"Degrading" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mischievous notion of it which would encourage us to draw immediate and crude deductions from Holy Scripture, subject only to the control and the colouring of our own minds, responsible for nothing further than our own consciousness of an honest intention. Whilst we claim a release from that degrading yoke which neither are we nor were our fathers able to bear, we deprecate for ourselves and for our fellow-believers that licentiousness which in doctrine and practice tempts a man to follow merely what ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... immense people be reduced, stronger in its natural resources than in its artificial defences, opposing to a monstrous and discordant confederation, simple and united counsels and combinations, that the cowardly, degrading idea of sacrificing its soverignty, of permitting any discussion as to its liberties, of committing to negotiation its rights, could be considered among the possibilities of ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... harness. Lionel and his wife of a few days descended from it, when they found themselves in the midst of this unexpected crowd. They had cause, those serfs, to shout out a welcome to their lord; for never again would they live in a degrading position, if he could help it. The various improvements for their welfare, which he had so persistently and hopefully planned, were not ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... transactions—the taking of money or making of change but a simple record on a slate behind the counter of articles selected by those customers whose urgent needs could not wait Mr. Harkutt's return. Perhaps on account of this degrading limitation, perhaps for other reasons, the boy did not fancy the task imposed upon him. The presence of the idle loungers who usually occupied the armchairs near the stove, and occasionally the counter, dissipated any romance ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... Intercessions were supposed to be made by the Virgin Mary, and by favorite saints, more efficacious with Deity than the penitence and prayers of the erring and sinful themselves. The influence of this veneration for martyrs and saints was degrading to the mind, and became a very lucrative source of profit to the priests, who peddled the bones and relics of saints as they did indulgences, and who invented innumerable lies to attest the genuineness and antiquity ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... say, so unaccustomed had I been to such a state of filth, that I felt a degree of happiness, as I returned from the pump in the prison-yard, and I put on the prison dress almost with pleasure; for degrading as it was, at all events, it was new and clean. I then returned to my cell and was left to ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... mean, low, unartistic, degrading as is this passion, I felt it rise up like a snake in my breast when I saw that feeble woman. She was splendidly dressed—wrapped in furs of the most costly kind, trailing behind; her velvets and lace ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... everything to lose. As we have seen, force ruled the world, and the common people had no voice in their government. The workers were looked down upon by the members of the fighting class, who never did a stroke of work themselves and considered honest toil as degrading. In fact, as one writer has said, the only respectable trade in Europe in those days was what we ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... said, in accents that vainly struggled for calm, "if thou hast admitted to thy heart one unworthy thought towards a Moorish infidel, dig deep and root it out, even with the knife, and to the death—so wilt thou save this hand from that degrading task." ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... had a proverb, that "He who gives blows is a master, he who gives none is a dog?" We should instantly decide on the mean and servile spirit of those who could repeat it; and such we find to have been that of the Bengalese, to whom the degrading proverb belongs, derived from the treatment they were used to receive from their Mogul rulers, who answered the claims of their creditors by a vigorous application of the whip! In some of the Hebrew proverbs we are struck by the frequent allusions of that fugitive people to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... practiced any mechanical art. The Helots were slaves, who, as is generally believed, on account of their obstinate resistance in some early wars, and subsequent conquest, had been reduced to the most degrading servitude. The people of the provincial districts were a mixed race, composed partly of strangers who had accompanied the Dorians and aided them in their conquest, and partly of the old inhabitants of the country who had submitted to the conquerors. The provincials were under the control of ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... considered that there is no power which can reach the abuse. There are many industrious and worthy people among these natives, who are anxious for improvement, and to promote the education and improvement of their people, but a degrading personal dependence on the one hand, and the absence of nearly all incentives and all power to do good on ...
— Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts - Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained • William Apes
... inconvenience, since from time to time they would have to pay their court to their suzerain; and it seems towards the close of the Median period to have involved an obligation which must have been felt, if not as degrading, at any rate as very disagreeable. The monarch appears to have been required to send his eldest son as a sort of hostage to the Court of his superior, where he was held in a species of honorable captivity, not being allowed to quit the Court and return home without leave, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... dregs the bitter cup of humiliation. The new king, Jerome, who declared, "Je veux qu'on respecte la dignite de l'homme et du citoyen," bestowed, it is true, many and great benefits upon his subjects; the system of flogging, so degrading to the soldier, was abolished, the judicature was improved, the administration simplified, and the German in authority, notwithstanding his traditionary gruffness, became remarkable for urbanity ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... time, Auletes, the father, went on toward Rome. So far as his character and his story were known among the surrounding nations, he was the object of universal obloquy, both on account of his previous career of degrading vice, and now, still more, for this ignoble flight from the difficulties in which his vices and ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... elevated the Maurepas, the D'Aiguillons, and that hateful Abbe Terray, who, for rapacity, were none of them better than Du Barry—and thus he ended by losing the love of his subjects. I have often pitied Louis XV. for degrading himself as he did before the eyes of his family, his subjects, and ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... days, the queen of Prom, who administered the government, offered to become tributary if he would grant a peace; but the king insisted that she should put herself into his hands with all her treasure. She refused these degrading terms, knowing his perfidious character, and resolved to defend the city to the last extremity. The king of Siam accordingly gave several assaults, in all of which he was repulsed, and in a short time, lost above 80,000 of his men, partly by the sword, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... in my house, in my vases. Yes, I suppose I am greedy. Oh, I am going to enjoy myself these next few days. All the people I like best are coming, and they mostly like me best. That is such an advantage. Wouldn't it be awful to like somebody very much and find he didn't like you? What a degrading position! Oh dear, ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... condition of getting out of servitude. No such thing. Let three millions of people but abandon all that they and their ancestors have been taught to believe sacred, and to forswear it publicly in terms the most degrading, scurrilous, and indecent for men of integrity and virtue, and to abuse the whole of their former lives, and to slander the education they have received, and nothing more is required of them. There is no system of folly, or impiety, or ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... monarchy under the veil of popular assent, and of giving to the most ruthless acts of despotism the stamp and semblance of law. He saw nothing to fear in a House of Lords whose nobles cowered helpless before the might of the Crown, and whose spiritual members his policy was degrading into mere tools of the royal will. Nor could he find anything to dread in a House of Commons which was crowded with members directly or indirectly nominated by the royal Council. With a Parliament such as this Cromwell might well trust to make the nation itself through its very ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... clamoured for her, imperiously, as it clamoured for light and air. He had no concern with anyone but her—her only—and he could not let her go. It was not love; it was a bodily weakness, a pitiable infirmity: he even felt it degrading that another person should be able to exercise such an influence over him, that there should be a part of himself over which he had no control. Not to see her, not to be able to gather fresh strength from each chance meeting, meant that the grip life had of him would relax—he grew ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... here on good behaviour, or not, I could not rightly ascertain, but certainly they were scampish-looking steeds, their physiognomical expression was low and dogged, such as one might expect from the degrading nature of ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... then known only to a few, and had not the credit of antiquity, while even those who understood it were afraid to mention it to their most trusted friends. Men at that time could not endure natural philosophers and those whom they called in derision stargazers, but accused them of degrading the movements of the heavenly bodies by attributing them to necessary physical causes. They drove Protagoras into exile, and cast Anaxagoras into prison, from whence he was with difficulty rescued by Perikles; while Sokrates, who never took any part in these speculations, was ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... and efficient management the earnings of the penitentiary continue to exceed its expenses, and at the same time gratifying progress has been made in improving the condition and treatment of the prisoners. The hateful and degrading uniform of past years is disappearing; increased means of education, secular and religious, are afforded, and the officers of the institution exhibit an earnest desire to employ every instrumentality authorized by existing laws to restore its ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... is it much alluded to in the pulpit, and the result is that young people commonly get their notions about it from those only a little older than themselves, and who therefore know but little more than they do, or from those who form their opinions from the abuse they see of it and so hold degrading and unworthy ideas respecting it. Sometimes all that is known about it amounts to this, that it is a delightful ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... armies and frontiers, why should we bring into existence new jingo armies and new jingo frontiers? All the other revolutionists fell in instinctively with Home Rule for Ireland. Shaw urged, in effect, that Home Rule was as bad as Home Influences and Home Cooking, and all the other degrading domesticities that began with the word "Home." His ultimate support of the South African war was largely created by his irritation against the other revolutionists for favouring a nationalist resistance. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... flogging, and he felt it deeply. To his proud spirit the disgrace was intolerable. At that moment he hated Dr. Rowlands, he hated Mr. Gordon, he hated his schoolfellows, he hated everybody. He had been flogged; the thought haunted him; he, Eric Williams, had been forced to receive this most degrading corporal punishment. He pushed fiercely through the knot of boys, and strode as quick as he could along ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... nameless, renownless[obs3]; obscure; unknown to fame; unnoticed, unnoted[obs3], unhonored, unglorified[obs3]. shameful; disgraceful, discreditable, disreputable; despicable; questionable; unbecoming, unworthy; derogatory; degrading, humiliating, infra dignitatem[Lat], dedecorous[obs3]; scandalous, infamous, too bad, unmentionable; ribald, opprobrious; errant, shocking, outrageous, notorious. ignominious, scrubby, dirty, abject, vile, beggarly, pitiful, low, mean, shabby base &c. (dishonorable) 940. Adv. to one's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... flag to the English; and, finally, that neither the young Prince of Orange nor any of his family should ever be invested with the dignity of stadtholder. These two latter conditions were certainly degrading to Holland; and the conditions of the treaty prove that an absurd point of honor was the only real cause for the short but bloody and ruinous war which plunged the Provinces ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... ancient French nobility who had been ruined by the Revolution, and whose minds she expected to have found on a level with their circumstances. These, however, either suspecting her intent and her views, or preferring honest poverty to degrading and disgraceful splendour, had started objections which she was not prepared to encounter. Thus the time passed away; and when, on the 18th of the following May, the Senate proclaimed Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of the French, not a Chamberlain ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... power in it which enables it to exert an attraction on him even after death. For we must remember that the influence of music, though always powerful, is not always for good. We can scarcely doubt that as certain forms of music tend to raise us above the sensuality of the animal, or the more degrading passion of material gain, and to transport us into the ether of higher thought, so other forms are directly calculated to awaken in us luxurious emotions, and to whet those sensual appetites which it is the business of a philosopher not indeed to annihilate or to be ashamed ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... certainly produced by the system. In the first place, private gambling (between gentleman and gentleman), with its degrading incidents, is at an end. In the second place, this very circumstance brings the worst part of the practice within the reach of the law. Public gambling, which only existed by and through what were popularly termed hells, might be easily suppressed. There were, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... it is not possible for any society in which there is a very large body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society is—to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so much belief in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion of what pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows. Therefore, let us have none with this nonsense about our being much better than the rest of our countryman, or the pretence that that was a reason why we ought to have ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Captain Cook). Hayes happened to be there with his vessel, and agreed to convey the shipwrecked missionaries to Samoa. No doubt he charged them a pretty stiff price, for he always said that missionaries "were teaching Kanakas the degrading doctrine that even if a man killed his enemy and cut out and ate his heart in public, and otherwise misconducted himself, he could yet secure a front seat in the Kingdom of Heaven if he said he was sorry and was then baptized as Aperamo (Abraham) ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... in paying the most obsequious homage to fictitious rank of every kind. A vulgar millionaire of the Fifth Avenue, and a foreign adventurer with a meaningless title, are equally objects of their misplaced deference. Losing sight of their own manhood and self-respect, they descend to the most degrading sycophancy. We have little hope of benefiting them. They are "joined to their idols; let ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify, and at ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... however, been supplanted by brutal sport. The bull-fights of Spain are true Colosseum spectacles, and whilst the danger-thrills which throb through a human concourse at the assaults of an infuriated bull may not be as degrading as mere gloating over pain, what can we say of the disembowelling of the horses which is such a feature of that sport. And the modern prize fight and boxing championship has something of the gladiatorial spirit. The enormous interest in the Dempsey-Carpentier contest is evidence of the increasingly ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... back in these regards to below the level of the ordinary cur, who makes his place in the affections of his owner because he has attractive or useful qualities of mind. It appears to me, in a word, that our treatment of this noble animal, where he is bred for ornament, is in effect degrading. ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... ignorance was the parent of vice; and, by diffusing the school-master, you would extinguish the greater part of the wickedness which afflicted society; that the providing of cheap, innocent, and elevating amusements for the leisure hours of the working-classes, would prove the best antidote to their degrading propensities; and that then, and then only, would crime really be arrested, when the lamp of knowledge burned in every mechanic's workshop, in every peasant's cottage. The idea was plausible, it was seducing, it was amiable; and held forth the prospect of general improvement of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... this I hear About the new carnivora? Can little plants Eat bugs and ants And gnats and flies? A sort of retrograding: Surely the fare Of flowers is air Or sunshine sweet; They shouldn't eat Or do aught so degrading!" ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... I walked till I was tired, thinking of all the sacrifices I had made to be my husband's housekeeper and keep myself in woman's sphere, and here was the outcome! I was degrading him from his position of bread-winner. If it was my duty to keep his house, it must be his to find me a house to keep, and this life must end. I would go with him to the poorest cabin, but he must be the head of the matrimonial firm. He should not be my business assistant. I would ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... Carby are far, far from gay, and what pleasure they do take, they take entirely in the society of their equals. So determined are they to drink delight of tennis with their peers, and with nobody else, that even the Clergy are excluded, ex officio, and in their degrading capacity of ministers of Religion, from the County Lawn Tennis Club. As we all know how essential young curates fresh from college are to the very being of rural lawn-tennis, no finer proof can ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... was able to spend ninety thousand pounds in a single twelvemonth. The Court was as shameless as it was profuse. If the Court of Elizabeth was as immoral as that of her successor, its immorality had been shrouded by a veil of grace and chivalry. But no veil shrouded the degrading grossness of the Court of James. James was no drunkard, but he was a hard drinker, and with the people at large his hard drinking passed for drunkenness. When the Danish king visited England actors in a masque performed ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... that of my cousin, I can not see how the privilege of which I availed myself in proposing for her hand, can be construed into a breach of confidence. I trust, sir, that you have not contemplated your brother's son in any degrading or unbecoming attitude." ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... felt that she was a little vexed with me, poor dear. But, apart from the economical question, I'm glad I insisted. It's so much better for her not to be so dependent on another woman. It's a little degrading for both of ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... soldier held that the bible alone contained all things essential to salvation, and that though it might be advisable that those who were gifted with wisdom or eloquence should expound the Scriptures to their brethren, it was by no means necessary, but rather hurtful and degrading, that any organised body of ministers or of bishops should claim special prerogatives, or take the place of mediators between the creature and the Creator. For the wealthy dignitaries of the Church, rolling in their carriages to their cathedrals, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... yet these are very rare exceptions, which occur but seldom in most men's lives; and as a general rule a strict adherence to the truth is the only just and safe course, even though it may apparently lead one into a difficulty. There is something degrading in a falsehood or prevarication, which must injure the self-respect of a man of proper feeling. It is a sin! There is no disguising it. People often tell falsehoods to conceal what they have done wrong, but that does not make the sin less; it is only adding one sin to another. ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... NATURE.—For a certain period between her monthly illness, every woman is sterile. Conception may be avoided by refraining from coition except for this particular number of days, and there will be no evasion of natural intercourse, no resort to disgusting practices, and nothing degrading. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... seems the government of this earth. I feel calm, yet sternly, towards Fate. This last plot against me has been so cruelly, cunningly wrought, that I shall never acquiesce. I submit, because useless resistance is degrading, but I demand an explanation. I see that it is probable I shall never receive one, while I live here, and suppose I can bear the rest of the suspense, since I have comprehended all its difficulties in the first moments. Meanwhile, I live day by ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... sorry I let you in for all this. I don't know how it is that we contrive to make feelings like ours, which seems to me to be beautiful and sacred feelings, and which lead to such interesting and exciting adventures, end in vulgar squabbles and degrading scenes. ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... some one casually remarked that it was a scandalous shame that an escaped Cossack like Pugasceff should be in a position to conquer a fourth of Russia in Europe, to disgrace the Russian troops time after time, to condemn the finest Russian officers to a degrading death, and now even to bombard ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... threatened: If he was to be hung by the Law, by all means let it be for a sheep! Moreover the notion of standing in a witness box and swearing to the truth that no gesture, not even a word of love had passed between them seemed to him more degrading than to take the tacit stigma of being an adulterer—more truly degrading, considering the feeling in his heart, and just as bad and painful for his children. The thought of explaining away, if he could, before a judge and twelve average Englishmen, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... friends, what of all this? If these things I have been saying to you are true, what is the upshot of them for you and me? Simply this, as I conceive it—that instead of wasting your time, and degrading your souls, by indulgence in such grime as this'—and he pointed to the newspapers—'it is your urgent business and mine—at this moment—to do our very utmost to bring this life of Jesus, our precious invaluable possession as a people, back into some real and ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... by concessions to the false and vitiated taste of those who combine to treat them with neglect bordering upon insolence. If the system of female education, if the system of female manners, conspire to show in the fair sex a degrading anxiety to attract worthless admiration, wealthy or titled homage, is it surprising that every young man, who has any pretensions to birth, fortune, or fashion, should consider himself as the arbiter of their fate, and ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... women the right to their own earnings. A "Memorial" was sent by the Suffrage Association to the Ohio Constitutional Convention in 1850, from which I take the following: "We believe the whole theory of the common law in relation to woman is unjust and degrading." (Then follows political injustice.) "We would especially call your attention to the legal condition of married women." (Then follow general statements and quotations from the common law.) The attention of the memorialists was called by the proper authorities to the fact that the statute ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... athlete of the day before was obliged to submit to having his tea-cup carried to his lips and tipped for him by a woman, and the chop administered bit by bit on a fork. It was very degrading; but once in a while Cornelia accidentally touched him, or her face, lit up by interest in her occupation, came so near his own that he felt warm and thrilled, and went near to admit it was worth all the broken bones in the world, and the sacrifice ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... were unwritten, none of which they could read, and the larger part of which (those written in Latin) they could not translate, or understand when they heard them read, is equivalent to supposing the nation sunk in the most degrading slavery, instead of enjoying a ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... path and down again, talking of dogs, because it happened that Tom Tripe's enormous beast was sprawling in the shadow of a rose-bush at the farther end. The commissioner did not like dogs. "Something loathsome about them—degrading—especially the big ones." She disagreed. She liked them, cold wet noses and all, even in the dark. Tom Tripe, stepping behind a bush with the obvious purpose of smoking in secret the clay pipe that be hardly troubled ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... very impressive. Nothing could be more clear, more just, more true, than the picture he drew of the manifold evils of intemperance; a vice so deceitful in its first appearance, so treacherous in its growth; so degrading, so brutalizing in its enjoyments; so blasting and ruinous in its effects—ruinous to body and mind, heart and soul—blasting all hopes for this life and for the next, so long as it remains unconquered. He entreated his friends to count the cost of indulgence in this ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... is exclaimed, is it not dangerous to tell them anything about it? Such a course is unnecessary. Teach them that any handling of the parts, any indecent language, any impure thought, is degrading and hurtful. See that the servants, nurses, and companions with whom they associate are not debased; and recommend ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... and lavished away the provisions of the inhabitants, seizing upon whatever pleased their caprice, and obliging the cacique and his subjects to dance before them for their amusement. Their very pleasures were attended with cruelty. They never addressed the natives but in the most degrading terms, and on the least offence, or the least freak of ill-humor, inflicted blows and lashes, ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... He tenderly took his wife in his arms, and they exchanged the closest, the most human of kisses amid the quiet of the slumbering fields. After the scorching pavement of Paris, after the eager struggling of the day and the degrading spectacles of the night, how reposeful was that far-spreading silence, that faint bluish radiance, that endless unrolling of plains, steeped in refreshing gloom and dreaming of fructification by the morrow's sun! And what suggestions of health, and rectitude, and felicity ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... then; a board and a mud hovel is enough to-day. They cannot comprehend a white man's ambition to work that he may dress and live well, and all money and all thought spent in civilizing the Indian has only resulted in degrading him. He absorbs all the white man's vices and none of his virtues. Not only that, but the effort to redeem him has warped and twisted him into a cunning and revengeful creature; all malice and no honor. So true is this that the fact has crystalized itself into the universal ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... the practice of artificial birth control. To a very great extent Malthusian teaching was responsible for the Poor Law of 1834, the most severe in Europe, the demoralising laxity of the old Poor Law being replaced by degrading severity. Again, as recently as 1899, a Secretary of State reiterated the Malthusian doctrine by explaining that great poverty throughout India was due to the increase of population under the pax Britannica. Now the truth is that ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... in a cloak to promote perspiration, and was asleep, when a party of Moors entered the hut, and pulled away the cloak. He made signs that he was sick, and wished to sleep, but his distress afforded sport to these savages. "This studied and degrading insolence," says Mr. Park, "to which I was constantly exposed, was one of the bitterest ingredients in the cup of captivity, and often made life itself a burthen to me. In these distressing moments I have frequently envied ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... redress and have found no remedy. When five years ago, with our social atmosphere poisoned with vices which as women we had no power to remove, men in authority began a series of attempts to fasten upon us by law the huge typical vice of all the ages—the social evil—in a form so degrading to all womanhood that no man, though he were the prince of profligates, would submit to its regulations for a day; then we cried out so that the world heard us. We know the plague is only stayed for a brief ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... him to suicide, than condemned him to live a lie to the end of his days. No doubt she regarded it as a momentary act of expiation. That's the way her romances taught her to look at loveless marriage—as something spectacular, transitory, instead of the enduring, degrading squalor that it is!" ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... strongly:—"I cannot get myself to feel at all anxious about the Catholic question. I cannot see the use of fighting about the platter, when you have let them snatch the meat off it. I hold Popery to be such a mean and degrading superstition, that I am not sure I could have found myself liberal enough for voting the repeal of the penal laws as they existed before 1780. They must and would, in course of time, have smothered ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... volumes. We have a whole chapter on Practical Life, [24] on self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, full of portentous platitudes and ancient saws; St. Paul's doctrine of charity, and all that is best in the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, is liberated from its degrading association with the belief in a God who rewards and punishes.[25] We are "to act strenuously in that direction which, after conscientious inquiry, seems the best, ... and trust to what religious men call Providence, and scientific men Evolution, for the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... stood before the faces of those who labored for the uplifting of the race. Practices attached to the ecclesiastics, and degrading the organized church, were flaunted before the eyes of those who stood for true faith and pure living. These were attacked with vigor, while this evil, which had been especially the sin of the Jew, crept ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... success attained by other brethren but denied to himself, by references to what he calls "playing to the gallery" or "catering for popular applause." He, forsooth, will not so demean himself as to be guilty of practices so degrading. Thought is his provision for those who come to hear. He appeals to thinkers. Alas! for him, his "thinkers," if only he knew it, are human and have a mind to be pleased. "Very intellectual," may ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... to say that you have the worst opinion of me; that you deny me the possession of all I value most. That is to say that I am a traitor to all my sisters; that I have acted as no woman can act without degrading herself and her sex; that I have sought where the incorrupt of my kind naturally scorn and abhor to seek.' She and I were silent for many a minute. 'Lucifer, Star of the Morning,' she went on, 'thou art fallen! You, once high in my esteem, are hurled down; you, once intimate ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... according to the commandments? Look at the fearful evils which prevail in our beloved country; the love of rule, civil and ecclesiastical; the miserly love of money, selfishness, vanity and sensualism, in their worst and most degrading forms! Customs and habits prevail which threaten the extinction of at least the Protestant portion of the community in large sections of our country. A Catholic bishop stated, a few years ago, that ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... although cleaning a lady's shoes, and bringing in a pail of water, or an armful of wood, is by no means such disgusting employment as scouring greasy pots and scrubbing the floors, she has been told that the former is degrading work not fit for a woman, and she is now in a free country, and ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... necessary perhaps before Italy could take her place as a united nation gifted with constitutional self-government and independence. Except, therefore, for the sufferings and the humiliations inflicted on her people; except for their servitude beneath the most degrading forms of ecclesiastical and temporal tyranny; except for the annihilation of their beautiful Renaissance culture; except for the depression of arts, learning, science, and literature, together with the enfeeblement of political ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... from a corner bookstore a lavishly pictured novel in octavo, entitled "The Ballet Girl's Revenge." She could not sew, nor wash, nor cook, nor keep house or even accounts. Not one faint notion had she of supporting herself. Domestic service she thought degrading, and she looked with a lofty scorn upon shop-girls. There were some dreadful women in a house close by; if Mercedes was conscious of their existence, it was as of women who were failures in that they played the right cards badly. She held her own pretty head the ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... it a great come-down to be a cab-horse, and was disgusted at standing in the rank, but he confessed to me at the end of the week that an easy mouth and a free head made up for a great deal, and after all, the work was not so degrading as having one's head and tail fastened to each other at the saddle. In fact, he settled in well, and Jerry liked ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... however, fall into a popular error concerning the division of labour in savagery, if we consider that all women's work is regarded as degrading to men and all men's work is tabooed to women. The duties of war and the chase are the chief occupation of men, yet in all parts of the world women have fought at need, and sometimes habitually, both to assist their men and also against them. Thus Buckley, ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... reason as well as all sense of