"Obscene" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... constant risk of falling, that gives a barbaric picturesqueness to the panorama of what is called fashionable society in America. The chief character of that society is to be found in its shameless self-assertion, its almost obscene display of its importance and of the shadowy privileges and acceptances on which that importance is based. It is assertive for the simple reason that, immediately it ceased to be assertive, it would cease to exist. Structurally, ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... and men cursed, and all the dogs in the parish fell a-barking furiously. Even in bed one could not be secure. Once or twice some wild cry in the night—a woman's scream, a man's volley of oaths—has drawn me hurrying to my window in dread that outrage was afoot; and often the sounds of obscene singing from the road, where men were blundering homewards late from the public-houses in the town, have startled me out of my first sleep. Then, besides the distresses brought upon the people by their ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... over the country by the printing presses. Such Noels seem to have been written by clerks or recognized poets, either for old airs or for specially composed music. "To a great extent," says Mr. Gregory Smith, "they anticipate the spirit which stimulated the Reformers to turn the popular and often obscene songs into good and ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... him from his wife, from his children, from all those whose conversation makes life dear to him; cast him on the ends of the earth; let him there fall amongst reprobates who are the last stain and disgrace of our common nature; give him those obscene-mouthed monsters for his constant companions and consolers; let the daily vision of their progress from infamy to infamy, until the demon that inspires them has exhausted invention and the powers of nature together, be his only example; house him, at night, in a bark hut on ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... indulging in the indecorous language I heard at these places, would, by a very summary process, have met with ejectment, without ceremony. Here, however, a laxity of moral feeling prevails, that stifles all sense of propriety; and scurrility, obscene language, and filthy jests, of which the coloured population are, I suppose, per force of habit, the principal butts, form the chief attractions of such places of resort to ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... wax, Inhuman, hushed, ghastly with Painted Eyes), I wandered; and no living soul Was nearer than the pay-box; and I stared Upon them staring—staring. Till at last, Three sets of rafters from the streets, I strayed upon a mildewed, rat-run room, With the two Dancers, horrible and obscene, Guarding the door: and there, in a bedroom-set, Behind a fence of faded crimson cords, With an aspect of frills And dimities and dishonoured privacy That made you hanker and hesitate to look, A Woman with her litter of Babes—all slain, All in ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... strange dusk clouds of steam that went up from the herd were scores of turkey buzzards, their obscene heads bent downward, their sodden eyes gleaming with expectancy. Well they knew that many a gorgeous feast awaited them wherever boulder, tree or swamp lay in the path of the mighty herd. At last the face of the prairie ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... Sandy—all the world knew the story of his life, his struggle, his fall; all the world could see upon his blotched and bloated face the outer sign of his inner lusts; and what deeper humiliation can there be than for all one's world to know how brutish and obscene one may be in the bottom of one's heart? What deeper shame may any man suffer than to have his neighbors read upon his blasted front the stamp and seal of all, all his heart's lust, set there not only as a warning and a lesson, not only a visible proof how deep below the ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... fixed boots of the car 40 That give the feet a stay against the strength Of the Henetian horses, and around His body flung the rein, and urged their speed Along the rocks and shingles at the shore, When from the gaping wave a monster flung His obscene body in the coursers' path. These, mad with terror, as the sea-bull sprawled Wallowing about their feet, lost care of him That reared them; and the master-chariot-pole Snapping beneath their plunges like a reed, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... below for holding the injunctions of the Prophet so cheap. His house was the seat of revelry; the noise of singing and tambours was heard there from night till morning. He kept men dancers and women dancers; and was the protector of every Luti,[64] however impudent and obscene he might be. But with all this, he did not in the least relax in the severities of his office; and one might frequently hear, amid the sounds of revelry, the cries and groans of some unfortunate ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... been, by some friend, closed and bolted. Its stout oaken panels were soon dashed in, and the door driven from its hinges. A crowd of miserable women, abandoned to the lowest depths of degradation and vulgarity, rushed into the apartment, assailing her ears with the most obscene and loathsome epithets the language could afford. The queen stood in the recess of a window, with queenly pride curbing her mortal apprehension. A few friends had gathered around her, and placed a table before her as a partial protection. ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... I call singing the bloody gospil. The man that wrote that ballad was no slouch,' cried out George Leese, alias 'Snatchem,' one of the worst scoundrels in New York, who is now in the saving path of grace. As a beastly, obscene ruffian, 'Snatchem' never had his equal in America, according to his own account. The writer has seen this fellow at prize fights, with a couple of revolvers in his belt, engaged in the disgusting ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... in a secret club with him and Sir Fulke Greville in 1587. The date is incorrect, but the intimacy is confirmed by Bruno's dedication to the English poet of two of his works, the one being entitled Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfaute, a book which is admittedly blasphemous and obscene, where it is not so obscure as to be unintelligible, the other the no less ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... except with his comrades: if, like him, all are internes, they can communicate to each other only their ignorance. If day-scholars are admitted, they are active smugglers or willing agents who bring into the house and circulate forbidden books and obscene journals, along with the filthy provocative and foul atmosphere of the streets.—Now, with excitement of this kind or in this manner, the brains of these captives, as puberty comes on and deliverance draws near, work actively and we know in what sense[6359] and in what counter-sense, how remote ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... look up, an object attracted my attention. Against the sky I distinguished the outlines of a large bird. I knew it to be the obscene bird of the plains, the buzzard vulture. Whence had it come? Who knows? Far beyond the reach of human eye it had seen or scented the slaughtered antelopes, and on broad, silent wing was now descending to the ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... of Saint-Etienne the revelation of love, the life of womanhood, came from the hand of genius through one sweet book. To any other mind the book would have offered no danger; to her it was worse in its effects than an obscene tale. Corruption is relative. There are chaste and virgin natures which a single thought corrupts, doing all the more harm because no thought of the duty ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... this Lady appears in the Boxes the grave part of the fair Sex are seen to put their Fans before their Faces; and are heard to whisper one another— Lud what an indecent Sight Miss Giggle's Neck is— It is really quite obscene! I wonder somebody does not tell her of it, then the Men, they are all in a high Grin; and the Smarts are frequently heard to roar out— O Gad— they are ravishingly White, and smooth ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... orgie of serfs and boors, sharing by night the sacrament of love, by day the sacrament of death. The violent Sabbath-round is no more the one only dance of the evening. Thereto are now added the Moorish dances, lively or languishing, but always amorous and obscene, in which girls dressed up for the purpose, like La Murgui or La Lisalda, feigned and showed off the most provoking characters. Among the Basques these dances formed, we are told, the invincible charm which sent the whole world of women, wives, daughters, widows—the ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... British women, with their knuckled hands, their splayed feet. Their abominable dressing, too, a bust and a brooch and a hooped skirt—their grocers' conventions, prudish, almost obscene, avoiding of the natural in word, deed, or thought.... He wanted Fenzile, with her eyes, vert de mer, her full childish face, her slim hands with the orange-tinted finger nails, her silken trousers, her little slippers of silver and blue.... Her soft arms, her back-thrown ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... Being, the creator of themselves and the universe. This word is LACHA, which with them is the corporeal chastity of the females; we say corporeal chastity, for no other do they hold in the slightest esteem; it is lawful amongst them, nay praiseworthy, to be obscene in look, gesture, and discourse, to be accessories to vice, and to stand by and laugh at the worst abominations of the Busne, provided their LACHA YE TRUPOS, or corporeal chastity, remains unblemished. The Gypsy child, from her earliest years, is told by her strange mother, that a good Calli need ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... along it nimbly as an ape, and dived. The monster, her eyes fixed upon the two remaining in the tree, never noticed his escape. Mawg swam the creek, thrust his way through the grass-stems, darted back to snatch up his club, shook it at Grom, and, yelling an obscene taunt, raced off to seek himself ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... newspaper, so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a scullery door-mat, should be able to publish those same writings side by side, cheek by jowl, with the coarsest and most obscene companions with which they must become connected, in course of time, in people's minds? Is it tolerable that besides being robbed and rifled an author should be forced to appear in any form, in any vulgar dress, in any atrocious company; that he should ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... into a vicious and idiotic senility, she, always a sincere Catholic in spite of her romantic marriage with the Arian Ataulfus, seems to have been forced into a horrible intimacy with him; at least we know that he obliged her to receive his obscene kisses, even in public, to the scandal and perhaps the amusement of that corrupt society. And then suddenly her brother's dreadful love seems to have turned to hate and she is a fugitive again with her two children at the court of her nephew Theodosius II. at Constantinople. In the very year of ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... weeds each pile surround, And things obscene bestrew the ground; Skulls, bones, in mouldering fragments lie, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... filthy, calumnious, vermin-infested wretches, spewed up from perdition, whose joy it is to write letters with fictitious signatures. Sometimes they take the shape of a valentine, the fourteenth of February being a great outlet for this obscene spawn. If your nose be long, or your limbs slender, or your waist thick around, they will be pictorially presented. Sometimes they take the form of a delicate threat that if you do not thus or so there will be a funeral at your house, yourself the chief object of interest. Sometimes they will ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... mentioned Lemaitre's habit of drinking himself into a state of intoxication every night. This habit, and the obscene language that the man seemed to revel in when in such a condition, was so disgusting to me that not the least-prized advantage afforded by my convalescence was the ability to remain on deck until the nightly saturnalia was at an end and Lemaitre and his companion had retired ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... hardly repeat them for laughing, always make Mr. Bracebridge look grave, he having a great antipathy to an indecent jest. In a word, the general is a complete instance of the declension in gay life, by which a young man of pleasure is apt to cool down into an obscene old gentleman. ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... year made a curious discovery, that in a province of this kingdom, not fifty miles from its capital, a sort of devotion is still paid to Priapus, the obscene divinity of the ancients (though under another denomination), I have thought it a circumstance worth recording; particularly as it offers a fresh proof of the similitude of the Popish and Pagan religion, so well observed by Dr. Middleton in his celebrated Letter from Rome; therefore ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... leader of a sect, and whose doctrines of art five or six faithful disciples spread while copying his waistcoats and even imitating his manner of speaking with closed teeth, is reduced to writing stories for obscene journals. "Chose," the fiery revolutionist, had obtained a good place; and the modest "Machin," a man hardly noticed in the clubs, had published two exquisite ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Sex affects the very root of all human life. Its activities are not obscene, but Nature's own means to certain legitimate ends. The sex functions, when properly controlled and led into the proper channels, are a most essential and legitimate form of physical self-expression. ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... found his son in the middle of the night in a resort of gamblers and sharpers, carrying all before him with his cue, in the full flush of triumph, and a great heap of five-franc pieces before him, you may conceive with what wrath the proud, hasty, passionate man drove out, cane in hand, the obscene associates, flinging after them the son's ill-gotten gains; and with what resentful humiliation the son was compelled to follow the father home. Then Roland took the boy to England, but not to the old Tower; that hearth ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... singers of those Carnival songs,—cruel satires most often, of which the local meaning is unintelligible to those unacquainted with the incident inspiring the improvisation,—of which the words are too often coarse or obscene,—whose burdens will be caught up and re-echoed through all the burghs of the island. Vile as may be the motive, the satire, the malice, these chants are preserved for generations by the singular beauty of the airs; and the ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... up to the scorn of church members for accepting advertisements which the publishers knew and which he proved to be not only fraudulent, but actually harmful. He called the United States Post Office authorities to account for accepting and distributing obscene circular matter. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... you would be infinitely more revolted if, instead of trampling them under their feet, the animals insisted on wearing them in their snouts. So Pilkington rootling in Miss Harden's affairs; Pilkington posing as Miss Harden's adviser; Pilkington adorning his obscene conversation with Miss Harden's name, was to Rickman an infinitely more abominable beast than Pilkington behaving according to his nature. But to quarrel with Pilkington on this head would have provoked the vulgarest of comments, and for Miss ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... descanting on the merits of some particular animal; but she can do much more; she is a prophetess, though she believes not in prophecy; she is a physician, though she will not taste her own philters; she is a procuress, though she is not to be procured; she is a singer of obscene songs, though she will suffer no obscene hands to touch her; and though no one is more tenacious of the little she possesses, she is a cutpurse and a shoplifter whenever opportunity shall offer. . . . Observe, for example, the ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... understandable drama. He had always been on the verge of realizing before, he realized now, the two entirely different and antagonistic strands that interweave in the twisted rope of contemporary religion; the old strand of the priest, the fetishistic element of the blood sacrifice and the obscene rite, the element of ritual and tradition, of the cult, the caste, the consecrated tribe; and interwoven with this so closely as to be scarcely separable in any existing religion was the new strand, the religion of the prophets, the unidolatrous universal worship of the ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... For us to live together any longer would be an obscene joke. Let's end it while we still have some sanity and ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... naked savages of Nicobar and Andaman; of Ceylon, the Isle of Gems, with its Sacred Mountain and its Tomb of Adam; of India the Great, not as a dreamland of Alexandrian fables, but as a country seen and partially explored, with its virtuous Brahmans, its obscene ascetics, its diamonds and the strange tales of their acquisition, its sea-beds of pearl and its powerful sun; the first in modern times to give any distinct account of the secluded Christian Empire of Abyssinia, to speak, though ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... denying it expression, nor by reducing it to the plane of the purely physiological. Sexual experience, to be of contributory value, must be integrated and assimilated. Asceticism defeats its own purpose because it develops the obsession of licentious and obscene thoughts, the victim alternating between temporary victory over "sin" and the remorse of defeat. But the seeker of purely physical pleasure, the libertine or the average sensualist, is no less a pathological case, living as one-sided and unbalanced a life as the ascetic, for his conduct is likewise ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... make a soul slothful or dissatisfied in her vocation, in which God expects to be glorified by her. Being discovered and repulsed by the young novice, he varied his method of attack, and annoyed him night and day with filthy thoughts and obscene imaginations. Antony opposed to his assaults the strictest watchfulness over his senses, austere fasts, humility, and prayer, till Satan, appearing in a visible form, first of a woman coming to seduce him, then of ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... there came to him some premonition of the future, some half-revealed, half-blurred picture of prophecy. Perhaps that picture was one of himself, lying in the darkness on the roof of the railway carriage, and an obscene Boolba standing erect in a motor-car on the darkened station, waving his rage, ere the ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... consciousness and glories in its strength. He obtains from the explosion an immense feeling of relief; and so too with the other great natural passions which our religious or social morality keeps in check. Even the saints have known these revenges of natural instincts too violently denied. Thoughts of obscene words and gestures came unasked to torment the pure soul of Catherine of Siena.[68] St. Teresa complained that the devil sometimes sent her so offensive a spirit of bad temper that she could eat people up.[69] Games and sport of a combative or destructive kind provide an innocent outlet for a ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... one thing that it said—that all good things are one thing. There is no conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and a comic-opera tune played by Mildred Wain. But there is everlasting conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and the obscene pomposity of the hired mute: and there is everlasting conflict between the comic-opera tune and any mean or vulgar words to which it may be set. These, which man hath joined together, God shall most ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... affirmed that the English were drunkards and had tails; the sons of France proud, effeminate and carefully adorned like women. They said that the Germans were furious and obscene at their feasts; the Normans vain and boastful; the Poitevins traitors and always adventurers. The Burgundians they considered vulgar and stupid. The Bretons were reputed to be fickle and changeable, and were often reproached for the death of ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... not as it did to the fabled hero of old, by contact with the earth, but by communing with heaven. The bark of the wolf, the snarl of the hyena, may be heard in the debate which the Government have encouraged in the House of Commons on the Church. Philistia rejoices. Let the movers in this obscene tumult look to themselves. Have they the confidence of the people even as the Church has that confidence? Let them put it to the test. I tell you, George Holland, the desert and the ditch, whose vomit those men are who now move against us in ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... pious Father Wilson himself from their girdles? To the vigilant eye of Puritanism was he not alike discernible in the light wantonness of the May-pole revellers, beating time with the cloven foot to the vain music of obscene dances, and in the silent, hat-canopied gatherings of the Quakers, "the most melancholy of the sects," as Dr. Moore calls them? Perilous and glorious was it, under these circumstances, for such men as Mather and Stoughton to gird ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... on girls began crying out in the carriage next us, and I could hear the words of obscene songs when the train stopped at ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... where the shining sink had grown a gray, rough skin, a sort of fungoid coat, from the grease that clung to it, and the gas stove, furred with rust, skulked like some obscene monster in its corner. He was afraid, morally and physically afraid, to look at that thing of infamy behind the back door. He tried to pretend ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... head lifted away from the rock, and then turned to one side as its body, somehow vaguely obscene in its resemblance to the human form, fell away, ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... little while that he might witness a novel entertainment. He was taken to a garden where a number of young girls, selected for their extraordinary beauty and entirely nude, executed in his presence the most obscene dances. It was two churchmen that are said to have provided the boy-king with this infamous diversion—Cardinal Charles of Bourbon and Cardinal Louis ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... more, in her visions, she walked the streets, wearily measuring the dark, empty blocks, footsore, into the smaller hours of the night; slyly, insinuatingly, pathetically offering herself—all she possessed—to the hovering beasts of prey. And even these rejected her, with gibes, with obscene jests that sprang to her lips and brought a shudder to those ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a strange republic. Fanatical, where the Bible is burned in the public plaza whenever introduced, yet, where the most obscene prints are publicly offered for sale in the stores. Where it is a "mortal sin" to listen to the Protestant missionary, and not a sin to break the whole Decalogue. Backward—where the villagers are tied to a post and whipped by the priest when they ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... hardness of wood, and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man—these influences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... carpeted with human bones, among which, battered and defaced, lay village gods of wood and stone. Some, covered with obscene totemic figures and designs, were carved from solid tree trunks forty or fifty feet in length. He noted the absence of the shark and turtle gods, so common among the shore villages, and was amazed at the constant recurrence ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... said were the Eatooas of several deceased chiefs, whose names they recounted. The place was full of whattas, on which lay the remains of their offerings. They likewise give a place in their houses to many ludicrous and some obscene idols, like the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... obstruction, he did not discover it by word or feature. He went on humming a tune without words as he worked, handing out biscuits and ham to the hungry crew. Jim had eaten his breakfast already, and was smoking a cigarette at his ease. Now and then he addressed somebody in obscene jocularity. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... hung the shadow of great trouble. They were aware, and it seemed to them purposely suffered to be aware, that they were about to be tried for their lives upon monstrous and obscene charges; namely, that they had consorted with a dim and awful creature called the Enemy of Mankind, whom, it was supposed, human beings had power to call to their counsel and assistance. To them who knew well that ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... obscene songs were sung, in form of litany, from the pulpits and altars; what was done with the communion-vessels, when they were not worth stealing,"—is hideous to the religious sense, and shall not ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... challenge," answered Penn, "to all men, women and children upon earth, justly to accuse me with ever having seen me drunk, heard me swear, utter a curse, or speak one obscene word (much less that I ever made it my practice). I speak this to God's glory, that has ever preserved me from the power of those pollutions, and that from a child begot an hatred in ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... English, and, though no one feeds them, these domesticated tigerkins swarm. The only happy pets are the parrots. Every village swarms with hogs, the filthy wealth of the old Saxon proprietor, and their habits are disgusting as their forms are obscene. Every Anglo-Indian will ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... was at the club, and surrounded by a host of the most abandoned profligates he joined in the ribaldry and obscene jests with a zeal that betrayed the utter depravity of his habits, and also shewed that he had taken a headlong plunge into the vortex and must soon become a hopeless wreck. And yet a short time ago, so fair to look upon, Hubert Tracy had been ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... latter pursuit was his principal amusement, His purity of heart and propriety of language were extreme, and deserve the greater mention from the contrast which they afforded to the morals and manners by which he was surrounded. He would neither permit an oath nor an obscene expression to be uttered in his presence, and never failed to rebuke any violation of his pleasure in this respect. He was passionately attached to dogs, and conversed with them, according to a contemporaneous historian, in a peculiar language;[192] but as regarded his kingly duties he was ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... whole scene there is an obscene play upon (a) word which means in Greek both 'sow' and ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... piece with the rest of his life experiences; there had been hopes, and wonderful dreams, but very few realizations. Peter knew a lot about such matters; in the orphan asylum there were few vicious practices which he did not witness, few obscene imaginings with which he was not made familiar. Also, Pericles Priam had been a man like the traditional sailor, with a girl in every port; and generally in these towns and villages there had been no place for Peter to go save where Pericles went, ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... of this violation of children's souls one can hardly bear to look; for here we find pious fraud masking the violation of the body by obscene cruelty. Any parent or school teacher who takes a secret and abominable delight in torture is allowed to lay traps into which every child must fall, and then beat it to his or her heart's content. ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... little girl carrying as tenderly a large wax doll. A diamond necklace sparkled like a circlet of fire around the lady's neck. Her husband had gone to the south side, and she had had but time to snatch this and her children. A crowd of obscene and profane rowdies stood just behind them, and with brutal jest and coarse laughter they passed around a whiskey-bottle. One of these roughs caught a glimpse of the diamond necklace, and was putting forth his blackened hand to grasp it, when Dennis ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... the lightning-bugs and glowworms of many kinds are the same as in North America; that the beetle, or elator, when placed upon its back, snaps itself up in the air and falls upon its feet, as our species does; that the obscene fungus, or Phallus, taints the tropical forests, as a similar species at times taints our dooryards and pasture-borders; and that the mud-dauber wasps stuff their clay cells with half-dead spiders for their young, just as in North America. Of course there ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... that particular course, and in a manner of its own accord—and then falling with all its heat directly into that one particular place, and no other—was a real judgment upon Phutatorius for that filthy and obscene treatise de Concubinis retinendis, which Phutatorius had published about twenty years ago—and was that identical week going to give the ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... marvellous feat. Most of them used the frank vocabulary of the humble home, as alone synonymous with Truth. Never before had such words invaded the sacrosanct pages of American letters. Little they recked, as Mr. Lee Clavering, who took the entire school as an obscene joke, pointed out, that they were but taking the shortest cut—advantage of the post-war license affecting all classes—to save themselves the exhausting effort of acquiring a ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... first disaster. Then you get the upper body exploiting the lower body. You get the hands exploiting the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and in masturbation. You get a pornographic longing with regard to the self. You get the obscene post cards which most youths possess. You get the absolute lust for dirty stories, which so many men have. And you get various mild sex perversions, such as ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... to gloat over homicide was in that miserable creature in the studio, the potential Jacobin; in that confounded buyer of agricultural produce, the punctual employe of Hernandez Brothers, the jealous wretch with an obscene tongue and an imagination of the same kind to drive him mad. I thought of him without pity but also without contempt. I reflected that there were no means of sending a warning to Dona Rita in Tolosa; for of course no postal communication existed with the Headquarters. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... sort of alarm occurred, and in consequence, this evening, the head cooly gave his orders to his men in the following terms: "Watch to-night well." Nobody answering him, he continued, "Do you hear what I say?" Then addressed himself to them in the most obscene terms, which habit and uncivilized life seem to have adapted to common conversation amongst these people without any breach of modesty or decorum; and amongst the Assamese such expressions likewise form not an ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... power remained in the hands of the multitude, constitute the first of these; and it goes by the name of the old comedy. In those pieces no person whatever was spared. Though they were so modelled and represented as to deserve the name of regular comedy they were obscene, scurrilous, and defamatory. In them the most abominable falsehoods were fearlessly charged upon men and women of all conditions and characters; not under fictitious names, nor by innuendo, but directly and with ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... and demure looks, had consulted divines about the state of their souls, now surrounded the midnight table where, amidst the bounding of champagne corks, a drunken prince, enthroned between Dubois and Madame de Parabere, hiccoughed out atheistical arguments and obscene jests. The early part of the reign of Lewis the Fourteenth had been a time of licence; but the most dissolute men of that generation would have blushed at the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... what blasphemies obscene, What eager movements urge each threatening mien! Present the spectacle of human kind, Devoid of feeling—destitute of mind; With ev'ry dreadful passion rous'd to flame, All sense of justice ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... his career by writing a satirical sonnet against indulgences, and was compelled to fly from his native place and wander through Italy. At Rome he found a temporary resting-place, where he was employed by Popes Leo X. and Clement VII. Then he wrote sixteen gross sonnets on the sixteen obscene pictures of Giulio Romano [Footnote: These were published under the title of La corona de i cazzi, cio, sonetti lussuriosi del Pietro Aretino. Stamp. senza Luogo ne anno, in-16. The engravings in this edition, the work of Marc ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... would I had in my best part Fit rooms for Thee! or that my heart Were so clean as Thy manger was! But I am all filth, and obscene: Yet, if Thou wilt, ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... more recent acts excluding objectionable commodities from interstate commerce are the laws forbidding the importation of like commodities from abroad. This power Congress has exercised since 1842. In that year it forbade the importation of obscene literature or pictures from abroad.[476] Six years later it passed an act "to prevent the importation of spurious and adulterated drugs" and to provide a system of inspection to make the prohibition effective.[477] Such legislation guarding against the importation of noxiously ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... the most Celebrated of your Plays? as the City Politicks, the Lady Mayoress, and the Old Lawyers Wife, who goes with a Man she never saw before, and comes out again the joyfull'st Woman alive, for having made her Husband a Cuckold with such Dexterity, and yet I see nothing unnatural nor obscene: 'tis proper for the Characters. So in that lucky Play of the London Cuckolds, not to recite Particulars. And in that good Comedy of Sir Courtly Nice, the Taylor to the young Lady—in the fam'd Sir Fopling Dorimont and ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier, and the anathema maranatha of every fawning dean. In every high place worship was paid to Charles and James—Belial and Moloch,—and England propitiated those obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and bravest children. Crime succeeded to crime and disgrace to disgrace, until the race, accursed of God and man, was a second time driven forth to wander on the face of the earth, and to be a byword and a ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... cried, "who have failed to understand your own symbols. To use plain language, then, where is Susan? She is the lamb that was entrusted to your keeping, and that you suffered the obscene bird to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the bottom of anything. In biography he gives us the characteristic rather than the character. Here he never faces the real issue. It is all defence, apology, ingenuity; but he defends far too much. He admits there are obscene rites; there had been human sacrifices; but the gods cannot have ordained them; daemons, who stole the names of gods, imposed these on men—not the gods; men practised them to avert the anger of daemons. The gods are good. Waiving the fact that he had not much evidence ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... contains besides an English transcript of Ovid's "Arte Amandis" and some amatory poems.[g] The date of the Petyt text may be about.... It is written in a miscellaneous, folio, commonplace-book, and in the catalogue it is described as "an obscene poem, entitled 'The Choosing of Valentines,' by Thomas Nash. The first 17 lines are printed at p. lx. of the Preface to vol i. of Mr. Grosart's edition of Nash's works, as if they formed ...
— The Choise of Valentines - Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo • Thomas Nash
... can't tell 'ee," answered Nicky-Nan after a painful effort at guessing. "It couldn' be for obscene language; nor ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... which was printed by Messrs. Hansard, it was stated, that amongst other books in use by the prisoners, one published by John Joseph Stockdale, in 1827, was of the most disgusting nature, the plates being obscene and indecent in the extreme. In 1836, Stockdale brought an action against Messrs. Hansard for the sale of this report, on the ground that the allegation therein contained about the work was a libel. The defendants pleaded two picas: first, "Not guilty;" ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... prodigieuse et tenebreuse orgie; C'est Final, mais Final vaincu, tombe, fletri; C'est un chant dans lequel semble se tordre un cri; Un gouffre ou les lueurs de l'enfer sont voisines Du rayonnement calme et joyeux des cuisines; Le triomphe de l'ombre, obscene, effronte, cru; Le souper de Satan dans un ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... is (so he would say) obscene,—'t is the word Virgil writes of dogs wallowing in the mud and mire,—to depict murderers, whoreson men-at arms, fighting-men, conquering heroes and plundering thieves, wreaking their foul and wicked will, yea! and poor devils licking the dust and swallowing the same in great mouthfuls, ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... the fever, but not from the impression. It left him with a prevailing sense of horror and, at first, with a sense of disgust too. "It's a damned obscene country," he would say. But he stayed in it, for he had no choice. All the money which he could save went to the support of his family, and for six years the firm he served moved him from district to district, ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... torrent of foul words fell from her lips. She abused Mavis; she reviled the man; she accused the two of sin, the while she made use of obscene, filthy phrases, which caused Mavis to put her hands ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds; the story therefore had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... whiplashing woman's tongue. Finally he spoke, in English. He called Dor a puddle-snake. That wasn't all of what he said, by any means; the name was preceded by several adjectives and followed by an obscene command. Dor ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... of a minister, of pure life and unquestioned standing, for sending obscene literature through the mail. The sole charge was the publication of an earnest and chastely worded article on marital purity; but the real cause was supposed to be his severe criticism of the Society for the Prevention of Vice nearly a year afterward. If these facts are verifiable this is a ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... coarseness of nature herself. But Beaumont and Fletcher's pages are corrupt. Even their chaste women are immodest in language and thought. They use not merely that frankness of speech which was a fashion of the times, but a profusion of obscene imagery which could not proceed from a pure mind. Chastity with them is rather a bodily accident than a virtue of the heart, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... sticks and rubbish at the mountebank, some caught him by the legs and strove to pull him from the place. He, on the other hand, manfully maintained his ground, hurling back every missile, struggling with his assailants, and continuing the while to pour forth a malignant and obscene discourse. At last a young sailor, warm in the Catholic Faith, and impulsive as mariners are prone to be, ascended the pulpit from behind, sprang upon the mechanic, and flung him headlong down the steps. The preacher grappled with his enemy as he fell, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... growing fast. Germinie did not notice it: in her eyes he was still the child he had always been. From habit she always stooped to kiss him. One day she was summoned before the abbe who was at the head of the school. He spoke to her of expelling Jupillon. Obscene books had been found in his possession. Germinie, trembling at the thought of the blows that awaited the child at his mother's hands, prayed and begged and implored; she succeeded at last in inducing the abbe to forgive the culprit. When she went ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... when to crown the work he goes, Gods! What a stink salutes his nose! Where are the honest toilers? Where The gravid mistress of their care? A busy scene, indeed, he sees, But not a sign or sound of bees. Worms of the riper grave unhid By any kindly coffin lid, Obscene and shameless to the light, Seethe in insatiate appetite, Through putrid offal; while above The hissing blow-fly seeks his love, Whose offspring, supping where they supt, ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... merging away from carnal to gelatinous substance, and here there is an abundance of instances or reports of instances. These data are so improper they're obscene to the science of today, but we shall see that science, before it became so rigorous, was not so prudish. Chladni was not, and Greg ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... consequently prevent a thousand vicious or profane discourses, as well as actions; neither would men of understanding complain, that a clergyman was a constraint upon the company, because they could not speak blasphemy, or obscene jests before him. While the people are so jealous of the clergy's ambition, as to abhor all thoughts of the return of ecclesiastic discipline among them, I do not see any other method left for men of that function to take, in order to reform the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... Chia Chen with still more vehemence, and shouted in a boisterous manner. "I want to go," he cried, "to the family Ancestral Temple and mourn my old master. Who would have ever imagined that he would leave behind such vile creatures of descendants as you all, day after day indulging in obscene and incestuous practices, 'in scraping of the ashes' and in philandering with brothers-in-law. I know all about your doings; the best thing is to hide one's stump of an arm in one's sleeve!" (wash one's ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... were prosecuting Wilkes for a libel, the Lords also continued the prosecution. Wilkes, in conjunction with Potter, a dissipated son of Archbishop Potter, during some of their bacchanalian revels, had written a blasphemous and obscene poem, after the model of Pope's Essay on Man, called An Essay on Woman. The satire was not published, but a few copies of it were printed privately for the authors. Lord Sandwich had contrived to secure a copy of it, and read ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... asleep at his side in a night-cap. Every one who knows Keene's work can imagine how the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against the mother-in-law; abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom with shambling side-long legs ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... palmetto-tops admitted but a shaft of light here and there. The flies, which had been a nuisance across the stream, here swarmed in myriads so thick that they seemed to hang in clusters from the boughs; and their incessant buzzing added to the horror of the place a hint of something foul, sinister, almost obscene. ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... shunned the society of professed thieves; in his golden youth he had scorned to shelter him in the flash kens, which were the natural harbours of pickpockets. But now, says his biographer, he began to seek evil company, and, the victim of his own fame, found safety only in obscene concealment. ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... bulwarks would like to have been able to get rid of his enemy the sun for a moment, was probable enough. His companions, sitting on the combings of the main-hatch, or crouched in careless fashion on the shady side of the barricade, were laughing and talking, with blasphemous and obscene merriment hideous to contemplate; but he, with cap pulled over his brows, and hands thrust into the pockets of his coarse grey garments, held aloof from ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... should produce. It was at the period when Greece was led captive and Asia made tributary to the Republic, fast verging itself to slavery and ruin, that a multitude of Syrian captives, bigoted to the worship of their obscene Ashtaroth, and the unworthy successors of Socrates and Zeno, found there a precarious subsistence by administering, under the name of freedmen, to the vices and vanities of the great. These wretched men were skilled to plead, with a superficial but plausible set of sophisms, in favour of that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... sorcerers.