"Debased" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he had been disposed to criticise her; now that this criticism was extended to all that she said or did, the spirit of accusation tinctured her whole life; their joint past seemed altered and debased. ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... to endure terrible physical ills; and as such he calls forth more than an intellectual interest. It is true, alas! that there is a heavy weight in the other scale—that Heine's magnificent powers have often served only to give electric force to the expression of debased feeling, so that his works are no Phidian statue of gold, and ivory, and gems, but have not a little brass, and iron, and miry clay mingled with the precious metal. The audacity of his occasional coarseness and personality is ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... base malignity of our latest adversaries have debased modern warfare, as waged by them, from its ancient dignity and honour; and they have conducted it so as to make it difficult to believe that from the Kaiser down to the subaltern on land and the petty officer at sea that nation can produce ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... detestable of Satanic attributes, assuming the gentle affections of a father, only to exercise more effectually the wanton power of a tyrant, and treacherously inviting our confidence and our love, when, with such falsehood and cruelty, as the most debased of his creatures would not be able to perpetrate, He is only preparing ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... world. It is the idea of right which enabled men to define anarchy and tyranny; and which taught them to remain independent without arrogance, as well as to obey without servility. The man who submits to violence is debased by his compliance; but when he obeys the mandate of one who possesses that right of authority which he acknowledges in a fellow creature, he rises in some measure above the person who delivers the command. There are no great men without ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... in joy's ecstatic blaze; Others again will change to each extreme, They know not why—as hurried in a dream; Unstable, they, like water, take all forms, Are quick and stagnant; have their calms and storms; High on the hills, they in the sunbeams glow, Then muddily they move debased and slow; Or cold and frozen rest, and neither rise nor flow. Yet none the cool and prudent Teacher prize. On him ther dote who wakes their ectasies; With passions ready primed such guide they meet, And warm and kindle with th' imparted heat; 'Tis he who wakes the nameless strong desire, ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... republished in a more extended form my pamphlet on "Paper Money Inflation in France: How it Came, What it Brought, and How it Ended,'' which had first been published at the suggestion of General Garfield and others, as throwing light on the results of a debased currency, and it was now widely circulated in all parts of ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Wolseleys and bulbuls. We go moping through its glories in green spectacles, befouling it with our loathsome statistics and reports. The sweet air of heaven, the blue firmament, and the everlasting hills do not satisfy our poisoned hearts; so we make to ourselves a little tin-pot world of blotted-paper, debased rupees, graded lists, and tinsel honours; we try to feed our lungs on its typhoidal effluvia. Aroint[T] thee, Comptroller and Accountant-General with all thy grisly crew! Thou art worse than the blind Fury with the abhorred shears; for thou slittest my thin-spun pay-wearing ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... higher than that of the adventurous Coeur de Lion. But in the Crusade, itself an undertaking wholly irrational, sound reason was the quality of all others least estimated, and the chivalric valour which both the age and the enterprise demanded was considered as debased if mingled with the least touch of discretion. So that the merit of Philip, compared with that of his haughty rival, showed like the clear but minute flame of a lamp placed near the glare of a huge, blazing torch, which, not possessing half the utility, makes ten times ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Museum's collection of presentation silver given to Schley not only attest the recipient's popularity but seem to express the poor taste, debased design, and stereotyped workmanship that was characteristic at the ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... be laid on this. There can be little doubt that if it were not for the charity and beneficence and for the strong spirit of humanity, which lives in a strange strength, even in the hearts of the debased and evil-minded, the industrial warfare which our modern competition has come to be would have wrought tenfold more evil than it has, and would have already arrayed class against class with other weapons than ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... unfailing courtesy, ready sympathy with distress, and a truly lavish liberality, mark their intercourse with one another. The Jesuit missionaries among the Hurons knew them before intercourse with the whites and the use of ardent spirits had embittered and debased them. The testimony which they have left on record is very remarkable. The missionary Brebeuf, protesting against the ignorant prejudice which would place the Indians on a level with the brutes, gives the result of his observation ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... with reference to our worthy friend Uncle John fighting the battle of Mohamedanism—let it lay at his door the grave charge of degrading himself by seeking to make firm the rotten props of one of the most debased governments that has stained the history of the world with its crimes, John will humanely acknowledge the charge while forwarding to Turkey a copious edition of his "Society ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... disappearance becoming a fair field, in which arts, sciences, and all the amiable virtues flourished, instead of being a pestilent marsh where swine-like ignorance wallowed, and artful hypocrites, like so many wills-o'-the-wisp, played antic gambols about, around and above debased humanity. ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Mrs. Hochmuller. As her agitation subsided she began to notice how much the appearance of the house had changed. It was not only that winter had stripped the elm, and blackened the flower-borders: the house itself had a debased and deserted air. The window-panes were cracked and dirty, and one or two shutters swung dismally on ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... farewell to the entire of the abominable crew, whose evil doings and merited fates have only been recorded when it became necessary to our story. It is better to leave the debased and the profligate in oblivion than drag their doings before the day; and it is with happy consciousness an Irishman may assert, that there is plenty of subject afforded by Irish character and Irish life honourable to the land, pleasing to the narrator, and sufficiently attractive ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... fitting for its county town, the first entry in the Devonshire Domesday deals with Exeter, in which city, it is recorded, the king had 285 houses rendering customary dues. The generally debased character of the coinage of the time led to various expedients being adopted by the Exchequer for securing approximately accurate payment of a specified sum of money. Among other things the entries in Domesday state that ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... intend that the procreative function should be exercised by individuals who were not fully developed. The perpetuation of the species must not depend upon the license of immaturity. The instinct of sex-attraction must not be debased to serve a puerile, rather than a ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... 