"Rottenness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... human struggle—yes. But if we bring to it the hope and courage of those who are assured of the nearby presence and encircling love of the great powers? I would bring to my mountain the weary spirits who are obscured in the fetid city where life decays into rottenness; and call thither those who are in doubt, the pitiful and trembling hearts who are skeptic of any hope, and place them where the dusky vapors of their thought might dissolve in the inner light, and ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... no cure for rottenness." He was so beside himself with pain that he forgot that she was a woman, ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... we must believe, can hardly be acquainted with those alleys and stairways, narrow, dark, and foul. The unpaved ways show gaping holes in which the greasy mud lies thick or mingles with the pools of standing water, fed from every house and fermenting with rottenness. ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... Revolution; both feared that England was drifting the way of France; each had a remedy, but opposed and violently maintained. The Tories put the blame of the Revolution on the compromises of Louis XVI, and accordingly they were hostile to any political change. The Whigs, on the other hand, saw the rottenness of England as a cause that would incite her to revolution also, and they advocated reform while yet there was time. The general fear of a revolution gave the government of England to the Tories, and kept them in power for several decades. And England ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... prices. Pluralities are as bad as crowded gravepits, and I don't see that there is a pin to choose between the church and the churchyard. Sanitary revolutionists and incendiaries accuse us of gorging rottenness, and battening on corruption. We don't do anything of the sort, that I see, to a greater extent than other professions, which are allowed to be highly respectable. Political, military, naval, university, and clerical parties, of great eminence, defend abuses ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... was so preponderant as to be perceived in the city; all the passages separating the passages of the urine, and excrements being corroded and destroyed. The whole mass of his body was turned unto universal rottenness; and, though living creatures, and boiled animals, were applied with the design of drawing out the vermin by the heat, by which a vast hive was opened, a second imposthume discovered a more prodigious swarm, as ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... quarter is given, and where the merits of the deserving rather than the lapses of the blameworthy are torn as the most toothsome morsel in a furious feast. The Bible says that envy is the rottenness of the bones, meaning that utter corruption which has finally reached the framework of the structure. Society as now organized is really making progress toward the extinction of this hideous blemish. When, as ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... every attempt to educe unselfishness from selfishness has failed. The moral man even in our day has rather a bad time of it; what chance would he have had of surviving to propagate his species in the supposed pre-moral states of human society? Who can possibly conceive mere rottenness being cured by progress in rottenness; or a man drinking himself into temperance? On the other hand, it is at least conceivable that in the wildest savage there is some little seed of a moral sense—weak, compared with the lowest springs of action, just ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... expended on the property of the road. The stock was sold at from 20 to 40 cents on the dollar, and the proceeds disappeared in the hands of its managers. To what extent this freebootery was carried will probably never be known. An idea of the rottenness of the Erie management may be had from the fact that the courts at one time ordered its president to restore to the company $9,000,000 of diverted securities, which order was complied with. Vast private fortunes were amassed by nearly all the men who directed the affairs ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... "Good God! the rottenness of it, Dick!" he groaned. And then: "I've got to get out of this and begin all over again in some corner of the world where at least one man in ten hasn't forgotten the meaning of common honesty and decency and fair dealing. Heaven knows I'm no ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... even be concealed from others. The soul undergoing Degeneration, surely by some arrangement with Temptation planned in the uttermost hell, possesses the power of absolute secrecy. When all within is festering decay and rottenness, a Judas, without anomaly, may kiss his Lord. This invisible consumption, like its fell analogue in the natural world, may even keep its victim beautiful while slowly slaying it. When one examines the ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... 'Rome-bred law ... fiction' is a 'wart which here and there disfigures the face of justice. In English law fiction is a syphilis which runs into every vein and carries into every part of the system the principle of rottenness.'[425] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... for love, a symptom, a revelation of an unloving nature at bottom. It is the intermittent fever which bespeaks unintermittent disease within; the occasional bubble escaping to the surface which betrays some rottenness underneath; a sample of the most hidden products of the soul dropped involuntarily when off one's guard; in a word, the lightning form of a hundred hideous and un-Christian sins. A want of patience, a want of ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... American. There are strange dried roots, strange dried fish, strange dried land and marine plants, ducks and chickens, split, pressed thin and smoked; dried shellfish; cakes newly made, yellow, glutinous and fatty, stamped with tea-box characters; and great earthen jars filled with rottenness. I speak correctly if perhaps too forcibly, for when those imposing jars are opened to serve a customer with some manner of vegetable cut in long strips, the native-born American finds it expedient to hold his nose. American storekeepers in the mines deal largely ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... surface of professions and will be undazzled by the most stupendous miracles, and beneath the eloquent words of many a preacher and the wonderful works of many a so-called Christian philanthropist, will see the hidden rottenness that they never saw, and, tearing down the veil, will reveal men ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Crimean War, which had exposed the rottenness of the old order of things, a fresh current of air swept through the atmosphere of Russia, and the liberation of the peasantry and other great reforms were coming to fruition, the Jewish problem, too, was in line of being placed in the forefront of these reforms. For, after having ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... O'Conor spoke of his "austere integrity" in refusing to accept millions as a compromise.[1428] Moreover it was conceded that Barlow, with the possible exception of Tilden and O'Conor, knew more of the canal frauds than any one in the State. The list of suits brought by him showed the rottenness of the whole system of canal management, while a recent letter, denouncing a leader of the Ring, did not veil his hostility to its individual members.[1429] This attack, boldly directed against a prominent Republican, aroused the fierce opposition of the contract ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... overthrown by the Revolution, it seemed to be dead. But, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, behold it springing up again spontaneously, in one direct, new, strong and active jet and higher than the old one, free of the excrescences, rottenness and parasites which, under the ancient regime, disfigured and discolored it. No more compulsory vows, no "frocked" younger sons "to make an elder," no girls immured from infancy, kept in the convent throughout their youth, led on, urged, and then driven into a corner ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... that I have adduced to prove that the yellow fever is not an American, but an African disease, imported in slave-ships, and periodically renewed from those cargoes of human rottenness and putrefaction, I hope ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... strange animals about India, he has set down these remarkable words. "Among the rest," says he, "there is a serpent that wants teeth, and consequently cannot bite, but if its vomit (to which it is much addicted) happens to fall upon anything, a certain rottenness or corruption ensues. These serpents are generally found among the mountains where jewels grow, and they frequently emit a poisonous juice, whereof whoever drinks, that person's brain flies ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... at that time, I alienated the good will of a distant relative, and one day he east in my face my doubtful birth and shameful descent. I thought it all a slander and demanded satisfaction. The tomb which covered so much rottenness was again opened and to my consternation the whole truth came out to overwhelm me. To add to our sorrow, we had had for many years an old servant who had endured all my whims without ever leaving us, contenting himself merely with weeping and groaning ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Who hast died for us!' cried the priest, 'convince her of our nothingness! Tell her that we are but dust, rottenness, and damnation! Ah! suffer that I may hide my head in a hair-cloth and rest it against Thy feet and stay there, motionless, until I rot away in death. The earth will no longer exist for me. The sun will no longer shine. I shall see nothing more, feel nothing, hear nothing. Nought ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... and talked for a long time about the rottenness of the Cambridge bowling—which, by the way, I had never seen—and the runs Fred was sure to make in the 'Varsity match, until he tried very hard to stop me saying anything more about cricket, and Murray set me going on another subject when he remarked that it had not taken me long ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... reason of this is, because the stones there are pure, and not eaten up and decayed, like those here, by rottenness and saltness, which flow down hither together, and which produce deformity and disease in the stones and the earth, and in other things, even animals and plants. But that earth is adorned with all these, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... no excuse for encouraging the superstitious exaggeration of hopes about this particular measure, helping the cry to swallow it whole and to send up voting popinjays who are good for nothing but to carry it. You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... heard, and my belly trembled, My lips quivered at the voice; Rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in my place: That I should rest waiting for the day of trouble, When he that shall invade them in troops cometh up against the people. For though the fig tree shall not blossom, Neither shall fruit be in the vines; The labour of the olive shall ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... remorse. I was not going on as the Baileys thought I was going on. There were times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely. Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between twenty-three and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known to scarcely any one but myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of a collapse intensified. I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied five years before, that I was entangling myself in something that might smother all my uses in the world. Down there among those ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... which the soul abhorreth; for as the eye affecteth the heart, or soul (Lam 3:51) so the eye and ear, by hearing and beholding, doth ofttimes afflict the body. 'When I heard, my belly trembled—rottenness entered into my ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... sub-committee—in London! The story went on to relate how Medcroft, implacable leader of the opposition to the "grafters," suddenly had appeared before the committee with the most astounding figures and facts to support his charges of rottenness on the part of the "clique"; his unexpected descent upon the scene had thrown the opposing leaders into a panic; every one had been led to believe that he was sojourning in the east. As a matter of fact, it ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... better moments it inspired even himself with horror, he bethought him of Oliver's unvarying, unwavering affection; he pondered all the loving care and kindness that through these years past Oliver had ever showered upon him; and he cursed the rottenness of a mind that could even admit such thoughts as those which he had been entertaining. So wrought upon was he by the welter of his emotions, by that fierce strife between his conscience and his egotism, that he came abruptly to his feet, a ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... And I think we shall be preserved from the Pope by the rottenness of the Church; from the drapeau rouge by the indignation and horror of all honest men. You see how the Provisional Government has resisted the insane attempt of the fanatics to make the red flag accepted ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... read it was pure "blague." I knew that they had the telegraph in their hands and made my arrangements accordingly. But the secret power of the organization surprised me, though I knew very well the political influence at election time which the rottenness of our ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... myself and him safe in the streets of Toronto. I was not the least frightened for myself, but it was trying to see him always looking over, and about to lean against old crazy wooden balustrades that William said must have given way from sheer rottenness with any weight upon them. This is such a night, not a single cloud; the clearest possible sky and the moon shining brightly, as it did over the two Falls the first night we were here. Papa calls me every minute—"Oh ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... way, now you speak of it. They ain't no games or tricks here, no cheatin' an' no lyin'. Them trees just stand up natural an' strong an' clean like young boys their first time in the ring before they've learned its rottenness an' how to double-cross an' lay down to the bettin' odds an' the fight-fans. Yep; it is brave. Say, Saxon, you see things, don't you?" His pause was almost wistful, and he looked at her and studied her with a caressing softness that ran through her in resurgent thrills. "D'ye know, I'd ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... "Soothfast" meat. And there be foods which bring Aches and unrests, and burning blood, and grief, Being too biting, heating, salt, and sharp, And therefore craved by too strong appetite. And there is foul food—kept from over-night,[FN36] Savourless, filthy, which the foul will eat, A feast of rottenness, meet for the lips Of such ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... true and fair and blessed in our fellow-beings. Such a choice will commend itself to the best spirits; for, while it is the spontaneous movement of a mean nature to contract and swoop, a generous nature prefers to expand and soar. The vulture pounces on rottenness with a cry of obscene satisfaction; but the lark seeks the sunrise with a song of worship. So let the ingenuous mind, studying human character and life, bestow a shunning glance at evil, a fixed gaze on good. So, should any one wish to write a history of the enmities of women, for which, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... them into money, and the solemn faces they will break up into ear-rings for wanton women! And they shall get themselves a new name, but the angel of ignominy, with the fiery brand, shall know them, and their heart shall be the tomb of dead desires that turn their life to rottenness." ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... rather material views of morals, but they are frank. There may be mental prigs among them, but there are no moral prigs. In both England and America we suffer from a certain morbid ethical daintiness. There is a ripeness of moral fastidiousness that is often difficult to distinguish from rottenness. It is part of the feminism of America, born of our prosperity, for not one of these fastidious moralists is not a rich man, and Germany ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... as if petrified three yards away from the bed where Valerie lay dying, as she saw a priest from Saint-Thomas d'Aquin standing by her friend's pillow, and a sister of charity in attendance. Religion could find a soul to save in a mass of rottenness which, of the five senses of man, had now only that of sight. The sister of charity who alone had been found to nurse Valerie stood apart. Thus the Catholic religion, that divine institution, always actuated by the spirit of self-sacrifice, ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... my survey of this great subject may be, I trust I have said enough to expose the harmonious rottenness of the monetary policy of the Government, and by this I mean a rottenness so complete that it is impossible to find a single redeeming feature in the measure that has been adopted. It is rotten economically, it is rotten financially, and it is, if possible, still more rotten ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... which his own and his rams' achievements brought into other hands he would probably have died a millionaire. But for all his toil and skill he received no more than a shepherd's wage. There were not wanting persons, of course, who regarded his condition as a crucial instance of the exceeding rottenness of our present industrial system. There was a great lady from London, named Lady Lottie Passingham, who resolved to take up the case. Lady Lottie belonged to the class who look upon the universe as a leaky old kettle and themselves as tinkers appointed by Providence to mend the ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... back, quite as irritably. "And he's dead right, too. You take it from me, that the fewer people in this country you trust, the better for you. Why, the rottenness of this country is a proverb. 'It's a place where the birds have no song, where the flowers have no odor, where the women are without virtue, and the men without honor.' That's what a gringo said of Honduras ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... consequences of criminality, on the verge of detection! And so we might go on and on. All these were apparently sincere searchers after truth, and passed in the world for respectable persons. Externally, they were fairly eligible as candidates for Chelaship, as appearances go; but "within all was rottenness and dead men's bones." The world's varnish was so thick as to hide the absence of the true gold underneath; and the "resolvent" doing its work, the candidate proved in each instance but a gilded figure of moral dross, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... enveloped in her days! But for a storm at sea, we might have been subjected to Spain. By what a system of falsehood and petty tyrannies were we governed through the reigns of James I. and Charles I.! What periods of rottenness and danger there have been since! How little glorious was the reign of Charles II.! how full of danger that of William! how mean those of the four Georges, with the dishonesty of ministers such as Walpole and Newcastle! And to-day, are there not many who are telling us that ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... there is need," said Cronaca, gravely. "We have had the best testimony to his words since the last Quaresima; for even to the wicked wickedness has become a plague; and the ripeness of vice is turning to rottenness in the nostrils even of the vicious. There has not been a change since the Quaresima, either in Rome or at Florence, but has put a new seal on the Frate's words—that the harvest of sin is ripe, and that God will reap it ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... is much used in churches, but for the most part "Martha" is made of a series of jiggy choruses. Berlioz, who especially hated Flotow, declared that the "introduction of the Irish melody ('Last Rose of Summer') served to disinfect the rottenness of ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... and torpid formalism—that mockery of outward foliage—is to me nothing. 'Your new moons and Sabbaths—the calling of assemblies—I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting.' These are only as the whitewash of your sepulchres to hide the loathsomeness within—'the rottenness and dead men's bones!' If you had made no impious pretensions, I would not, peradventure, have dealt so sternly with you. If like the other trees you had confessed your nakedness, and stood with your leafless ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... How I do hate that word. If any word in the language reminds me of a whited sepulchre it is that;—all clean and polished outside with filth and rottenness within. Are your thoughts delicate? that's the thing. You are engaged to marry John Grey. That may be delicate enough if you love him truly, and feel yourself fitted to be his wife; but it's about the most indelicate thing you can do, if you love any one better than him. Delicacy with many women ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... penetrate into Borrow, the more we like him; not so with the blue-eyed Dean. Borrow's depths are dark and tortuous, but never miasmic; and as we grope our way through them, we may stumble upon treasures, but never upon rottenness. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... and reaction. It is a matter of profound regret that two infinitely more virile and progressive races, the German and the Jew, should be fighting their battles for them, and indeed bolstering up causes which would otherwise speedily collapse by reason of their own inward rottenness. It is the Triple Alliance which has made it possible for the iniquitous racial hegemony of the Magyars to survive in Hungary; it is the joint policy of Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin which has hampered the progress of the Balkan States, and above all the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... such a concurrence of misdemeanors, what is to be done? The example and the consequence so pernicious! which could not be, "if our great pastors but exercise the wisdom of common shepherds, by parting with one to stop the infection of the whole flock, when his rottenness grows notorious. Or if our clergy would but use the instinct of other creatures, and chastise the blown deer out of their herd, such mischiefs might easily be remedied. In this case it is that I think a clergyman is laid open to the pen of any one that knows ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... him on to his ruin. At the expiration of ten years, Venus had a head on her shoulders, and he had almost lost his own. There had been years of disease among the cattle, insects in the turnips, and rottenness in the heart of his mangels; his expenses had become enormous, the Inspector of Nuisances had complained of the state of the drains round and about his farm, his oxen had strayed, two bulls had got loose and had maimed several people for ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... there are fruits with tempting rinds 220 That are all dust and rottenness within. Would'st thou ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... for San Francisco—and through the open windows, hushed and far, came the brawl of the streets. The talk had led on from the Graft Prosecution and the latest signs that the town was to be run wide open, down through all the grotesque sordidness and rottenness of man-hate and man-meanness, until the name of O'Brien was mentioned—O'Brien, the promising young pugilist who had been killed in the prize-ring the night before. At once the air had seemed to freshen. O'Brien had been a clean-living ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... hatest, nay, I have uttered acclamations with those who have loved thy KA. Let not my body turn into worms, but deliver me [from them] even as thou didst deliver thyself. I beseech thee, let me not fall into rottenness as thou dost let every god, and every goddess, and every animal, and every reptile to see corruption when the soul hath gone forth from them after their death. For when the soul departeth, a man seeth corruption, and the bones ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... the definite unsoundness of animal and vegetable substances, and any condition of the intellect. Timber is said to be unsound, and although we may be little acquainted with the cause by which it is produced, yet its actual state of rottenness is evident:—a horse is unsound, in consequence of some morbid affection that can be pointed out by the veterinarian:—a dentist can detect an unsound tooth:—a physician, from certain well marked ...
— A Letter to the Right Honorable the Lord Chancellor, on the Nature and Interpretation of Unsoundness of Mind, and Imbecility of Intellect • John Haslam
... was accused of niggardliness; when he made war on abuses he was called a barbarian; when he frankly confessed, in his appeal to the German Diets, that perchance the whole evil infecting the church came from the rottenness of the Curia, he was assailed as putting arms into the arsenal of the enemy. His greatest crime in the eyes of his court was that he was a foreigner, an austere, phlegmatic man, who could understand neither their ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... these Messianic descriptions is the expulsion of the Assyrians; but most emphasis is laid on the restoration of the inner bases of the state, the rottenness of which has brought about and rendered inevitable the present crisis. The collapse of the government, the paralysis fallen on the law, the spoliation of the weak by the strong, these are the evils that call for redress. "How is the honourable city become a harlot; ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... inquisitor; but in the act of setting foot at its entrance, the trap opened, and the world of the living heard no more of him. I examined some of the earth found in the pit below this trap; it was a compost of common earth, rottenness, ashes, and human hair, fetid to the smell, and horrible to the sight and to the thought ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... the end. As the arts decay through neglect, as the body, once healthy and alert, will grow weak through sloth and indolence, even so the powers of the spirit, temperance, self-control, and courage, if we grow slack in training, fall back once more to rottenness and death. [76] We must watch ourselves; we must not surrender to the sweetness of the day. It is a great work, methinks, to found an empire, but a far greater to keep it safe. To seize it may be the fruit of daring and daring only, but ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... power, my popularity, my consequence, nay, my character, are all risked; but I have done right, and therefore in the end it must turn out to have been wise. If this fail me, the pillared firmament is rottenness, and ...
— 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
... unhappy church of Christ! fast rushing round and round the fatal circle of absorbing ruin!... Daily does every one see that things are going wrong. With sighs does every true heart confess that rottenness is somewhere; but, ah! it is hopeless of reform. We all pass on, and the tide rolls down to night. The waves of coming conflict which is to convulse Christendom to her center are beginning to be ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... as gradually as possible, so as to neither interfere with the plans of the war now waging, nor to stir up needless political strife. We simply asked for some firmly-based official recognition of the rottenness of the 'slavery plank in the Southern platform,' and trusted that the utmost caution and deliberation would be observed in eventually forwarding emancipation. We were literally alone, as a publication, in these views, and were misrepresented both by the enemies ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... evidence that the germ of an envenomed and bloody democracy had been elicited in the very perfection of his stern and heartless tyranny. The unblushing excesses of the Regent and of Louis the Fifteenth, who gratuitously withdrew the last vail that concealed the utter rottenness of all that claimed popular obedience, under the names of religion, and authority, sufficed, though scarcely needed, to complete the discredit of the French monarchy; and, ascending his throne, surrounded by a dissolute clergy, an overbearing aristocracy, and a discontented ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... trench rather too suddenly, she wheeled round for the advantage of coming down upon it more determinately, rode resolutely at it, and gained the opposite bank. The hind feet of her horse were sinking back from the rottenness of the ground; but the strong supporting bridle-hand of Kate carried him forward; and in ten minutes more they would be in Cuzco. This being seen by the vicious Alcalde, who had built great hopes on the trench, he unslung his carbine, pulled up, and ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... a fillip to their jaded senses. 'Twas here that I made my start, Labret—here that I delivered my first speech as though for a joke; here it was that I first began to hate the dogs who sat amongst us with all their fine clothes and perfumes and rottenness ... and I am very glad indeed, my good Labret, that you, too, should see just for once the place from which your great friend raised himself. (In another tone.) I say, Prosper, supposing the business doesn't ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... I put myself in peril of falling into the gorge and cavern of this river. I, Lord, have come to take with my hands, blindness to mine eyes, rottenness and shriveling to my members, poverty and affliction to my body; for my meanness and rudeness this it is that I merit to receive. Live and rule for ever in all quietness and tranquillity, O thou that art ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... of the little country town lost in the immensity of the Texas prairie, Brann saw the world, and saw it with the blazing eye of righteous wrath. He saw the sins of high society in New York and London, the rottenness of autocracy in Russia, the world war boiling beneath the surface in the cauldron of Europe's misery. But he saw also, with mingled humor and anger, the trivial passing events of his own state and nation and the local affairs of his home town. Of all these things, great and small, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... eyes and yours. I am not pleading innocence. I am pleading unqualified guilt. Understand that clearly. I knew what I was doing when I did it. I have known ever since. I've never been blind to the rottenness of the thing. At first I did it for the money because I was afraid of poverty and honest work. And then I went on with it for Tony, because I loved her and wouldn't give her up to you. Now I've given up the last ditch. The name is yours and ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... means of sexual pollutions, which is impossible to describe without shuddering), together with spinal diseases and many disorders of the most distressing and disgusting character, {208} filling the bones with rottenness, and eating away the flesh by gangrenous ulcers, until the patient dies, a horrible mass of putridity ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... why) a serene contempt for ordinary mortals. He is always growing black with fury, and bullying weak men. On such occasions, his lips may be observed to be twisted into an evil sneer. He is a seducer and liar: he has ruined various women, and had special facilities for becoming acquainted with the rottenness of society: and occasionally he expresses, in language of the most profane, not to say blasphemous character, a momentary regret for having done so much harm,—such as the Devil might sentimentally have expressed, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... brewer learnt from long experience the conditions, not the reasons, of success. But he had to contend, and has still to contend, against unexplained perplexities. Over and over again his care has been rendered nugatory; his beer has fallen into acidity or rottenness, and disastrous losses have been sustained, of which he has been unable to assign the cause. It is the hidden enemies against which the physician and the brewer have hitherto contended, that recent researches ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... which separates the cells from the surrounding fence, is one seething, living mass of stinking putrefaction. Here in the tropics, under a brazen sun, all unclean things turn to putrid filthy life within the hour; and in a native gaol the atmosphere is heavy with the fumes and rottenness of the offal of years, and the reeking pungency of offal that is new. No ventilation can penetrate into the fetid airless cells, nor could the veriest hurricane purge the odours bred by ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... principle of the heart; what palsies so entirely every moral faculty of the soul; what so soon and so awfully makes man dead while he liveth; what spreads through the whole frame-work of society such rottenness, or so effectually opens the door to all those powers of darkness by which the pillars of public order are crumbled and the restraints of religion are mocked; what so universally excludes from the death-bed of a sinner the consolations of the Gospel, or writes upon his grave such ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... either. I want to see whether there's good sense enough in this State to take the thing out of the hands of the fanatics so that we can get results that decent men can subscribe to—results instead of the ruin and rottenness we're ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... Two very large apricot-trees promised a shade for the tent, but the sakyeeah, or water-wheel, together with two powerful English lifting-pumps that were connected with a large reservoir and aqueduct of masonry, were in the last stage of rust and rottenness. I was not prepossessed with the aspect of the spot, as it reminded me strongly of an English property in charge of the Court of Chancery. The baggage animals with the tents arrived while our people were employed in clearing a space beneath the trees from the innumerable stones, ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... in an office, or a soldier in a barrack, to stand alone, and be Christlike; but only on condition that he yields to no temptation to drop his conduct to the level around him, and is never guilty of compromise. Once yield, and all is over. Flowers grow on a dunghill, and the very reeking rottenness may make the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... then there is every reason to suppose that the existing folly will follow in the footsteps of the past, and after displaying a given amount of cunning and credulity in those deceiving and deceived, will drop from the public view like a fruit which has ripened into spontaneous rottenness, and be succeeded by the fresh bloom of some other delusion required by the same excitable portion ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... God,* [[* Rom. 1, 18-32.]] and the course which the Greek nation and the Roman would have run from their pristine vigor exhibited in the days of Thermopylae and Cannae down to the state of marasmus senilis pictured by Juvenal, a state of rottenness which even the transfusion of German blood into the putrid veins of that degenerate and decaying race could not remedy, is a fearful corroboration of the ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... humorous, satirical sketches he swept away the metaphysical dreaming and foolish romantic affectation then in fashion, and taught men to see their country as it was, in all its hideous ugliness. With his help the young generation perceived the rottenness of the Administration, and the meanness, stupidity, dishonesty, and worthlessness of the landed proprietors, whom he made the special butt of his ridicule. The recognition of defects produced a desire for reform. From laughing at the proprietors there was but one step to despising them, and when ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace |
