"Ostracism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with her into quietness, and let all else go as it would. But Mrs. Wade's warning had impressed him deeply. It went with his secret inclination; for, at this stage of the combat, to lose all his aims would be a bitter disappointment. Rethought of the lifelong ostracism, and feared ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... Government is afraid of giving a chance to natives who may be suspected of being hostile to the British rule. In reality, the Government has little or nothing to do with it. This state of things must be attributed entirely to the social ostracism, to the contempt felt by a "superior" for an "inferior" race, a contempt deeply rooted in some members of the Anglo-Indian society and displayed at the least provocation. This question of racial "superiority" and "inferiority" ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... whirlwind and has trouble to keep her skirts from blowing up and entangling her waist, denotes that she will carry on a secret flirtation and will be horrified to find that scandal has gotten possession of her name and she will run a close risk of disgrace and ostracism. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... twenty, sometimes as many as one hundred and fifty of them, receiving presents from the bride's parents and immediately thereafter bidding good-by to her, going home never to see their "wife" again. The parents have now done their duty; they have escaped religious and social ostracism at the expense, it is true, of their daughters, who remain at home to make themselves useful. These poor girls can never marry again, and whether or not they become moral outcasts, their life is ruined; but that, to a Hindoo, is ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... torment the thought came to him that he should go through the ceremony after all, that he should do as the people expected, that he should accept the Governorship, and then defy the social ostracism of the island by making Kate his wife. "It's not yet too ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... curious of the new laws made by Cleisthenes was that known as "ostracism," by which any citizen who showed himself dangerous to the state could be banished for ten years if six thousand votes were cast against him. This was intended as a means of preventing the rise ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... idea, even as a possibility, had not entered the mind of either. They had lived a long time; they were practical people. They knew from the outset that somehow they must arrange to go on together. The alternative meant a mere pittance of alimony for her; meant for him social ostracism and the small income cut in half; meant ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... Aruna had been goaded to the brink of surrender; till her brother grew impatient and spurned her as a weakling. Yet her ordeal had been sharper than his own. For him, mere moral suasion and threats of ostracism. For her, the immemorial methods of the Inside; forbidden by Sir Lakshman, but secretly applied, when flagrant obstinacy demanded drastic measures. So neither Dyan nor his grandfather had suspected that Aruna, for days together, had suffered the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... of the devoted men and women who have been carrying on the blessed work of emancipation. They show how not less than 3,000 women have given of their best talent and strength to this Christ-like service. They speak of the perils by shotgun and by fire; of imprisonment, ostracism, and scorn; of persecution, that it was believed the progress of the age had made impossible in these later days, but which the State of Florida has been able to revive. But these chapters tell also how the truth has been ...
— American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 9, September, 1896 • Various
... aid of the despised Abolitionists at an early day. While it was still inviting social ostracism and public indignity to do so, he bravely lifted up his voice in their defence, and began lending his vigorous and powerful pen to the cause they represented. All the traditions of his life seemed to bind him to the conservative ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... beauty and mercy. He loved the book so well that he even read the preface and learned that Hypatia really lived once and was virtuous, though pagan, and was stripped and slain at the Christian altar, chopped and mutilated with oyster shells in a literal ostracism, her bones burned and her ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... gaiters carried to an incredible pitch of absurdity. The facts are: B. & E. were the publishers of Household Words. They objected to Dickens explaining in H.W. He insisted. They said that in that case they must take H.W. out of his hands. Dickens, like a lion threatened with ostracism by a louse in his tail, published his explanation, which stands to this day, and informed his readers that they were to ask in future, not for Household Words, but for All the Year Round. Household Words, left Dickensless, gasped for a few weeks and died. All the Year Round, in exactly ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... of men, who had already fallen into the monotony of routine, while every friendly overture he made towards the citizens of Flambeau was met with distrust and coldness, his stripes of office seeming to erect a barrier and induce an ostracism stronger and more complete than if they had been emblems of the penitentiary. He began to resent it keenly. Even Doret and the trader seemed to share the general feeling, hence the thought of the long, lonesome winter ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... a state of agitation and [foment?]. The air is laden with rumors of a [rising?] conflict between the North and the South, and any want of allegiance to Southern opinions is punished either as a crime if the offender is a man, or with social ostracism and insult if ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... elements of the liberal party in Provins. And this is how it came about: The launch of the Rogrons in society had been watched with great curiosity by Colonel Gouraud and the lawyer Vinet, two men drawn together, first by their ostracism, next by their opinions. They both professed patriotism and for the same reason,—they wished to become of consequence. The Liberals in Provins were, so far, confined to one old soldier who kept a cafe, an innkeeper, Monsieur Cournant a notary, Doctor Neraud, and a few ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... such an example should be made. Inaugurate social ostracism against every white man who gives any support to the Radical Party. Every true Southern man or woman should refuse to recognize as a gentleman any man belonging to that party, or having any dealings ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... who invest borrowed capital in farming operations. The fields of the slothful in Canada bring forth thorns and thistles, as his fields brought them forth in England. Idleness is absolute ruin, and drunkenness carries with it worse evils than at home, for the practice of it entails a social ostracism, as well as total ruin, upon the emigrant and his family. The same conditions of success are required as in England—honesty, sobriety, and industry; with these, assisted by all the advantages which Canada possesses, there ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... one to demonstrate the heartlessness of the projectors, who, while pretending to glorify liberty in the distance, were treating it with contumely at home, where 3,000,000 slaves were held in bondage, and feeling keenly the ostracism of the slave as beyond the pole of popular sympathy or national compassion, with words struggling for utterance, I spoke as best I could, receiving toleration, and a quiet measure of approbation, possibly on the supposition, ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... for his enemy. "Well," added Guadet, alarmed or softened by Robespierre's feigned generosity, "I denounce to you a man who, from love of the liberty of his country, ought perhaps to impose upon himself the law of ostracism; for to remove him from his own idolatry is to serve the people!" These words were smothered under peals of affected laughter. Robespierre ascended the steps of the tribune with studied calmness. His impassive brow involuntarily brightened ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... is naturally a democratic country, social ostracism is not unknown amongst us. The daughter of any one who "keeps a window," or is at all engaged in trade, is as effectually excluded from society as if she were a moral leper, and although her attainments, intellectually and otherwise, be far superior to those ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... grew imperative. He the more blamed Frances for having quarrelled with her aunt, told her it was for her money he had married her, that she had ruined his career, and that she was to blame for his ostracism—a condition that his own misconduct had brought upon him. Finally, after twelve months of this, one morning he left a note saying he no longer would allow her to be a drag upon him, and sailed ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... Ireland were deprived, not only of all rights to the land, but, as a corollary, of all social privileges whatsoever. "The law," said an Irish Lord Chancellor, "does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic." The instrument of ostracism was the famous Penal Code, begun in William's reign in direct and immediate defiance of a solemn pledge given in the Treaty of Limerick, guaranteeing liberty of conscience to the Catholics, and perfected in the ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... a graduate of a great university of the far North, where Negroes are seldom seen, resented it most indignantly when she was threatened with social ostracism in a city farther South with a large Negro population because she insisted upon receiving upon terms of social equality a Negro man who had ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... we really accept Christ and believe Him is not in anything we say. It is not even in what we are in our lives when all goes smoothly. It is in what we are in our lives when opposed, when it costs criticism, ostracism, petty persecution, or more outright persecution. This is our Lord's test of acceptance ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... and could not well be forbidden on such an occasion. But this woman was one of the fallen class, a woman who had been unvirtuous, and who had to bear, as part of the penalty for her sins, outward scorn and practical ostracism from those who professed to be morally superior. She approached Jesus from behind, and bent low to kiss His feet as a mark of humility on her part and of respectful homage to Him. She may have been one of those who had heard His ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... facile local verse-writer into a national poet. It was the ancient miracle of losing one's life and finding it. For the immediate sacrifice was very real to a youth trained in quietism and non-resistance, and well aware, as a Whig journalist, of the ostracism visited upon the active Abolitionists. Whittier entered the fight with absolute courage and with the shrewdest practical judgment of weapons and tactics. He forgot himself. He turned aside from those pleasant fields of New England legend and history to which he was destined to return after ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... and—I had almost said—the unamiable. No man can pacify his conscience; if quiet be what he want, he shall do better to let that organ perish from disuse. And to avoid the penalties of the law, and the minor capitis diminutio of social ostracism, is an affair of wisdom—of cunning, if you will—and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... only solution of the slavery question was to put an end to that institution at once and forever. Of the persecutions which were visited on the abolitionists we have spoken when telling the story of Lucretia Mott. Social ostracism was the least ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... Langdon's daughter kick him into it again? Or into any other house on God's green earth, for that matter, if she tried to do so? Do you suppose he'd have to pay any attention to a little, petty ostracism, on the part of such puppets of society as gathered out there, if he became the husband of Patricia Langdon? Don't be an ass, Roderick! You are just plain jealous, and I don't know that I ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... inferiority, for in the course of centuries a large part of the wealthier middle classes had bought or bargained themselves out of the tax, so that to pay it was a certain mark of the lower class or roture. Taillable, roturier, were terms of social ostracism ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... of a wrestler himself, "Jack" sent him a challenge. At that time and in that community a refusal would have resulted in social and business ostracism, not to mention the stigma of cowardice which ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... talking about it," I said to Peters, "the man is ruining me. Socially with the Travises I am an outcast, and I have no doubt they will tell about it, and my ostracism will extend. On the Digestic my sanity is seriously questioned, and now for the first time in my life, before some two thousand people, I break down in a public lecture which I have delivered dozens of times ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... him closer to her; hoped the coolness of friends and acquaintances would make him more dependent on her love and sympathy. It acted in the opposite direction. The public seldom wants two scapegoats. Madame's ostracism satisfied its idea of justice. Every one knew Archie was very much under her control. Every one could see that he suffered dreadfully after Sophy's death. Every one came promptly to the opinion that Madame only was ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... Straight from the Pales of Kief, Ketchinoff, and Odessa they come to settle in the nearest to a pale we have to offer. Great has been their poverty; a long-standing terror with them, and along with it in many cases, persecution, starvation, and social ostracism. Poverty in all but spirit and mind. The great leveler to them is education, and it is no uncommon thing for the Jewish father to sacrifice himself in order to better his son, to take upon himself that greatest of sacrifices, daily grind and deprivation. Not only this ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... this good man, Brandon, called for young Daniel, who was then too far away to be on hand in time to hear what was to have been said before death ensued. Thus died a man who was brave enough, in the midst of environments that were exacting to the extent of active ostracism for his assertion of his belief that the Negro is a real human being, possessed of a mind, soul and rights to happiness, and should share in the community ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... recession. Within the space of a few days a revolution was completed that had been sought by the power of our nation and of the civilized world, for a generation, with stripes and imprisonment, death, confiscation and the ostracism of the country's public contempt. It had been obtained, I knew, chiefly by the sagacity of the First Councillor using the pressure of circumstances to enforce the persuasions of diplomacy. I felt that a miracle of change had been brought ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... my young days wrote, he had one eye upon fact, and the other on Genesis; at present, he wisely keeps both eyes on fact, and ignores the pentateuchal mythology altogether. The publication of the 'Principles of Geology' brought upon its illustrious author a period of social ostracism; the instruction given to our children is based upon those principles. Whewell had the courage to attack Lyell's fundamental assumption (which surely is a dictate of common sense) that we ought to exhaust known ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... a more engrossing and more serious character. It comprehends nothing less than the absolute consolidation of sixteen States,—not by liberty of speech, or public discussion, or freedom of suffrage, but by a tyranny of opinion which threatens timid dissentients with social ostracism and suppresses the bolder form of opposition ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... lower classes, as they are considered of a more inferior order than the men of the family and are treated with little respect, being virtually slaves. The higher class lead secluded lives, but do not escape the inflexible law that demands the marriage of a girl by the age of fourteen, or the ostracism thrust upon the child widow, who, on returning to a home of which she was once an honored member, finds herself virtually an outcast. Her pretty clothes are taken from her, and she is required to do the ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... ostracism, Goree had departed for his office, muttering to himself as he unsteadily traversed the unlucky pathway. After a drink of corn whiskey from a demijohn under the table, he had flung himself into the chair, staring, ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... Southern States is, unhappily, not such as all true patriotic citizens would like to see. Social ostracism for opinion's sake, personal violence or threats toward persons entertaining political views opposed to those entertained by the majority of the old citizens, prevents immigration and the flow of much-needed capital ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... the first time Corrie had ever admitted knowledge of Rupert's ostracism of him, or revealed how deeply the hurt had been felt. Gerard laid a caressing hand on his shoulder, wisely saying nothing. After a moment Corrie grasped the Titan's steering-wheel and swung himself into his seat behind it, but paused before summoning Devlin ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... of right and wrong conduct; to discriminate infallibly between virtuous and vicious character; and all this with such certainty that they are prepared to visit all the rigors of the law, and all the ruinous penalties of social ostracism on people, however harmless their actions maybe who venture to laugh at their monstrous conceit or to pay their assumptions the extravagant compliment of criticizing them. As to children, who shall say what canings and birchings and terrifyings ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... satisfied that the peace of Egypt would be secured by the absence of a popular leader; but he refused to fill the vacancy of the archiepiscopal throne; and the sentence, which, after long hesitation, he pronounced, was that of a jealous ostracism, rather than of an ignominious exile. In the remote province of Gaul, but in the hospitable court of Treves, Athanasius passed about twenty eight months. The death of the emperor changed the face of public affairs and, amidst the general ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... might be perfected and duly patented, his consequent fall from grace in the Postal-Union offices, through holding up a trivial racing-return or two until he and his outside confederate had been able to make their illicit wagers, then his official ostracism, and his wandering street-cat life, when, at last, the humbling and compelling pinch of poverty had turned him to "overhead guerrilla" work and the dangers and vicissitudes of a poolroom key-operator. He recalled his chance meeting with MacNutt, ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... of the honor due him, and, as for herself, she had been degraded from being the most popular woman in the regiment to the level of a social outcast; but her proud soul refused to submit to this ostracism, and it was no small gratification to her that the wives of the leading civilians made it a point to visit her at frequent intervals, and with some ostentation. Meanwhile Lieutenant Bleibtreu, the ever-faithful, was no less zealous in ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... of Philosophical Transactions there is no speculation upon this extraordinary subject. Ostracism. The fate of this datum is a good instance of damnation, not by denial, and not by explaining away, but by simple disregard. The fall is listed by Chladni, and is mentioned in other catalogues, but, from the absence of all inquiry, and of all but formal mention, we ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... body of citizens above thirty years of age, specially convoked and sworn for the purpose. The assembly thus convened was called HELIAEA and its members HELIASTS. Clisthenes also introduced the OSTRACISM, by which an Athenian citizen might be banished without special accusation, trial, or defence for ten years, which term was subsequently reduced to five. It must be recollected that the force which a Greek government ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... and sometimes it annoyed him to suspect that she did not feel at all. He said to himself that she was too light and childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have reflected upon her ostracism, or even to have perceived it. Then at other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant and irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced. He ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... other he is the perfection of all the moral qualities. This scurrilous manner in which all political discussions are carried on in Mexico, has always furnished a ready apology for the suppression of liberty of speech, and for the enforcement of the Mexican law of ostracism in turn by every ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... with its back to the room and looked out and the stubborn pride died in his eyes and his face grew old and pathetic. There was no further room for doubt. He was tasting ostracism and being included in this wave of hatred for his son, which he had regarded as newspaper rubbish. He leaned forward with his gloved hands on his cane and once or twice under his fastidiously trimmed ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck |
