"Discreditable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Why can't they speak properly, and say Kone?" says the Dane. "Weib is the right word," says the German. "Who ever says woman?" cry both. The language has not been reduced to writing; indeed, the little that has been done with it is highly discreditable to the Sleswick-Holstein Church Establishment. It is spoken by upwards of thirty thousand individuals; and when we remember that the whole population of Denmark is less than that of London and the suburbs, we see at once that a large proportion of it has been less heeded in respect to its ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... Work, not discreditable to the best Gentleman. How they geld their Cattle. How they make Glew. Their Manufactures. How they make Iron. How they make Butter. Shops in the City. Prices of Commodities. Or their Measures. Their Weights. Measures bigger than the ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... loiterers in the streets: men with their hands in their pockets sauntering along; loud-laughing and loud-spoken girls clustered together, apparently excited to high spirits, and a boisterous independence of temper and behaviour. The more ill-looking of the men—the discreditable minority—hung about on the steps of the beer-houses and gin-shops, smoking, and commenting pretty freely on every passer-by. Margaret disliked the prospect of the long walk through these streets, before she came to the fields which she had planned to reach. Instead, she would ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... to inaugurate some drastic measures of urgently needed reform, not until then will it be possible to alter this disastrous state of affairs—not until then will matters become less unbearable to the individual and less discreditable to every one concerned. We can cure disease only by removing its cause; this is my maxim and it is true ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... an idea is not a bad means of roughly estimating its value. To have come of respectable ancestry, is prima facie evidence of worth in a belief as in a person; while to be descended from a discreditable stock is, in the one case as in the other, an unfavourable index. The analogy is not a mere fancy. Beliefs, together with those who hold them, are modified little by little in successive generations; and as the modifications which successive generations ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... zealous, might display 5 Banners at enmity with regal sway, And, like the Pyms and Miltons of that day, Think that a State would live in sounder health If Kingship bowed its head to Commonwealth— Ye too—whom no discreditable fear 10 Would keep, perhaps with many a fruitless tear, Uncertain what to choose and how to steer— And ye—who might mistake for sober sense And wise reserve the plea of indolence— Come ye—whate'er your creed—O waken all, 15 Whate'er your temper, at your Country's call; Resolving ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... said on the subject of the White House and its precincts, because we took occasion, in a former work, to berate the narrow-minded parsimony which left the grounds of the White House in a condition that was discreditable to the republic. How far our philippic may have hastened the improvements which have been made, is more than we shall pretend to say, but having made the former strictures, we are happy to have an occasion to say (though nearly ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... to hint their objections to the beneficent autocrat who had willed and given them effect for the general welfare. After Governor Longden came Sir Henry Turner Irving, a personage who brought to Trinidad a reputation for all the vulgar colonial prejudices which, discreditable enough in ordinary folk, are, in the Governor of a mixed community, nothing less than calamitous. More than amply did he justify the evil reports with which rumour had heralded his coming. Abler, more ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... namely, to the people against Metellus, in which, no doubt, he put forth all that he had intended to say when Metellus stopped him from speaking at the expiration of his Consulship; the second, against Clodius and Curio, in the Senate, in reference to the discreditable Clodian affair. The fragments which we have of this contain those asperities which he retailed afterward in his letter to Atticus, and are not either instructive or amusing. But we learn from these fragments that Clodius was already ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... the distance of a hundred yards from the block, and under the gun of the Scud; while Pathfinder descended to the door of the blockhouse and settled the terms on which the island was to be finally evacuated by the enemy. Considering all the circumstances, the conditions were not very discreditable to either party. The Indians were compelled to give up all their arms, even to their knives and tomahawks, as a measure of precaution, their force being still quadruple that of their foes. The French officer, Monsieur ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... and the saying was repeated the next day with shameless mirth as the best joke of the season. For the wood for the library had had a history distinctly discreditable and as distinctly ludicrous, at which Hillsboro people laughed with a conscious lowering of their standards of honesty. The beginning had been an accident, but the long sequence was not. For the first time in the history of the library, the farmer who brought ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... no oars or winds could be fast enough for me; not that I thought that I should not arrive in time, but lest I should be later than I wished in congratulating the republic; and I quickly arrived at Velia, where I saw Brutus; how grieved I was, I cannot express. For it seemed to be a discreditable thing for me myself, that I should venture to return into that city from which Brutus was departing, and that I should be willing to live safely in a place where he could not. But he himself was not agitated in the same manner that I was; for, being elevated with the ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... for yourself, major," said the lady, extracting a newspaper from a heap under the dinner-waggon. "He seems to have been mixed up in a rather discreditable affair, as far as I could make out, but I didn't ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... condemned, to put it plainly, as "boring," and such have even done me the compliment to wonder why I countenance him. But, on the other hand, there is a large faction who marvel at his countenancing such a dishevelled, discreditable acquaintance as myself. Few appear to regard our friendship with equanimity. But that is because they do not know of the link that binds us, of my amiable connection via ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... as no creditor can at present be cheated in consequence of the high valuation of copper. The bankers only would suffer by this regulation. When a run comes upon them, they sometimes endeavour to gain time, by paying in sixpences, and they would be precluded by this regulation from this discreditable method of evading immediate payment. They would be obliged, in consequence, to keep at all times in their coffers a greater quantity of cash than at present; and though this might, no doubt, be a considerable inconveniency to them, it ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... Another discreditable feature is, that, for a like reason, they are incapable of carrying on any war. Either they arm the multitude, and then they are more afraid of them than of the enemy; or, if they do not call them out in the hour of battle, they are oligarchs indeed, few to fight as they are few ...
— The Republic • Plato
... its inmost folds, By sight undazzled with the glare of praise, Who shall be named—in the resplendent line Of sages, martyrs, confessors—the man Whom the best might of conscience, truth and hope, For one day's little compass, has preserved From painful and discreditable shocks Of contradiction from some vague desire Culpably cherished, or corrupt relapse To some ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... not a high disdain of the strife which goes on not less in Europe than in America, and must, of course, go on everywhere as long as competitive conditions endure, but is the result of chances and preferences which mean nothing nationally calamitous or discreditable. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... repelled Hannibal from the walls, and the Senones from the capitol. Have I been reserved for this, that when aged I should be blamed? I will consider what it is thought should be set in order, but tardy and discreditable is the ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... first place, if this be so no other animal but man, and not even children, can be said to act voluntarily. Next, is it meant that we never act voluntarily when we act from Lust or Anger, or that we act voluntarily in doing what is right and involuntarily in doing what is discreditable? The latter supposition is absurd, since the cause is one and the same. Then as to the former, it is a strange thing to maintain actions to be involuntary which we are bound to grasp at: now there are occasions on ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... Certainly all who knew anything at all of the personnel of the Russian revolutionary movement during the past twenty years knew that Trotzky was Bronstein, and that he was a Jew. The idea, assiduously disseminated by a section of the American press, that there must be something discreditable or mysterious connected with his adoption of an alias is extremely absurd, and can only be explained by monumental ignorance of Russian ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... steamer Victoria. In many cases of this nature, loss of life must rather be attributed to panic than to a want of life saving appliances; but, as a general rule, an abundant supply of such apparatus will tend to give passengers confidence, and prevent the outbreak of such discreditable scenes on the part of passengers as took place on ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... minerals, so long as money due to others on that mortgage was yet unpaid. Was it conceivable that one so strict and scrupulous in all monetary transactions as Parkman would have settled his own personal claim, and then sacrificed in so discreditable a manner the claims of others, for the satisfaction of which he had ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... were among the first works in which scientific knowledge was put in a popular shape, by the system of number publishing. The Doctor's performances in this way are not discreditable, and are still useful ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... found. He disappeared, and from that day was not seen in the neighborhood. It is supposed that he went West and found a secure concealment in some of the distant territories, where probably he is engaged in the same discreditable courses for which he ...
— Frank and Fearless - or The Fortunes of Jasper Kent • Horatio Alger Jr.
... to be considered disgraceful, or even discreditable, among the patrician order in Rome before the soldiers ventured to break their oaths of allegiance. Military service had, from the ignorance and selfishness of this order, been rendered extremely odious to free-born Romans; ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... be less justifiable, or indeed more nefarious, than these arrangements. They were discreditable to George the First, and they were disgraceful to the King of Denmark. Yet the general policy of that time seems to have approved of the whole transaction, and regarded it merely as a good stroke of business ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... blacksmith or a bootmaker, to work on a farm or drive a team, is beneath their dignity, as compared with being a merchant, or practising medicine or law. This is PRIDE, an enemy to success and happiness. No necessary labor is discreditable. It is never dishonorable to be useful. It is beneath no one's dignity to earn bread by the sweat of the brow. When boys who have such false notions of dignity become men, they are ashamed to help themselves as they ought, and for want of this quality they live ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... Too long have they been regarded as an engine of State, connected with vested interests and official patronage, against which it was unsafe to murmur, however pernicious they might be to commerce, or discreditable to a country laying claim to medical knowledge. The regulation for preventing the importation of tropical yellow fever, (which is altogether a malarious disease of the highest temperature of heat and unwholesome locality,) into England or even into Gibraltar, stands eminent for absurdity. ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... himself for the life of a statesman; but it does seem necessary for all to be so well instructed in political learning as to possess the means of forming a reasonable and philosophical opinion of the policy of the government. It is as discreditable to the intellect and judgment of a free people to complain of that which is right in itself, and rests upon established principles of right, as to submit without resistance or murmur to usurpation or misgovernment. I do not mean to undervalue the periodical press; but it must always assume ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution; which work with more energy than we believe whilst we depend on artificial restraints. The movement in this direction has been very marked in modern history. Much has been blind and discreditable, but the nature of the revolution is not affected by the vices of the revolters; for this is a purely moral force. It was never adopted by any party in history, neither can be. It separates the individual from all party, and unites ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... is supposed,—had been driven to madness by wrongs inflicted on him in his dearest and nearest family relations. That the unfortunate gentleman is now insane we believe we may state as a fact. It had become our special duty to refer to this most discreditable transaction, from the fact that a paper, still in our hands, had been confided to us for publication by the wretched husband before his senses had become impaired,—which, however, we were debarred from giving to the public by an injunction served upon us in sudden haste by the Vice-Chancellor. ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... learned with terror the presence of Henri at the hotel de Saint-Geran. They consulted about this; the marquis undertook to cut the danger short. However, he dared put in practice nothing overtly against the child, a matter still more difficult just then, inasmuch as some particulars of his discreditable adventures had leaked out, and the Saint-Geran family received ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE COUNTESS DE SAINT-GERAN—1639 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... For a considerable period, during 1859, discreditable scenes of brawling took place at this Church as a protest against the High Church practices of the Rector, ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... destroyed a life's hope, embittered a life's peace, and brought unending sorrow and disgrace. It is scarcely worth while to enter into a comparative analysis of ill-temper and passion; they are alike discreditable, alike injurious, and should ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... rank nonsense about some queer animals he had discovered. I believe he has retracted since. Anyhow, he has suppressed it all. He gave an interview to Reuter's, and there was such a howl that he saw it wouldn't do. It was a discreditable business. There were one or two folk who were inclined to take him seriously, but he soon ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... young creature the Countess of Hurstmonceux, the rival of Nora, the wife of Herman Brudenell, the "bad, artful woman" who had entrapped the young Oxonian into a discreditable marriage? Impossible! ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... the age of nine or ten, was Olympe Mancini, who, in spite of her childish lack of beauty, was destined to enslave the handsomest King in Europe; and, after a life of discreditable intrigues, in which she incurred the stigma of witchcraft and murder, to end her career in obscurity, shunned by all who had known her ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... ground her refusal upon strict law, but it is equally difficult to deny, first, that in so doing she exercises harshly an extreme and hard law; secondly, that her conduct with respect to the navigation of the St. Lawrence is in glaring and discreditable inconsistency with her conduct with respect to the navigation of the Mississippi. On the ground that she possessed a small domain in which the Mississippi took its rise, she insisted on the right to navigate the entire volume of its waters. On the ground that she possesses both banks of the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... the fashion among our younger writers to speak slightingly and flippantly of Emerson, referring to him as outworn, and as the apostle of the obvious. This view is more discreditable to the young people than is their criticism damaging to Emerson. It can make little difference to Emerson's fame, but it would be much more becoming in our young writers to garland his name with flowers than to utter these ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... connection, deserve mention. They and John Johnston make momentary reappearances again. Otherwise the whole of Abraham Lincoln's kindred are now out of the story. They have been disposed of thus hastily at the outset, not because they were discreditable or slight people, but because Lincoln himself when he began to find his footing in the world seems to have felt sadly that his family was just so much to him and no more. The dearest of his recollections attached to premature death; the next to ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... failing which they resigned themselves to the post of usher in some ultra- Protestant school. Sport in all its forms, art and literature, being alike forbidden, the boy's hungry energy had found no reasonable outlet. He had been miserable, peevish, ailing, until at barely eighteen—after a discreditable episode with a scullery-maid—he had been shipped off to New York to learn business in the house of certain brokers and bill-discounters with whom Messrs. Barking Brothers had extensive financial relations. Life in the land of the Puritans ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... substantially that is what it is. Now I do not deny for a moment that if proceedings of this kind, such as took place on December 13 last year, were normal or frequent, if they took place every day of the week or every week of the month, it would be dangerous and in the highest degree discreditable to our whole Government in India. It would be detestable and dangerous. But is there to be no such thing as an Emergency power? I am not talking about England, Scotland, or Ireland. I am talking about India. Is there ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... father a murderer, but his wife, whom he had married for money, was the child of a most horrible incest, his sisters were prostitutes, his sons and brothers were debauchees and drunkards, and, in short, never had a distinguished man a more uncomfortable and discreditable family-circle than that which surrounded Barneveld, if the report of his enemies was to be believed. Yet it is agreeable to reflect that, with all the venom which they had such power of secreting, these malignant tongues had ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... may give the honours of the battle to the one who strives for her. "Ha! vassal," quoth the knight to Erec, "let us withdraw and rest a little; for too weak are these blows we deal. We must deal better blows than these; for now it draws near evening. It is shameful and highly discreditable that this battle should last so long. See yonder that gentle maid who weeps for thee and calls on God. Full sweetly she prays for thee, as does also mine for me. Surely we should do our best with our blades of steel for the sake of our lady-loves." Erec replies: ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... you. I felt that I had let you pledge yourself in the dark; that in my care for Lucia, and confidence in you, I had to some extent bound you to a discreditable engagement. I released you from it; I told you the truth of the story I had hidden from everybody—I wrote to you when my husband lay in jail waiting his trial for murder, and I heard no more from you. It was natural, prudent, right that you should accept the separation I desired—you did ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... could not see Bill's continuous crafty incitements to mutiny, or the hundred and one ways in which he strove, when out of harness, to work up hatred of Jan among his mates, or when in harness to play subtle tricks which should produce an effect discreditable ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... impulses honourable to mankind, to meet the demands of the faculty which is perhaps the noblest of our nature. In the instance of Taste, the process has been reversed; and from the prevalence of dispositions at once injurious and discreditable, being no other than that selfishness which is the child of apathy,—which, as Nations decline in productive and creative power, makes them value themselves upon a presumed refinement of judging. Poverty of language ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... 1846 has been called, from another outlook, "one of the least creditable affairs in the highly discreditable Mexican War," and Fremont nothing more than a filibuster seeking private ends. California had been made ours, nevertheless, and Fremont had ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... poisoned at its very source. If this be so, then it is as reprehensible in those whose vocation is to watch over the moral and spiritual development of their fellow-men to be indifferent to the conditions by which life is surrounded as it would be discreditable to the physicians of a city swept year after year by pestilence, if they took no interest in the insanitary conditions to which the epidemic was due, but lazily contented themselves ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... empowering any three of his suffragans to commit, in his name, and as his delegates, the sins which he did not choose to commit in person. The reproaches of all parties soon made him ashamed of himself. He then tried to suppress the evidence of his fault by means more discreditable than the fault itself. He abstracted from among the public records of which he was the guardian the instrument by which he had authorised his brethren to act for him, and was with difficulty induced to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... discreditable motives for everyone who would not take her at her own estimate of herself. She detested Clutton. She told Philip that his friend had no talent really; it was just flashy and superficial; he couldn't compose a figure to save his ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... happened to meet Madame Marneffe instead of Lisbeth Fischer, he would have found a protectress whose complaisance must have led him into some boggy or discreditable path, where he would have been lost. He would certainly never have worked, nor the artist have been hatched out. Thus, while he deplored the old maid's grasping avarice, his reason bid him prefer her iron hand to the life of idleness and peril led ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... different classes and by no means intimate. Each, however, had cordially liked the other, and Billings would have been slow to believe the statement as told him for a single instant except for two things,—one was that Gleason was a new acquaintance of whom up to that time he knew nothing really discreditable; the other was that just before the regiment came East from Arizona the adjutancy became vacant, Lieutenant Truscott, who had long held the position, was detailed for duty at West Point and speedily promoted to his captaincy; Billings was brought in wounded and sent off by sea to San ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... who has made such a discreditable career," she murmured, "who has never been able to get a roof of his own over his head! I can very well understand his partiality for bullets! He can go and stand in their way if he chooses; but let ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... have undergone, but now fortunately passed. I assure you that I have never entertained any feelings in regard to you which you suppose. Please to remember that I distinctly stated that I did not consider the sum which I advanced as a loan, but as a gift; and surely there is nothing discreditable to you, under the circumstances, in receiving a gift from a rich man, as I am. Therefore I earnestly beg you to banish the whole subject from your mind, and begin laying up something for yourself ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Mexico was one of the first subjects. The doctor regarded it as a discreditable performance, unworthy a great and generous nation. The Mormon question followed, and on this he had much curious information. Living in the interior of New York State, he had heard Joseph Smith's history from ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... about a union with England. Till the emergence of the religious question the English party in Scotland consisted of traitors and mercenaries, and their efforts to strengthen English influence form the most discreditable pages ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... of her devout mother, the wife of Richard Bowes, commander of Norham Castle, near Berwick, but to the anger and disgust of the Bowes family in general. They by no means shared Knox's ideas of religion, rather regarding him as a penniless unfrocked "Scot runagate," whose alliance was discreditable and distasteful, and might be dangerous. "Maist unpleasing words" passed, and it is no marvel that Knox, being persecuted in one city, fled to another, leaving England for Dieppe early in ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... repeal the Missouri prohibition. Mr. Douglas himself never advanced such a pretence until this session. His own Nebraska bill, of last session, rejected it. It is a sheer afterthought. To