Sentence Examples:
The small farmer class were deprived of holdings, the soil was being worked by slaves, and its products wasted on pleasure and debauchery by the rich; the law courts were controlled by the wealthy and powerful, while oppression, bribery, and fraud were generally rampant in the city.
There were some ruffian faces among them, and some haggard with debauchery; but on the whole they were extremely good-looking men, superior beyond measure to the ordinary rank and file of an army.
The victory was for the crusaders a change from famine to abundance; and their feasting was accompanied by the wildest riot and the most filthy debauchery.
It appears, therefore, my lords, that this bill will increase the number of lawful retailers, without diminishing that of private dealers; so that the opportunities of debauchery will be multiplied, in proportion to the numbers who shall take licenses.
To their disciples they cry up fortitude and temperance, a contempt of riches and pleasures, and, when alone, indulge in riot and debauchery.
He was deeply immersed in the public distractions of the times, and is said to have committed many debaucheries, of which the following instance has been recorded.
And it lasted, it still subsists, it has produced something else than meetings and prayers, it has induced extensive moral reforms, it has closed places of debauchery and taverns by hundreds.
If a man possessing some property should get into habits of gambling and debauchery, squandering his money and not providing for his family, what could be done?
The debauchery of his youth and the privation and exposure of his old age did not deeply affect his hardy constitution, for he is said to have lived to the age of ninety.
Is there an ancient house among you, again, of which village gossips do not whisper some dark story of lust and oppression, of decrepit debauchery, of hereditary doom?
Many of those despicable wretches does my present acquaintance with infamy and wickedness enable me to number among the heroes of debauchery.
Their lives were a continual alternation between idleness and extreme toil, riotous debauchery and great privation, prolonged monotony and days of great excitement and adventure.
They thought that to be chaste was to be weak and foolish; that a fellow was not a man unless he led a life of debauchery like the rest.
He may, despite her remonstrances, take this her substance and her money, and spend it in foolish speculation; or, worse still, in gambling, drunkenness, and debauchery.
The impious alone, to quiet his own feelings in his debaucheries, endeavors to persuade himself that all men shall perish as well as he.
Can't you get your friends to unite with you in committing those odious instruments of debauchery to the flames in which you have consumed your own?
Scarcely had they escaped from the dreadful scourge which had laid them waste, when they plunged into excesses of pleasure and debauchery, as if to fly from the memories that haunted them.
On the other hand it is just that smack which it has of Oriental debauchery that makes it appeal so strongly to the idle rich.
He himself was anything but pleasant to look upon, his natural plainness having been rendering repellent by a life of low debauchery.
What can be said of a man who could expose the lascivious expressions of abandoned females and retail his own debaucheries to a gentle and innocent woman, and that woman his own daughter?
His courtesy and amiability did not restrain him from perfidy and debauchery; neither did he ever do a kind act when an unkind one would have served his purposes better.
Education was not universal, and the want of recreation and human society was so great as to lead notoriously to drunkenness and course debauchery.
On the other hand, the scenes of debauchery which a few chroniclers have described were not typical of the colony the year round.
They were joined of course, by a crowd of idle vagabonds, who, under the mask of extraordinary sanctity and humble penitence, indulged in every species of disorder and debauchery.
Man's spiritual nature, awakening in a body worn and weakened by debaucheries, longs ardently and tries vainly to escape.
He came of sound English stock, of a family who would not have regarded drunkenness and debauchery as "sowing wild oats," but recoiled from the thought of them with horror.
In private life the grossest ignorance and debauchery were written upon our social habits, in the broadest and most legible characters.
Throughout the volumes of these great writers, the features perpetually recur of insolence, corruption, violence, and debauchery in the one class, and of servility and cunning in the other.
Others were gazing about them vacantly, and others, sufferers from the effects of drink, debauchery, or fatigue, seemed to be half comatose or asleep.
He has come from the squalid dens, and lanes of filth, of misery, of want, of debauchery and death; no home, no sympathy and no kind words have greeted him, perhaps, for years.
Both knew that the unhappy young man had long been given to drunkenness and debauchery, and that his constitution was undermined by his excesses.
The consequence was that on receiving their wages on Saturday evening, the laborers habitually met in great gatherings and passed the night in gambling, drunkenness, and debauchery.
The social meal is now recompensed by a trifling sum of money, which is either the resource of drunkenness and debauchery, or at best is but comparatively ill-spent.
They rode in a totally undisciplined and disorderly manner; reeling in their saddles, drunken with debauchery, red-hot, reeking from some scene of fire and blood!
Their native modesty, assisted by the precepts of religion and morality, instilled into their young minds by John Adams, had hitherto preserved these interesting people from every kind of debauchery.
For, in short, what debauchery, what avarice, what crime among men is there which does not owe its birth to thought and reflection, that is, to reason?
He owed much to the care they took of him during his fits of debauchery; and he was not unmindful of it when he had the wherewithal to compensate them.
She was fully persuaded that Peter, with a feeble constitution and wallowing in debauchery, could not live long, and that, at his death, she would be undisputed empress.
It was a more distinguished and fascinating type of debauchery than that which she had known in other days in England, and from which Greville had rescued her.
He himself was anything but pleasant to look upon, his natural plainness having been rendered repellent by a life of low debauchery.
Then, resolved to baffle at all costs the disease which he now knew pursued him, he plunged in the crowd of drunkenness and debauchery which swelled the Strand at night.
I had no idea that Oscar was going to the dogs, and that this represented a real degeneracy produced by his debaucheries.
For these two years he was one of the most intimate companions of his sovereign, in his festivities and most private debaucheries.
He neglects the conveniences and finer pleasures of life, lives in filthy poverty with scanty nourishment, and squanders the rest of his earnings in debauchery.
Zeno gave himself up at once to debauchery and vice, while the empire was harassed on all sides by the barbarians, and the provinces were roused into rebellion by the cruelty of the prefects.
As might be suspected, seasoned as it was with such a population, drunkenness, debauchery, and murder walked abroad, hand in hand, day and night.
The most probable opinion is that this prince had made an immoderate use of drugs which he compounded himself, in order to recruit his constitution, shattered by debauchery and excess.
"Because," says he, "the orderlies, namely, certain persons so called, subservient to his debaucheries, were persons whom he wished to spare."
The debaucheries, jealousies, and cruelties of his reign, remind us of what we have half skeptically read of Nero and Caligula.
It is in the great towns that the rich invalids are; debauchery, the excesses of the table, the passions, are the cause of their maladies.
Scenes of the most disgraceful drunkenness, gambling, profanity, and almost all kinds of debauchery, were exhibited in the vicinity of the gallows, and even at the time the culprit was suffering.
Many men of fashion and dissipation had lived with him and upon him recently as boon companions and partners in debauchery.
Toward the close of this vigil, which throughout was marked by all sorts of debaucheries and excesses, all the participants seemed suddenly seized by ten thousand devils.
The world, for all the pressure of order, is still full of savage and stupendous conflicts, of murders and debaucheries, of crimes indescribable and adventures almost unimaginable.
The speaker laughed amiably, and his smile revealed the weakness which was pointed by the signs of debauchery in his good-looking face.
The people were treated with shocking barbarity, many of them being shut up in convents and churches and burned alive, while the pirates gave themselves up to every excess of debauchery.
Now he was compelled to look back upon a short life of squandered opportunities, a pathway stained with vice, memories of vile debaucheries which had wasted his youth and broken his constitution.
A night of debauchery and the sudden terror of its awakening had effectually blurred whatever judgment the officer may have had, and his one thought was to kill or capture his quarry.
He then envelops them in total darkness, and they all, male and female, give themselves up to the grossest and most disgusting debauchery.
They seem to have no alternative, but that of continuing in the practice which they once too fatally begun, in which the major part of them end a short life of debauchery and wretchedness.
The sons of families came from afar, sated with the diversions and debaucheries of eastern cities, looking for strange thrills and adventures to heat their surfeited blood.
They wallow in debauchery, are quarrelsome and saucy, and commit crimes, in proportion to the slaves, as a hundred to one.
And peaceable probably they will remain while they are permitted, without control, to ruin families and riot in their debaucheries.
Moreover, as Ivan looked again, something in the recumbent figure suggested the abandon rather of despair than of debauchery.
She lives there, I was told, with an old woman, her godmother, about whom the people of the countryside tell stories of murder and debauchery.
Her premature death, brought on by a licentious life, seven years of which had been devoted to debauchery and dissipation, and attended by consequent infamy, misery, and disease.
Leading as he was, freely and openly, a life of shameless debauchery, wholesale blackmail and political intrigue, it is marvelous how his power became so unlimited.
I will arm myself forthwith, and from the midst of his wine and debauchery you shall call him forth to me, and there will I smite him with the edge of the sword, that our great work be not retarded.
The men were discontented with a service, in which money was refused them: it was illegally possessed, and therefore rapidly spent in debauchery and drunkenness.
Drunkenness and debauchery there have been again and again, but they have been severely checked and restrained by both the civil and military authorities.
Sometimes devotion was mingled with debauchery, as if a feeble struggle was still kept up between the recollections of the past and the seductions of the present.
His life was that of a libertine; and his marriage with a woman of fashion who was yet more dissolute than himself only gave a new spur to his debaucheries.
At the other end of the social scale there are young men and women, poor, overburdened with toil, crushed by poverty and want, also driven to dissipation and debauchery and crime.
It was that susceptibility which gave zest to his debaucheries, and occasionally subdued into pathos the storms of his dazzling and sonorous eloquence.
He was followed by an unwieldy multitude, not less than sixty thousand men in arms, all corrupted by a life of debauchery.
Ferocity here is hidden in debauchery, like a serpent hidden in its own slime, here all that is required is some chance event and this bad place will be transformed into a death trap.
His companions, without being insensible to the pleasures afforded by liberal hospitality, were all too intellectual in their tastes and habits to give themselves up to vulgar debauchery.
As they grow up, they show this degeneration by engaging in all kinds of licentious debauchery, and unnatural and perverted indulgences of appetite.
Drink, drugs and debauchery hurried this winsome and respected girl to her coffin before nineteen years had passed over her head.
Promiscuous indulgence is always evidence of debauchery, and a departure from that natural course which is prompted by an innate sense of propriety characterizing mankind.
While the King indulged in his vicious pleasures, and went reeking from his debaucheries to obtain absolution from his confessors, the persecution of the Protestants went on as before.
As long as I manage the estate I must manage it as my conscience dictates; and I cannot give the fruits of the toil of the overworked peasants to be spent on the debaucheries of Life-Guardsmen.
At his voice, vice plunged into its most shameless diversions, and the wine-steeped wings of debauchery outspread themselves over the feast.
Sinclair would then hasten to the low pot house in Water Street which he made his resort, and amid his vagabond companions expend the money in the lowest debauchery.
When rich veins are struck, the wages of the miners increase, but in most instances they spend them in drinking and debauchery, while the proprietors of the mines are almost equally uncivilized.
This sage had introduced him into power, had restrained his madness when he could, and with his colleague had conducted the general administration of the Empire with the greatest honor, while the boy was wearing out his life in debauchery in the palace.
Among which vices, debauchery and unrestrained gluttony grew to a head, and costly banquets superseded triumphs for victories.
My husband, not content with calling a spade a spade, invariably uses the nastiest terms in the dictionary of debauchery.
No doubt certain better individuals, fallen by chance into debauchery, speak respectfully of a mother or a sister, for whom they profess an almost religious worship.
This excludes an important and intelligent portion of the species from reproduction, and also favors clandestine debauchery.
He scolded us sternly for being late, and said he meant to flog us both well for our idleness and, he had no doubt, debauchery.
These holy fathers had immense resources in the way of infinite variety, stimulating to excesses of debauchery that very soon brought the rod into requisition.
In a hundred engagements did I distinguish myself by my recklessness even as at other seasons I distinguished myself by my debaucheries.
A marriage is doubtless, as Chesterton so admirably puts it, a passionate compromise, but it does not follow that love is therefore a compromising debauchery.
Men without faith, without law, without shame, whose contagious example will corrupt the French nation, formerly so decent, and precipitate it into all kinds of debauchery and wickedness.
The young man, on coming of age, acquired control of the whole of his father's property, and soon started on a career of extravagance and debauchery.
In their sensual rages, in their mad parade of debauchery, the king, the whole company might see the bottomless pit itself yawning for the life, the feeling, the body, and the soul of each.
They were in that ill-favored district he had penetrated earlier in the day, but if it had been offensive then it was doubly so now, with its muffled sounds of debauchery and wickedness.
In 1212 a council commanded the clergy not to have women in their houses, nor to suffer in their cloisters assemblies for debauchery, nor to entertain women there.
It was not until after the death of the king, which occurred on February 6, 1685, that the nation recovered from the spell of debauchery through which it had passed, and assumed its wonted sobriety.