improbity

It had a peculiar sensitivity to certain stimuli, and he felt a sensation in its roots whenever he encountered prevarication, deception, or any degree of improbity.

The Cat Who Moved A Mountain Braun, Lilian Jackson 1992

We are pressed by our very nature into the service of virtue; our souls are up in arms against vice and improbity, and thus we receive lasting impressions, which, when our hearts are not very corrupt, must forever after have a favourable influence on our moral conduct.

The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor Volume I, Number 1

Howat was hot and cold, and possessed by a subtle sense of improbity, a feeling resembling that of a doubtful advance through the dark, for a questionable end.

The Three Black Pennys A Novel Joseph Hergesheimer 1917

Persons generally who were under no incapacity could make a will; those prohibited were such as had some defect of status, some vice or defect of mind, or even some sufficient defect of body, and those guilty of crime or improbity.

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 9: Laprade-Mass Liturgy 1840-1916 1913

On the part of those on whom they operate, they are indicative either of improbity or intellectual weakness, or of a contempt for the understanding of those on whose minds they are indicative of intellectual weakness; and on the part of those in and by whom they are pretended to operate, they are indicative of improbity, viz., in the shape of insincerity.

Fallacies of Anti-Reformers 1909

"Beelzebub" had been floundering in the sea of improbity, holding by a slender life-line to the respectable world that had cast him overboard.

Cabbages and Kings 1904

"Beelzebub" had been floundering in the sea of improbity, holding by a slender life-line to the respectable world that had cast him overboard.

Cabbages and Kings O. Henry 1886

Yet here too there is the stain of intellectual improbity, and it is perhaps all the more mischievous for being partly hidden under the mien of spiritual exaltation.

On Compromise John Morley 1880

Apart, however, from the immorality of such reasoned hypocrisy, which no man with a particle of honesty will attempt to blink, there is the intellectual improbity which it brings in its train, the infidelity to truth, the disloyalty to one's own intelligence.

On Compromise John Morley 1880

Briefly, in this man of culture and refinement, in whose own mysterious life one might perhaps have found various crimes but not a single act of base improbity, one could divine an implacable, obstinate theoretician, who was resolved to set the world ablaze for the triumph of his ideas.

The Three Cities Trilogy: Paris, Complete ��mile Zola 1871