What is "decency"

Usage examples of "decency".

However deep-seated his animosity toward Franklin, Adams did truly treat him with decency and managed to work effectively with him as he had in times past.

On some particular occasions, when the magistrates were exasperated by some personal motives of interest or resentment, the rules of prudence, and perhaps of decency, to overturn the altars, to pour out imprecations against the emperors, or to strike the judge as he sat on his tribunal, it may be presumed, that every mode of torture which cruelty could invent, or constancy could endure, was exhausted on those devoted victims.

Nowere it that, Alypia had the decency, and the courage, to tell him to his face.

He found my little mistress smiling and polite, but always keeping within the bounds of decency, from which he would have very willingly excused her.

It was a delightful breakfast, though we passed certain bounds which decency ought to have proscribed to us, but Leonilda was wonderfully innocent considering her position.

I spent almost the whole afternoon with Leonilda, keeping within the bounds of decency, less, perhaps, out of respect to morality, than because of my labours of the night before.

If Corvus heard yearning in the question, he had the decency not to show it.

Not until later, when I knew more French, did I discover that the Rough Alleys, who caused such grief among us before we were finished with Dartmoor, got their name from the French word raffales, a term applied by French prisoners on English prison ships to those THE LIVELY LADY 181 among them unfit in dress, person, and manners to associate with folk who made any pretence to decency.

Jack at once saw that Jagiello was concerned but he could not in decency seem to understand and there appeared to be no remark he could possibly offer.

Sir Roger Lowestoft with all decency little more than a year back, and having for a space mourned him with suitable propriety she had now launched upon a single life again, which promised to be very much more entertaining than had been the married state.

The clothing of these urchins was of the lightest possible description consistent with decency, and mocassins seemed to be the prevailing fashion.

You do all those thingsto your fellow creatures, your fellow species, your fellow menyou do all those things for millennia upon millennia, while you are examining the question of good and evil, of right and wrong, of decency and cruelty, you do all those things as your father did, and his father before him, and do you mean to tell me that whatever plea is made to justify youby science, by philosophy, by politicsyou are not going to feel forever and omnipresently guilty as you stand shivering and naked in your own awful sight?

The river burial had a certain rustic poetry, but Ophion cared not at all about preserving the decency of the dead.

Colonel Raden agreed that the decencies had somehow to be preserved, even at the cost of a certain amount of humbug.

And the deaths of those who had been trapped in the flaming spaceliner were still a debt on his conscience, waiting to be discharged by the only thing that in decency could do soan act that would preserve the future for the human race.