"Debasing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... echoed back from that lovely panorama of stone and water, all flavour of human frailty has been taken out of it. There is, indeed, something wholly chastening and dephlogisticating in the scene, something which makes the joys and tumults of the flesh seem trivial and debasing. A man must be fed, of course, to yield himself to the suggestion, for hunger is frankly a brute; but once he has yielded he departs forthwith from his gorged carcass and flaps his transcendental wings.... Do honeymooners ever come to Waterloo ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... indeed and believe in the heart, that there is nothing deserves the name of good besides God, to have the same superlative and transcendent thoughts of that great and glorious self-being God, and the same diminishing and debasing thoughts of all things and beings besides him. And that as the Lord seeth no evil in the creation but sin, and hates that with a perfect hatred, as contrary to his holy will; so for a soul to aggravate sin in ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... supplies at the gaming table. He proves, at starting on his perilous career, to be a favourite of fortune; wins largely, and, alas! profanes his noble enthusiasm for science by yielding his soul to the all-debasing passion ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... of them was used in building workhouses on the surface, and these men placed at work there under the watchful care of the official, they would then be unable to communicate with each other, and would be saved from the debasing contamination of the hardened criminals. They would be saved from all this that ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... modest and accomplished women, associate with these vicious and miserable beings, destroying thereby all those exquisite and delicate sensibilities whose existence cold-hearted worldlings have denied; annihilating all genuine passion, and debasing that to a selfish feeling which is the excess of generosity and devotedness. Their body and mind alike crumble into a hideous wreck of humanity; idiocy and disease become perpetuated in their miserable offspring, and distant generations suffer for the bigoted morality of their ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... combined with a spiritual partaking of the Redeemer's blood, of which, mysterious as the symbol may be, the sacramental wine is no mere or arbitrary memento. This is the only certain, and this is the universal, preventive of all debasing superstitions; this is the true haemony ([Greek: haima], blood, [Greek: oinos], wine), which our Milton has beautifully allegorised in a passage strangely overlooked by all his commentators. Bear in mind, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... passions; and it is melancholy to contemplate the perfect self-gratulation with which some of the highest-born nobles of the time have in their personal memoirs chronicled the unblushing subserviency with which they lent themselves to the encouragement of the worst and most debasing qualities of their sovereign. Even before his departure for Blois, and during the period of his temporary retirement from the Court, while Henry still wore the mourning habits which he had assumed in honour of his dead mistress, the more ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... character of the slave, promote kindly feelings between him and his master, and ultimately prove profitable to both. But where Christianity, used by irreligious persons, whose very acts destroy the vitality of the means, is made the medium of enforcing superstition, and of debasing the mind of the person it degrades into submission, its application becomes nothing less than criminal. It is criminal because it brings true religion into contempt, perverts Christianity-makes it a mockery, and gives to the degraded whites of the South a plea for discarding its precepts. Religion-were ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... much more serious one, is of the Devil's own contriving—(and remember I am always quite serious when I speak of the Devil,)—namely, that the most current and authoritative names are apt to be founded on some unclean or debasing association, so that to interpret them is to defile the reader's mind. I will give no instance; too many will at once occur to any {6} learned reader, and the unlearned I need not vex with so much as one: but, in such cases, since I could only ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... angel sent To make me with a quiet life content. The question shall no more my bosom irk, To go to Washington or go to work. From Fame's debasing struggle I'll withdraw, And taking up the pen lay down the law. I'll leave this rogue, lest my example make An honest man of him—his heart ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... bull-fighting is enough of itself to blast the sport, no matter how great the skill and prowess shown by the bull-fighters. Any sport in which the death and torture of animals is made to furnish pleasure to the spectators is debasing. There should always be the opportunity provided in a glove fight or bare-fist fight to stop it when one competitor is hopelessly outclassed or too badly hammered. But the men who take part in these fights are hard as ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... declaring that the prevailing judgments of mankind are pernicious prejudices which have too long tyrannised over the world. He acknowledges himself to be not a moralist, but an 'immoralist,' and he bids us break in pieces the ancient tables of the Decalogue. Christianity is the most debasing form of slave-morality. It has made a merit of weakness and servility, and given the name of virtue to such imbecilities as meekness and self-sacrifice. He calls upon the individual to exalt himself. The man of {110} the future is to be the man ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... XV the morals of the Court fast deteriorated. A new epoch opened—troublous, lewd, dissolute. And was not the Duchess of Berry eccentric, capricious, passionate, the very image of the time? The favorites of Louis XV indicate to us in their own sad history the conditions of debasing humiliation and moral decadence of monarchical power. At first Louis XV chose his favorites from among ladies of quality—after that, from the middle classes, and, finally, from the common women of the people." He did not stop at the low-born ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... no more. 'T is past. Remember it But as thou would'st the action of another, By thy enlighten'd judgment much condemn'd; And serving as a beacon in the storms Thy passions yet may raise. Remorse is vice: Guard thee against its influence debasing. Say to thyself, "I am not what I was; I am not now the instrument of vice; I'm changed; I am a man; Virtue's firm friend; Sever'd for ever from my former self; No link, but ...
— Andre • William Dunlap
... artist in the Book way that the world hath yet seen, to keep up in the mind of the reader the heroic attributes of the character without relaxing; so as absolutely that they shall suffer no alloy from the debasing fellowship of the clown. If it ever obtrudes itself as a disharmony, are we inclined to laugh; or not, rather, to indulge a contrary emotion?—Cervantes, stung, perchance, by the relish with which his ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... beginnings the whole nation had gradually become bound by an iron system of caste. The country was split up into little sections, each governed by some petty despot, and harassed by internecine feuds. Religion had become a debasing ritualism, with charms and incantations, fear of the influence of the stars, and belief in dreams and omens. The idea of the existence of a soul was supplemented ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... they form an affection for their playmates, which may lead to good or evil results, as these playmates are moral or vicious in their tendencies. Therefore, at the formative period of character children should be guarded from the debasing influences of improper companions, as well as such institutions as saloons and low dance-halls which are generally found to be the ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... it. But whether it be so or not, of one thing I am certain,—and that is that the half-hearted dallying with things sexual is wholly an evil; that the prurient sniffing and sniggering round the subject is more fraught with peril to a community, more debasing to the emotional currency, more blighting to the higher sexual feelings of the race, than the most shameless public repudiation of all moral restraints. Evil cures itself in the sunlight; it grows and flourishes in the darkness. Vice looks fascinating in the gloaming; the morning ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... of the hand feeling along the whitewashed plank, or fingering, unconsciously, the trigger of the loaded rifle, testified, in a dumb way, to the derangement of the nervous system which had been surrendered to that most debasing of all passion, drink. He had sought the invigorating mountains, the safety of isolation, to do for him that which an abused and deadened will refused to do. It is a terrible thing to stand alone with the wreck of one's self. It is worse to set the Might-Have-Been side by ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... toilet of her aunt, to perform numerous offices which might be termed menial; but she entered upon her work with so much zest, she executed each task with such consummate skill, she took so much interest in the employment of the moment, that no labor seemed either tedious or debasing. ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... many things attempted in this book is the encouragement of charity, and free and genial manners, and the exposure of humbug, of which there are various kinds, but of which the most perfidious, the most debasing, and the most cruel, is the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... sensual. It has been remarked, that "he who cannot find in this and other branches of natural history a salutary exercise for his mental faculties, inducing a habit of observation and reflection, a pleasure so easily obtained, unalloyed by any debasing mixture—tending to expand and harmonize his mind, and elevate it to conceptions of the majestic, sublime, serene, and beautiful arrangements instituted by the God of nature, must possess an organization ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... women are represented with the minds of strumpets, except a few irrational humorists, far less capable of exciting our sympathy than a Hindoo, who has had a bason of cow-broth thrown over him;—for this, though a debasing superstition, is still real, and we might pity the poor wretch, though we cannot help despising him. But B. and F.'s Lucinas are clumsy fictions. It is too plain that the authors had no one idea of chastity as a virtue, but only such a conception as a blind man might have of the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... sound of his voice to challenge this to his face or take the consequences of being swept into oblivion by the high tide of a people's indignation that would sweep everything before it on the third day of November next, having been aroused in its might at last from the debasing sloth into which the corrupt hell-hounds of a venal opposition had swept them, but a brighter day had dawned, which would sweep the onrushing hordes of petty chicanery to where they would get theirs; and, as one who had heard the call of an oppressed people, he would accept this fitting ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... they used it for their advancement; and the sharp contrast of their conduct with the holy state makes them appear altogether fiendish. The Borgias are a satire on a great form or phase of religion, debasing and destroying it. They stand on high pedestals, and from their presence radiates the light of the Christian ideal. In this form we behold and recognize them. We view their acts through a medium which is permeated with religious ideas. Without this, and placed on a purely ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... maintained, at any cost, by the sequestration of tribes and by the rigid prohibition of intercourse, it is worse than useless to keep up the forms of reservations and non-intercourse. Many tribes are already as fully subject to all the debasing influences of contact with the whites as they could be if dispersed among the body of citizens; while yet they are without any of the ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... intention to describe the fight between Myles Falworth and Walter Blunt. Fisticuffs of nowadays are brutal and debasing enough, but a fight with a sharp-edged broadsword was not only brutal and debasing, but cruel and ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... the operations of commerce by debasing the coin of the realm to meet the exigencies of the state, was always in want of money. His cupidity was excited by the wealth of the order of Knights Templars, and, emboldened by his successes over the spiritual power, he now entered upon the career of intrigue which resulted in the destruction ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... gently, looking at him with grave eyes, "a fortune is a great blessing in the hands of the man who knows how to spend it. But riches considered as something to possess or to display is one of the most despicable and debasing of all the aims ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... nature is never seen in worse colours than in that dark and dismal review. Childhood, without any of its engaging properties, appears prematurely artful, wicked and cruel[1]; woman, the victim of a wretched and debasing bigotry, has yet so little of the feminine adjuncts, that the fountains of our sympathies are almost closed; and man, tyrannizing over the sex he was bound to protect, in its helpless destitution and enfeebled decline, seems lost in prejudice and superstition and only ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... jealous of him? Poor Pen got a good stock of this suspicious kind of love from the nurse who was now watching over him; and the kind and pure creature thought that her boy had gone through a malady much more awful and debasing than the mere physical fever, and was stained by crime as well as weakened by illness. The consciousness of this she had to bear perforce silently, and to try to put a mask of cheerfulness and confidence over her inward doubt ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... words, as the Rosicrucians applied to their founders, he has been called the discoverer of the secret which brings man into more intimate connexion with his Creator; the deliverer of the soul from the debasing trammels of the flesh; the man who enables us to set time at defiance, and conquer the obstructions of space. A careful sifting of his pretensions — and examination of the evidence brought forward to sustain them, will soon show which opinion is the more correct. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... consequently, it is to be presumed, are doing the devil's work. Republicans under Tammany cannot serve two masters. A Republican has a right to serve Tweed if he chooses. But he ought not at the same time to be taken into the confidence of Republicans who wage war against Tammany for debasing the bench, the bar, and every channel ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... of debasing the legion of honour was completely in the power of government; they could make it cheap, and to this plan they resorted. Under Napoleon the Cross was never granted until it had been long and truly deserved: now it became the prey of meanness. The order was prostituted ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... glad when he shut the door between him and her father. He paused in the hall to dispel the vague, self-debasing discomfort—and listening to her voice as she sang helped wonderfully. There is no more trying test of a personality than to be estimated by the voice alone. That test produces many strange and startling results. Again and again it ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... silence—I allude to the trade in opium; and I now unhesitatingly declare in this public manner that after the most unbiased and careful observations I have become convinced during my stay in China that the alleged demoralizing and debasing evils of opium have been and are vastly exaggerated. Like all other indulgences, excesses in its use are bad and reprehensible; but I have neither myself seen such vicious consequences as are frequently ascribed to it, nor have I been able ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... as well as excitement in it when rightly viewed. The possibilities that lie in it of noble or ignoble work—of happy self-sacrifice or ruinous self-indulgence—the capacities in the right use of which it may rise to heights of beautiful virtue, in the abuse of which it may sink to the depths of debasing vice—make the crisis one of fear as well as of hope, of sadness ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... medicine-man, wild priest of a wild and debasing superstition, reverenced as one through whom the dead ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... just finished reading the newspaper account of the Coronation which must have been a magnificent spectacle. We were horrified at the Queen debasing herself so much as to ask admission at the door—a request she was certain of being denied. We long to hear how you and Philip saw the ceremony, and whether the latter is not half killed ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... his correspondence and his essays, does Carlyle recur to that teaching of the threefold Reverence: Reverence for what is above us, for what is around us and for what is under us; that is to say, the ethnic religion which frees us from debasing fear, the philosophical religion which unites us with our comrades, and the Christian religion which recognizes humility and poverty ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... whatsoever you constantly meditate upon you will not only come to understand, but will grow more and more into its likeness, for it will become incorporated into your very being, will become, in fact, your very self. If, therefore, you constantly dwell upon that which is selfish and debasing, you will ultimately become selfish and debased; if you ceaselessly think upon that which is pure and unselfish you will surely become ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... comic as it was, did not suggest hysteria or epilepsy, and it was not so lacking in grace that we could not recall the original story without a shudder. There is no shattering of an ideal, and one cannot reproach the authors of the Belle Helene with what Theophrastus Such calls "debasing the moral currency, lowering the value of every ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... herds of London slept, into open spaces. For some obscure reason this made her nervous, and she turned back. After a while London closed in on her again, but this time in a more squalid quarter, a wilderness of dirty narrow streets, where even in the darkness the debasing marks and odours of squalid poverty were perceptible in the endless rows of houses which seemed to crowd in upon her. She came to a bridge and crossed it into an area of gaunt and darkened factories. Here, ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... never gained his ear, Or led to slavish and debasing fear; A hater of hypocrisy in all The varied forms ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... there, on the other hand, a doubt that the age in which they were heroic was the most unheroic of all ages; that they were bred, lived, and died, under the most debasing of materialist tyrannies, with art, literature, philosophy, family and national life dying or dead around them, and in cities the corruption of which cannot be told for very shame—cities, compared with which Paris is the abode of Arcadian simplicity and innocence? ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... of a Puritanical bringing-up is a belief that pleasure is unworthy, especially in the sex field and even in marriage. Now and then one meets a patient caught between perfectly proper desire and an obsession that such pleasure is debasing; and a feeling of self-disgust and self-hatred results that is the more tragic since ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... banner of Charity and Benevolence, preserves that religious feeling, strengthens it, extends it in its purity and simplicity, as it has always existed in the depths of the human heart, as it existed even under the dominion of the most ancient forms of worship, but where gross and debasing ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... courage in making this admission I know not. After the middle turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys with a tranquil mind. So I proceed in peace to declare that I have always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility—innocently enough, perhaps, and of necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the pitch of natural ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... people for the purpose of obtaining a legacy under their wills. "Later, childlessness conferred advantages in the shape of the greatest authority and Lower; undue influence became very insidious in its quest of wealth, and in grasping the joyous things alone, debasing the true rewards of life; and all the liberal arts operating for the greatest good were turned to the opposite purpose, and commenced to ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... cures them of all manner of diseases by touching them. Such is the strength and power that he has over their minds."[Footnote: Ibid., i. 110, Letter xxiv. Referring to the sale of offices and titles, to the habit of debasing the coinage, and to ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... had been miles and miles away, out of sight and earshot of all evil. He was sickened by an immense disgust of Sterne. To even mention his threat to a man like Whalley would be positively indecent. There was something more vile and insulting in its hint than in a definite charge of crime—the debasing taint of blackmailing. "What could anyone bring against him?" he asked himself. This was a limpid personality. "And for what object?" The Power that man trusted had thought fit to leave him nothing on earth that envy could lay hold of, except ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... aims may themselves be foreign to elevation and purification, or even, as for instance the lewd or brutal subjects of some painting and poetry, and the nervous intoxication of certain music, exert a debasing or enervating influence. But, as the whole of this book has tried to establish, the contemplation of beautiful shapes involves perceptive processes in themselves mentally invigorating and refining, and a play of empathic feelings which ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... materia medica I find are gradually being reduced in number to a possible forty or fifty, and one doctor makes the radical statement that they can be cut down to the 'six or seven real drugs.' Still further light has been thrown upon the debasing nature of the drugging system by a member of the Philadelphia Drug Exchange, in a recent hearing before the House Committee on municipal affairs right here. He is reported as saying that it makes little difference what a manufacturer puts into a patent medicine, for, after all, the effect of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... this. "Yes, I don't think we can insist on it as being a levee," he said, "where one is expected to come and make one's bow and pay formal compliments. That idea is an old anthropomorphic one, of course. It is superstitious—it is almost debasing to think of God demanding praise as a duty incumbent on us. 'To thee all angels cry aloud'—I confess I don't like the idea of heaven as a place ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... would in itself have been undesirable; but the practical effect of it, as the world then stood, would have only been to make the educated into infidels, and to leave the multitude to a convenient but debasing superstition. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... latter was too drunk to talk with any sense. He then sought Carson and offered financial assistance in the rescue work, but the men spurned the offer. They felt they were doing a God-given duty and to receive money for an act of that kind would be debasing their manhood. Such was it then and such is now the spirit of the West. He called at the Amos home, and while he was received by the matron and failed to see Annie, he thought he detected an air of distress in the surroundings, and attributed it to Amos' condition. Feeling that he was at their home ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... so thoroughly known, and he was so profoundly esteemed by the Austrian plenipotentiaries, that I will venture to say none of them would have been capable of making the slightest overture to him of so debasing a proposition. Besides, it would have induced him to put an end to all intercourse with the plenipotentiaries. Perhaps what I have just stated of M. de Gallo will throw some light upon this odious accusation. But let us dismiss this story with the rest, and among them that of the porcelain tray, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... But if such be the common hazards of seeking inspiration from those potent fountains, it may easily be conceived what chance Mr. Wordsworth had of escaping their enchantment,—with his natural propensities to wordiness, and his unlucky habit of debasing pathos with vulgarity. The fact accordingly is, that in this production he is more obscure than a Pindaric poet of the seventeenth century; and more verbose "than even himself of yore"; while the wilfulness with which he persists in choosing his examples of intellectual dignity and tenderness ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... out and say so in unmistakable language. The Indian Times speaks of the little ones being "steeped deep from their childhood" in all that is most wrong. A Hindu, writing in the Epiphany, puts the matter clearly when he says: "Finally, one can hardly conceive of anything more debasing than to dedicate innocent little girls to gods in the name of religion, and then leave them with the Temple priests"; and another writer in the same paper asks a question which those who say that Hinduism is good enough for India might ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... the same nature, levied by the two first Norman kings, and abolished by the charter of Henry I. [d]. It was a shilling paid every three years by each hearth, to induce the king not to use his prerogative in debasing the coin. Indeed it appears from that charter, that though the Conqueror had granted his military tenants an immunity from all taxes and talliages, he and his son William had never thought themselves bound to observe that rule, ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... solve. The question is: "How shall the warfare against White Slavery be waged to blot out this cloud upon civilization expeditiously?" Over two years ago I learned that there was a gigantic slave trade in women, and with a handful of people we began to fight the traders. That a system of slavery, debasing and vile, had grown to enormous proportions before our very doors seemed beyond belief, an impossibility, and even romantic. Most people were skeptical of the existence of a well defined and organized ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... was founded in 1832 "to give equal advantages to whites and blacks, and to give education to women as well as to men." Other objects were "to establish universal liberty by the abolition of every form of sin" and "to avoid the debasing association of the heathen classics and make the Bible a text book in all departments of education." The traditions of Oberlin are strongly religious, and from Charles Grandison Finney, revivalist and president ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... permitted to see a newspaper; and strictly prohibited the use of tobacco and snuff. We have been subjected to the annoyance of being stripped naked, a dozen men together, when a process of 'searching' takes place that is debasing to any human being, but perfectly revolting to men whose sensibilities have never been blunted by familiarity with crime—an ordeal of examination, and the coarse audacity with which it is perpetrated, as would make manhood blush, and which it would assuredly resent, as an outrage upon common ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... is a very grave danger to the country in the liberty of the press, which has a most debasing influence by printing all the sensational news, and encouraging the interest in these things in the youthful mind. It must bring a paltry taint into the glorious freedom of the true American spirit, but that will ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... silver in reality being neither diminished nor increased by the false coinage, the proportion of these metals to other merchandise was not changed, and consequently it was not in the power of the sovereign to make that which was worth but two worth four. For the same reason, if, instead of debasing the coin, it had been in the king's power to double its mass, the exchangeable value of gold and silver would have decreased one-half immediately, always on account of this proportionality and equilibrium. The adulteration ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... where it throbs in harmony with the Divine, and touches—as might some dying desert-waif with his parched lips a cooling fountain—the very source of love itself. But the most of human love—how debased and debasing, how vile! God, for purposes of His own, links for mankind the Aphroditic passion to the love Divine. The two are separable, and man assuredly separates them. True love may be witnessed as low in the ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... And nothing is so mortal to thought and sentiment as that same derisive tew-tewing, disingenuous and non-committal! Day by day, and that is why I roll my rs, I must witness this debasing of language and ideals. It's ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... 'William Harland, how have you kept your vows?' At that moment I seemed to suddenly awake to a full sense of my fallen and degraded position. What madness, thought I, has possessed me all this time, thus to ruin myself and those dear to me? And for what? for the mere indulgence of a debasing appetite. I rose to my feet and my step grew light with my new-formed resolution, that I would break the slavish fetters that had so long held me captive; and now, my dear wife, if you can forgive the past and aid me in my resolutions for ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... was making herself look, for the remainder, like Antonia. It was her latest vaudeville turn, imitating Antonia. He was careful not to look again in her direction until she had stopped doing what annoyed him furiously. He could not hope to make her understand to what point the debasing of beauty to brutal ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... proposed terms. Most of the cash claims were to be paid up; part were to be referred to arbitration; and Boulogne was to remain for eight years in the hands of the English as security. The financial pressure of the war had been terribly heavy, so that the expedient of debasing the coinage had been repeated in order to supplement taxation. Henry accepted the French terms; and almost simultaneously his hands were strengthened by the assassination of his most resolute opponent in Scotland, Cardinal Beton (May 29th, 1546). The Peace with France ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... rejoice that this cruel and debasing opium war is terminated. We have triumphed in one of the most lawless, unnecessary, and unfair struggles in the records of history; and Christians have shed more heathen blood in two years, than the heathens have shed of Christian blood in ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... entirely civilized, or more humanized by religion, it is even probable that he might have discharged his high duties with considerable distinction. But his lot was thrown upon stormy times, and a most difficult crisis amongst tribes, whose native ferocity was exasperated by debasing forms of superstition, and by a nationality as well as an inflated conceit of their own merit absolutely unparalleled, whilst the circumstances of their hard and trying position under the jealous surveillance of an irresistible lord paramount, in the person of the Russian Czar, gave a fiercer ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... you'd never have looked at if he hadn't money—a man who will make you ridiculous, a man who can't have a thought or feeling in common with you—it's not fit—it's not worthy; it smirches you; it's debasing.' ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... feeble. The scene of the murder of the jeweller in the "Count of Monte Cristo," or those with the Squelette in the "Mysteres de Paris," appeal to instincts which are as common to all mankind as those of thirst and hunger, and which are only debasing in the exaggerated condition consequent upon the dulness of other instincts higher than they. And the persons who, at one period of their life, might take chief pleasure in such narrations, at another may be brought into a temper of high tone and acute sensibility. But the love ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... subjects. But there is very high precedent for such a practice. Quite recently the fact has been brought to light that the great founder of modern astronomy once prepared for the government of his native land a very remarkable paper on the habit of debasing the currency, which was so prevalent during the Middle Ages. [1] The paper of Copernicus is, I believe, one of the strongest expositions of the evil of a debased currency that had ever appeared. Its tenor may be judged by the opening sentence, ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... that the most brutal man cannot live in constant association with a strong female influence, and not be greatly controlled by it. When he first bought her, she was, as she said, a woman delicately bred; and then he crushed her, without scruple, beneath the foot of his brutality. But, as time, and debasing influences, and despair, hardened womanhood within her, and waked the fires of fiercer passions, she had become in a measure his mistress, and he alternately ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... at this time might also have disenchanted these worshippers at the shrine of French civilization. A king absolutely indifferent to conditions in his kingdom, immersed in debasing pleasures, while Madame de Pompadour actually ruled the state—this is not the worst they would have seen! Destitute of shame, of pity, of patriotism, and of human affection, what did it mean to the king that his people were growing ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... contains thrills; it sells papers. However, aside from the fact that the publication of details concerning human folly and misfortune is often cruel and unjust to the sufferers, its influence upon the public is debasing in the same way, if not in the same degree, as public ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... the extremity of terror and pain, thus borne by a sensitive creature, either comes of neglect, or of cruel purpose, or is merely wasted. And yet the chase and the slaughter of the unhappy thing cannot be anything but debasing to those who took part in it. And at the same time, to be angry and sorry over so wretched an episode seems like trying to be wiser than the mind that made us. What single gleam of brightness is it possible to extract from the ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... uninterrupted; its resources continued to develop; its political constitution gained in power and consolidation. But there was a deficiency of disinterested principle. There was an open field for the operation of such sordid motives and debasing tactics as those ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... good, wise, bright, beneficent Spirit, which lived in it, and worked through it, and was the true benefactor of mankind and sustainer of life and of the universe. Sun-worship of this latter kind was no mean form of natural religion. If not purged from the debasing element of materialism, if not incompatible with a certain kind of polytheism, it is yet consistent with the firmest belief in the absolute supremacy of one God over all others, with the conception of that God as all-wise, all-powerful, pure, holy, kind, loving, and with the entire devotion ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... that the Prince of Wales should be made independent of his father, and there was clear good-sense in the contempt with which Walpole treated the argument that the State dependency upon his father in {85} which the son of a great family usually lives, must necessarily tend to the debasing of the son's mind and the diminishing of his intelligence, or that the dignity and grandeur even of a Prince of Wales could not be as well supported by a yearly allowance as by a perpetual and independent settlement. Some of ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... complications of foreign intercourse. The financial situation in the first half of the nineteenth century may be briefly described as one of expenditures constantly exceeding income, and of repeated recourse by the Bakufu to the fatal expedient of debasing the currency. Public respect was steadily undermined by these displays of impecuniosity, and the feudatories in the west of the empire—that is to say, the tozama daimyo, whose loyalty to the Bakufu was weak at the best—found an opportunity ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... bowed the neck gladly, groveled in beatitude. Deprived of power, they consoled themselves with privileges, patented favors, impertinences vented on the common people. The princes amused themselves by debasing the old aristocracy to the mire, depreciating their honors by the creations of new titles, multiplying frivolous concessions, adding class to class of idle and servile dependents on their personal bounty. In one word, the paradise of mediocrities came ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... practice. Men's minds must be called back from the present of phantoms and encouraged to follow the only path which tends to enduring results. We cannot afford to make the tacit concession that our opinions, though true, are depressing and debasing. No; they are encouraging and elevating. If the medicine is bitter to the taste, it is good for the digestion. Here and there, a bold avowal of the truth will disperse a pleasing dream, as here and there it will relieve ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... to tell you the childish lengths to which he has gone," she went on, "if he were quite himself on the point. But indeed he is not. He is Stingaree in his heart, Stingaree in his dreams; it is as debasing a form as mental and temperamental weakness could well take; yet I know, who watch over him half of the night. He has an eye-glass; he keeps revolvers; he has even bought a white mare! He can look extremely like the portraits one has seen of the wretched man. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... the burgesses seized an opportunity, when the bishop was away in England, to set up a commune. On his return he was obliged to accept the situation and to recognise the commune in return for a substantial payment. But he further recouped himself by debasing the local currency, till it was practically worthless; and he gratified his spite against the citizens by an atrocious crime. Professing to have discovered a conspiracy against his life, he arrested the Mayor and caused the unhappy man to be blinded by a black slave, ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... despair which rise unceasingly to heaven from the hearts of tortured millions, in the famine of the operatives, the grinding poverty of the peasants, the desecration of their wives and daughters, the degradation of the race through unjust laws and debasing and brutal prejudices—from all this agony spring my new formulas, the creed which I am determined to establish: 'Man has a birthright of happiness.' These thoughts are my god, a god which will give bread, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... party should have been guilty of it. Nevil certainly provoked, and he required, hard blows; and his uncle Everard might be right in telling her father that they were the best means of teaching him to come to his understanding. Still a foul and stupid squib did appear to her a debasing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... If Desdemona had been really guilty, the greatness would have been destroyed, because his love would have been unworthy, false. But she is good, and his love is most perfect, just, and good. That a man should place his perfect love on a wretched thing, is miserably debasing, and shocking to thought; but that loving perfectly and well, he should by hellish human circumvention be brought to distrust and dread, and abjure his own perfect love, is most mournful indeed—it is the infirmity of our good nature wrestling in vain with the strong powers of evil. Moreover, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... seen that the Oriental-world, so favored by nature, so rich in fields, in flocks, and fruits, failed to realize the higher destiny of man. In spite of all the advantages of nature, he was degraded by debasing superstitions, and by the degeneracy which wealth and ease produced. He was enslaved by vices and by despots. The Assyrian and Babylonian kingdom, that "head of gold," as seen in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, became inferior to the "breast ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... branch of one of these clans is transported, or emigrates, to a wholly new environment, it soon creates for itself, in many cases, an environment similar to that from which it came. Whether it goes to the city, or to the agricultural districts of the west, it may soon manage to reestablish the debasing atmosphere to which it has always been accustomed.[76] Those who see in improvement of the environment the cure for all such plague spots as these tribes inhabit, overlook the fact that man largely creates his own environment. The story of the tenement-dwellers who were supplied with bath tubs ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... younger authors, as many a one, who might otherwise make progress, may be frightened off. So far as I am concerned I am far from thinking myself so perfect as not to be able to endure faulting; yet at the beginning the clamor of your critic was so debasing that I could scarcely discuss the matter when I compared myself with others, but had to remain quiet and think: they do not understand. I was the more able to remain quiet when I recalled how men were praised who signify little among those who know, and ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... been a much stronger government had it been able to enlist on its side all the power of the monkhood, none can doubt. It might even have been a better government; of that I am not sure. But that such a union would have meant the utter destruction of the religion, the debasing of the very soul of the people, no one who has tried to understand that soul can doubt. And a soul is worth ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... for him that influenced her mind in this struggle—or that raised the struggle? With fiercely throbbing heart Eleanor looked this question for the first time in the face. "No!" she said to herself,—"no! I have not. I have no such regard for him. How debasing to have such a doubt raised! But I might have—I think that is true—if circumstances put me in the way of it. And I think, seeing him and knowing his superior beauty of character—how superior!—has wakened me up to the consciousness of what I do like, and what I like ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... comprehensible, and promising salvation to all who would believe, inspiring an enthusiasm for a pure life, were natural, and naturally soon became wide-spread, and as the writer believes, has done more in breaking away the shackles of ignorance and debasing superstition from the mind, than any other system of worship or doctrine of faith taught by man; and to this, in a great degree, is due the freedom of thought, independence of feeling and action, chivalrous bearing, and high honor of the Southern people. Inculcating as it does ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... look upon the worship of the Aztecs as monstrous; but the witnesses against them were themselves monsters, who were seeking for a pretense to excuse their own brutality in reducing the Indians to the most debasing slavery, while they appropriated to their own use the best looking of the squaws, and kept such swarms of supernumerary wives that each Spaniard had to brand them with a red-hot iron in order to know his own family. The fathers of the present mixed-breed ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... an inspired warning to persons who should chance to be in a like position at any time," replied Li Keen. "So grasping and corrupt are those who control affairs in Peking that I have no doubt they would scarcely hesitate in debasing even one so immaculate as the exceptional Ling, and placing him in some laborious and ill-paid civil department should he not ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... picture, and it might be possible, in a detailed criticism of the epics, to distinguish between the comic incidents that have an artistic value and intention, and those that are due merely to the rudeness of those common minstrels who are accused (by their rivals in epic poetry) of corrupting and debasing ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... power, since the position of the novelist in regard to his characters may be compared with that of the destiny which in the largest comedy moves to and fro mankind its actors. As destiny moves its puppets, so the novelist moves his—upraising, debasing; favouring, tormenting; creating, wiping ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... advantages: contrasted with Michael: she engages with Aaron in a plot against Moses: God observes it and punishment of leprosy inflicted upon Miriam: her cure: dies at Kadesh: general remarks on slander: debasing nature of sin: hope of escaping punishment fallacious: danger of opposing Christ: exhortation to imitate the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... that of Oriental nations, it must still be evident to us that the best phases of this life and the magnificent features of Greek learning have been emphasized much by writers, while the wretched and debasing conditions of the people of Greece ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... least two of these essays, those on "Debasing the Moral Currency" and "The Modern Hep, Hep, Hep!" she has newly expressed herself concerning tradition. In the first she protests against the too-common custom of satirizing what is noble and venerable. Our need of faith in the higher things ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... this article to them, and under circumstances which must have brought home the fact to the knowledge of our Indian agents. Black Hawk with other chiefs of the band to which he belonged, earnestly remonstrated against the introduction of whiskey among his people, because of its debasing effect upon their morals, and the danger of its provoking them to acts of aggression upon the whites, while in a state of intoxication. One of the facts, set forth in the memorial which the white settlers on Rock river, presented to Governor Reynolds, in 1831, and upon which ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... assume that the hardships they have come away to escape exist here, and they begin agitating against them. Their business is to so mix the real wrongs of our social life with imaginary hardships, and to heighten the whole with illusory and often debasing theories, that discontent will be engendered. For it is by means of that only that they live. It requires usually a great deal of labor, of organization, of oratory to work up this discontent so that it is profitable. The solid workingmen of America who ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... not honest with him and makes no suitable provision for his developing nature, he will be better off in a quiet hour of family conversation and reading at home. That means the application of parents to this hour.[33] It banishes the monstrous Sunday supplement with its hideous, debasing pictures. It substitutes conversation in the whole group, reading aloud of stories and poems, biblical and otherwise, and songs, hymns, or at times the walk in the fields or parks. Fortunately the ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... to learn my ABC to know quartz from feldspar before I indulge in such speculations. I lately got hold of a report on M. Dessalines D'Orbigny's labours in S. America (7/2. "Voyage dans l'Amerique Meridionale, etc." (A. Dessalines D'Orbigny).); I experienced rather a debasing degree of vexation to find he has described the Geology of the Pampas, and that I have had some hard riding for nothing, it was however gratifying that my conclusions are the same, as far as I can collect, with his results. It is also capital ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... contrary, it cannot admit of a reasonable doubt, in any unbiased mind conversant with the interior life of a man-of-war, that most of the sailor iniquities practised therein are indirectly to be ascribed to the morally debasing effects of the unjust, despotic, and degrading laws under ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... politically and spiritually. They're a debased people!..." Henry muttered angrily at that, for his mind was still full of Mary Graham. "They're a debased people ... that's why I want to get free of them ... and all the debasing things in Ireland are part of the English taint. We've nothing in common with them. They're a race of factory-hands and manufacturers; we're a race of farmers and poets; and you can never reconcile us. All you can do is to make us like them ... ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... felt so sure that nothing could really humiliate her, or pull her down from her real eminence, that the knowledge conveyed no fears to her mind. When this confidence in her own superiority to all debasing influences is held by the spotless princess in the poem, it is the most beautiful of human sentiments, and why it should not be equally elevated when entertained by a pink and plump modern young woman, well ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... increase, Lord, Thy gifts more and more in me, that my soul may follow me to Thee, disentangled from the birdlime of concupiscence; that it rebel not against itself, and even in dreams not only not, through images of sense, commit those debasing corruptions, even to pollution of the flesh, but not even to consent unto them. For that nothing of this sort should have, over the pure affections even of a sleeper, the very least influence, not even such as a thought would restrain, -to work this, not only during life, but even at my present ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... to-day, and make utter havoc and spoil of our lives. Are we not enslaved, nay, are not our careers completely shipwrecked, by love of gain, that fever which rages unappeased in us all, and love of pleasure?—one the most debasing, the other the most ignoble of the ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... change my ways"— Thus Juan said—"No more for me A round on round of idle days 'Mid soul-debasing company. I've pleasure woo'd from year to year As by a siren onward lured, At last of roystering, once held dear, I'm as a man of ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... god, for example, took for his wife the Dravidian goddess Kali. In many ways like this, the Aryan and the Dravidian united to form the Hindu. The Hindu religion is a composite—a corruption of the nature-worship of the earlier Vedas by its union with the more cruel and debasing features of the Dravidian idolatry. The renowned temples of Southern India best represent this mongrel form of Hinduism, and show Hinduism in its most corrupt development ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... have condescended to thrash that base coward there, whom all you miserable lower boys have been making an idol and hero of, and from whom you have been so readily learning every sort of blackguardly and debasing trick. But let me tell you and your hero, that if any of you dare to annoy or lift a finger at me again, you shall do it at your peril. I despise you all; there is hardly one gentlemanly or honourable fellow left among you since that fellow Brigson has come here; ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... operation bestowed upon the abnormal inmates of our prisons, reformatories, jails, asylums, and public institutions, would entirely eradicate those unspeakable evil practices which are so terribly prevalent, debasing, destructive, and uncontrolled in them. It would confer upon the inmates health and strength, for weakness and impotence, satisfaction and comfort for discontent and ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... James was growing out of boyhood. But not a day had passed that the young man did not see a sad result of that great gambling passion in his own mother's face and bearing. He loathed the thought of a vice so debasing that it ignored all the tender ties of kindred and was ready to stop at nothing in order to get means ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... our reasonable Faculties, and try how we can love to extremity, and yet without a Fault; to be angry and sin not; to be just without partiality, and rejoyce with them that rejoyce. We are there instructed to Love, Hate, and Fear within measure, how we may be Men without debasing our Souls; and all this by moving Examples, which in spite of Stubbornness, will force its Impressions; and 'tis our own Fault if they are not lasting. This certainly must recommend the Stage to the Vertuous; and Piety can't be offended at the decent reproving of Vice, and the ...
— A Letter to A.H. Esq.; Concerning the Stage (1698) and The - Occasional Paper No. IX (1698) • Anonymous |
