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Debauched   Listen
adjective
Debauched  adj.  Dissolute; dissipated. "A coarse and debauched look."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Debauched" Quotes from Famous Books



... the truth of which the experience of all ages contradicts. Nero was not less a tyrant for being a fiddler: He[2] who wished the whole Roman people had but one neck, that he might dispatch them at a blow, was himself the most debauched man in Rome; and Sydney and Russel were condemned to bleed under the most barbarous, though most dissipated and voluptuous, reign that ever disgraced the ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More

... four days after they were discovered, in spite of the united efforts of their families, the police, and the residents of Hull-House. But finally the superior boy of the gang, the manliest and the least debauched, told his tale, and the others followed in quick succession. They were willing to go somewhere to be helped, and were even eager if they could go together, and finally seven of them were sent to the Presbyterian Hospital for four weeks' treatment and afterwards ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams

... inflicted. Yet the treatment which Lord Ely experienced was still more scandalous. That nobleman was thrown into prison, in order to compel him to settle his estate in a manner agreeable to his daughter-in-law, whom, as there is every reason to believe, Strafford had debauched. These stories do not rest on vague report. The historians most partial to the minister admit their truth, and censure them in terms which, though too lenient for the occasion, axe still severe. These facts are alone sufficient to justify ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... him up in godly ways," went on the father with self-accusing misery, "but I war a hard man, an' I never gentled him none. I reckon I driv him ter others ... thet debauched an' ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... rebellion, public opinion on this coast was sorely distracted at the issues raised. The great majority of the people were warmly attached to their Government; but they had drunk deep at the fountains of Southern eloquence, and had been measurably debauched by the dangerous teachings of the able men who had ruled the state from its infancy. When we consider the critical condition of public sentiment at that dark hour (1860-1861); how the public mind had been thrown off its poise by the false teaching of a long succession of political ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds

... confines the vagaries of amateur romance. Hence the market is choked, and the circulating libraries are overwhelmed with rubbish, and good books, as the Americans of the West say, "get no show." The debauched novel reader, to whom every story is a story, and one no better nor worse than another, may not heed it, but the judicious grieve, and the artist in fiction returns a smaller income tax. Then the very revenue suffers with the general decline of letters. ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang

... freebooter sat still, his dissipated face and heavy angry lips looking like a debauched and villainous caricature of his brother ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... they were heavy, frowsy creatures, slatternly and uncouth. They came generally from the dregs of frontier cities, or were the sweepings of the open country, gleaned in the debauched moments of the men who protected them. Nor, as his eyes wandered in their direction, was it possible to help a comparison between them and the burden of delicate womanhood he held in his arms, a comparison ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... actuating him he held to be revenge on Preston, for having, long previously, debauched his wife Phyllis. This passion, held in check during Preston's lifetime by fear of the consequences which might follow its indulgence, had broken out after his death, and wreaked itself ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... general was successively foiled in his attempts upon Duncannon and Waterford. His forces already began to suffer from the inclemency of the season, when Lord Broghill, who had lately returned from England, debauched the fidelity of the regiments under Lord Inchiquin. The garrisons of Cork, Youghal, Bandon, and Kinsale declared for the parliament, and Cromwell seized the opportunity to close the campaign and place his followers ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc

... some who agree with this account of Alcibiades's death in all points, except that they impute the cause of it neither to Pharnabazus, nor Lysander, nor the Lacedaemonians: but, they say, he was keeping with him a young lady of a noble house, whom he had debauched, and that her brothers, not being able to endure the indignity, set fire by night to the house where he was living, and, as he endeavored to save himself from the flames, slew him with their darts, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... supposed that he kept chickens in it. There were some dreadful stories about midnight dissections, but cooler heads affirmed that if there were any chickens there at all, they were there as the companions and not as the helpless victims of a debauched old age. And now the two social workers were invited into these mysterious precincts! The news might swell the roster to disconcerting proportions. They should have to ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis

... besides his sanctity, we owe an entire credit, tells among others, two very wonderful dreams. The first is, when a person was arrested by one, as for a certain sum of money, which his father had owed him by a note under his own hand, while he led a lewd debauched life, saw the ghost of his father one night, upon this very account, which told him of the money being paid, and where the acquittance lay. When he got up in the morning, he went and found the acquittance in that very place that ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey

... let us see what was the progress and success of this experiment. It seemed a risk to trust the raw materials of industry— wool, flax, hemp, etc.—to the hands of common beggars; to render debauched and depraved class orderly and useful, was an arduous enterprise. Of course the greater number made bad work at the beginning. For months they cost more than they came to. They spoiled more horns than they made spoons. Employed first ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... exchanged look or word with his brother Matazaemon, nor does he desire to do so with the issue. Let the Tamiya of Samoncho[u] look out for itself. A muko was taken without aid or advice of Yoemon. A stranger, one practising wayside divination, this fine fellow turns out a gambler and a debauched man, to the ruin of the House. Iwa can look to him; ignorant and foolish woman that she is. This Yoemon would contribute to the needs of a beggar before granting even a single mon ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... requited. Of late she has enlarged her list of national cruelties by her butcherly destruction of the Caribbs of St. Vincent's, and returning an answer by the sword to the meek prayer for "Peace, liberty and safety." These are serious things, and whatever a foolish tyrant, a debauched court, a trafficking legislature, or a blinded people may think, the national account with heaven must some day or other be settled: all countries have sooner or later been called to their reckoning; ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... such mischiefs might easily be remedied. In this case it is that I think a clergyman is laid open to the pen of any one that knows how to manage it; and that every person who has either wit, learning, or sobriety, is licensed, if debauched, to curb him; if erroneous, to catechise him; and if foul-mouthed and biting, to muzzle him. Such an one would never have come into the church, but to take sanctuary; rather wheresoever men shall find the footing of so wanton a satyr out of his own bounds, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... which can only give a man liberty and happiness in this world. Let this suffice at present to be spoken of those great trinmviri of the world; the covetous man, who is a mean villain, like Lepidus; the ambitious, who is a brave one, like Octavius; and the voluptuous, who is a loose and debauched one, like Mark Antony. Quisnam igitur Liber? Sapiens, sibi qui Imperiosus. Not Oenomaus, who commits himself wholly to a charioteer that may break his neck, ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley

... "The farce ascends in interest." He drew with a flourish, with actual animation, for sottish, debauched and power-crazed as this man was, he came of a race to whom danger was a cordial. "Very luckily a sword forms part of your disguise, so let us amuse ourselves. It is always diverting to kill, and if by any chance you kill ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... dramatis personae, we consider the pantaloon the most worthless and debauched. Independent of the dislike one naturally feels at seeing a gentleman of his years engaged in pursuits highly unbecoming his gravity and time of life, we cannot conceal from ourselves the fact that he is a treacherous, worldly-minded old villain, constantly enticing his younger companion, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... and street-walkers. Suddenly, vividly, she relived again the horrible moment when he had tried to force himself into her room, and what she had before supposed to be a mad aberration now appeared to her as a vulgar incident in a debauched ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton

... Wilfer—debauched and demoralised by drink—was disposed to look at the worst side of things; and from this point of view thought she meant the reverse of what ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice

... the world of to-day can speak with authority on this point. Your opinion, when you state it publicly, will, I assure you, make a profound sensation. For the rest it would be strange, certainly, if the race did not show an improvement. In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The labor required of children, and the burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs of life. Instead ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... mother-in-law. Mr. Miller was a mere cipher about his premises. If any one came on business connected with the farm, he would invariably say, "Wait till I see my wife," and the wife's opinion was sure to be law in every case. Bankrupt in character, and debauched in body and mind, with seven mulatto children who claimed him as their father, he was badly prepared to find fault with his son-in-law. It was settled that Mrs. Miller should use her own discretion in removing Isabella from her little cottage, and her future disposition. ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown

... convince us of our inferiority, these were awe-inspiring to the Frank and filled him with longings to drink deep at this fountain of civilization. The heroic strain brought by Clovis was quickly enfeebled and debauched by luxury. The court of the Merovingian king became a miserable assemblage of half-Romanized barbarians covered with the frayed and worn-out mantle of imperialism. It is a strange picture we have of this descendant of Clovis, this Roi Faineant (Do-nothing King) in a royal procession ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele

... its domination, ecclesiasticism had succeeded in destroying them by augmenting royal prerogatives which it could control with less difficulty. Public maxims of government, connected as they were with private morals, had debauched the nation, and plunged it into a depth of degradation out of which Richelieu and his whole entourage of clerical reformers could not extricate a single individual. It was a riot of ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.

... which justice was paralyzed by Privilege to make war upon an infamous scoundrel who had killed my best friend—a wanton, brutal act of murder, which there was no law to punish. And as if that were not enough—forgive me if I speak with the utmost frankness, madame—he afterwards debauched the woman I was to ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... from their infancy, and unacquainted with all the duties of life, are fitted to bestow? To touch a musical instrument with useless skill, to exhibit their natural or affected graces, to the eyes of indolent and debauched young men, who dissipate their husbands' patrimony in riotous and unnecessary expenses: these are the only arts cultivated by women in most of the polished nations I had seen. And the consequences are uniformly such as may be expected to proceed from ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]

... honestly believe, if money keeps getting crowded farther and farther into the background of life—we'll develop an honest politician. We know that to give a bribe is just as bad as to take one. Think of the men debauched with money disguised as campaign expenses, or with offices or with franks and passes and pull and power! Think of all the bad government fostered, all the injustices legalized, just to win a sordid game! The best I can do now is to cry, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... reach, ordered that he should be confined for his offence against themselves. Their proceedings excited public ridicule. That Sandwich should complain of obscenity and profanity, and should censure Wilkes, a fellow-monk of Dashwood's debauched fraternity, for indulging in them was, indeed, a case of Satan rebuking sin. At a performance of the "Beggar's Opera" at Covent Garden theatre the audience caught up with delight Macheath's words, "That Jemmy Twitcher should peach me I own surprised me," and Sandwich became generally ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt

... says (Etym. x), "a lustful man is one who is debauched with pleasures." Now venereal pleasures above all debauch a man's mind. Therefore lust is especially concerned with such ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... most dissipated courts the conduct of the queen is expected to be decorous, and that the instances are not rare where the wife of the monarch has died on the scaffold, or in a dungeon, or in exile, because she dared to be indiscreet where all were debauched. But for the great majority of royal wives, they exist without a passion; they have nothing to hope, nothing to fear, nothing to envy, nothing to want, nothing to confide, nothing to hate, and nothing to love. Even their duties, though multitudinous, are mechanical, and, while ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... amorous thoughts or feelings. Though she is exposed to the danger of meeting other girls who may be lewd in thought and speech, in the houses of friends or at school, she is not apt to be carried away by their example. Yet even a good, pure-minded young girl may be debauched. Especially during adolescence, the easy observance of natural continence depends greatly on the proper functioning of the feminine genital organs. These may be easily disturbed. The syringe used for injections, for so-called purposes of cleanliness, ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton

... entrance hall leads by a dark winding staircase to the cellars, now filled with merchandise, but which formerly constituted the debtors' prison, or, as it was vulgarly called, "The Louse Hole," and doubtless from its frequently-crowded and horribly-dirty condition, with half-starved, though often debauched and dissipated, occupants, the nasty name was not inappropriately given. Shocking tales have been told of the scenes and practices here carried on, and many are still living who can recollect the miserable cry of "Remember the poor ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... inhuman traffic. On reflection, however, this was discovered to be but another case of Satan rebuking sin. The blood money which reddened the hands of English royalty stained equally those of many an American rebel. The public opinion of the colonies was already too much debauched to sit in unanimous moral judgment on this crime against humanity. The objections of South Carolina and Georgia sufficed to cause the erasure and suppression of the obnoxious paragraph. Nor were the Northern States ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... they delight in the acts. We hear them utter cries of horror and indignation at the slightest equivocal word, we see them stop their ears at the recital of a racy tale, chastely cover their face before the figure of the Callipygean Venus, treating Moliere as obscene and Rabelais as debauched; yet, out of sight, sheltered by the curtains of the alcove, they love to strip in silence some lascivious Maritorne, and cautiously abandon themselves to disgusting orgies with Phrynes ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France

... and character as a tradesman, I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid the appearances to the contrary. I dressed plain, and was seen at no places of idle diversion. I never went out a fishing or shooting; a book, indeed, sometimes debauched me from my work, but that was seldom, was private, and gave no scandal; and to show that I was not above my business, I sometimes brought home the paper I purchased at the stores through ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... their hair once a day, bathed themselves once a week, changed their clothes frequently; and by all these arts of effeminacy, as well as by their military character, had rendered themselves so agreeable to the fair sex that they debauched the wives and daughters of the English and dishonored many families. But what most provoked the inhabitants was that, instead of defending them against invaders, they were ever ready to betray them to the foreign Danes, and to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... father and tyrant were convertible terms. Youth must have been but a dreary time in those old days. Scott's Sir Henry Lee, according to his son, kept strict rule over his children, and he was a type of the antique knight, not of the debauched cavalier, and would be obeyed, with or without reason. The letters and the literature of the seventeenth century show, that, how loose soever became other ties, parents maintained their hold on their children with iron hands. Even the license of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... the dear man, "you shall have them without being troubled with me;" and turning her round, "Your client has not told you who I am, eh? No? Learn then, I am the husband of the lady whom the king has debauched, and whom you serve. Carry her these crowns, and come back here. I will hand over yours to you on a condition which will ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... none of his care. It is like a little red paint ground on a saucer, and held up against the sunset sky. Why not take more elevated and broader views, walk in the great garden, not skulk in a little "debauched" nook of it? consider the beauty of the forest, and not merely of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various

... and in his eyes shone a terrible earnestness, an almost prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train gambler who used to run between Omaha and Denver. He was a man made for the extremes of life; from the most debauched of men he had become the most ascetic. His was a bestial face, a face that bore the stamp of Nature's eternal injustice. The forehead was low, projecting over the eyes, and the sandy hair was plastered down over it and then brushed back at an abrupt right angle. The chin was heavy, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... hidalgo to a servant: always choose a master with a good memory: for 'if he does not pay, he will at least remember that he owes you.' In future, I shall take care to herd only with those who recollect, after they are finally debauched, all the good ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... many, however, it is to be feared, it is not so. The mind has become debauched by dwelling on licentious images, and by indulgence in licentious conversation. There is no wish to resist. They are not overtaken by temptation, for they seek it. With them the transgression becomes habitual, and the stain on the character is deep ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... Clothier loses his Business, or has his Goods on Hand, 'tis all 'long of Betty: Wheat bears no Price, for Betty has glutted the Market. Whereas, in Fact, they never keep the same Markets. But they forget, they are all so idle and debauched, such gobling and drinking Rascals, and so expensive in blew Beer, that they are forced to put a double Price on every thing goes to Market; so that no Body will deal with them. Indeed, if it incenses them, that Betty won't buy, burn her own Goods ...
— The True Life of Betty Ireland • Anonymous

... and effeminate men tricked out their hair. Seneca, who was himself tainted with affectation, has left a beautiful epistle on the very question that makes the main subject of the present Dialogue. He points out the causes of the corrupt taste that debauched the eloquence of those times and imputes the mischief to the degeneracy of the manners. Whatever the man was, such was the orator. Talis oratio quails vita. When ancient discipline relaxed, luxury succeeded, ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus

... London would be incredibly quiet and quaint in that noisy, commonplace, modern neighborhood. It in nowise remembers the disreputable and roistering antipuritan, who set up his May-pole at Wollaston, and danced about it with his debauched aboriginies, in defiance of the saints, till Miles Standish marched up from Plymouth and made an end of such ungodly doings at the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... amateur policeman and informer did not renounce work; he found the greatest pleasure, as he himself expressed it, in acting the spy over the official spies. This man was a well-known frequenter of the low cafes of the Quartier Latin, and his face bore such evidences of his debauched life, that though only twenty-eight years of age, he looked ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... He looked even more debauched than I remembered him, for whereas in Singapore he had had a tanned skin, now he looked unhealthily pallid and blotchy. He ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... subsequently became rector of St. John's Church, in Bedford, and master of the hospital attached to it. Gifford's career had been a strange one. We hear of him first as a young major in the king's army at the outset of the Civil War, notorious for his loose and debauched life, taken by Fairfax at Maidstone in 1648, and condemned to the gallows. By his sister's help he eluded his keepers' vigilance, escaped from prison, and ultimately found his way to Bedford, where for a time he practised as a physician, though without ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables

... Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, was born; and as soon as he approached manhood, he displayed the worst features of his ancestral house: he was extravagant and debauched; he threw himself into a violent opposition to his father: with this view he was at first a Whig, but afterwards became a Tory. He had also peculiar opportunities for exerting authority during the temporary fits of insanity which attacked the king in 1764, in 1788, and in 1804. At last, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... same time that it pays no regard to law, it does not debauch it, it does not wrest it to its purposes: the law disregarded still exists; and hope still exists in the sufferer, that, when law shall be resorted to, violence will cease, and wrongs will be redressed. But whenever the law itself is debauched, and enters into a corrupt coalition with violence, robbery, and wrong, then all hope is gone; and then it is not only private persons that suffer, but the law itself, when so corrupted, is often perverted into the worst instrument of fraud and violence; ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke

... mind of Mr. McLean it grew less simple during that day at Golden, while Billy recovered, and talked, and ate his innocent meals. The cow-puncher was far too wise to think for a single moment of restoring the runaway to his debauched and shiftless parents. Possessed of some imagination, he went through a scene in which he appeared at the Lusk threshold with Billy and forgiveness, and intruded upon a conjugal assault and battery. "Shucks!" said he. ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister

... hope. We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active brothers - Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book- shop over against the University building - had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjunct editors and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic - that flatterer of credulity - the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision. ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... who sat beside them wore the latest fashions in clothing cut from the finest fabrics. Heavy men of brutal bulk slouched beside their dainty daughters, the purple blotches on their bloated and lumpy faces showing how politics or business had debauched and undermined them. Everywhere was the rustle of drapery and soft, musical speech. All that was lacking in "the round up" at Chiquita was here—shining, ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland

... a king went to war with his jugglers and they ran away, would represent the point of view of the old house-carle, who was neglected, though "a first-class fighting man", for these debauched foreign buffoons. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... haunches, he saw the pistol in the Lost One's hand, and then, as a thread of light steals between the black trees of a jungle, a light stole across Fielding's face for a moment. He saw the Lost One hand the pistol back to Dicky and fix his debauched blue eyes on the Pasha. These blue eyes did not once look at Fielding, though they were aware of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... integrity, rebuking with his unbending republicanism the treachery, cowardice, and servility of his old associates! He had outlived the hopes and beatific visions of his youth; he had seen the loudmouthed advocates of liberty throwing down a nation's freedom at the feet of the shameless, debauched, and perjured Charles II., crouching to the harlot-thronged court of the tyrant, and forswearing at once their religion and their republicanism. The executioner's axe had been busy among his friends. Vane and Hampden slept in their bloody ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... turned to his wife, (a very pretty woman, and dressed even to a plumed head)—shew Monsieur the little miniature, said he; she then opened a drawer and took out a book, (I think it was her mass-book) and brought me a picture, so indecent, that I defy the most debauched imagination to conceive any thing more so; yet she gave it me with a seeming decent face, and only observed that it was bien fait. After examining it with more attention than I should, had I received it from the hands of her husband, I returned it to her prayer-book, ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse

... that both adorn and exercise man's understanding, are philosophy and religion: for the first of these, take it even among the professors of it where it most flourished, and we shall find the very first notions of common-sense debauched by them. For there have been such as have asserted, "that there is no such thing in the world as motion: that contradictions may be true." There has not been wanting one that has denied snow to be white. Such a stupidity or wantonness had seized upon the most raised ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser

... any health, for it is become one of the greatest artifices of drinking, and occasions of quarrelling in the kingdom. If you pledge one health you oblige yourself to pledge another, and a third, and so onwards; and if you pledge as many as will be drunk, you must be debauched and drunk. If they will needs know the reason of your refusal, it is a fair answer, 'that your grandfather that brought you up, from whom, under God, you have the estate you enjoy or expect, left this in command with you, that you should never ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... physic as much good or ill as any one would have me Thinking nothing done, if anything remained to be done Thinks nothing profitable that is not painful This decay of nature which renders him useless, burdensome This plodding occupation of bookes is as painfull as any other Those immodest and debauched tricks and postures Those oppressed with sorrow sometimes surprised by a smile Those which we fear the least are, peradventure, most to be fear Those who can please and hug themselves in what they do Those within (marriage) despair of getting out Thou diest because thou art ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne

... climate, the weeds of luxury will spring up among the flowers of art; but the spontaneous weeds would grow more rank, if they were allowed the undisturbed possession of the field. Letters keep a frugal, temperate nation from growing ferocious, a rich one from becoming entirely sensual and debauched. Every gift of the gods is sometimes abused; but wit and fine talents by a natural law gravitate towards virtue; accidents may drive them out of their proper direction; but such accidents are a sort of prodigies, ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton

... States."[777] At the same time a California statute requiring a bond from shipowners as a condition precedent to their being permitted to land persons whom a State commissioner of immigration might choose to consider as coming within certain enumerated classes, e.g., "debauched women," was also disallowed. Said the Court: "If the right of the States to pass statutes to protect themselves in regard to the criminal, the pauper, and the diseased foreigner, landing within their borders, exists at all, it is limited ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... kitchen; nothing is to be seen but a tall soldier-like policeman in green, on watch under the wooden shed, and a few sparrows industriously yet vainly trying to get breakfast from between the closely packed paving-stones. How different from the fat debauched-looking sparrows who throve upon the dirt and waste of the old ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney

... now advert to some of the charges touching the character of the Indians. It is said, that they are debauched and insincere. This charge has been particularly made against the Creeks, and I believe is not altogether unfounded. Yet, if this be now the character of the once warlike and noble Creek, let the white man ask himself who has made ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall

... to death, heartbroken at the murder of her two sons by Tiberius, and despairing at the thought that her other son, the crazy, debauched, cruel Caligula was alone left to represent her family. The other daughter of Agrippa, Julia, was infamous for her debaucheries, and died in banishment. The family was then represented by the second Agrippina, daughter ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... the soft and purple panorama brought no emotions, as pride of country or aesthetic associations; and even the bracing savor of the gale upon the eminence seemed laden, to his hard regard, with the corruptions and excesses of a debauched government and a rank society. The river, to him, was but the fair sewer to this sculptured sepulchre. The lambent amphitheatre of the inclosing ridges was like the wall of a jail which he longed to cross and return no more. He saw the dark granite form ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... I am not a worn-out, debauched, useless carcass of a man, if it has been or will be my fate to advance the cause of science, if I feel that I have a shadow of a claim on the love of those about me, if in the supreme moment when I looked down into my ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... clocks, but when we adopted mechanical methods of progression we became unnatural and mechanical people, whizzing restlessly and recklessly from here to yonder, for no purpose save the mere sensual pleasure of movement, and we are at this date simply debauched by travel and have shortened the world to less than one-tenth of its actual size as well as destroying our abilities for simple and ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... possession of the lands formerly cultivated by the Etrurians; and that Aruns, a native of Clusium, introduced wine into Gaul for the purpose of enticing the nation, through resentment for his wife's having been debauched by Lucumo, whose guardian he himself had been, a very influential young man, and on whom vengeance could not be taken, unless foreign aid were resorted to; that this person served as a guide to them when crossing the Alps, and advised them to lay siege to Clusium. I would ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius

... a slave-holder, and only awaited opportunity to become one in deed and practice.... It is none the less true, however, that ancient civilization, in its various national developments, was habitually corrupted, debauched, and ultimately ruined by slavery, which rendered labor dishonorable, and divided society horizontally into a small caste of the wealthy, educated, refined, and independent, and a vast hungry, sensual, thriftless, and worthless populace; rendered impossible the preservation of republican ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... were openly hurled at political antagonists that decent men would not tolerate to-day, and the public press gave expression to charges and insinuations against honorable partisans such as none but the very yellowest and most debauched journals would now deem it expedient to print. As a single illustration, I have in my possession what is called "An infallible remedy to make a true Federalist." It is without date and was given to me by a ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... the "spiritual faculty,"—if it exist at all, and is any thing more than an ill-defined tendency, —instead of being a glorious light which anticipates all external revelation, and renders it superfluous, is, in fact, about the feeblest in our nature; which everywhere and always is seduced and debauched by the most trumpery pretensions of the "historical" and "traditional"! It is not so with people's eyes; it is not so with people's appetites; no parental influence or early instruction can make men think that green ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers

... soldiers, is partly the greater conveniency of accommodating them in families that subsist, by the entertainment of strangers, and partly the nature of their profession, which, by exposing them to frequent encounters with the rude and the debauched, enables them either to bear or repress the insolence of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson

... achievements must be placed the introduction of the Spoils System, which debauched the Civil Service and did the country lasting harm; yet Jackson only responded to public opinion which held "rotation in office to be the cardinal principle of democracy." It needed a half-century of ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg

... the Drama.—Music and the drama have a similar stimulating and refining influence when they are not debauched by a sordid commercialism. They strengthen the noblest impulses, stir the blood to worthy deeds by their rhythmic or pictorial influence, unite individual hearts in worship or play, throb in unison with the sentiments that through all time have swayed human ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... of ancient time Waxed arrogant in boastful pride; Debauched were they, and borne along On foul corruption's loathsome tide, Till in their stiff-necked self-conceit They e'en the ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius

... have been all mercy and all love and no justice. That would have meant no moral laws; for why have moral laws, if there would be no penalty, no justice? That would have meant a premium on crime. That would have meant the debased, the debauched, the immoral, the drunken, the fiend, on a level with the chaste, the pure, the upright, the true. That would have meant unbridled rein to passion and lust and every other evil inclination, and no penalty following. ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin

... being, who is neither a layman nor an ecclesiastic, in a word, that which we call an abbe, is an unknown species in England. Here all priests are reserved, and nearly all are pedants. When they are told that in France young men known for their debauched lives and raised to the prelacy by the intrigues of women make love publicly, amuse themselves by composing amorous songs, give long and dainty suppers every night, and go thence to ask the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, and boldly ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... of recent civilization, perhaps the most absurd is the vast tax laid upon all nations at the whim of a knot of the least respectable women in the most debauched capital in the world. The fact may be laughed at, but it is none the less a fact, that to meet the extravagances of the world of women who bow to the decrees of the Breda quarter of Paris, young men in vast numbers, especially in our cities and large towns, are harnessed to ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... of their rage, They broke the mirror of the times, the Stage; The Stage against them still maintained the war, When they debauched the Pulpit ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine

... celibacy itself was forced upon the early Christian Church by the scandal of rich Roman ladies loading bishops and handsome priests with fabulous gifts until the passion for currying favor with women of wealth, and marrying them or wheedling their fortunes from them, debauched the whole priesthood. You ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... ready to depart, and stood before the ex-butler a well-dressed, intellectual, but very debauched-looking gentleman. Being evidently well acquainted with the regime of the establishment, he pressed an electric bell beside the door, presented Soames with half-a-sovereign, and, as Said reappeared, took his departure, leaving Soames more reconciled to his lot than he could ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer

... his senatorial duties. His authority would be nothing. When would he dare, or when would he care, to come among us? Unless it might be in the idle month of February, when would a man so idle, so debauched, show himself in the Senate-house? Let him come and show himself. Let him advise us to attack the Cretans; to pronounce the Greeks of Byzantium free; to declare Ptolemy King.[120] Let him speak and vote as Hortensius may direct. This will have but little effect upon ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope

... king, though he looks and is a sot. Shakespeare's marvellous illustration of this blindness (in the third act) is seldom praised as it should be. Antony, crushingly defeated, owing to the treachery of all debauched natures, calls upon Octavius to meet him ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield

... come timidly to court. The rest is an idyll which is found set forth in all the history books at considerable length, and at this particular moment it was a genuine idyll, for the king had not then become the debauched roue that he was ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield

... the present inclinations of those with whom he is connected. You say rightly that his gallantries are such as you can by no means approve. He is, if I am not greatly misinformed, in the utmost degree loose and debauched in his principles. The greater part of his time is spent in the haunts of intemperance, and under the roofs of the courtezan. I am afraid indeed he has gone farther than this, and that he has not scrupled to ruin innocence, and practise ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin

... mother also if she had never been born, or had been cast with a millstone round her neck into the sea. Whom she marries—whether a man old enough to be her father, whether a pattern of imbecility, whether a man of a notoriously debauched character—this matters not a jot. Only let him have money. This being the conception of marriage, and marriage being the aim of all sagacious up-bringing, as most men unhappily are more surely taken on their animal than on their rational side, it is perfectly natural that you should strive to ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... at this time that Publius Clodius debauched Caesar's wife in her house and during the performance of the secret rites which according to ancestral precedent the Vestals carried out at the residences of consuls and praetors in behalf of the whole male population. Caesar brought no charge ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio

... be matter of wonder to you, friend Jack, that this small band of persons, and of debauched wretched persons too, any half dozen of whom you would be able to beat with one hand tied down; it will be matter of wonder to you that this contemptible band should have been able thus to subjugate, ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury

... A debauched fellow named Robert [said Orderic] was the first, about the time of William Rufus, who introduced the practice of filling the long points of the shoes with tow, and of turning them up like a ram's horn. Hence he got the surname of Cornard; and this absurd fashion ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... was evidently new and not welcome tidings to Guy's mother. No wonder. Any mother in England would have shrank from the thought that her best-beloved son—especially a young man of Guy's temperament, and under Guy's present circumstances—was thrown into the society which now surrounded the debauched dotage of the ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... believes himself to be quite a respectable member of society: but perhaps the only good action he ever did in his life is the involuntary one of giving an example to be avoided, and showing what an odious thing in the social picture is that figure of the debauched old man who passes through life rather a decorous Silenus, and dies some day in his garret, alone, unrepenting, and unnoted, save by his astonished heirs, who find that the dissolute old miser has left money ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray

... dark places, not the least among which are the low theatres, the concert halls, and other similar resorts where immorality nourishes as it flourished in Rome during that long moral night when Messalina dragged down an already debauched court to unspeakable debasement, when Nero thirsted for blood and wallowed in the sewers of moral degradation, and when Domitian's frightful cruelty only equaled his gross sensualism. The saloon, the black plague of nineteenth ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... of the emperors who governed it. Nero, Caligula, Tiberius, Caracalla, and Messalina, the depraved wife of Claudius and the daughter of Domitia Lepida, herself a licentious and libidinous woman, were but accentuated types of the luxurious and debauched nobility. Not only did the nobility become victims of degeneration, but the poorer classes also lost their virility, until at last we find the stability of the nation preserved through the instrumentality of foreign mercenaries. The ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... the deeper guilt? Who made these devils? Who nursed them in crime and fed them on injustice? Who ravished and debauched their mothers and their grandmothers? Who bought and sold their crime, and waxed fat and rich on public ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson

... by stuffing straw or hay under his blouse. The peilloux because he is covered with peille (rags). And, lastly, the paien (heathen), which is the most significant of all, because he is supposed, by his cynicism and his debauched life, to represent in himself the antipodes of all ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand

... was, cheaper to work him rapidly to death; the limit is simply the cost of procuring him and keeping him alive a profitable length of time. Only the moral sense of a community can keep helpless labor from sinking to this level; and when a community has once been debauched by slavery, its moral sense offers little resistance to economic demand. This was the case in the West Indies and Brazil; and although better moral stamina held the crisis back longer in the United ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois

... his nephew, 'that the rest of my conduct will not be found to deserve censure. I appeared, Sir, with this gentleman's daughter at some places of public amusement; thus what was levity, scandal called by a harsher name, and it was reported that I had debauched her. I waited on her father in person, willing to clear the thing to his satisfaction, and he received me only with insult and abuse. As for the rest, with regard to his being here, my attorney and steward can best inform you, as I commit the management of business entirely to them. If he has ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith

... not tell him that, do you? No. You say to him: "Loan you money? No. You are down. You will have to go to the dogs. Lend you a shilling? I would not lend you five cents to keep you from the gallows. You are debauched! Get out of my sight, now! Down; you will have to stay down!" And thus those bruised and battered men are sometimes accosted by those who ought to lift them up. Thus the last vestige of hope is taken from them. Thus those who ought ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... half-drunken condition, rendering them helpless to control the abnormal, sickening, mind and body wrecking demands made upon them by the gonorrheal, syphilitic, sodden wretches of whom not one in ten is capable of normal sexual coalition, yet whose debauched, drunken desires and requirements, no matter how unnatural and revolting, must be satisfied by the use of the bodies of their hopeless victims at fifty or even as low as ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann

... describing his characteristic style, when he speaks of his "fierceness of chiaroscuro, and intrepidity of hand." We readily give up to him "the great but abused talents of Pietro da Cortona," a painter without sentiment, and the "fascinating but debauched and empty facility of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various

... Minister so drunk that he could neither speak nor be spoken to, perhaps the old hope of becoming after all a real king, had turned the Pretender into a temporarily-reformed character. Or, perhaps, weary of the life of melancholy solitude, of debauched squalor, of the moral pig-stye in which he had been rotting so many years, the idea of decency, of dignity, of society, of a wife and children and friends, may have made him capable of a strong resolution. Perhaps, also, the unfamiliar, wonderful presence ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... cause of profound National grief, reflects no dishonor upon popular government. The murder of Lincoln was the maddened and aimless blow of an expiring rebellion. The murder of Garfield was the fatuous impulse of a debauched conscience if not a disordered brain. Neither crime had its origin in the political institutions or its growth in the social organization of the country. Both crimes received the execration of all parties and all sections. In the universal ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... and Psalms into their Language: Which Book when he gave me, he told me that it had not the desired Effect, neither did his Preaching avail as much as could be wished, because Policy and Interest intervening often superseded the Promotion of the Gospel, and the debauched Lives and vile Practices of our ordinary People give Examples very pernicious to Religion; for the Indians think, that they may surely be allowed the same Liberty as we; and if our Folks don't act, as they say, ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones

... common with her provinces, to add to the power of the Austrian Hapsburgs and the French Bourbons. We have seen how the people whom Napoleon had believed to be sunk in fanaticism, dead to all national aspiration, the mere slaves of a despicable King, and the sport of his debauched Queen and her lover, sprang to arms and drove the invader from their land. So would it be to-day if the country were even threatened by foreign invasion. "The dogs of Spain," as Granville called them, know well how ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street

... unpleasant picture of the state of Ireland at this time. "Never," he writes, "in her history was Ireland less inclined to self-reliance. The soul of the country was debauched with doles and charities. An English statesman might quite truthfully have boasted that Ireland would eat out of his hand. The only thing which troubled most of us was that the hand, whether we licked it or snarled at it, was never full enough. The idea of self-help was intensely ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan

... covered, it is uncertain after what manner these oracles were delivered, though Cicero supposes the Pythoness was inspired, or rather intoxicated by certain vapours which ascended from the cave. Some say that the Pythoness being once debauched, the oracles were afterwards delivered by an old woman in the dress ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... your liberty, and yet unfit to return to restraint, curse the world, and scorn it, and be miserable, like my Lord Byron and other philosophers of his kidney; or else mount a step higher, and, with conceit still more monstrous, and mental vision still more wretchedly debauched and weak, begin suddenly to find yourself afflicted with a maudlin compassion for the human race, and a desire to set them right after your own fashion. There is the quarrelsome stage of drunkenness, when a man can as yet walk ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray



Words linked to "Debauched" :   fast, degraded, libertine, riotous, degenerate, profligate, dissolute, immoral, dissipated



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