declare the prohibition inoperative, may, indeed, have effect in law as a repeal, but it is a most discreditable way of reaching the object. Will the people permit their dearest interests to be thus made the mere hazards of a presidential game, and destroyed by ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... have never crossed his path without finding him engaged in something discreditable. But he's truckled himself into a kind of popularity and power, and, having always been 'a Democrat,' he hopes to get the ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... o' man's beyond belief. But it's awfu' discreditable to Holdock, Steiner & Chase, if that ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... consisted of a battalion of infantry and a regiment of Uhlans. Frossard and his whole corps were looking across at Saarbrueck over the ridges of the Spicheren, and nobody had the means of knowing what everybody knows now, the reason, so discreditable to French organization, which prevented him from blowing out of his path the few pickets and patrols, and invading the territory which had its frontier only nominally guarded. I was in Saarbrueck at the time, and I had the pleasure of dodging shells there, too. Why, ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... some diminution of the force of adjuration. But probably the station-master lost little of the meaning the Patriarch desired to convey. This tended in the direction of showing the utter incapacity of the Swiss or French nature to manage a railway, and the discreditable incompetency of the officials of whatever grade. The station-master was properly abashed before the torrent of indignant speech. But he had his turn presently. Calmer inspection disclosed the fact that all ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... themselves who all sat as judges on one another's cases.... The Convention as now composed has no claim to represent the voters of the Republican party.... Any man nominated by the Convention as now constituted would merely be the beneficiary of this successful fraud; it would be deeply discreditable for any man to accept the Convention's nomination under these circumstances; and any man thus accepting it would have no claim to the support of any Republican on party grounds and would have forfeited the right to ask the support of any honest man of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... is not a little startled that you should make such totally groundless assumptions of fact, and then leave a discreditable inference to be drawn from them. He directs me not only to repel this inference as it ought to be repelled, but also to bring to your serious consideration and reflection the propriety of such an assumed narration of facts as your despatch, in ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... and benevolence, to put it to this other gentleman, so much your junior, whether he can under any circumstances reconcile it to his station to play that Ace of which he has spoken. I admit that I am a spy, and that it is considered a discreditable station—though it must be filled by somebody; but this gentleman is no spy, and why should he so demean himself as ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... perpetual curacy or vicarage, worth at that time only 35 per annum! forming one of the discreditable anomalies of the church, in the division ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... capture by the sailors from Admiral Rooke's fleet, creditable as it was to its captors, who swarmed up the steep cliffs as they would have swarmed up the shrouds and yards of their own frigates, leaping from rock to rock with fearless activity, was equally discreditable to its defenders, who either did not appreciate the worth of their charge or else had not the courage to hold it as such a trust should have been held. But when England closed her strong hand upon it, nothing could open it again, neither motives of profit nor motives of fear. In 1729 Spain ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... knew how a little truth could deceive. You must remember that at this point of the case, when the Rev. Faker was called, there was nothing to cross-examine about. I knew nothing of the parties, the witnesses, the solicitors, or any one except my learned friends. It would not have been discreditable to my advocacy if I had submitted to a verdict. I will, therefore, give the points of the questions which elicited the truth from the Christian warrior; and probably the non-legal reader of these memoirs may be interested in seeing ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... consistent with either propriety or common sense. However plausible may be the arguments which in this or that case may be adduced for concealment, the common instinct of mankind, which rarely errs in such matters, always conceives a suspicion that it is dictated by secret and discreditable motives; and that he who screens manifest guilt from exposure and punishment makes himself an accomplice in the wrong-doing, if he was not so before. But, though Louis judged rightly for his own and his queen's character in bringing those who ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... doubt, and that the efforts of French and Russians to reach the Upper Nile from the French Congo and Southern Abyssinia compelled Ministers to concentrate their attention on that great enterprise. But this excuse will not bear examination. Strength at any one point of an Empire is not increased by discreditable surrenders at other points. No great statesman would have ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... appear here, Master Seadrift," he said, "under what, to borrow a figure from your profession, may be called false colors. You bear the countenance of one who might be a useful subject, and yet are you suspected of being addicted to certain practices which—I will not say they are dishonest, or even discreditable—for on that head the opinions of men are much divided, but which certainly have no tendency to assist Her Majesty, in bringing her wars to a glorious issue, by securing to her European dominions that monopoly of trade, by which it ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... over here go into politics and into public-houses—I don't see why they shouldn't. If such things are good enough for men they are good enough for women; we haven't your sort of chivalry. But it's the peculiar malignant silliness of this sort of Toryism that's so discreditable. It's discreditable. There's no good in denying it. Those people you have heard and seen are a not unfair sample of our governing class—of a certain section of our governing class—as it is to-day. Not at all unfair. And you see how amazingly they ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... accuses the "opposing candidate" of refusing to answer certain questions which somebody has chosen to ask him. I think myself it is discreditable for a candidate to answer any questions at all, to make speeches, declare his policy, or to do anything whatever to get himself elected. If a political party choose to nominate a man so obscure that his character and his views on all public ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... the differences between the Reformed Churches of England and the Continent were very considerable. Yet, with the one discreditable exception just referred to, there had been much comity and friendliness in all personal relations between their respective members; and the absence of sympathy on many points of doctrine and discipline was not so great ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... these men are positivists, only recognizing those things that can be weighed and measured. Anything beyond that they consider as rather discreditable nonsense, that same nonsense about which they held yesterday the theories that today ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... told me that you haven't given Stanley anything at all for his money—that you've cheated him outright. The thing itself is discreditable, but your tone suggests that you think ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... once or twice at the most, did my labours meet with the slightest recognition beyond payment. Once I remember that I accused a member of a discreditable manoeuvre to consume the time of the House, and as he represented a borough in my district, he wrote to the editor denying the charge. The editor without any inquiry—and I believe I was mistaken—instantly congratulated me on having "scored." ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... Americans lacked the discipline and experience necessary to win for themselves any great reputation on the water. Though they showed themselves full of dash and spirit, they were deficient in discipline and staying qualities. Nevertheless, the record of the year was by no means discreditable to ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... to retain the royal favour until he entered into the coalition with the Whigs. This was a step the King could not forgive. No extremity could reconcile him to a measure so repulsive to his feelings. Yet the coalition, after all, was more discreditable to the Whigs than to Lord North, who may be pardoned for accepting it as a tribute to his personal weight, and a recantation, in some sort, of all the odium the Whigs had industriously heaped upon him during the whole period of his Administration. If they really believed him to be the base ...
— 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
... you were involved in a most discreditable affair in Siena before you came here? That your intrigue—I hate to have to enter into the unsavoury details, Miss Agar, but you have forced me to it—that your intrigue with your cousin's fiance drove her to suicide, ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... anything of the sort," urged Frank Carlton. "I came out here to form an estate, and I have succeeded in what I undertook, while a number of other persons with similar opportunities have failed. I do not say this for the sake of boasting, but simply as a fact which is certainly not discreditable." ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... the story of Henry VIII., Catharine, and Anne Boleyn. "Bluff King Hal," although a well-loved monarch, was none too good a one in many ways. Of all his selfishness and unwarrantable acts, none was more discreditable than his divorce from Catharine, and his marriage to the beautiful Anne Boleyn. The King's love was as brief as it was vehement. Jane Seymour, waiting maid on the Queen, attracted him, and Anne Boleyn was forced to ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... Indeed, Mr. Mershone was really talented, and had he possessed any manly attributes, or even the ordinary honorable instincts of mankind, there is little doubt he would have been a popular favorite. But he had made his mark, and it was a rather grimy one. From earliest youth he had been guilty of discreditable acts that had won for him the contempt of all right-minded people. That he was still accepted with lax tolerance by some of the more thoughtless matrons of the fashionable set was due to his family name. They could not forget that in ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... for the use of discreditable tactics, but it will have no hesitation in using such itself if it can thereby snatch a discreditable victory. So, clear speaking is needed: a fight that is not clean-handed will make victory more disgraceful than any defeat. I make the point here because ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... that girl," I said, nodding to where Heru lay blossoming in the hot gloom like some night-flowering bud. "I do not know whether your majesty is aware how she came here, but it is a highly discreditable incident in what is doubtless your otherwise blameless reign. Some rough scullions intrusted with the duty of collecting your majesty's customs asked Prince Hath of the Hither people to point out the most attractive young person at his wedding ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... period no national crisis called his nobler qualities into action, and his course was largely influenced by selfish considerations. It was not long before Mr. Calhoun also entered the lists, though in a manner less discreditable to himself, personally, than were the resources of Crawford and Clay. The daily narrations and comments of Mr. Adams display and explain in a manner highly instructive, if not altogether agreeable, the ambitions (p. 107) and the manoeuvres, the hollow ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... Kay refused the application, but he was induced to refuse it by means which, as Mr. Justice Stephen justly remarked, were highly discreditable to Mr. Booth. Mr. Booth filed an affidavit which appears totally to have misled Mr. Justice Kay, as it would have misled any one who regarded it as a frank and honest statement by a professed ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... the newcomers first with absolute refusal; then, when the patient, persistent applicants did get inside, both students and teachers met them not only with unkindness and unfairness, but with a weapon ingeniously well chosen, and most discreditable—namely, obscenity. Grave professors, in lecture and clinic, as well as grinning students, used offensive language, and played offensive tricks, to drive the women out—a most ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... caught some day, my friend,' Somers would occasionally observe to him. 'I don't mean to say entangled in anything discreditable, for I admit that you are in practice as ideal as in theory. I mean the process will be reversed. Some woman, whose Well-Beloved flits about as yours does now, will catch your eye, and you'll stick to her like a limpet, while she follows her Phantom and leaves ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... had gone wrong with Auld Jock. It was the man who wore the air of a culprit. A Scotch laborer does not lightly confess to feeling "fair silly," nor sleep away the busy hours of daylight. The old man was puzzled and humiliated by this discreditable thing. A human friend would have understood his plight, led the fevered man out of that bleak and fetid cul-de-sac, tucked him into a warm bed, comforted him with a hot drink, and then gone swiftly for skilled help. Bobby knew only that his master ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... weakling that he was, had the perspicacity to give the Baron Haussmann a chance to play his part in the making of modern Paris, and if the Tuileries and Saint Cloud had not disappeared as a result of his indiscretion the period of the Second Empire would not have been at all discreditable, as far as the impress it left on ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... in her own right comfortably well-to-do. But, despite the exiguous nature of my own resources, it was not the money question which impressed me most in this connection, but rather the fact that, while my only acquaintances in London were of a more or less discreditable sort, Constance seemed to have friends everywhere, and these in almost every case people of standing and importance. Her army friends were apt to be generals, her political friends ex-Ministers, her journalistic friends editors, and so forth. And I—— But you have seen my ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... marriage—which was her people's phrase for a happy marriage—is equality of position, combined with business instincts on the part of the man. People in her world lived to get on; it was a sacred duty with them; failure to do so was discreditable, almost criminal, as she had often heard her mother say when engaged in district visiting amongst the homes of the improvident poor. Jimmy would get on, she fully believed that, especially when he had a sensible wife to help him; moreover, ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... faster. My schedule is disrupted; my family life suffers; my personal health suffers. No amount of mere money could pay for this. And then some of these people go and waste all my help to accomplish some discreditable secret agenda that they have never really admitted to ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... course, he would be ready. Wilson tried to convince him that if he had been present himself when Angelo told him about the homicide committed by Luigi, he would not have considered the act discreditable to Luigi; but the obstinate old man ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... would like to direct such concerns. He wants to begin at the top, for manual labor is held to be discreditable, and he would never defile his hands by the apprenticeship which the architects, engineers, and manufacturers of England cheerfully undergo; and he would be aghast to learn that the leading names of industrial enterprise ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the confidence placed in her if she makes a discreditable use of any information coming to her through her association with her husband's family. There are skeletons in every closet, and she may not tell even her own mother of what she has seen in the other house. A single word breathed against her husband's family to an outsider stamps her ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... learned sir," said Dridrano. "Surely it would be very unbecoming, in one of my age and standing, to set up a theory in opposition to yours, but it would be yet more discreditable to be a plagiarist; and, with all due respect for your superior wisdom, it does seem to my feeble intellect, that no two theories can be more different. You use several remedies for one disease: I admit several ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... horse-thieves could come into Illinois and declare horse-stealing to be legal [Laughter], and it would be just as legal as slavery is in Kansas. But by express statute, in the land of Washington and Jefferson, we may soon be brought face to face with the discreditable fact of showing to the world by our acts that we prefer slavery to freedom—darkness to ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... dark sullen-looking man that he did not approve of his style of shearing. He was temporarily absent, and on his return found the same man about to let go a sheep whose appearance, as a shorn wool-bearing quadruped, was painful and discreditable ...
— Shearing in the Riverina, New South Wales • Rolf Boldrewood
... show one's face; in the shade, in the background; out at elbows, down at the elbows, down in the world. inglorious; nameless, renownless^; obscure; unknown to fame; unnoticed, unnoted^, unhonored, unglorified^. shameful; disgraceful, discreditable, disreputable; despicable; questionable; unbecoming, unworthy; derogatory; degrading, humiliating, infra dignitatem [Lat.], dedecorous^; scandalous, infamous, too bad, unmentionable; ribald, opprobrious; errant, shocking, outrageous, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the three blessed (or white) ladies of Britain.[391] Perhaps these two aspects of her character may point to a divergence between religion and mythology, the cult of a virgin goddess of whom myth told discreditable things. More likely she was an old Earth-goddess, at once a virgin and a fruitful mother, like Artemis, the virgin goddess, yet neither chaste nor fair, or like a Babylonian goddess addressed as at once "mother, wife, ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... Borrow, but then, perhaps, his champion had not. Borrow was neither one of the 'kindest of men' nor the reverse. He was a good hater and a whole-hearted lover, and to be thus is to fill a certain uncomfortable but not discreditable place in the scheme of things. About a month later Borrow was on the way to the East, travelling by Paris and Vienna. From Paris he wrote to Mr. John Murray that Vidocq 'wished much to have a copy of my Gypsies in Spain,' ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... recognized officially by the government, the perpetrators were neither punished nor reprimanded for their excursions against Spanish commerce at home or in the West Indies; rather were they commended, and it was considered not altogether a discreditable thing for men to get rich upon the spoils taken from Spanish galleons in times of nominal peace. Many of the most reputable citizens and merchants of London, when they felt that the queen failed in her duty of pushing the fight against the great Catholic Power, fitted out ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... whose singular breadth of understanding and various knowledge of mankind belied the notion that fathered on him the clumsy execution of a theory wholly inapplicable to a social state like Australia. I am glad to see that he has vindicated himself from the discreditable paternity. But I grieve to find that he still clings to one cardinal error of the system, in the discouragement of small holdings, and that he evades, more ingeniously than ingenuously, the important question: "What should be the minimum ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be reached. Orators at fashionable missionary-meetings were wont to speak of them as irreclaimable heathens who bid defiance to civilising influences from impenetrable fastnesses. Mr. George Smith may be credited with having broken down this discreditable state of things. He brought us face to face with this unfortunate section of our fellow-creatures, with what result it is not necessary to say. The sympathies of the public were effectually roused by the narratives which revealed to us the deplorable depths ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... that he opposed the law because he thought it discreditable to Pennsylvania—that there should be a law to the effect that, "If I play cards, a man may say to me—there, you have done an act that, if legally visited, would send you to the Penitentiary." Mr. Freeman illustrated his views by a reference ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... of our soldiers, both at Siboney and at the front, in the early days of the campaign, was discreditable to the army and to the country; and there is no reason why military surgeons should not frankly admit it, because it was not their fault, and they cannot justly be held accountable for it. The blame should rest, and eventually will rest, ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... with indifference and neglect, for a long time I bore it in silence; but I was at length forced to acquaint my parents of the matter. My father soon took measures to ascertain what manner of life he had led while pursuing his studies in New York; and the information he gained was very discreditable to Mr. Almont. But my parents advised me, as we were married, to try if, by kindness, I could not reclaim him from his evil ways. I willingly followed their advice, for I still loved him; but, I suppose the ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... necessarily discreditable to Cayley, even though he were hiding something. All that could be said against him at the moment was that he had gone the longest way round to get into the locked office and that this did not fit in with what he had told the Inspector. But it did fit ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... must go South, to get braced up, and to avoid a New York February and March. Suppose the patient has only about money enough to get here, and relies on finding something to do to keep him in food and lodging. Well—there's nothing mysterious or especially discreditable in that, is there? ... The dew is beginning to fall. And I'm keeping you out here in the damp. ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... 'Prevention is better than punishment. It would be wiser if, instead of these avenging raids, the more frequented roads could be cleared of forest on either side, and held by block-houses and armed posts at intervals. Indeed it is somewhat discreditable that the great towns and princes of Germany cannot achieve what the Swiss do by co-operation and local action.' He then turns to the religious dissensions, and in his passion for concord exclaims that it would be better that a nation should be ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... am glad to find that the blame cannot be attached to any boy in the school. I am sorry that it is even an Old Boy. It was a foolish, discreditable thing to have done, but it is not as bad as if any boy still at the school had broken out of his house at night to ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... not a practical question; Agnes would never hear of his fall. If his friend had been, as he expressed it, "labelled"; if he had been a father, or still better a brother, one might tell him of the discreditable passion. But why irritate him for no reason? Thinking "I am always angling for sympathy; I must stop myself," he hurried onward to ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... on behalf of their own candidate of the Lopez and Fletcher quarrel. If Mr. Fletcher had insulted the other man's wife, surely he could not be a proper member for Silverbridge. And then the row was declared to have been altogether discreditable. Two strangers had come into this peaceful town and had absolutely quarrelled with sticks and whips in the street, calling each other opprobrious names. Would it not be better that they should elect their own respectable townsman? All this was nearly effective. But, in spite of all, Arthur ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... to feel really better now. She rather wondered that she had never told Count Paul about that strange visit to the fortune-teller, but she had been taught, as are so many Englishwomen of her type, to regard everything savouring of superstition as not only silly and weak-minded, but also as rather discreditable. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... men of that grade,—eminent in civil life, active partisans, but with no military training,—were preferred to the most experienced soldiers. This fact disfigures the energetic record of Mr. Marcy as secretary of War, and was eminently discreditable to the President ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the mother of Ajax and also Phereboea and Iope the daughter of Iphikles: and, as has been told already, it was on account of his love for Aegle the daughter of Panopeus that he deserted Ariadne, which was a shameful and discreditable action. And in addition to all this he is charged with carrying off Helen, which brought war upon Attica, and exile and destruction on himself; about which we shall speak presently. But, though ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... where any of our young people happened to be on shore, they warned their companions against these men, but not always with success. Hindrances there must be always in the way of all attempts to do some good. But this is a sad business, and very discreditable to the persons employed in it and the Government which sanctions it, for they must know that they cannot control the masters of the vessels engaged in the trade; they may pass laws as to the treatment the natives are to receive on the plantations, as to food, pay, &c., the time of service, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Lammle, Twemlow politely intimates (though greatly shocked), to have one always beside him who is attached to him in all his fortunes, and whose restraining influence will prevent him from courses that would be discreditable and ruinous. As he says it, Mrs Lammle leaves off sketching, and ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... this award. His claiming or accepting it under the circumstances has been considered discreditable and a breach of faith by many modern writers. Oviedo says the native of Lepe was so indignant at not getting the reward that "he went over into Africa and denied the faith," i.e., became a Mohammedan. Las Casas seems ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... without a son before his uncle, then his brother would be the heir. The arrangement, however, if practicable, would at once make all things comfortable for Ralph, and would give him, probably, a large unembarrassed revenue,—so large, that the owner of it need certainly have recourse to no discreditable marriage as the means of extricating himself from present calamity. But then Sir Thomas had very strong ideas about a family property. Were Ralph's affairs, indeed, in such disorder as to make it necessary for him to abandon the great prospect of being Newton of Newton? If the ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... councils held to try the Templars in the other lands where they had also been seized. In England, the confessions of the knights tortured in France were employed as evidence, together with the witness of begging friars, minstrels, women, and discreditable persons; and on the decision of the Council of Vienne, the poor knights confessed, as well they might, that their order had fallen under evil report, and were therefore pardoned and released, with the forfeiture of ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... steady work; Swiss couriers, and other Swiss servants chronically out of place; industrious Swiss laundresses and clear-starchers; mysteriously existing Swiss of both sexes; Swiss creditable and Swiss discreditable; Swiss to be trusted by all means, and Swiss to be trusted by no means; these diverse Swiss particles are attracted to a centre in the district of Soho. Shabby Swiss eating-houses, coffee-houses, and lodging-houses, ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... was at first inclined to be angry. The whole thing was a mystification—absurd, discreditable. His daughter had grossly deceived him. It needed all the stepmother's gentle influence to soften the outraged father's feelings. But Lady Palliser said all that was kindly about Ida's youth and inexperience, her ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... fittest manner. A language destitute of grammatical regularity can possess neither {ix} perspicuity nor precision, and must therefore be very inadequate to the purpose of conveying one's thoughts. The Gaelic is in manifest danger of falling into this discreditable condition, from the disuse of old idioms and distinctions, and the admission of modern corruptions, unless means be applied to prevent its degenerating. It is obvious that a speaker cannot express himself with precision without a correct knowledge of grammar. When ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... very discreditable bills which would have been made positively infamous if it had not been for the active opposition of a few friends of liberty. One of these bills was designed to add to the stringency of the present obstructive medical law; the other was ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... said, "and what a disgrace some of the men have brought upon your regiment." Every one of the guards at Holyrood Palace had been found 'beastly' drunk, excepting one man, who was keeping sentry at the magazine on the top of Arthur's Seat. The circumstance was especially discreditable as His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales was staying at Holyrood. "I understand (continued the speaker) that they broke into the wine cellar, and stole some fifty bottles of port and champagne. Most of that they drunk, until when found they were 'blind palatic'." ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... her other endocrine influences are still dormant. She breaks off her engagement to Captain Caleb Williams on the eve of her wedding because she is informed of the episodes of a sex affair he was involved in on his last voyage, under circumstances not discreditable to him. The next act shows her thirty years later when, as an elderly spinster, she is passing through the climacteric, and is in the state of sexual hyperesthesia some women are afflicted with before the menopause. It is as if ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... go to him!" Mr. Blumentein declared irritably. "We have nothing to conceal here! All that we desire is to be left alone by guests whose conduct about the place is discreditable. Good afternoon, Mr. Courage!" ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... into company with a woman too well known in the idle and dissipated circles. Her character was not unknown to me. There was nothing in her features or air to obviate disadvantageous prepossessions. I sought not her intercourse; I rather shunned it, as unpleasing and discreditable, but she would not be repulsed. Self-invited, she made herself my frequent guest; took unsolicited part in my concerns; did me many kind offices; and, at length, in spite of my counter-inclination, won upon my ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... over-estimate, but its manifestation is certainly the less amiable and pleasing. I have known a successful author whose relatives never believed, till the reviews assured them of it, that his writings were anything but contemptible and discreditable trash. ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... your good looks, your charm, your wit, your poetry to the front. If you indulge in small discreditable courses, let it be within four walls, and you will never again be guilty of a blot on the decorations of this great theatrical scene called society. Napoleon called this 'washing dirty linen at home.' ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... money by giving things away. This is, of course, a fundamental axiom of commerce. And now Hugo's annual sale was to be more astonishing than ever; some said that he meant at any cost to efface the memory of those discreditable incidents before mentioned. Decidedly, many of the advertised bargains were remarkable in the highest degree. There was, for example, the 'fine silvered fox-stole, with real brush at each end,' at a guinea. Every woman who can tell a silvered fox-stole from a cock's-feather boa is aware ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... for him a painful memory. He was a writer of anti-clerical romances and the editor of an anti-clerical newspaper—legitimate occupations in one sense, but in this instance too frequently connected with literary methods of a gravely discreditable kind. A catalogue of the defunct Libraire Anti-Clericale is added to one of the romances, and advertises, among other productions from the same pen, the following contributions made by Leo Taxil to the literature of ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... Abolitionist, Granville Sharp, he was restored to health, when his unfeeling and avaricious master again claimed him as bondman. The claim was repelled. After elaborate and protracted discussion in Westminster Hall, marked by rarest learning and ability, Lord Mansfield, with discreditable reluctance, sullying his great judicial name, but in trembling obedience to the genius of the British Constitution, pronounced a decree which made the early boast a practical verity, and rendered Slavery forever impossible in England. More than fourteen thousand persons, at that time held as ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... and the masters advertise the fact of their being thus branded with their own signature, thereby proving to the world, that, however damning it may appear to non-slavers, such practices are not regarded discreditable among the slaveholders themselves. Why, I believe if a man should brand his horse in this country—burn the initials of his name into any of his cattle, and publish the ferocious deed here—that the united execrations of Christians in Britain would descend upon ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... strange that Tom should have given up so quickly. It soon appeared that it was not caprice, but that he had an object in view, and that a very discreditable one. ...
— Struggling Upward - or Luke Larkin's Luck • Horatio Alger
... have no right to petition on political subjects; that it is discreditable, not only to their section of the country, but also to the national character; that these females could have a sufficient field for the exercise of their influence in the discharge of their duties to their fathers, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... men of disengaged affections, cheerfully pursuing their virtuous avocations, would be thunderstruck if they knew the dark suspicions harboured against them in spinster bosoms, that they are concealing some discreditable matrimonial secret, which alone can account for their—well—their extraordinary behaviour ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... detect the departure of the fugitives, but, from some cause or other, failed to do their duty, and they must have been quite a way off at the time the Mohawk put out his awkward scow. The party on shore were angry because of the failure, which was certainly a discreditable one, and they were very ready to accuse their comrades of being "squaws" on the war-path. The accused were equally ready to charge the others with being "old women" for permitting the whites to land under their noses, and to reach cover again. It would be hard to say which of the ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... through a hole, and he writes down all about the incident as faithfully as he describes the palace of the King of France, and the English war with Holland. His nature is amazingly complicated, and yet our judgment of it is simplified by his passion for telling everything, no matter how discreditable or how ignoble the detail may be. He is a great man and a great statesman, and he is the liveliest of our English crickets on the hearth. One set of excerpts would present him as the basest, another set as the pleasantest and kindliest of men; and always without any exception ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... incorporation of impartial suffrage in the Reconstruction laws. The Republican victory of 1868, it was now resolved in the councils of the party, should lead to the incorporation of impartial suffrage in the Constitution of the United States. The evasive and discreditable position in regard to suffrage, taken by the National Republican Convention that nominated General Grant in 1868, was keenly felt and appreciated by the members of the party when subjected to popular discussion. There was something ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... at one time the opinions of the majority or at least a great number of the faithful. But it was not the sect which flourished in Ceylon and the writer of the Dipavamsa is prejudiced against it. It may be a result of this animus that he connects it with the discreditable Vajjian schism and the Chinese tradition may be more correct. On the other hand the adherents of the school would naturally be disposed to assign it an early origin. Fa Hsien says[562] that the Vinaya of ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... assured her there was a fallacy somewhere in the glowing logic of the proposition—as he saw it—even though she mightn't put her very finest finger-point on it; and to inflict upon a man who offered so much a wife with a tendency to criticise would be a peculiarly discreditable act. She had promised him she would consider his question, and when, after he had left her, she wandered back to the bench where he had found her and lost herself in meditation, it might have seemed that she was keeping her vow. But this was not the case; she was wondering if she were ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land. The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... which I have not corrected, or allowed to be touched in any way, is not discreditable to B. F. You observe that he is acquiring a knowledge of zoology at the same time that he is learning French. Fathers of families in moderate circumstances will find it profitable to their children, and an economical mode of instruction, to set them to revising and amending this boy's exercise. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist) |