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 ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... coarsely, "Deutschland, Deutschland, Gott mit uns"—(Germany, Germany, God is with us). Metaphorically he was correct, because the words are printed upon the belt of every German soldier, but if the Almighty was with that drunken, debased crowd that night, then Old Nick must have been wearing out his shoes looking for ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... of them exclaimed, "it is frightful to murder this young man, whose only offence is resistance to insult from his debased half-breed keeper. Is there ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... most desperate adventure into reality had been the consumption of a small claret hot with a slice of lemon in it in a back-street public-house. Thus Mr. Kipling brought a new violence and wonder, a sort of debased Byronism, into the imagination of youth; at least, he put a crown upon the violence and wonder which youth had long previously discovered for itself in penny dreadfuls and in its rebellion ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... question there seems a touch of awe and respect: "Art Thou a king then?" That moral nature which is in all men, however debased, seemed for a moment to assert itself, and a strange spell lay ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... saints together in a hut; Young Rustick, where a corner seemed to jut; A bed of rushes for the novice placed, Since sleeping on the floor had her debased, Who, yet unused to hardships, much must feel: 'Twas best that these should on her senses steal. A little fruit, and bread not over fine, She had for supper:—water too for wine. The hermit fasted; but the lady fed, And ate with appetite ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... under one of the arches of Waterloo Bridge, which, in the sweep of its curve, is as vast—it alone—as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in proportions. But over the Rialto, though of late and debased Venetian work, there still reigns some power of human imagination: on the two flanks of it are carved the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation; on the keystone the descending Dove. It is not, indeed, the fault of living designers that the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... is dependent upon another for his livelihood is not capable of enjoying real liberty, or of attaining happiness. When the men of a nation are debased to a position of minor importance, where they can only act as servants, they lose the stamina necessary to make them good citizens. This condition now prevails ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... which are in flagrant contradiction with the religious character of that belief. That belief is what we call rational, and even elevated. The myths, on the other hand, are what we call irrational and debasing. We regard low savages as very irrational and debased characters, consequently the nature of their myths does not surprise us. Their religious conception, however, of a "Father" or "Master of Life" seems out of keeping with the nature of the savage mind as we understand ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... resistance, as though in the unavoidable future conflict between timidly propounded theories and politico-social forces the former had any serious chance of surviving. In politics, as in coinage, it is the debased metal that ousts ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... points of iron, the wedges for jamming fast her bones. Her courage failed her, so weak she was now of body. She submitted to be set before her cruel master, who might laugh triumphant now that he had debased not only her body, but yet more her conscience, by making her the murderess of ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... blunder of a horse, The crash upon the frozen clods, And Death? Ah! no such dignity, But Life, all twisted and at odds! [92] At odds in body and in soul, Degraded to some brutish state, A being loathsome and malign, Debased, obscene, degenerate. ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mastered, and, barring some surface cracks, the paintings are in as perfect condition as when they came from the artists' hands. The chief defect is a somewhat crude opacity of pigments, a characteristic belonging to the debased period of wall-painting rather than to the "fresco buono et puro" of Giotto, ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... mansion of red sandstone, was built by Richard Prince, a lawyer, in 1578-82, "to his great chardge with fame to hym and hys posterite for ever." The Old Market Hall in the Renaissance style, with its mixture of debased Gothic and classic details, is worthy of study. Even in Shrewsbury we have to record the work of the demon of destruction. The erection of the New Market Hall entailed the disappearance of several old picturesque houses. ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... could not with propriety be modelled after that regular epic form which the more splendid works of this kind have taken, and on which their success is supposed in a great measure to depend. The attempt would have been highly injudicious; it must have diminished and debased a series of actions which were really great in themselves, and could not be ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... reflected, will make you either liked or disliked, in the general run of the world." For all the wisdom and brilliancy of his worldly knowledge, perhaps no other writer has done so much to bring disrepute on the "manners and graces" as Lord Chesterfield, and this, it is charged, because he debased them so heavily by considering them merely as the machinery of a successful career. To the moralists, the fact that the moral standards of society in Lord Chesterfield's day were very different from those of the present era rather adds to the odium that has become associated with his ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Composition, knew very well that many an elegant Phrase becomes improper for a Poet or an Orator, when it has been debased by common Use. For this Reason the Works of Ancient Authors, which are written in dead Languages, have a great Advantage over those which are written in Languages that are now spoken. Were there any mean Phrases or Idioms ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... interested in it. I fear no play that I care to write will please a sufficient number of people to make its production worth your while. I release you from your promise. Believe me, I am shaken in my confidence to-night. Your audience seemed so heartless, so debased of taste. They applauded most loudly the things most revolting to me. Since I have come to know you I cannot afford to have you make a sacrifice of yourself to produce my play, much as I desire to see ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the honour of a family were lowered by one's action; but that were the husband or wife a shame and degradation to the children or the family, the individual would be entirely justified in divorcing, and would be helping the good of the State by preventing the guilty and debased partner from committing further harm. Common sense is always the truest wisdom, but it has often unhappily had to be cloaked and hampered either by spiritual superstition, prejudice, or ignorance. So that when a flagrant case which ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... them; Out of the streets where they chased them, Taxed them, and then bayonetted them; Out of the homes where they spied on them (Using their daughters and wives); Out of the church where they fretted them, Rotted their souls and debased them, Trained them to answer with knives, Then cursed them all at their prayers!— Out of cold lands, not theirs, Where they exiled them, starved them, lied on them; Back they come like a wind, in vain Cramped up in the hills, that roars its road The stronger ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... for their loyalty, industry, patriotism, or zeal, when they remember that their Sovereigns have nothing to give but what the rebel has obtained, the robber worn, the murderer vilified, and the regicide debased? ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... as the preacher said "hell." He gave a maudlin cry, and almost whimpered, "No, sir, no, preacher, I am a-goin' to reform." John had known what note to touch in this debased nature. Not love, nor hope, nor shame, would move Tom Davis, but fear stung him into a semblance of sobriety. "I'll come along wi' you," he went on, swaying back and forth, and steadying himself with a hand on the lumber against which he had been leaning. "This is the last ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... their common poetic strain and predilection for the examination of mental maladies, differed radically in the affective conceptions which held such a large place in their works; Baudelaire with his iniquitous and debased loves—cruel loves which made one think of the reprisals of an inquisition; Poe with his chaste, aerial loves, in which the senses played no part, where only the mind functioned without corresponding to organs ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... we have received, in written records, more than a fraction of the fixed rules which were practised among themselves by the members of the conquering tribes. If we can once persuade ourselves that a considerable element of debased Roman law already existed in the barbarian systems, we shall have done something to remove a grave difficulty. The German law of the conquerors and the Roman law of their subjects would not have combined if they had not possessed more affinity for each other ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... and I feel your bounty at my heart;—but the virtuous gratitude, that sowed the deep sense of it there, does not inform me that, in return, the tutor's sacred function, or the social virtue of the man must be debased into the pupil's pander, or the ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... kind, though unmixed with prose. The choice of his numbers is suitable enough to his design as he has managed it; but in any other hand the shortness of his verse, and the quick returns of rhyme, had debased the dignity of style. And besides, the double rhyme (a necessary companion of burlesque writing) is not so proper for manly satire, for it turns earnest too much to jest, and gives us a boyish kind of pleasure. It tickles awkwardly, ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... gives one glimpses of splendid self-sacrifice, of lives devoted to a high cause; it sets one aglow with visions of patriotism, liberty and justice. It shows one also the darker side; how great natures can be neutralised or even debased by uncorrected faults; how bigotry can triumph over intelligence; how high hopes can be disappointed. All this is saddening; yet it deepens and widens the mind; it teaches one what to avoid; it brings one near to the deep and patient ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... experience had done to them. Both, as she saw the case, had been moved to pity, horror, and indignation that such things should be done, or should have to be done, in the world. After that point came the divergence. The higher nature had been raised, the lower debased; Alec Naylor's sympathies had been sharpened and sensitized; Beaumaroy's blunted. Where the one had found ideals and incentives, the other found despair—a despair that issued in excuses and denied ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... could, not indicating thereby a special love of oysters but a craving appetite for food of some kind. It was oyster or nothing with them. And in the course of life thus forced upon them, the males who survived the period of infancy may have averaged twenty-five years of wretched, debased, brutal existence, while the females, of more delicate frame and subjected to additional evils, have usually died much younger. But the gallows, the charity hospitals, the prisons, the work-houses (refuges denied to the healthy and the unconvicted), with the unfenced kennels and hiding-places ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Europeans. Their existence at present hangs upon the supplies of ammunition and clothing they receive from the traders, and they deeply feel their dependent{18} situation. But their character has been still more debased by the passion for spirituous liquors, so assiduously fostered among them. To obtain the noxious beverage, they descend to the most humiliating entreaties, and assume an abjectness of behaviour which does not seem natural to them, and of which not a vestige ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... The debased position of the Athenian citizen woman becomes abundantly clear when we find that ideal love and free relationship between the sexes were possible only with the hetairae. Limitation of space forbids my giving any adequate details of these stranger-women, who were the beloved companions ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... of foul political method—they are the most successful because they explode so easily and flood the mind with those unconscious prejudices which make critical thinking difficult. Yet for all its abuse the deliberate choice of issues is one of the high selective arts of the statesman. In the debased form we know it there is little encouragement. But the devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants. It is always a pretty good working rule that whatever ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... which revived hopes had been industriously weaving throughout the day was torn into tatters. The kindness of Raoul's manner, however, his words, and the explanations of Ithuel, removed a mountain from his breast, and he became quite unmanned. There is none so debased as not to retain glimmerings of the bright spirit that is associated with the grosser particles of their material nature, Clinch had in him the living consciousness that he was capable of better things, and he endured moments ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the tiger spell-bound and crouching under his cold, fearless gaze. The beast, ever docile and submissive, has cringed at his feet, fawned to his touch, and licked the hand that snatched away the half-devoured morsel. Obedient to voice and eye, the giant strength and sinewy grace have been debased to make the sport of multitudes; the noble, pliant frame has contorted itself to execute the mean antics of the low-comedy ape—to counterfeit death like a poodle dog; to leap through gaudily-painted rings at the word of command; to fetch and carry like a spaniel. ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... cherished brown cobs, animals which in the eyes of Kingthorpe were almost as sacred as that Egyptian beast whose profane slaughter was more deeply felt than the nation's ruin—to think that these exalted brutes should have been sent to fetch that debased creature, a salaried companion. But then Aunt Betsy was never like ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... case of Apollonius Rhodius, and offers this explanation of the matter: "Ancient terms of art, even if they can be made intelligible, cannot be rendered, with any degree of grace, into a modern language, where the corresponding terms are debased into vulgarity by low and familiar use. Many passages of this kind are to be found in Homer. They are frequent also in Apollonius Rhodius; particularly so, from the exactness which he affects in describing everything."[446] Warton, unusually tolerant of Augustan taste in this respect, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... not understand what I felt for you. Our whole lives might have been changed. Now I think it was better as it has been; it is better that we should never expose our friendship to the test of common life, the daily life, in which even the purest must be debased...." ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... styled) every rank was marked with the most scrupulous exactness, and its dignity was displayed in a variety of trifling and solemn ceremonies, which it was a study to learn, and a sacrilege to neglect. The purity of the Latin language was debased, by adopting, in the intercourse of pride and flattery, a profusion of epithets, which Tully would scarcely have understood, and which Augustus would have rejected with indignation. The principal officers of the empire were saluted, even by the sovereign himself, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... we could at least keep him out of the house; but what of the modern Darwinist surgeon whom we dread and mistrust ten times more, but into whose hands we must all give ourselves from time to time? Miserably as religion had been debased, it did at least still proclaim that our relation to one another was that of a fellowship in which we were all equal and members one of another before the judgment-seat of our common father. Darwinism proclaimed ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... intended to supersede this system of royal government; kings no less than emperors were regarded as holding a definite rank and office in the Christian commonwealth. No traditions of imperial bureaucracy, except in a debased and orientalised form, were accessible to Charles the Great. In Gaul and Italy he had subjects who lived under a corrupt and mutilated Roman Law; but he was unacquainted with the scientific principles of the great jurists whose writings were the highest achievements ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... notoriety of Ascalon attended to this, bringing with the outlawed and debased a fresh and eager train of victims. The sons of families came from afar, sated with the diversions and debaucheries of eastern cities, looking for strange thrills and adventures to heat their surfeited blood. Unsophisticated young ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... cannot be a wonder to us or yourselves that Dadney merchants do not come forward to contract with the Company, that the manufactures find their way through foreign channels, or that our investments are at once enormously dear and of a debased quality. It is evident, then, that the evils which have been so destructive to us lie too deep for any partial plans to reach or correct; it is therefore our resolution to aim at the root of those evils, and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... have a longing to take you by the hand and unburden my heart by saying, "Sir, I honour you as a man who supports the dignity of human nature, amid an age when frivolity and avarice have, between them, debased us below the brutes that perish!" But, alas, Sir! to me you are unapproachable. It is true, the Muses baptised me in Castalian streams; but the thoughtless gipsies forgot to give me a name. As the sex have served many a good fellow, the Nine ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Spain was in getting money to pay the men for doing the work—a very great difficulty. The bank was not in the habit of having large cheques drawn upon it to pay money; for nearly all the merchants kept their cash in safes in their offices, and it was a very debased kind of money, coins composed of half copper and half silver, and very much defaced. You had to take a good many of them on faith. I had to send down fifteen days before the pay day came round, to commence getting the money ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... of departed spirits returning to visit the scenes and beings which were dear to them during the body's existence, though it has been debased by the absurd superstitions of the vulgar, in itself is awfully solemn and sublime.... Raise it above the frivolous purposes to which it has been applied; strip it of the gloom and horror with which it has ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... getting gold. Had we gone back to relieve our fellow-beings, we should have been unable to proceed the next day for the diggings. A whole day would have been lost. Oh, most foul and wretched was the mania which inspired us! Unnatural! no; it was that of fallen, debased human nature; it was too true to that nature. Those miserable men must have died horribly— devoured by wolves or scalped by Indians. The next day we pushed eagerly on; yet we had to sleep high up on the side of a snow-capped mountain; thence we were ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... untouched by powder, curled round the low narrow forehead; whilst the small sensual mouth expressed all the worst passions of our nature. Around the table sat his admiring parasites; young beauty and hoary age, the strength of manhood and the earliest youth, were there, alike debased by the evidences of lawless passion. With what a master-hand had the painter seized upon the individual expression of each! There the glutton, and here the sot; now the eye fell on the mean pander ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... madman. Another woman might perhaps have produced another life. In a man we can always trace the woman whom he first loved. Happy would he have been who had met Madame de Warens before her profanation! She was an idol to be adored, but the idol had been polluted. She herself debased the worship that a young and loving heart tendered her. The amours of this woman and Rousseau appear like a leaf torn from the loves of Daphnis and Chloe, and found soiled and defiled on the bed of a courtesan. It' matters not; it was the first love, or the first delirium, if you will, ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... of what Manoelino was; an expression of Portugal's riches and power, and of the gradual assimilation of such Moors as still remained on this side the Straits. Of course it is easy to say that it is extravagant, overloaded and debased; and so it may be. Yet no one who sees it can help falling a victim to its fascination, for perhaps its only real fault is that the great cusps and finials are on rather too large a scale for the rest. Not even the greatest purist could help admiring the exquisite fineness of the ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... prospect of these north-western tribes remaining in their present primitive state, indeed of their gradual improvement, for nothing can induce them to touch spirits. They know that the eastern Indians had been debased and conquered by the use of them, and consider an offer of a dram from an American trader as an indirect attempt upon their ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... politicians and state-functionaries are recruited, the lower seems their intellectual level to have sunk. This deterioration in the personnel of government has been yet more striking from the moral point of view. Politics have tended to become more corrupt, more debased, and to soil the hands of those who take part in them and the men who get their living by them. Political battles have become too bitter and too vulgar not to have inspired aversion in the noblest and most upright natures ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... enforced, and the acknowledgment of previous revelations in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, told not only on the idolaters of Arabia and the fire-worshipers of Persia, but on Jews and Samaritans and the followers of a debased and priest-ridden Christianity. All this is true; but it is still not the less true that without the sword Islam would never have been planted even in Arabia, much less ever have spread to the countries beyond. The ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... the degraded robbers of the Western plains in having naturally evil and debased propensities, and entertaining similar gross and monstrous customs and most wicked superstitions. But in the Long House the Senecas were really aliens; every nation felt this, from the Canienga and Oneida peoples, whose skin was almost as white as our own, to the dusky Onondaga, Tuscarora, ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Frank could understand why he said little of the purpose that took him to Europe. Although she waited anxiously for any word he might let fall on that subject, she respected his natural reticence in the matter. He was a criminal, low and debased enough, it was true; but he was a criminal of such apparent largeness of mind and such openness of spirit that his very life of crime, to the listening woman, seemed to take on the dignity of a Nietzsche-like abrogation of all civic ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... whom the people nursed so strong a hate, stood for all that was harsh, narrow, tyrannical, and unprogressive. In order to gain money and maintain their political ascendency they engaged in commerce, became owners of real estate and buildings, including saloons and dance-houses, debased their churchly functions, discouraged attempts at progress, practically forbade the printing of secular books and papers, making illiteracy, with its attendant vice, poverty, and superstition, universal; and when ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... state to the civilized. But the primitive man, as described by Horace in his Satires, and asserted by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others, is far below the savage. The lowest, most degraded, and most debased savage tribe that has yet been discovered has at least some rude outlines or feeble reminiscences of a social state, of government, morals, law, and religion, for even in superstition the most gross there is a reminiscence of true religion; but the people in the alleged state ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... importance, in the solution of which some legal skill is requisite; especially where the law and the fact, as it often happens, are intimately blended together. And the general incapacity, even of our best juries, to do this with any tolerable propriety has greatly debased their authority; and has unavoidably thrown more power into the hands of the judges, to direct, control, and even reverse their verdicts, ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... reserve on her part. He shamed himself more than once for deploring the fact that her ankle was mending with uncommon rapidity, and that in a few days she would be quite able to walk without support. And he actually debased himself by wishing that the Rushcroft company might find it imperative to go on rehearsing for weeks in ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... cellar; hold, bilge; feet, heels. low water; low tide, ebb tide, neap tide, spring tide. V. be low &c. adj.; lie low, lie flat; underlie; crouch, slouch, wallow, grovel; lower &c. (depress) 308. Adj. low, neap, debased; nether, nether most; flat, level with the ground; lying low &c. v.; crouched, subjacent, squat, prostrate &c. (horizontal) 213. Adv. under; beneath, underneath; below; downwards; adown[obs3], at the foot of; under foot, under ground; down ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in a sweet slumber, and when we awaken what joy will be ours to find all our sorrows and fears past. A little patience, and all will be over; aye, a very little patience; for, look, there is the key of our prison; we hold it in our own hands, and are we more debased than slaves to cast it away and give ourselves up to voluntary bondage? Even now if we had courage we might be free. Behold, my cheek is flushed with pleasure at the imagination of death; all that we love are dead. Come, give me your hand, one look of joyous sympathy and we will ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... abiding place". I have lived to see bright hopes fade—high and noble aspirations fall to the ground, checked 