"Degeneracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... speaks straight to the heart of Islam, and it's an honourable message. But for our sins it's been twisted into part of that damned German propaganda. His unworldliness has been used for a cunning political move, and his creed of space and simplicity for the furtherance of the last word in human degeneracy. My God, Dick, it's like seeing St Francis ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... the evening and a spirit of good humour and good fellowship prevailed. Young Lambert and Mr. Gerard were deep in reminiscences of certain mutual duck-shooting expeditions. Mrs. Gerard and Mrs. Cedarquist discussed a novel—a strange mingling of psychology, degeneracy, and analysis of erotic conditions—which had just been translated from the Italian. Stephen Lambert and Beatrice disputed over the merits of a Scotch collie just given to the young lady. The scene was gay, the electric bulbs sparkled, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... of performing them as successfully, as ever were done by their ancestors; and, consequently, an expedition that must convince not only us, but all Europe, that if our maritime force be not employed in undertakings of the most important nature, it is not owing to the degeneracy or our seamen, nor to be imputed to our want of able or daring commanders, which is not my business, and which indeed surpasses ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... to be involved in my infamy; If you grant my request, you shall be informed of my family name. A Villain made himself Master of my affections, and to follow him I quitted my Father's House. Yet though my passions overpowered my virtue, I sank not into that degeneracy of vice, but too commonly the lot of Women who make the first false step. I loved my Seducer; dearly loved him! I was true to his Bed; this Baby, and the Youth who warned you, my Lord Baron, of your Lady's danger, are the pledges of our affection. Even at this moment ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... he who will may find out something of what it means to be really an artist. The framework is perfect and the polish is absolutely without flaw. They are sometimes a little hard, always calculating and dispassionate, but they are perfect. I wish James would write about modern society, about "degeneracy" and the new woman and all the rest of it. Not that he would throw any light on it. He seldom does; but he would say such awfully clever things about it, and turn on so many side-lights. And then his sentences! If his character novels were all wrong one could read him ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... the Time will come, when a Bribe shall remove the most excellent Man from Office for the Purpose of making Room for the worst. It will be called an Error in Judgment. The Bribe will be concealed. It may however be vehemently suspected & who, in Times of great Degeneracy will venture to search out and detect the corrupt Practices of great Men? Unless a sufficient Check is provided and clearly ascertained for every Power given, will not the Constitution and the Liberties of the Citizens for want of ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... other means of educating the spirit of a people in this respect, except by War, and that too under bold Generals. By it alone can that effeminacy of feeling be counteracted, that propensity to seek for the enjoyment of comfort, which cause degeneracy in a people rising in prosperity and immersed in an ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... who, in somewhat a later period, and in the court of a Syrian queen, preserved the spirit of ancient Athens, observes and laments this degeneracy of his contemporaries, which debased their sentiments, enervated their courage, and depressed their talents. "In the same manner," says he, "as some children always remain pygmies, whose infant limbs have been too closely confined, thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... a pretext for arming itself; and what is the pretext? There was a time when men openly advocated war as a thing to be desired; commended it to each generation as a sort of tonic to tone up the moral system and prevent degeneracy, but we ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... It was ordered otherwise, and doubtless wisely. The church was allowed a hundred and fifty more years to fill full the measure of her offences, that she might fall only when time had laid bare the root of her degeneracy, and that faith and ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... time of the birth of our Lord even the Jews had sunk into a state of the grossest degeneracy. They were now divided into sects, two of which, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, are frequently mentioned in the New Testament. The Pharisees were the leading denomination, being by far the most numerous and powerful. By adding ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... refer to the speeches of Mr. Pitt, and especially to those of that profound statesman and most instructed man, Lord Shelburne, to find that we can boast no remarkable superiority either in political justice or in political economy. One must attribute this degeneracy, therefore, to the long war and our insular position, acting upon men naturally of inferior abilities, and unfortunately, in ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust. The elective mode of obtaining rulers is the characteristic policy of republican government. The means relied on in this form of government for preventing their degeneracy are numerous and various. The most effectual one, is such a limitation of the term of appointments as will maintain a proper responsibility to the people. Let me now ask what circumstance there is in the ...
— The Federalist Papers
... ever pipe the pure and lofty and highly ennobling sentiments, the spiritually beautiful inspiration which characterizes that book of his—that deft little dip into degeneracy—something about a frozen wedding! Oh, slush! Percy, pass ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... long time; but the descendants of Seth intermarried finally with the descendants of Cain, from whom sprung a race of lawless men, so that the earth was filled with violence. The material civilization which the descendants of Cain introduced did not preserve them from moral degeneracy. So great was the increasing wickedness, with the growth of the race, that "it repented the Lord that he had made man," and he resolved to destroy the whole race, with the exception of one religious family, and change the whole surface of the earth by a mighty flood, which should ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... angles in their outline. By great men like Titian, this somewhat conventional structure was only given in haste to distant masses; and their exquisite delineation of the foreground, kept their conventionalism from degeneracy: but in the drawings of the Carracci and other derivative masters, the conventionalism prevails everywhere, and sinks gradually into scrawled work, like Fig. 28, about the worst which it is possible ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... hope and spirit. There was not one moment of pleasure, one instant of relief from the day's beginning to its end. At night they went to sleep on hastily made beds, cursing at all things in heaven and earth; they blasphemed with growing savagery all that men hold holy and true; and degeneracy grew upon them very swiftly. They quarreled over their tasks, and they hated each other with a hatred only second to that they bore Darby himself. All three had always been reckless, wicked, brutal men; but now, particularly in the case of Ray and Chan, the ordeal brought out and augmented ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... than you in your long coats do the Monument. You complain of our masculine appearance in our riding habits, and indeed we think it is but reasonable that we should make reprisals upon you for the invasion of our dress and figure, and the advances you make in effeminency, and your degeneracy from