— I abhor flies,—to see them stare upon me Out of their little faces of gibbous eyes; To feel the dry cool skin of their bodies alight Perching upon my lips!—O yea, a dream, A dream of impious obscene Satan, this Monstrous frenzy of life, the Indian being! And there are men in the dream! What men are they? I've heard, naught relishes their brains so much As to tie down a man and tease his flesh Infamously, until a hundred pains Hound the desiring life out of his body, Filling his nerves ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... arm himself with a machete, said machete not being one of his normal and accustomed weapons, and did loiter in wait on the front steps of the Legislative Assembly Building in the city of New Austin, Continent of Sam Houston, and did approach the decedent, addressing him in abusive, obscene, and indecent language, and did set upon and attack him with the machete aforesaid, causing the said decedent, ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... reputation. The discovery of the hidden depths of iniquity in the reformer's youthful productions it was reserved for the same prurient imaginations to make that afterward fancied that they had detected obscene allusions in the most innocent lines of the Huguenot psalter. At the age of forty-two years, Beza, after having successively discharged with great ability the functions of professor of Greek in the Academie of Lausanne, and of professor of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... who is the lady singing," said Carminow with sudden stiffness, "she is Miss Grey, who has the room above this. She is a young lady about whom I think even you would not make your obscene jokes if you ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... have not learned from England are foolish thoughts; what words they have not learned from England, unseemly words; the vile among them not being able even to be humorous parrots, but only obscene mocking-birds." ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... the finest humanity of our race has been enduring Promethean agonies. But even as Prometheus unflinchingly bore the cruelties of pain, of heat and of cold, of hunger and of thirst, and the tortures inflicted by an obscene bird of prey, so have endured the men of our nation and of those nations with whom we are proud to be allied. Much more remote than they seemed one little year ago, now seem the old stories of sunny Greece. But if we have studied the strange ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... of the Archbishop of Paris has been sacked, and every object in it demolished. —— told me that the ribaldry and coarse jests of the mob on this occasion were disgusting beyond measure; and that they ceased not to utter the most obscene falsehoods, while they wreaked their vengeance on the property of this venerable prelate, against whom they can bring no charge, except the suspicion of jesuitical principles, and of having encouraged the ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... that. A nightmare in which all of Earth stood helpless, unable to resist or flee, while the obscene shapes slithered and flopped over all her green fields and fair cities. And the awakening had not brought the reassurance that it had all been a bad dream. That if it had happened in reality, the people of Earth would have been capable of dealing with the terrible ...
— The Mightiest Man • Patrick Fahy
... country flooded with obscene pictures and immodest representations which corrupt our youths? If the agents of Satan employ means so vile for a bad end; if they are cunning enough to pour through the senses into the hearts of the unwary the insidious poison of sin, by placing before them lascivious portraits, in God's ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... post]; as were also those relating to Natural History; which latter were sold by auction without his Eminence's name: but it is a gross error in the Bibl. Krohn, p. 259, no. 3466, to say that many of these books were impious and obscene. These are scarce and dear volumes; and as they supply some deficiencies [Transcriber's Note: missing 'in'] Audiffredi's account of books published at Rome in the xvth century [vid. p. 62, ante], the bibliographer should ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... explain the name, I must here digress into a chapter of the history of manners in the nineteenth century, very well worth commemoration for its own sake. In some of the studios at that date, the hazing of new pupils was both barbarous and obscene. Two incidents, following one on the heels of the other tended to produce an advance in civilization by the means (as so commonly happens) of a passing appeal to savage standards. The first was the arrival of a little gentleman from Armenia. He had a fez upon his head and (what nobody counted on) ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... comes back, I'll interduce you to him." The soldiers yawped applause. In the midst of the uproar, Juno, the house servant, ventured to come in by way of the library, with Harman. The child ran to his mother where she stood in the centre of the room. A saucy corporal broke out with obscene speech and plucked at the dress of the negro ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... fat black men in clean linen waiting for interviews. They are bankers, shopkeepers, and landholders, who have only come to "pay their respects," with ever so little a petition as a corollary. The chuprassie-vultures hover about them. Each of these obscene fowls has received a gratification from each of the clean fat men; else the clean fat men would not be in the verandah. This import tax is a wholesome restraint upon the excessive visiting tendencies of wealthy men of colour. ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... he picked up the thing. There were horrible woodcuts in it, coloured with liberal splashes of red and blue and yellow, and the print contained matter more lurid still. Vice mopped and mowed and slavered, obscene and hideous, within those ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... men's ears. The tyrannous Star-chambers, branding-irons, chimerical Kings and Surplices at All-hallowtide, they are gone, or with immense velocity going. Oliver's works do follow him!—The works of a man, bury them under what guano-mountains and obscene owl-droppings you will, do not perish, cannot perish. What of Heroism, what of Eternal Light was in a Man and his Life, is with very great exactness added to the Eternities; remains forever a new ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... libel,[db] And on the honour of—Oh God! my wife, The nearest, dearest part of all men's honour, Left a base slur to pass from mouth to mouth 160 Of loose mechanics, with all coarse foul comments, And villainous jests, and blasphemies obscene; While sneering nobles, in more polished guise, Whispered the tale, and smiled upon the lie Which made me look like them—a courteous wittol, Patient—aye—proud, it ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... for I often heard her walking her chamber long after she had retired for the night. Indeed, they made such an uproar, that it was difficult to sleep till they were gone. Sometimes, after they had broken up, I heard them talking on the piazza; and their oaths and obscene jests were shocking to hear; yet if I met any of them the next day, they appeared like courtly gentlemen. When they were intoxicated, niggers and Abolitionists seemed always to haunt their imaginations. I remember one ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... wonderful cavern, and when at length they emerged into daylight once more they found that already a whole army of vultures had gathered about the carcass of the strange monstrous beast, and were busily engaged in devouring the malodorous flesh. The trio made a wide circuit so as not to disturb the obscene birds at their disgusting banquet, and in due time found their way back again to their camp, where, after a hearty meal, they set to work in earnest upon the construction ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... aristocrats rendered them delirious with rage. They crowded all the avenues to the Tuileries, burst through the gates and over the walls, dashed down the doors and stove in the windows, and, with obscene ribaldry, rioted through all the apartments sacred to royalty. They thrust the dirty red cap of Jacobinism upon the head of the King. They poured into the ear of the humiliated queen the most revolting and loathsome ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... the general conversation of adults, this sacred temple is treated as a common sewer, too filthy to be spoken of, and that the books which contain even the most necessary descriptions of it are liable to be condemned as "obscene" in the law courts.[189] It is vain for the physician to explain to young men and women the subtle and terrible nature of venereal poisons, to declare the right and the duty of both partners in marriage to know, authoritatively ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... at the expense of Mackintosh. He would say ridiculous things about him to the natives, and Mackintosh, his knowledge of Samoan still imperfect, would see their unrestrained mirth when Walker had made an obscene reference to ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... any opinion out of the applauded way. That thinks certainly all Spaniards and Jesuits very villains, and is still cursing the pope and Spinola. One that thinks the gravest cassock the best scholar; and the best cloaths the finest man. That is taken only with broad and obscene wit, and hisses any thing too deep for him. That cries, Chaucer for his money above all our English poets, because the voice has gone so, and he has read none. That is much ravished with such a nobleman's courtesy, and would venture his life for him, because he put off his hat. One ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... a mind overwrought. I had not slept and had scarcely tasted food for more than thirty hours; for, following up a faint clue supplied by Burke, Slattin's man, and, like his master, an ex-officer of New York Police, my friend, Nayland Smith, on the previous evening had set out in quest of some obscene den where the man called Shen-Yan—former keeper of an opium-shop—was now ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Elizabethan drama, remarks that "there were no female actors, and the grossness which startles us in words which fall from a woman's lips took a different color when every woman's part was acted by a boy."[3] Why, in the name of all moral sense, should it be less dreadful that gross and obscene passages should be uttered at a public spectacle by young and unformed boys than by adult women, who at least would have the safeguard of mature knowledge and instincts to teach them their full loathsomeness? Do we really think that boys are born less pure than girls? Does the mother, when her ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... a visit, but I must enter a loud, a screeching protest against the Arab brutes—the schieks being the very worst of the brutes—who have these monuments in their hands. Their numbers, the filthiness of their dress—or one might almost say no dress—their stench, their obscene indecency, their clattering noise, their rapacity, exercised without a moment's intercession; their abuse, as in this wise: "Very bad English-man; dam bad; dam, dam, dam! Him want to take all him money to the grave; but no, no, no! Devil hab him, and money too!" This, be it remembered, from a ferocious, ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... is our evening sacrifice begun, When evil demons, lurid as the clouds That gather round the dying orb of day, Cluster in hideous troops, obscene and dread, About our altars, casting far and near Terrific shadows, while the sacred fire Sheds a pale lustre o'er ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... comments. In reading many of these chapters we wonder that an expurgated edition of these books was not issued long ago. We trust the volume we propose to issue may suggest to the next Revising Committee of gentlemen the propriety of omitting many texts that are gross and obscene, especially if the Bible is to be ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... recount them at length to Christophe; for hours she would try to recollect some detail that she had forgotten; she never spared him one; absurdities piled one on the other, strange marriages, deaths, dressmakers' prices, burlesque, and sometimes, obscene things. He had to listen to her and give her his advice. Often she would be for a whole day under the obsession of her inept fancies. She would find life ill-ordered, she would see things and people rawly and overwhelm Christophe with ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... are printed without any approbation or privilege. Many are exposed on stalls, which are very improper for the public eye. One of these was called the Private Life of the Queen, in two volumes, with obscene prints. The book itself is contemptible and disgusting, and might as well have been called the Woman of Pleasure. Of books of this sort I saw above thirty, with plates. Another was on a subject not fit even to ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... such serious affair to negotiate with him; but what may very safely be turn'd upon thy trust. It is in the general behalf of this fair society here that I am to speak; at least the more judicious part of it: which seems much distasted with the immodest and obscene writing of many in their plays. Besides, they could wish your poets would leave to be promoters of other men's jests, and to way-lay all the stale apothegms, or old books they can hear of, in print or otherwise, to farce their scenes withal. ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... real test of greatness is purity and justice, then Chinese myth must be placed among the greatest of all; for it is not obscene, and it ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... and some wise and simple reasoning, the Italian prevailed. Together, without objection from the captain of the yard, with many unavailing protests from Richling, who would now do it alone, and with Ristofalo smiling like a Chinaman at the obscene ribaldry of the spectators in the yard, they scrubbed the cell. Then came the tank. They had to stand in it with the water up to their knees, and rub its sides with brickbats. Richling fell down twice in the water, to the uproarious delight of the ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... glimpse of a barmaid at an upper window interested him pleasantly for a moment.) And the Redcliffe Arms was the true gate to the stucco and areas of Redcliffe Gardens. He looked down into the areas and saw therein the furtive existence of squalor behind barred windows. All the obscene apparatus of London life was there. And as he raised his eyes to the drawing-room and bedroom stories he found no relief. His eyes could discover nothing that was not mean, ugly, frowzy, and unimaginative. He pictured the heavy, gloomy, lethargic life within. The slatternly servants ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... they sent up shrill wordless calls to their fellows who were still in the fields, which were immediately answered. She realised that any minute the woods would be full of lads whom the sight of her would change to obscene creatures, and that being consolidated in this undisturbed place they would say and do things that would hurt her so much that they would hurt her child. There was nothing for it but to leave the cover of the wood and cross the waste space and walk down ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... persons about him pointed at the object in his hand and their merriment increased as he dropped it and it went rolling among their feet. They danced about it with gestures grotesque and attitudes obscene and indescribable. They struck it with their feet, urging it about the room from wall to wall; pushed and overthrew one another in their struggles to kick it; cursed and screamed and sang snatches of ribald songs as ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... hospital, through sombre squalid streets, past narrow courts in which innumerable children tumbled and yelled, disturbed and desolated her. It appeared that she had entered the secret breeding-quarter of the immense city, the obscene district where misery teemed and generated, and where the revolting fecundity of nature was proved amid surroundings of horror and despair. And the hospital itself was the very centre, the innermost temple of all this ceaseless parturition. In a corner of the hall, near a door, waited ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... invaded the rooms of the king and queen. They struck at him with pikes, and forced upon his head the red bonnet of the Jacobins, while the most wretched of her sex encircled the queen with a living wall of vice, and loaded her with obscene execrations, charges, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... scientist replied stonily, "but, unlike you, I am not a fool. These walls, this very atmosphere, are fields of force that will transmit no rays directed by you. You weak-minded scion of a depraved and obscene house—arrogant, overbearing, rapacious, ignorant—your brain is too feeble to realize that you are clutching at the Universe hundreds of years before the time has come. You by your overweening pride and folly have doomed our beloved planet—the ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... is more chaste than other languages; for my own part I think it more obscene; for it seems to me that the purity of a language does not consist in avoiding coarse expressions but in having none. Indeed, if we are to avoid them, they must be in our thoughts, and there is no language in which ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... of Christianity was chiefly based upon the argument from the fulfilment of prophecy. All apologists undertook to show that the heathen calumnies against the Christians were false, that the heathen religions were replete with obscene tales of the gods, and that the worship of idols ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... the king, as was plain by the offices they were in about him; for one of them was appointed to be his butler, another of them got his supper ready for him, and the third put him into bed, and lay down by him. Now Alexander had prevailed with these men, by large gifts, to let him use them after an obscene manner; which, when it was told to the king, they were tortured, and found guilty, and presently confessed the criminal conversation he had with them. They also discovered the promises by which they were induced so to do, and how they were deluded by Alexander, who had told them that they ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... were resolved to judge for themselves, and would not suffer the town to be imposed upon by scribblers. In the pit, they exerted themselves with great spirit and vivacity; called out for the tunes of obscene songs, talked loudly at intervals of Shakespeare and Jonson, played on their catcalls a short prelude of terrour, clamoured vehemently for a prologue, and clapped with great dexterity at the first ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... great general nor a great statesman, he is a gentleman. I am therefore surprised that he allows obscene caricatures of the Empress to be publicly sold in the streets and exhibited in the kiosks. During the time that she occupied the throne in this most scandal-loving town, no scandal was ever whispered against her. She was fond, it is true, of dress, but she was a good mother and a good wife. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... watching a posse of citizens in wrathful pursuit of one of those theatrical managers who are big brothers to the trembling crones that totter up to you on the Boulevard des Italiens and try to sell you a few obscene postal-cards. But most American playwrights would feel a genuine apprehension lest such a posse, confused in its values and its mission, might then turn and lock up Eugene O'Neill because of the rough talk that lends veracity to "The Hairy Ape" or because of the steady scrutiny which has ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... thought. He laboured at it all his life, and his mental qualifications enabled him to keep pace with the public desires in all their branches. The age was frivolous, and he excelled in fugitive pieces; it was libertine, and he had obscene verses at command; the esprits forts had a leaning to incredulity, and he put himself at the head of the movement, and made use of it to turn into ridicule all that men had been most accustomed to revere. Gifted with extraordinary powers of raillery and sarcasm, he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... the hell Of his bewildered phantasy saw fiends In actual vision, a foul throng grotesque Of all horrific shapes and forms obscene, Crowd in broad day before his open eyes. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... we could by constructing fearfully wicked, obscene and insulting parodies on these, and by singing them with irritating effusiveness in the hearing of the guards who were ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... of nonsense that he had thought about the immaculacy of the flesh? The world in general found his theories ridiculous or obscene. The world might be right. After all, the majority is not necessarily wrong. Jamie's illness interfered like a blank space between his present self and the old one, with its strenuous ideals of a purity of body which vulgar ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... Hitaishi refers also to the Durga festival, in which the weird and often horrible and obscene rites of Skakti worship not infrequently play a ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... indignation, the glittering steel slumbered uneasily and showed its half-drawn menace from the subtle lines of poets and essayists who have been carrying weapons these twenty years; their souls thirsted for an opportunity to rescue fair Liberty from the obscene rout who had her in durance for their purposes, and to hail her accession to a lawful throne with the rich gifts of knowledge, use, and beauty, a homage that only free minds can pay, and only when freedom claims it. We do not forget the literary activity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... shock an eighteenth century Frenchman they must have been exceptionally bad; but the customs of the New Orleans men were entirely too unprincipled for Berquin-Duvallon and various other French investigators. "Not far from the taverns are obscene bawdy houses and dirty smoking houses where the father on one side, and the son on the other go, openly and without embarassment as well as without shame, ... to revel and dance indiscriminately and for whole nights with a lot of men and women of saffron color ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... tribes for which it was written. To this, our guest counters with the remark that if this be a parable of manners and morals, then, from what he observes on the earth, we, Earthlings, have certainly outgrown the need for such coarse and obscene statements made some 2000 years ago; and that on Mars, although the inhabitants are not blessed with such divine revelations, common sense and reason have taught their most primitive men the same lessons in morality while they were ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... an hour he recounted how a Monsieur Gendrin, designer, had deceived the vigilance of his porter, Rue Saint-Honore. Monsieur Gendrin had committed infamies worthy of Marat,—obscene drawings at which the police winked. This Gendrin, a profoundly immoral artist, had brought in women of bad lives, and made the staircase intolerable,—conduct worthy of a man who made caricatures of the government. And why ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... his hornpipe. Silent are the "yarns" with which he used to while away the time when off his watch and huddling under the lee of the capstan with his messmates. And then, when he comes ashore, it is only to be devoured by the sharks that lie in wait for him and drag him away bodily to their obscene "boarding-house" dens. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 1, Saturday, April 2, 1870 • Various
... terrific upheaval. France and England particularly are the prey of the Demon of Realism,—and all the writers who SHOULD use their pens to inspire and elevate the people, assist in degrading them. When their books are not obscene, they are blasphemous. Russia, too, joins in the cry of Realism!—Realism! ... Let us have the filth of the gutters, the scourgings of dustholes, the corruption of graves, the odors of malaria, the howlings of drunkards, the revellings ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... steam-harrows, and their premium sows; Let all in bulky majesty appear, Roll the dull eye, and yawn th' unmeaning cheer. Ye veteran Swiss, of senatorial wars, Who glory in your well-earned sticks and stars; Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons; Ye smug defaulters; ye obscene buffoons; Come all, of every race and size and form, Corruption's children, brethren of the worm; From those gigantic monsters who devour The pay of half a squadron in an hour, To those foul reptiles, doomed to ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... at the recollection of the poissardes, or rather furies, who wore white aprons, which they screamed out were intended to receive the bowels of Marie Antoinette, and that they would make cockades of them, mixing the most obscene expressions with ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... loved by the decorous and the sober. But from the low and rude evidences of vice around her she was saved by her misfortune. And at that hour the streets were quiet and silent, nor was her youthful ear shocked by the sounds which too often broke along the obscene and obscure haunts she patiently ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... appear in due time," replied the aged one. "In the meanwhile I have her message to declare. Three times foiled in his malignant scheme the now obscene Ming-shu sets all the Axioms at naught. Distrusting you and those about your path, it is his sinister intention to call up for judgment Kai-moo, who lies within the women's ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... of it all the trenches are now sometimes half full of water, for the summer rains, which have held back for so long, are beginning to fall. The stenches are so bad from rotting carcases and obscene droppings that an already weakened stomach becomes so rebellious that it is hard to swallow any ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... usually given these innocent Creatures, which in some Measure is owing to their being plac'd in Rooms next the Street, where, to the great Offence of chaste and tender Ears, they learn Ribaldry, obscene Songs, and immodest Expressions from Passengers and idle People, and also to cry Fish and Card-matches, with other useless Parts of Learning to Birds who have rich Friends, she has fitted up proper and neat Apartments ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele |
