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More "Degeneracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lament the degeneracy of the age in this regard, I cannot refuse to succumb to its influence. Looking out through my study-window, I see Mr. Biglow at a distance busy in gathering his Baldwins, of which, to judge by the number of barrels lying about under the trees, his crop is more abundant ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... renewed retreat to the quiet centre of the spirit, gives that assurance of a Reality, a calmer and more valid life attainable by us, which supports the stress and pain of self-simplification and permits us to hope on, even in the teeth of the world's cruelty, indifference, degeneracy; whilst diligent character-building alone, with its perpetual untiring efforts at self-adjustment, its bracing, purging discipline, checks the human tendency to relapse into and react to the obvious, and makes possible the further development of the ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... and clearness of perception should be on the side of the 'common-sense' party. In one of his letters to Mr. James Burness, Montrose, wherein he describes the strange doings of a strange sect called the Buchanites,—surely in itself a convincing proof of the degeneracy of the times in the matter of religion,—we have an interesting reflection which gives us some insight into the poet's mind. 'This, my dear Sir, is one of the many instances of the folly in leaving the guidance of sound reason ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... rule without exception, and is a reassuring reflection in view of the talk about the degeneracy of the House of Commons, and the decadence of its standard of manner. It would not be difficult to show that the House at present in Session will, from the point of view of manners, favourably compare with any that have ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in Puente Genil. Like page 279 Bartrina, Reina is an imitator of Nunez de Arce, in that he sings of the degeneracy of mankind. He undertook, with but little success, to revive the eleven-syllable romance of the neo-classic Spanish ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... uninhabited room becomes full of foul air soon, and needs to have the windows opened often. She would keep sick people, or well, forever in the sunlight if possible, for sunlight is the greatest possible purifier of the atmosphere. "In the unsunned sides of narrow streets, there is degeneracy and weakliness of the human race,—mind and body equally degenerating." Of the ruin wrought by bad air, she says: "Oh, the crowded national school, where so many children's epidemics have their origin, what a tale its air-test would tell! We should have parents saying, and saying ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... and noise and a brass band, for all the world like an excursion to Coney Island, and though most people, except the grateful natives, were obediently believing with Ruskin that it was the symbol of the degeneracy of Venice and would have thought themselves disgraced forever if they were seen on it. But the Lagoon was as beautiful from the noisy, fussy little steamboat as from a gondola, the sails of the fishing boats touching it ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... grieve to say that my intimacy with Aunt Helen was strained. Many were the tears she shed over my degeneracy, and no words of mine could make her see other than a foolish waste of golden opportunities in the course I was pursuing. This disturbed me greatly, for my attachment to her was very strong, and I knew she would have cut off her right hand to serve me. Our interviews ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... defective hearing, and 30 per cent, from starvation. The physical deterioration of the recruits who offer themselves for the army is a subject of increasing concern. There are grounds for at least suspecting a growing degeneracy of the population of the United Kingdom, particularly in ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... punishment, also, is visibly from the physician, who illustrates man's individual way of dealing with sin in another; but it is not the minister's suffering under the hand of revenge working subtly in secret that arrests our attention; it is the physician's own degeneracy into a devil of hate through enjoyment of the sight and presence of this punishment, that stamps him into the reader's mind as a type of the failure of such a revenge. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord" ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... Virtues. But my Friend, I fear the Time will come, when a Bribe shall remove the most excellent Man from Office for the Purpose of making Room for the worst. It will be called an Error in Judgment. The Bribe will be concealed. It may however be vehemently suspected & who, in Times of great Degeneracy will venture to search out and detect the corrupt Practices of great Men? Unless a sufficient Check is provided and clearly ascertained for every Power given, will not the Constitution and the Liberties of the Citizens for want of ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... spirits leaning close together, in their turn question who Virgil and Dante may be? When they hear mention of Rome and Florence, they hotly inveigh against the degeneracy of dwellers on the banks ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... the rearing of children is an accident rather than a preconceived reality. Such marriages are unholy and destructive, and unless your people respond to a Spiritual awakening such as God's workers are now trying to inaugurate on your Earth the growing degeneracy will be augmented rather than diminished and the extinction of the ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... influence over his countrymen. Prophets, lawgivers, and sages have formed the character of other nations; it was reserved to a poet to form that of the Greeks. This is a feature in their character which was not wholly erased even in the period of their degeneracy. When lawgivers and sages appeared in Greece, the work of the poet had already been accomplished; and they paid homage to his superior genius. He held up before his nation the mirror in which they were ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... where an everlasting summer and fertile land yield a harvest of fruits and grain all the year round where it is not even necessary "to tickle the ground with a hoe to make it laugh with a harvest." But thinking over the cause of the degeneracy of the Spaniards and Indians, I am led to believe that in climes where man has to battle with nature for his food, not to receive it from her hands as a gift; where he is a worker, and not an idler; where hard winters kill off the weak and ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... lives, and deserves not to be involved in my infamy; If you grant my request, you shall be informed of my family name. A Villain made himself Master of my affections, and to follow him I quitted my Father's House. Yet though my passions overpowered my virtue, I sank not into that degeneracy of vice, but too commonly the lot of Women who make the first false step. I loved my Seducer; dearly loved him! I was true to his Bed; this Baby, and the Youth who warned you, my Lord Baron, of your Lady's danger, are the pledges ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... this principle there is but a step to another: All ornament should be modest and moderate. It must not obtrude itself, and a great profusion and ostentation in its application is always a sign of degeneracy and bad taste. Of course some objects, from their nature, position, and use, will admit of greater and more elaborate ornament ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... year has been on the potato, and the chief problem has been on the determination of the cause of degeneracy. Incidentally, many varieties have been tested, and the exchange of seed with the Grand Rapids, Crookston and Duluth stations has been started. If possible, the effect of varying climatic and soil conditions on the ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... ruler at his call. Many were the lamentations which he uttered over the degeneracy of his times; frequent were the confessions which he made of his own shortcomings. It seems strange that it never came distinctly before him, that there is a power of evil in the prince and the peasant, which no efforts of their own and no instructions of sages are effectual to subdue. The ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... the Second Isthmian Ode, we find an elaborate justification of his practice of praising for pay,—a practice, he admits, unknown to primitive poets, but rendered inevitable, in his time, by the poverty of the craft, and the degeneracy of the many, with whom, in the language of the Spartan sage, "money made the man." With this Pindaric precedent, therefore, for selling Pindaric verses, it is no wonder, if the children of the Muse, in an age still more degenerate than that of their great original, found ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... their daughters, and the ceaseless murmurs of their wives, while they in their turn unite in complaining of parental parsimony and meanness. Social intercourse I have long since given up, for I am tired of tedious narratives of the delinquencies of servants and the degeneracy of the times. I prefer large parties, where, although you know the smile hides the peevish temper, the aching heart, the jealous fear, and the wounded pride; yet it is such a great satisfaction to know there is a truce to complaints, that I prefer its many falsehoods ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... aware that the age is not what we all wish. But I am sure that the only means of checking its precipitate degeneracy is heartily to concur with whatever is the best in our time, and to have some more correct standard of judging what that best is than the transient and uncertain favor of a court. If once we are able to find, and can prevail on ourselves to strengthen an union of such men, whatever ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... question whether you yourself suspect all you possess. Your Bas Bleu is in a style very, different from any of your other productions that I have seen; and this letter, which shows your intuition Into the degeneracy of our language, has a vein of humour and satire that could not be calculated from your Bas Bleu, in which good nature and good-humour had made a great deal of learning wear all the ease of familiarity. I did wish you to write another Percy, but I beg now that you will first produce a specimen of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Peveril, "why will you distress yourself with fixing your eye on deficiencies which arise rather from a change of times and manners, than any degeneracy of my noble friend? Let him be once engaged in his duty, whether in peace or war, and let me pay the penalty if he acquits not himself becoming ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... but I attributed that to the degeneracy of the times, and of Cornish people in particular. The fact was, they understood that text far better than I did, and knew that "the Church of the first-born" was something more spiritual than I had ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... matter of fact, nothing could be more slothful or slow, more given up to a life of ease and degeneracy, than the "reef-building polypifer"—to give him his scientific name. He is the hobo of the animal world, but, unlike the hobo, he does not even tramp for a living. He exists as a sluggish and gelatinous worm; he attracts to himself calcareous elements from the water to make himself a house—mark ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... phenomenon may be observed. As each lower status of mythology is discovered it is assumed to be the first in origin, the primordial mythology, and all lower but imperfectly understood mythologies are interpreted as degradations, from this assumed original belief; thus polytheism was interpreted as a degeneracy from monotheism; nature worship, from psychotheism; zooelotry, from ancestor worship; and, in order, monotheism has been held to be the original mythology, then polytheism, then physitheism or nature worship, then ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... enacted and enforced by our New England fathers more than two hundred years ago, which history informs us were attended with the most beneficial results.[76] Although their descendants of the present generation should blush for their degeneracy, still we should be encouraged from an increasing disposition of late to return to these salutary restraints and needful checks upon ignorance and crime. Said the Honorable Josiah Quincy, Jr., late mayor of the city ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... the great money hunt. It was this: A certain charitable lady gave some years of her life to the study of those conditions in which, as I have said, the criminally inactive, the hopelessly useless, were produced by authorized routine, at a ruinous cost in money and degeneracy, and to the great ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... that this degeneracy of the feet goes with a decline in the brain, whether as cause or effect I will not pretend to know. These hoofed beasts have shallow natures and live shallow lives. They eat what is spread by Nature before their noses, have no homes, and do nothing but feed and fight with each other. The elephant ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... facile writers of those endless newspaper articles on the degeneracy of modern women really wish to make good their case, they had better abandon their foolish complaints as to women's inability to manage the spinning-wheel or preserve pickles, and other tasks which ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... Cave; he has maintained that the Church of Christ, with respect to life and conduct, had begun to fall into decay immediately after the ascension of our Saviour, and still more after the death of the Apostles, and that this degeneracy had enormously increased since the age of Constantine ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... "But I see their degeneracy. Once you could believe nearly all they said; now he is a fool who believes a tenth part of it. There is the New York 'Scandalmonger,' and the Philadelphia 'Prestidigitateur,' and the Boston 'Prolific,' which do nothing but hoodwink and confound ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... never have a decent social life. Indeed the whole attraction of our present arrangements lies in the fact that they do relieve a handful of us from this fear; but as the relief is effected stupidly and wickedly by making the favored handful parasitic on the rest, they are smitten with the degeneracy which seems to be the inevitable biological penalty of complete parasitism, and corrupt culture and statecraft instead of contributing to them, their excessive leisure being as mischievous as the excessive ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... perishes except actions and the consequences that ensue. To orthodox India its tenets were as heretical as those of Christianity were to the Jews. Nonetheless the doctrine became popular. But doctrines once popularized lose their nobility. The degeneracy of Buddhism is due ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... sagacity, which in many other respects were calculated to build up the very highest civilization, and which, at the same time, failed to foresee that this oppression of woman must result in the inevitable degeneracy of succeeding generations of men, must ever remain ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... two years might see him—almost anywhere. He was likely to ride far and to ride fast. To the Federalists his progress from the tobacco-fields to the Elysian Heights of office was but another burning sign of the degeneracy of the times and the tendencies of Jefferson. On the other hand, the Republicans quoted the Rights of Man and the Declaration of Independence, and made the name of Lewis Rand as symbolic as a liberty pole. He was bon enfant, bon Republicain. Virginia, like Cornelia, numbered ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... tyrannical prince in time of peace, an incompetent general in war; nay, he would have equalled his predecessors in that art, had not his degeneracy in other ways likewise detracted from his merit in this respect. He first began the war against the Volsci, which was to last two hundred years after his time, and took Suessa Pometia from them by storm; and when by the sale of the spoils he had realized forty talents ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... generous, romantic, disinterested chivalry of the old heroic times, entirely different from the sordid, calculating, and selfish character, which the practice of entertaining mercenary troops had introduced into most parts of Europe, and of which degeneracy Scotland, which furnished soldiers of fortune for the service of almost every nation, had been contaminated with a more than usual share. Montrose, whose native spirit was congenial, although experience had taught him how to avail himself of the motives ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... morality, new wisdom, predicate of the Future by the Past? In ancient States, the mass were slaves; civilization and freedom rested with oligarchies; in Athens twenty thousand citizens, four hundred thousand slaves! How easy decline, degeneracy, overthrow in such States,—a handful of soldiers and philosophers without a People! Now we have no longer barriers to the circulation of the blood of States. The absence of slavery, the existence of the Press; the healthful ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... irritable, high-strung, and anaemic—a typical child of the gutter, with unbeautiful twisted features, small-eyed, with face and mouth perpetually and feverishly hungry, brutish in a cat-like way, stamped to the core with degeneracy. ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... poets in their fables, most of which, however extravagant they may seem, had their origin in truth, speak the same language. Some of these represent the first condition of man by the figure of the golden, and his subsequent degeneracy and subjection to suffering by that of the silver, and afterwards of the iron age. Others tell us that the first female was made of clay; that she was called Pandora, because every necessary gift, qualification, or endowment, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... butterflies, moths or humming birds about others, each visitor choosing the restaurant most to his liking? With what infinite pains the wants of each guest are catered to! How relentlessly are pilferers punished! The endless devices of the more ambitious flowers to save their species from degeneracy by close inbreeding through fertilization with their own pollen, alone prove the operation of Mind through them. How plants travel, how they send seeds abroad in the world to found new colonies, might be studied ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... the American spirit. It is only natural for the sons and grandsons of the men who settled this country to take an interest in wholesome and vigorous sports; in fact it would be a sad commentary on the degeneracy of the modern generation if such an expression of their inheritance were not evident. But a distinctively American attitude towards sport is also manifested in the intense personal and university rivalries developed, the very rock upon which the modern system of inter-collegiate ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... supply of new-laid eggs and a magnificent round of beef; against which Mr. Escot immediately pointed all the artillery of his eloquence, declaring the use of animal food, conjointly with that of fire, to be one of the principal causes of the present degeneracy of mankind. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... descendants of Cain, from whom sprung a race of lawless men, so that the earth was filled with violence. The material civilization which the descendants of Cain introduced did not preserve them from moral degeneracy. So great was the increasing wickedness, with the growth of the race, that "it repented the Lord that he had made man," and he resolved to destroy the whole race, with the exception of one religious family, and change the whole surface of the earth by a mighty flood, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... plays—thesis plays as they nearly all are in one way or another—seldom attack these evils directly. Caciquismo is an issue only in Mariucha and Alma y vida, and in them occupies no more than a niche in the background. Sloth and degeneracy are a more frequent butt, and Voluntad, Mariucha, La de San Quintn, and, in less degree, La loca de la casa, hold up to scorn the indolent members of the bourgeoisie or aristocracy, and spur them into action. From this motive, perhaps, Galds ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... by age or solitude, their malignity is generally exerted in a rigorous and spiteful superintendance of domestic trifles. Eriphile has employed her eloquence for twenty years upon the degeneracy of servants, the nastiness of her house, the ruin of her furniture, the difficulty of preserving tapestry from the moths, and the carelessness of the sluts whom she employs in brushing it. It is her business every ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... priest. To us, in an age of science, it has become difficult to imagine Christianity without the attribute of development and the faculty of improving society as well as souls. But the idea was acquired slowly. Under the burden of sin, men accustomed themselves to the consciousness of degeneracy; each generation confessed that they were unworthy children of their parents, and awaited with impatience the approaching end. From Lucretius and Seneca to Pascal and Leibniz we encounter a few dispersed and unsupported passages, suggesting advance towards perfection, and the flame ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... corrupt that you cannot conceive of an honest friendship, even between near relations. You fill me with repulsion—I measured the depth of your degeneracy at Pisa. That is why I left you. I wanted to breathe in an uninfected atmosphere. My cousin is a person of remarkable intellectual powers, of chivalrous ideals, and of superior character. He has had great troubles. He is far from well. I am ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... endemic disease among mountainous people who drink largely of lime water, and is characterized by a condition of physical, physiologic, and mental degeneracy and nondevelopment, and possibly goiter. The subjects of this disease seldom reach five feet in height, and usually not more than four. The word cretin is derived from the Latin creatura. They are found all over the world. In Switzerland it is estimated that in ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... who, in somewhat a later period, and in the court of a Syrian queen, preserved the spirit of ancient Athens, observes and laments this degeneracy of his contemporaries, which debased their sentiments, enervated their courage, and depressed their talents. "In the same manner," says he, "as some children always remain pygmies, whose infant limbs have been too closely ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... with concern and apprehension, that pockets are gradually falling into disuse. To use the flippant idiom of the day, they are going out! This is an alarming, as well as a lamentable fact; and one, too, strikingly illustrative of the degeneracy of modern fashions. Whether we ascribe the change to a contemptuous neglect of ancestral institutions, or to an increasing difficulty in furnishing the indispensable attributes of the pocket, it is alike indicative of a crisis; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... Lombroso in two notable particulars: He had no quarrel with the world, and he did not wax rich. "One thing thou lackest, O Walt Whitman!" we might have said to the poet; "you are not a financier." He died poor. But this is no proof of degeneracy, save on 'Change. When the children of Count Tolstoy endeavored to have him adjudged insane, the Court denied the application and voiced the wisest decision that ever came out of Russia: A man who gives away his money is not necessarily more foolish ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... We might have a picture of a cow, with an American tax-collector at the horns, a foreign-born assessor at the heels, forcibly selling the birthright of an American citizen, while Julia and Abby Smith, in the background, with veiled faces, weep over the degeneracy of Republican leadership. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... act as a country justice of peace, a man who has scarce ever travelled beyond the excursion of a fox-chase, whose conversation never rambles farther than his stable, his kennel, and the barnyard; who rejects decorum as degeneracy, mistakes rusticity for independence, ascertains his courage by leaping over gates and ditches, and founds his triumph on feats of drinking; who holds his estate by a factious tenure, professes himself the blind ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... gold-mines of Peru; the legions of Alva were only to be disarmed by intercepting the gold ships on their passage; and, inspired by an enthusiasm like that which four centuries before had precipitated the chivalry of Europe upon the East, the same spirit which in its present degeneracy covers our bays and rivers with pleasure yachts, then fitted out armed privateers, to sweep the Atlantic, and plunder and destroy Spanish ships wherever they ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... theatrical performances, the essential demands of the stage, the character of the plays, and the constitution of human nature, make it impossible that the theater should exist, save under a law of degeneracy. Its trend is downward; its centuries of history tell just this one story. The actual stage of to-day..is a moral abomination. In Chicago, at least, it is trampling on the Sabbath with defiant scoff. It is defiling our youth. It is making ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... N. deterioration, debasement; wane, ebb; recession &c. 287; retrogradation &c. 283[obs3]; decrease &c. 36. degeneracy, degeneration, degenerateness; degradation; depravation, depravement; devolution; depravity &c. 945; demoralization, retrogression; masochism. impairment, inquination|, injury, damage, loss, detriment, delaceration|, outrage, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... have said, the question does not impress me as one demanding my particular attention. I also like the woman who does not smoke. I have met in my time some very charming women who do not smoke. It may be a sign of degeneracy, but I am prepared to abdicate my position of woman's god, leaving her free to lead ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... this, no State will ever get rid of the criminal problem unless its population is composed of healthy and vigorous citizens. Very often crime is but the offspring of degeneracy and disease. A diseased and degenerate population, no matter how favourably circumstanced in other respects, will always produce a plentiful crop of criminals. Stunted and decrepit faculties, whether physical or mental, either vitiate the character, or unfit the combatant for the battle ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... the misshapen bodies, by marks of degeneracy, recognizable to your practised eyes everywhere on the streets, by the agony of the mother who bore you, and later wept over you, I conjure you men to live up to your high and holy privilege, and tell all men that they can be clean, if they will. This in memory ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... Ritters, and least of all by their young Hochmeister, was, That the Teutsch Ritters had well deserved that terrible down-come at Tannenberg, that ignominious dismissal out of West-Preussen with kicks. Their insolence, luxury, degeneracy had gone to great lengths. Nor did that humiliation mend them at all; the reverse rather. It was deeply hidden from the young Hochmeister as from them, That probably they were now at length got to the end of their capability: and ready to be withdrawn from the scene, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... strange people who seem to think that you can consecrate and purify any campaign for ever by repeating the names of the abstract virtues that its better advocates had in mind. These people will say "So far from aiming at slavery, the Eugenists are seeking true liberty; liberty from disease and degeneracy, etc." Or they will say "We can assure Mr. Chesterton that the Eugenists have no intention of segregating the harmless; justice and mercy are the very motto of——" etc. To this kind of thing perhaps the shortest answer ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... degeneracy of the moderns, as if men now-a-days were in every respect inferior to their 99ancestors; but I maintain, and challenge contradiction, that there are many stout rubicund gentlemen in this metropolis that might be backed for eating or drinking with any Bacchanalian ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... each of his hollow cheeks. His hands were tremulous and his voice deep and husky. After a few personal inquiries the old man broke out into a most extraordinary and characteristic harangue on the wretched degeneracy of these evil days. The prophet Jeremiah was cheerfulness itself in comparison with him.... Most of his extraordinary harangue was like an eruption of Vesuvius, but the laugh he occasionally gave showed that he was talking about as much for his ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... from establishing social conditions suitable for their own best development and that of their children but has thrown over the home the dark shadow of commercialized prostitution with its cloud of evil thought, physical degeneracy and defrauded childhood. ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... some years afterwards, in the same spirit of emigration, and thirsting, perhaps, to avenge their injured ancestors, burst into the provinces of France, which the degeneracy of Charlemagne's posterity, and the dissensions which prevailed there, rendered an affair of no great difficulty. Louis le Debonnaire had taken every means of keeping on good terms with them; annually persuading some to become Christians, and then sending them home so ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... price in narrower sympathies, a narrower brain, and a narrower heart. The eternal spirit of Progress which works throughout the universe never fails to punish the deserter, and the most common punishment is atrophy. Not to submit to the process of evolution is to fall down the long slope of degeneracy. ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... idea of a law of degeneracy, of a "fatal drift towards the worse," is as obsolete as astrology or the belief in witchcraft. The human race has become hopeful, sanguine—SEELEY, Rede Lecture, 1887. Fortnightly Review, July ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... of Yeu. The indignant letters of Windham to Pitt in 1796-8 show that, after the Yeu fiasco and the beginning of the peace negotiations with France, his advice was slighted. His moanings to Mrs. Crewe over the degeneracy of the age also tell their tale. In October 1796 he merely "drags on" at the War Office until he sees what ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... a lodgment in his soul. It would be well if our moralists could realise that the chief causes of weakness in the presence of sensual temptation are, on the one hand, boredom and ennui, and on the other hand flabbiness and degeneracy of spiritual fibre, and that the remedy for both these defects is to give the young the type of education which will foster rather ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... recent times. They are characterised by the rapidity of their early conquests; by the immense extent of the dominions comprised in them; by the establishment of a satrap or pacha system of governing the provinces; by an invariable and speedy degeneracy in the princes of the royal house, the effeminate nurslings of the seraglio succeeding to the warrior-sovereigns reared in the camp; and by the internal anarchy and insurrections, which indicate and accelerate the decline and fall of those unwieldy and ill-organized ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... old course of training, has a right to complain of the degeneracy which he sees in the broken-hearted drudges around him, or, having any feeling, will hesitate in adopting a more humane course, if one be offered? Such a course is submitted to English readers for the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... my God that this degeneracy was transient, that he deigned once more to raise me aloft. I thought upon what I had done as a sacrifice to duty, and WAS CALM. My wife was dead; but I reflected, that though this source of human consolation was closed, yet others were still open. ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... England, and ten years later, in seventeen hundred and ninety-one, under the inspiration of Bishop White, the pioneer First Day school in America was opened in Philadelphia. The good Bishop was disturbed mentally by the religious and moral degeneracy of the poor children in his diocese, and annoyed during church services by their clamor outside the churches—a noise often sufficient to drown the prayers of his flock and the sermons of his clergy. To occupy these restless children for a part of ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... not one of those who believe in the degeneracy of the race, and I look forward to the future with hope rather than with dismay. I believe upon the whole the world improves. It is useless to be always looking back to be a laudator temporis acti se puero is placed by the wise and genial Horace to the discredit and ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... ordered otherwise, and doubtless wisely. The church was allowed a hundred and fifty more years to fill full the measure of her offences, that she might fall only when time had laid bare the root of her degeneracy, and that faith and manners might ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... spendthrifts, but never as young and accomplished a dissembler.— Nay, man, never bend your angry brows on me. I speak in bitterness of heart, from what I remember of your worthy father; and if his son hears of his degeneracy from no one else, he shall hear it from ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... real one; peopled by strange folk quite un-English in their ideas and ways, and very hard to understand and live with. In vain did Lionel protest and explain; his remonstrances were treated as proofs of the degeneracy and blindness induced by life in "The States," and to all his appeals she opposed that calm, obstinate disbelief which is the weapon of a limited intellect and experience, and is harder to deal with than ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... Bernard, "belongs to the old school of politeness, of which Sir Charles Grandison is the model. Modern degeneracy might strive in vain ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... machinery, cannot be understood except in connection with the occasional attempts to end the discord between production and distribution by diminishing the former. It is impossible not to see that in this way morality also would be preserved from a degeneracy the real cause of which this sort of reformers certainly did not understand, but which hovered before their mind's eye as an indistinct presentiment. And now, having noticed seriatim the three ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... the sight of these things, that I entertained no notions of any danger to myself from it for a long while: all my apprehensions were buried in the thoughts of such a pitch of inhuman, hellish brutality, and the horror of the degeneracy of human nature, which, though I had heard of it often, yet I never had so near a view of before; in short, I turned away my face from the horrid spectacle; my stomach grew sick, and I was just at the point of fainting, when nature discharged the disorder from ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... duties on spirituous liquors, and licenses for retailing these liquors; and imposed others at an easier rate. When those severe duties, amounting almost to a prohibition, were imposed, the populace of London were sunk into the most brutal degeneracy, by drinking to excess the pernicious spirit called gin, which was sold so cheap that the lowest class of the people could afford to indulge themselves in one continued state of intoxication, to the destruction of all morals, industry, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... permitting the, adolescent to sleep away from home is exceedingly dangerous. Many a youth may trace the beginning of his degeneracy to the downward, push received when he slept away from home. Care must be exercised also as to the kind of group he associates with; it is too much to expect a youth to be better than the gang with whom he consorts. During the most critical part of this critical, epoch neither youth nor maiden ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... convincing eugenic evidence that has been discovered in the human race. Doubtless it will long be used as a basis for attempted biological control of the propagation of the unfit. Many similar cases of hereditary degeneracy are ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... bestow a pension of two or three hundred a-year on his widow; to which the next Barnacle in power had added certain shady and sedate apartments in the Palaces at Hampton Court, where the old lady still lived, deploring the degeneracy of the times in company with several other old ladies of both sexes. Her son, Mr Henry Gowan, inheriting from his father, the Commissioner, that very questionable help in life, a very small independence, had been difficult ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... son, more than delicate from his birth, was very evidently the child of a man whose constitution had early been exhausted by the excesses in which rich men indulge, who then marry at the first stage of premature old age, and thus bring degeneracy into the highest circles of society. During the years of the emigration Madame de la Baudraye, a girl of no fortune, chosen for her noble birth, had patiently reared this sallow, sickly boy, for whom she had the devoted love mothers feel for such changeling creatures. Her death—she was a Casteran ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... well-informed man of thirty; the same thoughts and feelings being clothed in 2the semi-poetic prose of a fashionable novel-writer. Deeply grieved, therefore, am I at being forced both to set at nought so laudable an established precedent, and to expose my own degeneracy. But the truth must be told at all hazards. The only feeling I experienced, beyond a vague sense of loneliness and desolation, was one of great personal discomfort. It rained hard, so that a small stream of water, which descended from the ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... of his age and standing, has a great idea of the degeneracy of the times. He seldom expresses any political opinions, but we managed to ascertain, just before the passing of the Reform Bill, that Nicholas was a thorough Reformer. What was our astonishment to discover shortly after the meeting of the first reformed Parliament, that he was ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... successful enough to get into the "press," seeks to lay up a treasure of a million dollars for his old age, as if a million dollars could keep such a man out of the poor-house. Thoreau might observe that this one good example of Christian degeneracy undoes all the acts of regeneracy of a thousand humble five-hundred-dollar country parsons; that it out-influences the "unconscious influence" of a dozen Dr. Bushnells if there be that many; that the repentance of this man who did not "fall from grace" because he never ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... course of the commission's exhaustive investigation there was found no evidence that any progressive deterioration was going on in any function of the body except the teeth. "There are happily no grounds for associating dental degeneracy with progressive physical deterioration." The increase in optical defects is attributed not to the deterioration of the eye, but to greater knowledge, more treatment, and better understanding of the connection ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... criminal conversation with the wife of my client, is, or very lately was, a preacher of morality; an expounder of that divine doctrine which inculcates the precept, 'Do unto others, as you would have others do unto you;' he is a gentleman, who, beholding with horror the degeneracy of the times, and believing, no doubt, it required some extraordinary exertions to recall us unto virtue, has voluntarily, for no idea of gain, or means of livelihood, publicly devoted his talents to the pulpit. Such conduct, if we had not other ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... constitutes an unpardonable offence. He always looks on the dark side of human character, so that a single foible or one glaring fault will eclipse a thousand real excellences. He is always complaining of the degeneracy of the times, and especially of the corruption of the church; for he can see nobody around him who is perfect, and therefore he comes to the conclusion that there is very little piety in the world; forgetting that, were he to find a church of immaculate purity, his own connection ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... off" the "Examiner," most of which I had never seen nor heard of before. I remember some time ago in one of the "Tatlers" to have read a letter,[4] wherein several reasons are assigned for the present corruption and degeneracy of our taste, but I think the writer has omitted the principal one, which I take to be the prejudice of parties. Neither can I excuse either side of this infirmity; I have heard the arrantest drivellers pro and con commended for their smartness even by men of tolerable judgment; and ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... agency, levied aids and benevolences upon the different travellers on the king's highway. A letter of the old lord, his father, which, by the by, is not the letter of an illiterate man, is still extant, in which he complains in very moving terms of his son's degeneracy and misconduct. The young scapegrace, wishing to make his father know from experience the inconvenience of being scantily supplied with money, enjoined his tenantry in Craven not to pay their rents, and beat one of them, Henry Popely, who ventured to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... of manners and customs. Those great and magnificent social necessities have been well represented; but we ought surely to renounce the noble title of historian if we are not impartial, if we do not here depict the present degeneracy of the race of nobles, although we have already done so elsewhere,—in the character of the Comte de Mortsauf (in "The Lily of the Valley"), in the "Duchesse de Langeais," and the very nobleness of the nobility ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... In this evil pre-eminence both of the universities and all the colleges appear to have been upon a level, though Lincoln College, Oxford, is mentioned as a bright exception in John Wesley's day to the prevalent degeneracy. The strange thing is that, with all their neglect of learning and morality, the colleges were not the resorts of jovial if unseemly boon companionship; they were collections of quarrelsome and spiteful litigants, who ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... Cases of Hereditary Degeneracy: Juke Family; Kallikak Family; New Zealand Cases cited; Sir Robert Stout's ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust. The elective mode of obtaining rulers is the characteristic policy of republican government. The means relied on in this form of government for preventing their degeneracy are numerous and various. The most effectual one, is such a limitation of the term of appointments as will maintain a proper responsibility to the people. Let me now ask what circumstance there is in the constitution of the House of Representatives that violates the principles of ...
— The Federalist Papers
... with double door-plates on their portals, looking out on streets and courts which to know is to be unknown, and where to exist is not to live, according to any true definition of living. Therefore complain I not of modern degeneracy, when, even from the open window of the small unlovely farm-house, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine flavors and the flat-patterned woman of broken-down countenance, issue the same familiar sounds. For who knows that Almira, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... proportion mulatto; its annual mortality in the registration area; its educational progress since emancipation, in so far as it can be measured by elementary schooling and by increasing literacy; its criminality, dependency, and physical and mental defectiveness—those characteristics of individual degeneracy which Negroes manifest in common with other racial classes in all civilized communities; finally, its economic progress, as indicated by increasing ownership of homes, by entrance into skilled trades ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... to his virtues so early as the year 1406 leaves a most important chasm in a young man's life, during which he might have fallen from his integrity, and have rapidly formed habits of the opposite vices. But through that period no expressions occur in history which even by implication involve any degeneracy, any change from good to bad. On the contrary, to his zeal and steadiness, and perseverance and integrity, such incidental testimony is borne from time to time as would of itself leave a very different ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... the spiritual influence is not exercised and man resigns himself to the uncontrolled influences which spring from his lower nature, he rapidly degenerates. Socially, this degeneracy is noticed by its process of gradually loosening, and finally severing the ties which bind man to his race. He becomes an unsocial being and ceases to contribute to the wealth, peace or establishment of society. His desire for society ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... historian; that no reader of sentiment and imagination can be entertained or interested by a detail of transactions such as these, which admit of no warmth, no colouring, no embellishment; a detail of which only serves to exhibit an inanimate picture of tasteless vice and mean degeneracy." On the contrary, and Smollett might have discovered it, if he had been in the humour—the subject is capable of inspiring as much interest as even a novelist can desire. Is there no warmth in the despair ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... once proudly traversed, the very streams themselves, which bore navies on their bosoms, shrunk into too shallow a channel for the meanest craft to navigate,—the modern Spaniard who surveys these vestiges of a giant race, the tokens of his nation's present degeneracy, must turn for relief to the prouder and earlier period of her history, when only such great works could have been achieved; and it is no wonder that he should be led, in his enthusiasm, to invest it with a romantic and exaggerated coloring. [86] Such a period in Spain cannot ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... has produced no notorious offenders against civil or military usage. He has arisen to the moral concept of high responsibility for the future of his race in the estimation of all mankind. There is no story of moral degeneracy which has yet come from abroad concerning him. Pitfall, temptation and opportunity for vice and crime have all been shunned in light of preparation for the higher service. The Negro has proven his power of moral restraint while guided ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... horizontal and having a profile which closely approaches a straight line, until it curves inward under the abacus (Fig. 51); in the post-classical period it is low and sometimes quite conical (Fig. 60). In general, the degeneracy of post-classical Greek architecture is in nothing more marked than in the loss of those subtle curves which characterize the best Greek work. Other differences must be learned ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... of degeneracy in the farmer's face Kenny barricaded the door with a loose plank from the upper step, made sure it would fall easily with a clatter, examined his revolver and had his sleep out, thanks to the fact that ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... achieve. Human beings, two living, healthy men, one white, one black, were the requirements. Impossible! The experiment could never be performed: its requirements were unattainable. O tempora! O mores! Alas, for the degeneracy of the age! In the days of the Roman emperors men were fed, literally fed, to wild beasts in the arena—Gauls, Scythians, Nubians, even Roman freedmen when barbarians were scarce. This to amuse the populace alone. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... work on the (horse) for the last week, while the (horse) aforesaid, knowing the purchase he had on his rider, would be a fool to give in. But these young Colonials had nothing in them; and Jack's spirit was moved within him by reason of their degeneracy. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... rule, to run the risk of developing this by too repeated unions. Stock-breeders find that the best specimens of the lower animals are produced by crossing nearly-related individuals a certain number of times; but that, carried beyond this, such unions lead to degeneracy and sterility. Such, also, has been the ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... as to Macaulay. We do not, in fact, look the question frankly in the face. When one assures us of the decline of poetry as a fact and as inevitable, we have a right to ask him two questions. One is: "What signs of weakening and degeneracy in poetic genius, or of failing interest in its creations, do you actually discover in the course of history?" the other: "From what arguments are we to conclude that the future must of necessity prove barren of poetry?" Is ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... alter—old forms change—and high-minded and good men cling to these as if they were the only things by which God could regenerate the world. Christianity appears to some men to be effete and worn out. Men who can look back upon the times of Venn, and Newton, and Scott—comparing the degeneracy of their descendants with the men of those days—lose heart, as if all things were going wrong. "Things are not," they say, "as they were in our younger days." No my Christian brethren, things are not as they then were; but the Christian cause lives on—not in the successors of such men as those; ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... variety of it in its single state were known to CLUSIUS, and similar varieties of the double kind are said to exist; it is of little moment whether they do or not, every variation in this plant from a bright scarlet is in every sense of the word a degeneracy. ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 8 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... whiteness of complexion. A subsequent descent of a new Aryan host upon the plains of northern India found the descendants of their predecessors of darker hue than themselves, which bespoke their race degeneracy; so they kept aloof from them. Later, however, they began to mingle with the former inhabitants, so that their descendants partly lost the ancestral complexion. A still later Aryan incursion declined to have intercourse with the descendants ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... to work. The boy's diseased mind nauseated him. His heart revolted with each fresh revelation of the terrible degeneracy that possessed ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... very odd prejudice against pie as an article of diet. It is common to hear every form of bodily degeneracy and infirmity attributed to this particular favorite food. I see no reason or sense in it. Mr. Emerson believed in pie, and was almost indignant when a fellow-traveller refused the slice he offered him. "Why, Mr.," said be, "what is pie ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... angels. Their answers will soon inform him, that the supposed perfection of man was not absolute, but respective; that he was perfect, in a sense consistent enough with subordination, perfect, not as compared with different beings, but with himself in his present degeneracy; not perfect, as an ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... Young Tiridates, the future hope of his country, was saved by the fidelity of a servant, and Armenia continued above twenty-seven years a reluctant province of the great monarchy of Persia. [134] Elated with this easy conquest, and presuming on the distresses or the degeneracy of the Romans, Sapor obliged the strong garrisons of Carrhae and Nisibis [1341] to surrender, and spread devastation and terror on either ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... destruction of the world.[50] The Works and Days of Hesiod show us that precisely the same succession of ages was held by the Greeks, but without their duration being calculated by years, and with the supposition of a new humanity being produced at the beginning of each; the gradual degeneracy, however, which marks this succession of ages is expressed by the metals after which they are named—gold, silver, brass, and iron. Our present humanity belongs to the age of iron, and is the worst of all, although it began ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... affrights him [87] not: capons and game, good wine and the dainties of the earth console him and cheer his heart. Then he prays to God and says 'I am poor and in misery.' Were God to answer him He would say, 'thou liest!'" To illustrate the degeneracy of the age, Peire relates a fable, perhaps the only instance of this literary form among the troubadours, upon the theme that if all the world were mad, the one sane man would be in a lunatic asylum: ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... and encourage her. Nowhere else is the condition of woman so deplorable; not so much because she is deprived of her liberty as because she is condemned to the most absolute ignorance. And in this ignorance lies one of the principal causes of Oriental degeneracy; for the young, being brought up in the polluted atmosphere of the harem, undergo a fatal enervation of body and soul, and imbibe the germs of the ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... the pitcher nearer him, clinking the ice invitingly, and directed his attention to our iris-bed as a more cheerful object of contemplation than the degeneracy of the inhabitants of Vermont. The flowers burned on their tall stalks like yellow tongues of flame. The strong, sword-like green leaves thrust themselves boldly up into the spring air like a challenge. The plants vibrated with ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... that I was on the point of cheating myself," he said, soberly. "That argues a shameful flabbiness of the moral fibre, doesn't it? A 'brace' game of solitaire! What a hideous picture of degeneracy!" ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... suppose that, by the three children, three different generations are designated, and the gradual degeneracy of the people, which sinks deeper and deeper. But this opinion must certainly be rejected. There is no gradation perceptible. On the contrary, the announcement of the total destruction of the kingdom of Israel is connected immediately with the name of the first child, ver. 4. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... game. I quote in this connection Mr. A. G. Mills, ex-President of the League, and the originator of the National Agreement: "It has been popular in days gone by to ascribe the decay and disrepute into which the game had fallen to degeneracy on the part of the players, and to blame them primarily for revolving and other misconduct. Nothing could be more unjust. I have been identified with the game more than twenty-five years—for several seasons as a player—and I know that, with rare exceptions, those faults ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... their mothers in the women's balcony; and here worship is still more loosely observed, as there is gossiping, chattering, and laughing, while, as always happens, the young quizz the old, and the latter censure the light-headedness of the girls and the general degeneracy of the age. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... with your philosophy." The consequence of this prevalent spirit of universal skepticism was a general laxity of morals. The Aleibiades, of the "Symposium," is the ideal representative of the young aristocracy of Athens. Such was the condition of society generally, and such the degeneracy of even the Government itself, that Plato impressively declares "that God alone could save the young men ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... gratification of the animal passions; and the rearing of children is an accident rather than a preconceived reality. Such marriages are unholy and destructive, and unless your people respond to a Spiritual awakening such as God's workers are now trying to inaugurate on your Earth the growing degeneracy will be augmented rather than diminished and the extinction of ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... Muse. In the Second Isthmian Ode, we find an elaborate justification of his practice of praising for pay,—a practice, he admits, unknown to primitive poets, but rendered inevitable, in his time, by the poverty of the craft, and the degeneracy of the many, with whom, in the language of the Spartan sage, "money made the man." With this Pindaric precedent, therefore, for selling Pindaric verses, it is no wonder, if the children of the Muse, in an age still more degenerate than that of their great original, found ample excuse for dealing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... in his wild and reckless course since he left his father's mansion. It was too painful to witness the degeneracy of our early favorite. But the whole history of the past was written on his haggard brow and pallid cheek. It need not be recorded here. He had thought himself a life-long alien from the home he had disgraced, for never could ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... familiar to Addison as to Macaulay. We do not, in fact, look the question frankly in the face. When one assures us of the decline of poetry as a fact and as inevitable, we have a right to ask him two questions. One is: "What signs of weakening and degeneracy in poetic genius, or of failing interest in its creations, do you actually discover in the course of history?" the other: "From what arguments are we to conclude that the future must of necessity ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... men of his age and standing, has a great idea of the degeneracy of the times. He seldom expresses any political opinions, but we managed to ascertain, just before the passing of the Reform Bill, that Nicholas was a thorough Reformer. What was our astonishment to discover shortly after the meeting of the first reformed ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... for his satire. He declared that these so-called developers came for pelf, not patriotism. "Why, these men," he said, "are like thieving elephants. They will uproot an oak or pick up a pin. They would steal anything from a button to an empire." On one occasion he was bewailing the degeneracy of the times, and he exclaimed: "I am sorry I have got so much sense. I see into the tricks of these public men too quickly. When God Almighty moves me from the earth, he will take away a heap of experience. I expect when a man gets to be seventy he ought to go, for ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... me, that when Paul said nothing stronger than heathen moralists had said about human wickedness, it was absurd to quote his words, any more than theirs, in proof of a Fall,—that is, of a permanent degeneracy induced by the first sin of the first man: and when I studied the 5th chapter of the Romans, I found it was death, not corruption, which Adam was said to have entailed. In short, I could scarcely find the modern doctrine of the "Fall" ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... of these people, men and women, were foreign in aspect—round, bushy heads with no backs to them were everywhere; muddy skins, unhealthy skins, loose mouths, shifty eyes!—everywhere around her Palla saw the stigma of degeneracy. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... of our race. The study of God's works is a truly noble one, and such the enlightened Incas considered it; and therefore it was the especial study of young chiefs in bygone days. But, alas! in these times of our degeneracy, in that, as in many other points, we are grievously deficient compared to ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the race and Greece its beautiful youth, Republican Rome represents its strong manhood—a soldier filled with the lust of war and the love of glory—and Imperial Rome its degeneracy: that soldier become conqueror, decked out in plundered finery and sunk in sensuality, tolerant of all who minister to his pleasures but terrible to all ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... overwhelmed him, that he for the first time realised his perilous condition. Ah! to die, amidst such pain, such physical degradation, what a revolting horror for that frivolous and egotistical man, that lover of beauty, joy, and light, who knew not how to suffer! In him ferocious fate chastised racial degeneracy with too heavy a hand. He became horrified with himself, seized with childish despair and terror, which lent him strength enough to sit up and gaze wildly about the room, in order to see if every one had not ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... sharply-pointed arches, clustered columns, which had its origin in the Middle Ages, and prevailed from the 12th to the 15th centuries, though the term Gothic was originally applied to it as indicating a barbarous degeneracy from ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... auld themsel's. There's a feow signs o' decrepitude, no to say degeneracy, amo' ye, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... take with a young man of good birth before exposing him to the scandalous manners of our age! These precautions are painful but necessary; negligence in this matter is the ruin of all our young men; degeneracy is the result of youthful excesses, and it is these excesses which make men what they are. Old and base in their vices, their hearts are shrivelled, because their worn-out bodies were corrupted at an early age; they have scarcely strength ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... needed. Brutes, beasts of the field? Not so: that were easy to achieve. Human beings, two living, healthy men, one white, one black, were the requirements. Impossible! The experiment could never be performed: its requirements were unattainable. O tempora! O mores! Alas, for the degeneracy of the age! In the days of the Roman emperors men were fed, literally fed, to wild beasts in the arena—Gauls, Scythians, Nubians, even Roman freedmen when barbarians were scarce. This to amuse the populace alone. Frightful waste of life! In India, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... work on the catatonic states in degenerates, describes this condition at length. Although recognizing a good many hysterical features in these patients, he prefers to place these catatonic conditions under the general group of the psychoses of degeneracy. He does not add anything worthy of note to what Raecke had to say concerning this mental disorder, but the differentiating points which he advances between it and the genuine catatonia are of interest and should ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... Spirit's work have been entertained by theologians in consequence of erroneous conceptions regarding the degeneracy of human nature. Augustine held that man can do nothing which will at all contribute to His spiritual recovery. He is like a lump of clay, or a statue without life or activity. In consequence of these views, ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... to be disarmed by intercepting the gold ships on their passage; and, inspired by an enthusiasm like that which four centuries before had precipitated the chivalry of Europe upon the East, the same spirit which in its present degeneracy covers our bays and rivers with pleasure yachts, then fitted out armed privateers, to sweep the Atlantic, and plunder and destroy Spanish ships ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... families will be extinct, and that the flood of immigration means a Niagara of muddy waters fouling the pure springs of American life. In his address in New Haven Professor Kellogg calls the roll of the signs of race degeneracy and tells us that this deterioration even indicates a trend toward ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... minute or two. My new acquaintance, Hawkins, and Martin both seemed to be pondering upon the degeneracy of Upper Crossleys, and I could mot help thinking that Hawkins took a secret delight in ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... that upon a throne. It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. You can say she drove out the English—saved France. But for what? The Bartholomew massacres. The ruin of the Palatinate by Louis XIV. The horrors of the French Revolution, ending with Napoleon and all the misery and degeneracy that he bequeathed to Europe. History might have worked itself out so much better if the poor child had left it alone and ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... mare, a gelding, a horse, a four-year-old, a weanling or a sucker. To refer to a trotter as a thoroughbred is to suffer social ostracism, and to obfuscate a side-wheeler with a single-footer is proof of degeneracy. This applies equally to the ethics of the ballroom or the livery-stable. In Kentucky they read Richard's famous lines thus: "A saddler! a saddler! my kingdom for a saddler!" So when I complimented General ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... of this great man, without a reflection on the degeneracy of those times, which suffered him to languish in obscurity; and though he had done more against the Puritan interest, by exposing it to ridicule, than thousands who were rioting at court with no pretensions to favour, yet he was ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... centre of the spirit, gives that assurance of a Reality, a calmer and more valid life attainable by us, which supports the stress and pain of self-simplification and permits us to hope on, even in the teeth of the world's cruelty, indifference, degeneracy; whilst diligent character-building alone, with its perpetual untiring efforts at self-adjustment, its bracing, purging discipline, checks the human tendency to relapse into and react to the obvious, and makes possible the further development ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... Chinese view, nothing of importance was achieved during this period in north China in the intellectual sphere; there was no culture in the north, only in the south. This is natural: for a Confucian this period, the fourth century, was one of degeneracy in north China, for no one came into prominence as a celebrated Confucian. Nothing else could be expected, for in the north the gentry, which had been the class that maintained Confucianism since the Han period, had largely been destroyed; from political ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... render a bright boy stupid. If he goes with Caesar at all, he must build an agger, fight battles, construct bridges, and approve or condemn Caesar's acts. But we doubt the moral value of Caesar's Gallic wars. By reading Plutarch we may see that the Latins and Greeks, before the days of their degeneracy, nourished their rising youth upon the traditions of their ancestry. The education produced a tough and sinewy brood of moral qualities. Their great men were great characters, largely because of the mother-milk of national tradition and ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... maintenance of Greenwich hospital. The house having taken cognizance of this affair, and made some new regulations in the prosecution of the African trade, presented a solemn address to the king, representing the general degeneracy and corruption of the age, and beseeching his majesty to command all his judges, justices, and magistrates, to put the laws in execution against profaneness and immorality. The king professed himself extremely well pleased with this remonstrance, promised to give immediate ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... client, even in the state of degeneracy which overtook it, is a phenomenon which I believe is well-nigh unique. It shows to what extent two classes felt the social necessity, the patriotic necessity of mutual support and of a recognition of ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... but one operation, certainly acquires the power to execute it better and more readily than another; but at the same time he becomes less capable of any other occupation, whether physical or moral; his other faculties become extinct, and there results a degeneracy in the individual man. That one has made only the eighteenth part of a pin is a sad account to give of one's self: but let no one imagine that it is the workingman who spends his life in handling a file or a hammer that ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... obviated but, as with most other hybrids between distinct species, the seedlings lacked sufficient uniformity to be of especial value. A few individuals turned out superior to the parent but on the whole degeneracy, from the nut-producers standpoint, appears among seedlings ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... period at Oxford had been rather a period of obscure conflict than of mere idleness and degeneracy, as it had seemed to be. But it might easily have ended in physical and moral ruin, and, as it was—thanks to Courtenay—Delafield went out to the business of life, a man singularly master of himself, determined to live his own ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... must find a pretext for arming itself; and what is the pretext? There was a time when men openly advocated war as a thing to be desired; commended it to each generation as a sort of tonic to tone up the moral system and prevent degeneracy, but ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... labor as in some measure responsible for the unattractiveness of the farmer's life, and affecting adversely the farming interest. These touch the matter at various points, and are charged with greater or less importance. We know of no one cause more responsible for whatever there may be of physical degeneracy among the farming population than the treatment of its child-bearing women; and this, after all, is but a result of entire devotion to the tyrannical idea of labor. If there be one office or character higher than all others, it is the office or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... recommended the Crown to bestow a pension of two or three hundred a-year on his widow; to which the next Barnacle in power had added certain shady and sedate apartments in the Palaces at Hampton Court, where the old lady still lived, deploring the degeneracy of the times in company with several other old ladies of both sexes. Her son, Mr Henry Gowan, inheriting from his father, the Commissioner, that very questionable help in life, a very small independence, had been difficult ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... which may be roughly identified with the reign of Charles II. After that, naval warfare was virtually suspended for fifteen years, and when resumed in the last decade of the century, the traces of incipient degeneracy can already be noted amid much brilliant performance. From that time completeness of military achievement became in men's minds less of an object than accurate observance of rule, and in practice the defensive ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... Dutch half-caste—has a wretched habitation, mostly made of attap. We sat there for some time. It looked most miserable, the few things about being empty bottles and meat-tins. A man would need many resources, great energy, and an earnest desire to do his duty, in order to save him from complete degeneracy. He has no better prospect from his elevation, than a nearly level plateau of mangrove swamps and jungle, with low hills in the distance, in which the rivers ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... somewhat a later period, and in the court of a Syrian queen, preserved the spirit of ancient Athens, observes and laments this degeneracy of his contemporaries, which debased their sentiments, enervated their courage, and depressed their talents. "In the same manner," says he, "as some children always remain pygmies, whose infant limbs have ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... commission's exhaustive investigation there was found no evidence that any progressive deterioration was going on in any function of the body except the teeth. "There are happily no grounds for associating dental degeneracy with progressive physical deterioration." The increase in optical defects is attributed not to the deterioration of the eye, but to greater knowledge, more treatment, and better understanding of the connection ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... without the inevitable consequences becoming plainly visible. But sooner or later, if the balance of trade in this human traffic be not adjusted, the raw material out of which urban society is made will be seriously deteriorated, and the symptoms of National degeneracy will be properly charged against those who neglected to foresee the evil and treat the cause. It is enough for my present purpose if it be admitted that the people of every state are largely bred in rural districts, and that the physical and moral well-being ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... altogether imaginary America, not at all like the real one; peopled by strange folk quite un-English in their ideas and ways, and very hard to understand and live with. In vain did Lionel protest and explain; his remonstrances were treated as proofs of the degeneracy and blindness induced by life in "The States," and to all his appeals she opposed that calm, obstinate disbelief which is the weapon of a limited intellect and experience, and is harder to deal with than the ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... better than all the chroniclers. Let him represent them in gala dress, riding their genets, in hunting-costume, an arquebuse in their hand, a greyhound at their feet, and we recognize in these wan figures of kings, queens, and infantas, with pale faces, red lips, and massive chins the degeneracy of Charles V. and the falling away of exhausted dynasties. Although a court-painter, he has not flattered his royal models. However, despite the brainlessness of the type, the quality of these high personages would ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... most excellent Man from Office for the Purpose of making Room for the worst. It will be called an Error in Judgment. The Bribe will be concealed. It may however be vehemently suspected & who, in Times of great Degeneracy will venture to search out and detect the corrupt Practices of great Men? Unless a sufficient Check is provided and clearly ascertained for every Power given, will not the Constitution and the Liberties of the Citizens for want of such ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... he was giving her his best. His voice was very quiet now, his excited gestures had ceased. "Try and think of it as something more real, more important and necessary than he was; or you and I. Something that is always struggling to be, to go on being. Something that degeneracy is always trying to keep under.... Power. A power in retreat, fighting to get back its ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... their tears and cease their cries; explain to them that here one man is as good as another, and they will find those who were rich on earth no better than themselves. As for your Spartans, you will not mind scolding them, from me, upon their present degeneracy? ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... peas were fired by his second son John, who had been delivering this invisible artillery all the evening from the other end of the identical pew in which the Rev. Dr. was seated. He groaned in the spirit, and muttered something to Mrs. Rev. Dr. A—— about the degeneracy of other people's children, which made that lady chuckle low, under cover of the night; for she knew that her second son John was the pea-shooter, and had made vain efforts to stop him, by pinching his leg, though the good matron ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... and so stronger than the Assyrians that the Medes were able to dispossess them of their sovereignty over western Asia. But in this, as in most other cases of conquest throughout the East, success was followed almost immediately by degeneracy. As captive Greece captured her fierce conqueror, so the subdued Assyrians began at once to corrupt their subduers. Without condescending to a close imitation of Assyrian manners and customs, the Medes proceeded directly after their conquest to relax the severity of their old habits and to indulge ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... the signs of the Lord's blessing. It is a fanaticism which puts forth no good fruit; instead of blessing, it has brought forth cursing; instead of love, hatred, instead of life, death—bitterness and sorrow, and pain; and infidelity and moral degeneracy follow its labours." There is no shirking of the question here. Slavery is proclaimed to be the GOD-appointed means for the regeneration of the African race, and those who seek to bring about the emancipation of the slaves are branded as apostles of infidelity. Upon these grounds, ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... appearance in our riding habits, and indeed we think it is but reasonable that we should make reprisals upon you for the invasion of our dress and figure, and the advances you make in effeminency, and your degeneracy from the figure of man. Can there be a more ridiculous appearance than to see a smart fellow within the compass of five feet immersed in a huge long coat to his heels with cuffs to the arm pits, the shoulders ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... impostor who dares to claim nobility or precedency and cannot shew his family name in the history of his country. Even he who can shew it, and who cannot write his own under it in the same or as goodly characters, must submit to the imputation of degeneracy, from which the lowly and obscure ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... that I ever remember seeing a sight more pathetic in its way than that of this beautiful and high-spirited young woman weeping in the presence of her Council over the utter degeneracy of the race she was called upon to rule. Being old and accustomed to these Eastern expressions of emotion, I remained silent, however; but Oliver was so deeply affected that I feared lest he should do something foolish. He went red, he went white, and was rising from his ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... saw, was an evil-appearing savage with every mark of brutal degeneracy writ large upon his bestial countenance. To Jane Clayton he looked more gorilla than human. He tried to converse with her, but without success, and finally he called to ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the preparation of the abundant and solid fare with which Oxford is wont to entertain all comers. Everything the best of its kind, no stint but no nonsense, seems to be the wise rule which the University hands down and lives up to in these matters. However we may differ as to her degeneracy in other departments, all who have ever visited her will admit that in this of hospitality she is still a great national teacher, acknowledging and preaching by example the fact, that eating and ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... other sorts of writing. There is perhaps no better weapon for the scourging of vice and folly than this potent literary embodiment of wit and irony, and certainly no author ever wielded that weapon more nobly than Lucilius. His aera was characterised by great degeneracy, due to Greek influences, and the manner in which he upheld failing Virtue won him the unmeasured regard of his contemporaries and successors. Horace, Persius, and Juvenal all owe much to him, and it is melancholy to reflect that all his work, save a fragment or two, is lost to the world. Lucilius, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... has ever, as a poet, exercised a similar influence over his countrymen. Prophets, lawgivers, and sages have formed the character of other nations; it was reserved to a poet to form that of the Greeks. This is a feature in their character which was not wholly erased even in the period of their degeneracy. When lawgivers and sages appeared in Greece, the work of the poet had already been accomplished; and they paid homage to his superior genius. He held up before his nation the mirror in which they were to behold the world of gods and ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... may feel inclined to call this quiet enjoyment of life, this mere looking on, a degeneracy rather than a growth. It seems so different from what we think life ought to be. Yet, from a higher point of view it may appear that those Southern Aryans have chosen the good part, or at least the part good for them, while we, Northern Aryans, have been careful ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... approximation of shape, nor the use of the hand, [Footnote: Traite de l'esprit.] nor the continued intercourse with this sovereign artist, has enabled any other species to blend their nature or their inventions with his; that, in his rudest state, he is found to be above them; and in his greatest degeneracy, never descends to their level. He is, in short, a man in every condition; and we can learn nothing of his nature from the analogy of other animals. If we would know him, we must attend to himself, to the course of his life, and the tenor of his conduct. With him the society ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... the walls of little parlors in houses with double door-plates on their portals, looking out on streets and courts which to know is to be unknown, and where to exist is not to live, according to any true definition of living. Therefore complain I not of modern degeneracy, when, even from the open window of the small unlovely farmhouse, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine flavors and the flat-patterned woman of broken-down countenance, issue the same familiar sounds. For who knows that Almira, but for these keys, which throb away her wild ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... takes the form of a direct caution to the reader, again it may be shown by inference, and lastly the events speak for themselves and give their own lesson. The author meant to teach adults as well as children. The graphic history of the Doasyoulikes is rather a clear-cut study in degeneracy for older people, as well as a lively warning for youngsters. But what is the author's main theme? Is his real text in the advice the poor Irishwoman gives to Grimes and Tom? "Those that wish to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... of archangels or angels. Their answers will soon inform him, that the supposed perfection of man was not absolute, but respective; that he was perfect, in a sense consistent enough with subordination, perfect, not as compared with different beings, but with himself in his present degeneracy; not perfect, as an angel, but perfect, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... sympathy with native merit, and of disgust towards all affectation, we cannot but recall such anecdotes with scorn; and often we recollect the stories recorded by poor Benvenuto Cellini, that dissolute but brilliant vagabond, who (like our own British artists) was sometimes upbraided with the degeneracy of modern art, and, upon his humbly requesting some evidence, received, by way of practical answer, a sculptured gem or vase, perhaps with a scornful demand of—when would he be able to produce anything like that—'eh, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the home, and never to relax until a race of parents has arisen which knows no other duty to the state than to rear with heart and brain the children which have been given to them. Then we shall hear no more about physical degeneracy."[13] ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... even his own guardian, murdered Cicero, to whose confidence, too improvidently given, he owed all his power? Was this the master you chose? Could you bring your tongue to give him the name of Augustus? Could you stoop to beg consulships and triumphs from him? Oh, shame to virtue! Oh, degeneracy of Rome! To what infamy are her sons, her noblest sons, fallen. The thought of it pains me more than the wound that I died of; it stabs ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... truly (chap. 6, 1) that our first parents sinned, and also ( 2) that by this sin they fell from their original righteousness; for this only means that the first conscious act of disobedience by man produced alienation from God, and degeneracy of nature. This was no arbitrary punishment, but the natural consequence. The creed also says truly ( 3) that this corrupted nature was conveyed to all their posterity; for this only means, that, by the laws of descent, good and evil qualities are transmitted; which all ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... crowd and noise and a brass band, for all the world like an excursion to Coney Island, and though most people, except the grateful natives, were obediently believing with Ruskin that it was the symbol of the degeneracy of Venice and would have thought themselves disgraced forever if they were seen on it. But the Lagoon was as beautiful from the noisy, fussy little steamboat as from a gondola, the sails of the fishing boats ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... the hills, a little journey from Pointview, on the shores of a pleasant river. To the unknowing traveler, who approaches from either hilltop, it has a peaceful and inviting look. But the rutted, rocky road begins at once to excite suspicion. A bad road is an indication and a producer of degeneracy in man and beast. It tends to profanity, and if it went far would probably lead to hell. Trent itself is one of the little modern hells of New England. There are the venerable and neatly fashioned houses of the old-time Yankee—the peaked roofs and gables, the ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... by their agency, levied aids and benevolences upon the different travellers on the king's highway. A letter of the old lord, his father, which, by the by, is not the letter of an illiterate man, is still extant, in which he complains in very moving terms of his son's degeneracy and misconduct. The young scapegrace, wishing to make his father know from experience the inconvenience of being scantily supplied with money, enjoined his tenantry in Craven not to pay their rents, and beat one of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... reproduced at a distance of three generations his great-great-grandmother, Adelaide Fouque. He did not look more than twelve years old, and his intelligence was that of a child of five. There was in him a relaxation of tissues, due to degeneracy, and the slightest exertion produced hemorrhage. Charles was not kindly treated by his stepfather, and generally lived with his great-grandmother Felicite Rougon. He was frequently taken to visit the aged Adelaide Fouque in the asylum at Les Tulettes, and on one occasion, in 1873, when he chanced ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... payment was by promissory notes, and that on several occasions he asked for special favours, such as dating bills ahead or the privilege of renewal of notes, one is able to read a certain unmistakable sign of degeneracy in the customer's credit. New orders from such a customer will bear scrutiny; and a closer attention to the present condition of the account may save the ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... single state were known to CLUSIUS, and similar varieties of the double kind are said to exist; it is of little moment whether they do or not, every variation in this plant from a bright scarlet is in every sense of the word a degeneracy. ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 8 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... itself. Instead of using the classical literatures to impart a liberal education, give larger vision, and prepare for useful public service, they came to be used largely for disciplinary ends. The teaching of Campion at Prague (1574) well illustrates this degeneracy (R. 146). This change alienated practical men from the schools. French now in turn became the language of the court and of diplomacy, and the work of the schools tended to be confined largely to preparing students to enter ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... or ecstasy, sometimes lasting for a long period; and it may have been in one of these that he was inspired by the idea of asking the Emperor for a decayed city in Campania, there to establish a philosophic commonwealth as nearly upon the model of Plato's Republic as the degeneracy of the times ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... sign which could be made by the hand, the phallic hand, was used as a protection against the evil eye. Ancient representations of Priapus have been found with the hand in this attitude. As further evidence to show the total degeneracy of these beliefs, it may be said that the phallic hand was adopted ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... the American Negro has produced no notorious offenders against civil or military usage. He has arisen to the moral concept of high responsibility for the future of his race in the estimation of all mankind. There is no story of moral degeneracy which has yet come from abroad concerning him. Pitfall, temptation and opportunity for vice and crime have all been shunned in light of preparation for the higher service. The Negro has proven his power of moral restraint while guided ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... the South had a brick Russian stove in 1812. About the same date the First Church had a stove and the Tabernacle had one also. The objections that [to heat churches] was contrary to the custom of their hardy fathers and mothers, [and that it] was an indication of extravagance and degeneracy, had ceased to be advanced. Not a few remember the general knocking of feet on cold days and near the close of long sermons. On such occasions the Rev. Dr. Hopkins used to say, now and then: 'My hearers, have a little patience, ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... my paternal guardian, I never caught the maudlin look of his reeling eyes, nor listened to some exquisite inanity from his besotted lips, but that my thoughts flew instantly back to the Sir Charleses and the Sir Roberts of my race, and I comforted myself with the hope that the present degeneracy should pass away. Hence, Julia, my family pride; hence, too, another feeling you dislike in me,—disdain! I first learned to despise my father, the host, and I then despised my acquaintances, his ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Can Grande and his nephew Mastino, in the first half of the fourteenth century (1312-51). Mastino had himself cherished the project of an Italian Kingdom; but he died before approaching its accomplishment. The degeneracy of his house began with his three sons. The two younger killed the eldest; of the survivors the stronger slew the weaker and then died in 1374, leaving his domains to two of his bastards. One of these, named Antonio, killed the other in 1381,[2] and afterwards fell a prey ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... can be entertained or interested by a detail of transactions such as these, which admit of no warmth, no colouring, no embellishment; a detail of which only serves to exhibit an inanimate picture of tasteless vice and mean degeneracy." On the contrary,—and Smollett might have discovered it, if he had been in the humour,—the subject is capable of inspiring as much interest as even a novellist can desire. Is there no warmth in the despair of a plundered people?—no life and animation in ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... a sad story of Solomon's defection and degeneracy. As the Queen of Sheba did not have seven hundred husbands, she had time for travel and the observation of the great world outside of her domain. It is impossible to estimate the ennui a thousand women ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... said Grattan of the elder Pitt. "Modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... much. On the one side of the picture a snail was slowly creeping up a steep path; on the other a stag rushed and bounded unrestrained down the sheer proclivities of a wide and darkening hill. Improvement is ever slow and difficult; degeneracy is too often startling rapid. From henceforth, as we shall have occasion to see hereafter, Walter was progressing from strength to strength, adding to faith virtue, and to virtue temperance, and to temperance knowledge, and to knowledge ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... the county people round considered our family far gone on the inclined plane of degeneracy. First my mother, the heiress, had married a clergyman of no high family; then they had given their eldest daughter to a poor artist, something of the same standing as—well, I will be rude to no order of humanity, and therefore avoid comparisons; and now ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... Purgatory (canto xiv.), a noble Romagnese, lamenting the degeneracy of his country, calls to mind with ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... pipe the pure and lofty and highly ennobling sentiments, the spiritually beautiful inspiration which characterizes that book of his—that deft little dip into degeneracy—something about a frozen wedding! Oh, slush! Percy, ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... now such cause for rigid economy. Was it that he grew old?—he could no longer take his wine with disregard of consequence. The slightest excess, and too surely he paid for it on the morrow, not merely with a passing headache, but with a whole day's miserable discomfort. Oh, degeneracy of stomach and of brain! Of will, too; for he was sure to repeat the foolish experience ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... prudence, a people with a low, vacillating, and uncertain moral ideal may, for a time, be able to stem the tide of outraged virtue, but this is merely transitory. Ultimate destruction and ruin follow absolutely in the wake of moral degeneracy; this, all history shows;—this, experience teaches. God visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. "The judgments of the Lord are true and ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... the three children, three different generations are designated, and the gradual degeneracy of the people, which sinks deeper and deeper. But this opinion must certainly be rejected. There is no gradation perceptible. On the contrary, the announcement of the total destruction of the kingdom of Israel is connected immediately with the name of ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... spirit of a people in this respect, except by War, and that too under bold Generals. By it alone can that effeminacy of feeling be counteracted, that propensity to seek for the enjoyment of comfort, which cause degeneracy in a people rising in prosperity and immersed ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... this full admission of the partial degradation of the Jewish race, we are not prepared to agree that this limited degeneracy is any justification of the prejudices and persecution which originated in barbarous or mediaeval superstitions. On the contrary, viewing the influence of the Jewish race upon the modern communities, ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... Roman art is an appendix to the art history of Greece. It originated little in painting, and was content to perpetuate the traditions of Greece in an imitative way. What was worse, it copied the degeneracy of Greece by following the degenerate Hellenistic paintings. In motive and method it was substantially the same work as that of the Greeks under the Diadochi. The subjects, again, were often taken from Greek story, though there were ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... the dissolution of the Greek civilization is not a pleasant one. 'The glory that was Greece' fades out of the world and leaves it grey and dull, and there was worse than this; there was also decay and degeneracy and corruption. To dwell upon it is as the sin of Ham. Nevertheless what took place was not a mere relapse towards barbarism, but on the contrary the supersession of a form of civilization which had done its work by another form less attractive, but more sound and ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... commenting on the "generally admitted" fact that "the percentage of mental disorders among Jews is much greater than among non-Jews," asks: "Is the cause inherent, that is to say, is there a racial disposition towards degeneracy, or is it the result of the external conditions and causes?" The writer goes on to refer to an article in the Zukunft which supports the view that the terrible experiences of the Jews in the Middle Ages have affected their nervous system, and therefore that the cause of mental derangement amongst ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... by Mrs. Poyser's own hand, setting off the proportions of his leg. Mr. Poyser had no reason to be ashamed of his leg, and suspected that the growing abuse of top-boots and other fashions tending to disguise the nether limbs had their origin in a pitiable degeneracy of the human calf. Still less had he reason to be ashamed of his round jolly face, which was good humour itself as he said, "Come, Hetty—come, little uns!" and giving his arm to his wife, led the way through the causeway ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... turned the wrong way is called "hysteria," or "neurasthenia," or "degeneracy." It may be one of these or all three, in its effect, but the training of the will to overcome the cause, which is always to be found in some kind of selfishness, would cure the hysteric, give the neurasthenic more wholesome nerves, and start the degenerate on ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... assizes, followed his fortunes to Rome and there became a leader of the metropolitan bar. He saw gallant military service in Spain and in Greece, commanded an army, held all the curule offices of state and ended a contentious life in the Senate denouncing Carthage and the degeneracy of the times. ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... the family not only in preventing women from establishing social conditions suitable for their own best development and that of their children but has thrown over the home the dark shadow of commercialized prostitution with its cloud of evil thought, physical degeneracy and ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... enforced by our New England fathers more than two hundred years ago, which history informs us were attended with the most beneficial results.[76] Although their descendants of the present generation should blush for their degeneracy, still we should be encouraged from an increasing disposition of late to return to these salutary restraints and needful checks upon ignorance and crime. Said the Honorable Josiah Quincy, Jr., late mayor of the city of Boston, in his inaugural address, "I hold that the state has a right ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... or crimson, pea-green or sky-blue, it was all one: these were all flaunting, giddy colours; and as to the lace I talked of, that was but a 'colifichet de plus.'" And he sighed over my degeneracy. "He could not, he was sorry to say, be so particular on this theme as he could wish: not possessing the exact names of these 'babioles,' he might run into small verbal errors which would not fail to lay him open to my sarcasm, and excite my unhappily sudden ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... present; some day I shall perhaps find a grand passion, a woman to play the Don Quixote about, like the Pole that I am; a woman out of whose slipper to drink, and for whose pleasure to die; but not here! Few things strike me so much as the degeneracy of Italian women. What has become of the race of Faustinas, Marozias, Bianca Cappellos? Where discover nowadays (I confess she haunts me) another Medea da Carpi? Were it only possible to meet a woman ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... eventually puts out the lamp of life, and that can result only in confusion and darkness. It severs the ordained relationship, the connecting, the binding cord, between the soul—the self—and its Source. Stagnation, degeneracy, and eventual death ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... of vanity and pedantry disappeared on the one side, pusillanimity and servility on the other; the ideas of the subjects of a large state have naturally a wider range; the monasteries, those dens of superstition, the petty princely residences, those hotbeds of French vice and degeneracy, the imperial free towns, those abodes of petty burgher prejudice, no longer existed. The extension of the limits of the states rendered the gradual introduction of a better administration, the laying ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... toward White River Farm, and he was thinking chiefly of Seth, a man he hated for no stronger reason than his own loss of caste, his own degeneracy, while the other remained an honest man. The deepest hatreds often are founded on one's own failings, one's own obvious inferiority to another. He was thinking of that love which Wanaha had assured him Seth entertained for Rosebud, and he was ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... who occupied this platform on Tuesday evening last, in the course of his remarks upon the wide degeneracy of the American Clergy on the Slavery Question, reminded us that there was in a Brooklyn pulpit, A MAN. We thought you would be glad to see and hear such a rara avis, and therefore have besought him to come hither to-night to ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... sermon. Rode in the evening to Castleton, where I read three discourses by Secker. In the forest I was sorry to observe a party of boys playing at Football. I spoke to them but was laughed at, and on my departure one of the boys gave the football a wonderful kick—a proof this of the degeneracy ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... laws forbidding the marriage of near relations with each other, originated from the political view of preserving the human race from degeneracy, they are the only laws we meet with on that subject, and exert almost the only care we find taken of so important a matter. The Asiatic is careful to improve the breed of his elephants, the Arabian of his horses, and the Laplander of his reindeer. The Englishman, eager to have swift horses, staunch ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... child with reins, or give his servants stinking meat to eat— surely this was reason enough to be indulgent to him? Besides, he was the chief sufferer from his failings, like a sick man from his sores. Instead of being led by boredom and some sort of misunderstanding to look for degeneracy, extinction, heredity, and other such incomprehensible things in each other, would they not do better to stoop a little lower and turn their hatred and anger where whole streets resounded with moanings from coarse ignorance, greed, scolding, impurity, swearing, the shrieks ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Society Horticultural Society's garden Machine tools Manures, concentrated —— liquid, by Mr. Bardwell Marvel of Peru Mechi's (Mr.) gathering Mirabilis Jalapa New Forest Plant, hybrid Potatoes, Bahama Potato disease —— origin of Poultry, metropolitan show of Races, degeneracy of Roses, Tea —— from cuttings Soil and its uses, by Mr. Morton Strawberry, Nimrod, by Mr. Spencer Truffles, Irish Vegetables, lists of Violet, Neapolitan Waggons and carts ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... corruption, shallowness and false refinement, and that of a life of simple manners and unperverted instincts. That he depicted this as the real life of a primitive epoch only gave greater pungency to the contrast. The eighteenth century, aroused to the consciousness of its own degeneracy, its false and artificial existence, readily accepted an idealized Geneva, an idealized Sparta, as the type of a primitive community, the model on which society was to be refashioned. What the "pure word of God" had been to the Reformers, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... us the light of his countenance, nor ever visits us, save one night in the year; when he rattles down the chimneys of the descendants of the patriarchs, confining his presents merely to the children, in token of the degeneracy of the parents. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... attempt should be made toward such a reformation, is perhaps more necessary than people commonly apprehend; because the ruin of a state is generally preceded by a universal degeneracy of manners, and contempt of religion; which is entirely our case ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... general moral theme as the English novels; but the scenes are entirely different, and opinion is divided as to the comparative merit of the work. It is a study, a very profound study of moral development in one character and of moral degeneracy in another. Its characters and its scenes are both Italian, and the action takes place during a critical period of the Renaissance movement, when Savonarola was at the height of his power in Florence. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... thought! It is so delightful to be able to belie the assertion, that it is too late now to think of propounding any new idea, every thing having already been said that can be said about any thing! Here, ye croakers about modern degeneracy, here is something that should cover you with confusion and shame. Lady Morgan, after having read all, aye, all, that has been written about a certain subject by all the "many men of genius" who have treated it—which it would only ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... high authority for the statement that the sifting of the country community in recent years has on the whole improved it. Wilbert L. Anderson says, "If this emigration of the best were the whole story, it would be impossible to refute the charge of degeneracy. There is, however, another aspect of the matter. The industrial revolution has put a pressure upon rural life that is more important even than the attraction of cities. That pressure has aggravated the severity of the struggle for existence, ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... Hereditary Degeneracy: Juke Family; Kallikak Family; New Zealand Cases cited; Sir Robert Stout's ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... Regard I have for you. The SPECTATOR'S late Letter from Statira gave me the Hint to use the same Method of explaining my self to you. I am not affronted at the Design your late Behaviour discovered you had in your Addresses to me; but I impute it to the Degeneracy of the Age, rather than your particular Fault. As I aim at nothing more than being yours, I am willing to be a Stranger to your Name, your Fortune, or any Figure which your Wife might expect to make in the World, provided my Commerce with you is not to ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... besides being somewhat soft and leathery in aspect, owing to the want of angles in their outline. By great men like Titian, this somewhat conventional structure was only given in haste to distant masses; and their exquisite delineation of the foreground, kept their conventionalism from degeneracy: but in the drawings of the Carracci and other derivative masters, the conventionalism prevails everywhere, and sinks gradually into scrawled work, like Fig. 28, about the worst which it is possible to get ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
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