"Degenerate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color—wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenia and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... occasional and habitual criminals ceased voluntarily from their depredations. There was no longer any need for them to commit crime. They merely changed with changing conditions. A smaller number of criminals was put into hospitals and cured. And the remnant of the hopelessly criminal and degenerate was segregated. And the courts in all countries were likewise decreased in number again and again. Ninety-five per cent. of all civil cases had been squabbles over property, conflicts of property-rights, lawsuits, contests of wills, breaches of ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... The government of college, Those liberal helluos of knowledge, Who, e'en in these degenerate days, Deserve the world's unceasing praise; Who, friends of science and of men, Stand forth Gomorrah's righteous ten; On them I naught but thanks bestow, For, like my cash, my credit's low; So I can give nor ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... dared to lift her eyes in Mary Pidwall's presence. For Mary knew not only the sum of her lies, but also held—or so Laura believed—that she came of a thoroughly degenerate family; thanks to Uncle Tom. And the early weeks spent at close quarters with her bore out these fears. The looks both M. P. and her friend bent on Laura said as plainly as words: if we are forced to tolerate this obnoxious little ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... will wear shoes in summer-time and coats in winter, weather-board their log cabins, put glass in the windows and partitions across the one room inside. Woods-meetings will creep into churches, square sousing in the river will degenerate to the gentle baptismal sprinkle; no picnics or barbecues will delight the inhabitants with flying horses and fights, open fireplaces and sparking-benches will give way to stoves and chairs, riding double on horseback, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... from a higher estate. But the facts do not support the brute theory. Even if the "missing links" could be found, it would be as reasonable—though not so flattering to man's pride—to believe that the monkey is a degenerate man as that man ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... philosophic study. He claims Philosophy as his mistress in The Fisher, and in a case where he is in fact judge as well as party, has no difficulty in getting his claim established. He is for ever reminding us that he loves philosophy and only satirizes the degenerate philosophers of his day. But it will occur to us after reading him through that he has dissembled his love, then, very well. There is not a passage from beginning to end of his works that indicates ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... The men are not the same: 'tis we are base, Poor, and degenerate from the exalted strain Of our great fathers. Where is now the soul Of god-like Cato? he, that durst be good, When Caesar durst be evil; and had power, As not to live his slave, to die his master? Or where's the constant Brutus, that being proof Against all charm of ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... may have charms for a lover. There is a certain susceptibility of temper, that sometimes accompanies the pride of virtue, which indicates a quick sense of shame, and warm feelings of affection; in whatsoever manner this may be shown, it appears amiable and graceful. And if this sensibility degenerate into irritability, a lover pardons it in his mistress; it is her prerogative to be haughty; and if he be dexterous to seize "the moment of returning love," it is often his interest to promote quarrels, for the sake ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... commanded sternly. "The Meccans are a people corrupt and accursed. 'Their hearts are black as their skins are white.' They live by fleecing the Hujjaj, by making sale and barter of relics, by turning the holy places into marts of trade. All this is well known throughout Islam. Ah, the degenerate breed of the sons ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... so it has always been, that the counsel which the Upland chiefs have resolved among themselves has always been followed by the men of the rest of the country. Our forefathers did not need to take advice from the West Gautlanders about the government of the Swedes. Now we will not be so degenerate as to need Emund to give us counsel; but let us, friends and relations, unite ourselves for the purpose of coming to a determination." All agreed to this, and thought it was well said. Thereafter the people joined this ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... feast, The Faith's red "Auto," fed with human fuel, While sate the catholic Moloch, calmly cruel, Enjoying, with inexorable eye,[ef] That fiery festival of Agony! The stern or feeble sovereign, one or both 340 By turns; the haughtiness whose pride was sloth; The long degenerate noble; the debased Hidalgo, and the peasant less disgraced, But more degraded; the unpeopled realm; The once proud navy which forgot the helm; The once impervious phalanx disarrayed; The idle forge that formed Toledo's blade; The foreign ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... to strike at the roots of individual initiative. We have secured its execution during the war as to the willing co-operation of 95 per cent of the trades of the country, but under peace conditions it would degenerate into an harassing ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... occurred to me. I remember the time when I, too, deified the "soul's impulses." It is a noble worship; but, if we do not aid it by a just though limited interpretation of what "Ought" means, it will degenerate into idolatry. For a time it was so with me, and I am not yet good ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... conferred for some feat of strength and daring on a stalwart Borderer. We find the corresponding Tornebeuf in Old French, and Turnbuck also occurs. Trumbull and Trumble are variants due to metathesis followed by assimilation (Chapter III), while Tremble is a very degenerate form. In Knatchbull we have the obsolete verb knatch, which in Mid. English meant to strike on the head, fell. Crawcour is Fr. Crevecoeur, breakheart, which has also become a local name in France. With Shacklock, shake-lock, and Sherlock, Shurlock, shear-lock, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... last eight or nine years; and while I was unavoidably delayed in the writing of this, awaiting material, put in one-half of DAVID BALFOUR, the sequel to KIDNAPPED. Add the ordinary impediments of life, and admire my busyness. I am now an old, but healthy skeleton, and degenerate much towards the machine. By six at work: stopped at half-past ten to give a history lesson to a step- grandson; eleven, lunch; after lunch we have a musical performance till two; then to work again; bath, 4.40, dinner, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Rome—thy sterner, younger sister, she Who awed the world with her imperial frown— Rome drew the spirit of her race from thee, The rival of thy shame and thy renown. Yet her degenerate children sold the crown Of earth's wide kingdoms to a line of slaves; Guilt reigned, and woe with guilt, and plagues came down, Till the North broke its floodgates, and the waves Whelmed the degraded race, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... they left for the Murchison Pass they had laid in a comfortable supply, but apparently Allister had cached a quantity of the stuff at the Twin Eagles shack. Of one thing Andrew was certain, that four such practiced whisky drinkers would never let their party degenerate into a drunken rout; and another thing was even more sure—that Scottie Macdougal would keep his head better than the best of the others. But what the alcohol would do would be to cut the leash of constraint and dig up every strong passion among them. For instance, Jeff ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... the banner at their head, go in procession along the walls and to every threatened gate, never doubting that at the sight of it the Sultan and his unbaptized hordes will be reft of breath of body or take to flight.... This we pray of Your Majesty, that the Mother of God may in these degenerate days have back the honor and worship accorded her by the Emperors and Greeks of ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... amongst what they have opportunities of seeing; that is, between the various pieces presented to them by the managers of theatres. Further than this, it is impossible for them to extend their office of judging and collating; and the degenerate taste which substituted the caprices of Davenant, the rants of Dryden, or the filth of Tate, for the jewellery of Shakspeare, cannot with any justice be charged upon the public, not one in a thousand of whom was furnished with any means of comparing, but exclusively upon those ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the audience. They gained their livelihood. The wolf was lettered, likewise the man. The wolf had been trained by the man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which swelled the receipts. "Above all things, do not degenerate into a man," his friend would say ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... churches in Venice we have already spoken; his palaces are mainly to be found in his native city, Vicenza. In these structures he displayed great fertility of invention and a profound familiarity with the classic orders, but the degenerate taste of the Baroque period already begins to show itself in his work. There is far less of architectural propriety and grace in these pretentious palaces, with their colossal orders and their affectation of ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... passed and repassed before the window—Sorenson's figure, of course. Brute, coward, degenerate he was, and to be dealt with as such. Not only as such, indeed, but as a wretch who had dared to touch Janet Hosmer against her will, to drag her from her home to this lonely spot by violence for ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... Common Sense! And more and more with pleasing objects strive To dull his judgment and pervert his will To their behests: who, were he not so wrapp'd I'the dusky clouds of their dark policies, Would never suffer right to suffer wrong. Fie, Lingua, wilt thou now degenerate? Art not a woman? dost not love revenge? Delightful speeches, sweet persuasions, I have this long time us'd to get my right. My right—that is, to make the senses six; And have both name and power with ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... no more power than what every man naturally may have over another. Sect, 10. Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... the Arabic word kafer 'pagans.' These names are used in Binh-Thuan to make a distinction, but Banis and Kaphirs alike are all Chams.... In Cambodia all Chams are Mussulmans." (E. Aymonier, Les Tchames, p. 26.) The religion of the pagan Chams of Binh-Thuan is degenerate Brahmanism with three chief gods, Po-Nagar, Po-Rome, and Po-Klong-Garai. (Ibid., p. 35.)—H.C.] The books of their former religion they say (according to Dr. Bastian) that they received from Ceylon, but ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... degraded yourself, you shall be scourged. For a subsistence, therefore, betake yourself to cultivation; or other drudgeries for which alone you are now fit, and do not bring a disgrace on the character of the sacred order.” In these degenerate days perhaps there is not one Brahman out of fifty who either does not do what he ought to shun, or who does not omit to do what he ought to perform; and all will admit that degraded Brahmans are unworthy ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... anything to shake the power of the throne, he would not submit to be patronized by the mean fawning Mazarin. Not that the hard-hearted Conde would have listened to his wife and mother, even if he had loved them as Coriolanus did, or that his arrogance did not degenerate into wonderful meanness at last, such as Coriolanus would have scorned; but the parallel was very amusing, and gave me a great interest in Conde. And did you ever observe what a great likeness there is in the characters of ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cold at the calm pride of this degenerate fiend, had it not been boiling at the reference to Helene. He crept nearer to them, along the wall. He lay down on the floor, below the level of the first bullet paths. Then he drew his automatic and the bulb light, ready for ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... the Fowler (919-936), was permitted to make the royal title hereditary, and to assert an effective suzerainty over the other tribal dukes. In France the House of Paris, after ruling for many years in the name of a degenerate Carolingian line, was invited in the person of Hugh Capet to assume the royal dignity (987). We have here a European movement in favour of monarchy; and on the heels of it follows another for the ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... smile his Tyrant can accost, And wield the slavish sickle, not the sword: Ah! Greece! they love thee least who owe thee most— Their birth, their blood, and that sublime record[187] Of hero Sires, who shame thy now degenerate horde! ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... sits sad and solitary—a pale and beautiful ruin, pathetic beyond speech, infested by noisy shop-keepers and petty pilferers, the degenerate sons of the robbers who once roamed the sea and enthroned ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... and red tape! There are nations that will not fling away the empire of earth in order to slight an unknown man and insult a noble woman whose boots they are not fitted to unlatch. There are nations not blinded to Science, not given over hand and foot to effete snobocracies and Degenerate Decadents. In short, mark my words—THERE ARE ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... followed the dusty road and examined the telegraph poles, for the woodpecker of these latter days has departed from the ways of his fathers, deserted the cool and fragrant woods, and taken up his abode in degenerate places, a fitting change of residence to follow his change of habit from digging his prey out of the tree-trunks to catching ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... book, where the heroine receives whacks with patient smiles. Fate boots her from pillar to post and she blesses Fate and is much obliged. That most deadly reproach to degenerate human nature—the accidental fact of sex—had been so skilfully extirpated from those pages that, like chaste amoebae, the characters merely multiplied by immaculate subdivision; and millions of lineal descendants of the ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... more satisfied with herself because she had never for an instant forgotten her dignity so far as to degenerate into the vehemence of passion or to falter with the ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... men are monstrously cruel. The guards and the men over me, from the Warden down, were stupid monsters. Listen, and you shall learn what they did to me. There was a poet in the prison, a convict, a weak-chinned, broad-browed, degenerate poet. He was a forger. He was a coward. He was a snitcher. He was a stool—strange words for a professor of agronomics to use in writing, but a professor of agronomics may well learn strange words when pent in prison for the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... of the Khasis. The following is his opinion of them:—"They are a powerful, athletic race of men, rather below the middle size, with a manliness of gait and demeanour. They are fond of their mountains, and look down with contempt upon the degenerate race of the plains, jealous of their power, brave in action, and ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... Robber indeed! My noble Ruperto the purest of patriots, purer than any in this degenerate ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... contemplated by the wildest imagination. The flagitious Queen did not, it is said and believed, hesitate to signify to her son that the King was not his father—and this in the presence of that King and of Napoleon. Could crime justify crime—could the fiendish lusts and hatreds of a degenerate race offer any excuse for the deliberate guilt of a masculine genius, the conduct of this abject court might have apologised for the policy which it perhaps tempted the pampered ambition of Napoleon to commence, and which it now encouraged ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... distance, but forbear the prize. Then fierce Tydides stoops; and from the fields Heaved with vast force, a rocky fragment wields. Not two strong men the enormous weight could raise, Such men as live in these degenerate days:(147) He swung it round; and, gathering strength to throw, Discharged the ponderous ruin at the foe. Where to the hip the inserted thigh unites, Full on the bone the pointed marble lights; Through both the tendons broke the rugged stone, And stripp'd the skin, and crack'd the ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... God's world"—and poet and plagiarist, courtier and courtesan, Kipling and cant—these now dally by the banks of the Thames and dine off the peoples of the earth, just as once the degenerate populace of imperial Rome fed upon the peoples of the Pyramids. But the thing is near the end. The "secret of Empire" is no longer the sole possession of England. Other peoples are learning to think imperially. The Goths and ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the honors of office by his poverty, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and San Gil in the kingdom of New Grenada. In our days its cultivation during twenty-five years has almost entirely removed the apprehension at first entertained, that being transplanted to America, the cane would by degrees degenerate, and become as slender as the creole cane. The third species, the violet sugar-cane, called Cana de Batavia, or de Guinea, is certainly indigenous in the island of Java, where it is cultivated in preference in the districts of ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... narrow rather than simple, for simplicity is the work of civilization. They did not understand, and could not adopt, the law of the world into which they had come. Yet neither could they, if they would, force their laws upon the conquered inhabitants. Among these the old civilization lingered on in a degenerate form, and with it the Roman law. One of the first things that happened was that the conquerors drew up for their Roman subjects short codes of the Roman law as it survived in a debased form, as they drew up statements of their own law for their followers. For a long time each man, according ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... Mr. Collier, as evidence of the date at which they were made. And as, according to Dr. Ingleby, "the primal evidence of the forgery lies in the ink writing, and in that alone," with that alone we shall at present concern ourselves. As the careless, half-formed hand of the present day, degenerate from "the round hand of the school-master," appears only in the pencil writing, we have therefore to deal but with the first three styles of writing enumerated by Mr. Hardy; and as he himself admits that "it is perfectly possible that any two of these hands in succession may have been practised ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... he writes to his wife, "that such actions will hurt the reputation of black troops and of those connected with them. For myself I have gone through the war so far without dishonor, and I do not like to degenerate into a plunderer and a robber,—and the same applies to every officer in my regiment. After going through the hard campaigning and the hard fighting in Virginia, this makes me very much ashamed. There are two courses only for me ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... power of the terrible goddess Davee, are not afraid to incur her displeasure by informing of their fellows, they reply, that Davee has done her worst in abandoning them. She can inflict no severer punishment, and therefore gives herself no further concern about her degenerate children. This cowardly doctrine is, however, of advantage to the Government that seeks to put an end to the sect, and has thrown a light upon their practices, which could never have been ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... and he soon became an oracle at the billiard-table, and a hero in the racquet-court. His refined education, however, fortunately preserved him from the fate of many other lively youths: he did not degenerate into a mere hero of sports and brawls, the genius of male revels, the arbiter of roistering suppers, and the Comus of a club. His boyish feelings had their play; he soon exuded the wanton heat of which a public school would have served as a safety-valve. He returned to his books, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... to drink, shrank into as little space as possible; she was nervous and self-reproachful, yet the singing and the uproar gave her a certain pleasure. There was nothing in the talk around her and the songs that were sung that made it a shame for her to be present. Plebeian good-humour does not often degenerate into brutality at meetings of this kind until a late hour of the evening. The girls who sat with glasses of beer before them, and carried on primitive flirtations with their neighbours, were honest wage-earners of factory and workshop, ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... about four of them before abandoning her mule for the detour on foot. But when she had left the town only a little way two horsemen came up behind her. She knew neither of them, and they were immature boys, with the empty and vacuous faces of almost degenerate illiteracy. They seemed unarmed but since it was vital to Alexander's scheme to ride unwatched it became important to have them either go ahead or to distance them. Accordingly she urged her mule into a lumbering canter and when a turn of the road had been reached slowed down only to discover ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... who deceived her. I should like also to omit all reference to the conversation which ensued between them, but for the sake of true art I am constrained to state that Lucifer descended to commonplace. M. Renan tells us that since he left Saint Sulpice he did nothing but degenerate, and the inference is obvious, that he ought to have gone back to Saint Sulpice, despite the literary splendours of the Vie de Jesus. Since he last broke a lance with Michael, the devil has debilitated mentally, and the substance of ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... Silence] You think I don't understand. [His voice trembles] I fully understand. Had you beaten me like a dog, it would have felt less hard. Don't I understand what I am? I am a rascal, a degenerate, I mean. Forgive me for the Lord's sake. [Sobs, throws the parcel on the table, ...
— The Cause of it All • Leo Tolstoy
... in either fit a captive with the jail-rot upon him, and the impurity of his prison worn into the grain of his soul, he revealed his degenerate state to his affectionate child. No one else ever beheld him in the details of his humiliation. Little recked the Collegians who were laughing in their rooms over his late address in the Lodge, what a serious picture they had ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... civilization of our age and its medical science, we see, on the one hand, the crude superstitions of the masses, the subtler superstitions of the educated classes; gross materialism, bewildering Darwinism, pessimism, and degenerate political economy; on the other hand, unmitigated quackery and cupidity, with its weight of oppression on ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... where art thou, My Country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy Lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands like mine? ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... Doth he so, sir? thou unnatural boy! "Too well," sayest thou? that word shall cost thee[261] somewhat: O monstrous! have I brought thee up to this? "Too well!" O unkind, wicked, and degenerate, Hast thou the heart to say so of thy mother? Well, God will plague thee for't, I warrant thee: Out on thee, villain! fie upon thee, wretch! Out of my sight, out of ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... the least. He had lapsed hopelessly. No urchin in the lower school, brewing cocoa over a form room fire, ladling out condensed milk with the blade of a penknife, would have been more dead to the decencies of life than this degenerate hero of the ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... conditions altered (for better or for worse) with the national prosperity under Elizabeth, and classes and masses reconsidered their relative positions, Robin should fall from the popular pantheon, and should degenerate, as we find him degenerated in the broadsides of the Reformation hacks, into a swashbuckler unheroic enough to be defeated in quarter-staff bouts and so undemocratic as to find for himself a noble title and a wife ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... apt to degenerate into occasions of riot, and in 1432 the following statute was passed with a view to ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... rights, to be capable of enjoying on a sudden, without any preparation, the benefits of absolute liberty. He feared, too, that the opposition inherent in representative governments would not be rightly comprehended in France, and would make a bad impression; that it would degenerate into resistance; and that it would clog the action of the sovereign power, take from it its illusion, its moral strength, and make of it nothing ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... us. Civilized warfare itself, the only field remaining where undying fame may be purchased, seems likely to lose its hold on men, and soon the arbitrator will everywhere replace the commander-in-chief and the noble art of war will degenerate into the ignoble lawsuit. So even universal peace may ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... volunteer and not half a dozen Parsis. Englishmen prefer to join a corps which consists of Englishmen or at least has an English Company. When they have no opportunity of so doing, it is a little unfair to class them with the lazy, unpatriotic, degenerate young gentlemen who have the opportunity and do not seize it. Captain Ross-Ellison was doing his utmost to provide the ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... great-great-grandmother. It was currently reported that every forest had one within its precincts, who ruled over the woodmen, and exacted tribute from them in the shape of little blocks of wood ready hewn for the fire of his underground palace,—such blocks as are bought at shops in these degenerate days, ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... that had seen you both as youths, notwithstanding Audley had the advantage of being some years your senior—who could have thought that he was the one to become distinguished and eminent, and you to degenerate into the luxurious idler, averse to all trouble and careless of all fame? You, with such advantages, not only of higher fortunes, but, as every one said, of superior talents; you, who had then so much ambition, so keen a desire for glory, sleeping ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hair was up she'd look a little faded, and there'd be moments of stress and strain when her naively insolent drawl would jar on the nerves, like the talk of a spoiled child too intent on holding the attention of a visitor averse to precocity. And her disdain of the practical would degenerate into untidiness, and her clinging-ivyness, if it clung too much, would probably remind a man in his reactionary moments of ennui that there are subtler pursuits than being a wall, even ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... the neighbour which he more perhaps than any of his contemporaries had suffered from, but which he was certain involved enormous dangers not only for himself but also to the next and subsequent generations (see Note B., where "pity" is mentioned among the degenerate virtues). Later in the book we shall see how his profound compassion leads him into temptation, and how frantically he struggles against it. In verses 31 and 32, he tells us to what extent he had to modify ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... she answered, gaily, for she was before her time inasmuch as she was what is known in these days of degenerate speech ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... ghosts in the shadowed avenues, flitting in and out among the trees, joining hands to dance "la ronde" about the pool of Neptune. Gay abbes, cavaliers, beautiful ladies of the late Renaissance, red-heeled, painted, powdered; frail, degenerate children of the hard-headed old Florentine citizens pictured in the frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio. No greater shades could ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... and princesses made the grande tournee through the rooms, and then mingled with the guests; all formal etiquette was now laid aside, and a gay and unembarrassed conversation might be carried on till the beginning of the concert. This seemed to degenerate, on the part of the French officers, to an indiscreet, frenzied levity. They laughed and talked boisterously—they walked arm in arm before the ladies, and remarked upon them so boldly, that crimson blushes, or frightened pallor, was ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... used to be described in satirical writings of the first half of the century as "an aristocratic drawl," and his pronunciation was archaic. Like other high-bred people of his time, he talked of "cowcumbers" and "laylocks," called a woman an "'ooman," and was "much obleeged" where a degenerate age is content to be obliged. The frigidity of his address and the seeming stiffness of his manner, due really to an innate and incurable shyness, produced even among people who ought to have known him well a totally erroneous notion ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... I think I will join you in a pipe," said the lieutenant, pulling out a tin case, in which he kept the blackest of little cutty pipes. "In days of old our ancestors loved to fight—now we degenerate souls love to ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... he can get,—a very laughable scene as you may suppose, of awkwardness and agility, and failures on the very brink of success. Now began a dance. The women danced very well, and, in general, I have observed throughout Germany that the women in the lower ranks degenerate far less from the ideal of a woman, than the men from that of man. The dances were reels and waltzes; but chiefly the latter. This dance is, in the higher circles, sufficiently voluptuous; but here the emotions of it were far more faithful interpreters of the passion, which, ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... so-called classical art, historical, genre and landscape painting, all showing the same conventional black grease. The works reeked of uniform mediocrity, they were characterised by a muddy dinginess of tone, despite their primness—the primness of impoverished, degenerate blood. And the friends quickened their steps: they ran to escape from that reign of bitumen, condemning everything in one lump with their superb sectarian injustice, repeating that there was nothing in the place worth ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... "—a degenerate—a dope addict whose greatness lay only in the realms of his sensual dreams. A weak, pitiful figure bereft of followers, ...
— The Clean and Wholesome Land • Ralph Sholto
... mounted among the Indians showed themselves in the moonlight. Travellers who have met only with civilised Indians can with difficulty form any idea of the savage tribes. Nothing less resembled those degenerate Indians than these unconquered sons of the desert; who—like the birds of prey, wheeling in the air before pouncing on their victims—rode howling around the camp. Their figures hideously marked with paint, were ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... a banquet was out of the question. Suddenly the wily building hit on an idea. “I’ll give them a feu d’artifice. There hasn’t been a first-class fire here since I burned myself down fifty-three years ago! That kind of entertainment hasn’t been run into the ground like everything else in these degenerate days! I’ll do it in the best and most complete way, and give Newport something to talk about, whenever my name shall ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... so doing, she had occasion to speak with what she considered undue severity to one of the parties, she would immediately apologise with tears, and in the humblest manner entreat forgiveness. This extreme sweetness of disposition, however, did not degenerate into weakness; and she could testify the utmost displeasure, and reproved with energy when offences were committed against God. It was intolerable to her that His Divine Majesty should be insulted in her abode; and she, the gentlest and most ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... thrown out by his enemies, that he himself was infected with the very crime against which his inquiries were directed;—now Maenius, I say, in order that he might, in a private capacity, meet the imputation, abdicated the dictatorship. I expect not such moderation in you; you will not degenerate from your family, of all others the most imperious and assuming; nor resign your office a day, nor even an hour, before you are forced to it. Be it so: but then let no one exceed the time limited. It is enough to add a day, or a month, to the censorship. ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... original thought amongst them; the froth of society, with the natural tendency of froth to rise to the surface and thence be swept aside; mere bubbles, that shine a moment and then burst. It is fashion that unsexes women and unmakes men. To be in the world of fashion and of it, is to degenerate; but to be in it and not of it, to know it and remain untainted, despising all it has to give, makes towards solid advance. There are some ugly stages to be gone through, however, before the ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... parts of Asia. Idolatries of several kinds came into vogue, some adopted from abroad, others developed out of their own system. Temples, some of which had a character of extraordinary magnificence, were erected to the honor of various gods; and the degenerate descendants of pure Zoroastrian spiritualists bowed down to images, and entangled themselves in the meshes of a sensualistic and most debasing Nature-worship. Still, amid whatsoever corruptions, the Dualistic faith was maintained. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... ages the gods were wont, it was believed, to visit the earth and mingle with men. But even in Homer's time this familiar intercourse was a thing of the past—a tradition of a golden age that had passed away. Their forms were no longer seen, their voices no longer heard. In these later and more degenerate times the recognized modes of divine communication with men were by oracles, and by casual and unusual sights and sounds, as thunder and lightning, a sudden tempest, an eclipse, a flight of birds,—particularly ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... alike. The heroine is a demimondaine in everything but her alleged virtue—the hero a young bounder whose better self restrains him just in time. A conventional marriage on the last page legalizes what would otherwise have been a liaison or a degenerate flirtation. ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... magnificent Youantee entered the Hall of Delight, which was illumined with ten thousand lanthorns, and cast his eyes over the portraits of the hundred beauties, but not one feature touched his heart, he turned away in disgust at the degenerate countenances of the age, "Is this all," exclaimed he, "that the world can lay at the feet of its lord?" And the committee of taste prostrated themselves when they beheld his indignation. "And this," exclaimed he, pointing to the supposed portrait ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of life is a song; every sound is a song. But inflections must not be multiplied, lest delivery degenerate into a perpetual sing-song. The effect lies entirely in reproducing the same inflection. A drop of water falling constantly, hollows a rock. A mediocre man will employ twenty or thirty tones. Mediocrity is not the too little, but the too much. The ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... under the Hudson and under Jersey City as I lit my cigar and settled comfortably into the green plush. When we emerged from the tunnel on the other side of the long ridge (which is a degenerate spur from the Palisades farther north) a crescent of sun was just fringing the crest with fire. Another moment and we flashed onto the Hackensack marshes and into the fully minted gold of superb morning. The day ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... ruling of it; it has always been so, that what the chiefs of the Up-Swedes have resolved among them, to this the other men of the land have listened. Our fathers needed not to receive advice from the West Gauts about their ruling of the land. Now are we not so degenerate that Emund need teach us counsel; I would have us bind our ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... mob, "down with the assassin." And the secretary saw them seize a degenerate-looking wretch and begin pounding him with their fists. After a little while he was thrown to the ground, but was dragged up again and at last, as the chauffeur was guiding his car backwards through the crowd, the secretary heard ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... view naturally suggested the prolongation of earthly life by artificial means; hence the search for an elixir, carried on through many centuries by degenerate disciples of Taoism. But here we must pass on to consider some of the speculations on God, life, death, and immortality, indulged in by Taoist philosophers and others, who were not fettered, as the Confucianists were, by traditional reticence ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... with sunbeams, we proceeded unto Rome (381 miles). An Ohio village, this Rome, and so fallen from its once proud estate that its postoffice no longer bears the name—it is simply "Stout's," if, in these degenerate days, you would send a ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... extremely likely to degenerate into a petty jealousy that is bred of fear. This is how Mr. H. G. Wells wrote of our attitude towards Germany ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... objected against the greatness of these prodigious Adventures, intimating that the resistance our Bucaniers found in America, was everywhere but small. For the Spaniards, say they, in the West Indies, are become of late years nothing less, but rather much more degenerate than in Europe. The continual Peace they have enjoyed in those parts, the defect of Military Discipline, and European souldiers for their Commanders, much contributing hereunto. But more especially, and above all other reasons, the very luxury of the Soil and Riches, the extreme heat of ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... intervened in the affairs of his country with a superior nobility of aim. He was the last champion of the Irish aristocracy and still more the voice of conscience for them, and he spoke to them of their duty to the nation as one might imagine some fearless prophet speaking to a council of degenerate princes. When the aristocracy failed Ireland he bade them farewell, and wrote the epitaph of their class in words whose scorn we almost forget because of their sounding melody and beauty. He turned ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... only too glad to consent to it," he said, "is the sodden depravity of that Floud chap. Really he's a menace to the community. I saw from the degenerate leer on his face this morning that he will not be able to keep silent about that little affair of ours back there. Mark my words, he'll talk. And fancy how embarrassing had you continued in the office for which you were engaged. Fancy it being known ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the insurrection I have been anxious and careful that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle. I have therefore in every case thought it proper to keep the integrity of the Union prominent as the primary object of the contest on our part, leaving all questions which are not of vital military importance to the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... wretch as I that had been forced by my bitter wrongs to company with all manner of rogues and fellows of the baser sort, this Don Federigo (and all unknowing) served but to show me how very far I had sunk from what I might have been. And knowing myself thus degenerate I grieved mightily therefore and determined henceforth to meet Fortune's buffets more as became my condition, with a steadfast and patient serenity, even ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... Diuels. Saddle my horses: call my Traine together. Degenerate Bastard, Ile not trouble thee; Yet haue I ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... remarked more than once, that Gordon's military career reminds one of the great soldier Cromwell, who did so much to rescue England from the degenerate condition into which it had fallen under the miserable rule of the Stuarts. In the same way the six years spent by Gordon at Gravesend, very forcibly remind us of the great religious philanthropist, Lord Shaftesbury, who did perhaps more than any other man of this ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... might all evaporate away. Anaximenes affirmed that it was air, of which all things were formed by rarefaction and condensation: on such a supposition it could have no permanent personal identity. Critias said it was blood: this might degenerate and lose its nature, or be poured out on the ground. Leucippus maintained that it was a peculiar concourse of atoms: as these came together, so they might fly apart and there be an end of what they formed. The followers of Aristotle asserted that it was a fifth unknown substance, with properties ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... exclaimed Barere, "that men really attached to liberty will imitate the most frightful excesses of despotism!" He proved to the Convention, after his fashion, out of Sallust, that such arbitrary courts may indeed, for a time, be severe only on real criminals, but must inevitably degenerate into instruments of private cupidity and revenge. When, on the tenth of March, the worst part of the population of Paris made the first unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Girondists, Barere eagerly ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was the cynical and open criminal activity of an Englishman named James Stuart. This man was a degenerate criminal of the worst type, who came into a temporary glory through what he considered the happy circumstances of the time. Arrested for one of his crimes, he seemed to anticipate the usual very good prospects of escaping all penalties. ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... with you in detail regarding Berlin and all that which, according to your previous preparations and suggestions, is going on there. Great cities always contain within themselves the image of whole empires, and even though distorted by exaggerations which degenerate into caricature, they nevertheless present the nation in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... have a natural grace and ease in their manner, and make excellent wives and mothers. This character must not, however, be taken in an unlimited sense, for we cannot expect this rule to be without its exceptions, and it is true that some of these females do degenerate, and copy after the manners of the creoles, or white natives; but this is only the case when, by their intercourse with the whites, their Indian blood is merged and lost in the European. That part of the population in which is blended the ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... captivity and poor health. But now another and most unexpected feature developed itself; for, on attempting to remove the last web by placing against it a large wire ring, and cutting the guy-lines, I found that this most degenerate spider had not only failed to make her house perpendicular, but had so far departed from the traditions of our ancestors as to have the centre thereof decidedly eccentric, and four times as near the upper as the lower border of the web, so that its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... last cannot stand the touch-stone of truth; there are mean plebeians, who sweat and struggle to maintain the appearance of gentlemen; and, on the other hand, there are gentlemen of rank who seem industrious to appear mean and degenerate; the one sort raise themselves either by ambition or virtue, while the other abase themselves by viciousness or sloth; so that we must avail ourselves of our understanding and discernment in distinguishing those persons, who, though they bear the same appellation, are yet so different ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the handsomest young man in Athens. He was aristocratic, proud, insolent, and needlessly rich. He had a passion for gambling, horse-racing, dog-fighting, and indulged in the churchly habit of doing that which he ought not and leaving undone that which he should have done. He was worse than that degenerate scion of a proud ancestry, who a-kneiping went with his lady friends in the Cincinnati fountain, after the opera, on a wager. He whipped a man who admitted he did not have a copy of the "Iliad" in his house; publicly destroyed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... Think me cold, Frosen and impotent, and so report me? That I had Nestor's hernia, thou wouldst think. I do degenerate, and abuse my nation, To play with opportunity thus long; I should have done the act, and then have parley'd. Yield, or I'll ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... building afforded visible proof of financial progress the Saskatchewan farmers were warned by the directors and the general manager of the "Co-Op" that co-operation which was allowed to degenerate into mere production of dividends would but reproduce in another form the evil it was intended to destroy. The ideal of service was the vital force which must be kept in mind and the work of the Grain Growers' Association in fostering ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... injury. And while the original purpose of this militant, even defiant, attitude is self-protection, those who are long compelled to maintain it conceive a contempt for the law, which they find inadequate to guard them, and not infrequently degenerate into bandits. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... these primitive human beings became tamed and civilized by the gods and heroes, who taught them to work in metals, to build houses, and other useful arts of civilization. But the human race became in the course of time so degenerate that the gods resolved to destroy all mankind by means of a flood; Deucalion {22} (son of Prometheus) and his wife Pyrrha, being, on account of their piety, the only ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... appropriated their military strength, robbed them of most of the fruits of their labour, and thus virtually enslaved them. Such was the origin of the great despotic empires of Oriental type. Such states degenerate rapidly in military strength. Their slavish populations, accustomed to be starved and beaten or massacred by the tax-gatherer, become unable to fight, so that great armies of them will flee before a handful of freemen, as in the case of the ancient Persians and the modern Egyptians. To strike ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... Nor'westers afterwards became as uproarious on that inspiring beverage as if they had all been drunk. There was this peculiarity, however, in their uproar, that it was reasonable, hearty, good-humoured; did not degenerate into shameful imbecility, or shameless impropriety, nor did it end in stupid incapacity. It subsided gradually into pleasant exhaustion, and terminated ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... cease to feel that they must exert themselves for each other in little matters. Knowing themselves accepted, they lounge—mentally, mannerly, and physically—when at home or elsewhere alone together. Some of this relaxation is a good thing, but it is a mistake to let home and spouse degenerate into nothing more than ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... winter were to continue unmitigated from year to year, without the genial influence of summer, the human race, as is apparent in polar regions and upland mountainous districts, would degenerate into dwarfishness. ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... good- looking, and I'm making a name for myself in the House; she'll be able to read all sorts of nice and horrid things about me in the papers at breakfast-time. I can be brilliantly amusing at times, and I understand the value of silence; there is no fear that I shall ever degenerate into that fearsome thing—a cheerful talkative husband. For a girl with money and social ambitions I should think I was ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... background. A picture of Spanish society does emerge from the dramas, indeed. It is a society in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty, in which the old titled families are generally degenerate and slothful, and the middle classes display admirable spiritual qualities, but are too often unthrifty and inefficient. Of the laboring classes, Galds has little to say. Bitter religious and political intolerance creates an atmosphere of hatred which a few exceptional characters strive ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... from the see (whose bounty to the just And needy is gone by, not through its fault, But his who fills it basely), he besought, No dispensation for commuted wrong, Nor the first vacant fortune, nor the tenth), That to God's paupers rightly appertain, But, 'gainst an erring and degenerate world, Licence to fight, in favour of that seed, From which the twice twelve cions gird thee round. Then, with sage doctrine and good will to help, Forth on his great apostleship he far'd, Like torrent bursting from a lofty vein; And, dashing 'gainst the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... his degree with no examination but that of his own college, both under the Laudian Statute and after the great statute of 1800, which set up the modern system of examinations. What the founder had intended as an encouragement for industry was made by his degenerate disciples ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... army or the navy, or by some communication with those who could give them good examples of accent and pronunciation. By their Lowland neighbours they would not willingly be taught; for they have long considered them as a mean and degenerate race. These prejudices are wearing fast away; but so much of them still remains, that when I asked a very learned minister in the islands, which they considered as their most savage clans: 'Those,' said he, 'that ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... which the town followed the lead of the younger man. My uncle, who was not born to be second to any one, retired instantly to St. Albans, and announced that he would make it the centre of fashion and of society, instead of degenerate London. It chanced, however, that the mayor and corporation waited upon him with an address of thanks for his good intentions towards the town, and that the burgesses, having ordered new coats from ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... at the expense of man is one of the most pernicious things in the world. The stunted man is a retrogression in the human race: he throws a shadow over all succeeding generations The tendencies and natural purpose of the individual science become degenerate, and science itself is finally shipwrecked: it has made progress, but has either no effect at all on life or else ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... a cripple, a degenerate, responsible for his actions, certainly, but a man in whom the doctors will find every form of wasting illness: disease of the spinal cord, tuberculosis, and ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... of our era, we hear of the Eunuch of the "Queen of the South[107]," or of Abyssinia, who was a Jew, and converted by Philip to Christianity. There is therefore no manner of difficulty in accounting for the presence of these corrupt degenerate black Jews, amongst ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... offering a large ransom if they be given up to him. How anxiously they listen for the reply! The king will not hear of it. The spirit of his father complains that he has been neglected; that his nation must have become degenerate; that they have ceased to conquer, since so few captives have been sent to bear him company in the world of shades. Again the strange white chief speaks, and offers higher bribes. Curious that he should take so much trouble about ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... affairs, he listened to the proud persuasions of his mother, to whom anything like commercial pursuits were abhorrent. Clarice d'Orsini's forbears had all been soldiers, Lorenzo's merchants, that made all the difference in Rome's degenerate days. ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... the true aspects of the world we live in,—these seem to us of first importance. After that, we prize next reasonable and reasoning goodness; for mere rule-of-thumb goodness, which comes by rote, and might so easily degenerate into formalism or superstition, has no honour among us, but rather the contrary. If any one were to say with us (after he had passed his first infancy) that he always did such and such a thing because he had been told it was right by his parents or teachers—still more because priests or fetich-men ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... and lasting impression upon my mind, and I began to think that my own partial indulgence in the practice of drinking so freely after dinner was an act of great weakness and folly, which, if not checked, was likely to degenerate into one of the ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt |
