"Indecency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... suggestion that the Act leaves too vague just what is indecent and that the word 'indecent' should be defined with precision. In the nature of things there are, however, very great difficulties in attempting such a definition. It is significant that no precise definition of indecency exists either in the principal Act or so far as we are aware in the legislation of ...
— Report of the Juvenile Delinquency Committee • Ronald Macmillan Algie
... his departure therefrom. To the serious grounds of complaint which had unquestionably been given were added numerous delinquencies of the most petty and trifling nature. It was stigmatized as "a great indecency" that Judge Willis had been seen in a dress "but little according with his situation."[113] In view of the interests involved, and of the grave nature of the questions to be decided, it seems ludicrous that the ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... English literature;" and of whose "brightness and felicity of genius there can be but one opinion," is disgraced, as the same writer tells us, by "a sceptical bias and great indifference of temperament;" and "has led the way" as an habitual offender, "to the indecency too characteristic ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... me? Because I drag his bedraggled name about with me is there no decent chance, no decent hope? Is there only indecency in prospect, if a man comes to care for a married woman? Can't a decent man love her at all? ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... once he hears the Voice of God, and all eternity cleaves the earth at his feet with a glare of truth. Once in her loathsome life, that woman, brazen with sin and shame, flaunting on the pavement, the scorn and jest of decency and indecency, the fearful index of corrupt society,—even she has her hour of softness, when the tiny grass that creeps out from the stones comes greenly into a spring sunshine, and as with a divine whisper recalls to her the time before she fell, the unburdened heart, the pure childish pleasures, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... reading.[11] I will be very frank—I believe it is so with all good books except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that gun-powder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only useful ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... children of the upper world could not even by chance give a thought to the sources whence their needs are supplied; speech on such a subject in their presence would be held indecent. In John Hewett's position, the indecency, the crime, would have been to keep silence and pretend that the needs of existence are ministered to as a ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... Sciras, and Timon, were conspicuous for the entire absence of restraint with which they treated serious subjects, as well as for a merry-andrew style of humour easily naturalised, if it were not already present, among the huge concourse of idlers who came to sate their appetite for indecency without altogether sacrificing the pretence of a dramatic spectacle. Two things marked off the Mimus from the Atellana or national farce; the players appeared without masks, [1] and women were allowed to act. This opened the gates to licentiousness. We find from Cicero that Mimae ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the theological method in sculpture, the literary dogma of the monks of that time; and this is the meaning and purpose of certain groups which even now shock the propriety of our methodistical purists. These unseemly subjects and images of indecency are very numerous at Saint Benoit on the Loire, in the cathedral of Reims, at le Mans, in the crypt at Bourges, everywhere in our churches; for in those where they do not occur, it is because the prudery which was most rife in the most immoral times, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... redden as at the hearing of some horrible indecency. He felt himself stripped naked, and he was hotly ashamed that Jennie should be associated with him in the exposure. And while he was raging inwardly, paying the penalty of his new-found place in the public eye—a publicity to which he was not yet hardened—he ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... laughed savagely as he thought of her gentility and the refinement with which she ate her food; she could not bear a coarse word, so far as her limited vocabulary reached she had a passion for euphemisms, and she scented indecency everywhere; she never spoke of trousers but referred to them as nether garments; she thought it slightly indelicate to blow her nose and did it in a deprecating way. She was dreadfully anaemic and suffered from the dyspepsia ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... heartless avarice of the parents. At present, no class of her Majesty's subjects cries so loud, and so vainly, to her motherly bosom, and the humanity of Parliament as these poor little children; their parents, the lowest and most degraded set of brutes in England, teach them swearing and indecency at home, and rob them of all decent education, and drive them to their death, in order to squeeze a few shillings out of their young lives; for what?—to waste in drink and debauchery. Count the public ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... the contrary, he was a man full of keen interests, of which they were only one, and, as far as I saw, an entirely subordinate one. He was a broad-minded man, who hated petty misconception or a narrow view of anything, and he would have been horrified at the prurient indecency with which the most private affairs of the Carlyles have been exposed and distorted to please a public which really has a higher moral tone than is possessed by those who ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... simply loathed it. It was horrible to have dust and splinters blown into that snug, homely room, whereas if I had been in a ruined barn I wouldn't have given the thing two thoughts. In the same way bombs dropping in central London seemed a grotesque indecency. I hated to see plump citizens with wild eyes, and nursemaids with scared children, and miserable women scuttling like rabbits in ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... Liberal League, who formed it to express their convictions, and who withdrew and formed a rival League when they found that the old organization had gone over to the defense of indecency, who gave to the League all the character it had, and who had great hopes at one time of destroying the influence of the preachers of the Gospel of Christ, and thereby ridding our country of that terrible pest called the Bible, have given ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... Tedaldi wrote a record of his losses and a confused account of money matters and broker business, which he sent to Michelangelo in 1540. The Leda remained at Fontainebleau till the reign of Louis XIII., when M. Desnoyers, Minister of State, ordered the picture to be destroyed because of its indecency. Pierre Mariette says that this order was not carried into effect; for the canvas, in a sadly mutilated state, reappeared some seven or eight years before his date of writing, and was seen by him. In spite of injuries, he could trace the hand of a great master; "and I confess that nothing I had seen ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... becomingnesses;' and seeing that dirt is proper to a swine, malice to a monkey, poison to a nettle, and folly to a fool, they called a nettle but a nettle, and the faults of fools but folly; and never saw the difference between ugliness and beauty absolute, decency and indecency absolute, glory or shame absolute, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... quote from a well known anthropologist. "There is nothing more difficult for us to realize, civilized as we are, than the mental state of the man far behind us in cultivation, as regards what we call par excellence 'morality.' It is not indecency; it is simply an animal absence of modesty. Acts which are undeniably quite natural, since they are the expression of a primordial need, essential to the duration of the species, but which a long ancestral and individual education has trained us to subject to a rigorous restraint, and ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... the offense I have given to the Court in the late Courant, relating to the fitting out of a ship by the government, and I truly acknowledge my inadvertency and folly therein in affronting the government, as also my indiscretion and indecency when before the Court; for all of which I intreat the Court's forgiveness, and pray for a discharge from the stone prison, where I am confined by order of the Court, and that I may have the liberty of the yard, being much indisposed, and suffering ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... Protestantism, its recognition of divorce and its indifference to a "thus saith the Lord," come forth as the defender of the Bible, the champion of the home and the guardian of the sacredness of marriage, concentrating all its thunders against the shame and indecency of divorce? ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... take special care not to follow their excellent example. That which is not fit to be uttered before women is not fit to be uttered at all; and it is next to a proclamation, tolerating drunkenness and indecency, to send women from the table the moment they have swallowed their food. The practice has been ascribed to a desire to leave them to themselves; but why should they be left to themselves? Their conversation is always the most ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... more courtesy in each of their fingers than most of the seniors had all put together, had to bow to a scandalous condition that made England's rule a laughing-stock within a stone's throw of the city limits. And they had to submit to the indecency of seeing a new, inexperienced arrival picked for the task of commanding a body of irregulars, for no other reason than because it was considered wise to make an ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... turn upon temperamental traits rather than on the judgment, or, at any rate, upon modes of judgment not clearly analyzable in consciousness. An openness of manner in the relations of the sexes is very charming, but a little more, and it is boldness, or, if it relates to bodily habits, indecency. A modest behavior is charming, but too much modesty is prudery. Under these circumstances, when the suggestive effect of bodily habits is realized, but the effect of a given bit of behavior cannot be clearly reckoned, and when, at ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... Religion." In other words, it is in a vein of anti-Puritanism, or even anti-Cromwellianism, quite as bitter as that of any of the contemporary Royalist writers, or as that of Butler and the post-Restoration wits, with a decided tendency also to indecency in ideas and expression, Of the more serious parts this is ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... that of a man who, "after that he had fallen into that frantic heresy, fell soon after into plain open frenzy besides." The man was confined in Bedlam, and when discharged went about disturbing public service in churches, and committing acts of great indecency. Devout, religious folk besought the Chancellor to restrain him, and accordingly, one day when he came wandering by Mores door, he caused him to be taken by the constables, bound to a tree in the street before the whole town, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 (48 and 49 Vict., c. 69). This section, which is sufficiently comprehensive, runs as follows: 'Any male person who in public or private commits or is a party to the commission, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person, of any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour.' The penalty is imprisonment for two years, with or without hard labour. It is provided by Section 4 of the same Act that a boy under sixteen ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... of an old father, unreasonable, despotic, but fondly loving, indecent in his own expressions of preference, and blind to the indecency of his appeal for protestations of fondness! Blank astonishment, anger, wounded love, contend within him; but for the moment he restrains ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... me. I felt as if I had suffered a kind of indecency. I got up and changed my place. My husband watched me with the look of a man who wanted to roar with laughter. It was the proud and insolent as well as passionate look of one who had never ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... great crowd, in a dusty hall, on a warm midsummer day, it is also a disgusting dance. Night is its only appropriate time. The blinding, dazzling gas-light throws a grateful glare over the salient points of its indecency, and blends the whole into a wild whirl that dizzies and dazes one; but the uncompromising afternoon, pouring in through manifold windows, tears away every illusion, and reveals the whole coarseness and commonness and all the repulsive details of this most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... of modesty is, "Restrained within due limits of propriety; free from indecency or lewdness; not excessive or extreme; moderate." A Christian's apparel should be modest in cut, that is, in the way it is made; it should cover the body as a modest person would cover it, not displaying ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... occurred. The captain broke loose upon the dead man like a thunderclap. Oaths rolled from his lips in a continuous stream. And they were not namby-pamby oaths, or mere expressions of indecency. Each word was a blasphemy, and there were many words. They crisped and crackled like electric sparks. I had never heard anything like it in my life, nor could I have conceived it possible. With a turn ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... was not only quite able to defend herself, but to give as good as she got. Peel, in a letter to Croker, says: 'Lady Morgan vows vengeance against you as the supposed author of the article in the Quarterly, in which her atheism, profanity, indecency, and ignorance are exposed. You are to be the hero of some novel of which she is about to be delivered. I hope she has not heard of your predilection for angling, and that she will not describe you as she describes one of her heroes, as "seated in his piscatory corner, intent on the destruction ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... This work is, for Chesterton, Thackeray's 'most difficult task.' It is difficult for the reason that the situation of the tale is placed between possibilities of grace and possibilities even of indecency. It is not hard to write a graceful tale, it is easy to write a loose story; it is extremely difficult to write a story that may by a stroke of the pen be either beautiful or merely sordid. But Thackeray manipulates the keys of the tale so that 'it moves like music,' an extremely ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... subscription. The last quoted lines are probably a bark at some forgotten detraction, and if not actually ironical, doubtless about as sincere as Fielding's promise, in the Prologue to his first comedy, not to offend the ladies. Those who had found inelegancy and indecency in the previous productions of the painter, would still discover the same defects in the masterpiece he now submitted to the public. And although it may be said that the "characters" represented are not "personal" in a satirical sense, his precautions, as he himself tells us, "did ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... and cowardice of the proconsul. After this pretended parade of his prisoner through the streets of the town, Surenas called a meeting of the Seleucian senate, and indignantly denounced to them the indecency of the literature which he had found in the Roman tents. The charge, it is said, was true; but the Seleucians were not greatly impressed by the moral lesson read to them, when they remarked the train of concubines that had accompanied Surenas himself in the field, and thought ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... hostile party to assail this great prince's reputation during his life; but the joy which they and all his enemies in Europe showed at his death, is a proof of the terror in which they held him. Young as Esmond was, he was wise enough (and generous enough too, let it be said) to scorn that indecency of gratulation which broke out amongst the followers of King James in London, upon the death of this illustrious prince, this invincible warrior, this wise and moderate statesman. Loyalty to the exiled king's family was traditional, as has been said, in that house to which Mr. ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... magnificent, and most appalling. A man does not change as he crosses the threshold of the larger room. His personality remains the same, although the expression of it may be altered. Here we have material bodies in a material world—there, perhaps, ether bodies in an ether world. There is no indecency in reasonable speculation and curiosity about the life to come. One end of the thread is between our fingers, but we are haunted for the most part by ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... inclemency of the seasons. His garments were of the meanest kind, his beard neglected, his person filthy, his diet bordering on starvation. To the passers-by this ragged misanthrope indulged in contemptuous language, and offended them by the indecency of his gestures. Abandoned at last by every one except Diogenes of Sinope, he expired in extreme wretchedness. It had been a favourite doctrine with him that friendship and patriotism are altogether worthless; and in his last agony, Diogenes asking him whether he needed a friend, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... women. That is the way of simple candor and naturalness. Treat the sex question as you would any other question. Don't treat it reverently; don't treat it rakishly. Treat it naturally. Don't insult your intelligence and lower your moral tone by thinking about either the decency or the indecency of matters that are familiar, undeniable, and unchangeable facts of life. Don't look on woman as mere female, but as human being. Remember that she has a mind and a heart as well as a body. In a sentence, don't join in the prurient clamor of "purity" hypocrites ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... The corruption grew worse. Lower and meaner grafters rose to take the place of the earlier and more robust good fellows who trafficked in the city o' shame. Graft lost class, and lost caste. It was ultimately exposed in all its shocking indecency. The light and licentious town developed a conscience. Public indignation arose and reached its height, when the grafters ventured too far in the shooting of the attorney ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... of English sentimentalists, and he had that taint of insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment, like Goldsmith's, for example. Sterne, in life, was selfish, heartless, and untrue. A clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the indecency of his writings were a scandal to the Church, though his sermons were both witty and affecting. He enjoyed the titilation of his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent pathos that lies in the expression of dumb ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... might not, as he had heard was the case at other executions, "roll about the scaffold and be mangled and disfigured." "For I would not," he added, "though it may be but a trifling matter, that my remains should appear with any needless indecency after the just sentence of the law is satisfied." He spoke calmly and easily on all these particulars, nor did he even shrink when told that his head would be held up and exhibited to the multitude as that of a traitor. "He knew," he ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... "Whether it be the relation of cause and effect, or only what logicians call a "mere coincidence," the fact remains that in Rome, Russia, France, and England, political corruption, cruelty of government, sexual immorality—nay, downright, impudent, open, boastful indecency—have culminated, for the most part, in the eras of the influence of viragints on government or ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... and she pined away in the first freedom of her life. The very fact that deception was no longer necessary seemed to sweep her accustomed moorings from beneath her feet. She had lied so long that lying had become at last a second nature to her, and to her surprise she found almost an indecency in the aspect of the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... It became the book of the day, and passed through countless editions and endless commentaries; and yet it is agreed on all hands that there exists not another work, admitted as literature, that would bear a moment's comparison with it, for indecency, profanity, and repulsive and disgusting coarseness. His work is now a mere curiosity for ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... pass. Then SAGE, smelling obtrusively of cigarettes, interposed, and declared it "would be indecent" to accept the Clause without further discussion. Nothing House shrinks from just now more abjectly than from charge of indecency. Accordingly debate stood over, and Thursday may, if the SAGE and his Party please, and the Closure is not invoked, be appropriated for further discussion of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... one despair—I mean hope. What do I mean? That's the worst of music! I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes, yellow cakes, drink thin, sharp wine. Or an indecent story, now—I could relish that. The older one grows the more one likes indecency. Hah, hah! I'm laughing. What at? You said nothing, nor did the ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... compelled him to do as he did. But we are not all Peels. And there are plenty of workshops and offices and dinner-tables in our own city, where young men who would walk up to the cannon's mouth without flinching have not had Peel's courage to protest against indecency or to confess that they belonged to an evangelical church. If a church is only sufficiently unevangelical there is no trial of conscience or of courage in confessing that you belong to it. But as Shame so ably and honestly said, that type of religion that creates a tender conscience ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... libel on this play, which is noted for its novel and successful attempt to represent humour without indecency. Aristophanes here alludes to the prevailing custom of concluding every group of three tragedies with a play in which the chorus consisted of Satyrs: a custom which ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... exceeded even old Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility. "Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT IN THE PAPERS!" Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shudder. The ancestress had had to give in; but her concession was bought only by the promise that the wedding-breakfast should take place under her roof, though (as the Washington ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... begins so promptly, affecting the very prologue, that we could not present even that piece of writing entire in our extract. We are informed that the circulation in England of the works of Rabelais, in translation, has been interfered with by the English government, on the ground of their indecency. We are bound to admit, that, if any writings whatever were to be suppressed on that ground, the writings of Rabelais are certainly entitled to be of the number. It is safe to say that never, no, not even in the boundless license of the comedy of Aristophanes, was ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... not come quite near his confused and only half-intelligible jumble of indictments for indecent practices and crude philosophy of the moral and metaphysical kind. A vigorous line or phrase occasionally redeems the chaos of rant, fustian, indecency, ill-nature, and muddled thought. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... out—"Every member shall (at the annual meeting) deliver what he hath to say to the preses; and if two or more members attempt to speak at a time, the preses shall determine who shall speak first;" and "members guilty of indecency, or unruly, obstinate behaviour" are to be punished "by fine, suspension, or exclusion, according to the nature of the transgression." The Westminster Divines could not have ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... "in all your life have you ever once been in a crowd—formed part of it, I mean? Well, then, how can you tell? I have. There is plenty of indecency in a Jingalese crowd—especially indecent suggestion; and it is crowds the theaters ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... wanting in the respect they owe you, and in the consideration which is due to all sovereigns [French not famous for their refined demeanor in Saxony this time]. Why could not I fly to prevent such disorders, such indecency! I can only offer you a great deal of good-will; but I feel well that, in present circumstances, the thing wanted is effective results and reality. May I, Madam, be so happy as to render you some service! May your fortune be equal to your virtues! I am with ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... belonged to nobody and had done nothing—nothing even at Cambridge—had only the uncanny spell he had cast upon her younger daughter to recommend him; but if her younger daughter had a spark of filial feeling she wouldn't commit the indecency of deserting for his sake a deeply dependent and intensely ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... countenance with a lowering hostility. The indecency of anyone being cheerful at such a time struck him forcibly. He would have liked mankind to have preserved till further notice a hushed gloom. He glared at the ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... herself, yet she had an amazing faculty for looking knowing and indecent beyond words, rolling her eyes and pitching her eyebrows in a certain way—oh, it was quite sufficient for her companions! And yet, if they had ever actually demanded a dirty story or a really open indecency from her, she would ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... the French Canadians are simple, almost infantine, in their language, and as chaste in expression as the hymns of other countries. Impure songs originate in classes who know better, and revel from choice in musical slang and indecency. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... 27th the Marine Committee reported to Congress that "Captain Barry ought, within twenty days, make full acknowledgment to the Navy Board of having treated Mr. Hopkinson with indecency and disrespect." Nothing further appears on record, so it is presumed Captain Barry complied and the case closed. At this time Barry was, by order of the same Committee, actively at work destroying British supplies in the ...
— The Story of Commodore John Barry • Martin Griffin
... impossible; and the horrible brutalities of the passenger-ship are day after day repeated,—but on a larger scale. And yet this is a fair specimen. And for such hideous and necessarily demoralizing habitations,—for two rooms, stench, indecency, and gloom, the poor family pays—and the rich builder receives—"thirty-five per cent, annually on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... removing your name from these—ach!—these legacies of the Nineteenth century. You'll wind up the Warren Hotels' Company, and as to the two houses you've got here and at Roquebrune, you'll turn them now into decent places where no indecency is tolerated." ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... was not sustained by the Court, if it were questioned. He liked to recite his old triumphs. He especially plumed himself on his sagacity in dealing with one case which came before him. A complaint was made of a book well known at that time, the memoirs of a dissolute woman, which was full of indecency, but in which there could not be found a single, separate indecent sentence or word. The Major was at a loss for some time what to do in indicting it. If he set forth the whole book, it would give it an immortality on the records of the court which perhaps ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... Johnson said, very reasonably as it appears to us, that some of the satires of Juvenal are too gross for imitation. Mr. Croker, who, by the way, is angry with Johnson for defending Prior's tales against the charge of indecency, resents this aspersion on Juvenal, and indeed refuses to believe that the doctor can have said anything so absurd. "He probably said—some passages of them—for there are none of Juvenal's satires to which the same objection may be made as to one ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... that such enormity could be committed by any human being, at least by civilized men, and in the face of the injunctions of Moses to the Jews, to say nothing of the evident indecency of the act. The Jews still maintain their integrity to the observance of this command ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... faint voice beside him, "ye're ower particular, I'm thinking. And it would be a verra hungry shark that wad hae the indecency to eat such a puir chicken-hearted creature as yourself, ye miserable cur! Are ye no ashamed to be whining before ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... was he thus handicapped by his birth; he had for tutor that arch-scoundrel Dubois—the "grovelling insect" who rarely opened his mouth without uttering a blasphemy or indecency, and who initiated his charge, while still a boy, into every base form ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... that band play for here to-day? She has been dead and I so short a time!... Her little hands are hardly cold as yet; But they can show such cruel indecency As ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... avoided is indecency. We are not only to forbear the repeating of such words as would give an immediate affront to a lady of reputation, but the raising of any loose ideas tending to the offence of that modesty which, if a young woman hath ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... who strove to arouse in him some spontaneous opinion on human conduct. With enthusiasm and dramatic force, this instructor exhibited the career of Nero,—showed his list of crimes natural and unnatural, personal and political; his indecency, and cruelty, demanding what should be said of the monster. The student, spurred by questions, some-what fretfully responded, "He never ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... held unreservedly. In the "Persian Letters" it goes no farther than an elaborate apology for divorce, a scathing denunciation of celibacy, and a general licentiousness of tone. The later writings of Montesquieu are free from indecency. But it is noticeable of him, perhaps the most high-minded of the Philosophers, and of the rest of them, that while they constantly insist on the importance of virtue, they hardly rank chastity among the virtues.[Footnote: See the story of a Guebir who marries his sister, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... ceremonies. His character is pointedly defined by St. Evremond, as "a lover whom the Precieuse is to love without enjoyment, and to enjoy in good earnest her husband with aversion." The scene offered no indecency to such delicate minds, and much less the impassioned style which passed between les cheres, as they called themselves. Whatever offered an idea, of what their jargon denominated charnelle, was treason and exile. Years passed ere the hand of the elected maiden was kissed by its martyr. The ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... the organ in pieces, and committed a kind of sacrilegious devastation in the church; they burnt the service books in the market-place, filled the cathedral with musketeers, who behaved in it with as much indecency, as if it had been an alehouse; they forced the bishop out of his palace, and employed that in the same manner. These are the most material hardships which, according to the bishop's own account, happened to him, which ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... not believe, what no other man living believes, that Mr. Wilkes was punished for the indecency of his publications, or the impiety of his ransacked closet. If he had fallen in a common slaughter of libellers and blasphemers, I could well believe that nothing more was meant than was pretended. But when I see, that, for years together, full as impious, and ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... and eat it, if he might use so homespun a simile for a woman who had persistently lived for him and in him and then had made clear spaces about him by going away in the dignity of death. He wanted to breathe in the space she had left, and he also wanted to be spared the indecency of recognizing his relief. But Nan, studying the fire persistently, to allow his eyes all possible liberty of searching her face while she generously avoided his, was going on in what was evidently a preconceived task ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... facts are divulged by a corrupt boy, because his manner is irresistibly suggestive of uncleanness as well as of secrecy. Similarly when self-abuse is fallen into spontaneously by a boy who is otherwise clean, no sense of indecency attaches itself to the act. When, however, it is taught by an unclean boy, there is a feeling of defilement from the first. In boys under the age of puberty this feeling may overpower the temptation; in ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... career. He was assailed not only by Napoleon but by those whose fall had been his own rise; for Godoy was sent to Bayonne by Murat, and the old King and Queen hurried after their son in order to witness his humiliation. Ferdinand's parents attacked him with an indecency that astonished even Napoleon himself; but the Prince maintained his refusal until news arrived from Madrid which terrified him into submission. The irritation of the capital had culminated in an armed conflict between the populace and the French troops. On ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... plough; actual rebellion, fighting the good fight; and regicide, doing the great work of the Lord. This vocabulary became grievously unfashionable at the Reformation, and was at once swept away by the torrent of irreligion, blasphemy, and indecency, which were at that period deemed necessary to secure conversation against the imputation of disloyalty and fanaticism. The court of Cromwell, if lampoons can be believed, was not much less vicious than that of Charles II., but ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... horrid indecency of Miss Chudleigh's habit at the Ranelagh Masquerade some five years back, when Mrs Montagu, observing her, said: "Here is Iphigenia for the sacrifice, but so naked the high priest may inspect the entrails of the victim ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... brusque and rough as to jut up a very sizable cliff. This is the loveliest thing in Marathon: sunlight and shadow break and angle in cubist magnificence among the oddly veined knobs and prisms of brown stone. Yet this cliff or quarry is by common consent taboo among us. It is our indelicacy, our indecency. Such "residences" as are near modestly turn their kitchens toward it. Only the blacksmith and the gas tanks are hardy enough to face this nakedness of Mother Earth—they, and excellent Pat Lemon, Marathon's humblest and blackest citizen, ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... That is a further question, and admitting, as we must, the possibility of such a state, there seems to be no reason why the life of wisdom should not exist in this neutral state, which is, moreover, the state of the gods, who cannot, without indecency, be supposed to feel either ...
— Philebus • Plato
... 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 ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... century was not long in, the Regent Philip of Orleans had not long been in power, before France showed that Versailles had ceased to control her literature. A new Rabelais with an 18th century lisp, Montesquieu, by seasoning his Lettres Persanes with a sauce piquante compounded of indecency and style, succeeded in making the public swallow some incendiary morsels. The King of France, he declared, drew his power from the vanity of his subjects, while the Pope was "an old idol to whom incense is offered from sheer habit"; nothing stronger ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... opposed to the ministerial policy in America, Franklin had shown himself anxious to maintain the tie between Great Britain and her colonies. This attack upon his character made him one of England's enemies, and, as it proved, one of the most dangerous of them. His conduct is not palliated by the indecency of his opponents. It has been urged in his defence that, as Whately had shown the letters to certain English politicians, it was fair that Boston politicians should also see them, that as agent he was bound to do ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... injustice he saw practiced on shore had always turned him with a sense of relief to the cleansing challenge of the sea; always, brought in contact with cunning and self-seeking men and heartless schemes, with women cheapened by a conviction of the indecency of life, he was in a state of hot indignation. From all this Taou Yuen offered a ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... to acquire, a good knowledge of Greek. Like Petrarch, he was assisted largely by the Popes, and took service at the papal court. But his views of life and morality were coloured by Paganism rather than by Christianity. Many of his minor poems are steeped in indecency and immorality, and reflect only too clearly the tendency to treachery and deceit so characteristic of the Italian rulers of his day; while the /Decameron/, his greatest work, is more like the production of a Pagan writer than of ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... detain it, in spite of the struggles it should use, and the various shapes into which it might be transformed. The redemption of the abstracted person was then to become complete. The minister, a sensible man, argued with his parishioner upon the indecency and absurdity of what was proposed, and dismissed him. Next Sunday, the banns being for the first time proclaimed betwixt the widower and his new bride, his former wife, very naturally, took the opportunity of the following night to make him another visit, yet more terrific than the former. ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... seen little of the idolatry of India; and that little, though excessively absurd, is not characterised by atrocity or indecency. There is nothing of the sort at Ootacamund. I have not, during the last six weeks, witnessed a single circumstance from which you would have inferred that this was a heathen country. The bulk of the natives ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... mixture of all sexes, ages, and conditions; the confusion of costumes and rags beside uniforms, old men beside young; even children, some carried in their mothers' arms, others holding their father's hand or his garments; common prostitutes, their silken dresses soiled and torn, indecency on their brow, and insult on their lips, hundreds of women of the lowest description, and from the dregs of the people, recruited to swell the cortege, and excite commiseration from the garrets of the faubourgs, clothed in tattered finery, pale, emaciated, their ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... certain Mysteries of a given tribe, and that Baiame is spoken of as the hero of this ballet, no more deprives the Australian moral and religious teaching (at the Mysteries) of sacred value, than the stupid indecency whereby Baubo made Demeter laugh destroys the sacredness of the Eleusinia, on which Pindar, Sophocles and Cicero eloquently dwell. If the Australian mystae, at the most solemn moment of their lives, are shown a dull or dirty ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... child," I interrupted. "In society you are scarcely respectable unless you go about half naked at night; but to do so in the daytime would be the grossest indecency. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... were not in any marked degree ruled or moulded by the influence of that religious literature with which they helped to furnish the world. They were neither better nor worse than the average British workman; but they certainly cursed a good deal, and a stiffish breeze of indecency blew ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... offspring of Mummius"; Sicilians, "Look at Claudius"; the Epirots, "Look at Appius"; Asiatics, "There's Lucius"; Iberians, "There's Publius"; Carthaginians, "There's Africanus"; Romans, "There they all are". Such was the expiation that the emperor chose to offer for his own indecency. ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... carrion and lock him up!" said De Launay, calmly. "I accuse him of public indecency, spreading scandal and criminal slander. He has said that I, the General de Launay, was kicked out of the army for unmentioned crimes. I will prefer charges against ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... delights. In defiance of 'Mrs. Grundy' he ventured to maintain that the words 'music-hall' and 'public-house', rightly understood, should be held in honour. It is one thing to hate drunkenness and indecency; it is quite another to assume that these must be found in the poor man's place of recreation, and this roused him to anger. To him 'public-house' meant a place of fellowship, and 'music-hall' a place of song ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... already observed, go stark naked, and seem to have no more sense of indecency in discovering the whole body, than we have in discovering our hands and face. Their principal ornament is the bone which they thrust through the cartilage that divides the nostrils from each other: What perversion of taste could make them think this a decoration, or what could prompt them, before ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... most engaging feature of a topic which pure chance and impure idiocy have of late conspired to pull about in the public prints,—I mean the question of "indecency" in writing,—is the patent ease with which this topic may be disposed of. Since time's beginning, every age has had its literary taboos, selecting certain things—more or less arbitrarily, but usually some natural function—as the things which must ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell
... circumstances, provoked neither jeers nor pity. No one cared how the next man felt or looked. Colonel D'Hubert himself hardened to exposure, suffered mainly in his self-respect from the lamentable indecency of his costume. A thoughtless person may think that with a whole host of inanimate bodies bestrewing the path of retreat there could not have been much difficulty in supplying the deficiency. But the great majority of these ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... was of a very similar character, but freer in point of form. It renounced the use of masks and reached, it would seem, an even greater pitch of indecency than the Atellan. The subjects of a few mimes are known to us. Among the most popular were the Phasma or Ghost[87] and the Laureolus[888] of Catullus, a writer of the reign of Caligula. In the latter play was represented the death by crucifixion of the famous brigand 'Laureolus'; so degraded ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... was made, effectually stopped short his hopes in this direction. A letter of his was found, written to a nun with whom he had been intimate, whom he loved, and by whom he was passionately loved. It was a tissue of filthiness and stark indecency, enough to make the most abandoned tremble. The pleasures, the regrets, the desires, the hopes of this precious pair, were all expressed in the boldest language, and with the utmost licence. I believe that so many abominations are not uttered ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... and permitted it to be written in the clearest terms. And, therefore, though there are passages in the "Inferno" which it would be impossible for any poet now to write, I look upon it as all the more perfect for them. For there can be no question but that one characteristic of excessive vice is indecency, a general baseness in its thoughts and acts concerning the body,[40] and that the full portraiture of it cannot be given without marking, and that in the strongest lines, this tendency to corporeal degradation; which, in the time of Dante, could be done frankly, but cannot now. And, therefore, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... that it was up to them to take the opportunity of testifying, of severing any connection that might yet exist in any one's mind between them and the other products of their parents. They did so, with the uncompromising decision proper to their years, and with, perhaps, the touch of indecency, regardlessness of the proprieties, which was characteristic of them. Their friends soon discovered that they need not guard their tongues in speaking of Potterism before the Potter twins. The way the twins put it was, 'Our family is responsible for more than ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... shades of the character; there can be little doubt that Hall was in his own private contemplation as shining an object of moral perfection as he portrayed himself before others. His perversity was of the spirit, not of the letter, and thus escaped his own recognition. His indecency and falsehood were in his soul, but not in his consciousness; so that he paraded them at the very moment that he was claiming for himself all that was their opposite. No one who knew him took him seriously, but admired the ability of his performance, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... selfishness described in the preceding pages, this voluntary yielding by man of the place of honor and of the right of the strongest, is little less than a miracle; it is the grandest triumph of civilization. Yet there are viragoes who have had the indecency to call gallantry an "insult to woman." There is indeed a kind of gallantry—the Ovidian—which is an insult to women; but true masculine gallantry is woman's chief glory and conquest, indicating the transformation of the savage's scorn for ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... traditional Anglo-Saxon lines. Anybody who knows no more of Japan than may be gathered from the pages of LAFCADIO HEARN will at least have learned that her youth is taught to regard the love-interest of an ordinary English novel as an indecency; and so will recognise the improbability of the romantic element in the play. Still, all that is of little consequence, for there must have been very few who went to His Majesty's to improve their acquaintance ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... company, of the avarice with which the late Duke of Marlborough had been charged, some examples whereof being given, the Lord Bolingbroke was appealed to (who, having been in the opposite party, might perhaps, without the imputation of indecency, have been allowed to clear up that matter): "He was so great a man," replied his lordship, "that I have forgot ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... from an anonymous Christian in the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette. He protests against the "grotesque indecency of such a scheme," and stigmatises Marlowe as "a disreputable scamp, who lived a scandalous life and died a disgraceful death." That Marlowe was "a scamp" we have on the authority of those who denounced his scepticism and held him up as a frightful ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... not instinctively compare it with the compliment this mountain farmer paid his wife that day. I never hear the love of a man for his wife misnamed by the new disillusioned thinkers of our times that I do not recall the charming testimony of this husband against the injustice and indecency of ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... to know how low Art may sink when materialism triumphs and vulgarises and degrades? Then see that exhibition of French pictures that was placed in Bond Street some years ago, which attracted those who loved indecency more than those who loved the beautiful, and then you will understand how Art perishes where the breath of the ideal does not inspire and keep alive. And Theosophy to the artist would bring back ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... require no further explanation, in order to be satisfied as to the moral of this play: but is it not a very bitter satire upon the country, which calls itself the politest nation in the world, that the incidents, the indecency, the coarse blasphemy, and the vulgar wit of this piece, should find admirers among the public, and procure reputation for the author? Could not the Government, which has re-established, in a manner, the theatrical censorship, and forbids or alters plays ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Lady Mallowe was a woman not in the least distressed or hampered by shades of delicacy and scruple, she surely was astute enough to realize that even this bounder's dullness might be awakened to realize that there was more than a touch of obvious indecency in bringing the girl to the house of the man she had tragically loved, and manoeuvering to work her into it as the wife of the man who, monstrously unfit as he was, had taken his place. Captain Palliser knew well ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... after the Restoration, the influence of French standards in literature is obvious. The drama declined, partly from the earlier antagonism of the Puritans, and partly from the rage for indecency which infected the dramatic writers,—even those of much ability, as Congreve,—and defiled the stage. The Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan (1628-88) is written in a plain, unaffected style, and is the most popular work of that age. In ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... seemed interminable. At last we arrived at No. 7. At my ring the door swung open drawn by the concierge within. I helped Paragot out of the carriage. He made a desperate effort to stand and walk steadily. Heaven knows how he managed to clamber with not too great indecency up the stairs to the Comte de Verneuil's flat on the first floor. Joanna opened the door with her latch key and we entered ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke |
