"Immorality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... insolence, and neglect, which were as pernicious to the nation as if they had formed a design of reducing it to the lowest ebb of disgrace and destruction. By this time, indeed, public virtue was become the object of ridicule, and the whole kingdom was overspread with immorality and corruption; towards the increase of which many concurring circumstances happened to contribute. The people were divided into three parties, namely, the Williamites, the Jacobites, and the discontented Revolutioners; these factions took all opportunities to thwart, to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... immorality was nowhere so flagrant as in the temples of Astarte, whose female servants honored the goddess with untiring ardor. In no country was sacred prostitution so developed as in Syria, and in the Occident it was to be found practically only where the Phoenicians had imported it, as on Mount ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... continued upright in doctrine and true in the knowledge of the faith, though perhaps deficient in the above-mentioned two self-evident features of Christian life. While it is true that if sins of immorality are not renounced God will punish, yet punishment in such cases is for the most part temporal, these sins being less pernicious than such gross offenses as ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... quite mildly towards them really. But I know you are sincere—and my soul is mad against you. In the same way you used, I suppose, to think that all atheists thought atheism would leave them free for immorality—and yet in your heart you tolerated them entirely. Now you know that I am an honest man, and you are mad against me, as I am against you. Yes, that's it. You can't be angry with bad men. But a good man in the wrong—why one thirsts for his blood. Yes, you open for me ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... discriminate between right and wrong, which is the highest attribute of civilised humanity, is notably lacking in physically and psychically stunted organisms. Many criminals do not realise the immorality of their actions. In French criminal jargon conscience is called "la muette," the thief "l'ami," and "travailler" and "servir" signify to steal. A Milanese thief once remarked to my father: "I don't steal. I only relieve the rich ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... Frank Cowperwood, wealthy as he was, to suggest ways and means. In his younger gallivantings about places of ill repute, and his subsequent occasional variations from the straight and narrow path, he had learned much of the curious resources of immorality. Being a city of five hundred thousand and more at this time, Philadelphia had its nondescript hotels, where one might go, cautiously and fairly protected from observation; and there were houses of a conservative, residential character, where appointments ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... simple sentence, and you will see what is the matter with the modern mind. I do not mean the growth of immorality; I mean the genesis of gibbering idiocy. There are ten little boys whom you wish to provide with ten top-hats; and you find there are only eight top-hats. To a simple mind it would seem not impossible to make two more hats; to find out whose business it ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... unworthy, we are, that we speak, and we tell your Majesty, in His sacred name, not to sanction this law, which will be the source of a thousand disorders. We also beg your Majesty to put a check to the press which is constantly vomiting forth blasphemy and immorality. Your Majesty complains of the clergy. But these last years the clergy have been persistently outraged, mocked, calumniated, reviled and derided by almost all the papers ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... wallowing in the streets, like some unclean animal in the mire. Every side-walk, on a market-day, will furnish you with examples. Point out to him the immorality of such a degrading position; make him fully sensible of all its disgusting horrors. Tell him that God has threatened in words of unmistakable import, that he will exclude such from his heavenly kingdom. Convince him that such loathsome impurity must totally unfit the soul for communion ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... materialism which was every day more and more creeping over the eighteenth century. "Sciences and arts have corrupted the world," he said, and he put forward, as proof of it, the falsity of the social code, the immorality of private life, the frivolity of the drawing-rooms into which he had been admitted. "Suspicions, heart-burnings, apprehensions, coldness, reserve, hatred, treason, lurk incessantly beneath that uniform and perfidious veil of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... according to their light. And they were told by the profligates of Africa, that this and no less, was their doom. It is not to be wondered at, again, if they mistook the Catholic creed for the cause of Catholic immorality. That may account for the Vandal custom of re-baptizing the Catholics. It certainly accounts for the fact (if after all it be a fact) which Victor states, that they tortured the nuns to extort from them shameful ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... proper one to talk about next summer, when Dora there'll be up hill and down dale with a perambulator. Now look here, young man, immorality— ...
— Night Must Fall • Williams, Emlyn
... Italians are at the present day grouped around, I will not say the conception of unity, but the mere unstable fact of union, the great soul of Italy still lies prostrate in the tomb dug for her three centuries ago by the Papacy and the Empire,—the cause is to be found in the immorality and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... entered in the register of the Order, a second collection was made for the poor, and he was permitted to continue his way into the town. If, instead of wine, the misguided individual desired baptism with water, he was justly punished for the immorality, by a bucket of the insipid element being tumbled over his head. This Order, it is said, had its origin in the reconciliation at St. Goar of the two sons of Charlemagne; which was doubtless accompanied by much ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... run on ahead to say it was coming) and this new anarchic trick, combined with the corruptibility of nearly all the other courts, left him after the two Silesian wars in possession of the stolen goods. But Maria Theresa had refused to submit to the immorality of nine points of the law. By appeals and concessions to France, Russia, and other powers, she contrived to create something which, against the atheist innovator even in that atheist age, stood up for an instant like a spectre of the Crusades. Had that Crusade been universal ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... the banished might lament, the great and powerful might dispose of the souls and bodies of their serfs; rare honesty might be oppressed by consuming usury; offices, honors, and titles might be gambled for; justice and punishment might be bought and sold; vice and immorality might universally prevail—Anna would not know it. She would neither see nor hear any thing of this outside world! The palace is her world, in which she is ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... brings; the question whether he is good or bad to his fellow men does not touch this matter at all. Whether some other law is or is not obeyed, is entirely outside the question. It is a matter of dry fact that the scientific man may be moral or immoral, provided that his immorality does not upset his eyesight or nervous system. It is the same with