Armies were vividly portrayed. He did not hesitate to speak straight out on the subject of the demoralizing influence of Armies on the People among whom they were quartered or posted, and the broad track of moral desolation which an armed force everywhere leaves behind it. If the facts in this connection were but generally known, I think there would soon be a loud call from Christians, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... be the same as house-keeping," said March. "I want my little girl to have the run of a kitchen, and I want the whole family to have the moral effect of housekeeping. It's demoralizing to board, in every way; it isn't a home, if anybody else takes the care of it ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Various temporizing policies. The general property tax in practice is unjust and demoralizing. What, then, shall be done about it? Various policies have been followed. One has been to declare that the law would be good if it could be enforced, but that as in practice it cannot be, the best thing is to ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... favor died at that, and he was given five years in the penitentiary. He was a demoralizing influence there, already a socialist with anarchical tendencies, and with the gift of influencing men. A fluent, sneering youth, who lashed the guards to fury with his unctuous, ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the Revising Committee of "The Woman's Bible," in denying divine inspiration for such demoralizing ideas, shows a more worshipful reverence for the great Spirit of All Good than does the Church. We have made a fetich of the Bible long enough. The time has come to read it as we do all other books, accepting the good and rejecting ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... That was not demoralizing to the Afghans, who have not European nerves. They were waiting for the mad riot to die down, and were firing quietly into the heart of the smoke. A private of the Fore and Aft spun up his company shrieking with agony, another was kicking the earth and gasping, and a third, ripped through ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... this as a hint of what might be accomplished, because it has become fashionable for good but easy-going people to dismiss these matters with the remark that nothing practical can be done to meet the demoralizing and degrading power ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Those religious books which engage the mind of the masses are of a very different class. They are the wild legends of the Puranas, and inane dialogues and lying incantations of the Tantras—two classes of works which are both the most popular and are lowest in the range of their ideas and most demoralizing in the ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... souls whose livelihood is dependent upon largely the will of the Vanderbilt family. To that will there is no check. To-day it may be expansively benevolent; to-morrow, after a fit of indigestion or a night of demoralizing revelry, it may flit to an extreme of parsimonious retaliation. As the will fluctuates, so must be the fate of the hundred thousand workers. If the will decides that the pay of the men must go down, curtailed it is, irrespective ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... sold by giving plated ware, baking powder by glassware, boots and shoes by giving dolls and sleds, ready-made clothing by a prize of a Waterbury watch, and soap by giving jewelry. Nowadays a dealer don't ask you about the quality of your goods, but about the scheme you've got to sell them. It's a demoralizing way of doing business, and ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher
... necessary by the British retention of the posts; and also in this same summer the inhabitants of western Pennsylvania broke into insurrection against the hated excise tax. This lawlessness was attributed by the Federalists, including Washington himself, to the demoralizing influence of the French Revolution, and was therefore suppressed by no less than 15,000 militia, an action denounced by the Republicans—as Randolph confided to the French Minister—as an example of {165} despotic brutality. Men were fast coming to be incapable ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... the restraints imposed by a committee of incompetents; besides, the minister who was chairman of the Board, considered a Unitarian to be an infidel, demoralizing the religious life of the young. I grew tired of his malicious peccadillos, and accepted a "louder" call from that quaint town where the historic Lloyd Ireson "with his hord horrt was torrd and futhered und Korrid in a Kort by the wimmun o' ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... general breakdown in the old arrangements for providing water, drainage, and fresh air; and made rents high, and consequently living in crowded rooms necessary. The factory towns in the early part of the century were filthy, crowded, and demoralizing, compared alike with their earlier ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... simple, perspicuous style, without that ambition of rhetorical display too common with his countrymen. He writes with honest candor, and while he does ample justice to the merits and capacity of the conquered races, be notices with indignation the atrocities of the Spaniards and the demoralizing tendency of the Conquest. It may be thought, indeed, that he forms too high an estimate of the attainments of the nation under the Incas. And it is not improbable, that, astonished by the vestiges it afforded of ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... as plain now as Su-Tum-Tum. I dared not break in upon them. Had I opened the door, the general might have recognized their voices. Meanwhile, silly nothings were demoralizing the heart of my good Suzette. She would fall desperately in love with either one or the other of those sacre virtuosos. Then another thought struck me! One of them might be Suzette's sweetheart, ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... "the dregs and scum," but even descriptions of peasants and of officials below the rank of titular councillor. Besides, one period, however brilliant, does not entitle us to draw conclusions in favour of this or that literary tendency. Reference to the demoralizing effects of the literary tendency we are discussing does not decide the question either. Everything in this world is relative and approximate. There are people who can be demoralized even by children's ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... be paralyzed, or if sound in body, may be without aim or ambition, without plans or projects, destitute of executive ability or good judgment in the business affairs of life. And such sentimentalists, after demoralizing women with their twaddle, discourage our demand for the right of suffrage by pointing us to the fact that the majority of women are indifferent to this movement in their behalf. Suppose they are; have not the masses of all oppressed classes been apathetic ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... perhaps nothing so demoralizing to regular troops as employment on police duty which requires them to work singly or in small squads. Discipline speedily goes to the ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... of France, Belgium, and Germany all yield convincing and corroborative testimony to the demoralizing influence on political life which results from the coalitions at the second ballots. Insufficient attention, however, has been directed to one aspect of this influence, its pernicious effect upon the inner working of parliamentary institutions. The deputy who is ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... all conscience, warranted their anxiety. For more than a week Felix Page's iron-prowed ships had been crushing and smashing their way through the ice, opening a way for other ships; yesterday they had steamed into port with their precious cargoes, demoralizing the bull clique with a deluge ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... herself, and the stout lady on the platform went on piling up the indictment against her sex, and showing how demoralizing the vote had proved to women; how the suffrage sentiment was dying out in the West; how the "Antis" were organizing even in the suffrage States to lift the curse from their kind; how much purer and nobler politics would be without the influence of woman, and wound up ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... rapidly-increasing population; where there was a numerous peasantry, a trading middle class struggling into existence; the system of Dutch finance, pursued more or less for nearly a century and a half, has ended in the degradation of a fettered and burthened multitude. Nor have the demoralizing consequences of the funding system on the more favoured classes been less decided. It has made debt a national habit; it has made credit the ruling power, not the exceptional auxiliary, of all transactions; it has introduced a loose, inexact, haphazard, and dishonest ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... not in front of the child. (JOYCE kicks). It's demoralizing for her to hear her idolized brother held ...
— I'll Leave It To You - A Light Comedy In Three Acts • Noel Coward
... brain; Hodgson, his leg broken by a ball, clung to a sergeant's stirrup until a second shot stretched him dead upon the bank. The loss in that wild retreat (which Reno later called a "charge") was heavy, the effect demoralizing; but those who escaped found a spot well suited for defence. Even as they swung down from off their wounded, panting horses, and flung themselves flat upon their faces to sweep with hastily levelled carbines the river banks below, Benteen came trotting gallantly down the valley to their aid, ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... as back again I had to come, as Betty and Hugh were coming to stay with me for a night on their way to Thorpshire. It is not astonishing, perhaps, that two children, modern children in particular, and a nursery-maid can fill to overflowing a small London house, but it is astonishing how demoralizing a thing it is. A visiting child to people who have children of their own means nothing, beyond the changing from one room to another of some particular child, or the putting up of an extra bed, or perhaps the joy supreme to some child of sleeping in something that is not ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... striking than this, that you may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma. It is always demoralizing to extend the domain of sentiment over questions where it has no legitimate jurisdiction; and perhaps the severest strain upon Mr. Lincoln was in resisting a tendency of his own supporters which chimed with his own private desires, while ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... acquaintance in the days of my prosperity, it would have given me great pleasure to raise your standard of taste regarding wines and alcoholic liquors. The mixed drinks, which are held in such high esteem in this community, are, in my opinion, utterly demoralizing." ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... stones on the hillside, Peter knew, was cached illicit whisky, and at night the boot-leggers carried on a brisk trade among the gamblers. More than that, the glade on the Big Hill was used for still more demoralizing ends. It became a squalid grove of Ashtoreth; but now, in the autumn evening, all the petty obscenities of white and black sloughed away amid the religious implications of the ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... of these young people are possessed of good intentions and would respond to amusements less demoralizing and dangerous, if such were available at no greater cost than those ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... fortune, however, instead of demoralizing him, had been his salvation. It set him to work, and made a man of him. He never believed that he would inherit a dollar of his father's, so he prepared to make his own way in the world, ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... a runaway horse without a rider coming along it at full gallop, straight at us, with a most demoralizing sharp clatter of its iron hoofs on ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... now consider the action of several substances, in common use, that are inimical to health, and that have an especially demoralizing effect upon digestion. ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... adventurers who, from the year 1748 to 1783, encroached on the hunting grounds of the Indians and explored the wilderness, seeking out the remote tribes and trading the villainous rum for the rare pelts. In 1784 the French authorities, realizing that these vagrants were demoralizing the Indians, warned them to get off the soil. Finding this course ineffectual they arrested those that could be apprehended and sent them to Canada. But it was too late: the harm had been done: the poor, ignorant savage had ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... same." But as she said this, with a decision which seemed to make it imply that more than the sofa was unchanged, she held out a cup into which she had forgotten to pour any tea. Being told of her forgetfulness, she frowned with annoyance, and said that Cassandra was demoralizing her. The glance she cast upon them, and the resolute way in which she plunged them into speech, made William and Cassandra feel like children who had been caught prying. They followed her obediently, making conversation. Any one coming in might have judged them acquaintances met, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... pay his debts; then a fresh start and more debts, and more subscriptions and funds for his benefit, and gifts of money for his table, and checks or notes for several thousand dollars in token of admiration of the 7th of March speech.[1] This was, of course, utterly wrong and demoralizing, but Mr. Webster came, after a time, to look upon such transactions as natural and proper. In the Ingersoll debate, Mr. Yancey accused him of being in the pay of the New England manufacturers, and his biographer has replied to the charge at length. ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... were living in their marquee as we had seen them three weeks earlier, just after their yacht went ashore. It could not be said that they were molestive in the same sense as the sailors, but they were even more demoralizing in the spectacle they offered the neighborhood of people dependent on hired service, and in their endeavors to supply themselves in perishable provisions, like milk and eggs, by means of money. Cyril had held several ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... had a demoralizing effect upon untrained troops, and perhaps their use by the English against raw American levies at Bladenburg, in 1814, contributed to the rout of the United States forces and the capture of Washington. They also helped to ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... revolutionary manner; there was grave cause for apprehension that, if they were given high rank and corresponding command, they would innovate upon established infantry tactique, in the same unprecedented and demoralizing style. Mr. Davis did not dislike Morgan, but simply entertained no particular fancy for him, and did not believe that he was really a superior, although a successful officer; in fact, he ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... Fortunately, the demoralizing effect of the panic of the 15th was to be merely temporary. Indeed, before the details of the affair had time to circulate through the camps and work further discouragement or depression, there occurred another encounter with the enemy on the following ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... captured property, branding them U. S., and refusing to pay for them. General Curtis, misled by the misrepresentations that had been made, and without fully knowing the circumstances, or realizing to what a base and demoralizing state of things this course was inevitably tending, practically ordered me to make the Payments, and I refused. The immediate result of this disobedience was a court-martial to try me; and knowing that my usefulness in that army was gone, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... but when once its deliberate commands are issued, and so long as they remain unrepealed, it should enforce them with calm but inexorable determination. Nothing is more fatal to the very foundations of political society, than the spectacle of a government that can be defied with impunity.[45] That demoralizing spectacle has been seen far too often during recent years, and at the moment when the war broke out it had led us to the verge of national disaster. The war has brought us into closer touch with realities ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... pride, or self-will, by [25] demoralizing his motives and Christlikeness, would have dethroned his ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... brawling or swearing. Not a woman there lost a particle of refinement, or became a grain coarser, or neglected her family. Not one of the misguided women whose bad influences Mr. Reynolds, of the Journal, so much dreads, came to the polls. That kind of women, I judge, are literally opposed to women demoralizing themselves by voting. But if such lived in our district, and had offered to vote, I trust their votes would have been received and counted just the same as the votes of the men who support and encourage them in their wicked career. I never knew ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... an hour went by, a time of dead silence and anxious watching. Some of the less eager conspirators began to feel the demoralizing effects of the long wait; their courage began to ebb. Andrew Windybank had time to reflect, and he wished himself well out of the whole business. Here and there a man sighed or fidgeted in the darkness. Basil was quick to notice the signs, and equally quick to combat them. He whispered words ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... to the front was both confused and demoralizing. No American officer had ever had the chance even of seeing, much less handling, thirty-six thousand men under arms. This force was followed by an immense and unwieldy train of supplies, manned by wholly undisciplined civilian drivers; while other, and quite superfluous, civilians clogged ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... "Don't put such demoralizing ideas into the child's head. How it is that girls are not ruined," said Miss Dorset, shaking her head, "ruined! by such examples, I cannot tell. They must have stronger heads than we think. As poor as Cinderella one day, and the next as rich as the Queen—without any merit ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... mandarin to hold any office for more than three years made it the selfish interest of every office-holder to get as much out of the people within his jurisdiction as he possibly could in that time. This corruption in high places had a thoroughly demoralizing effect. While among the better commercial classes Chinese probity in business relations with foreigners is proverbial, the people generally set little or no value upon truth, and this has led to the use of torture ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... naturally a strong affinity for truth. Hence there is nothing more demoralizing than any sustained attempt to believe that which does not commend itself to our most sacred convictions. Far better it is to be honest and sincere, even though that may involve temporary error. I believe that to the ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... joyless thing. But substitute the national service of the Guilds for the profiteering of the few; substitute responsible labor for a saleable commodity; substitute self-government and decentralization for the bureaucracy and demoralizing hugeness of the modern State and the modern joint stock company; and then it may be just once more to speak of a "joy in labor,'' and once more to hope that men may be proud of quality and not only of quantity in their work. There is a cant of the Middle Ages, and a cant of "joy in labor,'' but ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... proper light, and is not valued as it should be; that these men have a secret influence which is well known, and are countenanced and retained for the weight of their control among a certain class; and, strange to say, that the party ex-officio make these demoralizing things the basis of their complaints against the "powers that be;" yet such is their feeble dependence, that no sooner are they in office than we have the repetition ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... mistress of the whole Mediterranean world. Her ships plied the seas, her armies and governors ruled the land. The introduction of wealth, luxuries, and slaves from the new provinces, which followed their capture, soon had a very demoralizing influence upon the people. Private and public religion and morality rapidly declined; religion came to be an empty ceremonial; divorce became common; wealth and influence ruled the State; slaves became very cheap and abundant, and were used for ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... only to the man who is burdened with unnecessary and exaggerated fears, and who mistakes for a fancied security the privilege of sitting quietly in one place, that the uprooting which comes with war is demoralizing. The natural officer sees it as an hour of opportunity, and though he may not like anything else about war, he at least relishes the strong feeling of personal contention which always develops when there ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... dinner never was late; yet, for that matter, she never was out visiting her neighbors in the middle of the day, either. Perhaps, as she had followed one demoralizing impulse and transgressed all her domestic traditions, the breaking of another did ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... Jeremy was not far wrong, when he attacked these specimens of the drama with an unrelenting Nemesis; but he was before his age. It was less the obvious coarseness of these productions with which he found fault than their demoralizing tendency in a direction which we should now, perhaps, consider innocuous. Certainly the Jeremiad overdid it, and like a swift, but not straight bowler at cricket, he sent balls which no wicket-keeper could stop, and which, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... a cent for a colt that never kicked over the traces!" Which, if Jerry had really been guilty of any offence, would have been very demoralizing. But she was not and she watched Uncle Johnny go out of the room with a look of adoration in ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... the absurd, contradictory and demoralizing Dogmas and Mysteries of the Christian Religion. Now first translated from the French of Freret, but supposed to be written by Baron Holbach, author of the System of Nature, Christianity Unveiled, Common Sense, Universal Morality, Natural Morality. R. Carlile, The Deist, etc., ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... all that Jack could do. Jack was deeply perplexed. What could be done? If he attempted to put the machinery of reclamation in order, the boys would be subjected to all sorts of vicissitudes, prisons, everything distressing and demoralizing to tender youth. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan |
