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Prostitute   Listen
verb
Prostitute  v. t.  (past & past part. prostituted; pres. part. prostituting)  
1.
To offer, as a woman, to a lewd use; to give up to lewdness for hire. "Do not prostitute thy daughter."
2.
To devote to base or unworthy purposes; to give up to low or indiscriminate use; as, to prostitute talents; to prostitute official powers.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Prostitute" Quotes from Famous Books



... appear the highest achievement that the human imagination has yet accomplished in prose)—in the struggles and perplexities and final solutions of Petroff, Nekhludoff, and Levin; in the miserable isolation of Ivan Ilyitch; in the resurrection of the prostitute Maslova; and in the hardly endurable tragedy of Anna Karenin herself, there runs exactly the same deep undercurrent of thought and exactly the same solution of life's question as in the briefer and more definite statements of the essays and letters. The greatest men are ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... dirt road we commit a vulgar error by employing a wrong epithet. All this I know, and yet, conforming to a custom, because it is a custom followed by all except a smattering of purists, I humiliate my sense of integrity, and I prostitute the virtue ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... can to earn the money. I can't help admiring 'em. But your fashionable married woman, she's too refined, too delicately souled, too spiritual to do anything but eat herself sick on her man's money and spend him into a hole. It's bad enough to be a prostitute who plays the game, but it's a damned sight worse to ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris

... a young, childlike woman. Since he was rejected and mocked most of the time because of his hump, the memory of these women and girls was terrible. Therefore he was cautious at these times. He went to a prostitute when he felt danger. ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein

... singing heroine of the French opera, figured more than once as the goddess of reason, that divinity was generally personified by some shameless female, who, if not a notorious prostitute, was frequently little better. Her throne occupied the place of the altar; her supporters were chiefly drunken soldiers, smoking their pipe; and before her, were a set of half-naked vagabonds, singing and ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... the least communication with unlawful and anti-Christian institutions they esteemed dangerous and criminal. "Touch not, taste not, handle not;" this cry went out amongst them: and the king's ministers at last perceived, that they should prostitute the dignity of government, by making advances, to which the malecontents were determined not ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume

... Evropi, he makes speeches, writes to the minister, combats evil, applauds good, falls in love, not in an ordinary, simple way, but selects either a blue-stocking or a neurotic or a Jewess, or even a prostitute whom he tries to save, and so on, and so on. But by the time he is thirty or thirty-five he begins to feel tired and bored. He has not got decent moustaches yet, but ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... dying prodigal or prostitute he would sit with intense interest, pointing them to Him who casts out none. In our house to house visitation he would sit down and read of the Saviour's love, making special reference to those that are poor in ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle

... very hard for him at this time. He has given us a moving sketch of it in his story entitled: "Once in Autumn." The hero, who is none other than the author himself, passes the night under an old, upturned boat, in the company of a prostitute who is just as poor and just as abandoned as himself. They have broken into a booth in order to steal enough bread to keep them from starving. Gorky is sad; he wants to weep; but the poor girl, miserable as she is, consoles him ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... bondage, assured me that this ci-devant chief magistrate spoke with a faltering voice and with tears in his eyes, and that indignation was read on the countenance of every member of the deputation thus forced to prostitute their rights as citizens, and to vilify ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith

... step or two in that direction, but his critical faculty, which, despite all his monstrosities of taste, was vital, restrained him from making a fool of himself, and he forswore the muse, puffed the prostitute away, and carried his very saleable wares to another market, where his efforts were crowned with prodigious success. Sir William Fraser introduces his great man to us as observing, in reply to a question, that revenge was the passion which gives pleasure the latest. A man, he continued, will ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell

... Constitutions, but Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, found it necessary, in the third century, to upbraid even virgins vowed to chastity for continuing the custom. "What of those," he asks, "who frequent baths, who prostitute to eyes that are curious to lust, bodies that are dedicated to chastity and modesty? They who disgracefully behold naked men, and are seen naked by men? Do they not themselves afford enticement to vice? Do they not solicit and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... "too great a respect cannot be paid to the honorable part of the profession of the law," but when state-lawyers, attorneys and sollicitors general, & persons advanced to the highest stations in the courts of law, prostitute the honor of the profession, become tools of ministers, and employ their talents for explaining away, if possible the Rights of a kingdom, they are then the proper objects of the odium and indignation of the public.—A very judicious author has observed ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams

... most learned Doctors leaue vs, and The congregated Colledge haue concluded, That labouring Art can neuer ransome nature From her inaydible estate: I say we must not So staine our iudgement, or corrupt our hope, To prostitute our past-cure malladie To empericks, or to disseuer so Our great selfe and our credit, to esteeme A sencelesse helpe, when helpe past sence ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... is," she said, "to prostitute the beauties of this magnificent region to such a purpose. To make of these beetling crags a joke! To invade these vast gorges with the spirit of commercialism and to bring a pack of movie actors to desecrate the virgin silence with ribald jests and laughter! Lizzie, ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... The name was sometimes written Qodshu, like that of the town: E. de Bouge argued from this that Qaddishat must have been the eponymous divinity of Qodshu, and that her real name was Kashit or Kesh; he recalls, however, the role played by the Qedeshoth, and admits that "the Holy here means the prostitute." ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... Fissore admitted having committed the crime, but not alone, and named as his accomplices three others, Martinengo, Boulan, and a prostitute, named Ada. All three strenuously denied their guilt. ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... Poerio, he listened with as much patience as he could command to the principal crown witness, giving such evidence that the tenth part of what he heard should not only have ended the case, but secured condign punishment for perjury—evidence that a prostitute court found good enough to justify the infliction on Poerio, not long before a minister of the crown, of the dreadful penalty of four-and-twenty years in irons. Mr. Gladstone accurately informed himself of the condition of those ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... him with nothing but contempt and loathing for the mass of mankind, the aristocrat who in a dozen plays sneers at the greasy caps and foul breaths of the multitude, fell in love with Dogberry, and Bottom, Quickly and Tearsheet, clod and clown, pimp and prostitute, for the laughter they afforded. His humour is rarely sardonic; it is almost purged of contempt; a product not of hate but of love; full of sympathy; summer-lightning humour, harmless ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... his character could enable him to support; and a letter, signed with the name of Honorius, was immediately despatched to the praetorian prefect, granting him a free permission to dispose of the public money, but sternly refusing to prostitute the military honors of Rome to the proud demands of a Barbarian. This letter was imprudently communicated to Alaric himself; and the Goth, who in the whole transaction had behaved with temper and decency, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... Favourite, in order to obtain, by Means of her Interests, the just Reward of your Services. She took a Pleasure in countenancing Merit, and certainly such as yours would have engag'd her Favour." "I, Madam," replied the Officer, with Indignation, "should I make a Prostitute my Refuge? I am her Relation, and it is the only Blot that I know of in our Family. I am too tender in Point of Honour, to hold any Thing from the Hands of a Woman, who has so notoriously trampled it under her Feet." ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon

... too, an impostor? Does this man, so plain and simple in life, in garb, in mien—does he too, like Arbaces, make austerity the robe of the sensualist? Does the veil of Vesta hide the vices of the prostitute?' ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... emolument has emancipated him. This has often been the true reason that the Company's servants in India, in order to free themselves from this horrid and atrocious servitude, are obliged to become instruments of another tyranny, and must prostitute themselves to men in power, in order to obtain some office that may enable them to escape the servitudes below, and enable them to pay their debts. And thus many have become the instruments ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... monstrous harlequinade. The whole was made up of extravagant transformations and burlesque contrasts; Atheists turned Puritans; Puritans turned Atheists; republicans defending the divine right of kings; prostitute courtiers clamouring for the liberties of the people; judges inflaming the rage of mobs; patriots pocketing bribes from foreign powers; a Popish prince torturing Presbyterians into Episcopacy in one part of the island; Presbyterians cutting off the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... to make my imagination behave!" and he rushed over to the Latin Quarter to see a prostitute he knew. "I have been a good boy too long," he murmured as he hurried down the street. "One can't stay on the straight and narrow path ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... went dragging on for many months, but I had as yet managed to keep it at bay; for though several of my comrades were dead, I survived in health and freedom. Now it chanced one evening that an intimate comrade of mine brought home to supper a Bolognese prostitute named Faustina. She was a very fine woman, but about thirty years of age; and she had with her a little serving-girl of thirteen or fourteen. Faustina belonging to my friend, I would not have touched her for ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini

... Midnight found them still asserting and contradicting. Although they were both agreed now that Kadambini should be got out of the house, although Sripati believed that their guest had deceived his wife all the time by a pretended acquaintance, and Jogmaya that she was a prostitute, yet in the present discussion neither would acknowledge defeat. By degrees their voices became so loud that they forgot that Kadambini was ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore

... woman passed over the line of respectability into the besmeared realm of sheer disrepute, and that person would find Longworth not only accessible but genuinely sympathetic. The drunkard, the thief, the prostitute, the veriest wrecks of humanity could always tell their stories to him and get relief. This was his grim way of striking back at a commercial society whose lies and shams and hypocrisies he hated; he knew them all; he had practiced them himself. There is good reason to believe that alongside of ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... it appears that before marriage all women were formerly obliged by custom to prostitute themselves to strangers at the sanctuary of the goddess, whether she went by the name of Aphrodite, Astarte, or what not. Similar customs prevailed in many parts of Western Asia. Whatever its motive, the practice was clearly regarded, not as an orgy of lust, but as a solemn religious duty performed ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... contemptible fin de siecle, and safe to be even more tyrannously the ruler of the coming century. What hope, I ask you, is left for us poor devils of literary men? None, absolutely none. Just in proportion as we honour our calling and refuse to prostitute our talents we are at a discount. The powers that be have no earthly use for us. We have not the ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... itself insensibly through all the towns of Portugal Many, who had deferred their conversion from time to time, now on the sudden gave themselves up to God, and even renounced the world. The most inveterate enemies were sincerely reconciled, and the most impudent harlots abandoned their prostitute ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden

... Angouleme. A vine, beneath which he loved to recline and muse, may still be seen; it was for a long time called "Calvin's vine." He was still living on the last bounties of a church which he had renounced, and which he called "a stepmother and a prostitute"; and on the presents of a queen gallant, whose morals and piety he lauded, continuing to assist at the Catholic service, and composing Latin orations, which were delivered out of the assembly of the synod, at the temple of St. Peter. He left the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... with women we mean, sexual intercourse out of wedlock. The term applies either to intercourse between any man and a prostitute, between an unmarried man and a married woman, between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman or between a married man and a married woman not his wife. The term, illicit intercourse, applies to all sexual intercourse ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall

... he adds, in a postscript, "that not even parental authority or influence could ever have brought the beautiful and accomplished Miss Theodosia Burr thus to prostitute herself to her father's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... countries is sometimes vice, sometimes crime—among the free of our own, much more aggravated; among slaves, hardly deserves a harsher term than that of weakness. I have heard of complaint made by a free prostitute, of the greater countenance and indulgence shown by society toward colored persons of her profession, (always regarded as of an inferior and servile class, though individually free,) than to those of her own complexion. The former readily obtain employment; ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... mendacity, four had been liars from childhood. She found in them the combination of the general habit of lying underneath the more accentuated form of pseudologia phantastica. One case had perverted sex feeling, one was a prostitute at sixteen years. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy

... is not uncommon amongst the so-called Aryan and Semitic races, while to the African it is all but unknown. Women highly prize a conformation which (as the prostitute described it) is always "either in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... he went on, with a sudden change of tone, "you would rather tell the police when they come; there must be some reason, I suppose, for your bringing that woman, a common prostitute, into my house, and into the presence ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith

... child is begotten in lust, its lower passions will as certainly be abnormally developed as peas will produce peas, or potatoes produce potatoes. If the child does not become a rake or a prostitute, it will be because of uncommonly fortunate surroundings, or a miracle of divine grace. But even then, what terrible struggles with sin and vice, with foul thoughts and lewd imaginations—the product of a naturally abnormal ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... parent will not be questioned by anyone who will do himself or herself the justice to look at it soberly and reverently, without a trace of that tendency to levity or to something worse which here invariably betrays the vulgar mind, whether in a princess or a prostitute. For it needs little reflection to perceive that the most familiar facts of our experience and observation never fail to confirm the doctrine based by Weismann upon the revelations of the microscope when applied to the ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... once to introduce into Scotland the church-government, and to renew, in England, the temporal domination, of his predecessor, Henry VIII. The furious temper of the Scottish nation first took fire; and the brandished footstool of a prostitute[A] gave the signal for civil dissension, which ceased not till the church was buried under the ruins of the constitution; till the nation had stooped to a military despotism; and the monarch to the block of ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... reflect on, for example, Lecky's "History of European Morals," and remember that it was not a profligate or a hedonist, but an honourable and respectable member of a civilized society, who proclaimed the prostitute the high priestess of humanity—the protectress of the purity of a thousand homes[A]—I am prepared to say that to have "no morals at all" is better than to accept such infamy and call it "morals"; as it is better to be an agnostic or an atheist ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden

... violence, and, above all, his want of truth. Brougham made a speech, in which he belaboured the Ministry generally, and many of them by name, with his usual acrimony. Handley, who had a resolution to move, said he regretted to see the chairman prostitute the cause for which they were assembled by making it the vehicle of abuse of the Government, and thus venting his spite, disappointed ambition, and mortified vanity; on which Brougham rose in a great ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... that his shining page (provoking fate!) Defends sirloins, which sons of dulness eat? What foe to verse without compassion hears, What cruel prose-man can refrain from tears, When the poor muse, for less than half a crown, A prostitute on every bulk in town, With other whores undone, tho' not in print, Clubs credit for Geneva in the mint? Ye bards! why will you sing, tho' uninspir'd? Ye bards! why will you starve, to be admir'd? Defunct by Phoebus' laws, beyond ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young

... faintest exaggeration or burlesque. These brigands and cut-throats, pimps and pickpurses are set before us without bravado, without the genteel glaze of the timid painter, without an attempt to call a prostitute a cocotte. Indeed, persons are called by their true names in these hasty sketches of Lautrec's, and so clearly sounded are the names that sometimes you are compelled to close your ears and eyes. His models, with their cavernous glance, their emaciated figures, and vicious expression, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... common run of men have such an ignoble way of thinking that if they debauch their hearts and prostitute their persons, following perhaps a gust of inebriation, the wife, slave rather, whom they maintain has no right to complain, and ought to receive the sultan whenever he deigns to return with open arms, though his have been polluted by half an hundred promiscuous ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... sense, perpetually wearied by trifles, never get any rest. The poet's sensitive nerves are perpetually shocked, and what ought to be his glory becomes his torment; his imagination is his cruelest enemy. The injured workman, the poor mother in childbed, the prostitute who has fallen ill, the foundling, the infirm and aged—even vice and crime here find a refuge and charity; but the world is merciless to the inventor, to the man who thinks. Here everything must show an immediate and practical ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... virtuous hands of Ellen Craft, a wife and mother, whom her Georgian "owner" wished to sell as a harlot at New Orleans! A meeting was summoned at Faneuil Hall, and Boston answered, "Yes, here is the chain. Let the woman-hunter capture Ellen Craft, make her a Prostitute at New Orleans. She is a virtuous wife and mother,—but no matter. Slavery is king and commands it. Let the 'owner' have ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker

... responsible for his death? I, I alone! Do you think that I am so heartless that I can look upon such things with no pang of self-reproach? I wish that I were old and ugly, fortuneless and an outcast—or dead. Then I would not be compelled to prostitute my beauty and my talents to conspire with a rabble of scoundrels and convicts who discuss murder and assassination as if they ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

... with the salary of L500 per annum, or a consulate in the United States, sine cura, would be considered by him as a fair discharge of the obligation of the Government to him for his services. Lord Liverpool was not disposed to prostitute such favours upon a mercenary and intriguing vagrant, and referred him to the Government of Lower Canada, then in charge of Sir George Prevost, who had succeeded Sir James Craig. Henry knew the little estimate that was placed ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson

... they refused to carry out their Government's orders? When they deny justice to a long suffering people? Loyal! Don't prostitute the word. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... did not easily find adequate redress, and the good became an evil. But all this is the necessary attendant on a factitious state of society. Material civilization will lead to an undue estimate of money. And when money purchases all that artificial people desire, then all classes will prostitute themselves for its possession, and justice, dignity, and elevation of sentiment are forced to retreat, as hermits sought a solitude, when society had reached its lowest degradation, out of pure despair ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... you poor blind boy, that I was the woman you were talking about. You never saw it at all. But I am. I was brought up like that.—Oh, not on purpose. Dear old mother! She wasn't trying to make me into a prostitute any more then you are trying to make me into your mistress. You both love me, that's all. It's just an instinct not to let anything hurt me, nor frighten me, nor tire me, nor teach me what work is. She thought she was educating me to ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... kept by her husband, Robert Hogg. Hughson's house on the outskirts of the town was a resort for Negroes, and Hughson himself aided and abetted the Negro men in any crime that they might commit. Romme was of similar quality. Peggy was a prostitute, and it was Caesar who paid for her board with the Hughsons. In the previous summer she had found lodging with these people, a little later she had removed to Romme's, and just before Christmas she had come back to Hughson's, and a few weeks thereafter she became a mother. ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... that man could fill, increased with each successive interview. I never envied that greatness which seems to most men so enviable. The servitude of a constitutional King, so often a puppet in the hands of the worst and meanest of men—those who prostitute their powers as rulers of a State to their interests as chiefs of a faction—must seem pitiable to any rational manhood. But even the autocracy of the Sultan or the Czar seems ill to compensate the utter isolation of the throne; the lonely grandeur of one who can ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... upon them. Aye, Love, into which all else merged—Love for the unknown babe, left helpless and alone on the great river's bank—Love for the radiant child, whose white soul the agents of carnal greed and lust would prostitute ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... most wicked and incorrigible, according to the word of Jer. 2:20: "Thou hast broken My yoke, thou hast burst My bands, and thou hast said: 'I will not serve.' For on every high hill and under every green tree thou didst prostitute thyself." Hence Augustine says (Ep. lxxviii ad Pleb. Hippon.): "From the time I began to serve God, even as I scarcely found better men than those who made progress in monasteries, so have I not found worse than those who in the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... turned on him. She was evidently in a prostitute's tantrum of malicious deviltry. Presently she would begin to lash herself into a ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers

... Law was made severer. Tiberius decreed that no woman, whose grandfather, father or husband had been or still was a Roman Knight, could prostitute herself for money. Married women, who caused themselves to be entered in the registers of prostitutes, were condemned to banishment from Italy as adulteresses. Of course, there were no such punishments for the men. Moreover, as Juvenal reports, even the murder of husbands by poison was a frequent ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... happiness, though he uses neither flattery, nor bribery, nor intrigue, nor deceit; instead of loading you with praise, he will point you to the better way. I scoff at Cleon's tricks and plotting; honesty and justice shall fight my cause; never will you find me a political poltroon, a prostitute to the highest bidder. ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... the flippancy of her manner. She rose to her full stature, and said with punitive lips: "He has made our maid an ordinary prostitute, and the consequences are no longer to be concealed. Do you know what ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... is a prostitute which must be sent about her business with kicks when one is in the right. [To her friend Adolphe Gueroult. La Chatre, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... interlocutor maintaining the Epicurean, the second the Stoical, and the third the Christian standard. The sympathies of the author are plainly with the champion of hedonism, who maintains that pleasure is the supreme good in life, or rather the only good, that the prostitute is better than the nun, for the one makes men happy, the other is dedicated to a painful and shameful celibacy; that the law against adultery is a sort of sacrilege; that women should be common and should go naked; and that it is irrational to die for one's country or for any other ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... confesses he was often obliged "to pen unedifying toys for gentlemen." When Harvey denounced him for "emulating Aretino's licentiousness" he admitted that poverty had occasionally forced him to prostitute his pen "in hope of gain" by penning "amorous Villanellos and Quipasses for new-fangled galiards and newer Fantisticos." In fact, he seems rarely to have known what it was to be otherwise than the subject of distress and need. As an example of these "unedifying toys" the present poem may, ...
— The Choise of Valentines - Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo • Thomas Nash

... Viola was not even his step-sister. He experienced a thrill of joy over that,—notwithstanding the ugly truth that gave her the new standing; to his simple, straightforward mind, Viola's mother was nothing more than a prostitute. (In his thoughts he employed another word, for he lived in a day when prostitutes were called by another name.) Still, Viola was not to blame for that. That could ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon

... mounted the car of shamelessness." These latter are now called, are compelled to carry out the dead (among whom are their lovers), and to make clean the place of slaughter. Then they are led out and hung: such was the ancient fate of the prostitute ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... reconciliation, he takes fresh umbrage, and sends money to her for her complaisance with another letter of more abominable insult than ever. Now it is bad to insult any one of whom you have been fond; worse to insult any woman; but to insult a prostitute, faugh![359] ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... from curiosity, monsieur," he said at last. "It is not my habit to prostitute a power which, according to my conviction, emanates from God; if I made a frivolous or unworthy use of it, it would be taken from me. Nevertheless, there is some hope, Monsieur Bouvard tells me, of changing the opinions of ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac

... of faults and perfections. The tragic is sometimes pushed to the grotesque, but from the depths it brings the pearls of truth. A convict becomes holier than the saint, a prostitute purer than the nun. This book fills the gutter with the glory of heaven, while the waters of the sewer ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... too intelligent a woman to be cured by an incantation. When you feel surging up within you the sense of God's goodness, or when you actually want to realize His loving kindness, then by all means repeat the verses. But don't prostitute those wonderful words by making them into a charm and then expect them to cure your indigestion. It is a desecration of the words and a denial of your own intelligence. Autosuggestion is a powerful force, but real psychotherapy is based not on the mechanical ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... him condemned to serve the passions of all that surround him ... to raise degraded men to power, to prostitute his judgement by ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... avowed Concubine: All Bavaria was scandalized by her impudent and abandoned conduct. Her feasts vied in luxury with Cleopatra's, and Lindenberg became the Theatre of the most unbridled debauchery. Not satisfied with displaying the incontinence of a Prostitute, She professed herself an Atheist: She took every opportunity to scoff at her monastic vows, and loaded with ridicule the most sacred ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis

... fine gunsmith; I had him build a deer-rifle for Dot, a couple of years ago—Mexican-Mauser action, Johnson barrel, chambered for .300 Savage; Umholtz made the stock and fitted a scope-sight—it's a beautiful little rifle. I hate to see him prostitute his talents the way he does by making these fake antiques for Rivers. You know, he made one of these mythical heavy .44 six-shooters of the sort Colt was supposed to have turned out at Paterson in 1839 for Colonel Walker's Texas Rangers—you know, the model he couldn't find any ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper

... only does it appear that your mind is as impure as though none of the influences to which I have referred had been brought to bear upon it, but it seems as though their only result had been this—that you have not even the common sense to be able to distinguish between a respectable girl and a prostitute. ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... the girl would be that of a prostitute. She might be married by the temple priests to the god Khandoka, as thousands of widows had been, and thus become a nun of the temple, a prostitute to the celibate priests. Knowing all this, and that Bootea was what she ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... publishing house is a private business undertaking, and often stands for class, party, or sectarian interests before those of the whole of society. There is always a temptation to sacrifice principle to policy, to publish distorted or half-true statements from selfish interest, and to prostitute influence to individuals or groups that care little for the public welfare. The publication of a statement or narrative of a crime or other misdemeanor tends by suggestion to the imitation of the wrong by others; it is a well-known fact that a sensational story of suicide or murder is likely ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... letter from the Abb Tolbiac: "Madame, the hand of God is weighing heavily on you. You refused Him your child; He took him from you in His turn to cast him into the hands of a prostitute. Will not you open your eyes at this lesson from Heaven? God's mercy is infinite. Perhaps He may pardon you if you return and fall on your knees before Him. I am His humble servant. I will open to you the door of His dwelling when you come ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... Simon Magus! woe to you, His wretched followers! who the things of God, Which should be wedded unto goodness, them, Rapacious as ye are, do prostitute For gold and silver in adultery! Now must the trumpet sound for you, since yours Is the third chasm. Upon the following vault We now had mounted, where the rock impends Directly o'er the centre of ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... second-class house, where the proprietress is more cruel and exacting, and where the visitors are rougher and ruder than those who frequented the place in which the lost one began her career. Two or three years in these houses is the average, and by this time the woman has become a thorough prostitute. She has lost her refinement, and, it may be, has added drunkenness to her other sin, and has become full-mouthed and reckless. She has sunk too low to be fit for even such a place as this, and she is turned out without pity to take the next step in her ruin. Greene street, with its ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... all give way, And conscience dies, the prostitute of play. Eternity ne'er steals one thought between, Till suicide completes ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... instances of people needing help. He knows how to make the heart beat at a brave story; to inflame us with just resentment over the hunted slave; to stop our mouths for shame when he tells of the drunken prostitute. For all the afflicted, all the weak, all the wicked, a good word is said in a spirit which I can only call one of ultra Christianity; and however wild, however contradictory, it may be in parts, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... "go to see the girls," as the phrase is, because they think that otherwise "they are not real men." More subtle in its evil effect, yet somewhat less dangerous physically, perhaps, than the professional prostitute is the lure of the "hidden" prostitute, who carefully conceals her derelictions, and publicly wraps herself in ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton

... had conquered thee, And changed the object of thy will, It had been lethargy in me, Not constancy, to love thee still. Yea, it had been a sin to go And prostitute affection so, Since we are taught no prayers to say To such as ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... calls off all her sneaking train, And all th' obliged desert, and all the vain; She waits, or to the scaffold, or the cell, When the last lingering friend has bid farewell. Ev'n now, she shades thy evening walk with bays, (No hireling she, no prostitute of praise) Ev'n now, observant of the parting ray, Eyes the calm sun-set of thy various day; Thro' fortune's cloud ONE truly great can see, Nor fears to ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... duty to give testimony to virtue. It is true, your lordship is not of that nature, which either seeks a commendation, or wants it. Your mind has always been above the wretched affectation of popularity. A popular man is, in truth, no better than a prostitute to common fame, and to the people. He lies down to every one he meets for the hire of praise; and his humility is only a disguised ambition. Even Cicero himself, whose eloquence deserved the admiration of mankind, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden

... these women: 'Thy faith hath saved thee.' To the other one it was even more needful to say it than to this poor penitent prostitute, because that other one had the notion that, somehow or other, she could steal away the blessing of healing by contact of her finger with the robe of Jesus. Therefore He was careful to lift her above that sensuous ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... been. Rome was, however, very far from receiving the advantages she had expected; the inconceivable wickedness of Constantinople was brought into Italy. Pope Sylverius, who was the son of Pope Hormisdas, was deposed by Theodora, the emperor's wife. This woman, once a common prostitute, sold the papacy to Vigilius for two hundred pounds of gold. Her accomplice, Antonina, the unprincipled wife of Belisarius, had Sylverius stripped of his robes and habited as a monk. He was subsequently banished to the old convict island of Pandataria, and there died. Vigilius embraced ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... over allusions in Juvenal and Martial,[FN186] we find Eusebius relating that Galerius died (A.D. 302) of ulcers on the genitals and other parts of his body; and, about a century afterwards, Bishop Palladius records that one Hero, after conversation with a prostitute, fell a victim to an abscess on the penis (phagedaenic shanker?). In 1347 the famous Joanna of Naples founded (aet. 23), in her town of Avignon, a bordel whose in- mates were to be medically inspected a measure to which England (proh pudor!) still objects. In ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... explaining to the Duchess that the jewels of the murdered prostitute had been given as a present by the suspected murderer to another girl of the same stamp, the door of the large drawing-room opened wide once more, and two blond women in white lace, a creamy Mechlin, resembling each other like ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant

... Simon of Samaria, from whom all heresies derive their origin, has as the material for his sect the following: Having redeemed from slavery at Tyre, a city of Phoenicia, a certain woman named Helena,(38) a prostitute, he was in the habit of carrying her about with him, declaring that she was the first conception [Ennoea] of his mind, the mother of all, by whom he conceived in his mind to make the angels and archangels. For this ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... easily received impressions from objects, and very forcibly transmitted them to others. Of his exact observations on human life he has left a proof, which would do honour to the greatest names, in a small pamphlet, called "The Author to be Let," where he introduces Iscariot Hackney, a prostitute scribbler, giving an account of his birth, his education, his disposition and morals, habits of life, and maxims of conduct. In the introduction are related many secret histories of the petty writers of that ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson

... a kind of ecclesiastical Falstaff. A most immoral, licentious Dominican, who for money would prostitute even the Church and Holy Scriptures. Dominick helped Lorenzo in his amour with Elvi'ra the wife ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... honest hands in order to earn a supper for the household, she sees passing along the street on the head or on the body of a public woman. Thirty times a day a hired carriage stops before the door and there steps out a prostitute, numbered as is the hack in which she rides, who stands before a glass and primps, taking off and putting on the results of many days' work on the part of the poor girl who watches her. She sees that woman draw from ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... man of professed gallantry? impossible. To me, a common rake is as odious as a common prostitute is to a man of the nicest feelings. Where can be the joy, the pride, of inspiring a passion which fifty others ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald

... prostitute tell her tale? Who will give her help in the day of need? Hers is the leper sin, and all stand aloof dreading to ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... wont sometimes to bring thither a woman for his pleasure, and after keeping her there for a few days to escort her thence again. Now on one of these occasions it befell that he brought thither one Niccolosa, whom a vile fellow, named Mangione, kept in a house at Camaldoli as a common prostitute. And a fine piece of flesh she was, and wore fine clothes, and for one of her sort, knew how to comport herself becomingly and ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio

... slanderous falsehoods which they have given to the public; of corrupt officials, who have brought false accusations against us to screen themselves in their own infamy; and of hireling priests and howling editors, who prostitute the truth for filthy ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... of our courts. It is time for the medical and pharmaceutic professions to unite, and unmask this monster, and show the public its true nature. And this can be accomplished in no better way than through a study of the object of the laws which the secret nostrum manufacturers are now endeavoring to prostitute for their own advantage, and the teaching of the public what these laws ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... distinguish the madness produced by evil passions from the madness produced by brandy. A prisoner affirmed that the witnesses who appeared against him were not entitled to credit. One of them, he said, was a Papist, and another a prostitute. "Thou impudent rebel," exclaimed the Judge, "to reflect on the King's evidence! I see thee, villain, I see thee already with the halter round thy neck." Another produced testimony that he was a good Protestant. "Protestant!" ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... furies! ha! she comes to seek him!— O prostitute!—and, on her prodigal flesh, She has lavished all the diamonds of the Guise, To set her off, and ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden

... in common as the confidants of his amours, which certainly were neither suitable to the lustre of his actions nor the grandeur of his life; for Marion de Lorme, one of his mistresses, was little better than a common prostitute. Another of his concubines was Madame de Fruges, that old gentlewoman who was so often seen sauntering in the enclosure. The first used to come to his apartment in the daytime, and he went by night to visit the other, who was but the pitiful cast-off of Buckingham and Epienne. The two confidants ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz

... of the will of the majority of the party, but we kindly caution those who disturb and divide us, that their conduct will result only in the merited retribution which an indignant people will visit upon those who prostitute their temporary power to ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... with the theogonies of the Far East. She no longer sprang from biblical traditions, could no longer even be assimilated with the living image of Babylon, the royal Prostitute of the Apocalypse, garbed like her in jewels and purple, and painted like her; for she was not hurled by a fatidical power, by a supreme force, into the alluring ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... Shadwell, Amorous Widow (1690), Act iii: 'Her mother sells fish and she is little better than a bulker.' A bulker was the lowest class of prostitute. cf. Shadwell's The Scowerers, Act i, I: 'Every one in a petticoat is thy mistress, from humble bulker to haughty countess.' Bailey (1790) has: 'Bulker, one that would lie down on a bulk to any one. A common Jilt. A whore.' Swift, A ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn

... honourable member struck at the very root of monarchy. Mr. Rice proceeded to deny that politics had influenced ministers in their grant of pensions to literary and scientific men, as had been asserted by Mr. Grote, and expressed his belief that were any government disposed so to prostitute its power, there was a spirit in literature and science which would save talent from the disgrace of such political profligacy. Mr. Grote's motion was further opposed by Mr. Charles Buller, albeit he was his friend. He differed from him both as to tire ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... Even the Puritan colonies had to contend with it. In 1638 Josselyn, writing of New England said: "There are many strange women too (in Solomon's sense,"). Phoebe Kelly, the mother of Madam Jumel, second wife of Aaron Burr, made her living as a prostitute, and was at least twice (1772 and 1785) driven from disorderly resorts at Providence, and for the second offense was imprisoned. Ben Franklin frequently speaks of such women and of such haunts in Philadelphia, and, with characteristic indifference, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... I am helpless. I do not believe that those men have been spirited into China. Even if it were so, they would die, as I would die, rather than prostitute their talents ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer



Words linked to "Prostitute" :   demimondaine, lady of pleasure, hustler, cyprian, whore, woman, street girl, street-walk, adult female, white slave, tart, comfort woman, call girl, floozy, hooker, streetwalker, streetwalk



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