duty, Grace?" he stormed. "What is this beggarly farmer, the nephew of my bitterest enemy, that you should give up so much for him? Have you counted the cost—hardship, degrading drudgery, and your father's displeasure? And would you choose these instead of your natural ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer's ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... remember that I ought to be a devoted wife and to love you as much as it might be possible for me to love you, you became jealous, you, as no man has ever been before, with the base, ignoble jealousy of a spy, which was as degrading to you as it was to me. I had not been married eight months when you suspected me of every perfidiousness, and you even told me so. What a disgrace! And as you could not prevent me from being beautiful and from pleasing people, from being called in drawing-rooms and also in the newspapers one of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... should be scandalised by their apparent want of patriotism. Scott's indignation was characteristic. The 'Edinburgh Review,' he says, 'tells you coolly, "We foresee a revolution in this country as well as Mr. Cobbett;" and, to say the truth, by degrading the person of the sovereign, exalting the power of the French armies and the wisdom of their counsels, holding forth that peace (which they allow can only be purchased by the humiliating prostration of ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... have to go back to the lodging-house in Vaterland. I shrank at the thought of it, and I told myself all the while that it would not do. I went ahead all the same, and approached nearer and nearer to the forbidden spot. Of course it was wretched. I admitted to myself that it was degrading—downright degrading, but there was no help for it. I was not in the least proud; I dared make the assertion roundly, that I was one of the least arrogant beings up to date. I ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... nominal post was that of 'librarian,' and he now and then officiated as experimentalist extraordinary before Lord Shelburne's guests. The compensation was not illiberal, and the relation seems to have been as free from degrading elements as such relations can be. Priestley was not a sycophant even in the day when men of genius thought it no great sin to give flattery in exchange for dinners. It was never his habit to burn ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... Immune from the degrading punishments and privations of his fellow-convicts, he was enabled to keep his self-respect, and was treated without harshness even by the soulless planter to whom he had been sold. He owed it all to gout and megrims. He had won the esteem of Governor ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... respects, too, the reference is visible: "I gave my back to the smiters ( [Greek: mastigosantes], LXX. [Greek: eis mastigas]), and my cheeks to those plucking ( [Greek: empaichthesetai]—the plucking of the beard, an act of degrading wantonness), my face I hid not from shame ( [Greek: hubristhesetai]) and spitting." Bengel draws attention to the fact of how highly Christ, in the passage quoted, placed the prophecy of the Old Testament: "Jesus most highly valued that which was written. The word of God which is contained ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... foregone; and must He stoop To whelm the world, and heave the floors o' the deep, Of purpose to pursue me from my place? And since I gave men knowledge, must He take Their length of days whereby they perfect it? So shall He scatter all that I have stored, And get them by degrading them. I know That in the end it is appointed me To fade. I will not fade ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... my death'; thus explaining her dying gestures. On examination of this document by the friends and relatives of the girl, it was recognized and identified as her handwriting; and it established the fact that the father had died innocent of every crime, except that of trying to save his child from a degrading marriage. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... every unwholesome dainty he fancies, and feel myself honored by his acceptance of these services. I think it is for him to rise and offer me a seat, because I am a woman and his wife; and that a silly subservience on my part is degrading to him and to myself. And I am afraid I make known these sentiments to her in a ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... "Mr." and "Mrs."! A more than questionable taste and a foolish pride have led us to adopt these terms because they were originally applicable to the gentry or to magistrates, and to abandon the good old words which had a meaning truly polite to others, and not degrading to ourselves! ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... These and other degrading laws the European progressive women are trying to remove from the Codes. They have their origin in the belief in "The imprudence, the frailty, and the imbecility" of women, to quote ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... servants are allowed at least four times as much per head as those working people who value, more than any other class, the cheerful refreshingness of tea, but who, stinted in its use by the exorbitant duty, are tempted and almost driven to the use, instead, of degrading drinks. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... the eyes and fingers have complete command of the material, (as a glass-blower has, for instance, in doing fine ornamental work,)—the law is not violated; but all our great engine and furnace work, in gun-making and the like, is degrading to the intellect; and no nation can long persist in it without losing many of its human faculties. Nay, even the use of machinery other than the common rope and pulley, for the lifting of weights, is degrading ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... of ridicule, but you could not understand that you were consenting to buy me—me—your wife! You wished to possess me for a little, as a sort of variation to your usual list, although your heart must have told you that it was degrading to me to be placed on such a plane. You did not recoil from such an idea, but pursued it, just as you pursue them, and the more eagerly, because I was more expensive. But you have deceived yourself, not me. Not thus will you ever regain possession of your wife. Adieu, Monsieur! [Throws the money ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... tell you several times," returned the doctor, with a smile, "that, as for me, I do not feel guilty of harboring the least degrading sentiment toward women. But I cannot answer for the opinions of the world at large. This subject promises to be more interesting than we anticipated. I see you know a great deal about it. Have women always been accorded an equality with men, or ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... with pathetic tenacity. But if the young man's value had risen in the eyes of his employers it had deteriorated in his own. He was condemned to play a part he had not bargained for, and it seemed to him more degrading when paid in bank-notes than if his retribution had consisted merely in good dinners and luxurious lodgings. The first time the smiling aide-de-camp had caught his eye over a verbal slip of Mrs. Hicks's, Nick had flushed to the forehead and gone to bed swearing that ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... when there is joy in the work is elevating, to labor under the lash of compulsion is degrading. It matters not so much what a man's occupation as how it is performed. A coachman driving his team down the crowded street better than anyone else could do it, and glorying in that fact, may be a true artist in his occupation, and be ennobled through his work. ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... homes for Chinese slave girls are a feature of Home Mission work among Orientals tells its own story of degrading customs transplanted ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... useful and valuable writers of her day. As it is, every man would wish his wife and his children to read Caelebs;—watching himself its effects;—separating the piety from the puerility;—and showing that it is very possible to be a good Christian, without degrading the human understanding to the trash and ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... shorthand-writers, and printing, was about L60 a day, but it never occurred to any one of the number to get up and declare with indignation, that such a waste of money and time on so palpably absurd a scheme was degrading, and to demand an immediate close of their labours. It all went smoothly to the end, and Mr. Nogo walked off from his task with the approving conscience of a ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... come that the Rhamdas, superintellectual as they are, can consent to such a contest? Is it not degrading, to their way of thinking? It smacks ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... have money; no matter whence it comes, nor what it costs. If, at least, you had to justify your expenses, the excuse of some great passion, or of some object, were it absurd, ardently pursued! But I defy you to confess upon what degrading pleasures you lavish our humble economies. I defy you to tell us what you mean to do with the sum that you demand to-night,—that sum for which you would have our mother stoop to beg the assistance of a shop-keeper, to whom we would be compelled to ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... antiquity, combined with the exaltation of the priesthood to such a degree as to make priests the real rulers of the land, reminding us of the spiritual despotism of the Middle Ages. The priests of Egypt ruled by appealing to the fears of men, thus favoring a degrading superstition. How far they taught that the various objects of worship were symbols merely of a supreme power, which they themselves perhaps accepted in their esoteric schools, we do not know. But the priests believed in a future state of rewards and punishments, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... her people when she appealed to their hospitality. Many a village gossip, many a virtuous farmer's wife who had pursed her lips and kept her skirts from degrading contact with the notorious Mag Henderson, found herself pledged to employ the Madam's protegee ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... who had brought his lordship down, as it were, in a box, and were about to handle the wires as they willed. This in itself was a terrible vexation to the archdeacon. Could he have ignored the chaplain, and have fought the bishop, there would have been, at any rate, nothing degrading in such a contest. Let the Queen make whom she would bishop of Barchester; a man, or even an ape, when once a bishop, would be a respectable adversary, if he would but fight, himself. But what was such a person as Dr Grantly to do, when such another person as Mr Slope was put forward ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... which, by forms of law, consigned the nations' solemn vows to oblivion, with all possible expressions of detestation by the infamous "Act Rescissory." In the year 1707, the "Act of Incorporation" brought the church and kingdom of Scotland under degrading bondage to the anti-Christian, Prelatic ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery
... proudly. 'No, aunt, we only lower ourselves by exclusiveness. It is degrading to ourselves and our tastes to make them badges of vanity. Let them be freely partaken, we shall be first still. The masses cannot mount higher ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lodgings at Meudon, then a lovely suburb of Paris, hired a piano and sat down to compose his Dutchman. He gives a graphic account of his tremors whilst awaiting the piano: he feared that during the degrading struggle for bread the power of composing might have deserted him. The instrument arrived, he sat down, and shouting for joy, struck out the sailors' chorus. In seven weeks the draft was complete—it is dated September 13, 1841. Want of ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... year (1830) he was told that he might be elected to the House of Representatives, and the gentleman who made the proposition ventured to say that he thought an ex-President, by taking such a position, "instead of degrading the individual would elevate the representative character." Mr. Adams replied that he had "in that respect no scruples whatever. No person can be degraded by serving the people as Representative in Congress, nor, in my opinion, would an ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... calumny and satire excited his indignation, or, if he himself were the object, his contempt; but he protected the freedom of wit, and, in the hours which the emperor gave to the familiar society of his friends, he could indulge his taste for pleasantry, without degrading the majesty of his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... Saviour, and maintains (after the example of the sacred writers themselves,) a kind of dignity in his expressions, suitable to such a subject, without any of that fond familiarity of language, and degrading meanness of phrase, by which it is, especially of late, grown fashionable among some (who nevertheless I believe mean well,) to express their ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... South Seas. At the time of Cook's visit the natives were absolutely savages. They lived in a state of partial nakedness, and their manners and customs were of the grossest description. Their religion and superstitions were degrading in the extreme, and, until Christianity obtained a hold upon them, they delighted in war, and practised horrible cruelties on ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... checked the sharp words that were rattling from her tongue. A truce to open warfare was tacitly agreed upon between the parties. The antagonism was not, however, the less real. Mrs. Uhler knew that her husband expected of her a degree of personal attention to household matters that she considered degrading to her condition as a wife; and, because he expected this, she, in order to maintain the dignity of her position, gave even less attention to these matters than would otherwise have been the case. Of course, under such administration ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... yet with seraphic sorrow on this, the guilty abode of guilty man?—with pity's tear still mournest thou, as yoked to the car of young desire, we bow the neck in degrading and slavish bondage? Or dost thou, the habitant of some bright star, where frailty such as ours is yet unknown, lend to lovers a rapture unalloyed by passion's grosser sense; as, symphonious with the tremulous zephyr, chastened vows of constancy are there exchanged? ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... because he is a minister of the Church. Consequently, as long as the latter is tolerated in the ministry, he that receives a sacrament from him, does not communicate in his sin, but communicates with the Church from whom he has his ministry. But if the Church, by degrading, excommunicating, or suspending him, does not tolerate him in the ministry, he that receives a sacrament from him sins, because he ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... exception in favour of the particular trade in question. Oddly enough this trade reverses the ordinary standards of social respectability no less than of morals, for the retail and domestick is as creditable as the wholesale and foreign is degrading to him who follows it. Are our morals, then, no better than mores after all? I do not believe that such aristocracy as exists at the South (for I hold with Marius, fortissimum quemque generosissimum) will be found an element of anything like persistent strength in war,—thinking ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... waking from delusion, which needs not to be dragged from the privacy of Godfrey's bitter memory. He had long known that the delusion was partly due to a trap laid for him by Dunstan, who saw in his brother's degrading marriage the means of gratifying at once his jealous hate and his cupidity. And if Godfrey could have felt himself simply a victim, the iron bit that destiny had put into his mouth would have chafed him less intolerably. If the ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... to accept, it was at length, in obedience to his serious commands (for I stood out unaffectedly, till he exerted the sovereign authority which love had given him over me), that I yielded my consent to waive the remonstrance I did not fail of making strongly to him, against his degrading himself, and incurring the reflection, however unjust, of having, for respects of fortune, bartered his honour for infamy and prostitution, in making one his wife, who thought herself too much honoured in being but ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... discretion of Commissioners ignorant of local circumstances, and perhaps the dupes of misinformation; entertaining, as the petitioners do, deep and well-grounded repugnance to the means proposed for carrying this measure into execution, partly injudicious and partly degrading to the landholders of Scotland, for it does appear to be a humiliating and, the petitioners may venture to say, an unconstitutional Act, which would place the whole landholders in Scotland in the situation of being taxed for any object and to any amount at the discretion ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... mere allusion roused me to indignant passion, little as I was entitled to such pride. How shall we account for it, that every reminder of what man recognizes as degrading in his love life is never more unbearable, never more painful than ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... headache, that confined me to my bed for several days, succeeded the degrading and exciting scene through which I had passed, and, as Mrs. Clayton had at the same time one of her prostrating neuralgic attacks, the services of Dinah were in active requisition. During my own peculiar phase of suffering, the small racket ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... the Duke of Richmond has retired from the Cabinet, and means at the same time to keep the Ordnance. What other people mean about that, is, I think, not quite so clear; though the Duke of Richmond's bitterest enemy could not, I should think, wish to see him in a more degrading situation—such a situation, indeed, as it seems impossible should last for any length of time, or a moment longer than till a proper ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... degrading they taught, and The Progress they nipped in the bud: The things that they did when they oughtn't And failed to perform when they should: The Questions prevented from burning, The Movements forbidden ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... was so amiable and so much beloved by the princess, that she easily yielded; and casting down her eyes, confessed that she loved one who regarded her with contemptuous indifference; and what rendered her choice still more degrading was, its object being equally ugly ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... desperate tenacity in retaining office exhibited by the late Government, which was utterly unexampled, and most degrading to the character and position of public men engaged in carrying on the Queen's Government, Sir Robert Peel was called to the head of affairs by her Majesty, in accordance with the declared wishes of a triumphant majority ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... extravagant aspirations; a home of simple refinement and freedom from anxiety would restore her to her nobler self. How could he find fault with her? She knew nothing of such sordid life as he had gone through, and to lack money for necessities seemed to her degrading beyond endurance. Why, even the ordinary artisan's wife does not suffer such privations as hers at the end of the past year. For lack of that little money his life must be ruined. Of late he had often ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... Government did eleven States of the Union combine together to overthrow and destroy the Union; never before in the history of this Government have we had a four years' civil war; never before in the history of this Government have nearly four million people been emancipated from the most abject and degrading slavery ever imposed upon human beings; never before has the occasion arisen when it was necessary to provide for such large numbers of people thrown upon the bounty of the Government unprotected and unprovided ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... affectionately or needlessly to his wife, when alone with her is involuntarily conscious of her superiority. His house and all his property, in fact the entire homestead, has been acquired and is kept together solely by her labour and care. Though firmly convinced that labour is degrading to a Cossack and is only proper for a Nogay labourer or a woman, he is vaguely aware of the fact that all he makes use of and calls his own is the result of that toil, and that it is in the power of the woman (his ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... was base, degrading and unhappy, To make God's different worship, damning means Of an unholy war between his people; To be the beggar of his people's blood, To set that crown upon his false, weak brow, His pale, insolvent, moat dishonour'd brow, ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... of what are called great characters, both in Europe and America, but I do not hesitate to say that I never met any man who, in my estimation, was the equal of General Armstrong. Fresh from the degrading influences of the slave plantation and the coal mines, it was a rare privilege for me to be permitted to come into direct contact with such a character as General Armstrong. I shall always remember that the first time I went into his presence he made the impression ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... settled by intellectual and moral suasion; I ask you not to open a discreditable chapter of English history that ought to have been closed for ever; I ask you to give us a verdict of Not Guilty, to send us back to our homes and to stamp your brand of disapprobation on this prosecution, which is degrading religion by associating it with all that is penal, obstructive, and loathsome; I ask you to let us go away from here free men, and so make it impossible that there ever should again be a prosecution for blasphemy; I ask ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... can do as they like," replied His Grace. "I do not know, no more do you, what would happen if this degrading instrument were employed, but what I do know is that a true English physician should cure his patients only with the ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... was the most enthusiastic and resolute secessionist and supporter of the Confederacy. He was just rising in the world, and anything which barred the upward way was denounced as degrading and insulting. A larger class of Southerners who joined with measured alacrity the armies of defense were the small farmers of the hills and poorer eastern counties; but the "sand-hillers" and "crackers," ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... rights of man—and on account of that very feature which to many, has been so offensive—its rigorous doctrine of human accountability. Here, then, is the idea of man which Christianity gives in contrast with the inferior and degrading heathen notions of man. He is a being but begun on earth—a seed only planted here for its first growth. He is connected with God, not as all matter is by proceeding from creative power, but by partaking the divine nature, by the declared personal affection of God, witnessed and sealed by the presence ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... Crown colony, and has escaped hitherto the introduction of the election virus. The newspapers and certain busy gentlemen in Port of Spain had discovered that they were living under a 'degrading tyranny,' and they demanded a constitution. They did not complain that their affairs had been ill-managed. On the contrary, they insisted that they were the most prosperous of the West Indian colonies, and alone had a surplus in their treasury. If ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... Could anyone tell, with the uneven standard set up by morality and religion? The world smiled upon a loveless marriage. What more degrading? It frowned upon a love perfect in all but the sanction of the Church, if the two had the courage to proclaim their love. It discreetly looked another way when the harlot of "Society" tripped by with her husband on one hand and her lover on the other. A man enriched himself at the expense of others ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... which the people of England will be subjected." These words of the First Minister were evidently spoken in a spirit of kindness and compassion; still it is hard for an Irishman to avoid feeling that they are degrading and offensive. Ireland is not regarded as part and parcel of the United Kingdom in any part of the quotation. He speaks of placing a serious burthen on the finances "of this country," meaning England only. Again: the sums advanced are, he feels, ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... ardent spirits has again crept in among them, bringing discredit upon their faith. It is indeed hardly to be wondered at, when the Indian sees those around him that call themselves Christians, and who are better educated, and enjoy the advantages of civilized society, indulging to excess in this degrading vice, that he should suffer his natural inclination to overcome his Christian duty, which might in some have taken no deep root. I have been surprised and disgusted by the censures passed on the erring Indian by persons who were ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... rejected by Paul as a ministration no ways capable of abiding in the church now, since the ministration of the Spirit also hath taken its place (2 Cor 3). Wherefore instead of propounding it to the churches with arguments tending to its reception, he seeks by degrading it of its old lustre and glory, to wean the churches from any ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... as Vaughan's that Honorias value. Because a woman's nature is not proof against deterioration, because a large and long-continued infusion of gross blood, and perhaps even the monotonous pressure of rough, pitiless, degrading circumstances, may displace, eat out, rub off the delicacy of a soul, may change its texture to unnatural coarseness and scatter ashes for beauty, women do exist, victims rather than culprits, coarse against their nature, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... on a table in the sitting-room beyond which extended other rooms that, in addition to being ugly, were dark. But Lennox had no degrading manias for comfort. Pending the great day he camped in these rooms, above which, on an upper storey was a duplex apartment which, if Margaret liked, he ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... air pollution from power plant emissions results in acid rain; acidification of lakes and reservoirs degrading water quality and threatening aquatic life; Japan's appetite for fish and tropical timber is contributing to the depletion of these resources in Asia ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... herself and her red mouth took upon itself a grim line. The worst of it for him was that he was not of that strain of his race who had been the "bad lot." The "bad lot" had been the weak lot, the vicious, the self-degrading. Scandals which had shut men out from their class and kind were usually of an ugly type. This man had a strong jaw, a powerful, healthy body, and clean, though perhaps hard, eyes. The First Man of them, who hewed his way to the front, who ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... used the word reformer in this Tract. We formerly noted that, in India, there have arisen from time to time men who saw and sorrowed over the erroneous doctrines and degrading rites of the ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... Cranmer, Knox, we discover humiliating proofs of imperfection and fallibility. And, while the fundamental truths of Christianity have been preserved in the Catholic Church, those truths have been mingled or associated with errors so injurious and degrading, that no blind faith is to be rested on any human authority. Let us uphold the majesty of divine revelation, and vindicate our right and our duty to interpret the sacred page—not by the traditions of fallible men, not by the metaphysics of the ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... unclean and degrading about this humble side of Christianity. Ursula suddenly revolted to the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... vengeance of the legislature upon the South-Sea directors, who, by their fraudulent practices, had brought the nation to the brink of ruin. Nobody seemed to imagine that the nation itself was as culpable as the South-Sea company. Nobody blamed the credulity and avarice of the people,—the degrading lust of gain, which had swallowed up every nobler quality in the national character, or the infatuation which had made the multitude run their heads with such frantic eagerness into the net held out for them by scheming projectors. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... manuals of school logic should not have secured Baxter from the repeated blunder of 'Cum hoc, ergo, propter hoc'; but still more strange that his piety should not have revolted against degrading prayer into medical quackery. ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... (the seamen and officers of the transport looking grinning on) when a boat came from the shore bringing our captain to the ship; and though I started and blushed red as he recognised me—a descendant of the Barrys—in this degrading posture, I promise you that the sight of Fagan's face was most welcome to me, for it assured me that a friend was near me. Before that I was so melancholy that I would certainly have deserted had I found the means, and had not the inevitable ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tie that had yet united the guilty Caroline to Vargrave was broken,—a woman forgives sin in her lover, but never meanness. The degrading, the abject position in which she had seen one whom she had served as a slave (though, as yet, all his worst villanies were unknown to her), filled her with shame, horror, and disgust. She rose abruptly, and quitted the room. They did ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... compelling desire, assisted by obsolete land laws warped from their original purpose, we are facing in the public-land States west of the Mississippi the great question whether the Western people are to be predominately a people of tenants under the degrading tyranny of pecuniary and political vassalage, or free-holders and free men; and there is no exaggerating ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... exceptional interest to students of psychology. Nothing could be more interesting than to come into contact with a mind that from infancy onward had dwelt only upon what is noblest in literature, and from which had been excluded all that is enervating and degrading. A remarkable illustration of this is the familiar case of Helen Keller, whose acquisitions, by reason of her blindness and deafness, were limited to what was selected for her, and that mainly by one person, and she was therefore for a long time shielded from a knowledge ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... oath through his ground teeth; he would have liked to scratch the ashes of his father from their resting-place, and wreak his vengeance on them, whenever this degrading fact was named ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... before. The patronage that he obtained was not of much value, but had he brought his work into the market in its natural condition he could not have lived by his trade. He was, therefore, compelled to foster that which he no doubt felt to be degrading. The copies of Stradivari by Jacob Fendt are among his best efforts. The work is well done; the discoloration of the wood cleverly managed, the effects of wear counterfeited with greater skill than had ever been done before, and finally, an amount of style is thrown into the ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... strange how vulgar minds despise the things they have looked upon and their hands have handled, just because they have looked upon them and their hands have handled them; is there not in the fact a humiliating lesson, which yet they are unable to read, of the degrading power of their own presence upon themselves and their judgments? Whether a man is a hero to his valet or the opposite, depends as much on the valet as on the man: The bond, then, between the father and the son, was ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... demanded in our daily life and conversation. We should be actuated by a realizing sense of our position, and by example, action and generous thought, recommend our cause to the consideration of others. We should persevere for the attainment of every commendable virtue, to raise the mind from the degrading haunts of intemperance and folly; we should be distinguished for usefulness to society and the community at large. A good Odd-Fellow must necessarily be an upright and useful member of the community. The precepts inculcated are calculated to stimulate to the faithful performance of every moral ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... honest man to honest man, I want to warn you that there mustn't be too much work to it. I don't believe in the nobility of labor. I believe that work is the crowning shame and humiliation of the human race. It's all right for a horse or a dog or an ox to work, but a man ought to be above it. It's degrading, interferes with his ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... with it some sense of the servile status of the feudal vassal in old France. So the Canadian peasant, a feudal tenant en censive or en roture, yet wished not to be called censitaire or roturier, names which he thought degrading; he preferred to be called a habitant, an inhabitant of the country, a free man, not a vassal. The designation obtained official recognition in New France and has come to be the characteristic word for the French ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... illustrious protection of your excellency, for she needs to rest her-self, (es preciso que descanse,) and is tired for the present of working." The woman then returned to beg, which she considered infinitely less degrading. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Islam the modern Persian was doomed to be carried into India. This country, from the time of Alexander, had enjoyed repose from external aggression, had been ruled by its native princes, and been permitted by Providence to exercise, without control or reproof, the degrading superstitions, and the unnatural and bloody rites of a religion at the formation of which the fiends of cruelty and lust seem to have presided; but reckoning was now about to be demanded of the accursed ministers of this system for the ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... nation, a mighty empire, from a race of men, so unlike ourselves? But, if the removal be to Africa, then it is to a happy distance from us and to their father land.... Then let it aid in removing that population, which, under its peculiar relation to the whites, and under its degrading social and civil disabilities, is a most fruitful source of national dishonor, demoralization, weakness and horrid danger.'—[Memorial of ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... it is probable the young man might have found the means to indulge his passion without making too great a sacrifice of his pride. By transporting his wife to his castle, conferring his own established name, separating her from all that was unpleasant and degrading in the connexion, and finding occupation for his own mind in the multiplied and engrossing employments of his station, he would have diminished motives for contemplating, and consequently for lamenting, the objectionable features of the alliance he had ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper |
