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Debauchery   /dəbˈɔtʃəri/   Listen
Debauchery

noun
(pl. debaucheries)
1.
A wild gathering involving excessive drinking and promiscuity.  Synonyms: bacchanal, bacchanalia, debauch, drunken revelry, orgy, riot, saturnalia.






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"Debauchery" Quotes from Famous Books



... nothing more seemly in the world, than to see a Christian walk as becomes the Gospel; nor any thing more unbecoming a reasonable creature, than to hear a man say, I believe in Christ, and yet see in his life debauchery and profaneness. Might I, such men should be counted the basest of men; such men should be counted by all unworthy of the name of a Christian, and should be shunned by every good man, as such who are the ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan

... his heart. It was almost as if all feeling had passed from him, absorbed in a deep curiosity at the signs which the years had set upon a once handsome face. Even in death they remained. And only a dreadful pallor robbed it of the deeper signs which debauchery had impressed. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum

... talent and audacity. He was a man of gigantic size, and possessed a voice of thunder. His countenance was that of an Ogre on the shoulders of a Hercules. He was as fond of the pleasures of vice as of the practice of cruelty; and it was said there were times when he became humanized amidst his debauchery, laughed at the terror which his furious declamations excited, and might be approached with safety, like the Maelstrom at the turn of tide. His profusion was indulged to an extent hazardous to his popularity, for the populace are jealous of a lavish expenditure, as raising ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various

... passions drawing down the creative force from the higher planes, to waste it on the lower; till at last what had been an attempt of the Spirit to lift humanity up on to nobler lines of evolution, and to open a new order of ages, expires in debauchery, weakness, degeneracy, physical and moral death. The worst fate you could wish a man is genius without moral strength. It wrecks individuals, and it wrecks nations. I said we stand now on an isthmus of time; fifth-century Greece stood on such another. For ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... narrative in prose, the Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle, has borne the lapse of time ill. "J'y ai vomi la verite," he said. It is not the happiest way of communicating truth, and the moral of the book, that debauchery ends in cynicism, was not left for Musset to discover. Some of his shorter tales have the charm of fancy or the charm of tenderness, with breathings of nature here, and there the musky fragrance of a Louis-Quinze boudoir. Pierre et Camille, with its deaf-and-dumb ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... spending perhaps as much as five million dollars a year in Africa and accomplishing much good, but at the same time white merchants are sending at least twenty million dollars' worth of European liquor into Africa each year, and the debauchery of the almost unrestricted rum traffic goes far to neutralize ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois

... all the leading public buildings, columns generally forming the external, and arches the internal construction. Fabric after fabric arose on the ruins of others. The Flavii supplanted the edifices of Nero, which ministered to debauchery, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... writings about religion," should make him an object of interest and respect. The "Aurora's" own correspondent sent to his paper a favorable sketch of Paine's appearance, manner, and conversation: He was "proud to find a man whom he had admired free from the contaminations of debauchery and the habits of inebriety which have been so grossly and falsely sent abroad concerning him." But the enemy had ten guns to Paine's one, and served them with all the fierceness of party-hate. A shower of abusive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... subsided of its own accord, and, with his two fists on his hips, he surveyed the assembled guests with a melancholy and defiant air. The fatigue of bivouacs, absinthe, and fever, an entire existence of wretchedness and debauchery, stood revealed in his dull eyes. His white lips quivered, exposing the gums. The vast sky, empurpled, enveloped him in a blood-red light; and his obstinacy in remaining there caused ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert

... the hearth-stone, which scarcely are seen by the chronicler busy with kings and popes. There are superstitions and mummeries; wild fears of spectres and devils; sentimental piety handed with cruelty and debauchery. There are inward struggles, sorrows, achievements; rapturous glimpses, tender consolations; the ministry of faithful priests; the comforting of women and the purifying of men by the thought of the Virgin Mother and the saints. There are civilizers in state and church,—Alfred, Charlemagne, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... man and the many injuries I had received from him, and the attempt to save the bridge foremost in my mind, I found excuse for lack of the finer feelings. And, too, what would it benefit had he been saved? His life was spent in debauchery, the gambling table and plots to overthrow any government where a leader in opposition to the ruling power would promise him ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds

... plumbers, and see them roll from their roofs; (Lacretelle, Histoire de France pendant le 18me Siecle (Paris, 1819) i. 271.) but contents himself with partridges and grouse. Close-viewed, their industry and function is that of dressing gracefully and eating sumptuously. As for their debauchery and depravity, it is perhaps unexampled since the era of Tiberius and Commodus. Nevertheless, one has still partly a feeling with the lady Marechale: "Depend upon it, Sir, God thinks twice before damning a man of that quality." (Dulaure, vii. 261.) These people, of old, surely ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... such exploits worthy of a man, then I do not account him brave. And, indeed, if modesty, and decency, and chastity, and, in one word, temperance, is only upheld by the fear of punishment or infamy, and not out of regard to their own sanctity, then what lengths will adultery and debauchery and lust shrink from proceeding to, if there is a hope either of escaping detection, or of obtaining ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... from generation to generation, and this is why the morals, intelligence and progress of Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippine Islands, are to-day on the same plane of depravity as they were centuries ago, and no one is to blame for this carnality and debauchery of the inhabitants of these islands but the Roman Catholic Church, and until the Government of the United States shall declare and back up her declaration by Protestant manhood, the inhabitants of these islands will never know of the beauties of chastity ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg

... New York. All, or nearly all confectionaries injurious. Physical evils attending their use. Intellectual evils. Moral evils. The last most to be dreaded. Slaves to confectionary are on the road to gluttony, drunkenness, or debauchery—perhaps ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott

... of the name of Fishbourne in the reign of Charles II. published a vile play, called Sodom, so detestably obscene, that the earl of Rochester, then in the full career of licentiousness and debauchery, finding it ascribed to him, thought it necessary publicly to disclaim the infamy of the authorship. This circumstance, coupled with the gross tendency of most of even the best plays of that time, must convey to the reader a tolerably correct idea how far the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various

... peasants have vodka, the educated young people, shut out from activity, waste themselves in impossible dreams and visions and are crippled by theories; Jews have sprung up and are amassing money, and all the rest give themselves up to debauchery. From the first hour the town reeked of its familiar odours. I chanced to be in a frightful den—I like my dens dirty—it was a dance, so called, and there was a cancan such as I never saw in my day. Yes, there you have ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... scream. Sentences trod on one another's heels, so rapid was his delivery; or bumped and jolted so overlaid was it with emphasis. He, dealt in ugly words, too—"lies, drunkenness, theft, profanity;" and worse still, "uncleanness, adultery, carnal debauchery." For not venial sins only, but mortal sins likewise were rife in Deadham, as he averred, matters of common knowledge and everyday occurrence—tolerated if not openly encouraged, callously winked at. The public conscience could hardly be said to exist, so indurated was it, so moribund ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... being, and a probability of being thought, the lord's child. In the West Indies it cannot have these effects, because the mulatto is marked by nature different from the father, and because there is no bond, no law, no custom, but of mere debauchery.—1815. ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... correspondent wants to have a good story spoiled? In just twenty-seven days from that on which Zenobia bade farewell to Manila her winged words were flashed all over the States, and by thousands were the stones swallowed that death, disease, pestilence and famine, bribery and corruption, vice and debauchery, desertion and demoralization ran riot in the army at Manila, all due to the incapacity, if not actual complicity, of officers in high position. But mercifully were they spared the knowledge of these astonishing facts until the papers themselves began to reach the Eighth ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King

... reveals his love as though he told the tale of another, but he is met with scorn and only bidden to fight the husband who has repulsed her. Bellmour, meantime, in despair and rage at his misery plunges into reckless debauchery, and in company with Sir Timothy visits a bagnio, where they meet Betty Flauntit, the knight's kept mistress, and other cyprians. Hither they are tracked by Charles, Bellmour's younger brother, and Trusty, Lord Plotwell's old ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn

... with? And what is an army without discipline, subordination, and obedience? What, but a rabble of licentious vagrants, set free from the common restraints of decency, exempted from the necessity of labour, betrayed by idleness to debauchery, and let loose to prey upon the people? Such a herd can only awe the villages, and bluster in the streets, but can never be able to oppose an enemy, or defend the nation ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson

... skins; their foreheads are covered with wrinkles, their hair scanty and dirty, like a wig thrown on a dust-heap. All are gay in their degradation, and degraded in their joys; all are marked with the stamp of debauchery, casting their silence as a reproach; their very attitude revealing fearful thoughts. Placed between crime and beggary they have no compunctions, and circle prudently around the scaffold without mounting it, innocent in the midst of crime, and vicious in their ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... in eating appears! Miserably hot with gluttonous debauchery. He has feasted upon a thousand deaths! Belshazzar's court fed on fish of every type, birds of every flight, brutes of every clime, and added thereto each finer luxury known in the catalogue of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... well employed in any thing that is innocent, and are fortunate in finding any occupation which prevents the effects of a temper that would prey upon themselves, or upon their fellow creatures. But they who are blessed with a happy disposition, with capacity and vigour, incur a real debauchery, by having any amusement that occupies an improper share of their time; and are really cheated of their happiness, in being made to believe, that any occupation or pastime is better fitted to amuse themselves, than ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.

... in its day as Caleb Williams, mingles a romance of the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone with an ardent recommendation of those family affections which Political Justice had depreciated. Fleetwood (1805) makes war on debauchery with sincere and impressive dulness. Mandeville (1817), Cloudesley (1830) and Deloraine (1833) are dead beyond the reach of curiosity, yet the Radical critics of his day, including Hazlitt, tried hard ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... that unequalled throne, his face sickly pale with boyish debauchery; his young fore head worn with the premature sensual wrinkles of lust; and his eyes bloodshot with last night's intemperance. He sits there, the Emperor-boy, vainly trying to excite himself, ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale

... Mary might legitimately object. Since his emancipation from the Tower he had wandered into folly and debauchery; he was vain and inexperienced, and his insolence was kept in check only by the quality so rare in an Englishman of personal timidity. But to refuse Courtenay was one thing, to fasten her choice on ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude

... of society, poisoned at once the source 220of morals and of manners; for there can be nothing gentlemanlike in atheism, radicalism, and the level, ling system. To this state of things succeeded a reign of terror, assassination, and debauchery; and lastly, a military despotism, in which the private soldier rose to the marshals baton; a groom in the stables of the Prince of Conde saw himself ennobled; peers and generals had brothers still ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... which, seeming to extend over the whole land, affected nobles and people with its baleful influence. All law was at an end: the people, even while they murmured against the King, followed his evil example; and history shrinks from the scenes of debauchery and licentiousness, robbery and murder, which desecrated the land. But this state of things could not last long, while there still remained some noble hearts amongst the Castilians. Five years after their ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar

... and truth was the one keystone that kept the fabric of my past life together—the one star that lit the thick black darkness of the future. I was hail-fellow-well-met with bad men; I was in the center of riot, drunkenness, and debauchery; but the purifying influence of my love kept me safe from all. Thin and gaunt, the half-starved shadow of what I once had been, I saw myself one day in a broken bit of looking-glass, and was frightened by my own face. But I toiled on through all; through ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon

... all London: into worse, because keeping a house of conveniency, there were no lengths in lewdness she would not advise me to go, in compliance with her customers; no schemes, or pleasure, or even unbounded debauchery, she did not take even a delight in promoting: into a better, because nobody having had more experience of the wicked part of the town than she had, was fitter to advise and guard one against the worst dangers of our ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland

... sensibility, is missing. He has control of his technical forces and he never indulged in such nervous excesses as Kubin. Besides, he is sincere, while the other is usually cynical. He deals with the same old counters, love and death, debauchery and consequent corruption. He is an exponent of feverish visions, yet you never feel that he is borne down by his contact with dwellers on the threshold. A border-lander, as is Maurice Maeterlinck, Munch has a more precise vision; in a word he is ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... and were better provided with munitions of war; yet the pirates, fighting with the bravery of desperate men, were victorious, and the city fell into their hands. Then followed days of murder, plunder, and debauchery. Morgan saw his followers, maddened by liquor, scoff at the idea of discipline and obedience. Fearing that while his men were helplessly drunk the Spaniards would rally and cut them to pieces, he set fire to the city, that the stores of rum might be destroyed. ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... nephew, to hate the great captain as he himself did. He sought to infuse jealousy into his mind and to lead him to believe that Hunyady aimed at the crown. His slanders found the readier credence in the mind of the youthful sovereign as he was completely stupefied by an uninterrupted course of debauchery. At last the King was brought to agree to a plan for ensnaring the great man who so often jeoparded his life and his substance in the defence of his country and religion. They summoned him in the King's name to Vienna, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson

... unrestrained by moral laws, spends his days in sloth, his nights in debauchery. He smokes hashish till he stupefies his senses or falls into convulsions; he drinks palm-wine till he brings on a loathsome disease; he abuses children, stabs the poor brute of a woman whose hands keep him from starvation, and ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... be called the Puritan impulse from within. It is, indeed, but a single manifestation of one of the deepest prejudices of a religious and half-cultured people—the prejudice against beauty as a form of debauchery and corruption—the distrust of all ideas that do not fit readily into certain accepted axioms—the belief in the eternal validity of moral concepts—in brief, the whole mental sluggishness of the lower orders ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... but the custom of the Roman generals, which Trajan would doubtless have followed, was to divide the most fertile districts amongst their veteran soldiers,[100] and therefore, if the charges of cowardice and debauchery made by Carra were true, they would apply to the bravest in the legions who had conquered the almost indomitable Decebalus. But Carra lived and wrote at a time (A.D. 1777) when cool judgment could hardly be expected in a writer on Roumania, and if he were alive to-day he would be ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... themselves. It is not for weak beings, who enter into a composition with guilt, and cover selfishness and cowardice with the name of prudence. It is not for corrupt wretches, who rise from the bed of debauchery, or from the mire of indigence, to feast their eyes upon the blood that streams from the scaffold. It is the portion of a people who delight in humanity, practice justice, despise their flatterers, and respect the truth. While you are not such a people, O my fellow-citizens! ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... France and Austria. Maria Theresa, without the knowledge of her ministers, or even of her husband the emperor, privately conducted these negotiations with the Marchioness du Pompadour. M. Kaunitz was the agent employed by the queen in this transaction. Louis XV., sunk in the lowest depths of debauchery, consented to any arrangements his mistress might propose. But when the treaty was all matured it became necessary to present it to the Council of State. The queen, knowing how astounded her husband would be to learn what she had been doing, and aware of the shock ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott

... roadhouse was but the beginning. All at once Vandover rushed into a career of dissipation, consumed with the desire of vice, the perverse, blind, and reckless desire of the male. Drunkenness, sensuality, gambling, debauchery, he knew them all. He rubbed elbows with street walkers, with bookmakers, with saloonkeepers, with the exploiters of lost women. The bartenders of the city called him by his first name, the policemen, the night detail, were ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... with those who have your prejudices without your sense! But note well that they are not oftener in company—these tastes and vices—than honesty and meanness, good-nature and clownishness, sincerity and brutality, hospitality and debauchery, chastity and the absence of that virtue without which all others are as nothing. And let me remind you, by the way, that we of this age and generation make it our business, in fact, feel it our duty, to violate the injunction of the English ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... the Lord's tribute was thirty and two." In short, the matters contained in this chapter, as well as in many other parts of the Bible, are too horrid for humanity to read, or for decency to hear; for it appears, from the 35th verse of this chapter, that the number of women-children consigned to debauchery by the order of Moses was ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... table, we could see what passes in each bosom around, we would seek dens and caverns to shun human society! To see the projector trembling for his falling speculations; the voluptuary rueing the event of his debauchery; the miser wearing out his soul for the loss of a guinea—all—all bent upon vain hopes and vainer regrets—we should not need to go to the hall of the Caliph Vathek to see men's hearts broiling under their black veils.[402] Lord keep ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... those days, so the street outside Newgate had not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since attached to it. But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and villainy were practised, and where dire diseases were bred, that came into court with the prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself, and pulled him ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... was bold enough to speak. "If you are indeed Ulysses, great are your wrongs, for your property has been, squandered, and riot and debauchery have filled your palace. But at your feet now lies Antinous, whose wild ambition meant to slay your son and divide your kingdom. Since he is dead, spare the rest of your people. Our gold and treasures shall defray the expense, and the waste ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester

... splay-footed. To give him his right, he had the most piercing judgment naturally upon a figure of theft, and many other questions, that I ever met withal; yet for money he would willingly give contrary judgments; was much addicted to debauchery, and then very abusive and quarrelsome; seldom without a black eye or one mischief or other. This is the same Evans who made so many antimonial cups, upon the sale whereof he chiefly subsisted. He understood Latin very well, the Greek tongue not all; he had ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... and courteous. This character and their dress are accounted for by their long subjection to tyranny. They are "profoundly immoral," have indecent dances, and are dying out on account of the "exhaustion of men and women by premature debauchery."[1457] The Kavirondo are naked, but are, "for negroes, a moral race, disliking real indecency and only giving way to lewd actions in their ceremonial dances, where indeed the intention is not immodest, as the pantomime ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... consequences. The bonds of society were loosened; natural affection seemed to vanish; friend deserted friend, mothers even fled from their children; demoralization showed itself in many instances in reckless debauchery. An interesting example remains to us in Boccaccio's "Decameron," whose stories were told by a group of pleasure-lovers who had fled from ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris

... end of this childish detour his wife awaited him, not less surely because she was only his wife in name. He was too weak. Books and friends were not enough. Little by little she would claim him and corrupt him and make him what he had been; and the woman he loved would die out, in drunkenness, in debauchery, and her strength would be dissipated by a man, her beauty defiled in a man. She would not continue. That mystic rose and the face it illumined meant nothing. The stream—he was above it now—meant nothing, though it burst from ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster

... knights, displaying constantly, amidst all these contradictions of bearing, only the overflowing of nature. Thus prepared, they could take in everything, sanguinary ferocity and refined generosity, the brutality of shameless debauchery, and the most divine innocence of love, accept all the characters, wantons and virgins, princes and mountebanks, pass quickly from trivial buffoonery to lyrical sublimities, listen alternately to the quibbles ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... his own house of Newmilns, he was at first generally supposed to have drowned himself. But, the body having been hastily buried, a report arose that he had been strangled by ruffians, instigated by his son Philip, a profligate youth, whom be had disinherited on account of his gross debauchery. Upon this rumour, the Privy Council granted warrant to two surgeons of character, named Crawford and Muirhead, to dig up the body, and to report the state in which they should find it. Philip was present on this occasion, and the evidence of both surgeons bears distinctly, that he stood for some ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... among them may be chosen those tight-laced officers who make the court-residences of Europe look like camps; or, as they are often the sons of noblemen or rich parents, they may reach some of the sinecures in the State. They make their student-years but a pretext for a life of rough debauchery, from which they issue with a bought diploma; and, in many cases, satiated and disgusted with their own lives, they dwindle down into the timeserving reactionaries, the worst enemies of free development, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... didactic, that Ibsen was strongly on the side of some of his characters and strongly against others, that there was preaching and public spirit in the work of good dramatists; and that if this were not so, dramatists and all other artists would be mere panders of intellectual debauchery, to be locked up as the Puritans locked up the stage players. No one can understand Bernard Shaw who does not give full value to this early revolt of his on behalf of ethics against the ruling school of l'art pour l'art. It ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... persons whose brains are unbalanced by immoderate habits of thought, who are suffering from that primary kind of intoxication which the dictionary tells us is simply a condition of the mind wherein clear judgment is obscured? There is sometimes a debauchery in the reasoning faculties of the polite which sends their opinions rollicking on their way just as drink will send a man staggering up the highroad. Temperance and sobriety are virtues which in their relation to thought have a greater value than they possess in any other regard; ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall

... this eternal babble of the economists about the improvidence of laborers, their idleness, their want of dignity, their ignorance, their debauchery, their early marriages, etc.? All these vices and excesses are only the cloak of pauperism; but the cause, the original cause which inexorably holds four-fifths of the human race in disgrace,—what is it? Did not Nature make all men equally gross, averse to labor, wanton, and ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... ties with Angelique. But it was his fate, his cursed crook, he called it, ever to be overborne by some woman or other, and he resolved that Le Gardeur should pay for it with his money, and be so flooded by wine and debauchery that Angelique herself would repent that she ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... expressed also by the analogous designations: man of blood, of deceit, etc.—Calvin says, "She is called a wife of whoredoms, because she was long accustomed to them, gave herself over to the lusts of all indiscriminately, did not prostitute herself once, or twice, or to a few, but to the debauchery of every one." It is not without reason that "take" is connected with the children also. The prophet shall, as it were, receive and take, along with the wife, those who, without his agency, have been born of her. It is self-evident, and has been, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg

... first start, and they damned the blackguards pretty freely. In numberless instances the blackguards were to all intents and purposes damned before Muggleton's sentence was pronounced. They were fellows given over to drink and debauchery, sots who had not much life in them, scoundrels who were in hiding, skulking in the vilest holes of the city, whom the plague or famine would be likely to rid the world of any day. They died frequently enough after the sentence ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... reckless courses to expatriate themselves in search of fortunes with which to return and resume their extravagances in Spain; contemptuous of all forms of labour, they passed their enforced exile in gambling, dicing, and debauchery in the company of their Indian mistresses, chosen among the native beauties. They alternately courted the favour of the Viceroy or intrigued against him as seemed most profitable to their interests; they displayed few of ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... for the sustaining coca leaf they would be unable to undergo such excessive toil. When rich veins are struck, the wages of the miners increase, but in most instances they spend them in drinking and debauchery, while the proprietors of the mines are ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston

... and gave himself to a life of debauchery; he cared little for the boy-king, whose education and training he grievously neglected. His foreign policy was weak and vacillating, and his several efforts to reform abuses in the political and economic institutions of Louis XIV invariably ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... some pity for this monarch of twenty-three years, born with fine talents, a taste for literature and the arts, a character naturally generous, whom an execrable mother had tried to deprave by all the abuses of debauchery and power?" ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... spoken, Count Hector de Tremorel. The count intended to remain but a short time at Valfeuillu; but weeks passed and then months, and he still remained. It was not surprising. Hector had passed a very stormy youth, full of debauchery, of clubs, of gambling, and of amours. He had thrown to the winds of his caprices an immense fortune; the relatively calm life of Valfeuillu was a relief. At first people said to him, 'You will soon have enough of the country.' He smiled, but said nothing. ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau

... excitement during the night, for the country was full of soldiers. The mountaineers of Virginia were rushing to the standard of rebellion. They were a wild, rude set of men, and they made the night hideous with their debauchery. Tom succeeded in keeping out of the way of the straggling parties which were roaming here and there; but he was filled with dread and anxiety lest he should, at the next moment, stumble upon a camp, or ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic

... thrown upon London streets, their vices and debauchery, by a sordid and rapacious mother. What the younger girl was then, the elder had been once; and what the elder then was, the younger must soon become. A melancholy prospect, but how surely to be realised; a tragic drama, but how ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... which leaves them just sufficient life to feel the worst pangs of humanity. Yes: to live at such a price is virtue! Yes, society thus organized, whether it tolerates or imposes so much misery, loses all right to blame the poor wretches who sell themselves not through debauchery, but because they are cold and famishing. This poor girl spent ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... delights of home, sick of the companionship of gentle sisters, the love of a fond mother, and wishing to be back again at the old uproarious wine-parties, the drunken orgies, the card-playing and prize-fighting, the extravagance and debauchery of the bad set in ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... brother, which had begun during their last joint campaigns in France, crystallised into definite parties the discordant tendencies that had been well marked since the crisis of 1371. The old king was a mere pawn in the game. His health had been broken by the debauchery and frivolity to which he had abandoned himself after the death of Queen Philippa. He was now entirely under the influence of Alice Perrers, a Hertfordshire squire's daughter, whose venality, greed, and shamelessness ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... of Tiberius at Caprae was one of morbid and nameless debauchery. The condition of his mind may be inferred from the opening words of one of his letters to the senate. "If I know what to write, how to write it, what not to write, may the gods and goddesses destroy me with a worse misery than the death I feel ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... pious object a portion of the spoils was to be consecrated! The amount of their booty, during their expedition, was two hundred and sixty thousand pieces of eight, together with vast quantities of plate, jewels, and merchandise—most of which was soon dissipated, after their return, in debauchery, and other rude pleasures of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... all the elegance of a city man, Fritz Brunner sat in full view of the house displaying a bald crown of the tint beloved by Titian, and a few stray fiery red hairs on either side of it; a remnant spared by debauchery and want, that the prodigal might have a right to spend money with the hairdresser when he should come into his fortune. A face, once fair and fresh as the traditional portrait of Jesus Christ, had grown harder since the advent of a red ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac

... been his polar star. It was quenched, and he drifted on the gloomy sea of no hope. He rushed fiercely into pleasure, and in those days, more than now, pleasure was vice. The large sums he had put by for Margaret gave him ample means for debauchery, and he sought for a moment's oblivion in the excitements of the hour. "Ghysbrecht lives; Margaret dies!" he would try out. "Curse life, curse death, and whosoever made them what ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various

... extracted with very little art from wheat or barley, and corrupted (as it is strongly expressed by Tacitus) into a certain semblance of wine, was sufficient for the gross purposes of German debauchery. But those who had tasted the rich wines of Italy, and afterwards of Gaul, sighed for that more delicious species of intoxication. They attempted not, however, (as has since been executed with so much success,) to naturalize the vine on the banks of the Rhine and Danube; nor did they endeavor ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... involuntary movement she was beside him, looking down upon the unconscious face; and wonderful it was to see that all its lines were smoothing out, and all the marks of years of debauchery. Even the sallow hue of them seemed to be changing in his cheeks. Extraordinary that the healthy colour of early manhood should reappear in the ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann

... furious driving Jehu. Her cyclonic joint smashing shook the rum power of the United States from apex to foundation-stone. The great American god Bacchus turned pale on his throne. Gambrinus and his thirty thousand white-aproned priests of debauchery and licentiousness trembled in every saloon and bagnio throughout the union. No whirlwind, tornado or simoon of the desert ever startled a nation as her volcanic career. From ocean to ocean, from Canada to Texas. she faced a storm of relentless criticism and bitter sarcasm from political curs, ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation

... love," and emotion must be transmitted into action, and joy must lead to work, and love to faithful, self- sacrificing service, else they become a kind of pleasant and respectable, but none the less deadly, debauchery, and at last ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle

... shelter to some celebrated name; but it is not to be suffered that, from the retreats to which he fled from infamy, he should issue again with the confidence of conquests, and call upon mankind for praise. Yet we see men that waste their patrimony in luxury, destroy their health with debauchery, and enervate their minds with idleness, because there have been some whom luxury never could sink into contempt, nor idleness hinder from ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... conduct their elections," Dolly went on, smilingly. "But the women of the present day wouldn't stand it. They would change it right away. They wouldn't continue giving the men an excuse two or three times a year to engage in all that carnage and debauchery for no rational reason. Do you know the sort of election the women will hold, Warren, if they ever ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben

... inhabitants as to the danger of fire from the fireworks. Pepys mentions the Gardens as "a pretty place," and John Locke records "bowling at Marebone and Putney by persons of quality." These Gardens formed the scene of McHeath's debauchery in the "Beggars' Opera." Devonshire Place, built on the site, is a ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... intense interest. The rooms in the tower were then filled with company. Folly Fair was held on the open space of ground afterwards used as Islington Market. Booths were erected opposite the Infirmary and in Folly Lane. It was like all such assemblages—a great deal of noise, drunkenness, debauchery, and foolishness. But fairs were certainly different then from what they have been of late years. They are now conducted in a far more orderly manner than they were formerly. I went to a large one some years ago, in Manchester, and, on comparing it with those of my young days, I could ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian

... and Vaishnavas. The 'Walkers in the Left Way' (Vamachari), on the other hand, concentrate their thought upon the godhead in its sexually maternal aspect, and follow rites of senseless magic and—theoretically at least—promiscuous debauchery." As has been seen, the religious differences subsequently gave rise ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... always observed that young men, corrupted in early youth and addicted to women and debauchery, are inhuman and cruel; their passionate temperament makes them impatient, vindictive, and angry; their imagination fixed on one object only, refuses all others; mercy and pity are alike unknown to them; they would have sacrificed father, mother, the whole world, to the least ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... unjointed legs, unstable because of recurrent debauchery, carried him disconsolately to lower levels. The Banker must be sure of his business, must have it well in hand, when he ignored the usual diplomatic mollifying preparation ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser

... occasions to procure ardent spirits, and entice the Indians to drunkenness, and other acts of immorality; being apparently aware that with the introduction of virtue and knowledge among these people will be the departure of gain which arises from abuse, fraud, and debauchery. 2. That these agents are not always men who respect the Sabbath. 3. That the Missionary's "absurd advice" was in effect that the Indians should apply to their Great Father to remove such agents ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... period of the bombardment—speaks of well-dressed people "loitering in the boulevards as if nothing were going on. The cafes, indeed, were ordered to close their doors at midnight, but behind closed shutters went on gambling, drinking and debauchery. After spending a riotous night, fast men and women considered it a joke to drive out to the Arch of Triumph and see how the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris

... unworthy of her, Lucy,—thoroughly unworthy. This man, who calls himself devoted to a creature as innocent as she is lovely,—who pretends to feel a pure and genuine passion for this pure and too-believing girl, passes his evenings, his nights, in drinking, in gambling, in debauchery of the lowest and most degrading nature. He is doubtless at this very instant at the wretched beer-shop at the corner of the common—the haunt of all that is wicked, and corrupter of all that is frail, 'The Foaming Tankard'. It is ...
— The Beauty Of The Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... feeble in their circumstances, easily over-reached, easily seduced. If they are many, the wages of corruption are the lower; and would to God it were not rather a contemptible and hypocritical adulation than a charitable sentiment, to say that there is already no debauchery, no corruption, no bribery, no perjury, no blind fury, and interested faction among the electors in many parts of this kingdom: nor is it surprising, or at all blamable, in that class of private men, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke

... existed for many, many years between his deceased father and myself, shall no longer induce me to receive at this house a young man whose reputation is all but tainted, even in a city of dissipation and debauchery, such as, alas! the once glorious Florence has become! For his immorality is not confined to gaming and wanton extravagance," continued the count, his glance becoming more keen, as his words fell like drops of molten lead upon the heart of Giulia; "but his numerous intrigues amongst women—his ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... gives a terrible account, in connection with Alexander's capture of this city, of Babylonian debauchery, which must have been of long standing when it had attained the ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney

... means of improving his fortune, but was disappointed, and like our own Chaucer, but more frequently, he pours forth lamentations to his empty purse. He was evidently a friend of most of the prominent men of letters of his time, and he entered freely into the debauchery of the period. Thus his verse gives a representation of the debased manners of the day in gay society. His style was remarkably felicitous, and it is said that he adorned all that he touched. Most of his poems are quite short, and their subjects range from a touching outburst of genuine ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman

... him any day standing at the street corners, begging, a miserable-looking object, exciting the pity of the humane, and gathering in money to spend in drunken debauchery at night. He has been known to bring in some days as high as ten and some fifteen dollars, all of which is wasted in riot before the next morning. He lives just over the way, and night after night I can hear his howls and curses ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur

... considerable quantity of his iron money; but, on the contrary, the worth of speech was to consist in its being comprised in a few plain words, pregnant with a great deal of sense: and he contrived that by long silence they might learn to be sententious and acute in their replies. As debauchery often causes weakness and sterility in the body, so the intemperance of the tongue makes conversation empty and insipid. King Agis, therefore, when a certain Athenian laughed at the Lacedaemonian short swords, and said, "The jugglers would swallow ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... to imagine that drunkenness and debauchery are the only agents in moral heredity. There are a thousand others, all more or less unknown. Certain moral qualities appear to be transmitted as readily as though they were physical. In one race, for instance, we will almost constantly discover certain virtues which have probably ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck

... ravings are recorded above, was a melancholy instance of the baneful results of energies misdirected in early life, and excesses prolonged until their consequences could never be repaired. The thoughtless riot, dissipation, and debauchery of his younger days produced fever and delirium. The first effects of the latter was the strange delusion, founded upon a well-known medical theory, strongly contended for by some, and as strongly contested by others, that an hereditary madness ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... be contested; the most hostile journals ended by rendering it homage. And it lasted, it still subsists, it has produced something else than meetings and prayers, it has induced extensive moral reforms, it has closed places of debauchery and taverns by hundreds. The military and commercial marine of the United States has been especially subjected to its influence; captains, officers, and sailors in great numbers, have shown by their lives that their habits of piety are more than a vain form; American vessels are perhaps ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin

... handsome Le Gardeur de Repentigny—a captain of the Royal Marine, a Colonial corps recently embodied at Quebec. In general form and feature Le Gardeur was a manly reflex of his beautiful sister Amelie, but his countenance was marred with traces of debauchery. His face was inflamed, and his dark eyes, so like his sister's, by nature tender and true, were now glittering with the adder tongues of the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... comely looks and supreme tact, and who carry with them a halo of bright cheerfulness, who can deal successfully with cases of this kind. The long-faced, too much sanctified female, doling out fixed quantities of monotonous nothings, is an abomination, and is calculated to drive man into chronic debauchery. One look from this kind of awful female is a deadly agony, and much effort should be used to avoid her. But there are even men engaged in religious work, whose agonising look would give any person of refined senses the "jumps." What earthly use are such creatures ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman

... quarrelled with Ames for disapproving of the surplice and other outward symbols. One of Ames's sermons became historical in the Puritan controversies. It was delivered on St Thomas's day (1609) before the feast of Christ's nativity, and in it he rebuked sharply "lusory lotts" and the "heathenish debauchery" of the students during the twelve days ensuing. The scathing vehemence of his denunciations led to his being summoned before the vice-chancellor, who suspended him "from the exercise of his ecclesiastical function ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... cant word, but of Gypsy origin, signifying a sister in debauchery, as Pal denotes a brother in villainy. It is the Plani and Beluni of the Spanish Gypsies, by whom sometimes Beluni is made to signify queen; e.g. Beluni de o tarpe (tem opre), the Queen of Heaven, the Virgin. Blower is used by Lord Byron, in his 'Don Juan.' Speaking of the highwayman whom the Don ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow

... coterie of dark spirits, Quebec became the scene of a profligacy unparalleled in her history. The Palace, instead of being a hall of justice, was the abode of debauchery and gambling; and the mad revellers, whom a cynical fate had placed at the head of affairs, allowed the ship of state to drift upon the rocks. Even the fine palace within the city gave too little scope for the diversion of the Intendant and his confederates, and, accordingly, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... excellent parts entitle him to claim kinship and affinity with myself. He was still a boy, his powers were yet unformed, when plaintiff, aided and abetted by Pleasure—ever her partner in crime—seized upon him, and delivered him over into the clutches of debauchery and dissipation, under whose corrupt influence the unfortunate young man utterly lost all sense of shame. Those very facts that plaintiff supposed to be so many arguments in her favour will be found, on the contrary, ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... why the loss of a battle should lead to the loss of a state? It is not enough to say that Louis XIV was an improvident and passionate ruler, that Louis XV was a dreary and revolting voluptuary. The problem is rather this: Why were improvidence, passion, and debauchery in two men able to bring down in utter ruin one of the greatest monarchies the world has ever seen? In other words, what was the cause of the consummate failure, the unexampled collapse, of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson

... are again!—The London Chronicle of August 14, 1788, quoting from a "gentleman" who had visited this town, says that "the people are all diminutive in size, sickly in appearance, and spend their Sundays in low debauchery," the manufacturers being noted for "a great deal of trick and low cunning as ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... stupid all its afternoon. The vigour and freshness, which should have been stored up for the purposes of the hard struggle for existence in practical life, have been washed out of them by precocious mental debauchery—by book gluttony and lesson bibbing. Their faculties are worn out by the strain put upon their callow brains, and they are demoralised by worthless childish triumphs before the real work of life begins. I have no compassion for sloth, but youth has more need for ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... he had once had an epicurean palate. The effort had ended in his being overpowered again by his horrors—the horrors in which he found himself staring at that end of things when no pleasure had spice, no debauchery the sting of life, and men, such as he, stood upon the shore of time shuddering and naked souls, watching the great tide, bearing its treasures, recede forever, and leave them to the cold and hideous dark. During one ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... be remembered that absolution from sin and crime in those days was but a matter of money price and that pardons could be easily bought for any offence, as the venality of the clergy was astounding. The corruption of the time was great, and the priests themselves were steeped in crime and debauchery. In former generations, the Church at Rome had many times issued strict orders against the marriage of the clergy, and, doubtless as one of the consequences of this regulation, it had become the custom for many of the priests to have one or more ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... There was no end to these ghoulish acts. A student while in a hilarious mood one night did a decapitating operation on one of the bodies. His loot was the head of an old man with patriarchal beard and he carried it around from one place of debauchery to another, exhibiting it to gaping crowds of a rather unenviable class ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs

... of those in the city whom he had corrupted, Cornelius Lentulus kept together and encouraged. He had the surname Sura, and was a man of a noble family, but a dissolute liver, who for his debauchery was formerly turned out of the senate, and was now holding the office of praetor for the second time, as the custom is with those who desire to regain the dignity of senator. It is said that he got the surname Sura upon this occasion; being quaestor in the time ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... taken a wife, what would have been his opinion then of the woman taken in adultery; but he remained single and consequently incompetent to decide upon that delicate matter. All that, you see, is an encouragement to debauchery and a stimulant to lewdness. A devout woman, when she is young and pretty, is on a slope which leads quite straight ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France

... insensible to the value of this element to a popular journal. He knew, he said, that people liked to be amused; and he supplied this want in a section of his paper entitled "Mercure Scandale; or, Advice from the Scandalous Club, being a weekly history of Nonsense, Impertinence, Vice, and Debauchery." Under this attractive heading, Defoe noticed current scandals, his club being represented as a tribunal before which offenders were brought, their cases heard, and sentence passed upon them. Slanderers of the True-Born Englishman frequently figure in its proceedings. It was in this ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto

... usual graphic style, places him before us as if he were an acquaintance,—aloof from the world; immersed in the study of his high calling, with his brow never unbent from care and thought; severely abstemious in the midst of dissoluteness and debauchery; a water-drinker among Greeks; like that other Agonistes, elected and ordained to struggle, to suffer, and to perish for a people ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... with the world's undeveloped peoples. Whatever we may say of the results of such contact in the past, it certainly forms a chapter in human action not pleasant to look back upon. War, murder, slavery, extermination, and debauchery,—this has again and again been the result of carrying civilization and the blessed gospel to the isles of the sea and the heathen without the law. Nor does it altogether satisfy the conscience of the modern world to be told complacently ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... other virtues, so in temperance he was so strict that he abhorred all debauchery to that degree, that, at a great festival solemnity, where he once was, when very many of the nobility of the English and Scots were entertained, being told by one who withdrew from thence, what vast drafts of wine they drank, and "that there was one earl ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey

... destiny of the Pandora. Her voyage was to be a success; five hundred more unfortunate beings were to swell the ranks of slavery—her captain would be enriched—her crew would receive bounty and live for a time in riotous debauchery—and all this at the expense of every right ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid

... to work for long years; perhaps in chains among the outcasts of our race, fed on the coarsest food, subject to the tyranny of brutalised overseers, often themselves convicts; your ears forced to listen to the foulest language, your eyes to witness the grossest debauchery, till you yourself become as bad as those with whom you are compelled to herd; so that, when the time of your punishment is expired, you will be unfit for freedom; and if you venture to return home, you will find yourself, wherever you appear, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston

... crush the unions, to break strikes, and to imprison union men. And, if paid professional armies of detectives deal with the unions, so paid professional armies of politicians deal with the socialists. By every form of debauchery, lawlessness, and corruption they are beaten back, and, although it is absolutely incredible, not a single representative of a great party polling nearly a million votes sits in the Congress of the ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... on. She would cover all the territory where low debauchery fills its crop on Mondays and finds its loves, between a hospital, a slaughter-house, and a cemetery; Lariboisiere, the Abattoir ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

... more insist on her going to such places, but know your own happiness in having a wife that hath the discretion to avoid those places; which, though perhaps they may not be as some represent them, such brothels of vice and debauchery as would impeach the character of every virtuous woman who was seen at them, are certainly, however, scenes of riot, disorder, and intemperance, very improper to be frequented by a chaste ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... was so pretty. He had possessed so few women of such ingenuousness. This love without debauchery was a new experience for him, and, drawing him out of his lazy habits, caressed at once his pride and his sensuality. Emma's enthusiasm, which his bourgeois good sense disdained, seemed to him in his heart of hearts charming, since it was lavished on him. Then, sure of ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... according to its size. A number of these boats frequently sailed in company. The boatmen were proverbially lawless at every town and landing, and indulged without restraint in every species of dissipation, debauchery and excess. But this race has become reformed, or nearly extinct;—yes, reformed by the mighty power of steam. A steamboat, with half the crew of a barge or keel, will carry ten times the burden, and perform six or eight trips in the time it took a keel boat to make one voyage. Thousands ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck

... the constituent qualities of the greater epic hero are wisdom, bravery, and love, from whence springeth heroic virtue; it followeth that those of the lesser epic hero should be vanity, impudence, and debauchery, from which happy assemblage resulteth heroic dulness, the never-dying subject of ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... does the grim, consuming pestilence of gaming claim more victims than in the Ghetto. The ravages of drink and debauchery are slight indeed; but the tortuous streets can show too many a humble home haunted by the spectres of ruin and misery which stalked across the threshold when the first ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert

... had a much better reputation, while of the rural populations of French Flanders Dr. Villerme then affirmed, after a careful study of their habits, that nothing was to be seen among them of the 'debauchery and the daily and disgusting drunkenness ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... appeared to me,' he says, in his Journal, 'in the twelfth year of my age, and He visited me at intervals afterwards and gave me divine impressions of Himself. He sustained me through the darkness and debauchery of Oxford, through all my experiences in France, through the trials that arose from my father's harshness, and through the terrors of the Great Plague. He gave me a deep sense of the vanity of the world and of the irreligiousness of the religions ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham

... sinful custom of riding from town to town, men and women together, under pretence of going to lectures, but really to drink and revel in taverns, tending to debauchery and unchastity. All single persons, being offenders, to be bound in their good behaviour, with sureties in twenty pounds fine, or suffer fine and imprisonment."—Ib., pp. 320, 321, in ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson

... at Whitehall, terrible pictures of iniquity, conveyed in the scathing words of one who sat apart, in a humble lodging, where for him the light of day came not, and heard with disgust and horror of that wave of debauchery which had swept over the city he loved, since the triumph of the Royalists. And Lady Warner had heard the words of Milton, and had listened with a reverence as profound as if the blind poet had been the prophet of Israel, alone in his place of hiding, holding ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... brink. A large trading canoe, belonging to a Barra merchant named Soares, arrived at this time, and the Indian crew, as usual, spent the first day or two after their coming into port in drunkenness and debauchery ashore. One of the men, during the greatest heat of the day, when almost everyone was enjoying his afternoon's nap, took it into his head while in a tipsy state to go down alone to bathe. He was seen only by the Juiz de Paz, a feeble old man who was lying in his hammock in the open verandah at the ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... was eager to begin work. Prudence, however, held her back from visiting the scene of debauchery at Ifako. A few women had come home with fractious babies, or to procure more food for the revellers, and gathering these about her she held a little service, telling them in her simple and direct way the story of the Christ who came from the ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone

... show that on the 19th the German soldiers gave themselves up to debauchery in the streets of Liege, and on the night of the 20th (Thursday) a massacre took place in the streets, beginning near the Cafe Carpentier, at which there is said to have been a dinner attended by Russian and other students. A proclamation issued by General ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... ludicrous ideas. These performances were first given in honor of the god of wine, Bacchus, which accounts, I suppose, for the fact that a theatre cannot live without a bar. On certain festive days, they acted these plays often in the most indecent manner, with drunkenness and debauchery abounding—scenes which are re-enacted in theatres at the present day. Now, they have a more splendid stage, within a costly, spacious building, but there is little or no improvement in the purity of the play and its incidentals. It is just as demoralizing now as it was then, and has been so ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer

... whose house I also met him, and invited him to my own, whenever he should be disengaged. I did not then know, that he had formed an acquaintance with a set of men, a disgrace to their species, who live by plunder and pass their lives in continual debauchery. I knew several of the Chevalier's family, resident at Paris, and considered them as sufficient pledges for his introduction to my own. But you are ill; I will leave the subject.'—'No, sir,' said Emily, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... the Indians, some of the girls are pretty and interesting, but with exposure, cruelty, immorality, debauchery, idle and loose habits, the pretty, dark-eyed girl soon becomes the coarse, vulgar woman, with the last trace of virtue blown to the winds. If any one with but little keen sense of observation will ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... [Letters, 1898, i. 150-160, and 153, note]). Moore (Life, p. 86) and other apologists are anxious to point out that the Newstead "wassailers" were, on the whole, a harmless crew of rollicking schoolboys "—were, indeed, of habits and tastes too intellectual for mere vulgar debauchery." And as to the "alleged 'harems,'" the "Paphian girls," there were only one or two, says Moore, "among the ordinary menials." But, even so, the "wassailers" were not impeccable, and it is best to leave the story, fact or fable, to speak ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... hindrance to immediate riches was his ignorance of flash kens where he might fence his plunder. Meanwhile he painted his soul black with wickedness. Such hours as he could snatch from the profitable conduct of his trade he devoted to the austere debauchery of Leith or the Golden Acre. Though he knew not the seduction of whisky, he missed never a dance nor a raffle, joining the frolics of prigs and callets in complete forgetfulness of the shorter catechism. In vain the kirk compared him to a ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... to common beggars is naturally praised; because it seems to carry relief to the distressed and indigent: but when we observe the encouragement thence arising to idleness and debauchery, we regard that species of charity rather as a weakness than ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume

... thing then to be of a good fame, it is on the contrary afflictive to be of an ill one; and it is most certain that nothing in the world can be more infamous than want of friendship, idleness, atheism, debauchery, and negligence. Now these are looked upon by all men except themselves as inseparable companions of their party. But unjustly, some one may say. Be it so then; for we consider not now the truth of the charge, but what fame ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch



Words linked to "Debauchery" :   revelry, revel



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