Yoga. Morality matters profoundly, but it does not affect these particular things, and if you think it does, you are always getting into bogs and changing your moral standpoint, either lowering or making it absurd. Try to ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... we think too much stress has been laid on this part of their character by some travellers. It is regarded in France as a sort of professional accomplishment, without which it is in vain to attempt exercising a trade; and it is hardly thought to indicate immorality of any kind, more than the obviously false expressions which are used in the ordinary intercourse of society in England, or the license of denying oneself to visitors. That it should be so regarded is no doubt a proof of national inferiority, and perhaps immorality; but while the general ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... his Court in their struggle with Thomas is reflected and illustrated in the apocalypse and confession of this imaginary prelate. Picture after picture strips the veil from the corruption of the mediaeval Church, its indolence, its thirst for gain, its secret immorality. The whole body of the clergy from Pope to hedge-priest is painted as busy in the chase for gain; what escapes the bishop is snapped up by the archdeacon, what escapes the archdeacon is nosed and hunted down by the dean, while a host of minor officials prowl hungrily around these ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... reports are intended to advise parents of the progress of their sons, and it was supposed you would have seen the little advancement made by yours in his studies, and that no further notice was required. The action of the faculty was caused by no immorality on his part, but by a systematic neglect of his duties, which no counsel on the part of his professors, or my own, could correct. In compliance, however, with your wishes, and on the positive promise of amendment on the ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... the only person in Issoudun who thought it wrong that Flore Brazier should be queen over Jean-Jacques Rouget and his home. She protested against the immorality of the connection, and took a tone of injured virtue; the fact being that she was humiliated by having, at her age, a crab-girl for a mistress,—a child who had been brought barefoot into the house. Fanchette owned three hundred francs a year in the Funds, for the ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... first part of this discourse; in the second part, as at a second sitting, tho' I alter not the draught, I must touch the same features over again, and change the dead coloring[4] of the whole. In general, I will only say that I have written nothing which savors of immorality or profaneness; at least, I am not conscious to myself of any such intention. If there happen to be found an irreverent expression, or a thought too wanton, they are crept into my verses thro' my inadvertency; ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... never been able to treat as equal criminals the poor man who steals for a living, and the rich financier who robs right and left out of sheer greed. I agree with you that crime is not an absolute thing. The circumstances connected with every action in life determine its morality or immorality. But, Peter, it isn't worth while to ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Young of his undoubted right to go to the Legislature, whether the people were willing or not. Mr. Elias Benedict to draw up the proceedings of Mr. Wilkins and possibly to enforce the statute for the suppression of Vice and Immorality;—and committee of the whole to tell the county they had been there; and do away the strange reports which had gone abroad, that they were a little self-created body, without precedent, authority or premises, resembling what saucy people would ...
— A Review and Exposition, of the Falsehoods and Misrepresentations, of a Pamphlet Addressed to the Republicans of the County of Saratoga, Signed, "A Citizen" • An Elector
... of indulgences. Full of the popular belief in the wisdom and the goodwill of the highest rulers, Luther thought (he often said so later) that it was only necessary to present honestly to the princes of the Church the disadvantage and immorality of such abuses. But how childish this zeal of the monk appeared to the polished and worldly prince of the Church! What so deeply offended the honest man was, from the point of view of the Archbishop, a matter long settled. The sale of indulgences was an evil in the Church a hundred ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... probably more extravagant and anti-social. He appears to have objected to confraternities[235], to have enjoined a solitary life, absolute nudity and extreme forms of self-mortification, such as eating filth. The Jains accused his followers of immorality and perhaps they were ancient prototypes of the lower class of religious mendicants who have ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... too have their state dinners, where all important questions are considered before they are submitted to the grand council of the nation. The bishops dine in holy 87conclave to benefit Christianity, and moralize over Champagne on the immorality of mankind. The judges dine with the lord chancellor on the first day of term, and try their powers of mastication before they proceed to try the merits of their fellow citizens' causes. A lawyer must eat his way to the bar, labouring most voraciously ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... the verses, had taken him at his word, the poet would, in all probability, have been beaten to death. All his life long he evinced a great animosity towards the priesthood, and his famous poem abounds with passages reflecting upon their avarice, cruelty, and immorality. At his death he left a large box, filled with some weighty material, which he bequeathed to the Cordeliers, as a peace-offering, for the abuse he had lavished upon them. As his practice of alchymy was well-known, it was thought the box was filled with gold and silver, and the Cordeliers congratulated ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... however, of the animation and bonhomie of this little town, there is a dark side to social life, and in the train of intemperance and unthrift among the manufacturing population, we find squalor and immorality. After several weeks' sojourn in that Utopia of all socialistic dreamers—a land without a beggar!—I found myself here, once more, in the domains of mendicity, though it is not to be found to any great extent. The custom of putting out infants to nurse is, fortunately, ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... we think the present publication perfectly justifiable. But we can by no means agree with Mr. Leigh Hunt, who seems to hold that there is little or no ground for the charge of immorality so often brought against the literature of the Restoration. We do not blame him for not bringing to the judgment-seat the merciless rigour of Lord Angelo; but we really think that such flagitious and impudent offenders as those ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... them neither certain loathsome diseases nor Socialism. All of these are likewise the results of immorality—moral and political—and of a type of decadent civilization still prevalent on the Continent of Europe and at that time threatening to gain a foothold even in England. It was this last-named threat from which the founders of the American nation were wise and energetic enough to escape, ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... of their best into the higher class, swelling that slowly into the majority; the second, by the stern sloughing off of their worst by the diseases which spring from idleness, self-indulgence, filth, and immorality. ...
— Church work among the Negroes in the South - The Hale Memorial Sermon No. 2 • Robert Strange
... Ephesus had left its first love (Rev. 2:4); the church at Pergamos was tolerating false teachers and being ruined by false doctrines (2:14, 15); Thyatira had lost the spirit of holy judgment against wrong-doing and was therefore affected by a shocking degree of immorality (2: 20-23); the message to Sardis was, "Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead (3:1); Laodicea had become so lukewarm that the Lord said, "I will spew thee out of ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... the wild words that had burst from Plantagenet's lips in reference to her father. What could they mean? His morals might be misrepresented, his opinions might be misunderstood; stupidity might not comprehend his doctrines, malignity might torture them; the purest sages have been accused of immorality, the most pious philosophers have been denounced as blasphemous: but, 'a traitor to his king,' that was a tangible, an intelligible proposition, one with which all might grapple, which could be easily disproved if false, scarcely propounded were it not true. 'False to his God!' How false? Where? ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... Joseph, was the cause of all the calamities which he afterwards suffered. Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality. All the wicked fellows whom I remember at the ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... as the fowls, goats, or even a cow or two, generally increase the domestic party. It is well known that Paphos in Cyprus was the supposed birthplace of Venus, and that the island was at one time celebrated for the beauty of women and immorality: the change has been radical, as I believe no women are more chaste, and at the same time less attractive, than the Cypriotes of the present time. They are generally short and thickset; they are hardly treated by the men, as they perform most of the rough work in ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... been the last to put himself in competition, he preached sermons and performed marriages;—a function which must have given honest satisfaction to one who had been so close a witness of the enforced and systematised immorality of a slave-nursery. Before long, something fairly resembling order was established, and the settlement began to enjoy a reasonable measure of prosperity. The town was built, the fields were planted, and the schools filled. The Governor made a point of allotting the lightest ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... supreme—I dare say incredible, though unsuspected—immorality of the priests of Rome is a very evident and logical one. By the diabolical power of the Pope, the priest is put out of the ways which God has offered to the generality of men to be honest, upright, and holy[1]. And after the Pope has deprived ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... and of secondary education, and have not in the very slightest degree respected the liberty of the teachers of elementary education. The professor of higher education, especially since 1870, can teach exactly what he pleases, except immorality and contempt of our country and its laws. He can even discuss our laws, provided always that he maintains the principle that, such as they are, they ought to be obeyed till they are repealed. His liberty as to his opinions ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... to be, and—in the second place—to-morrow you will forget my sincerity along with the other lessons of the past. In this transaction, to speak grossly and precisely, I was the irreproachable man; but the subtle intentions of my immorality were defeated by the moral simplicity of the criminal. No doubt he was selfish too, but his selfishness had a higher origin, a more lofty aim. I discovered that, say what I would, he was eager to go through the ceremony of execution, and I didn't say much, for I felt that in argument ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... one thing worse than French immorality, it is French morality. This is a moral book, a la Francaise, and weak as ditch-water. Nor is the ditch-water ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... civility enough, had he had a little less of his odious rapture; for he flung his arms about me, Jenny in presence. A husband's fondness is enough to ruin these girls. Don't you think, Harriet, that there is an immorality in ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... designed to lessen the impartiality and independence of the judge by subjecting him to removal at the mere will of the executive and legislature, but that he might be removed for corruption, neglect of duty, incapacity, immorality, or other disgraceful conduct, after notice, hearing, and deliberation. For the executive and legislature, or even the majority of the people, to remove a judge because they do not like his opinions as to what the constitution requires or forbids them to do, would destroy the ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... cities of New York and Brooklyn were deplorably bad during the first few years I went there to preach. There was an onslaught of bad literature and stage immorality. For instance, there was a lady who came forth as an authoress under the assumed name of George Sand. She smoked cigars. She dressed like a man. She wrote in style ardent and eloquent, mighty in its gloom, terrible in its unchastity, vivid in its ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... to accomplish this. Their military organisation had to be broken up, their immorality suppressed, their prejudice against labour overcome. That this was by no means impossible was proved by many past examples. The Wa-Kwafi, living to the south and west of them, as well as the Njemps ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... dirty little hole, containing about three thousand souls, almost all of them half-bred, naked, and starved. Such is Santa Fe. You will there witness spectacles of wretchedness and vice hardly to be found elsewhere—harsh despotism; immorality carried to its highest degree, with ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... sometimes with Brockley, or "Cherry Blossom," or "Corporal Mush," or Sergeant Joe Smith, the sailormen as onlookers and listeners—it was here we drew diagrams in the sand with our fingers, and talked on politics and women's rights, marriage and immorality, drink and religion, customs and habits; of life ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, but clearly enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and immorality. Then follow the defence of poetry, the proof that the poetry of the ancients and of their modern followers contains nothing mendacious, the praise of it, and especially of the deeper and allegorical meanings which we must always ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... inherent wrong in doing away with Paolo. On the contrary, his death would be a benefit to the community at large, and an advantage to Marzio in particular. Not a pecuniary advantage either, for in Marzio's strange system there would have been an immorality in murdering Paolo for his money if he had ever had any, though it seemed right enough to kill him for an idea. That is, to a great extent, the code of those persons who believe in nothing but what they call great ideas. The ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... the early days, and he said that their religion, embracing the idea of a great spirit to whom they were responsible for their deeds here, and a happy hunting ground to which they went as a reward for decent living, was as fine as any religion that ever has been practiced by people of any nation. Immorality was unknown among them. Family ties were formed and they were binding They loved their children and reared them carefully. They were hardy and healthful. Until the introduction of whiskey and what we are pleased to term civilized methods of living, very few of them died ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... therefore considered to be an institution recognized by the state as a means of punishing immorality, upholding the Catholic religion, persuading the skeptical,—confirming the wavering, and exercising a salutary terror over the ladies of the upper class, at that period renowned for their dissolute morals. The aristocracy of Florence patronized and protected the institution—because ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... run on and tell many paragraphs of Kib; but that, as I have said, would be bad taste, which is one form of immorality. For in such things sentiment runs too closely parallel to sentimentality,—moderation becomes maudlinism,—and one enters the caste of those who tell anecdotes of children, and the latest symptoms of their physical ills. And the deeper one feels the joys of friendship with individual small folk ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... world to show that Thomas Paine ever wrote one line, one word in favor of tyranny—in favor of immorality; one line, one word against what he believed to be for the highest and best interest of mankind; one line, one word against justice, charity, or liberty, and yet he has been pursued as though he ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Cromwell's Government had acquiesced. Only in one particular, apart from politics, was there any disposition to interfere with the liberty of printing. This was where popular wit, humour, or poetry might pass into the ribald, profane, or indecent. Vigilance against open immorality had from the first appeared to Cromwell one of the chief duties of his Government; and he seems to have been unusually attentive to this duty in 1655-6, when he had just put the country under the military ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... deal in America," said Phil. "We talk about the immorality of older countries. Did you ever notice that no class of men are so apt to take to drinking as highly cultivated Americans? It is a very demoralizing position, when one's tastes outgrow one's surroundings. Positively, ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... husband—a fault, he says, which stains no play written before the Civil War. Addison had already suggested this test in the Spectator, and proceeds to lament that 'the multitudes are shut out from this noble "diversion" by the immorality of the lessons inculcated.' Lamb, indulging in ingenious paradox, admires Congreve for 'excluding from his scenes (with one exception) any pretensions to goodness or good feeling whatever.' Congreve, he says, spreads a 'privation ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... pork, on account of trichiniae, to become numerous, and unpreventible, there would then be a reason, such as a modern civilized community would consider sufficient, for making the rearing of swine a crime and an immorality. But no mere sentimental or capricious dislike to the pig, on the part of any number of persons, could now procure an enactment for ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... emblems of the season, and reared in honour of its coming. Where are they now! Pillars we have, but they are no longer rustic ones; and as to dancers, they are used to rooms, and lights, and would not show well in the open air. Think of the immorality, too! What would your sabbath enthusiasts say, to an aristocratic ring encircling the Duke of York's column in Carlton-terrace—a grand poussette of the middle classes, round Alderman Waithman's monument in Fleet-street,—or a general hands-four-round ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... unavoidably happen in spite of all our endeavours. Let us, then, not lose the important moment of human life, when it is possible to flatter ourselves with some hopes of success in giving good impressions; they may succeed; they may either preserve a young man from gross immorality, or have a tendency to reform him when the first ardour of youth is past. If we neglect this awful moment, which can never return, with the view which, I must confess, I have of modern manners, it appears to me like launching a vessel in the midst of a storm, without a compass ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... classes, Unch or high and Nich or low, the former being of pure blood, and the latter the descendants of kept women. These are practically endogamous. A man may not have more than two wives. If a girl is detected in immorality before marriage, she is permanently excommunicated, and a married woman can be turned out by her husband on proof of adultery. A bridegroom-price is usually paid, the father of the bride visiting ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... ways of the rich and fashionable, of the character of artificial life, he had not the remotest experience. He could not see or understand the distinctions and barriers that to the world are more impassable than those of ignorance, stupidity, and even gross immorality. He would learn, to his infinite surprise, that even in a Western democratic city men would be welcomed in society whose hand no pure woman or honorable man ought to touch, while he, a gentleman by birth, education, and especially character, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... to learn the self-denying virtues of the clerical character is plain from his own confession; that his conduct had always defied the reproach of immorality was confidently asserted by his friends, and is equivalently acknowledged by the silence of his enemies. The ostentatious parade and worldly pursuits of the chancellor were instantly renounced by the Archbishop, who in the fervor of his conversion prescribed to himself, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... parading the doubtful honor of his descent; yet who fails to return his bow? And I have yet to learn that his mother was ignored by the ladies of her day. Those Hortensias on his carriage are horrible to me; they are an attempt to exalt in a queen the immorality condemned ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... was a reviewer, he was as well a Whig and was running a Review that was Whig from the front cover to the back. Leigh Hunt was not merely a poet, for he was also a radical, and therefore in the opinions of Tories, a believer in immorality and indecency. No matter how innocent a title might appear, it was held in suspicion, on the chance that it assailed the Ministry or endangered the purity of England. William Gifford was more than merely the editor of the Quarterly Review, for he was as well a Tory ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... principles, when he heard this discourse of St. Paul. You may infer his fears from his character. Figure to yourselves a man hearing for the first time the maxims of equity and righteousness inculcated in the gospel. Figure to yourselves a man who heard corrected the immorality of pagan theology; what was doubtful, illustrated; and what was right, enforced. See a man who knew of no other God but the incestuous Jupiter, the lascivious Venus, taught that he must appear before Him, in whose presence the seraphim veil their faces, and the heavens are not clean. Behold ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... United States, that his Administration may be conducted in righteousness and be eminently useful to Thy people over whom he presides, by encouraging due respect for virtue and religion, by a faithful execution of the laws in justice and mercy, and by restraining vice and immorality. ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... teacher: in case a child should ask if the things in the Bible happened, "Either the teacher must answer him insincerely and that is immorality, or he must answer him sincerely, and that is sectarian education, or he must refuse to answer him at all, and that is first of all bad manners and a sort of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... madness!" cried the princess. "To wish to live thus alone, is to carry immorality and immodesty ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... hindrances—but it never sinks into nothingness, and never fails to find new and noble work in creations of permanent and memorable excellence. Heaven forbid that I should seem to cover, even with a counterpane of courtesy, exhibitions of deliberate immorality. Happily this sort of thing is not common, and although it has hardly been practised by any one who, without a strain of meaning can be associated with the profession of acting, yet public censure, not active enough to repress the evil, is ever ready to pass a sweeping condemnation ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... widespread; and the idea of a fellow-creature actually suffering from want of food or shelter is, perhaps, more repugnant to the average American than to the average Englishman, and more apt to act immediately on his purse-strings. In that which popular language usually means when it speaks of immorality, all outward indications point to the greater purity of the American. The conversation of the smoking-room is a little less apt to be risque; the possibility of masculine continence is more often taken for granted; solicitation on the streets is rare; few American publishers ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... their heart noble, upright, and benevolent men, and as in the writings of Diderot genuine virtue and a tenderness unknown to his contemporaries breathe, so the peculiarity of such a genius can, as it seems, be given to a noble and elevated being only. The deep contempt for prevailing immorality which naturally leads to cynicism, and a heart which beats for everything great and glorious,—virtues which then had no existence, —speak from the pages of the Roman in a language intelligible to every ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... fellow-travellers from Dublin. Lord Lieutenant of Ireland under the Whig Government, from 1708 to 1710, Wharton was the most thorough-going party man that had yet appeared in English politics; and his political enemies did not fail to make the most of his well-known immorality. In his Notes to Macky's Characters Swift described Wharton as "the most universal villain that ever I knew." On his death in 1715 he was succeeded by his profligate son, Philip, who was created Duke of Wharton ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... must say that the man who, bereaved of the partner of his bosom, can still eat six plates of alamode beef, must have a most excellent stomach. Gentlemen, beware of giving heavy damages in this case, or otherwise you will unconsciously be the promoters of great immorality. This is no paradox, gentlemen; for I am credibly informed that if the man succeed in getting large damages, he will immediately take his wife home to his bosom and his van, and instead of exhibiting her, as he has hitherto done, for one penny, he will, on the strength of the notoriety ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 4, 1841 • Various
... of the Impiety and Immorality of the Stage (1704) and Some Thoughts Concerning the Stage ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... do you say that I dislike your poesy? I have expressed no such opinion, either in print or elsewhere. In scribbling myself, it was necessary for me to find fault, and I fixed upon the trite charge of immorality, because I could discover no other, and was so perfectly qualified in the innocence of my heart, to 'pluck that ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... entered into the above details on the immorality of savages (39. See on this subject copious evidence in Chap. vii. of Sir J. Lubbock, 'Origin of Civilisation,' 1870.), because some authors have recently taken a high view of their moral nature, or have attributed ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... there was a plan and method in it. It is a history which offers much cause for sorrow and much for joy. Though, as has been before remarked, a period of harrowing doubt in the life of an individual or a nation is a melancholy subject for consideration, yet when it is not induced by immorality, but produced, as in this instance, by the operation of regular causes, and is the result of the attractiveness of new modes of inquiry which invited application to the criticism of old truths, to be accepted ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... their own communities, held by members of religious orders. Genuine information with regard to what the religious were doing during the Middle Ages was so much obscured by the tradition of laziness and immorality, created at the time of the so-called reformation in order to justify the confiscation of their property by those whose one object was to enrich themselves, that we have only come to know the reality ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... near Chatillon a certain Count de Rougemont, a noted duelist, whose violence and immorality were the talk of the neighborhood. Having heard people speak of the wonderful eloquence of M. Vincent, this man came one day out of curiosity to hear him preach. Surprised and touched in spite of himself, he determined to make the preacher's acquaintance and, hastening into ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... in all the West for you. I have kept you pure and sweet and good—and to think that such a fellow should dare—" Mr. Wayland choked with anger. "The one thing I cannot stand in a man or a woman is immorality. I have lived clean myself, and my son shall ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... that the fall of the Babylonian Empire, the fall of the Egyptian Empire, of the Grecian Empire, and the Roman Empire, were all due to the development of pride and immorality among those peoples; whereas, we believe that civilization tends rather toward peace, security, and higher citizenship. Is not the chief explanation for the ultimate and successive fall of those great empires to be found in the ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... outside the Jewish ecclesiastical body, bound by strict vows and professing an extraordinary purity. While there were no vows of extreme penance, they avoided cities as centers of immorality, and, with some exceptions, eschewed marriage. They held aloof from traffic, oaths, slave-holding, and weapons of offence. They were strict Sabbath observers, wore a uniform robe, possessed all things in common, engaged in manual labor, abstained from ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... mistress of the house, very elegant, very cultured, for example, a Madame Steno, you discover the descendant of the Doges, the patrician of the fifteenth century, with the form of a queen, strength in her passion and frankness in her incomparable immorality; while in a Florent Chapron or a Lydia you discover the primitive slave, the black hypnotized by the white, the unfreed being produced by centuries of servitude; while in a Madame Gorka you recognize beneath her smiling amiability the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Not only were the war, the pestilence, and the captivity, which were about to fall upon Jerusalem, directly and obviously due to the perjury and stupid pride of her rulers; but, as he more subtly saw, the immorality of the whole people had been disabling them, for years before, from meeting these or any disasters except as sheer punishment without place for repentance. Their previous troubles had failed to sober or humble them or rouse them. They would not accept correction, he says of ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... testimony, by which a few individuals attempt to stem the torrent of immorality by opposing themselves to its stream, and which may be considered as a living martyrdom, does, in a moral point of view, a great deal of good to those, who conscientiously adopt it. It recalls first ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... through his verses on the art of loving, and was on that account driven into exile, which he mourned so melodiously and complained of so querulously. In a period less remote we find Adrian Beverland wandering away from the true realm of poetry and taking up his abode in the pesthouse of immorality. He was born at Middlebourg in 1653, and studied letters at the University of Leyden. He began his career by publishing indecent poems. He wrote a very iniquitous book, De Peccato originali, in which he gave a very base explanation of ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... should have to give an evil name to the Creator who designed man and woman and ordained the law of attraction which draws, and often DRAGS them together. I like to be fair to everybody, the Creator included; yet to be fair to everybody I shall appear to sanction immorality. For the fact is that our civilization has upset all the original intentions of nature. Nature evidently meant Love, or the emotion we call Love, to be the keynote of the universe. But apparently Nature did not intend marriage. ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... twenty-five years!" said Moretti bitterly, "You should have made your confession before, and have made it privately. There is something unnatural and reprehensible in the sudden blazon you have made to the public of your gross immorality." ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... that the barriers to license are not more insuperable among those of the same color. That corruption of morals progresses with greater admixture of races, and that the product of vice stimulates the propensity to immorality, is as evident to observation as it is natural to circumstances. These developments of the census, to a good degree, explain the slow progress of the free Colored population in the Northern States, and indicate, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... because I am not impressed by the terrible penalties with which nature visits certain sins, but because I do not believe in the power of fear to deliver us. Though there were no such thing as venereal disease, immorality would still be a way of death, and morality would still be the way of life and joy. Till we perceive that we are not on the ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... common ditch—The living inhabitants of the necropolis: draughtsmen, sculptors, painters—The bas-reliefs of the temples and the tombs, wooden statuettes, the smelting of metals, bronze—The religions of the necropolis: the immorality and want of discipline among the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... dancing of to-day, is really not intended to be vulgar or immoral at all, despite the crusades of the anti-immorality dancing committees! What is dancing, after all, if not the expression of one's ideals and emotions? It is only the man or woman with a vulgar mind, with base ideals, who will give a vulgar interpretation to a dance of any kind. But the essentially fine girl, ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... times festered in the diseased tissue of almost every civilisation; but it is only within the last three-quarters of a century that he has been a serious menace to the peace of justice and righteousness. In consequence, decent citizens are only beginning to understand the base immorality of his preaching and practice; and he has been given entirely undeserved credit for good intentions. In England as in the United States, domestic pacificism has been the most potent ally of alien ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... picnics, parties; women, pretty, well-dressed, witty, easy-mannered; good pictures, elegant drawing rooms, well got-up books, Majolica and Dresden china— these are the truest guards to protect a youth from dissipation and immorality. ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... liberty should be allowed to men? Liberty of conscience?—But we should see them all profiting by the permission to become atheists. Liberty of education?—But parents would be paying professors to teach their sons immorality and error; besides, if we are to believe M. Thiers, education, if left to the national liberty, would cease to be national, and we should be educating our children in the ideas of the Turks or Hindoos, instead of which, thanks to the legal despotism of the universities, ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... not take ground for total abstinence, but against the use ardent of spirits, brandy, rum, and whisky. He was also a member of the society formed in New York in 1821 "for the prevention of pauperism, vice, and immorality." ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... with lawless banditti, and even the cities were powerless to protect individuals or property. The prisons were overcrowded with suspected criminals who had never been brought to trial; the immorality of the court had spread like a deadly poison through the lower grades of social life; even the priests had become tainted with the general demoralization. The coin of Castile had been debased until the most necessary articles of life were ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... fault, in the eyes of Machiavelli, was that he could not succeed in being 'perfettamente tristo.' Beautiful, but inhuman; passionate, but cold; powerful, but rendered impotent for firm and lofty deeds by immorality and treason; how many centuries of men like this once wasted Italy and plunged her into servitude! Yet what material is here, under sterner discipline, and with a nobler national ideal, for the formation of heroic armies. Of such stuff, doubtless, were the Roman legionaries. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... them and get them embodied in forms of words called "acts," are legislators, disguises, but ought not to disguise, the other fact, that these two men are simply playing the part of receivers or "fences." There probably never was a more striking illustration of the immorality in which, as it was long ago remarked, any principle of government is sure to land people if pushed to its last extreme, than the theory which is now urged on our attention—that superiority of numbers will justify fraud; or, in other words, that if the number ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... perhaps, of their ingratitude. The man born to L400 a year thinks nothing of it, compares himself only with those above his own standard, and sees rather a ground of discontent in his L400 as not being L4,000 than any ground of deep thankfulness. Now, this being so odious a form of immorality, should—by Paley—terminate in excessive evil. On the contrary, it is the principle, the very dissatisfaction which God uses for keeping the world moving ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil. A child which is proud and free in its movements, in all its deportment, will be quite as moral as need be. Honor is an instinct, a superb instinct which should be kept keenly alive. Immorality, vice, crime, these come from a suppression or a collapse at one or other of the great primary centers. If one of these centers fails to maintain its true polarity, then there is a physical or psychic derangement, or both. And viciousness ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... the attacks made upon Christianity, the apologists defended their religion along three lines: It was philosophically justified; it was true; it did not favor immorality, but, on the contrary, inculcated virtue. The philosophical defence, or justification, of Christianity was most brilliantly undertaken by Justin Martyr, who employed the current philosophical conception of the Logos. ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... time we shall be fighting the smaller and more dangerous, more elusive and more persistent moral troubles—HYPOCRISY, CONCEIT, UNCHARITABLENESS. These are the mosquitoes and flies of the world of immorality that will pursue us when the big fellows—murder and theft—shall ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... thereof might have put financiers to shame by the cunning, if not magnitude, of their operations. Good Christian women, mothers of families, would sell a tidy of no use except to wear to a frayed edge the masculine nerves, and hand-painted plates of such bad art that it verged on immorality, for prices so above all reason, that a broker would have been taken aback. And it was all for worthy objects, these pretty functions graced by girls and matrons in their best attire, with the products of their little ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... there suffer vicariously the accumulated agonies due to the LOST, thus placating the just wrath of the Father and purchasing the release of the elect. A sufficient refutation of that dogma, as to its philosophical basis, is found in its immorality, its forensic technicality. As a mode of explaining the Scriptures, it is refuted by the fact that it is nowhere plainly stated in the New Testament, but is arbitrarily constructed by forced and indirect inferences from various obscure texts, which texts can be perfectly explained without ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Territories in consequence of the Reformation, were men without knowledge, often without morals and generally of little worth, and that the three civil functionaries just-mentioned, had, by their harshness, immorality and acts of violence, stirred up the righteous indignation of the people; yet the forms, under which Zurich proceeded, were not those of confederate law, but the offspring rather of an arbitrary will, whose ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... so," said Harding; "and in her immorality we find the reason for all this bewildering outcry against the slightest license in literature. Strange that in a manifestly impure age there should be a national tendency towards chaste literature. I am not sure that a moral literature does not of necessity imply much ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... On the introduction of Christianity, the plays handed down from the Greeks and Romans were set aside, partly because they had reference to heathen ideas, and partly because they had degenerated into the most shameless immorality; nor were they again revived till after the lapse of nearly a thousand years. Even in the fourteenth century, in that complete picture which Boccacio gives us of the existing frame of society, we do not find ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... I put good and wholesome food (and, as I trust, sound moral) before the lower classes, they will eventually eschew that which is coarse and disgusting, which is only resorted to because no better is supplied. Our weekly newspapers are at present little better than records of immorality and crime, and the effect which arises from having no other matter to read and comment upon, is of serious injury to the morality of the country ... I consider, therefore, that in writing for the ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... stories to the same purpose. And for some time their writings were mainly apologetic, designed, whatever their form, to serve a defensive purpose. But later they took the offensive against the paganism and immorality of the peoples about them, and the missionary spirit became predominant. Alexander Polyhistor, who lived in the first century, included in his "History of the Jews" fragments of these early Jewish historians and ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... on, "it is the simple history of Fernande, an ange dechue of the Quartier Breda. She had formed a connection with a man who suited her perfectly in every way, and they went on in happy immorality, till she found out that Maurice had a wife somewhere, a very charming person, who loved him dearly; perhaps she thought that the possession of two such affections by one man was de luxe; at all events, she cut him at ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... here, would be a serious immorality there; and a little lower down again, a mere domestic arrangement, slightly more decorous and a shade more legal than the old system of the halter and the public sale. It was declared, however, that this ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... his literary work. They unlock the secret of his performance, if it is any longer a secret, and they afford its justification in all those respects where without them it could not be justified. The question of immorality has been set aside, and the indecency has been admitted, but it remains for us to realize that anxiety for sincerity and truth, springing from the sense of pity and justice, makes indecency a condition of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to prove that Vautrin is as innocent a work as a drama of Berquin's? To inquire into the morality or immorality of the stage would imply servile submission to the stupid Prudhommes who bring the matter ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... of squeamishness, echo of the immorality of my catechism and my race conventions. I felt almost aghast at finding myself alone with that magnificent creature in such a paradisiacal spot. I wondered what thoughts might come to me. I had danced with her, I had talked ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... filthy purposes. They tell the ladies forsooth, that it is only parting with a perishable commodity, hardly of so much value as a callico under-petticoat; since, like its mistress, it will be useless in the form it is now in. If the ladies have no regard to the dishonour and immorality of the action, I desire they will consider, that nature who never destroys her own productions, will exempt big-belly'd women till the time of their lying-in; so that not to be transformed, will be the same as ...
— The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers • Jonathan Swift
... professions; but they drove nearly all the best and most energetic Catholics to the Continent; they discouraged industry; closed the door of knowledge; taught the people to look upon law as something hostile to religion; introduced division and immorality into families by the rewards they offered to apostasy; and condemned the whole country to poverty and impotence by fatally depressing the great majority of its people. Under the influence of the penal laws the Catholics inevitably ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... leaves, to this "busted" complexion must he come at last. He is in Rome; he must take the consequences. Shall he insult the whole city with his solvency? Certainly not. He abandons his purse and his conscience to the madness of the hour, and, in generous emulation of the prevailing recklessness and immorality, dismisses every scruple and squanders his last cent. Then, and not till then, does he feel himself truly a Washington-man, able to look anybody in the face with the serene pride of an equal, and without the mortification of being accused or even ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... which they try to cram down everybody's throat, but never practise themselves. She formerly kept a boarding-house in the city, where, at table regularly after soup, she would regale those present with long dissertations on the shocking immorality of the present day, varying the monotony, perhaps, by allusions to the boarders who had just left. "Mr. SIMPSON was a pleasant-spoken young man as I want to see, and as good as the bank, but I'm afraid he was agettin' ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various
... "Langsyne, When Life Was Bonnie" Alexander Anderson The Shoogy-Shoo Winthrop Packard Babylon Viola Taylor The Road of Remembrance Lizette Woodworth Reese The Triumph of Forgotten Things Edith M. Thomas In the Twilight James Russell Lowell An Immorality Ezra Pound Three Seasons Christina Georgina Rossetti The Old Familiar Faces Charles Lamb The Light of Other Days Thomas Moore "Tears, Idle Tears" Alfred Tennyson The Pet Name Elizabeth Barrett Browning Threescore and Ten Richard Henry Stoddard Rain on the Roof Coates Kinney Alone by the Hearth ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... of immorality the police had no eyes, and, admitting enormous exaggeration in the common report of the conduct of the younger priesthood and the students of the theological schools (and there is no smoke without some fire), the conditions of morality amongst the younger ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... arrive at the impelling cause for its perpetration. This may have had its origin, perhaps, in the criminal's having over-indulged in drink, or in his having resigned himself to some immoral bent; or it may have been connected, generally, with some deluging of the community with immorality. If, haply, the origin of the crime be traced, the Superintendent embodies in his report a reccommendation looking to a change in the law, which shall tend to suppress and control the evil. If there be indication that a particular order of crime prevails, or that, unhappily, some new departure ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... has been vastly enlarged through the increased general average of civilization and refinement. This naturally produces on the one side the piled-up accumulations of individuals garnered by the few, an inordinate display of wealth and luxury, and the vices of intemperance and immorality; while on the other, maddened and starving crowds are likely to resort to violence, and the poorer population to indulge whenever they get a chance in the same pleasures as the rich. But with all these disadvantages ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... the contemporary tragedy—the "heroic play"—was artificial. It was, on the contrary, far more natural, and, intellectually, of {172} much higher value. In 1698 Jeremy Collier, a non-juring Jacobite clergyman, published his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, which did much toward reforming the practice of the dramatists. The formal characteristics, without the immorality, of the Restoration comedy, re-appeared briefly in Goldsmith's She Stoops ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... gave deep offence to the party for whom it was drawn. For not only did Burnet at the time express himself with great asperity of Dryden, but long afterwards, when writing his history, he pronounced a severe censure on the immorality of his plays, so inaccurately expressed as to be applicable, by common construction to the author's private character. From this coarse and inexplicit accusation, the memory of Dryden was indignantly vindicated by his friend ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... true, that French faces have in fact neither red nor white of their own. This humble acknowledgment of a defect looks the more like a virtue, being found among a people not remarkable for humility. Again, before we can prove the practice to be immoral, we must prove immorality in the design of those who use it; either that they intend a deception, or to kindle unlawful desires in the beholders. But the French ladies, so far as their purpose comes in question, must be acquitted of both these charges. Nobody supposes their colour to be natural ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... husband having to fork out some hundreds of pounds, without the further promise of revelations in which light-hearted, lighter living young women were concerned. Debts were forgivable, perhaps excusable, in a young gentleman of Lowther's standing, but immorality, in Mrs Devitt's eyes, was a horse of quite another colour; anything of this nature acted upon Mrs Devitt's susceptibilities much in the same way as seeing red afreets an ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... made of this expression as intimating that Chretien wrote "Cliges" as a sort of disavowal of the immorality of his lost "Tristan". Cf. Foerster, "Cliges" (Ed. 1910), p. xxxix f., and Myrrha Borodine, "La femme et l'amour au XXIe Seicle d'apres les poemes de Chretien de Troyes" (Paris, 1909). G. Paris has ably defended another interpretation ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... This, in default of linguistic facility, is universally understood and appreciated in all civilised countries. In uncivilised countries, to remove your hat, or to bow, may be taken as a gross outrage on good manners, or as signifying some horrible immorality, in which case the offender would not have the chance of repeating his well-intentioned mistake. But within the limits of Western enlightenment to bow is mere civility, and may be taken as a preface to conversation; to omit it is to show lack of breeding and to court hostility. Therefore, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... strength and weakness of real human nature; we have the whole action lifted above the platform of city swindlers, insignificant scoundrels, and needy cardsharpers, up to a stage exhibiting historic personages and scenes, courts and battlefields; and we breathe freely in the wider air of immorality on a grand scale. As a sample of spirited freehand drawing, the sketches of Continental society, 'before that vulgar Corsican upset the gentry of the world,' are admirable for their force and originality; and what can be better as a touch ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... country places and villages, where the new army is swarming to be billeted, the clergymen and their wives are greatly agitated. Even in times of peace one's vicar's wife tells one stories in shocked whispers of 'immorality'—though the rustic mind does not seem to regard it as particularly immoral. An illegal baby is generally accepted with simple resignation or merely a little fretful complaint even in quite decent cottages. It ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... reformed, and gave myself in passion and sincerity to a religious experience that has made me tolerant of all religion ever since. I discharged my best captain for immorality. So did I my cook, and a better never boiled water in Manatomana. For the same reason I discharged my chief clerk. And for the first time in the history of trading my schooners to the westward carried Bibles in their stock. I built a little anchorite bungalow up town ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... history, that, while raising her monuments to gigantic genius, she is compelled so often to record an immorality of parallel proportions. It is right that the infamy of Mirabeau should be as eternal as his greatness. He was a man who, in his political, as in his private life, had no sense of right for its own sake, and from whom conscience ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... so-called moral tendency; nay, it ought not to have such. The truly beautiful is itself moral, only in another form.... Art is eternally clear. The mists of ignorance are as inimical to her as the life-destroying carbonic acid gas of immorality. Art is the highest perfection of human power. Heart and ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... a decent girl. Here was a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances immorality was exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it was under the system of chattel slavery. Things that were quite unspeakable went on there in the packing houses all the time, and were taken for granted by everybody; only they did not show, as in the old slavery ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... classes of the community; the serious world was horribly scandalized. Zealous, honest, fervid, and terribly in earnest, these good folks, in their ignorance of the world and of human nature, only added to the mischief which it was their honest wish to abate. They proclaimed the immorality of the drama; denounced "Tom and Jerry" from the pulpit; and besieged the doors of the play houses with a perfect army of tract droppers. Anything more injudicious, anything less calculated to achieve the end which these good people had in view, I can scarcely ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... scandalously simultaneous. The rector, indeed, had married his first wife for the sake of a child, and his second for the child's sake. He had thus achieved a younger family so numerous that it had kept him from providing properly for Jane. It was what Tanqueray called the "consecrated immorality" of Jane's father that had ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... cold, for instance, had compelled them to forsake Aryanem-Vaejo and seek shelter in Sughdha and Muru.* Locusts had driven them from Sughdha; the incursions of the nomad tribes, coupled with their immorality, had forced them to retire from Muru to Bakhdhi, "the country of lofty banners,"** and subsequently to Nisaya, which lies to the south-east, between Muru and Bakhdhi. From thence they made their way into the narrow valleys of the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... lack of school opportunities for the Negro in the rural districts of the South, there is danger that ignorance and idleness may increase to the extent of giving the Negro race a reputation for crime, and that immorality may eat its way into the fibre of the race so as to retard its progress for many years. In judging the Negro we must not be too harsh. We must remember that it has been only within the last thirty-four years that the black father and mother have had ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... was at times selfish, ungenerous, cruel—as witness his treatment of the Pinzons, his claiming the reward for the discovery of land, which rightly belonged to Rodrigo de Triana, his massacres of Indians in Hispaniola and enslavement of the survivors. Against Amerigo Vespucci no such charges of immorality, cruelty, and bigotry can be brought as against Columbus, and the sole accusation against him, of falsifying the date of his "first" voyage, has not been sustained by ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... taking chances. Some people take their chances in one way—like you and Rosalie; some take them in another—as I do.... Once I was afraid to take any; now I'm not. Who was it said that self-control is only immorality afraid?" ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... foolish trickery on the part of some petty Japanese dealers,—attempts to sell abominable decoctions in foreign bottles under foreign labels, to adulterate imported goods, or to imitate trade-marks. But the common sense of the Japanese dealers, as a mass, is strongly opposed to such immorality, and the evil will soon correct itself. The native storekeepers can honestly undersell the foreign ones, because able not only to underlive them, but to make ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... the heathen rage, and the kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and his Anointed, yet the righteous cause will surely prevail, for God is king himself. Faith it is which enables him to bear up against the general immorality, and while he cries, 'Help me, Lord, for there is not one godly man left, for the faithful fail from among the children of men'—to make answer to himself in words of noble hope and consolation, 'Now for the comfortless troubles' sake of the needy, ...
— David • Charles Kingsley |
