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Infamy   Listen
noun
Infamy  n.  (pl. infamies)  
1.
Total loss of reputation; public disgrace; dishonor; ignominy; indignity. "The afflicted queen would not yield, and said she would not... submit to such infamy."
2.
A quality which exposes to disgrace; extreme baseness or vileness; as, the infamy of an action.
3.
(Law) That loss of character, or public disgrace, which a convict incurs, and by which he is at common law rendered incompetent as a witness. "Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 a day which will live in infamy,... "






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Infamy" Quotes from Famous Books



... betray; but I must renounce all future intercourse with you. I am a sister, a wife, a mother; all these connexions forbid me to be longer your friend. In misfortune, in sickness, or in poverty, I never would have forsaken you; but infamy I cannot share. I would have gone, I went, to the brink of the precipice to save you; with all my force I held you back; but in vain. But why do I vindicate my conduct to you now? Accustomed as I have always ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth

... prematurely learn your own secret. Then a race of mad demigods would be loosed through the void, an all-conquering scourge instead of a blessing. I would sooner have your whole race die with your very existence unsuspected, than have you live in infamy, the unchecked tyrants of the stars. Not even the Challon could stand against you, nor could they coerce a single one of you whose whole potential ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan

... little. He wanted to hate this man who had come between him and his desires. He was convinced that he had done so, convinced that but for this American, Jeanne St. Clair would have listened to him. His worth against Bruslart's infamy must have appealed to her, had this man ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner

... e'en tell it you, and do you, hearkening thereunto, as you are wont to do, whenas you enter into gardens, where, putting out your dainty hands, you cull the roses and leave the thorns be. On this wise must you do with my story, leaving the naughty man of whom I shall tell you to his infamy and ill-luck go with him, what while you laugh merrily at the amorous devices of his wife, having compassion, whenas need is, ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... KUBJA. What! She who has faithlessly left her husband—do you propose trumpeting her infamy and shame to every one by getting ...
— The King of the Dark Chamber • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)

... but go and be arrested. I shall always have time to kill myself. There will be this advantage about being arrested, that at the preliminary investigation I shall have an opportunity of exposing to the authorities and to the public all the infamy of her conduct. If I kill myself she may, with her characteristic duplicity and impudence, throw all the blame on me, and society will justify her behaviour and will very likely laugh at me. . . . If I remain alive, then ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... that he could escape no way, but that his enemies lay on him which way soever he offered to fly, he took good heart, and ran amongst the thickest, and thought with himself better to die than to live with so great infamy; therefore being at handy blows with them, he demanded the cause why they should so use them? But none of them would give him answer, until Dr. Faustus showed himself unto the knight; whereupon they ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various

... him and the feelings he possessed, and had got as far as Somerset House, when one of them laid hold of his arm, and, with a voice tremulous and faint, asked him for a pint of wine, in a manner more supplicatory than is usual with those whom the infamy of their profession has deprived of shame. He turned round at the demand, and looked steadfastly on the ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie

... blot out further revolution. But it was so fatuous, so stupidly unnecessary! The court martials, or French gardens of acclimatization, as the dissidents called them, were already doing the work of the decree. The poet prince merely lifted the odium of it to his own shoulders. His amnesty became infamy, and was called the Bando Negro, a nefast Decree to blacken his gentleness and well-meaning for ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... long before he showed the most passionate devotion for the Reformation. "He was a man," says De Thou, "of quick and insinuating wits, ready to undertake anything, and burning with desire to avenge himself, and wipe out, by some brilliant deed, the infamy of a sentence which he had incurred rather through another's than his own crime. He, then, readily offered his services to those who were looking out for a second leader, and he undertook to scour the kingdom in order to win over the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... and a sot. In 1843 he acted as a go-between for Baron Hulot under the name of Pere Thoul, and Cousin Betty, who concealed from the family the infamy ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... at her robes of purity could never cling to her, and at least her trial would be public; he would be there to take all infamy, all disgrace, all opprobrium ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... folly soon punished; for, as Poor Richard says, 'Pride that dines on vanity sups on contempt. Pride breakfasted with Plenty, dined with Poverty, and supped with Infamy.' And, after all, of what use is this pride of appearance, for which so much is risked, so much is suffered? It can not promote health, nor ease pain; it makes no increase of merit in the person; it creates ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... sunset flared and faded into the drabber colors of twilight, the shadows swept down in phalanxes from the hills, and the still lifeless trees, stirring in the evening breeze, became black mocking shapes of infamy. The yellow disc of a moon, climbing up over the woods, took on the semblance of the leering ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh

... quotation, and to Mr. Elkins for the idea. The Captain induced me to read the book in which I found the lines. He stigmatizes the preference given to the Northern poets—Longfellow, for instance—over Timrod as 'the crowning infamy of American letters.' He has taken the trouble to lay out a course of study for me, the object of which is to place me right in my appreciation of the literary men of the South. It includes Pollard's 'Lost Cause' and the works of ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... this new element in the scientific field. Therefore, putting aside those abstract formulae for which high talents have panted in vain, like the thirsty traveller at the sight of the desert mirage, the advocates of the Modern School came to the conclusion that sentences should show a decrease in infamy and ferocity proportionate to the increase in length and social safety. In lieu of infamy they substituted a longer period of segregation, and for cases in which alienists were unable to decide ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... commerce, even of the most lucrative description, was handed over to foreigners, and especially to Jews, who were often banished from the kingdom and as frequently ransomed, though universally despised and hated. Notwithstanding this, they succeeded in rising to wealth under the stigma of shame and infamy, and the immense gains which they realised by means of usury reconciled them to, and consoled them for, the ill-treatment to which ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix

... are few who will not share in the sin. There are none who will not share in the shame. Wives, would you hold back your husbands? Mothers, would you keep your sons? From what? for what? From the doing of the grandest duty that ever ennobled man, to the grief of the greatest infamy that ever crushed him down. You would hold him back from prizes before which Olympian laurels fade, for a fate before which a Helot slave might cower. His country in the agony of her death-struggle calls to him for succor. All the blood in all the ages, poured out for liberty, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... infamy of this villain was made manifest. He had invented out of his own brain the existence of Vito Torsielli in Yonkers, and had himself written the letters to Antonio which purported to come from him. ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train

... the hackmen intensified his resentment at the treatment accorded him by Bud Harper and the young woman, and, meditating vengeance, he now walked toward his den of infamy where his mother had reigned in her day and where he was ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... to avow it; and the Protestant alliance was therefore an incubus. After some two months of a queen's and wife's estate, poor Anne of Cleves was bid to pack her belongings and take up a separate establishment as an unmarried woman. No wonder she fainted when first informed of such an infamy. ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue

... me, 'How different your prayers are from ours. Why do you not pray to the Blessed Virgin?' I tell them that we only pray to the Lord Jesus Christ, as He is the only Saviour. While visiting lately in some wretched houses of infamy and talking to the poor women, they would shed tears, and say that they would like to live different lives, but it is so hard to begin to do better. It is surprising to see with what attention they listen to the words of Scripture and promise to ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles

... the Foaming Tankard! He drink to intoxication! He play for days and nights at Four Corners! It is a vile slander! I would, answer for it with my life! He told me this very day that he has never even entered that den of infamy." ...
— The Beauty Of The Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... once lost their "good name," so far from finding themselves, in the words of Iago, "poor indeed," generally discover that they have only become objects of greater interest and attraction. How long he had lived in the enjoyment of this supposed infamy, and all the benefits accruing from it, we really cannot pretend to say; but he seems never to have been made fully aware of the formidable position in which he stood until he had reached Vienna, when ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various

... saying of a well-known politician to the same effect—"you call that witty—I call it devilish." It is a just description. If the report is reliable that Bismarck, even in grim jest, spoke of truth in this sense as one of his great resources, the confession ought to cover his name with infamy. I do not commit myself to the statement that he ever said this; but whether he did or not, he is credited with acting upon what is a very general impression of how truth may be used. With vast masses of people it has become perilously like a conviction that strict integrity, while good and ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd

... fellow, and I knew that Sir Roland felt the same. It seemed terrible to find a man like this, quite young—he was certainly under thirty—a man with the unmistakable cachet of public school and university, engaged in a career of infamy. What was his life's story I wondered as I looked at him, noting how refined his features were, what well-shaped hands he had. Why had he sunk so low? Above all, who was he? for certainly ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux

... to be remembered, that the parent of all memoirs, is the ambition of being distinguished from the herd of mankind, and the fear of either infamy or oblivion, passions which cannot but have some degree of influence, and which may, at least, affect the writer's choice of facts, though they may not prevail upon him to advance known falsehoods. He may aggravate or extenuate particular circumstances, though he preserves ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson

... modest fashion that became her best of all. If her cheek might otherwise have been pale, yet the glow of the fire suffused it with a healthful bloom. If she had spent the many months of her absence in guilt and infamy, yet they seemed to have left no traces on her gentle aspect. She could not have looked less altered had she merely stepped away from her father's fireside for half an hour, and returned while the blaze was quivering upward from the same brands that were burning ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... independent part of the nation was associated under one standard; and the chiefs of the Ostrogoths appear to have yielded to the superior genius of the general of the Visigoths. He obtained the formidable aid of the Taifalae, [83a] whose military renown was disgraced and polluted by the public infamy of their domestic manners. Every youth, on his entrance into the world, was united by the ties of honorable friendship, and brutal love, to some warrior of the tribe; nor could he hope to be released from this unnatural ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... the Clan Ranald seem to have been too barbarous for even those lawless times, while by a strange contumacy in latter times, a representative of that ancient family pertinaciously continued to proclaim its infamy and downfall by the adherence to the wild strain of bagpipe music (their family pibroch called Cillechriost), at once indicative of its shame and submission. Kenneth's character and policies were of a higher ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie

... of doubtful taste and sensational style! The whole crowd of realists, naturalists, and impressionists—the Batignolles school was the mocking title given the latter—were dumped into the common vat of infamy and ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... back to Louis. This was what he had meant. He had known all along, and plotted with them; even if his stomach had turned now, he had been a party to this infamy. Even then she did not hate him; she saw him, misled as she had been by Doyle's high-sounding phrases, lured on by one of those wild dreams of empire to which men were sometimes given. She did not love him any more; she ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... The various pow'rs displayed, and wonders done; Yet scarcely had she on the knight begun, And mentioned what he wished her to unfold, But Argia could her rage no longer hold; A fellow! to presume, cried she, to speak Of me with freedom!—I am not so weak, To listen to such infamy, not I A pilgrim too!—no, you may well rely, E'en were he Atis, it would be the same, To whom I now my cruel conduct blame: Such things he never would to me propose; Not e'en a monarch would the like disclose; I'm 'bove temptation, presents ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine

... men who voted for this cruel kidnapping law should not be forgotten. Until they repent, and do works meet for repentance, let their names stand high and conspicuous on the roll of infamy. Let the "slow-moving finger of scorn" point them out, when they walk among men, and the stings of shame, disappointment, and remorse continually visit them in secret, till they are forced to cry, "my punishment is ...
— The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 18 • American Anti-Slavery Society

... cases—with religious fervor. He had laboriously reached the end of the veranda when he noticed the open window of Louise's room, and stopped as a perfunctory duty to look in. And then Richelieu Sharpe stood for an instant utterly confounded and aghast at this crowning proof of the absolute infamy ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte

... accusation, she raised her arm as if to ward off some sudden blow, then let it fall at her side, standing speechless, benumbed and horrified at the terrible words he had hurled at her. The disgrace and the infamy of them she did not at once grasp, but gradually her mind began to comprehend all that he had said. The room swam about her, and she caught at a chair for support, vainly trying to make some reply. Again he repeated: "Thou ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley

... them, and will protect all persons in their privileges, and molest no peaceable mortal," is posted on Church-doors, and extensively distributed by hand. Soldiers are forbidden, "under penalty of the rods," Officers under that of "cassation with infamy," to take anything, without first bargaining and paying ready money for it. On these terms the Silesian villages cheerfully enough accept their new guests, interesting to the rural mind; and though the billeting was rather heavy, "as many as 24 soldiers to a common Farmer (GARTNER)," no complaints ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... fair words, and consigned to the mercies of God and his mother. This is as it should be. I laugh at the bigotry and prejudices of Spain, I abhor the cruelty and ferocity which have cast a stain of eternal infamy on her history, but I will say for the Spaniards that in their social intercourse no people in the world exhibit a juster feeling of what is due to the dignity of human nature, or better understand the behaviour which it behoves a man to ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow

... grape from behind walls upon insurgent bands in the street. This same conduct is glorified as firm, as legitimate, as what not. The system of political morality changes, it seems, with men and with seasons. What was infamy in Espartero and Zurbano, is heroism and glory in Narvaez and Prim. What is more infamous than all this is the press, that thus displays itself in the light of a moral weathercock, ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various

... of precisely the same purport as that quoted by Mason. To me, that "wallow in my blood" has rather more of the Cromwellian ring in it, more of the quality of spontaneous speech, than the "rolled into my grave and buried with infamy" of the official reporter. John Haynes (24th July, 1653) reports "newes from England of astonishing nature," concerning the dissolution of the Rump. We quote his story both as a contemporaneous version of the event, and as containing some particulars that explain the causes that led to it. It differs, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... Montezumas and the valley of the Mississippi, and, although he was acquitted, his countrymen believed him guilty of a treasonable ambition. In the State where he had found his chief support, he ever after ranked in infamy next to Benedict Arnold. Thenceforth he became a stranger and a wanderer on the face of the earth. His friends left him and society shunned him. "I have not spoken to the damned reptile for twenty-five years," said former Governor Morgan Lewis, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... degenerate children? Was it for this that the Cherusci fought in the Teutoburg forest? Is every spark of German courage extinct? Does the sound of your clanking chains strike like music on your ears? Germans, awake! shake off your death-like slumber in the arms of infamy! Germans! shall your name become the ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... let me (pleasing task!) however hard, Join, as of old, the prophet and the bard; If not, ah! shield me from the dire disgrace, That haunts our wild and visionary race; Let me not draw my lengthen'd lines along, And tire in untamed infamy of song, Lest, in some dismal Dunciad's future page, I stand the CIBBER of this tuneless age; Lest, in another POPE th' indulgent skies Should give inspired by all their deities, My luckless name, in his immortal strain, ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe

... from the lips of Catiline this one refrain. You the serpent are, who poisoned all my joy in life, Steeled his heart against my kindness through your deadly strife. From those waking night-dreams well I know your infamy, Like a threat I see you stand between my love and me. With my husband at my side I cherished in my breast Longings for a tranquil life, a home of peace and rest. Ah, a garden-bed I planted in his weary heart; As its fairest ornament our love I hedged apart. Flower and all have you uprooted with ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen

... The disgrace and destruction of the noblest family in the province. The ending of a fine old name in infamy. Gracious heaven, it is too horrible to think of," exclaimed Manutoli, with ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... being derived a cathedra—that is to say, a chair or seat where he resteth, and for the most part abideth. At the first there was but one church in every jurisdiction, whereinto no man entered to pray but with some oblation or other toward the maintenance of the pastor. For as it was reputed an infamy to pass by any of them without visitation, so it was no less reproach to appear empty before the Lord. And for this occasion also they were builded very huge and great; for otherwise they were not capable to such multitude as came daily unto them ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed

... gorgeous one. To Shirley it was hard to harmonize the character of the man as he had already deduced it with the evident passion for the beautiful. That such a connoisseur of art objects could harbor in so broad and cultured a mind the machinations of such infamy seemed almost incredible. The riddle was not new with Reginald Warren's case: for morals and "culture" have shown their sociological, economic and even diplomatic independence of each other from the time when the memory ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... such a story is once started, society's strongest tendency is to exaggerate man's pusillanimity and woman's courage. He shuddered as he saw himself growing blacker and meaner in every fireside and street corner narration of the strange tale, till at last his infamy should pass into one of the traditions of the place. A man like Gregory could not long have endured such a prospect. He would have died, either by every physical power speedily giving way under ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... a better place after the college settled permanently above it. Some improvident citizens took a new hold on life, while some undesirables who had lived in lawless infamy skulked across the Walnut and disappeared in that rough picturesque region full of uncertainties that lies behind the west bluffs of the stream. All this, after the college had found an abiding place on the limestone ridge. For Sunrise ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter

... for holy anger. His soul often burned with intensest indignation. When one night the people in Quitman, Georgia, burned over their heads the seminary for colored girls, or when the Georgia Legislature was enacting the infamy of the Glenn Bill, his heart was hot as any Babylonian furnace, aflame with indignation, as though touched with the divine wrath, the anger of love. And yet not for a moment could one detect in him any ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various

... spirit resolves everything into a single question: How much is that going to bring me? and sums up everything in a single axiom: With money you can procure anything. Following these two principles of conduct, a society may descend to a degree of infamy impossible to ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner

... knew it, took her to wife, and lived with her a long time; accordingly, Marius being disgusted with both of them, decreed that the man should return the woman's portion, but he imposed on the woman, as a mark of infamy, a penalty of four copper coins.[130] Fannia, however, did not on this occasion exhibit the feeling of a woman who had been wronged, but when she saw Marius, far from showing any resentment for the past, she did all that she could for him under the circumstances, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long

... rich. It was Sir Robert Peel's mission to make England commercially prosperous, even as it was that of Brougham and Russell to give it liberty and political privileges, that of Pitt and Castlereagh to save it from foreign conquest, and that of Wilberforce to rescue it from the disgrace and infamy of negro slavery. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord

... and Christianity was at the zenith of its power, when it was denied that woman has a soul, when she was bought and sold as the cattle of the field, robbed of her name, her children, her property, and "elevated" (?) on the gibbet of infamy, and on the high altar of lust by the decree of ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... from a polluted source—I return to the world to seek you, to warm and to expostulate; I come to urge you to brave the infamy you have deserved; to court disgrace as the punishment you merit: briefly to avow ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold

... loyal to him—body and soul—loyal to him and to her House, ready to sacrifice her pride, her freedom if need be at a word from the Caesar, since he had said that by her action on the morrow she could help him fight the treacherous infamy. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... medallion with the heads of these great Negroes worn near the heart of the young Negroes of this generation might tend to fill their souls with loftier and nobler thoughts and drive them nearer to the race which these men dignified. The immortality of infamy is ours if we fail to produce a Negro in the next generation who will not at least measure up to the standard to which any one of these three immortals not only attained, but kept unsullied and unspotted until the angel of death gathered them unto their fathers, that they might sleep ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various

... no doubt he influenced some, as he was constantly quoting Scripture and twisting its meaning to suit his purpose, conveniently forgetting to mention those passages that would consign the major portion of those whose cause he was advocating to everlasting infamy and woe. As might be expected, the party he was assisting pointed to him as a model clergyman; many of them who had not read a passage of Scripture for years, having shaken the dust off their Bibles, turned to the verses to which he referred, and when in the taverns, so intoxicated ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter

... peace, and solid integrity. There were in the noble houses admirable wives and sisters. Was there ever a more touching fate than that of the young and chaste Octavia, the daughter of Claudius, and wife of Nero, remaining pure in the midst of infamy, and slain at twenty-two years of age, without having known a single joy? The epithets "castissimo," "univiro,"[6] are not at all rare in the inscriptions. Some wives accompanied their husbands into exile, and others shared ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various

... crowd. No question was asked of who? or whence? by a generous people, to wounded and wearied men and helpless women; till there pressed through the ring of bystanders a tall fellow, with a strong expression of debasement and desperate impudence upon his face, that seemed to say, "Infamy, you have done your worst." He demanded our names and passports, and arrested us all in the king's name, almost in the same breath. I struck him in the face with my fist, and kicked him into the kennel. No one attempted to lift him; but he scrambled to his feet, with ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various

... loss has been equal! If, then my fall takes place in this battle, that would be highly praiseworthy. Or, perhaps, Time will be the cause! Up to this day I have never been vanquished in fair fight on the field of battle! If you vanquish me by deceit, your infamy will certainly last for ever! That act of yours will, without doubt, be unrighteous and infamous! Do not, O son of Kunti, roar fruitlessly in this way like autumnal clouds uncharged with water! Show all the strength thou hast in battle now!" Hearing these words of his, the Pandavas ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... risen!" he exclaimed—"the spectre of all my crimes is risen to haunt me through life! I am a murderer—yet she lives, and my guilt is not the less! The stamp of eternal infamy is upon me—the finger of scorn will mark me out—the tongue of reproach will sting me like that of the serpent—the deadly touch of shame will cover me like a leper—the laws of society will crush the murderer, not the less that his ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... looked like braided silver. To these were attached very many little bells, which rung as she walked. I believe all dancing-girls wear these rings. We felt very sad when we thought that she was dedicated to a life of infamy ...
— Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen. • Dr. John Scudder

... conjecture, the sense would be;—"let higher, or the more northern part of Italy—(unless 'higher' be a corruption for 'hir'd,'—the metre seeming to demand a monosyllable) (those bastards that inherit the infamy only of their fathers) see," &c. The following "woo" and "wed" are so far confirmative as they indicate Shakespeare's manner of connection by unmarked influences of association from some preceding metaphor. This it is which makes his style so peculiarly vital and ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... from pure malice towards myself, in order to bring me into an amount of disrepute, which might justify the withholding of my claims according to the stipulations of the Imperial patents. By whom this infamy was perpetrated, it is impossible for me to say—but that it was perpetrated—there cannot be the smallest ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald

... if you please, this present age—the sickly wane, the impotent decline of the eighteenth century: which from a hopeful boy became a most insignificant man; and for any thing that appears at present will die a very fat drowsy block-head, and be damned to eternal infamy and contempt: every such author I say, though he may thrive as far as an author can in the present age, will by degrees languish into obscurity in the next. For though naked and bare-faced vanity; though an active exertion ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen

... to the preservation of those noble works, and preferment of good learning in our posterity, it had been yet somewhat. But to destroy all without consideration, is, and will be, unto England for ever, a most horrible infamy among the grave seniors of other nations. A great number of them which purchased those superstitious mansions, reserved of those library-books, some to serve the jakes, some to scour their candlesticks, and some to rub their boots: some they sold to the grocers and soap-sellers; ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... then, mounted aloft; I, who had said I could not bear the shame of standing on my natural feet in the middle of the room, was now exposed to general view on a pedestal of infamy. What my sensations were no language can describe; but just as they all rose, stifling my breath and constricting my throat, a girl came up and passed me: in passing, she lifted her eyes. What a strange light inspired ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... on a scrap of paper by Eustace Budgell, were found shortly after the death of that odd genius. From being an honoured contributor to the Spectator, Budgell descended to the depths of infamy, poverty, and despair, and so one day he threw himself out of a boat under London Bridge, and the waters of the Thames closed over him for ever. He owed his early prosperity to Addison, his cousin, and by way of gratitude he sought ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... fearing an attack in force, and his garrison being much reduced, resolved to evacuate the fort and abandon the country. But before doing so he resolved, in obedience to instructions from the War Department at Washington, to perpetrate an act of inhuman barbarity which shall hand down his name to infamy so long as the story shall be told. In order to deprive the British troops of winter quarters he determined to burn the town of Niagara, leaving the innocent and non-combatant inhabitants, helpless women and little children, the sick and infirm, homeless and shelterless amid ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow

... that noble name Sunk in the mire of everlasting shame! He lives,—who once was lovely in thy sight— As monster foul—his every breath a blight; The foe of Heaven, of Jove, of all our race, His kisses poison, and his love—disgrace! Wretch, coward, miscreant, steeped in infamy, O worse than every ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille

... upon the accused, whose inscrutable countenance underwent no shadow of a change, no fear of death was there, no regret for infamy. If the expression had altered at all, it was to display a shade more of triumphant insolence. The Duchess ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton

... did not take care! This reflection troubled the excess of his pleasure, and that of the greatness and the power to which so many artifices had elevated him. He feared the Princes of the blood as soon as they should be of age to feel the infamy and the danger of the wound he had given them; he feared the Parliament, which even under his eyes had not been able to dissimulate its indignation at the violence he had committed against the most holy ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... This infamy also was certain. Raimbaut foresaw what he must do. He clutched the dagger which Makrisi fondled. "Belhs Cavaliers, this fellow speaks the truth. Look now, the moon is old—is it not strange to know ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... because they themselves do not believe in the truth or feasibility of the doctrines they utter. In some cases eccentricity is a harmless disease; but the idiosyncrasies of these people spring from another source. They admit the principle that fame and infamy are synonymous terms. Disappointed in their struggle for the first, they grasp the last, and at the same time pocket all the money they can wring from the "barren fools" who can be found in any community eager to grasp at any doctrine which is novel, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... ages of anguish for the ecstasy of one half hour. If the human feeling of self-preservation, if the fear of death does not check them, how fruitless must be the laws which send them for two years to the Madelonnettes? O sublime infamy! And when one comes to think that he for whom these sacrifices are to be made is one of our brethren, a gentleman to whom we would not trust our fortune, if we had one, a man who buttons his coat just as all of us do, it is enough to make one burst into a roar of laughter ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac

... that she had loved him, and perhaps loved him still. The motives by which men are actuated in their conduct are not only various, but mixed. As Bertram thought in this way concerning Lady Harcourt—the Caroline Waddington that had once belonged to himself—he proposed to himself no scheme of infamy, no indulgence of a disastrous love, no ruin for her whom the world now called so fortunate; but he did think that, if she still loved him, it would be pleasant to sit and talk with her; pleasant to feel some warmth in her hand; pleasant that there should be some confidence in ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... boils at the conduct of this scoundrel," said the Major; "admitting his first impulse to have been fear, yet to allow his comrade to remain in that position for so long a while covers him with infamy." ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat

... arm-holes, with open sleeves that reached not to the elbow; and once in three years they had a coarse frock, and a little cap to cover their heads, which were always kept close shaved as a mark of their infamy. The allowance of provision was as narrow as the sentiments of those who condemned them to such miseries, and their treatment when sick is too shocking to relate, doomed to die upon the boards of a dark hold; covered with vermin, and without the least convenience for the calls ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... broke out. They determined to level the thieves' tents and the grog-shanties that had harboured them. What a wild scene it must have been! Two or three thousand men pulling down huts and tents, smashing crockery and furniture, ripping up beds, and levelling the roosts of infamy to the ground. When Dr. Laidman, the doctor sent for from Maryborough, arrived to attend the dying man, he saw a cloud of "white things" in the air, and could not make out what they were. They turned out to be the feathers of the numerous feather-beds, which the diggers had torn ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles

... Rostopchin,[135] told the women that "he should not detain them, as the less fear there was, the less danger there would be; but that their brothers and husbands must stay, or they would cover themselves with infamy." He then added encouraging particulars concerning the hostile force, which consisted, according to his statement, of "one hundred and fifty thousand men, who were reduced to the necessity of feeding on horseflesh. The emperor ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote

... nephew Theodore; "and when I have sometimes been tempted to wonder how good people can believe of me the unjust and impossible things they do believe, I have consoled myself by thinking of Uncle Jimmy Bulloch's perfectly sincere conviction that Gladstone was a man of quite exceptional and nameless infamy in both ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... been! Given over from that hour to the very incarnation of plotting crime, none to resist the evil impulse of my own maddening heart, the partner, forced on me by fate, leading me deeper and deeper into the inextricable hell,—from that hour fraud upon fraud, guilt upon guilt, infamy heaped on infamy, till I stand a marvel to myself that the thunderbolt falls not, that Nature thrusts not from her breast a living outrage on all her laws! Was I not justified in the desire of ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the capital. But he was gluttonous and intemperate, and subject to the influence of women and favorites. He was feeble in mind and body. He was married to one of the worst women in history, and Messalina has passed into a synonym for infamy. By this woman he was influenced, and her unblushing effrontery and disgraceful intrigues made the reign unfortunate. She trafficked in the great offices of the state, and sacrificed the best blood of the class to which she belonged. Claudius ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... consideration all these matters, I, as representative of the authority of the wojewodeship, proclaim to you with my confederate's staff of office that Jacek by faithful service and by the favour of the Emperor has removed the blot of infamy from his name, and has won back his honour, taking once more his place in the ranks of true patriots. So whoever dares to speak a word at any time to the family of the deceased Jacek of the offence ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz

... Thoughts for Merry Men; or Mother Midnight's Miscellany for the Small Hours;' and turning over the leaves, he was disgusted with profligate tales, and more profligate songs, ornamented with figures corresponding in infamy with ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... holiday, and the day is fair and balmy; but the chill and sadness cannot be shaken off, as we look around us. The sunshine seems almost to be a mockery in this place where fellow-men are caged and guarded like wild beasts, and skulk about with shaved heads, clad in the striped uniform of infamy. Merciful God! is this what thy creature man was made for? ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald

... Todd, a Newburyport merchant, had sailed for New Orleans with a gang of seventy-five slaves, his indignation burst into blaze. He blazoned the act and the name of Francis Todd in the Genius, and did verily what he had resolved to do, viz., "to cover with thick infamy all who were concerned in this nefarious business," the captain as well as the owner of the ill-freighted ship. He did literally point at these men the finger of scorn. Every device known to the printer's art for concentrating the reader's attention ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... corresponding to the ideas which they excite, and in listening to these sad sounds, I feel a stronger disposition to melancholy than in my life I ever experienced. But I will not give way to it. Begone, thou record of guilt and infamy!' he said, flinging the book upon the spare bed; 'a Scottish jail shall not break, on the very first day, the spirits which have resisted climate, and want, and penury, and disease, and imprisonment in a foreign land. I have fought many a hard battle with Dame ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... of certain gentlemen upon this floor to mold and rivet public sentiment against us as a people, and to lose no opportunity to hold up the unfortunate few, who commit crimes and depredations and lead lives of infamy and shame, as other races do, as fair specimens of representatives of the entire colored race. And at no time, perhaps, during the 56th Congress were these charges and countercharges, containing, as they do, slanderous statements, more persistently ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... plighted wife, long before he ever saw Ethel Dobb? She was your mother's rival. It was her only fault, and her whole life has been spent in expiating it. Was it not atonement sufficient, that for the crime of another, she should be branded with life-long infamy, and banished forever from ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming

... as the one beyond all others of the age whose critical occupation ought most to have secured him against such a delusion, the character of Johnson would have suffered seriously. Luckily, Dr. Douglas spared him; and Johnson, seeing the infamy of the hoax, and the precipice near which he stood, hastened to separate himself from Lander, and to offer such reparation as he could, by dictating that unhappy letter of recantation. Lander must have consented to this step ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... the stream he is thinking to himself, it will be the last time he will have to wade across it, gleeful at the thought of having so well succeeded in what brought him over it at all. Pondering on something besides, another deed of infamy yet to be done, but for which he will not have to come so far ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid

... and she to go—to go away together! It is only what I have been anticipating for months. I could see how it was with you. But that you should have the insolence to stand before me—" she grows almost magnificent in her wrath—"and declare your infamy aloud! Such a thought was beyond me. There was a time when I would have thought it ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

... of blood inhumanly and falsely stigmatized it as a declaration of war. The long-patient North, slow to anger, in its agony still cried, "My brother; oh, my brother!" It remained for that final, ineradicable infamy of Sumter to arouse the nation to arms! At last, to murder at one blow the hopes we had nursed so tenderly, they impiously dragged in the dust the glorious symbol of our national life and majesty, ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell

... meeting of his supporters and, in a five-hours' speech, states that, in spite of the unexampled infamy of Mr. REDMOND, he will never abandon his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various

... before he followed my example. But his enthusiasm, noble and sincere as it is, would not permit me to lay the axe at the root of the genealogical tree of a house whose ancestors had fought among the first Crusaders, and had later, as petty Italian princes, filled the world with deeds (of infamy). Against my loving Bertha he made no objection—really and truly, my dear friend, not the least. On the contrary, he was not a little proud of me when, in answer to his question whether I was sure of the maiden's love in return, I ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... bear testimony to the influence of the Christian home. "When he grows old he will not depart from it!" History confirms and illustrates this. Look at those scenes of intemperance and riot, of crime and of blood, which throw the mantle of infamy over human life! Look at your prisons, your hospitals, and your gibbets; go to the gaming-table and the rum-shop. Tell me, who are those that are there? What is their history? Where did they come from? From the faithful Christian home? Had they pious fathers and ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... seriously entertained of renewing the national Covenants with God, as at the commencement of the Second Reformation. Instead, the Acts Rescissory were permitted to remain on the Statute-book, and the Covenants to lie under the infamy to which the King and the Royalists had consigned them. The State exerted an Erastian control of the Church, and the Church yielded submission. Her standards were assigned her before she met; her assemblies were summoned and prorogued at the sovereign's pleasure; Presbyterianism ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various

... He had known every infamy of human cruelty, and through it all he had never been broken. He had resented and fought to the last, until, embittered and bestial, the day came when he was discharged. Five dollars were given him in payment for the years of his labour and the flower of his manhood. And he had worked ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London

... free from frights, the King from fears, And I, now held his infamy, be called Queen, The treasure of the Kingdom shall lie open To pay thy ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker

... Frederick, his ancestor, this handbook on lying. In turn, the Kaiser gave this notion of the treaty as a scrap of paper to his Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, who engraved, as has been said, "on eternal brass the infamy of Germany": "We are now in a state of necessity, and necessity knows no law. We were compelled to override the the just protest of Luxembourg and Belgian Governments. The wrong—I speak openly—that we are committing we will ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis

... an office, whatever it may be, has for his adversaries those who covet it, those who regret it, those who have once filled it, and those who desire to fill it. What assaults too! Against a successful rival, there is no infamy too base, no mine too deep, no villainy too cruel, no lie too poisoned to be made use of—and the minister, his Excellency, is ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... and memorable crime of this king of the French [declares a contemporaneous Liege sympathiser.][8] Scarcely anything so bad can be found in ancient annals or in modern history. What could be more stupid or more perfidious, or a better instance of infamy than for a king who had incited a people to arms against the Burgundians to act thus for the sake of his own safety? Not once but many times had he pledged them his faith, offering them defence and assistance against the same Burgundians. And now when they are overwhelmed and confounded ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... rid of them," said Madame Marneffe to Lisbeth, as she sat down once more. "I never loved and I never shall love any man but my Jaguar," she added, smiling at Henri Montes. "Lisbeth, my dear, you don't know. Henri has forgiven me the infamy to which ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... disturb the repose of their neighbors, and officiously interfering in other men's quarrels, even at the hazard of their own fortunes, were severely animadverted on by the Roman law; and they were punished by the forfeiture of a third part of their goods, and perpetual infamy."[4] ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren

... to try to explain to a young lady the reason for his being out at night. He would now conclude by giving the last touch to the dark evidence that would sink the once fair name of Ralph Hartsook in a hundred fathoms of infamy. He would ask that Henry ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston

... at large, and public opinion has lately been veering round to a less unfavourable conclusion upon it than heretofore. He had long been reviled as a truculent despot, artful and dangerous, powerful and perfidious; the genius of Victor Hugo had set on him a brand of infamy. In reality, if we may trust later French writers, there was much that was good in his nature, and they are disposed to regard him with compassion. M. de la Gorce says that throughout his life Napoleon had been a humane prince. From the entertaining memoirs of General ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... no place of refuge offered. Twice have I been buried in dungeons, where, fettered and in chains, I have passed nights in torture, looking forward to the morning's dawn that was to light me to a death of infamy. The sweat has started from limbs that seemed already drained of their moisture; and if I ventured to the hole that admitted air through grates of iron to look out upon the smiles of nature, which God has bestowed ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... Jove! Where then are truth, and faith, and honor fled? While I a fugitive, for love of you, Quit my dear country, you, Antiphila, For sordid gain desert me in distress! You, for whose sake I courted infamy, And cast off my obedience to my father. He, I remember now with grief and shame, Oft warn'd me of these women's ways; oft tried In vain by sage advice to wean me from her. But now I bid farewell to her forever; Though, when ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer

... an Athenian, son of Diopethes and Hegestrates, was, apparently, the most eminent of the writers of the new comedy. He had been a scholar of Theophrastus: his passion for the women brought infamy upon him: he was squinteyed, and very lively. Of the one hundred and eighty comedies, or, according to Suidas, the eighty which he composed, and which are all said to be translated by Terence, we have now only a few fragments ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... picture on every page, and it is particularly valuable as illustrating the relations between the Brahmins and the people. "These priests are invested," said one of the ablest writers on Indian affairs, "with a reverence which no extreme of abject poverty, no infamy of private conduct can impair, and which is beyond anything that a mind not immediately conversant with the fact can conceive. They are invariably addressed with titles of divinity, and are paid the highest earthly honors. The oldest and highest members of other castes ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis

... misdeeds died first amid the din of machinery. It was in the close, stove-heated parlors of the respectable citizens, behind the windows that had so long commanded envious views of the Northwicks going by in their carriages and sledges, and among women of leisure and conscience, that his infamy endured, and that the injuries of his creditors cried out for vengeance on those daughters of his; they had always thought themselves too good to speak to other folks. Such women could not understand what the Ponkwasset Mills ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... each, but don't punish the one and let the other go free. Don't have one law for men and another for women. You are unjust to women in England. And till you count what is a shame in a woman to be an infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or be not seen at all, or ...
— A Woman of No Importance • Oscar Wilde

... deputies, among them Dandolo, with a large sum of money wherewith to bribe the Directors to reject the treaty of Campo Formio. This would have been quite practicable, had not their errand become known to Bonaparte. Alarmed and enraged at this device, which, if successful, would have consigned him to infamy, he sent Duroc in chase; and the envoys, caught before they crossed the Maritime Alps, were brought before the general at Milan. To his vehement reproaches and threats they opposed a dignified silence, until Dandolo, appealing to his generosity, awakened those nobler feelings which were never ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose



Words linked to "Infamy" :   infamous, notoriety, disrepute, fame, dishonor, discredit, ill fame



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