23by the sordid policy of worldly men—and the proud hearts which gave them birth become gradually debased to the level of those around them, or break in the unequal struggle—and these things have pained me. I have beheld those dear to me stretched upon the bed of sickness, and taken from me by the icy hand of death; and have deemed, as the grave closed ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... that is current here, is either that of Portugal, consisting chiefly of thirty-six shillings pieces; or pieces both of gold and silver, which are struck at this place: The pieces of silver, which are very much debased, are called petacks, and are of different value, and easily distinguished by the number of rees that is marked on the outside. Here is also a copper coin, like that in Portugal, of five and ten ree pieces. A ree ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... Indians—dwelt upon the high claims of the Shawanoes to superiority over other tribes, and promised to all his followers, who would believe his doctrines and practice his precepts, the comforts and happiness which their forefathers enjoyed before they were debased by their connection with the whites. And finally proclaimed, with much solemnity, that he had received power from the Great Spirit, to cure all diseases, to confound his enemies, and stay the arm of death, in sickness, or on the ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... sense and experience, sir," returns Mr. Croker, severely; "look at the currency—debased until the dollar is merely a piece of paper. Look at prices—coffee, twenty dollars a pound, and sugar the same. Look at the army starving—the people losing heart—and strong, able-bodied men," adds Mr. Croker, looking at Colonel Desperade, "lurking about ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... ungratefully in deserting him? His own vessel filled to the brim with grief, had he not let the waters of its bitterness overflow into the heart of the soutar? The wail of that violin echoed now in Robert's heart, not for Flodden, not for himself, but for the debased nature that drew forth the plaint. Comrades in misery, why should they part? What right had he to forsake an old friend and benefactor because he himself was unhappy? He would go and see him the very next night. And he would make friends once more with the much 'suffering instrument' ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... go back to their play unknowing ever of what has been. But of the most blessed of all, when this now UnDead be made to rest as true dead, then the soul of the poor lady whom we love shall again be free. Instead of working wickedness by night and growing more debased in the assimilating of it by day, she shall take her place with the other Angels. So that, my friend, it will be a blessed hand for her that shall strike the blow that sets her free. To this I am willing, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... is born—fear of oneself, fear for oneself. Or else a false courage—who knows? Well, call it what you like; but tell me, how many of them would deliver themselves up deliberately to perdition (as he himself says in that book) rather than go on living, secretly debased in their own eyes? How many?... And please mark this—he was safe when he did it. It was just when he believed himself safe and more—infinitely more—when the possibility of being loved by that admirable girl first dawned upon him, that he discovered that his bitterest railings, the worst wickedness, ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... Huddersfield (Mr. Leatham) had used an argument which he (Colonel King-Harman) thought a most unworthy one, namely, that the franchise was not to be extended to women, because, unhappily, there are women of a degraded and debased class. Because there were 40,000 of them in this metropolis alone, the remaining women who were pure and virtuous were to be deprived of the power of voting. But would Mr. Leatham guarantee that the 2,000,000 men ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... curse of the young Republic—its direst, deadliest bane. For although his rule was not continuous, its evil effects were. Unfortunately, the demoralisation brought about by despotism extends beyond the reign or life of the despot; and Santa Anna had so debased the Mexican people, both socially and politically, as to render them unfitted for almost any form of constitutional government. They had become incapable of distinguishing between the friends of freedom and its foes; and in the intervals of Liberal administration, because the Millennium did not immediately ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... the New Zealanders place no value on the continence of their unmarried women, the arrival of Europeans among them does not injure their moral characters in this respect; but we doubt whether they ever debased themselves so much as to make a trade of their women, before we created new wants by shewing these iron tools, for the possession of which they do not hesitate to commit an action, that, in our eyes, deprives them of the very shadow of sensibility. It is unhappy enough, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... traditions of the feudal system; not only was he unjust and cruel towards the Templars in order to appropriate their riches; but he committed, over and over again, that kind of spoliation which imports most trouble into the general life of a people; he debased the coinage so often and to such an extent, that he was everywhere called "the base coiner." This was a financial process of which none of his predecessors, neither St. Louis nor Philip Augustus, had set him an example, though they had quite as many costly wars and expeditions ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... our great modern novelists, virtue is never debased, nor vice exalted; but there is a constant endeavour to impress upon the mind of the reader the true wisdom of the one, and the folly of the other; and where the author fails to create an interest in the fate of his hero or heroine, it is not because they are ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... his arrival, was so thunderstruck on hearing that Montezuma had so debased himself, to the Spaniards, as to depose his own nephew, whose only fault was patriotism, and who had been endeavoring to effect his rescue, that he was for a minute or two ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... me to write a tragedy on my own account; which, while following Shakespeare in his good points, should avoid his weaknesses, which should embody the best features of the nursery rhymes, and which should avoid like poison the shockingly debased style of Aeschylus. ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... the highest authorities on the committee, the man, in fact, from whom the inquiry derived its name, thus sums up some of its results: "However large a part in the production of prostitution must be allowed to the love of pleasure and of finery, to a dislike of work and to debased instincts, the cause which, according to the facts cited, appears everywhere as the most powerful and the most general, is the want of a home, the want of maternal care." Here are some of the facts on which M. Roussel bases his general statement. "At ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... having dealt in any thing disingenuous himself, was slow to credit duplicity in others, did not once suspect that the profligates had played him off this trick, rather to annoy the brother than himself. It was, after all, nothing but the discreditable triumph of cunning and debased minds, over the inexperience, or vanity, if you will, of one, who, whatever his foibles might be, would himself scorn to take an ungenerous advantage of confidence reposed in him in consequence of his good opinion and ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... poverty and want with their pay of but six pesos; for the country is so expensive and so needy that they can in no manner be fed or clothed as is fitting. This is necessary so that the spirit and honor of the soldiers may be kept constant, and so that they may not be debased and humbled to the low condition of becoming pages to women throughout the year. This fits the name of soldiers of your Majesty very ill, and many of them are now thus engaged. This is permitted to them and tolerated ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair
... forgetful of what is due to himself and to his country, is our only foe." An anonymous but well-known proclamation also declared: "Austria beheld—a sight that drew tears of blood from the heart of every true-born German—you, O nations of Germany! so deeply debased as to be compelled to submit to the legislation of the foreigner and to allow your sons, the youth of Germany, to be led to war against their still unsubdued brethren. The shameful subjection of millions of once free-born Germans will ere long be completed. Austria exhorts you to raise your ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... low and debased condition, and viewed under every disadvantages, I do not imagine that his vices would usually be found greater, or his passions more malignant than those of a very large proportion of men ordinarily denominated civilised. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... variation, with an insistence which became cruel, and then unbearable, it went on. Lee Randon, after an uneasiness which culminated in an exasperated wrath, found a degree of exactness in his description: it was, undoubtedly, the jungle, Africa, debased into a peculiarly harrowing travesty of later civilized emotions. Finally he lost the impression of a meaninglessness; it assumed a potency, a naked reality, more profound than anything in his previous knowledge. It was the voice ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... character, and if the bodies of Isaiah, and Paul, and John must be seraphic, to correspond with their experience and attainments, what must the bodies of the wicked be! They will have spent centuries in sinning, and suffering, debased in every part, the image of God supplanted by the image of him whose service they preferred to that of a holy God and Saviour. What a moment will that be, when the sinner's grave is opened by the last trumpet, and ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... Egyptians credit the goddess Isis with the discovery, the Greeks Minerva, the Chinese the Emperor Yao. It is related of Hercules, that, when in love with Omphale, he debased himself by taking the spindle and spinning a thread at her feet. This form of work was considered to belong only to women, and by spinning for her in this position he was thought to have greatly ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... last year," he says fiercely. "But nobody took no notice of that! Are they going to stop here all the blank morning for a blank tyke?" And for all his respectable appearance, his features become debased, and he emits a jet of disgusting profanity and brings most of the Trinity into the thunderous assertion that he has paid his fare. Then a man passes wheeling a muck-cart. And he stops and talks a long time ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... under such exceptional circumstances. But Mary could not pass the matter over so lightly. She could not wipe out from her memory that scene in the tent. She pressed her hand tightly over her eyes, and shuddered as she thought of Frank standing there, wild, coarse, debased, brutalised, a thing to make rude and vulgar merriment; while the man, the gentleman, and the Christian had been demonised out of that fair form by the drink. Oh, what bitter tears she shed that night as she lay awake, ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... sympathy of the tribunal, poured forth a vile flood of personal invective. Throughout his life he approved himself a mean-spirited and ignoble man, despised by those who used and rewarded his able and debased services. On this occasion he eagerly took advantage of the protection afforded by his position and by Dr. Franklin's age to use language which, under such circumstances, was as cowardly as it was false. Nothing, he said, "will acquit Dr. Franklin of the charge of obtaining [the letters] by fraudulent ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... of the wealthy were committed to trusted slaves, called pedagogues, who escorted them to school, instructed them in many things, and had a right to punish them for disobedience. This could not have been allowed by parents with such high ideals had the slaves been debased as ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... destructive intestine enemy of genius. Nor is it to be considered of small consequence what language, pure or corrupt, a people has, or what is their customary degree of propriety in speaking it.... For, let the words of a country be in part unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by wear and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare, but, by no light indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly-yawning race, with minds already long prepared for any amount of servility? On the other hand, we ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... of righteousness. He was a lightning moral calculator: to his luminous intelligence the statement of the problem carried the solution—he could not hesitate, he seldom erred. That upon his deeds and words was founded a religion which in a debased form persists and even spreads to this day is mere attestation of his marvelous gift: adoration is ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... human nature debased in the most vile manner, and seeing also that your country deeply suffered from the iniquitous custom of holding man in slavery, you have justly concluded "that at this particular crisis, when Europe and America appear ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... too, the image of Emily, which, amidst the dissipation of the city had been obscured, but never obliterated from his heart, revived with all the charms of innocence and beauty, to reproach him for having sacrificed his happiness and debased his talents by pursuits, which his nobler faculties would formerly have taught him to consider were as tasteless as they were degrading. But, though his passions had been seduced, his heart was not depraved, nor had ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... significant it seemed to me. He changed his workroom from the library, as we call it, to the sitting-room. He said all his characters became wrong and terrible in the library; they altered, so that he felt like writing tragedies—vile, debased tragedies, the tragedies of broken souls. But now he says the same of the smoking-room, and he's gone back to ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... God!" came from Pell, who had half risen. At that instant Pedro shot from his hip at the debased creature. The form stiffened and collapsed like a bag, ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... the flat rocks near the bank of the river, and close by the falls of Tumwater, the Indians were gathered to the number of several hundred, awaiting him,—some squatting, Indian fashion, on the ground, others standing upright, looking taller than human in the dusky light. Mingled with the debased tribes that made up the larger part of the gathering, Cecil saw here and there warriors of a bolder and superior race,—Yakimas and Klickitats, clad in skins or wrapped in blankets woven of the wool of ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... which every one except Bone Stillman and Henry Frazer had been assiduously training him all his life. They who know how naturally life runs on in any sphere will understand that Carl did not at the time feel that he was debased. He lived twenty-four hours a day and kept busy, with no more wonder at himself than is displayed by the professional burglar or the man who devotes all his youth to learning Greek or soldiering. Nevertheless, the work itself was so much less desirable than driving a ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... might well worship one another cut one another's throats, when Cruelty and Self-righteousness and Lying and Injustice and all the Powers of Destruction rule the human heart, the world is devastated, the fibre of the whole organism, of society grows flaccid, and all the ideals of civilisation are debased. If the world is not now sick of Hate we may be sure it never will be; so whatever may happen to the world let us remember that the individual is still left, to carry on the tasks of Love, to do good even ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... misleading name, for it cannot by any means claim to set before us the text of Sun Tzu in its pristine purity. Chi T'ien-pao was a careless compiler, and appears to have been content to reproduce the somewhat debased version current in his day, without troubling to collate it with the earliest editions then available. Fortunately, two versions of Sun Tzu, even older than the newly discovered work, were still extant, one buried in the T'UNG TIEN, ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... addressed to the Son 'from the foundation of the world' (c. v). Generally I think it may be said that the doctrine of the Incarnation, the typology, and the use of the Old Testament prophecies, approximate, most distinctly to the Johannean type, though under the latter heads there is of course much debased exaggeration. The soteriology we might be perhaps tempted to connect rather on the one hand with the Epistle to the Hebrews, and on the other with those of St. Paul. There may be something of an echo of the fourth Gospel in the allusion—to the unbelief and carnalised religion ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... the reservoir, and by the steps which gave entrance to it on the east. The reservoir above this in the Barberini gardens is of a date a half century later.[94] It is of the same brick work as the great fountain which stands, now debased to a grist mill, across the Via degli Arconi about half way between S. Lucia and Porta del Sole. The upper reservoir undoubtedly supplied this fountain, and other public buildings in the forum below. There is another large brick ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... suggest themselves:—such as, an amelioration of their condition and a diffusion of knowledge among them. But, as nothing can be effectual while the number of slaves may be daily increased by importation, and while the minds of our citizens are debased, and their hearts hardened, by contemplating these people only through the medium of avarice or prejudice (a necessary consequence of the traffic in man) we confine the prayer of this petition to ...
— Minutes of the Proceedings of the Second Convention of Delegates from the Abolition Societies Established in Different Parts of the United States • Zachariah Poulson
... being, what sort of a race is this, so despised and ill-treated, so poor and ignorant, that in a brief time on our shores can build the finest temple to God which this country has yet seen? What will the people, to whom we have described this race as sunk in papistical stupidity, debased, unenterprising, think, when they gaze on this ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... the only companions of Oberlus were the crawling tortoises; and he seemed more than degraded to their level, having no desires for a time beyond theirs, unless it were for the stupor brought on by drunkenness. But sufficiently debased as he appeared, there yet lurked in him, only awaiting occasion for discovery, a still further proneness. Indeed, the sole superiority of Oberlus over the tortoises was his possession of a larger capacity of degradation; and along with that, something like an intelligent ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... pitiable indeed. All others would be equally miserable. The human race would multiply, until the fruits of the soil would be insufficient for its support; and earth would be filled with degenerate beings, starved in body and debased in mind—all clinging to an existence utterly without joy. Life is dark to me, but not to others: these are matters beyond you, and it is presumptuous in one of your condition to attempt to ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... others. The terrace was not a terrace of cottages, but of houses rated at from twenty-six to thirty-six pounds a year; beyond the means of artisans and petty insurance agents and rent-collectors. And further, it was well built, generously built; and its architecture, though debased, showed some faint traces of Georgian amenity. It was admittedly the best row of houses in that newly settled quarter of the town. In coming to it out of Freehold Villas Mr. Skellorn obviously came to something superior, wider, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... on their instruction. Many have been baptized, after giving all the evidence of sincerity which could be expected, and at certain times the Lord's Supper has been dispensed. Among the lepers there have been persons of very debased character, but the conduct of most has been good, and, so far as we can judge, a number have become the true followers of the Saviour. If the Mission had done nothing more than sustain this Leper Asylum, ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... a more and more complete sway over the mind of his master and the affairs of the realm. The favourite had been guilty of all those extravagances which constitute the Nemesis of upstarts. He had trafficked in patronage and promotion, he had debased the currency, and he was supposed to influence the King to everything least honourable and advantageous to the country. Last injury of all, he had either asked from the King or accepted from him—at least, permitted himself to ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... a kingdom. The Repblican government discredited itself and became more and more debased until it fell into an abyss of hate. The ministers who led France were equally cruel and inept. Napoleon was great, singular, and, besides that, extremely ambitious. Nothing of the kind exists here. I am not Napoleon, no I wish to be; neither do I want ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... they say about Grandmother?" he asked in a low, intimate voice. "Ah, c'est degoutant. No one believes it, and everybody is jeering at Tychkov for having debased himself to interrogate a drink-maddened old beggar-woman. I will not ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... a man to principles, which every day's experience was so fatally for himself contradicting. To see the human mind in one of the most enlightened nations of the world, and after a lapse of some thousand years, debased by such a fermentation of disgusting passions, of fear, cruelty, malice, revenge, ambition, madness, and folly as would have disgraced the most savage nation in the most barbarous age must have been such a tremendous shock to his ideas of the necessary and inevitable progress of the human mind ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... is not spoken of at all); and how the neighboring ravenous Powers, on-lookers hitherto, have opened their throats with one accord to swallow Prussia, thinking its downfall certain: "Poor mercenary Sweden, once so famous under its soldier Kings, now debased by a venal Senate;"—Sweden, "what say I? my own kindred [foolish Anspach and others], driven by perverse motives, join in the plot of horrors, and become satellites ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... ride into the camp flourishing at the end of their spears the dreadful trophies of their success. But I should not have described those scenes at all, were it not to afford you a true picture of savage life, not as it is painted by romance writers, but as it really is, debased, and wretched, and hopeless. We soon reached the camp and recommenced our return to the settlements as rapidly as we ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... on his advice, and appointed Gylippus to the Sicilian command. Gylippus was a man who, to the national bravery and military skill of a Spartan, united political sagacity that was worthy of his great fellow-countryman Brasidas; but his merits were debased by mean and sordid vice; and his is one of the cases in which history has been austerely just, and where little or no fame has been accorded to the successful but venal soldier. But for the purpose for which he ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... hardened by contact with this debased age, was also stirred to his depths; his face was flushed, and he seized me ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... was usually austere and always unafraid, was feeling a strange terror of the debased and slouching ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... They feel themselves in a state of thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on their mercy. The desire of having some one below them descends to those who are the very lowest of all,—and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose footman's instep he measures, is able to keep ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... almost frantic with rage, exclaiming: "Oh, Ambulinia! Ambulinia!! undutiful, ungrateful daughter! What does this mean? Why does this letter bear such heart-rending intelligence? Will you quit a father's house with this debased wretch, without a place to lay his distracted head; going up and down the country, with every novel object that many chance to wander through this region. He is a pretty man to make love known to his superiors, and you, Ambulinia, have done but little credit to ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... this country should not be debased. It is vital that we should keep high the standard of well-being among our wage-workers, and therefore we should not admit masses of men whose standards of living and whose personal customs and habits are such that they tend to lower the level of the American ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... observations in the Transvaal, Orange Free State and the Province of the Cape of Good Hope. He used other facts collected by Attorney Msimang of Johannesburg. Organizing these facts, Mr. Plaatje shows how the native has been maltreated and debased so as to be considered a pariah of society in his own native land. In the struggle between right and wrong, the latter has triumphed, culminating in such an evil as the Native Land Act, an effort at class legislation, the worst sort ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... survey of the rich contents of Darwin's book. I may be permitted to conclude by quoting the magnificent final words of The Descent of Man: "We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man, with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... degraded, it is not necessary that he should have given himself up to low and mean practices. It is quite enough that he is living for purposes lower than those for which God intended him. He may be a man of unblemished reputation, and yet debased in the truest meaning of the word. We were sent into this world to love God and to love man; to do good—to fill up life with deeds of generosity and usefulness. And he that refuses to work out that high destiny is a degraded man. He may turn away revolted from everything ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... malignity, who would rather injure you than not, who, perhaps, have an old, by you long-forgotten, grudge, and become your apparent friends to pay you back—these are few. Human nature, with all its depravity, is seldom so completely debased. But there are many who are only selfishly your friends. When you most need their friendship, where is it? When some great calamity sweeps over you, and, bowed and weakened, you would lean on this friendship, though it were but a 'broken reed,' you stretch ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... is possible for men to receive? What! the head of our most noble Aga of the Janissaries to be placed upon the most ignoble part of a Jew! what are we come to? We alone are not insulted; the whole of Islam is insulted, degraded, debased! No: this is unheard-of insolence, a stain never to be wiped off, without the extermination of the whole race! And what dog has done this deed? How did the head get there? Is it that dog of a Vizier's work, or has the Reis Effendi and those traitors of Frank ambassadors been at work? ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... looked up as he reached the end of the ultimatum, in which one nation, for its pride, demanded that another should hand over its honour, debased ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... spoil a dialect as long as the speakers are men of varied idea and good intelligence; but the moment the life is contracted by mining, millwork, or any oppressive and monotonous labor, the accents and phrases become debased. It is part of the popular folly of the day to find pleasure in trying to write and spell these abortive, crippled, and more or less brutal forms ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... so debased, but that its good points still excel its bad! Just as you see but one real miser in a fixed proportion of men; so, are there, I believe, quite as small a representative set of absolutely heartless persons. I am certain that the "good Samaritans" outvie the "Levites" ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... people, whose manners I cannot but regard as the worst in the whole world. The open street for ever presents the spectator with the most loathsome scenes of beastliness, cruelty, and all manner of vice. In a word, if you would take a view of man in his debased state, go neither to the savages nor the Hottentots; they are decent, cleanly, and elegant, compared with the ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... one or two of these the disreputable letter awaiting her attention worried her. It was something importunate, disagreeable, like a debased face thrust in at her door. With a sigh she turned to it, to get it out of the way before she opened Terry's letter, clean and dandyish, written on the delicate ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... its representation was only a means to an end, it was a means which required to be mastered; and as such became in itself a sort of secondary aim; but the followers of Giotto merely utilized his observations—of Nature, and in so doing gradually conventionalized and debased these second-hand observations. Giotto's forms are wilfully incomplete, because they aim at mere suggestion, but they are not conventional: they are diagrams, not symbols, and thence it is that Giotto seems nearer ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Tower locked and barred, who perchance would have been wiser to follow Basil. A debased and fraudulent lawyer of no character at all, this man lived upon such fees as he could wring without authority from those who came to lay their suits before the Papal Court, playing upon their hopes and fears and pretending to a power which he did not possess. Had they done so, they ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... it there, it must be indigenous to the spot? Look at that girl, and tell me if there is one trace in feature, in form, in manner, or in speech, of plebeian blood, and then will you tell me that she is in any way connected with people such as these? They are not merely plebeian, they are low, debased, criminal. They are criminals of the deepest dye, not only capable of any villainy, but already guilty, and to such a degree that their guilt has made ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... this gruesome service, but it was generally accompanied by ribald jokes, at the expense of the poor "Johnny" they were "planting." This was not the fruit of debased natures or degenerate hearts on the part of the boys, who well knew it might be their turn next, under the fortunes of war, to be buried in like manner, but it was recklessness and thoughtlessness, born of the hardening ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... as purely utilitarian, lacking in cultural significance. Rational knowledge is supposed to be something which touches reality in ultimate, intellectual fashion; to be pursued for its own sake and properly to terminate in purely theoretical insight, not debased by application in behavior. Socially, the distinction corresponds to that of the intelligence used by the working classes and that used by a learned class remote from concern with the means of living. Philosophically, the difference turns about the ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... his ministers; nor could his ministers absolutely rely on the support of that parliamentary majority whose attachment had enabled them to confront enemies abroad and to crush traitors at home, to restore a debased currency, and to fix public credit on ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... she loved blood. But did she ever regard the cry of the sheep? The monster Intemperance has been glutted with blood; and never spared, and had no pity. He still howls for blood; and many plead that he may have some. But depend upon it, their pleas are only those of debased appetite and avarice. Rally the community against them. Enlighten the public mind. Collect facts. Let your towns and villages be searched with candles. Go into the dens. Bring the monster and his suffering victims to light, and the public indignation will ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... wrought, when she to Cyrus said, 'Blood didst thou thirst for, and with blood I glut thee!' Displayed how routed fled the Assyrians After that Holofernes had been slain, And likewise the remainder of that slaughter. I saw there Troy in ashes and in caverns; O Ilion! thee, how abject and debased, Displayed the image that is there discerned! Who e'er of pencil master was or stile, That could portray the shades and traits which there Would cause each subtile genius to admire? Dead seemed the dead, the living seemed alive; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... iniquitous, felonious, atrocious, outrageous, shameless; worthless, mean, despicable, contemptible, abject, scurvy, sordid, debased, ignoble, miserable, wretched. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... impelled and constrained him in all his seeking of the lost. He had come to be the Saviour of all who would believe and follow him. Therefore he was interested in every merest fragment or shred of life. No human soul was so debased that he ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... with some other measures of relief. But he began to play the despot very soon. The Commons voted him the large subsidy of 20,000 l. He doubled the amount by his own mere motion. He established a bank, and by his own authority decreed a bank monopoly. He debased the coinage, and fixed the prices of merchandise by his own will. He appointed a provost and librarian in Trinity College without the consent of the senate, and attempted to force fellows and scholars on the university contrary ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... body, at once slim and full, was consciously seductive, and her face, slightly swollen and pasty in the shadows, bore the same, heedless unrestraint. Her dark, widely-opened eyes, an insignificant nose and shortly curved, scarlet lips, held almost the fixed, painted impudence of a cynically debased doll. She turned and surveyed Jasper Penny with a petulant, silent inquiry, and whatever gaiety was in progress abruptly terminated as he advanced into ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer |
