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Unprincipled   /ənprˈɪnsəpəld/   Listen
Unprincipled

adjective
1.
Lacking principles or moral scruples.
2.
Having little or no integrity.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Unprincipled" Quotes from Famous Books



... he replied, "and what was never before done to any poet.... But even in 'Don Juan' I have been misunderstood. I take a vicious and unprincipled character, and lead him through those ranks of society whose high external accomplishments cover and cloak internal and secret vices, and I paint the natural effects of such characters, and certainly they are not so highly colored as we find ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... man could; but imprisoned as he was in a veritable "robbers' den," without means of communicating with the authorities or the outside world, and powerless to protect his life from the vengeance of the unprincipled scoundrel who held him, the only safe and sane mode of procedure was to give ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne

... of but very little force of character, was crushed by the calamities which were overwhelming his country. Not an hour of tranquillity could he enjoy. It was the ambition of his nephews, ambitious, energetic, unprincipled princes, struggling for the supremacy, which was mainly the cause ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott

... an able man, but unprincipled, who led a life of extravagance; professed loyalty to the existing government in England; intrigued with the Stuarts, and was convicted of high-treason, and died in Spain ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... (1788-1824), a great English poet, was born in London in the year 1788. He was the only child of a reckless and unprincipled father and a passionate mother. He was educated at Harrow School, and afterwards at Trinity College, Cambridge. His first volume— Hours of Idleness— was published in 1807, before he was nineteen. ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

... red with his fury. "When one of my blood loses her last shred of decency, when she takes up with a low, dissolute unprincipled Shandon? The worst of a bad lot. May God curse him, may God curse her if ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... hesitated to shorten the sweet illusion by making known to her the dismal reality. He felt an unconquerable repugnance to be the messenger of such fearful intelligence; for though the valet was accustomed to the unprincipled vagaries of his master, he was not entirely divested of humanity, and he could not but commiserate the utter wretchedness ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio

... the place. Round and round went the dance, and round and round went Charles's head. He was flush with money, and many a friend did he treat at the bar. Long ere the festivities closed he was unable to walk steadily. Still, stimulated by the excitement of the occasion, and urged on by unprincipled comrades, he poured down the deadly poison. His brain reeled under its influence. He alternately roared and laughed as a maniac. "Another drink! another drink!" he said. His youthful system could endure it no longer: he uttered ...
— Charles Duran - Or, The Career of a Bad Boy • The Author of The Waldos

... only prolong an interview singularly distasteful to me for many reasons. You are behind the curtain, I cannot doubt, and understand not only the contents of that absurd letter, but its unprincipled references. To Basil Bainrothe I will never address one line; but you may say to him that I scorn him and his conditions. Yet, helpless as I am, and in his hands, tell him to bring his emancipation papers, and I will sign them, though they cost me all I possess of property. ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield

... Miss Effingham," he said, appealing to Eve, of whom he stood habitually in awe, from the pure necessity of addressing her in his distress, or of addressing no one, "do me the favour to look into my room, and see the unprincipled manner in which I have been treated. Not a comb nor a razor left; not a garment to make myself decent in! I'm sure such conduct is quite a disgrace to the civilization of barbarians even, and I shall make it a point, to have the affair duly represented to ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... appointments unacceptable to the New York senator; Guiteau pretended to think the removal of Mr. Garfield necessary to the unity of the party and the salvation of the country. The prosecution showed that Guiteau had long been an unprincipled adventurer, greedy for notoriety; that he first conceived of killing the President after his hopes of office were finally destroyed; and that he had planned the murder several weeks in advance. Guiteau was found guilty, and executed at Washington on June 30, 1882. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... is not in this Hall of Independence that meetings of infuriated fanatics and unprincipled demagogues have been held to counsel a bloody resistance to the laws of the land. It is not in this city that conventions are held denouncing the Constitution, the Laws, and the Bible. It is not here that the pulpit has been desecrated by seditious exhortations, teaching ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker

... holding or dividing it, or renting it high, or renting it low—would be of the smallest ultimate use to the people—so long as the general contest for life, and for the means of life, remains one of mere brutal competition. That contest, in an unprincipled nation, will take one deadly form or another, whatever laws you make against it. For instance, it would be an entirely wholesome law for England, if it could be carried, that maximum limits should be assigned to incomes according to classes; and that every nobleman's income ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... again, and laid their plans, which were quite as deep, and quite as wicked, as the most unprincipled ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade

... secured the election of a majority of ignorant blacks, and equally ignorant or unprincipled whites, to the Convention, has proved sufficient to hold them firmly to their original purpose. They could only hope to obtain office by disqualifying everybody in the State who is capable of discharging ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... on, meeting new treasures at every rise of a leaf; and at the end of the book he came upon two sheets of paper, of much more recent date than anything he had seen yet, which puzzled him considerably. They must be contemporary, he decided, with the unprincipled Canon Alberic, who had doubtless plundered the Chapter library of St Bertrand to form this priceless scrap-book. On the first of the paper sheets was a plan, carefully drawn and instantly recognizable by a person who knew the ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James

... which an impartial though possibly unprincipled observer, might have offered at this point to the unfortunate Sophie and Valentine, would be the fact that the young Countess was evidently extremely plain, as even Balzac's partiality only allows him to say: ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... his own charge, and let not the spheres of duty be confused. When wise men are entrusted with office, the sound of praise arises. If unprincipled men hold office, disasters and tumults are multiplied. In this world, few are born with knowledge: wisdom is the product of earnest meditation. In all things, whether great or small, find the right man, and they will surely be well managed: on all occasions, be they urgent or the reverse, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... however, there are other unprincipled fish which display their affection and care for their young in far more questionable and unpleasant manners. For instance, there is that uncanny creature that inserts its parasitic fry as a tiny egg inside the unsuspecting shells of mussels and cockles. ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... Anne of Austria. These praises and attentions on the part of the king excited the jealousy of the petted favorite, Madame du Barri. She consequently became, with the party under her influence, the relentless and unprincipled enemy of Maria. She lost no opportunity to traduce her character. She spread reports every where that Maria hated the French; that she was an Austrian in heart; that her frankness and freedom from the ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... under thy rod. Owing to thee, the man of unfortunate disposition and neglected education, is condemned as a fool for his dissipation, despised and shunned as a needy wretch, when his follies as usual bring him to want; and when his unprincipled necessities drive him to dishonest practices, he is abhorred as a miscreant, and perishes by the justice of his country. But far otherwise is the lot of the man of family and fortune. His early follies and extravagance, are spirit and fire; ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... unextinguished in the people, and of all which tends to draw the attention of foreign countries upon this. It is now in its final and conclusive struggle. It has to struggle against a force to which, I am afraid, it is not equal. The whole kingdom of Scotland ranges with the venal, the unprincipled, and the wrong-principled of this; and if the kingdom of Ireland thinks proper to pass into the same camp, we shall certainly be obliged to quit the field. In that case, if I know anything of this country, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... consequently great weakness. The people of Lira were fighting with their friends the Langgos—those of Shooa with the natives of Fatiko; nor were there two neighbouring tribes that were at peace. It was natural that such unprincipled parties as the Khartoum traders should turn this general discord to their own advantage; thus within the ten months that I had been absent from Shooa a great change had taken place in the neighbourhood. The ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... Europe," cried Kaunitz, with unusual warmth." Russia's policy is that of unprincipled ambition; and if so far she has not progressed in her lust of dominion, it is Austria, or rather the policy which I dictate to Austria, that has checked her advance. It is I who have restored the balance of power, by conquering Austria's antipathy to France, by isolating haughty England, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... organizing his expedition and preparing to set out in the spring. The want of money was the great difficulty, for there was no lack of men. Don Pedro agreed, it is true, that when he recovered his kingdom he would pay back the advances which Edward had to make, but he was so unprincipled a man that Edward knew very well that he could not trust to his promises unless he gave some security. So Don Pedro agreed to leave his three daughters in Edward's hands as hostages to secure the ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... no!" cried John Saltram, with a wry face; "it is the romance of reality I deal with. My book is a Life of Jonathan Swift. He was always a favourite study of mine, you know, that brilliant, unprincipled, intolerant, cynical, irresistible, miserable man. Scott's biography seems to me to give but a tame picture, and others are only sketches. Mine will be a pre-Raphaelite study—faithful as a photograph, careful as a miniature on ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon

... king of Charles's Island furnishes another illustration of the difficulty of colonizing barren islands with unprincipled pilgrims. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... him—now prompting Ethelred to deeds of treachery against the Danes, now joining those Danes themselves, and surpassing them in cruelty—now seeking pretended reconciliation, only to betray his foe more surely, and in all this aided and supported by the weak, unprincipled king—as thus pictured there is scarcely ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... though it may communicate happiness by enabling us to relieve the wants of our fellow creatures, and afford us many joys in the indulgence of our benevolence, yet it cannot of itself communicate happiness, but virtue can. A wicked and unprincipled man is wretched, though he roll in all the wealth and splendors that earth can give. He feels in his bosom a burning flame, that all the streams of wealth can never quench, and a craving desire, that nought on earth can gratify. If his "great riches" afford him any enjoyments, yet ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods

... humiliating to conceive of it in the character of an unprincipled conspiracy of the civilised, horribly avenged by infuriated savages. It is a quite melancholy enough object of contemplation, in even its latter stages. A wild scene of rocks and mountains darkened overhead with tempest, beneath ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... make," said he, in the Sennaar manner, "it would be equally out of keeping with every other room in your house. My dear Potiphar, it is a perfectly unprincipled house, this of yours. If your mind were in the condition of your house, so ill-assorted, so confused, so overloaded with things that don't belong together, you would never make another cent. You have order, propriety, harmony, ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis

... numerous animal fables that remind one strongly of AEsop's fables and the Brer Rabbit stories of the Africans. In these KORA, the land-tortoise, and PLANDOK, the tiny mouse-deer, figure largely as cunning and unprincipled thieves and vagabonds that turn the laugh always against the ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... their infidel or licentious speculations. She was the friend of those economists and philosophers who sapped the foundations of the social system. An imperious and insolent hauteur and reckless prodigality were her most marked peculiarities,—just such as were to be expected in an unprincipled woman raised suddenly to high position. In spite of her power, she did not escape the malignant stings of envenomed rivals or anonymous satirists. "She was rallied on the baseness of her origin; she avenged herself by making common cause with those ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord

... in tying herself for life to an unprincipled man who has yielded to the dictates of sin year after year, forgets that he has lost to a great extent his better nature and is now hardly responsible for his actions. The spirit may indeed be willing, but the flesh is lamentably weak. The appetites that have ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... chaplain. "John Fetty," returned the boy, at the same time pointing to the place where he was confined. The interrogating miscreant on this said, "Why, thy father is a heretic!" The little champion again rejoined, with energy sufficient to raise admiration in any breast, except that of this unprincipled and unfeeling wretch—this miscreant, eager to execute the behests of a remorseless queen—"My father is no heretic: for you ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... the ordinary wine, but wanted some of good quality and high price. The slave replied in his simplicity, as he was speaking to an old acquaintance, that his master was entertaining Marcus Antonius, who was concealed at his house. The wine-dealer, a faithless and unprincipled wretch, as soon as the slave left him, hurried off to Marius, who was at supper, and having gained admission, told him that he would betray Marcus Antonius to him. On hearing this, Marius is said to have uttered a loud shout and to have clapped his ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long

... the province, the whole should be repaid to the account of the captors. This had not been done, and the officers and men were still losers to the amount, in addition to the non-adjudication of their prizes generally by the Portuguese tribunal at Rio de Janeiro, which, in unprincipled violation of the express decrees of His Imperial Majesty—asserted that "they knew nothing of prizes, and did not know that Brazil was at war with Portugal!" though, in the Imperial order of March 30th, 1823—given for the vigorous blockade of Bahia, His Majesty had explicitly ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald

... write about she should have written to ME. I am the oldest. Charlotte had no business to get a letter from Jane Roberts without consulting me. It's just like her underhanded ways. She got married the same way. Never said a word to me about it, but just sneaked off with that unprincipled ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... there may be no mistake about it, I'll say it once more. You're a good-natured, good-hearted, cunning, unprincipled, hardened old rascal of a politician. Now if you don't want to say what you came here to say, the same route that brings you in ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott

... sacred interests of humanity? In witnessing the multitude of vices which the torrent of the Revolution has rolled in turbid communion with its civic virtues, I confess that I have sometimes feared that I should be sullied, in the eyes of posterity, by the impure neighborhood of unprincipled men, who had thrust themselves into association with the sincere friends of humanity; and I rejoice that these conspirators against my country have now, by their reckless rage, traced deep the line of demarcation between themselves and ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... but the Ranee, to whom he was beholden for the position he occupied, turned the influence she had thus obtained over him to a bad account, and this gallant soldier and popular minister ultimately became distrusted and feared by his own friends, with whom the Ranee was no favourite. This unprincipled woman ill repaid the devotion of her minister, for, on his refusing to comply with her request that he should put to death some of her personal enemies, she became at once his implacable foe, and ruthlessly resolved upon the destruction ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant

... the Crown, has given this erroneous impression of her disposition. It was the only point on which she was ever influenced against her own judgment; the instigator being Lord Guilford, who in his turn was urged by his ambitious, unprincipled father, and his equally ambitious and unprincipled mother, in whose hands his weak, affectionate, yielding temperament rendered him an easy tool. The probability is, that had Jane been firmly established as Queen, she would have shown a character more akin to that of Elizabeth than is ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt

... is mischievous enough, however; and I think that much if not most current criticism as practised among the English and Americans is bad, is falsely principled, and is conditioned in evil. It is falsely principled because it is unprincipled, or without principles; and it is conditioned in evil because it is almost wholly anonymous. At the best its opinions are not conclusions from certain easily verifiable principles, but are effects from the worship of certain ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... cunning, untidy, and uninteresting, every day. And all this was going on under the very eyes of many thoroughly noble boys, and conscientious masters, and yet they never saw or noticed it, and looked on Eden as an idle and unprincipled little sloven. O our harsh human judgments! The Priest and the Levite still pass the wounded man, and the good Samaritans are rare ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... brightens them up—amuses them? Probably he has very high spirits. Perhaps he has the jar de veev." Miss Westbury had a private pronunciation of foreign expressions all her own. "It is unfortunate, but do you know one often sees that in unprincipled ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson

... striking feature about the moral organization of Pathfinder was his beautiful and unerring sense of justice. This noble trait—and without it no man can be truly great, with it no man other than respectable—probably had its unseen influence on all who associated with him; for the common and unprincipled brawler of the camp had been known to return from an expedition made in his company rebuked by his sentiments, softened by his language, and improved by his example. As might have been expected, with so elevated a quality his fidelity was ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... except by disinfectants, and by keeping the system regular, for it soon spread over all the land and the air was full of it. Remedies sold so high that many must have perished without the test of medicinal aid to cure their disease. A cry went up against unprincipled druggists who were over-charging for their drugs, but nothing more was done to check their greed. Camphor sold as high as four dollars a pound, and the druggist with a few hundred drops of laudanum and as much chlorodyne could travel through ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum

... unhappy Church. As year by year she saw the ruin of the Missions steadily going on, their vast properties melting away, like dew before the sun, in the hands of dishonest administrators and politicians, the Church powerless to contend with the unprincipled greed in high places, her beloved Franciscan Fathers driven from the country or dying of starvation at their posts, she submitted herself to what, she was forced to admit, seemed to be the inscrutable will of God for the discipline and humiliation ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson

... game lasted long because of the ever-green credulity of our "public." In the ever-fresh stream of human life which daily flowed beneath our windows, there were sure to be one or more pedestrians who, with varying expressions of conscientious responsibility, unprincipled appropriation, or mere curiosity, would open our parcels, either to ascertain what trinket should be restored to its owner, or to keep what was to be got, or to see what there was ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... interview with Dwight Pollard I have become convinced that, however unprincipled his brother might be, it was with no intention of carrying out his threats that he plunged me into the vat on that fatal night; that, recognizing the weakness in me, he had resorted to intimidation to ensure his ends; and that all the ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green

... of the Druze religion is Hamze, the "Universal Intelligence," the only Mediator between God and man, and the medium of the creation of all things. This Hamze was a shrewd, able and unprincipled man. In his writings he not only defends the abominations of Hakem, but lays down the complete code of Druze doctrine ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup

... portion of the adventurers, says Stith (History of Virginia), were unprincipled young men of family, whom their parents were glad to ship off, discharged servants, fraudulent bankrupts, or debauchees: and others of the same class, people more apt to pillage and destroy than to assist the settlement, were the seditious ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al

... very first, although he did not tell me so then, he saw that I had been simply exploited by this heartless and unprincipled scoundrel, Prince Adalbert of Rittersheim. But your father," she proceeded, turning to Dolores and placing her hand on hers, "your father, my dear, by his self-sacrifice and the pure affection which he bore ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties

... most singular rumors, after the case was given to you, gentlemen, to the effect that there had been in this cause a criminal abuse of justice. It is painful to suspect, and shocking to know, that courts and juries are liable ever to suffer by such unprincipled practices. After ten years upon the bench, I never witness a conviction of crime without pain; but that pain is light, compared with the distress of knowing of a wilful perversion of justice. It is a relief to me to be able to say to you that such instances ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various

... developed itself gradually after his marriage, every body began to dislike him also. He was unprincipled and vicious, as well as imperious and proud. His friendship for Rizzio was another ground of dislike to him. The ancient nobles, who had been accustomed to exercise the whole control in the public affairs of Scotland, found themselves supplanted by this young Italian singer, and an English boy ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... Truth, being one of those good fighters capable of respecting even his foe, his enemy, against whom from ten to four, occasionally a little later, he fought right valiantly) for saying that of all the men who go down into the City each day in a cab or 'bus or train, he was perhaps one of the most unprincipled: and whether that be saying much or little I leave to those ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... peeresses; not a queen of beauty and of fashion, leading the elite of society in London. Ah, no! she was a despised and neglected wife, wasting the flower of her youth in a remote and dreary coast castle, and daily insulted and degraded by the presence of an unprincipled rival. ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... the "constable's" story to the effect, "that a colored man in Philadelphia, who professed to be a great friend of the colored people, was a traitor, etc.," the Committee never learned. As a general thing, colored people were true to the fugitive slave; but now and then some unprincipled individuals, under various pretenses, would cause us ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the ladies, with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away! High times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him are to be permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do what the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out .. of his bed; for, alas! all fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often cause the most ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... wicked, immoral, iniquitous, arrant, corrupt, depraved, sinful, base, demoralized, sinister, licentious, unprincipled, abandoned, graceless, vicious, incorrigible, unscrupulous, miscreant, reprobate, disreputable, rascal, scoundrel, profligate, knavish, naughty, malevolent, malicious, unrighteous, degrading, dissolute, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... logical deduction of truth, if the facts which have been urged in support of this charge, are the mere creatures of misrepresentation, prevarication and falsehood; this alone will settle the controversy, and fix the imputation, upon its unprincipled authors. The loop on which this absurd tale is made to hang, is the frail and feeble certificate of Ketcham, Gardner and Cowles. That I should be authorised to apply an epithet more severe than that of frail and feeble, I take it upon me to prove in the first place by the certificate ...
— A Review and Exposition, of the Falsehoods and Misrepresentations, of a Pamphlet Addressed to the Republicans of the County of Saratoga, Signed, "A Citizen" • An Elector

... are opposed to them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others because they are themselves sincere, and endeavour to secure the public good with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have no regard to anything but their own unprincipled ends, and stick at nothing to accomplish them. Cassius was better cut out for a conspirator. His heart prompted his head. His habitual jealousy made him fear the worst that might happen, and his irritability of temper added to his inveteracy ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... punishment of suspension for three months changed into a severer one, and of an indefinite period. The annals of the most arbitrary government in the world—the history of the most despotic tyrant that ever lived—could not show an instance of more unprincipled violation of law and justice than this. And yet it may naturally be the result of the doctrine, that in a sentence of definite suspension, the party can be restored only by a vote of the lodge at the expiration of his term of suspension. If ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... for painting and sculpture, Powers observed that it was something very different and quite apart from the moral sense, and that it was often, perhaps generally, possessed by unprincipled men of ability and cultivation. I have had this perception myself. A genuine love of painting and sculpture, and perhaps of music, seems often to have distinguished men capable of every social crime, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... subjects, the literary reproduction of their own corrupt lives. The theatre no doubt represented men as worse than they were. But the friends of Buckingham and Rochester, both male and female, found in its long list of unprincipled men, of married women debauched, and of young girls anxious to be debauched, the reflection and justification of ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... many complaints and requests, the English had failed to punish unprincipled white men who had done ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney

... when it was finished, and a success. Then one of the largest stockholders of the railroad, an unprincipled man, planned a plot. At first his fellow stockholders would not agree to it, but he persuaded them, painting the ruin of their railroad, and saying only slight damage would be ...
— The Moving Picture Boys at Panama - Stirring Adventures Along the Great Canal • Victor Appleton

... invasion. Upon turning out those articles, the enemy pledged their faith and honor that they would not attack him. On these he relied and therefore thought it unnecessary to be on his guard against the enemy. But their pledges of faith and honor proved no better than those of other unprincipled hostile nations; for a few days after a certain relation of the king came and informed him, that the enemy who sent terms of accommodation to him, and received tribute to their satisfaction, yet meditated an attack on his ...
— A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of • Venture Smith

... white people remained, ten of whom were religiously engaged in keeping school, or were engaged in keeping a religious school. At this period of time it is difficult to say which. Worse than this scurvily decimated condition of the people, was the intrusion of some unprincipled and unprivileged adventurers from Rochelle, who had been bartering fire-arms with the Indians for the Company's furs. Champlain was very wroth, but moderated his anger somewhat on ascertaining that an enfant du sol—a real French-Canadian baby was in the land ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger

... kind sir, heartless, unprincipled creatures. I did them many favors, and then they went and related a batch of falsehoods to ruin me. I have always been too kind and ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau

... without restriction, even the most vile, would be summoned to vote in accordance with their favorite theory of inalienable right. That class of women, and other degraded classes of the ignorant and unprincipled, will always be ready to sell their votes many times over—to either party, to both parties, to the highest bidder, in short. They will sell their vote much more readily than the lowest classes of men now do. They will hold it ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... new pace in this race for votes. It has been estimated that in 1854 there "were about 40,000 shiftless, unprincipled persons who lived by their wits and the labor of others. The trade of a part of these was turning primary elections, packing nominating conventions, repeating, and breaking up meetings." Wood also systematized naturalization. A card bearing the following ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth

... far as Miss Fosby alone was concerned. To her there was but one woman in the world, and that was Lady Wicketts. But the majority of people saw Lady Wicketts in quite another light. They knew she had been, in her time, as unprincipled as beautiful, and that she had 'gone the pace' more openly than most of her class. They beheld her now without spectacles,—an enormously fat woman, with a large round flaccid face, scarred all over by Time's ploughshare with such deep furrows that ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... will find, in investigating this subject, that every solid argument is against the extraordinary court, and that every one in its favor is specious only. It is a transfer from a judicature of learning and integrity, to one, the greatness of which is both illiterate and unprincipled. Yet such is the force of prejudice with some, and of the want of reflection in others, that many of our constitutions have copied this absurdity, without suspecting it to be one. I am glad to hear that ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... I had time to think it over. I knew then I was too young and too ignorant to be any man's wife. I was frightened and I—well, I ran away; I went back to my sister. Both she and her husband regarded me after that as in some way marked, unprincipled, unworthy—" ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris

... several, too, this deplorable lot had fallen by unjust condemnation and corrupt judges; the conduct of the rich, in regard to money sacred and profane, in regard to matters public as well as private, being thoroughly unprincipled and rapacious. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various

... brief stop Frank took occasion to look at the object lying in the bottom of the tonneau, and which had seemed to be especially valuable in the eyes of the two unprincipled men. ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes

... the course of his travels he generally acquires some knowledge of one or two foreign languages; a knowledge, however, which is seldom sufficient to enable him either to speak or write them with propriety. In other respects he commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application, either to study or to business, than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home. By travelling so very young, by spending in the most frivolous dissipation ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae

... then!" breaks in Jack. "They're all rascals, every wastrel [an unprincipled, good-for-nothing fellow] ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt

... his eyes as he declared how easily he'd manage the affair, if poor Anty was once more in the house, his heart misgave him, even though he was a sharp attorney, at the idea of assisting such a cruel brute in his cruelty; and, for a moment, he had determined to throw up the matter. Barry was so unprincipled, and so wickedly malicious in his want of principle, that he disgusted even Daly. But, on second thoughts, the lawyer remembered that if he didn't do the job, another would; and, quieting his not very violent qualms of conscience with the idea that, though employed by the brother, ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... could never command one honest vote at their own homes in the North. Faye's company has been moved twenty-one times since we came from Colorado three years ago, and almost every time it was at the request of those unprincipled carpetbaggers. These moves did not always disturb us, however, as during most of the time Faye has been adjutant general of the District of Baton Rouge, and this kept us at Baton Rouge, but during the past winter we have been ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe

... Ireland some better grounds for the passion they display. It is noticeable that such reproaches come more often from the so-called Liberal Unionists than from the present Ministry. Perhaps, with their belief that all Liberals are unprincipled revolutionaries, the Tories deem a sin more or less to be of small account. Perhaps a recollection of their own remarkable gyrations, before and after the General Election of 1885, may suggest that ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.

... it was fresh. Boys are hardy things, and it is right they should not be accustomed to be too nice; but wholesome, plain roast and boiled is what they pay for and ought to have; and the defrauding them of what is so necessary to health, vigor, and even intellect, in this unprincipled manner, is almost the very worst form of robbery any man can ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... audacity to declare, in regard to slavery in the United States, that "we do not believe that such oppression is to be found in any other part of the world, civilized or uncivilized. We do not believe that such oppression ever existed before." Yet even this unprincipled writer has, in the very article containing this declaration, shown that he knows better. He has shown that he knows that the African has been elevated and improved by his servitude in the United States. We shall proceed to convict him out ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... farmer whose hospitable home afforded comfort and shelter to many who were houseless. He was an unbending Covenanter. Nothing could daunt his noble soul. Being threatened with trouble and loss, he once replied, that if the turning of a straw, in obedience to unprincipled and arbitrary rulers, would save him from harm, he would not comply. His wife was of equal heroism. His home was so often beset by soldiers in search of him, that he had to retire to the solitudes. He one day said to his wife, "My dear wife, stern necessity demands ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters

... vices. Their unnatural attempt to be wiser than God, and to unsex themselves, had done little but disease their mind and heart. They resorted more and more to those arts which are the weapons of crafty, ambitious, and unprincipled women. They were too apt to be cunning, false, intriguing. They were personally cowardly, as their own chronicles declare; querulous, passionate, prone to unmanly tears; prone, as their writings abundantly testify, to scold, to use the most virulent language against all who ...
— David • Charles Kingsley

... the family was, as we have seen, open to improvement in many respects, and Duncan junior was of that heart-breaking character which is known as ne'er-do-weel. Possibly, if differently treated by his father, he might have been a better man. As it was, he was unprincipled and hasty ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne

... his purpose. And having discovered some slight irregularity in Woodburn's deed, to begin upon, he then resorted to a trick quite fashionable among the corrupt speculators of those unsettled times—that of purchasing from some unprincipled person, ready, for a small sum, to enter into the fraud, a deed of prior date to that of the one to be defeated, with descriptions of premises and references to suit the purchaser the worthless assumed owner neither knowing nor caring what ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... who took mine were unprincipled fellows. Mr. Damon would not have gone away with men who would steal ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton

... men. The woman legislative agent has been known to occupy an important position in Washington, and she does yet. She is hard to detect and frequently more unprincipled than the men similarly ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise

... among the students who came almost every day. He made love to her from the start, and one day attempted liberties which she was prompt to resent in a way he did not relish. After that he let her alone. She never liked the man. She knew him to be unprincipled as well as vicious. One night he brought Howard Jeffries to the restaurant. They seemed the closest of cronies and she was sorry to see what bad influence the elder sophomore had over the young freshman, to whom she was at once attracted. Every time they came she ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow

... years as a daring officer and an unprincipled rascal. Indeed, there was a score between us, for he had shot my friend, Treville, at Warsaw, pulling his trigger, as some said, a good second before the ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle

... her country. I blush to think of it. We English cannot be too careful of our behavior abroad. No opportunity is slight enough for our continental neighbours to cast stones, and this opportunity is very far from being slight. It is the maddest piece of unprincipled folly ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull

... forthwith instruct in that barbarous dialect some matron of unblemished repute and devout aspirations; no mere ignorant devotee, however, but a woman of the world, whose prudence and experience may preserve the holy man from the pitfalls set for him by the unprincipled. Manifestly she must be a married person, else nought were gained, yet must she not be chargeable with forsaking her duties towards her husband and children. It follows that she must be a widow. It were also well that she should be of kin to some ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... Gogol, he was born not far from the latter's beloved Ukraine. He came honestly by the patrician quality that unconsciously animated all his books, for his family was both ancient and noble. His mother was wealthy, and in 1817 was married to a handsome, unprincipled military officer six years younger than herself. Their life together was an excellent example of the exact opposite of domestic bliss, and in treating the boy like a culprit, they transformed him—as always happens in similar cases—into a severe judge of their own ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... expenses attending the "consignment" of the three Miss Revels to India, Mrs Revel had consented to borrow money, insuring her life as a security to the parties who provided it. Her unprincipled husband took this opportunity of obtaining a sum which amounted to more than half her marriage settlement, as Mrs Revel signed the papers laid before her without examining their purport. When her dividends were become due, this treachery was discovered; and Mrs ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... gods, that Cambyses did not lay violent hands on him in a fit of passion. He has followed my advice now and gone with his wife to Sais. For the next few days Bartja must not come near the king; the mere sight of him might rouse his anger again, and a monarch can always find unprincipled ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... the individual statesmen concerned may be. A Kaiser who is a devout reader of sermons, a Prime Minister who is an emotional singer of hymns, and a General who is a bigoted Roman Catholic may be the executants of the policy; but the policy itself will be one of unprincipled opportunism; and all the Governments will be like the tramp who walks always with the wind and ends as a pauper, or the stone that rolls down the hill and ends as an avalanche: their way is the ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... in making presents out of his own money and squandering other people's. Besides, they were so greedy for power that they took even his vices for virtues. In both armies there were plenty of quiet, law-abiding men as well as many who were unprincipled and disorderly. But for sheer reckless cupidity none could match two of the legionary legates, Alienus Caecina and Fabius Valens.[96] Valens was hostile to Galba, because, after unmasking Verginius's hesitation[97] and thwarting Capito's designs, he considered that ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus

... opening for making an honest livelihood; but such a course did not suit the taste of Delano. Several of his crew, brought up in the slave-trade, or as smugglers, were ill-disposed men; others were weak, ignorant, and unprincipled, and were easily gained by his persuasions to abet him in his evil designs. Finding, after they had been some time at sea together, that neither his mates nor his crew were likely to refuse joining in any project he might suggest, ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston

... GEORGE. I am not surprised. Unprincipled attacks are often made on me by political muckrakers. I sometimes think that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various

... England. For myself, I can only say that I do not believe things have ever been quite so bad in England, and that I am quite sure there never has been any need for them to be. There are, no doubt, spiteful, unprincipled, incompetent practitioners of journalism as of everything else; and it is of course obvious that while advertisements, the favor of the chiefs of parties, and so forth, are temptations to newspaper managers not to hold up a very high standard of honor, anonymity affords ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... sports, horse-racing, and circus exhibitions. Immense crowds assembled, and, amongst the rest, tribe after tribe of the Aborigines from all the surrounding country. Despite the law prohibiting the giving of strong drinks to these poor creatures, foolish and unprincipled dealers supplied them with the same, and the very blankets which the Government had given them were freely exchanged for the fire-water which kindled them ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton

... Maurice, I blush to say that rather than become an unprincipled adventurer living on my wits, or a mean-spirited hanger-on fawning upon acquaintances for a livelihood, or doing anything rather than soil my hands with honest toil, I became a blacksmith fellow some ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... all—for nothing can be more insignificant than Being.' But if Hegel's central thought is easy to catch, his abominable habits of speech make his application of it to details exceedingly difficult to follow. His passion for the slipshod in the way of sentences, his unprincipled playing fast and loose with terms; his dreadful vocabulary, calling what completes a thing its 'negation,' for example; his systematic refusal to let you know whether he is talking logic or physics or psychology, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James

... shall probably ask you for some more sooner than I otherwise might have done, and you will also have to buy me a new watch and a knife." But then fancy the consternation which such an announcement would have occasioned! Fancy the scowl and flashing eyes of the infuriated Theobald! "You unprincipled young scoundrel," he would exclaim, "do you mean to vilify your own parents by implying that they have dealt harshly by one whose profligacy has disgraced ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... quite believe that, Mr. Spargo," she said coldly. "It is no surprise to me that John Maitland should come to such an end. He was a thoroughly bad and unprincipled man, who brought the most terrible disgrace on those who were, unfortunately, connected with him. He was likely to die ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher

... error, to run into the opposite error; forgetting that truth and right lie generally between two extremes. And in agreeing with Sydney Smith, as to the wisdom and the duty of 'taking short views,' let us take care of appearing to approve the doings of those foolish and unprincipled people who will keep no out-look into the future time at all. A bee, you know, cannot see more than a single inch before it; and there are many men, and perhaps more women, who appear, as regards their domestic concerns, to be very much of bees. Not bees in the respect ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... "grub" in sailor's style, threw off all his airs, and enjoyed the joke as much as any one; for a man must take a joke among sailors. He gave us the whole account of his adventures in the country,—roguery and all—and was very entertaining. He was a smart, unprincipled fellow, was at the bottom of most of the rascally doings of the country, and gave us a great deal of interesting information in the ways of the world we ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... forming the bases of the connexion, yet it is so important, that a man is never ruined who has an interesting, faithful, and virtuous wife; while he is lost to comfort, fortune, and even to hope, who has united himself to a vicious and unprincipled one. The fate of woman is still more intimately blended with that of her husband; for, being in the eyes of the law and the world but second to him, she is the victim of his follies and vices at home, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various

... young man; that he has no right to be in her company, to be standing there with her, all alone. Yes; he's a very wicked, unprincipled ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice

... her vast wealth, into the arms of a young man, whom no father, no guardian could have regarded as a well-chosen husband for any girl;—one who as yet had shown no good qualities, who had been a spendthrift, unprincipled, and debauched. Alas, she had loved him! It is possible that her love and her wealth might have turned him from evil to good. But who would have ventured to risk her,—I will not say her and her vast inheritances,—on such a chance? That ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... expulsion from the State. What is known in Illinois history as the "Mormon war" followed closely in the wake of the events just mentioned. Innocent persons were, in many instances, the victims of the folly and of the crimes of unprincipled ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... get hold of somebody with money, or he will soon be in the Bench. He is rather a friend of yours, my dear, so I ought not to abuse him; but he is very wild, and though extremely agreeable, I am afraid utterly unprincipled. I do not believe, however, that he cares one snap of the fingers for Lady Scapegrace, or Miss Molasses either, for the matter of that. I meant to have written you a long letter; but my stupid servants have let the Dean in, and I hear his cough at this ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... the idle and the visionary, who expect to eat without working; penniless demagogues, unprincipled adventurers, and the renegade outpourings of all Christendom; together with those who are enervated and demoralised by sickness and evil associates on board ship. I could not help thinking, as I saw many of the newly-arrived emigrants saunter helplessly ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... alluded to is Mr. Van Buren.—W. L. S.] for the firmness with which he has resisted the recent efforts to force a fraudulent treaty on the remnant of this injured people, and drive them against their will, and against law and treaties sacredly made, away from their lands, to satisfy the rapacity of unprincipled men. ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard

... whom he communicated his own selfish Epicureanism. To him in a great measure may be attributed the corruption of the Florentine aristocracy in the sixteenth century. In his public action he was no less vacillating than unprincipled in private life. After prevailing upon Ippolito and Alessandro de' Medici to leave Florence in 1527, he failed to execute his trust of getting Pisa from their grasp (moved, it is said, by a guilty fondness for the young and handsome ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... flashed to the old nobleman's mind that his wife had exhibited some little confusion when he had spoken to her a day or two previously concerning her jewels: and now it was clear that they had been used as the means to supply the extravagances of an unprincipled spendthrift. How could he any longer cling to the hope that Giulia was imprudent only, and not guilty? Must she not be guilty, to have made so large a sacrifice and run so great a risk for the sake of ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... could not tell him that the Colonel was amenable to any punishment. He was advised that he must take his wife away and live at Naples because of this man,—that he must banish himself entirely if he chose to repossess himself of his wife and child;—and yet nothing could be done to the unprincipled rascal by whom all his wrongs and sufferings were occasioned! Thinking it very possible that Colonel Osborne would follow his wife, he had a watch set upon the Colonel. He had found a retired policeman,—a most discreet man, as he was assured,—who, ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... misunderstand and dislike the word Equality, does not offer so clear a distinction between the Prussian and the other peoples as did the first Prussian principle of an infinite and destructive opportunism; or, in other words, the principle of being unprincipled. Nor upon this second can one take up so obvious a position touching the other civilisations or semi-civilisations of the world. Some idea of oath and bond there is in the rudest tribes, in the darkest continents. But it might be maintained, of the more delicate and imaginative element of reciprocity, ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton

... gold from the ores, and in this way amassed immense wealth. Rumours having got abroad of what was going on, and the suspicions of Tahir being aroused, the unfortunate Austrian was put secretly out of the way, and, as a blind, the unprincipled ruffian procured the firman to which allusion has been made. It need hardly be said that he never availed himself of the privileges which it conferred upon him. Some time after these transactions, he applied for leave to visit Austria, on the plea of ill-health, but ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot

... all lands to California for the coveted gold came the lawless and the blood-thirsty. Men in the gambling houses would sometimes quarrel over the results of the game or over some "love affair." Fair Helen and unprincipled, gay, thoughtless Paris were here by the Golden Gate. The old story is constantly repeating itself since the Homeric days. Duels were fought betimes as a consequence, and the issue for one or both of the combatants ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey

... influence of the press. The republican or patriot press neither sufficiently vigilant, nor clear-sighted, nor intelligent, nor undaunted; not reinvigorated by new, young agencies; the bad press reckless, unprincipled, without honor and conscience, but bold, ferocious in its lies, and sacrificing all that is noble, human and pure ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... impressed me. Really gentlemen, I was so surprised that I literally lost my balance. I was, as you are no doubt aware, merely asserting my rights as a free citizen to protest against the presumptions of the unprincipled oligarchy which is at present ruling this fair city. My case is exactly parallel to that of Caius Gracchus, who, I admit, reaped ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... embassadors to the Illyrian queen, Teuta, to complain of these outrages, she not only refused to attend to their complaints, but caused one of the embassadors to be murdered. War was straightway declared, and a Roman army for the first time crossed the Adriatic (B.C. 229). Demetrius of Pharos, an unprincipled Greek, who was the chief counselor of Teuta, deserted his mistress, and surrendered to the Romans the important island of Corcyra. Teuta was obliged to yield to the Romans every thing they demanded, and promised that the Illyrians should not appear south of Lissa with more than ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence

... experience. But however severe were her sufferings, she probably concealed them within her own breast: and she neither left her husband nor abandoned her duties in disgust. It is indeed possible, though in the highest degree improbable, that whilst his unprincipled conduct was too notorious to be concealed from others, she was not herself made fully acquainted with his infidelity towards her. At all events we may indulge in the belief that she proved to her husband's only legitimate son, Henry (p. 007) of Bolinbroke, a kind ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler

... wrong course, go astray; hug a sin, hug a fault; sow one's wild oats. render vicious &c adj.; demoralize, brutalize; corrupt &c (degrade) 659. Adj. vicious; sinful; sinning &c v.; wicked, iniquitous, immoral, unrighteous, wrong, criminal; naughty, incorrect; unduteous^, undutiful. unprincipled, lawless, disorderly, contra bonos mores [Lat.], indecorous, unseemly, improper; dissolute, profligate, scampish; unworthy; worthless; desertless^; disgraceful, recreant; reprehensible, blameworthy, uncommendable; discreditable, disreputable; Sadistic. base, sinister, scurvy, foul, gross, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... France towards the Swiss Cantons. Indeed his concurrence is not singular; we know of no Friend to Liberty who is not of his opinion. What we most admire is the avowal of his sentiments, and public censure of the unprincipled and atrocious conduct of France. The Poem itself is written with great energy. The second, third, and fourth stanzas contain some of the most vigorous lines we have ever read. The lines in the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... sung to him with his lute, danced before him to make him laugh, and having carried him on his shoulders like a 'pedlar his pack.' He continued to be page and companion to the King till 1524, when, in consequence of the unprincipled machinations of the Queen- mother—who was acting as Regent—he, as well as Bellenden, the learned translator of Livy and Boece, was ejected from his office. When, however, in 1528, the young King, by a noble effort, emancipated himself from the thraldom of his mother and the ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... unprincipled, but romantic; the child of whim, and the slave of an imagination so freakish and deceptive, that it was always impossible to foretell his course. He was alike capable of sacrificing all his feelings to worldly considerations or of forfeiting the world for a visionary caprice. ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... jury, that you are fully aware of the importance of your own office, of the dignity of this court, of the necessity of its existence, of its activity to protect the honest and inoffensive citizen, against the designing, the unprincipled, and the violent. Such protection we know to be absolutely binding upon every community claiming to be civilized; we know that without it no state of society, at all worthy of the dignity of human nature, at all worthy of the dignity of freemen, can exist; without active justice, indeed, the name ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... knows, Roger Carbury had not latterly held this cousin of his in much esteem. He knew her to be worldly and he thought her to be unprincipled. But now, at this moment, her exceeding love for the son whom she could no longer pretend to defend, wiped out all her sins. He forgot the visit made to Carbury under false pretences, and the Melmottes, and all the little tricks which he had detected, in his appreciation ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope

... a charity which should provide both for young and old, Sutton, who had ample reason fully to appreciate the unprincipled and grasping character of the court, proceeded to take every precaution that sagacity and ingenuity could suggest to keep his money secure from the hands of such harpies as Carr and "Steenie," and hedge it round with every ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... Then, I answer, let others do it, and on them, not on you, be the responsibility. But it is said, perhaps, if it is not in your hands—the hands of the respectable and the pious—it will be in the hands of the unprincipled and the profligate. I answer, THERE LET IT BE. There, if anywhere, it should be. There, if these principles are correct, is its appropriate place. And if that were done, intemperance would soon cease to curse the ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... know what to do. Would the conductor, I wondered, stop the car and put me off in ignominy and shame? Was it possible that I could convince him that I was merely the victim of my own absentmindedness, and not an unprincipled creature trying to obtain a ride upon false pretenses? How I wished that Alec or Alonzo were there. But they weren't because I wanted them. If I HADN'T wanted them they would have been there by the dozen. And I couldn't decide what to say to the conductor when he came around. As soon as I got ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... part of the speech was a defence of free, non-sectarian education. "I can conceive," he said, "nothing more unprincipled than a scheme to array the youth of the province in sectarian bands—to teach them, from the cradle up, to know each other as Methodist boys, and Presbyterian boys, and Episcopal boys. Surely, surely, we have enough of this most wretched sectarianism in our ...
— George Brown • John Lewis

... upon her now that the assassin was gone. And moody misgivings heaved within her, precursors of vain remorse. Gerard and Margaret were before their age. This was your true mediaeval. Proud, amorous, vindictive, generous, foolish, cunning, impulsive, unprincipled: and ignorant ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... telling me," Hugh remarked thoughtfully. "If they took candy and cigarettes and sporting goods it would look to me pretty much as if the robbery was the work of unprincipled boys, rather than men." ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson

... pretences—should have held out as qualifications for the post his respectable connections, when he knew perfectly well all the time that he was going to marry somebody who was not in Society—it was really quite too awfully wicked and deceptive and unprincipled of him! A very bad, dishonest young man, she was very much afraid; a young man with no sense of truth or honour about him, though, of course, she wouldn't say so for the world before any of the parents, or do anything to injure the poor young fellow's future prospects if she could possibly help ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... Mr. David Howell of 105 Cheapside, and a thoroughgoing, unprincipled rascal he proved to be. He was a small, spare, undersized man, with little beady eyes, light complexion, red hair, and stubby beard, and when he spoke it was with a thin reedy voice. From first to last he managed our case in exactly the way the prosecution would have desired. He bled us freely, ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell

... vice-president of the United States in 1800, with Thomas Jefferson as president; but in 1804, when Jefferson was re-elected, Burr was not. The brain of this brilliant but ill- balanced and unprincipled man was ever rife with ambitious schemes, and the taste of political power in his position as vice-president of the United States seemed to have driven him towards the accomplishment of one of the boldest and ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop

... by that unscrupulous general; and when David heard that Uriah was dead, he sent for Bathsheba, and made her his wife. He had already several wives, as was customary in those times; and among them was Michal, whom he had long ago reclaimed from the man to whom she had been given by the unprincipled Saul. ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley

... could say to Galloway respecting the unsoundness of its construction was of no avail. The fact was that, however Keir might argue about its not being able to stand, there it was actually standing, and that was enough for Galloway. Keir went home, his mind filled with Galloway's most unprincipled roof. "If that stands," said he to himself, "all that I have been learning and doing for thirty years has been wrong." That night he could not sleep for thinking about it. In the morning he strolled up Primrose ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... indicative of no deep-rooted disaffection, and to believe that almost the entire body of the reformers of this province sought only by constitutional means to attain those objects for which they had so long peaceably struggled before the unhappy troubles occasioned by the violence of a few unprincipled ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot

... Europe were backed by the representations of the Grecian exiles. The family and partisans of the Pisistratidae had fixed themselves in Susa, and the Greek subtlety and spirit of enterprise maintained and confirmed, for that unprincipled and able faction, the credit they had already established at the Persian court. Onomacritus, an Athenian priest, formerly banished by Hipparchus for forging oracular predictions, was now reconciled to the Pisistratidae, and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of your time at the cottage," he began, "and you will be thrown a great deal into Mr. Bowmore's society. I have known him for many years. Speaking from that knowledge, I most seriously warn you against him as a thoroughly unprincipled and thoroughly ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins

... Christian is not to be quarrelsome, he is not to be crushed. Though he is but a worm before God, he is not such a worm as every selfish and unprincipled wretch may tread ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... democracies, the seekers after all kinds of distinction have been hypnotized by an express desire for popularity. But American statesmen have not always been obliged to choose between Hamilton's unpopular integrity and Henry Clay's unprincipled bidding for popular favor. The greatest American political leaders have been popular without any personal capitulation; and their success is indicative of what is theoretically the most wholesome relation between individual political liberty and a democratic ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... emotions of human kind. There was a time in which she shone as the centre of a splendid and luxurious court, where minstrels sang to her and poets praised her and princes flattered her, while statesmen confessed her influence and cabinets adopted her plans. Fascinating, artful, able, ambitious, and unprincipled, she may be regarded as chief among many of the most celebrated of this class of her sex of ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous

... The unprincipled and impure can have no idea what virtue or delicacy are other than vestments of disguise or of ornament, to be thrown off at will; and therefore, to reason with such minds is to talk to the winds-to tell a man who ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter

... trembling and disgust from these dark terminations of unprincipled careers; and these fatal evidences of the indulgence of unbridled passions. How nearly, too, had he been shipwrecked in this moral whirlpool! With what gratitude did he not invoke the beneficent Providence that had ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli

... a few of the many advantages of democracy. It is a pleasant form of government in which equality reigns among unequal as well as among equal things. Moreover, when a democratic State, athirst for liberty, is controlled by unprincipled cupbearers, who give it to drink of the pure wine of liberty and allow it to drink till it is drunken, then if its rulers do not show themselves complaisant and allow it to drink its fill, they are accused and overthrown under the pretext that they are ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... apprehend this truth. It has begun to find out that disarmament is practical wisdom; and now it is beginning to wonder whether counsels of perfection may not serve its domestic interests with a higher efficiency than the compromises effected by unprincipled politicians. It is in the mood to listen to a teacher who speaks with authority; but in no mood to listen to a war ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... about the facilis descensus Averni; but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani said of singing, it is far more easy to get up than to come down. In the present instance I have no sympathy—at least no pity—for him who descends. He is that monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of genius. I confess, however, that I should like very well to know the precise character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her whom the Prefect terms 'a certain personage,' he is reduced to opening the letter I left for him in ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various

... are too apt treat the complaints of such patients lightly, making no effort to allay their anxiety—a course which often leads them to apply for aid in illegitimate quarters, and to become the victims of unprincipled men." ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... criminal intimacy with the Brieve (Breitheamh), or consistorial judge of the Island. On the other hand, it was maintained that the Brieve in his capacity of judge, had been somewhat severe on the Island chief for his reckless and immoral habits, and for his bad treatment of his lady and that the unprincipled villain, as throughout his whole career he proved himself to be, boldly, and in revenge, turned upon and accused the judge of committing adultery with his wife. Be that as it may, the unfortunate woman, attempting to escape from his cruel treatment, while passing in a large birlinn, from the ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie

... against the Thebans he determined to fulfil the last injunction of his father Amphiaraus, who had desired him to be revenged on his mother Eriphyle for her perfidy in accepting a bribe to betray him. This resolution was further strengthened by the discovery that his unprincipled mother had urged him also to join the expedition {278} in return for the much-coveted veil of Harmonia. He therefore put her to death; and taking with him the ill-fated necklace and veil, abandoned for ever the ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens

... permission to a number of persons, annually, to supply to the Islands of Hispaniola, (St. Domingo,) Cuba, Jamaica, and Porto Rico, natives of Africa, to the number of four thousand annually. John Hawkins, an unprincipled Englishman—whose name should be branded with infamy—was the first person known to have engaged in so inhuman a traffic, and that living monster his mistress, Queen Elizabeth, engaged with him and shared ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany

... think my sister ... ... So unprincipled in Virtue's book And the sweet peace that goodness bosoms ever, As that single want of light and noise Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts, And put them into misbecoming plight. Virtue could see to do what Virtue would By her own radiant light, though ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various

... dust. But the best of books drawing sustenance from the sympathy and memory of men have lived on the brink of destruction, for men's memories are short, and their sympathy is, we must admit, a very fluctuating, unprincipled emotion. ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad



Words linked to "Unprincipled" :   dishonourable, principled, unscrupulous, dishonorable



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