the figure of man. Can there be a more ridiculous appearance than to see a smart fellow within the compass of five feet immersed in a huge long coat to his heels with cuffs to the arm pits, the shoulders and breast fenced against the inclemencies of the weather ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... matter of fact, nothing could be more slothful or slow, more given up to a life of ease and degeneracy, than the "reef-building polypifer"—to give him his scientific name. He is the hobo of the animal world, but, unlike the hobo, he does not even tramp for a living. He exists as a sluggish and gelatinous worm; he attracts to himself calcareous elements ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... among the clergy, and the looseness of morals in society were notorious, but this degeneration could not have been universal. There are always a few Noahs and their families left to repeople the world with righteousness after a deluge of degeneracy, and Browning is quite right in his portrayal of an eighteenth-century knight sans peur et sans reproche who defends the honor of his house with his sword, because of his high moral ideals. Besides, the Methodist ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... organs, with a tendency to contracted pelvis. Charrin, again, regards utero-ovarian inadequacy as at least one of the factors of chlorosis. Chlorosis, in its extreme form, may thus be regarded as a disorder of development, a sign of physical degeneracy. Even if not strictly a cause, a congenital condition may, as Stockman believes (British Medical Journal, December 14, 1895), ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... they turn into mediocrities, and crawl over the high places of the world. So, too, their faces present the harsh pallor, the deceitful coloring, those dull, tarnished eyes, and garrulous, sensual mouths, in which the observer recognizes the symptoms of the degeneracy of the thought and its rotation in the circle of a special idea which destroys the creative faculties of the brain and the gift of seeing in large, of generalizing and deducing. No man who has allowed himself to be caught in the revolutions of the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... sheer lunacy. But this account is no exaggeration of Wagner's doctrine and plans. The one truth which emerges and speaks unequivocally is that Richard, deeply dissatisfied with the theatre of the day, and tracing its sad degeneracy to the corrupt state of society, wished to see society upraised, not that men and women might live more happily, but that a finer, nobler theatre might flourish. The most magnificent egotist of the century, it ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... justified. Nor was the Bard of the Victors ashamed of his mercenary Muse. In the Second Isthmian Ode, we find an elaborate justification of his practice of praising for pay,—a practice, he admits, unknown to primitive poets, but rendered inevitable, in his time, by the poverty of the craft, and the degeneracy of the many, with whom, in the language of the Spartan sage, "money made the man." With this Pindaric precedent, therefore, for selling Pindaric verses, it is no wonder, if the children of the Muse, in an age still more degenerate than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... for the present; some day I shall perhaps find a grand passion, a woman to play the Don Quixote about, like the Pole that I am; a woman out of whose slipper to drink, and for whose pleasure to die; but not here! Few things strike me so much as the degeneracy of Italian women. What has become of the race of Faustinas, Marozias, Bianca Cappellos? Where discover nowadays (I confess she haunts me) another Medea da Carpi? Were it only possible to meet a woman of that extreme distinction of beauty, of that terribleness of nature, even ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Exact, seated at her domestic altar, gives homilies on the degeneracy of modern housekeeping equal to the lamentations of Dr. Holdfast as to the falling off from the good ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... survival of the fittest, and in this residuum there was not wanting a certain savour. Subdued and quickened by man-o'-war discipline, they developed a dogged resolution, a super-capacity not altogether incompatible with degeneracy; and to crown all, the men who officered the resolute if disreputable crew were men in whose blood the salt of centuries tingled, men unrivalled for sea-sagacity, initiative and pluck. If they could not uphold the honour of the flag with the pressed man's unqualified aid, they did what was ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... "But I see their degeneracy. Once you could believe nearly all they said; now he is a fool who believes a tenth part of it. There is the New York 'Scandalmonger,' and the Philadelphia 'Prestidigitateur,' and the Boston 'Prolific,' which do nothing but hoodwink and confound the public mind. Ten dollars ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... not know that I ever remember seeing a sight more pathetic in its way than that of this beautiful and high-spirited young woman weeping in the presence of her Council over the utter degeneracy of the race she was called upon to rule. Being old and accustomed to these Eastern expressions of emotion, I remained silent, however; but Oliver was so deeply affected that I feared lest he should do something ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... very odd prejudice against pie as an article of diet. It is common to hear every form of bodily degeneracy and infirmity attributed to this particular favorite food. I see no reason or sense in it. Mr. Emerson believed in pie, and was almost indignant when a fellow-traveller refused the slice he offered him. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in rather a destitute condition, and they were forced to be economical. Their habits were so entirely different from modern habits that it would exceed our limits to undertake to draw a careful comparison. It is said that the people of those days bewailed the degeneracy of the times, and spoke of the industry and ...
— The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England • Various
... create a deep and widespread enthusiasm, how the forms of logic and rhetoric may usurp the place of reason and truth, how all philosophies grow faded and discoloured, and are patched and made up again like worn-out garments, and retain only a second-hand existence. He who would study this degeneracy of philosophy and of the Greek mind in the original cannot do better than devote a few of his days and nights to the commentary of ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... imperceptible growth alone could solve; and the idealistic pictures of early England are not drawn from life, but inspired by a belief in good old days and an unconscious appreciation of the polemical value of such a theory in political controversy. Tacitus, a splenetic Roman aristocrat, had satirized the degeneracy of the empire under the guise of a description of the primitive virtues of a Utopian Germany; and modern theorists have found in his Germania an armoury of democratic weapons against aristocracy and despotism. From this golden age the Angles and Saxons are supposed to have derived ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... life tell the same sad tale. The facility with which the marriage tie was contracted and dissolved is the strongest evidence of this degeneracy. The worst examples were set in the highest stations, for it is no uncommon incident, from the ninth century downwards, to find our Princes with more than one wife living, and the repudiated wife married again to a person of equal or superior rank. ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... intelligible to those who hear it, nor always to those by whom it is uttered: I am one of those instruments, to whom it has pleased the Almighty to make known His will, and I am come to declare to you, &c...' and then he went off in a rhapsody about the degeneracy of the times, and the people falling off from God. I asked him what Perceval seemed to be driving at, what was his definite object? He said it was not discoverable, but that from the printed paper which he had circulated ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... has stood in presence of mysterious decisions and new paths:—he knows still better from his painfulest recollections on what wretched obstacles promising developments of the highest rank have hitherto usually gone to pieces, broken down, sunk, and become contemptible. The UNIVERSAL DEGENERACY OF MANKIND to the level of the "man of the future"—as idealized by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates—this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a man of "free society"), this brutalizing of man ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... limes and its rum. In the language of men it is called Punch; I know not what may be its name in the Olympian speech. But tell not the Englishmen of George the Second's age, lest they should be troubled for the degeneracy of their grandchildren, that the punchbowl is now become a relic of antiquity, and their beloved beverage almost as obsolete as ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... the novelty of the thing, and watched with interest the anxious housewives who flocked in demanding that rara avis, an angel at nine shillings a week; and not finding it, bewailed the degeneracy of the times. Being too honest to profess herself absolutely perfect in every known branch of house-work, it was some time before she suited herself. Meanwhile, she was questioned and lectured, half engaged and kept ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... I'm in dead earnest. You want to put on the brakes. You've struck the down grade. Socialism takes the temper out of the steel fiber of character. It makes a man flabby. It is the earmark of racial degeneracy. The man of letters who is poisoned by it never writes another line worth reading; the preacher who tampers with it ends a materialist or atheist; the philanthropist bitten by it, from just a plain fool, develops a madman; while the home-builder ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... age is not what we all wish. But I am sure that the only means of checking its precipitate degeneracy is heartily to concur with whatever is the best in our time, and to have some more correct standard of judging what that best is than the transient and uncertain favor of a court. If once we are able to find, and can prevail on ourselves to strengthen an union of such men, whatever accidentally ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... gracefulness to shed their benedictions on her graceful head; old love-letters, shut up in iron boxes in the neighbouring offices, and made of no account among the heaps of family papers into which they had strayed, and of which in their degeneracy they formed a part, might have stirred and fluttered with a moment's recollection of their ancient tenderness, as she went lightly by. Anything might have happened that did not happen, and never will, for the love ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... It is the close of the dialogue called 'Critias,' in which he describes, partly from real tradition, partly in ideal dream, the early state of Athens; and the genesis, and order, and religion, of the fabled isle of Atlantis; in which genesis he conceives the same first perfection and final degeneracy of man, which in our own Scriptural tradition is expressed by saying that the Sons of God intermarried with the daughters of men, for he supposes the earliest race to have been indeed the children of God; and to have corrupted themselves, until 'their spot was not the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... away from him who possesses it. To bestow it they have not the power, since by nature they are vile, and because of their vileness they are opposed to Nobility. And here by vileness one means baseness, through degeneracy, which is directly opposite to Nobility: for the one opposite thing cannot be the maker of the other, neither is it possible to be, for the reason given above, which is briefly added to the text, saying, "No painter gives a form That is not of his knowing." Wherefore no ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... instance of this practice, where it is said that no one was so hardy as to clasp hands with Wainamoinen, who is at once the Orpheus and the Prometheus of Finnish mythology. These Runoias, or rhapsodists, complain, of course, of the degeneracy of human memory; they notice how any foreign influence, in religion or politics, is destructive to the native songs of a race. {160} 'As for the lays of old time, a thousand have been scattered to the wind, a thousand buried in ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... borne in mind that the first effect of association with the more advanced race was not improvement but degeneracy. I have no wish to discredit the statements of the early explorers, including the Jesuit priests; but it is evident that in the zeal of the latter to gain honor for their society for saving the souls of the natives it was almost necessary to represent them as godless and murderous ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... will American Christianity allow this process of degeneracy to go on, before realizing the peril of it, and providing the counteracting agencies of good? That is the question the young people ought to consider ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... the Spirit's work have been entertained by theologians in consequence of erroneous conceptions regarding the degeneracy of human nature. Augustine held that man can do nothing which will at all contribute to His spiritual recovery. He is like a lump of clay, or a statue without life or activity. In consequence of these views, he held that ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... of their Creator, these were hid from "learned ken" till modern times, I fell into the fanciful belief that the Western continent was brought forth at a second birth, and intended by Nature as a more perfect specimen of her handiwork. But how in the name of breeding must we account for the degeneracy of the human form in this otherwise mammoth-producing soil? The men are but sorry descendants from the noble race that begot their ancestors. And as for the women—my eyes have not found one that deserves to be called ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... mammon worship, we have risen to be a nation that pours out its wealth like water for a noble purpose. Never again will 'the almighty dollar' be called America's divinity. We were sinking fast to low aims and selfish purposes, and wise men groaned at national degeneracy. The summons came, and millions leaped to offer all they had, to fling fortune, limb, and life on the altar of an unselfish cause. The dead manhood of the nation sprang to life at the call. We proved the redness of the old faithful, manly blood, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and asthmatical, and short of breath, except in the article of story-telling; in which respect they were still marvellously long-winded. These gentry were much opposed to steam and all new-fangled ways, and held ballooning to be sinful, and deplored the degeneracy of the times; which that particular member of each little club who kept the keys of the nearest church, professionally, always attributed to the prevalence of dissent and irreligion; though the major part of the company inclined to the belief that virtue went out with hair-powder, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... days of tea and white bread it is to be feared that the "halesome parritch" is now very far removed from the honoured place of chief, and it must be more than a coincidence which connects the physical degeneracy of the Scottish working people with the supplanting of the porridge-pot by the tea-pot. Even in rural districts there is a great change in the daily fare, and there too anaemia, dyspepsia, and a host of other ills, ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... passage was a remarkable instance of the idea that I was illustrating in the article on "Barrel-organs," because Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle had conceived a theory of degeneracy (the exact converse of Darwin's theory of ascension) by which the bear might pass into a seal, and that into a whale. Trusting now to the fairness of "A. M." I leave to him to say whether he has quoted from the same edition as I have, and whether ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... lasting for a long period; and it may have been in one of these that he was inspired by the idea of asking the Emperor for a decayed city in Campania, there to establish a philosophic commonwealth as nearly upon the model of Plato's Republic as the degeneracy of ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... to his liking? With what infinite pains the wants of each guest are catered to! How relentlessly are pilferers punished! The endless devices of the more ambitious flowers to save their species from degeneracy by close inbreeding through fertilization with their own pollen, alone prove the operation of Mind through them. How plants travel, how they send seeds abroad in the world to found new colonies, might be studied with profit by Anglo-Saxon expansionists. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... to a poverty which destroys them physically and spiritually; that fully one- fourth of the dwellers do not have enough to eat, are inadequately clothed, sheltered, and warmed in a rigorous climate, and are doomed to a moral degeneracy which puts them lower than the savage ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... various metres, by Spenser, one for each month. January: Colin Clout (Spenser) bewails that Rosalind does not return his love, and compares his forlorn condition to the season itself. February: Cuddy, a lad, complains of the cold, and Thenot laments the degeneracy of pastoral life. March: Willie and Thomalin discourse of love (described as a person just aroused from sleep). April: Hobbinol sings a song on Eliza, queen of shepherds. May: Palinode (3 syl.) exhorts Piers to join ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... passions; and the rearing of children is an accident rather than a preconceived reality. Such marriages are unholy and destructive, and unless your people respond to a Spiritual awakening such as God's workers are now trying to inaugurate on your Earth the growing degeneracy will be augmented rather than diminished and the extinction of the race will ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... family not only in preventing women from establishing social conditions suitable for their own best development and that of their children but has thrown over the home the dark shadow of commercialized prostitution with its cloud of evil thought, physical degeneracy ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... impostor who dares to claim nobility or precedency, and cannot show his family name in the history of his country. Even he who can show it, and who cannot write his own under it in the same or as goodly characters, must submit to the imputation of degeneracy, from which the lowly and obscure are exempt." Good old Penn, too, is made a lay figure upon which Landor dressed his thoughts, when the Quaker tells Lord Peterborough: "Of all pride, however, and all folly, the grossest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... eyes were still keen and piercing, and a bright hectic spot of red appeared on each of his hollow cheeks. His hands were tremulous and his voice deep and husky. After a few personal inquiries the old man broke out into a most extraordinary and characteristic harangue on the wretched degeneracy of these evil days. The prophet Jeremiah was cheerfulness itself in comparison with him.... Most of his extraordinary harangue was like an eruption of Vesuvius, but the laugh he occasionally gave showed that he was talking about as much for his own ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... inhabitants: there are now about ninety thousand; and THESE!! few individuals can conceive, and none could describe, the actual state into which the more than infernal tyranny of Austria has plunged this unhappy city. From the present decay and degeneracy of Venice under the Barbarians, there are some honourable individual exceptions. There is Pasqualigo, the last, and, alas! posthumous son of the marriage of the Doges with the Adriatic, who fought his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... something of the old-time Athenian spirit still persisted; but the duration of that power had been brief. The deepest humiliation of a State is not in the loss of military prestige or of material resources, but in the degeneracy of its citizens, in the overthrow and scorn of high ideals; and so it was in Athens at the time ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... received among philosophers, that the atmosphere of America is more humid than that of Europe. Monsieur de Buffon makes this hypothesis one of the two pillars whereon he builds his system of the degeneracy of animals in America. Having had occasion to controvert this opinion of his, as to the degeneracy of animals there, I expressed a doubt of the fact assumed, that our climates are more moist. I did not know of any experiments which might authorize a denial of it. Speaking afterwards on the subject ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... being braver, simpler, and so stronger than the Assyrians that the Medes were able to dispossess them of their sovereignty over western Asia. But in this, as in most other cases of conquest throughout the East, success was followed almost immediately by degeneracy. As captive Greece captured her fierce conqueror, so the subdued Assyrians began at once to corrupt their subduers. Without condescending to a close imitation of Assyrian manners and customs, the Medes proceeded directly ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... two spirits leaning close together, in their turn question who Virgil and Dante may be? When they hear mention of Rome and Florence, they hotly inveigh against the degeneracy of dwellers on the banks ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... believe that these things were the promptings responsible for his present actions. Some hideous psychological twist was driving him. Some passion swayed him over which he had no control whatever. Some degeneracy was upsetting his mental balance, and forcing him against his better instincts. But, even so, his whole attitude was that of a man of clear, alert mind, of iron purpose, of ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... trouble your critical patience with the first sketch of a stanza I have been framing, as I passed along the road. The subject is Liberty: you know, my honoured friend, how dear the theme is to me. I design it an irregular ode for General Washington's birth-day. After having mentioned the degeneracy of other kingdoms I ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... those who believe in the degeneracy of the race, and I look forward to the future with hope rather than with dismay. I believe upon the whole the world improves. It is useless to be always looking back to be a laudator temporis acti se puero is placed by the wise ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... a vain attempt, and out of keeping with the object of this work, to describe in detail the "bloody assizes" and the infernal tragedies that ensued upon the accession of Alexander III; the moral degeneracy and the economic ruin that spread over the mighty empire; the shudder that passed over the civilized world, and was expressed in indignation meetings held everywhere, especially in Great Britain and in the United States (February, 1882), to protest, ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... The speaker who occupied this platform on Tuesday evening last, in the course of his remarks upon the wide degeneracy of the American Clergy on the Slavery Question, reminded us that there was in a Brooklyn pulpit, A MAN. We thought you would be glad to see and hear such a rara avis, and therefore have besought him to come hither to-night to instruct us by his wisdom and move us by his eloquence. I trust that, ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... talents; nay, I question whether you yourself suspect all you possess. Your Bas Bleu is in a style very, different from any of your other productions that I have seen; and this letter, which shows your intuition Into the degeneracy of our language, has a vein of humour and satire that could not be calculated from your Bas Bleu, in which good nature and good-humour had made a great deal of learning wear all the ease of familiarity. I did wish you to write another Percy, but I beg now that you will first produce a specimen ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... for Love"; but it was Dryden who said of him, by instinctive conviction rather than judgment, that within his magic circle none dared tread but he. Is he to blame for the extravagances of modern diction, which are but the reaction of the brazen age against the degeneracy of art into artifice, that has characterized the silver period in every literature? We see in them only the futile effort of misguided persons to torture out of language the secret of that inspiration which should be in themselves. We do not find the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... luxury, which infected the manners of courts and cities, had instilled a secret and destructive poison into the camps of the legions; and their degeneracy has been marked by the pen of a military writer, who had accurately studied the genuine and ancient principles of Roman discipline. It is the just and important observation of Vegetius, that the infantry was invariably covered with defensive armor, from the foundation of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... vehemently. "Since the fall of Carthage, have not the fears of Scipio AEmilianus almost come true: Troy has fallen, Carthage has fallen; has not Rome almost fallen, fallen not by the might of her enemies, but by the decay of her morals, the degeneracy of her statesmen? What is the name of liberty, without the semblance! Is it liberty for a few mighty families to enrich themselves, while the Republic groans? Is it liberty for the law courts to have their price, for the provinces ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... to lead and conduct them in Times of War and Trouble; to govern, inform, and protect them, in milder and more auspicious Seasons. Then was the Motto of the Crown, or of the chief Ensign of Pre-eminence, Digniori detur, and so continued till the Degeneracy of Time, and the baneful Growth of Avarice and Pride, with the feverish Lust of Power, perverted it ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... flunkies were carrying pampered lap-dogs with crests on their nasty little embroidered blankets, fat old women with epilepsy and gouty old men with scrofula, representing the aristocracy at its best, were being half carried to and from tables, and the degeneracy of noble Europe was being borne in upon my ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... was, a preacher of morality; an expounder of that divine doctrine which inculcates the precept, 'Do unto others, as you would have others do unto you;' he is a gentleman, who, beholding with horror the degeneracy of the times, and believing, no doubt, it required some extraordinary exertions to recall us unto virtue, has voluntarily, for no idea of gain, or means of livelihood, publicly devoted his talents to ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... and noise and a brass band, for all the world like an excursion to Coney Island, and though most people, except the grateful natives, were obediently believing with Ruskin that it was the symbol of the degeneracy of Venice and would have thought themselves disgraced forever if they were seen on it. But the Lagoon was as beautiful from the noisy, fussy little steamboat as from a gondola, the sails of the fishing boats touching it with ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... house, he said nothing, but merely opened the door, and thrust in his face with an air of defiant resignation, and waited. Tenniel started. "You scoundrel!" he exclaimed; "then I must!" And he did. But Leech was proof against this example of degeneracy, and to the end remained true to his views and his vow, although moustaches soon came into ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... were the only things by which God could regenerate the world. Christianity appears to some men to be effete and worn out. Men who can look back upon the times of Venn, and Newton, and Scott—comparing the degeneracy of their descendants with the men of those days—lose heart, as if all things were going wrong. "Things are not," they say, "as they were in our younger days." No my Christian brethren, things are not as they then were; but the Christian cause lives on—not in the successors of such men as those; ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... hither as refugees they met at first with much sympathy, and had many admirers. Some men even of learning and reputation, as Sir Edward Bulkeley and John Lacy, threw themselves heart and soul into the movement, on the not unreasonable ground that the dulness of religion and the degeneracy of the time needed a new dispensation of the Spirit, and that a great revival had begun. It is unnecessary to follow up the history in any detail. The impulse had been very genuine in the first instance, and had stood the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... and when the party in Louisiana was split by the two factions, the Custom House ring and the Warmoth faction, Pinchback was elected permanent chairman of the Warmoth convention and made the keynote speech for the campaign. Subsequently, Warmoth's utter degeneracy alienated him and so they parted company. Warmoth's star descended, and he went down to ignominious defeat. Upon his name and memory were heaped derogations, curses and anathemas. And unfortunately these will always be associated ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... of a nation depends upon the caprice of the ignorant, harebrained vulgar. All the miseries of men for a long series of years grew out of that infamous mode of polity, a democracy; which is to be reckoned to be only the corruption and degeneracy of a republic, and not to be ranked among the legitimate forms of government. If it be not a legitimate government, we owe it no allegiance. He is a blind man who does not see this truth; he is a base man who will not assert it. Democratic power is tyranny, in the principle, the beginning, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven. Except on the ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see no rational footing for scorning the whole present population of the globe, unless I scorn every previous generation from whom they have inherited their diseases of mind and body, and by consequence scorn my own scorn, which ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... given wings with the rumor that Elliott University was to pay him the unheard of amount of $50,000 for a yearns services although, it was grudgingly admitted, if John Brown could bring Elliott out of the slough of athletic degeneracy, he would probably be worth every cent ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... has been customary to have a general expulsion of evils and sins once a year. Now, if it occurred to people to combine these two customs, the result would be the employment of the dying god as a scapegoat. He was killed, not originally to take away sin, but to save the divine life from the degeneracy of old age; but, since he had to be killed at any rate, people may have thought that they might as well seize the opportunity to lay upon him the burden of their sufferings and sins, in order that he might bear it away with him to the unknown ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... years had passed there was a perceptible loss of tone and power in the Low Church party, when King William's bishops had gradually died off. Among High Churchmen, weakened by the secession, the growth of degeneracy was still more evident. The contrast is immense between the lofty-minded and single-hearted men who worked with Ken and Nelson and the factious partisans who won the applause of 'High Church' mobs in the time of Sacheverell. Perhaps the Church activity which, at all events ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... 1871 on this question were far from being satisfactory. Dr. Begg, too, in his striking and able pamphlet on the "Ecclesiastical and Social Evils of Scotland," refers to "symptoms of a nation's degeneracy which seem multiplying in Scotland;" also to a "growing amount ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... age to dwell on the degeneracy of the times and lament the good old days and their superiority, but Yale is infinitely greater and broader than when I graduated sixty-five years ago. The New York Legislature and State executives are governing an empire compared with the problems which ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... case of God against the people of these United States is not to be debated before any such petty tribunal as Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem to suppose. The sceptre which dropped successively from the grasp of Egypt, Assyria, Carthage, Greece, Rome, fell from a hand palsied by the moral degeneracy of the people; and the emasculate usurper or the foreign barbarian snatched and squandered the heritage of civilization which escheated for want of legitimate heirs of the old royal race, whose divine right was the imperial brain, and who found their strength in a national virtue which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... had taken possession of the seats of the old civilization, were the real triumphs of Christianity seen. Had the Roman empire continued longer, Christianity might have become still more corrupted; in the prevailing degeneracy it certainly could not save what was not worth preserving. The strong grasp which Rome had laid upon the splendors of all the ancient Pagan Civilizations was to be relaxed. Antiquity had lived out its life. The empire of the Caesars was doomed. Retributive ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... toddy, which gave an importance and even merit to the practice of drinking, and which had a most injurious effect. I am afraid some of the Pleydells of the old school would have looked with the most ineffable contempt on the degeneracy of the present generation in this respect, and that the temperance movement would be little short of insanity in their eyes; and this leads me to a remark.—In considering this portion of the subject, we should bear in mind a distinction. The change we ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... Englishman Cave; he has maintained that the Church of Christ, with respect to life and conduct, had begun to fall into decay immediately after the ascension of our Saviour, and still more after the death of the Apostles, and that this degeneracy had enormously increased since the age ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... lively and yet poignant satire upon the wilful corruption of the stage, the degeneracy of the public taste, and the reigning follies of the British nation can scarcely be imagined than the following, which, with several more under the same signature, has appeared in a celebrated ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... an entertainment of the reason and all our faculties, this way of being pleased with the suspense of them for three hours together, and being given up to the shallow satisfaction of the eyes and ears only, seems to arise rather from the degeneracy of our understanding, than an improvement of our diversions.[99] That the understanding has no part in the pleasure is evident, from what these letters very positively assert, to wit, that a great part of ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... several gradations by which corruption steals into the world, and oppose it in every step, by giving perpetual warning and instruction to mankind; which, added to the strong influence of our own example, would probably prevent that continual degeneracy of human nature so justly complained ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... accomplished and incredibly witty, queened it in this melee of appalling degeneracy; she was not at heart wicked, but her environment closed in upon her pinched and wasted heart, crushing the ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... indignation of Parliament and of the country; that it assisted in the spoliation of the princesses of Oude; that it passed sentence of death on Nuncomar. And this is the Court which we are to restore from its present state of degeneracy to its original purity. This is the protection which we are to give to the natives against the Europeans. Sir, so far is it from being true that the character of the Supreme Court has deteriorated, that it has, perhaps, improved more than ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... never as young and accomplished a dissembler.— Nay, man, never bend your angry brows on me. I speak in bitterness of heart, from what I remember of your worthy father; and if his son hears of his degeneracy from no one else, he shall hear it ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... success. Probably it occurred to him that the poor young lady, having more ardor than science, was not going the right way to work, and the thought of improving her method may have been the real cause of his apparent degeneracy. However that may be, it is certain that, crossing the bridge in company with her mother, Mademoiselle Beauvisage suddenly cried out, like a true ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... type-species. This will be that kind which has the class-properties in their greatest intensity (and, therefore, most easily studied with all their effects); and we must conceive the other varieties as instances of degeneracy from that type. ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... of the greatest authorities on our domesticated animals, are sufficient to show that the fact of infertility or degeneracy appearing in the offspring of hybrids after a few generations need not be imputed to the fact of the first parents being distinct species, since exactly the same phenomena appear when individuals of the same species are bred under similar adverse conditions. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the highest, in vain compromises and delusive hopes of liberty. Should the Roman people, of their own free will, pretend to give themselves away,—to sell themselves to a faction whose subversive principles they abhor, their forefathers of all preceding ages would protest against their base degeneracy; the children of the generations to come would curse their memory; all reflecting men of the present time would accuse them of black ingratitude,—ingratitude to the mighty dead among their Pontiffs, to whom they are indebted for their very name, their city's fame, its ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... Election Day for the best men, cutting out in advance the names of the candidates favored by the Law and Order League of his native city, and carrying them to the polls in order to jog his memory. He could talk knowingly, too, by the card, of the degeneracy of the public men of the nation, and had at his finger-ends inside information as to the manner in which President This or Congressman That had sacrificed the ideals of a vigorous manhood to the brass ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... touched, for she saw that it was sincere, and youthful, and indicative of clear faith in what is beautiful, and in fine ideals of what is fitting. Perhaps, dimly, she perceived that this is good stuff of which to make a man, provided it springs from immaturity, and not from the sentimentalism of degeneracy. The loss of it is a price we pay for wisdom. Some think the ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Peru; the legions of Alva were only to be disarmed by intercepting the gold ships on their passage; and, inspired by an enthusiasm like that which four centuries before had precipitated the chivalry of Europe upon the East, the same spirit which in its present degeneracy covers our bays and rivers with pleasure yachts, then fitted out armed privateers, to sweep the Atlantic, and plunder and destroy Spanish ships wherever they ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... flat and wide. He was a slender, weazened man, nervous, irritable, high-strung, and anaemic—a typical child of the gutter, with unbeautiful twisted features, small eyes, with face and mouth perpetually and feverishly hungry, brutish in a catlike way, stamped to the core with degeneracy. ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... most ancient down to the most recent times. They are characterized by the rapidity of their early conquests, by the immense extent of the dominions comprised in them, by the establishment of a satrap or pashaw system of governing the provinces, by an invariable and speedy degeneracy in the princes of the royal house, the effeminate nurslings of the seraglio succeeding to the warrior sovereigns reared in the camp, and by the internal anarchy and insurrections which indicate and accelerate the decline and fall of these unwieldy and ill-organized fabrics ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... and intellectual [225]; yet it was only succeeded by melodies more effeminate and luxurious. And Aristophanes enumerates the change from the old national airs and measures among the worst symptoms of Athenian degeneracy. Besides the musician, the tutor of the gymnasium and the grammarian still made the nominal limit of scholastic instruction. [226] But life itself had now become a school. The passion for public intercourse and disputation, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... one time the famous Canon of Notre Dame at Paris had an enthusiastic following; thousands flocked to his lectures from every country; his popularity was enormous. He combated the abuses of the age and the degeneracy of some of the clergy, and astonished and enraged many by the boldness of his speech and the novelty of his opinions. His views with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity expressed in his Introductio (Traite de la Trinite) were made the subject of a charge against ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... years past, in Paris, that state of things has been reached which some women desire to effect amongst ourselves. The women there mainly attend to business—serving the BOUTIQUE, or presiding at the COMPTOIR—while the men lounge about the Boulevards. But the result has only been homelessness, degeneracy, and family and ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... the possession of gold and other property;" a time when, as the chants of the Delaware Indians stated it (page 109, ante), "all were willingly pleased, all were well-happified." While the description given by Murray in the above extract of the degeneracy of mankind in the land of the gods, "a period of constant quarrelling and deeds of violence, when might was right," agrees with Plato's account of the Atlanteans, when they became "aggressive," "unable to bear their fortune," "unseemly," "base," "filled with unrighteous avarice and power,"—and ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... favourable to its full development. Book-production was still progressing in the immediate neighbourhood of London. At St. Albans, for example, over eighty were transcribed under Whethamstede during this reign, a number which is peculiarly interesting when the degeneracy of the monasteries is remembered. Neither Edward IV. nor Richard III. seems to have availed himself of the increasing plenty of books. The library of the former was a very unimportant affair. From ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... meals, consisted in spinning and weaving. In Homer we see the wives of the nobles occupied in this way; and the custom of the women making the necessary articles of dress continued to prevail even when the luxury of later times, together with the degeneracy of the women themselves, had made the establishment of workshops and places of manufacture for this purpose necessary. Antique art has frequently treated these domestic occupations. The Attic divinities, Athene Ergane and ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... and thus the wager of battle tells in the end for the advantage of the race, by eliminating the maimed, the ugly, and the cowardly, and encouraging the strong, the handsome, the enterprising, and the valiant. This is nature's way of preventing degeneracy. ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... capons and game, good wine and the dainties of the earth console him and cheer his heart. Then he prays to God and says 'I am poor and in misery.' Were God to answer him He would say, 'thou liest!'" To illustrate the degeneracy of the age, Peire relates a fable, perhaps the only instance of this literary form among the troubadours, upon the theme that if all the world were mad, the one sane man would be in a lunatic asylum: "there was a certain town, ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... nearer him, clinking the ice invitingly, and directed his attention to our iris-bed as a more cheerful object of contemplation than the degeneracy of the inhabitants of Vermont. The flowers burned on their tall stalks like yellow tongues of flame. The strong, sword-like green leaves thrust themselves boldly up into the spring air like a challenge. The ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... Government, and decay of the nation.] Everywhere Rome was failing in her duties as mistress of the civilised world. Her own internal degeneracy was faithfully reflected in the abnegation of her imperial duties. When in any country the small-farmer class is being squeezed off the land; when its labourers are slaves or serfs; when huge tracts are kept waste to minister to pleasure; when the shibboleth of art is on every man's lips, ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... God that this degeneracy was transient, that he deigned once more to raise me aloft. I thought upon what I had done as a sacrifice to duty, and WAS CALM. My wife was dead; but I reflected, that though this source of human consolation was closed, yet others were still open. If ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... with a young man of good birth before exposing him to the scandalous manners of our age! These precautions are painful but necessary; negligence in this matter is the ruin of all our young men; degeneracy is the result of youthful excesses, and it is these excesses which make men what they are. Old and base in their vices, their hearts are shrivelled, because their worn-out bodies were corrupted at an early ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... degenerate, and that the effect of this appears in his disregarding and disobeying that monitor within. I am not disposed to differ from the writers referred to, respecting the existence and the extent of this degeneracy, but rather as to the manner in which it operates in the actual moral condition of mankind. I do not say that there is in human nature more good than they assign to it, but that there is more knowledge of what is good; not that men do better than these writers ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... his work, as we think we remember to have heard was the case with "Sea Dreams," we do not know; but, with his probable taste in poetry, supposing him to have cared for the poetry of his time, he would doubtless have looked upon Alfred's success as another sign of the degeneracy of the age. As has been hinted, Mr. Tennyson was very careful of his money, and his boys were not allowed much spending money. Alfred and his brother Charles had the natural youthful desire to see their poetry in print, but they could not with ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... opportunity is trammelled only so far as we have trammelled it by our greed and falsehood; and in this aspect the psychology of Mr. White offers the strongest contrast to that of the latest Russian master in fiction. Maxim Gorky's wholly hopeless study of degeneracy in the life of "Foma Gordyeeff" accuses conditions which we can only imagine with difficulty. As one advances through the moral waste of that strange book one slowly perceives that he is in a land of No Use, in an ambient of such iron fixity and inexorable bounds that perhaps Foma's ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of Greece. The former are always opposed in heart to the popular divinities. In fact, there are the popular, the sacerdotal, and the mysterious religions of Greece, represented roughly by Homer, Pindar, and AEschylus. The ancients had no notion of a fall of man, though they had of his gradual degeneracy. Prometheus, in the old mythus, and for the most part in AEschylus, is the Redeemer and the Devil ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... greatest of modern apostles, has based many of his theories upon "a violent repudiation of any faith or tradition which recognizes a power of right and justice lying beyond our impulsive nature; an identification of self-restraint with degeneracy and of self-assertion with health; a search for happiness in the conquest of others rather than in self-conquest; a substitution of the Will to Power for the Darwinian Will to Live, with the consequent intensification of the unconscious and instinctive ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... beasts of the field? Not so: that were easy to achieve. Human beings, two living, healthy men, one white, one black, were the requirements. Impossible! The experiment could never be performed: its requirements were unattainable. O tempora! O mores! Alas, for the degeneracy of the age! In the days of the Roman emperors men were fed, literally fed, to wild beasts in the arena—Gauls, Scythians, Nubians, even Roman freedmen when barbarians were scarce. This to amuse the populace alone. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... grotesque devices: but what shall I say of Probus tower, which from top to bottom is covered with delicate tracery cut in granite? it rises above the miserable surrounding village, a satire upon neighbouring degeneracy in things religious: you must often have seen drawings of Probus at the Watercolour Exhibition, as it is a regular artists' lion. At about half-past six we got into Truro, a clean wide flourishing town with London shops, a commemorative column, a fine ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... high, Intelligent, good, great, and glorious things, As much superior unto all thy sire Adam could e'er have been in Eden, as 70 The sixty-thousandth generation shall be, In its dull damp degeneracy, to Thee and thy son;—and how weak they are, judge ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... resembled his mother. He had the same eyes, too big, too blue; the same lashes, too long, too dark; the same ears, too small and a trifle too far forward. In addition he had the same full upper-lip, the same cleft in the chin, the same features refined almost to the point of degeneracy. But the ensemble was charming—too charming, as was his voice, which he had acquired at Oxford where, at the House, he had studied, though what, except voice culture, one may surmise and never know. Men ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... him and Rose, began to question him on the subject of Philip Meryon. Meryon's mother, it seemed, had been an intimate friend of one of Flaxman's sisters, Lady Helen Varley, and Flaxman was well acquainted with the young man's most unsatisfactory record. He drew a picture of the gradual degeneracy of the handsome lad who had been the hope and delight of his warm-hearted, excitable mother; of her deepening disappointment ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... imperfectly endeavoured to trace our society from the sea to our woods! yet you must not imagine that every person who moves back, acts upon the same principles, or falls into the same degeneracy. Many families carry with them all their decency of conduct, purity of morals, and respect of religion; but these are scarce, the power of example is sometimes irresistible. Even among these back-settlers, their depravity is greater or less, according to what nation ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... here the thought that struck fire in the mind of young Schiller, whose bent was all for tragedy. If there was to be a proof that strong passion and bold action were still possible, notwithstanding the degeneracy of the age, what better object could there be for the passion to wreak itself upon than the age itself? If life had become vapid, and the German character servile and pusillanimous, here was the very field for a mad Ajax who should make havoc ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... of the great conspiracy. Having discarded the rational and humane views of their own fathers—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others—it was but the natural sequel that they should signalize their degeneracy by aiming to overthrow the work in which those sages had embodied their generous ideas—the Constitution of the United States and the whole fabric of government ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... heard of capital. In all his writing about crime and punishment, full as it is of insight, sympathy and good sense, it is odd that a mind so fertile nowhere anticipated the modern doctrine of the connection between moral and physical degeneracy. He saw in crime only error, where we see anaemia: he would have cured it with syllogisms, where we should administer proteids. His entire psychology, both social and individual, is vitiated by a naive and headstrong intellectualism. Life is rather ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... lowest stratum of society. Since the year 1876 the birth-rate had declined, and gradually the fear of over-population, which had saddened the lives of such men as John Stuart Mill, began to give way to the much less terrifying but still substantial fear of under-population, caused either by race degeneracy or race suicide. At that period the former of the two was the accepted explanation, and only by vague hints did scientific statisticians indicate that there might be or perhaps must be something else than "natural" causes ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... Doctor Mosely. He was still shaken with the storm of defending his ideals from profanation, and Hallard easily drew from him an admission that Mr. Dyckman was bent upon matrimony, also a scathing diatribe on the remarriage of divorced persons as one of the signs of the increasing degeneracy of public morals. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... course he's a failure, whether rich or poor;—a miserable imposition, a hollow vulgar fraud from beginning to end,— too insignificant for you and me to talk of, were it not that his position is a sign of the degeneracy of the age. What are we coming to when such as he is an honoured guest at ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... be on the side of the 'common-sense' party. In one of his letters to Mr. James Burness, Montrose, wherein he describes the strange doings of a strange sect called the Buchanites,—surely in itself a convincing proof of the degeneracy of the times in the matter of religion,—we have an interesting reflection which gives us some insight into the poet's mind. 'This, my dear Sir, is one of the many instances of the folly in leaving the guidance of sound reason and common sense in matters of religion. Whenever we ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... this, no State will ever get rid of the criminal problem unless its population is composed of healthy and vigorous citizens. Very often crime is but the offspring of degeneracy and disease. A diseased and degenerate population, no matter how favourably circumstanced in other respects, will always produce a plentiful crop of criminals. Stunted and decrepit faculties, whether physical or mental, either vitiate the character, or unfit the ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison |
