"Indecency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an allusion to the great controversy then just raised by Jeremy Collier in his famous Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage, in which all the dramatists of the day were violently attacked for their indecency. Catharine Trotter has the courage to side with Collier, and the tact to do so without quarrelling with her male colleagues. She takes the side ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... policy in America, Franklin had shown himself anxious to maintain the tie between Great Britain and her colonies. This attack upon his character made him one of England's enemies, and, as it proved, one of the most dangerous of them. His conduct is not palliated by the indecency of his opponents. It has been urged in his defence that, as Whately had shown the letters to certain English politicians, it was fair that Boston politicians should also see them, that as agent he was bound to do the best for his province, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... imposing medicines; the walls of this comfortable room being beauteously adorned by some fifty magazine covers representing the female form in every imaginable state of undress, said magazine-covers being taken chiefly from such amorous periodicals as Le Sourire and that old stand-by of indecency, La Vie Parisienne. Also Monsieur Richard kept a pot of geraniums upon his window-ledge, which haggard and aged-looking symbol of joy he doubtless (in his spare moments) peculiarly enjoyed watering. The Cook ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... This indecency was reported to me. I did not take long in discovering what it was right to do with Adrien. I had him sent to Clagny, where I happened ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... the judgment, or, at any rate, upon modes of judgment not clearly analyzable in consciousness. An openness of manner in the relations of the sexes is very charming, but a little more, and it is boldness, or, if it relates to bodily habits, indecency. A modest behavior is charming, but too much modesty is prudery. Under these circumstances, when the suggestive effect of bodily habits is realized, but the effect of a given bit of behavior cannot be clearly reckoned, and when, at the same time, the effect produced by the action is felt to be very ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... for us to understand how such a farrago of absurdity, profanity, and indecency could ever have been gravely produced in a so-called court of justice in England as a state paper—a bill of indictment against a body of noblemen and gentlemen; against an order that for two hundred years had been the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... followed a train of Seloucian music-girls, who sang songs derisive of the effeminacy and cowardice of the proconsul. After this pretended parade of his prisoner through the streets of the town, Surenas called a meeting of the Seleucian senate, and indignantly denounced to them the indecency of the literature which he had found in the Roman tents. The charge, it is said, was true; but the Seleucians were not greatly impressed by the moral lesson read to them, when they remarked the train of concubines that had accompanied ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... the Negro man and outrage every sentiment of decency in the foul language addressed to the Negro women; but if one of the helpless creatures, goaded to resistance and crazed under tyranny, should answer back with impudence, or should relieve his mind with an oath, or restore indecency, he did so at the cost to himself of $1 for every outburst. The 'agent' referred to in the statute is the well-known overseer of the cotton region, and the care with which the lawmaker of Louisiana provided that his delicate ears ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... lay the storm again? What spirit is there but the devil's spirit in bloodthirsty threats of revenge?"—"I denounce the weapons which you have been deluded into employing to gain you your rights, and the indecency and profligacy which you are letting be mixed up with them! Will you strengthen and justify your enemies? Will you disgust and cripple your friends? Will you go out of your way to do wrong? When you can be free ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... indifference to a "thus saith the Lord," come forth as the defender of the Bible, the champion of the home and the guardian of the sacredness of marriage, concentrating all its thunders against the shame and indecency of divorce? ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... Napoleon but by those whose fall had been his own rise; for Godoy was sent to Bayonne by Murat, and the old King and Queen hurried after their son in order to witness his humiliation. Ferdinand's parents attacked him with an indecency that astonished even Napoleon himself; but the Prince maintained his refusal until news arrived from Madrid which terrified him into submission. The irritation of the capital had culminated in an armed conflict ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... permitted? Every sensible person will surely say that it ought not to be permitted. Yet the number of people who attach themselves to this life continually increases, for year by year the prison commissioners tell us that the number of persons imprisoned for vagrancy, sleeping out, indecency, etc., continues to increase, and that short terms of imprisonment only serve as periods of recuperation for them, for in prison they are healed of their sores and cleansed ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... distorted humanity, the sight of which would have impelled Dore to more diabolical flights of fancy than he ever succeeded in achieving. It was a welter of rags and filth, of all manner of loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency, leering monstrosities, and bestial faces. A chill, raw wind was blowing, and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to sleep. Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from twenty years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly of nine months, lying asleep, flat ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... translation. The only impeccable writers are those that never wrote. Another is an oracle on subjects of taste and classical erudition, because (he says at least) he reads Cicero once a year to keep up the purity of his Latinity. A third makes the indecency pass for the depth of his researches and for a high gusto in virtu, till, from his seeing nothing in the finest remains of ancient art, the world by the merest accident find out that there is nothing in him. There is scarcely anything that ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Vayoo god of wind, Cama the god of love." (Baghvat Gets, p. 94, quoted by Dr. Robertson, Ind. Dis. p. 306.) The sacred rites of the Western Polytheism were gay, festive, and licentious; the rites of the public religion in the East partake of the same character, with a more avowed indecency. "In every function performed in the pagodas, as well as in every public procession, it is the office of these women (i. e. of women prepared by the Brahmins for the purpose) to dance before the idol, and to sing hymns in his praise; and it is difficult to say whether ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... gentility I could hope to tread. Ralph Limbert, who belonged to nobody and had done nothing—nothing even at Cambridge—had only the uncanny spell he had cast upon her younger daughter to recommend him; but if her younger daughter had a spark of filial feeling she wouldn't commit the indecency of deserting for his sake a deeply dependent and intensely ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... publishers hastily withdrew it, and for some time it was unobtainable; but at length another firm found courage enough to undertake its reissue. To Mr. Philpot, who knew it merely by extracts, the mere mention of this volume seemed to be something in the nature of an indecency. But there is always an attraction in the forbidden. I dreamed of this volume, from which I had seen extracts likewise; and at last a chance came to me of securing an apple from the boughs of this replanted tree ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... might use so homespun a simile for a woman who had persistently lived for him and in him and then had made clear spaces about him by going away in the dignity of death. He wanted to breathe in the space she had left, and he also wanted to be spared the indecency of recognizing his relief. But Nan, studying the fire persistently, to allow his eyes all possible liberty of searching her face while she generously avoided his, was going on in what was evidently a preconceived task of breaking ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... observed," Captain Cook wrote, "that our friends in the South Seas have not even the idea of indecency, with respect to any object or any action, but this was by no means the case with the inhabitants of New Zealand, in whose carriage and conversation there was as much modest reserve and decorum with respect to actions, which yet in their opinion were not criminal, as are to be found among ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... newspaper offices that the first few numbers of the Herald were strictly decorous and "respectable," but that the editor, finding the public indifferent and his money running low, changed his tactics, and filled his paper with scurrility and indecency, which immediately made it a paying enterprise. No such thing. The first numbers were essentially of the same character as the number published this morning. They had the same excellences and the same defects: in the news department, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... let matters rest on suspicion. He soon gave open proofs of his interest with the Confessor in procuring an office of some importance for one Rollo, a Roman of mean extraction and very despicable parts. When I represented to the king the indecency of conferring such an honor on such a fellow, he answered me that he was the archbishop's relation. 'Then, sir,' replied I, 'he is related to your enemy.' Nothing more passed at that time; but I soon perceived, by the archbishop's behavior, that the ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... above stairs," Hortensia reminded her, and her ladyship went white at the reminder, the indecency of her laughter borne in ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... more courtesy in each of their fingers than most of the seniors had all put together, had to bow to a scandalous condition that made England's rule a laughing-stock within a stone's throw of the city limits. And they had to submit to the indecency of seeing a new, inexperienced arrival picked for the task of commanding a body of irregulars, for no other reason than because it was considered wise to make an exhibition ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... omissions to be otherwise than conspicuous. Since the commencement of the Session there had been a series of articles in the "People's Banner" violently abusive of the Prime Minister, and in one or two of these the indecency of these exclusions had been exposed with great strength of language. And the Editor of the "People's Banner" had discovered that Sir Orlando Drought was the one man in Parliament fit to rule the nation. Till Parliament should discover ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... extraordinary process does Comstockery conjure decency into the stomach and indecency into the bowels? But how rejoiced we should be that it is no worse than indecent to speak of the receptacle of the intestines by its common name. By some hocus pocus of which Comstockery is easily capable it might have been obscene to ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... door, for she could not bring herself to witness Mildred Caniper's betrayal of her decay to one who had never loved her: there was an indecency in allowing Miriam to see it. Helen leaned against the door and heard faint sounds of voices, and in imagination she saw the scene. Mildred Caniper sat in her comfortable chair by a bright fire, though it was now late June of a triumphant summer, and Miriam ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... and difficult problems of adolescence present themselves, he will be prepared to handle them on the basis of right thinking and right living. Natural and healthy sport in the open air, and the avoidance of foul language and indecency should be stressed. The use of alcohol, coffee and tea by children tends to weaken their sexual organs. Every boy should know that chastity means continence. He should know that lascivious thoughts lead to lascivious actions, and that these are a drain on his system ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... mawkishness, and an exquisitely delicate and glancing style. He has contributed some immortal characters to English fiction, including Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. His great faults as a writer are affectation and a peculiarly deliberate kind of indecency, which his profession renders all the more offensive; and he was by no means scrupulous in adopting, without acknowledgment, the good things ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... one despair—I mean hope. What do I mean? That's the worst of music! I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes, yellow cakes, drink thin, sharp wine. Or an indecent story, now—I could relish that. The older one grows the more one likes indecency. Hah, hah! I'm laughing. What at? You said nothing, nor did the old gentleman opposite.... ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... parent, either the father or the mother, may by neglect and many unkindnesses do far more injury to a child than by an act of unfaithfulness. I need not wait to prove this perfectly obvious fact. It seems to me, however, that these home-destroying acts, the result of any sort of daily indecency of living, which brings suffering, with lasting injury, to little children, are the one condition that makes divorce necessary and also right in a marriage where ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... hearts have very depraved ideas of what is true decency. We will here give an authentic newspaper account of a scene which all the pure in heart consider a public indecency, moral degrading, ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... Rosalind.... But why in heaven's name isn't Jimmy at home this very moment,—with a wife and carpet-slippers and a large-size bottle of paregoric on his mantelpiece,—instead of here, grinning like a fool over some blatant indecency? He ought to marry; every young man ought to marry. Oh, you futile, abject, burbling twin-brother of the first patron that procured a reputation for Bedlam! why aren't you married—married years ago,—with a home of your ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... certain it is that the inhabitants who live at the foot of Etna will always have a certain pitch of life-vibration, antagonistic to the pitch of vibration even of a Palermitan, in some measure. And old houses are saturated with human presence, at last to a degree of indecency, unbearable. And tradition, in its most elemental sense, means the continuing of the same peculiar ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... least distressed or hampered by shades of delicacy and scruple, she surely was astute enough to realize that even this bounder's dullness might be awakened to realize that there was more than a touch of obvious indecency in bringing the girl to the house of the man she had tragically loved, and manoeuvering to work her into it as the wife of the man who, monstrously unfit as he was, had taken his place. Captain Palliser knew well that the pressing ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... forbidden, theatres are forbidden, operas are forbidden, circuses are forbidden, sweetmeats are forbidden, pretty colors are forbidden, all exactly as vice is forbidden. The Creator is explicitly prayed to, and implicitly convicted of indecency every day. An association of vice and sin with everything that is delightful and of goodness with everything that is wretched and detestable is set up. All the most perilous (and glorious) appetites and propensities are at once inflamed by starvation and uneducated by art. All the ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... trial. In 1789 they proposed a vote of censure upon Burke, for some violent language which he had used respecting the death of Nuncomar and the connection between Hastings and Impey. Burke was then unpopular in the last degree both with the House and with the country. The asperity and indecency of some expressions which he had used during the debates on the Regency had annoyed even his warmest friends. The vote of censure was carried; and those who had moved it hoped that the managers would resign in disgust. Burke was deeply ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... And there are plenty of workshops and offices and dinner-tables in our own city, where young men who would walk up to the cannon's mouth without flinching have not had Peel's courage to protest against indecency or to confess that they belonged to an evangelical church. If a church is only sufficiently unevangelical there is no trial of conscience or of courage in confessing that you belong to it. But as Shame so ably and honestly said, that type of religion that creates a tender ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... you see nothing that causes you to feel ashamed and foolish? Do you—you—fail to recognize the indecency of a woman of your mental age permitting herself to fancy that she is experiencing the authentic passions of youth? Are you capable of creating life? Can you love with unsullied memory? Have you the ideals of youth, the ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... heard was the case at other executions, "roll about the scaffold and be mangled and disfigured." "For I would not," he added, "though it may be but a trifling matter, that my remains should appear with any needless indecency after the just sentence of the law is satisfied." He spoke calmly and easily on all these particulars, nor did he even shrink when told that his head would be held up and exhibited to the multitude as that of a traitor. "He knew," he said, "that it was usual, and it ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... You have entrusted them to me, and they have come so exclusively under my control that nobody else—not even you—could conduct them to a successful issue so well as I can. Under such circumstances, of course, I cannot make any personal demand upon you, without indecency. To do so would be to take advantage of your necessities. It would amount to a threat that, if you refused my demands, I would abandon these enterprises and leave you to get out of all their difficulties as best you could. Don't you see, Captain Hallam, that under such circumstances, I simply could ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... cliff. This is the loveliest thing in Marathon: sunlight and shadow break and angle in cubist magnificence among the oddly veined knobs and prisms of brown stone. Yet this cliff or quarry is by common consent taboo among us. It is our indelicacy, our indecency. Such "residences" as are near modestly turn their kitchens toward it. Only the blacksmith and the gas tanks are hardy enough to face this nakedness of Mother Earth—they, and excellent Pat Lemon, Marathon's humblest and blackest citizen, who ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... savagely as he thought of her gentility and the refinement with which she ate her food; she could not bear a coarse word, so far as her limited vocabulary reached she had a passion for euphemisms, and she scented indecency everywhere; she never spoke of trousers but referred to them as nether garments; she thought it slightly indelicate to blow her nose and did it in a deprecating way. She was dreadfully anaemic and suffered from the dyspepsia which accompanies that ailing. Philip was ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... so for our new Art we must have a splendid ideal. Do you want to know how low Art may sink when materialism triumphs and vulgarises and degrades? Then see that exhibition of French pictures that was placed in Bond Street some years ago, which attracted those who loved indecency more than those who loved the beautiful, and then you will understand how Art perishes where the breath of the ideal does not inspire and keep alive. And Theosophy to the artist would bring back that ancient reverence which ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... free moral being, and that only by voluntarily yielding his heart and will and life to the King, can he enter the Kingdom. We are forced to respect his personality. We may watch and pray and speak, but we cannot save. There is almost a sort of spiritual indecency in unveiling the naked soul, in attempting to invade the personality of another life. There is sometimes a spiritual vivisection which some attempt in the name of religion, which is immoral. Only ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... and in tracing the origin of the French drama to romances. But in general his facts are right and his deductions fair. Mr. Saintsbury has accused him of depreciating Dryden's plays, especially the comedies, out of disgust at their indecency; yet in judging the period as a whole he seems to discriminate sufficiently between indelicacy and dulness. "The talents of Otway," he says, "in his scenes of passionate affection rival, at least, and sometimes excel those of Shakspeare." Again: "The comedies ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... d'un Voyageur." Others followed in quick succession, many of them dealing with the subject of marriage in such a manner as to raise a most violent storm about her head. People who had never read these books described them as being of revolting indecency; and that impression prevails in many quarters even yet. In point of fact, she is no more open to the charge of indelicacy than any prominent English novelist of the day. The opinions are bad enough many times, but ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... of Fletcher's more flagrant infringements of propriety. In the whole of the Elizabethan drama there was no piece which presented so liberal a mass of indelicacy as Fletcher's Custom of the Country. Dryden, who was innocent of prudery, declared that there was "more indecency" in that drama "than in all our plays together." This was one of the pieces which Pepys twice saw performed after carefully reading it in his study, and he expressed admiration for the rendering of the widow's part by his pretty friend, Mistress Knipp. One has ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... to the due assize of weight and measure; to permit no gaming, drunkenness, indecency, or disorder; to pay due respect to existing regulations; not to entertain persons from tap-too beating until the following noon, or during divine service, under the penalty of forfeiting licence and recognizances; ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... married yesterday. Don't we manage well! the original day was not once put off: lawyers and milliners were all ready canonically. It was as sensible a wedding as ever was. There was neither form nor indecency, both which generally meet on such occasions. They were married at my brother's in Pall-Mall, just before dinner, by Mr. Keppel; the company, my brother, his son, Mrs. Keppel, and Charlotte, Lady Elizabeth Keppel, Lady Betty Waldegrave, and I. We dined there; the Earl and new Countess ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... first febrile excitement of anticipation was succeeded by the apathy of an immense fatigue, and at the back of it all a loathsome sense of the positive indecency of his going. It was hunger that was driving him, the importunate hunger of many months, apparent in his lean face and shrunken figure. And after all could any dinner be worth the pain of dressing for it? When at the last moment he discovered a loose button on his trousers, he felt that ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... decline speaking of before a family, and which, if the questions were propounded by another in the presence of my daughter, aye, or even of my, no less, in mind and imagination, innocent wife, I should resent as an indecency? ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... imported either by land or sea. Yet it must be admitted that the progress of civilization had previously done much towards the removal of the most obnoxious of the abuses. The times, happily, no longer existed, when, as in the XIIth century, the prelate, with a degree of indecency scarcely to be credited, especially under an ecclesiastical government, did not scruple to convert the wages of sin into a source of revenue, as scandalous in its nature as it must have been contemptible in its amount, by ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... imaginative writing of a clever woman who tried to dramatise a scene without having any data to guide her. In all my life I never heard a conversation resembling that of the farrier and the rest in the remotest degree. In the first place, one element of public-house talk—the overt or sly indecency—is left out. In an actual public-house parlour the man who can bring in a totally new tale of a dirty nature is the hero of the evening. Then the element of scandal is missing. When men of vulgar mind meet together, you only need to wait a few minutes before you hear ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... had failed utterly to acquire, a good knowledge of Greek. Like Petrarch, he was assisted largely by the Popes, and took service at the papal court. But his views of life and morality were coloured by Paganism rather than by Christianity. Many of his minor poems are steeped in indecency and immorality, and reflect only too clearly the tendency to treachery and deceit so characteristic of the Italian rulers of his day; while the /Decameron/, his greatest work, is more like the production of a Pagan writer ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... him were out of all patience at the indignity and shame it would be for a proconsul of Rome to pay tribute to a crew of wretched barbarians. But he little regarded their censure, and slighting that which had only the appearance of an indecency, told them he must buy time, the most precious of all things to those who go upon great enterprises; and pacifying the barbarous people with money, he hastened his journey, and took possession of Spain, a country flourishing and populous, abounding ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... say that Francis Jeffrey was a reviewer, he was as well a Whig and was running a Review that was Whig from the front cover to the back. Leigh Hunt was not merely a poet, for he was also a radical, and therefore in the opinions of Tories, a believer in immorality and indecency. No matter how innocent a title might appear, it was held in suspicion, on the chance that it assailed the Ministry or endangered the purity of England. William Gifford was more than merely the editor of ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... said Katharine; "but you're mistaken, aren't you?" She was, in truth, horribly uncomfortable, dismayed, indeed, disillusioned. She disliked the turn things had taken quite intensely. The indecency of it afflicted her. The suffering implied by the tone appalled her. She looked at Mary furtively, with eyes that were full of apprehension. But if she had hoped to find that these words had been ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... while the said ward was being built; but he refused to do so. I again requested him to remove the most holy sacrament—which was deposited in a ward under the principal one of the infirmary and exposed to indecency, because the filth and water from the sick, fell from above—to a place above, where mass was said to the said sick. He also refused to do that; on the other hand, he went to the archbishop, who began a suit before the ordinary. Although the royal Audiencia (the said archbishop ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Various
... with a spirit suitable to the boldness of his character, addressed him in the following words: "As you are a stranger, sir, you may perhaps be excused for the indecency of your behaviour; yet give me leave to tell you that none but a Bear would ridicule any religious ceremonies in the presence of those who ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... that people who wear crinoline could see the indecency of their own dress as other people see it. A respectable elderly woman stooping forward, invested in crinoline, exposes quite as much of her own person to the patient lying in the room as any opera-dancer does on the stage. But no one will ever ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... The children of the upper world could not even by chance give a thought to the sources whence their needs are supplied; speech on such a subject in their presence would be held indecent. In John Hewett's position, the indecency, the crime, would have been to keep silence and pretend that the needs of existence are ministered to as a matter ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... sufficiently comprehensive, runs as follows: 'Any male person who in public or private commits or is a party to the commission, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person, of any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour.' The penalty is imprisonment for two years, with or without hard labour. It is provided by Section 4 of the same Act that a boy under sixteen ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... and these lazy varletesses (in full health) not come down yet to breakfast!—What a confounded indecency in young ladies, to let a rake know that they love their beds so dearly, and, at the same time, where to have them! But I'll punish them—they shall breakfast with their old uncle, and yawn at one another as if for a wager; while I drive my phaeton to Colonel Ambroses's, who ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... tumult. In one place Sir Simon Burley, a friend of Richard II., seized a workman, claiming him as a bondservant, and refusing to let him go under a fine of L300; while at Dartford a tax-collector had made trouble by gross indecency to the wife and ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... originality of conception regarding the form as well as the substance, the manner as well as the matter, it is in the province of art, always provided, of course, that the artist is sane and not guilty of indecency. The artist, like the poet, is born not made; you cannot make an artist, you can only make an artisan. The artist, who represents the Creator, the creative faculty, can influence man: man cannot, and should not try to, influence the artist, but can, and should only, offer ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... I seized it, and with guilty shoon Stole out indignant to the water's marge; Its eyes like emeralds caught the affronted moon; The stars conspired to make the thing look large; Surely all Chiswick would perceive my shame! I clutched the indecency and whirled it round And flung it from me like a torch in flame, And a great wailing swept across the sound, As though the deep were calling back its kith. I said, "It will go down ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... far otherwise of the indulgence shown to Edmund Smith, the poet. 'The indecency and licentiousness of his behaviour drew upon him, Dec. 24, 1694, while he was yet only bachelor, a publick admonition, entered upon record, in order to his expulsion. Of this reproof the effect is not known. He was probably ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... full-coloured sketch of what womanhood could become in a court like that of Francis I.; in which every shred of decency, gentlehood and honour had disappeared. Browning's description, vivid as it is, is less than the reality. Had he deepened the colours of iniquity and indecency instead of introducing so much detailed description of the laboratory, detail which weakens a little our impression of the woman, he had done better, but all the same there is no poet in England, living or dead, who could have done it so well. One of the best things ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... be yet restored. Sin the cause of present ugliness. Never too late to reform. Opinion of Dr. Rush. An important principle. The doctrine of human perfectibility disavowed. Various causes of ugliness. Obedience to law, natural and moral, the true source of beauty. Indecency and ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... require no further explanation, in order to be satisfied as to the moral of this play: but is it not a very bitter satire upon the country, which calls itself the politest nation in the world, that the incidents, the indecency, the coarse blasphemy, and the vulgar wit of this piece, should find admirers among the public, and procure reputation for the author? Could not the Government, which has re-established, in a manner, the theatrical censorship, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in Johnson's writings not a line can be found which a saint would wish to blot, so in his life he would never suffer the least immorality or indecency of conversation, [or anything] contrary to virtue or piety to proceed without a severe check, which no elevation of rank exempted them from.' Taylor's Reynolds, ii. 458. See ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... the child, drove down the road towards the Brewster house, his horse and buggy became the nucleus of a gathering procession, shouting and exclaiming, with voices all tuned to one key of passionate sympathy. There were even many women of the poorer class who had no sense of indecency in following the utmost lead of their tender emotions. Some of them bore children of their own in their arms, and were telling them with passionate croonings to look at the other little girl in the carriage who had been lost, and gone away a whole day and two nights ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... power. While the stage therefore keeps this great end in view, it answers a valuable purpose to the community. The poet should use his pen to reform, not to indulge a corrupt age, as was the case in the days of Charles the Second, when indecency was brought on to ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... that band play for here to-day? She has been dead and I so short a time!... Her little hands are hardly cold as yet; But they can show such cruel indecency ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Mr. Mortimer, I don't mind letting you into the secret, but the fact is every time I think of the old rascal's indecency it makes my cock stand, but you must not tell a soul what ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... infinite satisfaction of our hero, had not Jolter, to the manifest peril of his own person, interposed, and partly by force, and partly by exhortations, put a stop to the engagement before it was fairly begun. After having demonstrated the indecency of such a vulgar rencontre, betwixt two fellow-citizens in a foreign land, he begged to know the cause of their dissension, and offered his good offices towards an accommodation. Peregrine also, seeing the fray was finished, expressed himself to the same purpose; and the painter, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... respectable. How can we fancy a lie told by a gentleman in golden uniform, or a lady in a lace dress? But if the defenders of the civilization of Rossia and of the noble manners of its aristocracy knew all the cruel judgments of Rossian masters, the lewdness, recklessness, indecency, and shallowness often concealed beneath their artificial good breeding and apparent courtesy, they would learn that laces may cover coarse tissues, and gold hide corroded brass. The gaudy dress and uniform ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... his beaming countenance with a lowering hostility. The indecency of anyone being cheerful at such a time struck him forcibly. He would have liked mankind to have preserved till further notice a hushed gloom. He glared at the ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... described in the preceding pages, this voluntary yielding by man of the place of honor and of the right of the strongest, is little less than a miracle; it is the grandest triumph of civilization. Yet there are viragoes who have had the indecency to call gallantry an "insult to woman." There is indeed a kind of gallantry—the Ovidian—which is an insult to women; but true masculine gallantry is woman's chief glory and conquest, indicating the transformation of the savage's ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... "Anda pulque!" Within the car was more politeness—or perhaps, more exactly, more unconscious consideration for others—than north of the Rio Grande. There were many women among us, yet all the night through there was not a suggestion of indecency or annoyance. Indian blood largely predominated, hardy, muscular, bright-eyed fellows, yet in conduct all were caballeros. Near me sat a family of three. The father, perhaps twenty, was strikingly handsome in his burnished copper ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... Anglo-Saxon lines. Anybody who knows no more of Japan than may be gathered from the pages of LAFCADIO HEARN will at least have learned that her youth is taught to regard the love-interest of an ordinary English novel as an indecency; and so will recognise the improbability of the romantic element in the play. Still, all that is of little consequence, for there must have been very few who went to His Majesty's to improve ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... imperviousness to a joke with which he was credited; because he could not take in all the little infinity of homely facetiae in which the Madigans lived and had their being. Besides, it was pleasant and exciting, being leagued with Kate against Aunt Anne, who was known to have positively had the indecency to speak openly upon the subject, and in favor of ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... speaking, in his company, of the avarice with which the late Duke of Marlborough had been charged, some examples whereof being given, the Lord Bolingbroke was appealed to (who, having been in the opposite party, might perhaps, without the imputation of indecency, have been allowed to clear up that matter): "He was so great a man," replied his lordship, "that I ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... heard, and he was condemned to death by a show of hands. To the last Phocion maintained his calm and dignified, but somewhat contemptuous bearing. When some wretched man spat upon him as he passed to the prison, "Will no one," said he, "check this fellow's indecency?" To one who asked him whether he had any message to leave for his son Phocus, he answered, "Only that he bear no grudge against the Athenians." And when the hemlock which had been prepared was found insufficient for all the ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... And both felt that it was up to them to take the opportunity of testifying, of severing any connection that might yet exist in any one's mind between them and the other products of their parents. They did so, with the uncompromising decision proper to their years, and with, perhaps, the touch of indecency, regardlessness of the proprieties, which was characteristic of them. Their friends soon discovered that they need not guard their tongues in speaking of Potterism before the Potter twins. The way the twins put it was, 'Our family ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... venture on indecencies herself, yet she had an amazing faculty for looking knowing and indecent beyond words, rolling her eyes and pitching her eyebrows in a certain way—oh, it was quite sufficient for her companions! And yet, if they had ever actually demanded a dirty story or a really open indecency from her, she would have ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... true, and it is equally true of everything else; capitalism is against human nature, competition is against human nature, cruelty, kindness, religion and doubt, monogamy, polygamy, celibacy, decency, indecency, piety and sin are all against human nature. The present system in particular is against human nature, or what is the policeman for, the soldier, the debt-collector, the judge, the hangman? What means the glass along my neighbour's ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... retained them as indecent publications. Burned them, I hope he meant, and so, I fear, will all holders of this notorious publication, for prices will advance, and Sir Richard will chuckle to think that indecency is a much better protection than ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... to my mind, an' that is, that if a woman thinks she's goin' to attract men by pryin' an' peekin' into immorality an' settin' it straight ag'in, she's gone clean out of her head. Thar's got to be indecency in the world because thar al'ays has been. But a man sets a heap mo' sto' by his wife if she ain't too ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... refreshing in its boldness and freedom. There is no consenting estimate of this poet. Many think that his so-called poems are not poems at all, but simply a bad variety of prose; that there is nothing to him beyond a combination of affectation and indecency; and that the Whitman culte is a passing "fad" of a few literary men, and especially of a number of English critics like Rossetti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc., who, being determined to have something unmistakably ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... these—ach!—these legacies of the Nineteenth century. You'll wind up the Warren Hotels' Company, and as to the two houses you've got here and at Roquebrune, you'll turn them now into decent places where no indecency is tolerated." ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... theatre and the circus, and he wished as many as possible to share those delights. In defiance of 'Mrs. Grundy' he ventured to maintain that the words 'music-hall' and 'public-house', rightly understood, should be held in honour. It is one thing to hate drunkenness and indecency; it is quite another to assume that these must be found in the poor man's place of recreation, and this roused him to anger. To him 'public-house' meant a place of fellowship, and 'music-hall' a place of song and mirth; and if some critics complain ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Immodest, Indecent. It is from vulgus, the common people, the mob, and means both common and unrefined, but has no relation to indecency. ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... the crown; that three subsequent houses of commons had voted his exclusion: the taking away of the old charters, and all the hard things done in the last reign, were laid to his charge: the elections of the present parliament were also set forth very odiously, with great indecency of style; the nation was also appealed to, when met in a free parliament, to judge of the Duke's own pretensions;[1] and all sort of liberty, both in temporals and spirituals, was promised to persons of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... the different manifestations of meanness which take place among the travellers of the stage-coach, in the oft-quoted chapter where Joseph, having been robbed of everything, lies naked and bleeding in the ditch. There is Miss Grave-airs, who protests against the indecency of his entering the vehicle, but like a certain lady in the Rake's Progress, holds the sticks of her fan before her face while he does so, and who is afterwards found to be carrying Nantes under the guise of Hungary-water; there is the lawyer ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... impression that the dog had forgotten an essential part of its attire and was outraging decency. The ball of hair which had been allowed to grow on the dog's tail, and the circles of hair which ornamented its ankles, only served to intensify the impression of indecency. A pink ribbon round its neck completed the outrage. The animal had absolutely the air of a decked trollop. A chain ran taut from the creature's neck into the middle of a small crowd of persons gesticulating over trunks, and Constance ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... shall replenish Mr. Grand's hands, I will give you notice, that you may recommence your usual drafts on him; unless the board should provide a separate fund for you, dependant on yourself alone, which I have strongly and repeatedly pressed on them, in order to remove the indecency of suffering your drafts to pass through any intermediate ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... dyspepsia is connected with inflamed stomach, in which case the punching practice is death. We have heard from eminent physicians, that several lives have, within their knowledge, been endangered by it. Moreover, the real indecency of the Halstedian process, particularly in the case of women, has greatly ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... black teeth that we are asked to admire as a Japanese beauty. The traveller in China is early impressed by the contrast between the almost entire freedom from apparent immorality of the Chinese cities, especially of Western China, and the flaunting indecency of the Yoshiwaras of Japan, with "their teeming, seething, busy mass of women, whose virtue is industry and whose industry ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... strong and coarse, no curse too profane. Never was an Oriental despot the most vain and cruel addressed in language of more nauseous flattery by great ministers and officers of State than were the early English sovereigns of the House of Hanover. The filthy indecency which came so habitually from the lips of Walpole, of other statesmen, of the King—sometimes even of the Queen herself—hardly seems more ignoble, more demoralizing, than the outpouring of a flattery as false as it was gross, a flattery that ought to have sickened alike the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... mild, meek, inoffensive modern variety to which we are accustomed, but of the fierce, aggressive early type,—instead of proceeding against them for their overt offenses against the state, disorderly behavior, public indecency, contempt of court, sedition, they proceeded against them distinctly as Quakers, thus putting themselves in the wrong and conceding to their adversaries that crown of martyrdom for which their souls were hankering and to which they were not ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the limits of decency. Although it is a harsh term, and was mercilessly used by Mr. Shields in his fierce war on the men who slaughtered game for "sport," it has jarred at least a hundred thousand men into their first realization of the fact that to-day there is a difference between decency and indecency in the pursuit of game. The use of the term has done very great good; but, strange to say, it has made for Mr. Shields a great many enemies outside the ranks of the game-hogs themselves! From this one might fairly suppose that there is such a ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... rather than our own. We miserably did what we could to comfort her, and we at last silenced her with I do not know what pretences. The affair was quite too much for me, and I made a feint of having heard the children calling me, and I went out into the hall. I felt that there was a sort of indecency in my witnessing that poor young thing's emotion; women might see it, but a man ought not. Perhaps old Hasketh felt the same; he followed me out, and when we were beyond hearing, even if he had spoken ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... there is now. It rivals the corrupt and debauched age of Louis XV. of France. A delirium of fashion exists. Women are ranked by what they wear, not by what they are. Extravagance of dress, and almost indecency of dress, has taken the place of simple womanly beauty. Wordsworth once described the "perfect woman nobly planned." Where will you find the perfect woman now? Not in the parti-coloured, over-dressed creature—the thing of shreds and patches—with false hair, false colour, false eyebrows, false ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... Few cared. It was a "corrupt and contented" city. The corruption grew worse. Lower and meaner grafters rose to take the place of the earlier and more robust good fellows who trafficked in the city o' shame. Graft lost class, and lost caste. It was ultimately exposed in all its shocking indecency. The light and licentious town developed a conscience. Public indignation arose and reached its height, when the grafters ventured too far in the shooting of the attorney charged with ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... master of the ceremonies. His character is pointedly defined by St. Evremond, as "a lover whom the Precieuse is to love without enjoyment, and to enjoy in good earnest her husband with aversion." The scene offered no indecency to such delicate minds, and much less the impassioned style which passed between les cheres, as they called themselves. Whatever offered an idea, of what their jargon denominated charnelle, was treason and exile. Years passed ere the hand of ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... have but expanded these so-called arguments, often they have pushed them to trifling and indecency. They have found God in the folds of the skin of the rhinoceros: one could, with equal reason, deny His existence because of the ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... explain what He meant by a neighbour, selected as an example a heretic and an alien. Last year, we remember, it was represented by a pious writer in the John Bull newspaper, and by some other equally fervid Christians, as a monstrous indecency, that the measure for the relief of the Jews should be brought forward in Passion week. One of these humorists ironically recommended that it should be read a second time on Good Friday. We should have had no objection; nor do we believe that the day could be commemorated ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... business to go round the rooms of the French Embassy picking holes in the earthly robes of society's elect. Suffice it to say that every one was there. Miss Kate Whyte, of course, who had made a place in society and held it by the indecency of her language. Lady Mealhead said she couldn't stand Kitty Whyte at any price. We are sorry to use such a word as indecency in connection with a young person of the gentler sex, but facts must sometimes be ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... there to preach the superiority of man to the beasts, and the indecency and degradation of permitting man to be unduly insulted. I had come to learn for myself the new balance of things in the kingdom of Atlantis, and so I stood at my place behind the arrow-slit with a still face. And presently another scene in ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... sympathies, Tory in a loose sense, and firmly anti-Walpole. Perhaps verse satire is essentially aristocratic. Perhaps wit is, too. Certainly they never seem at home in a middle-class society. Wit comes to savor of indecency and blasphemy; satire in its incessant defence of moral value and centers of order comes to seem the expression of an arrogant disdain and a disquieting unease. His poise and verbal brilliance and hieratic commitment to the venerable tradition of classical and Christian ethical ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... up in the Sunday advertising the leading theater display, went to the musical comedy there exploited, and presently devoted a column to giving it a terrific and only half-merited slashing for vapid and gratuitous indecency. The play, which had been going none too well, straightway sold out a fortnight in advance, thereby attesting the power of the press as well as the appeal of pruriency to an eager and jaded public. Zucker left a note on the editorial desk warmly thanking his ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of indecency. A man who had stared at a woman would have been thrown out, execrated and forever more refused admission. But out in the street, where the litter-bearers and attendants whiled away the time, there were tales told that spread to the ends of ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... humor. He was the foremost of English sentimentalists, and he had that taint of insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment, like Goldsmith's, for example. Sterne, in life, was selfish, heartless, and untrue. A clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the indecency of his writings were a scandal to the Church, though his sermons were both witty and affecting. He enjoyed the titilation of his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent pathos that lies in the expression of dumb things and of poor, patient animals, that ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... mediaeval Europe: amongst the Arnauts he is called "Suttari" and is known by his fox's tails: he mounts a mare, tom-toms on the kettle-drum and is generally one of the bravest of the corps. These buffoons are noted for extreme indecency: they generally appear in the ring provided with an enormous phallus of whip-cord and with this they charge man, woman and child, to the infinite delight ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... exemplify the rules he has laid down for epic poetry in a most curious discussion that precedes it. That so small a part of the novel has been preserved is most annoying; it must have been comparable, in dramatic power and (notwithstanding the gross indecency of many passages) in a certain large sanity, to the great work of Fielding. In all the refined writing of the next age we never again come on anything at once so masterly and ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... say to the British consul; "I'll tell you what that is, old man. That's a porous plaster. It has some holes, but it's meant to cover your indecency." ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... depicted upon the throne of Apollo at Amyclae, the artist of which probably flourished about 600 B. C. The old philosopher Heraclitus, who would scourge Homer from the festivals of the Gods, doubtless had this passage in mind. Plato censures its indecency specially, and, as is well known, would exclude all Homer from his ideal Republic. The ancients thus accepted the passage as Homeric, with the exception of some ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... of the temporal and eternal damnation of a multitude of men. There is a shamelessness among many in what is called high life that calls for vehement protest. The strife with many seems to be how near they can come to the verge of indecency without falling over. The tide of masculine profligacy will never turn back until there is a decided reformation in womanly costume. I am in full sympathy with the officer of the law who, at a levee in Philadelphia last winter, ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... great artists of the two operas sing in private; was regaled with information concerning the remarkable decency or indecency of their private careers. She saw fashionable plays which instructed the public about squalor, murder, and men's mistresses, which dissected very skilfully and artistically the ethics of moral degradation. And being as healthy and curious ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... degree ruled or moulded by the influence of that religious literature with which they helped to furnish the world. They were neither better nor worse than the average British workman; but they certainly cursed a good deal, and a stiffish breeze of indecency blew through all ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... the French Canadians are simple, almost infantine, in their language, and as chaste in expression as the hymns of other countries. Impure songs originate in classes who know better, and revel from choice in musical slang and indecency. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... to me with a sort of smiling abhorrence by the kindly old kiosk woman whom I liked best to buy my daily papers of. When I came to look it through, I made more and more haste, for its satire of the priests was of an indecency so rank that it seemed to offend the nose as well as the eye. To turn from the paper was easy, but from the fact of its popularity a painful impression remained. It was not a question of whether the priests ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... certainly never so much as the sports of the circus. Besides comedies and tragedies, the Romans had a species of drama peculiar to their country, called the Atellane farces, which were, in general, low pieces of gross indecency and vulgar buffoonery, but sometimes contained spirited satires on the character and ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith |
