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Amuck   Listen
adjective
Amuck  adj., adv.  In a frenzied and reckless manner.
To run amuck, to rush out in a state of frenzy, as the Malays sometimes do under the influence of "bhang," and attack every one that comes in the way; to assail recklessly and indiscriminately. "Satire's my weapon, but I'm too discreet To run amuck, and tilt at all I meet."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Amuck" Quotes from Famous Books



... Caribbean Islands, ruthlessly subjugating Mexico, overrunning Venezuela, and eagerly seeking tidings of the reputed wealth of Peru. The air was supercharged with reports of treasure, and no reports were too wild for belief; myths, big and little, ran amuck. El Dorado, the gilded man of rumor, became the dream, then the belief, of the times; presently a whole nation was conceived clothed in dusted gold. The myth of the Seven Cities of Cibola, each a city of vast treasure, the growth of years ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard

... him about Howard again, did you?" Mrs. Carnarvon was indignant. "You are old enough to know better, Marian. You carry frankness entirely too far. There is such a thing as truth running amuck." ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)

... astronomy, zoology, biology, geography, chemistry, physics, anatomy, philology, archaeology, history, ethics, religion, etc. There is not one chance in a million that a writer of a fictitious account would not have run amuck among many of these sciences, if, like Moses, he had no personal knowledge ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams

... thirteen made a spring at the driver's seat. With a yelp of mischievous glee he proved his daring to his comrades by snatching at the starting-lever. He was quick as a flash of summer lightning, but if I hadn't been quicker, the big car might have leaped into life, and run amuck through the most crowded street in busy Marseilles. I felt myself go cold and hot, horribly uncertain whether my interference might work harm or good, but before I quite knew what I did, I had sent the boy flying with a sounding box ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... not presume to argue with you. We are here, I suppose, for some purpose or other. Whether we fulfil it or not may well be a matter of opinion. But that purpose is certainly not to look after any young idiot—you must excuse my speaking plainly—who runs amuck in this most fascinating city. In your case the Chief has gone out of his way to help you. He has interviewed the chief of police himself, brought his influence to bear in various quarters, and I can tell you conscientiously that everything which possibly can be done ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Wiley gravely. "I'd be dealing with a gentleman, then. But if your mother thinks, just because she is a woman, she can run amuck with a gun, then she gives up all right to be treated like a lady and she has to take ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge

... peril on the killing beds was when a steer broke loose. Sometimes, in the haste of speeding-up, they would dump one of the animals out on the floor before it was fully stunned, and it would get upon its feet and run amuck. Then there would be a yell of warning—the men would drop everything and dash for the nearest pillar, slipping here and there on the floor, and tumbling over each other. This was bad enough in the summer, when a man could see; ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... on from that point to say that "We came to a difficult passage with them, and Bedford mistaking certain gestures of theirs"—pretty gestures they were!—"gave way to a panic violence. He ran amuck, killed three, and perforce I had to flee with him after the outrage. Subsequently we fought with a number who endeavoured to bar our way, and slew seven or eight more. It says much for the tolerance of these beings that ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... the younger man groaned, his gaze turned sullenly downward. "Even granting that I have, that's no sign I'd ever—run amuck the way he did." ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... refuge from the privateers under the tricolor, which fairly ran amuck in the routes of trade. For this reason it meant a rich reward to land a cargo abroad. The ship Mount Vernon, commanded by Captain Elias Hasket Derby, Jr., was laden with sugar and coffee for Mediterranean ports, and was prepared ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine

... prove that there was nothing to be believed; nothing to be loved, and nothing worth living for; but every thing to be hated, in the wide world. He was a horrid desperado; and like a wild Indian, whom he resembled in his tawny skin and high cheek bones, he seemed to run amuck at heaven and earth. He was a Cain afloat; branded on his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse; and going about corrupting and searing every ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... been saved, the fire at this point not being permitted to creep farther east than Main Street. Another series of fatalities occurred, caused by the stampeding of a herd of cattle at Sixth and Folsom Streets. Three hundred of the panic-stricken animals ran amuck when they saw and felt the flames and charged wildly down the street, trampling under foot all who were in the way. One man was gored through and through by a maddened bull. At least a dozen persons', it is said, were killed, though probably this is an overestimate. One observer tells ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... told that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they were not like this all the year round, but were, in fact, quite civil persons save during certain weeks of autumn and winter, when, like the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and made it their purpose to destroy life—in this case harmless feathered creatures, brought into being by artificial means solely to gratify these propensities—at once so unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards their weaker fellows ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... whom I know to be a Malay, brings my afternoon tea to the Stadthaus! Of them I may write more hereafter. They are symbolized to people's minds in general by the dagger called a kris, and by the peculiar form of frenzy which has given rise to the phrase "running amuck." ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... stunning in its entire unexpectedness. The landscape went off in protest, exploded in pyrotechnic marvels; the earth spun and cavorted; the solar system was disrupted and planets ran amuck with din unbelievable. But he was used to these cataclysms now, and out of the roar of breakage he heard a voice much like his ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... soldier, "that man will some day drive me amuck. What do you think? One night, on a tiger hunt, he got me into an argument like this. A brute of a beast jumped into the middle of it. Courtlandt shot him on the second bound, and turned to me with—'Well, as I was saying!' ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath

... were distributed all over Penrod, both upon his body and upon his spirit. Driven by subtle forces, he had dipped his hands in catastrophe and disaster: it was not for a Georgie Bassett to beard him. Penrod was about to run amuck. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... indigestion had made Mr. Peters' temper, even when in a normal mood, perfectly impossible; in a crisis like this it ran amuck. He vented it on Aline because he had always vented his irritabilities on Aline; because the fact of her sweet, gentle disposition, combined with the fact of their relationship, made her the ideal person to receive the overflow of his black moods. ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... animus, not in enmity toward a people or with the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, but only in armed opposition to an irresponsible government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and of right and is running amuck. ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman

... handkerchief over which it had leaked, and a packet of dishevelled cigarettes. Lighting one, and restoring the other objects to his pocket, he continued calmly: "Tell me how did you manage to smooth things over with the Gillows? Ursula was running amuck when I was in Newport last Summer; it was just when people were beginning to say that you were going to marry Nick. I was afraid she'd put a spoke in your wheel; and I hear she put a big cheque in your ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... some of these clubs came to something—as a body I mean; for individual members were constantly working themselves up the summit of resolution to rush headlong and regardless down the other side and out of our sight. When a man had reached a certain pitch of excitement he ran amuck. He sold anything, deserted anything, broke through anything in the way of family, responsibility, or financial lacks in order to go. But, as I say, occasionally one of these clubs pooled its individual resources and bought some old tub of a whaler, or outfitted ...
— Gold • Stewart White

... in American parlance, running amuck. He was jumbling three languages together into an indistinguishable tumult of sound and he was emptying the cook-tent of everything which his stout, German muscles could fling from it. Not a thing did he leave that was ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower

... myself often enough," he resumed presently in a low voice. "I've been pulled up by something inside of me when I was plunging ahead with the bit in my teeth, and it's been just exactly as if this something said: 'Go steady or you'll run amuck and bu'st up the whole blooming show.' You can't talk about it. It sounds like plain foolishness when you put it into words, but when it comes to you, no matter where you are, you have to stand ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... no more. Enough to know that all the world was run amuck! With a glad whoop, I sped after the others, and only drew up when I stood on the threshold ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche

... evidently found the brain behind the syringe of the thing; for it reared in an agony that could only have been that of approaching death, and ran amuck. ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst

... first theory rests its case on the facts of history. Certain social institutions like the family, the state, and the church have thrown restraint about the individual, and when this restraint is removed he tends to run amuck. From the beginning the family was the unit of the social order, and the authority of its head was the source of wisdom. Self-control was not a substitute for paternal discipline, but was a fact only in presence of the dread of paternal discipline. The idea of absolute authority ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... quarrelled with a boy belonging to the quarter close to us about a bird, and both boys ran away. The Arab boy is missing still I suppose, but Mabrook was brought back by force, swelling with passion, and with his clothes most scripturally 'rent.' He had regularly 'run amuck.' Sheykh Yussuf lectured him on his insolence to the people of the quarter, and I wound up by saying, 'Oh my son! whither dost thou wish to go? I cannot let thee wander about like a beggar, with torn clothes and no money, that the police may take thee and put thee in the army; but say where ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... of criticism were thought extremists six months ago; now, they had all respectable society at their back. Of course it was never a point in a man's favor that his father (or indeed any relative) could run amuck as Andrew's had done. On the other hand, he had so promptly and fearlessly plucked out the parent who offended him, and behaved, moreover, through all this tribulation with such becoming solemnity, that he very soon began ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston

... a danger to society as a rocket without a stick is to people who fire it. Misery is a match that never goes out; genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow: and if knowledge, which should give that power guidance, is wanting, the chances are not small that the rocket will simply run amuck ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... and miserablenesses of actors and actresses dead and gone. After life's fitful fever they sleep (I trust) well; and in common candour, it ought never to be forgotten that whilst it has always been the fashion—until one memorable day Mr. Froude ran amuck of it—for biographers to shroud their biographees (the American Minister must bear the brunt of this word on his broad shoulders) in a crape veil of respectability, the records of the stage have been written in another spirit. We always know the worst of ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell

... Lloyd George was no man's man. He became a free lance and while sometimes he ran amuck his cause was always the ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson

... cried Hoggenback aloud. "There comes a point where you can't eat yer bile any more, where it don't do no good to cuss. Then you runs amuck." Hanging his head he went slowly into ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... played in strict accordance with a set of rules. For several centuries nobody in these islands had broken the rules. It had come to be regarded as impossible that any one could break them. No one expects his opponent at the bridge table to draw a knife from his pocket and run amuck when the cards go against him. Nobody expected that the north of Ireland Protestants would actually fight. To threaten fighting is, of course, well within the rules of the game, a piece of bluff which any one is entitled to try if he thinks he will gain anything by it. Half the politicians ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham

... and less in evidence; the excitement, the excesses, the intoxication of the cities are more and more. The follies and extravagances of wealth lead to the insolence and rebellion of the poor. Material power! Drunk with this power, the world is running amuck to-day. We have got rid of kings and despots and autocratic governments; now if we could only keep sober and make democracy safe and enjoyable! Too much science has brought us to grief. Behold what Chemistry has done to put imperial power in ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... his bunk, his legs swaying perpendicularly in the air like two derricks gone amuck. From the depths of his involuntary position he heard the silvery pealing of Dolly's laughter. When he rose again though, Dolly had ceased laughing, and Bison Billiam's face had a gravity which somehow vaguely impressed Charles-Norton as without solidity, like fresh ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper

... preserves himself better both in the spirit and the flesh. With a family he is like mushrooms in vinegar. If I were in your place I would marry him off. Our times require a strict watch over the animal called man; people are beginning to live in their brains. Men have run amuck with their thoughts, and they do things that are positively criminal. The church of God is avoided by the young folk; they shun the public places, and assemble in secret in out-of-the-way corners. They speak in whispers. Why speak in whispers, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky

... his Hair outgrew the Legislature. He was on whispering terms with a clean majority of all the Partisans in three connecting Counties, so he bought one Gross of the White String Kind and a pair of Gum Sneakers and began to run amuck as a ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade

... lives. I could feel myself deteriorating, morally and intellectually. I had a desire to beat the Precious Ones (who were certainly well behaved for children shut up in two stuffy rooms) or better still to set the house afire, and run amuck killing and slaying down four flights of stairs—to do something very terrible in fact—something deadly and horrible and final that would put an end forever to this melancholy haunt of Tuesday stews ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine

... large cigars, lighted and thrown away after a few puffs, lay on the verandah. The place inside was a wreck. Broken furniture, shattered glass, torn curtains and bedding, lay about in aimless disorder, as if some wild animal had run amuck there tearing and trampling to pieces all it touched. Windows and frames had been smashed with terrific blows. There were dents in the floor where it had been beaten ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen

... ride! Charge, Turcos, charge! The fateful hour has come. Let all the guns of Britain roar or be forever dumb. The Superman has burst his bonds. With Kultur-flag unfurled And prayer on lip he runs amuck, imperilling the world. ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke

... happy smile in them, firmly-cut lips half hidden by the thick brown beard, a face that would have looked well under a lifted helmet—such a face as the scared Saxons must have seen among the bold followers of William the Norman, when those hardy Norse warriors ran amuck in Dover town. ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon

... profound effect on the passions. Thus, under its influence, natives of the East become greatly exhilarated, then debased, and finally violent, rushing forth on the streets with the cry, 'Amok, amok,' - ' Kill, kill ' - as we say, 'running amuck.' An overdose of this drug often causes insanity, while in small quantities our doctors use it as a medicine. Any one who has read the brilliant Theophile Gautier's 'Club des Hachichens' or Bayard Taylor's experience at Damascus knows something of ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve

... godless rake, the defender of the roue; but I have small patience with those mawkish purists who persist in measuring men and women by the same standard of morals. We might as well apply the same code to the fierce Malay who runs amuck and to McAllister's fashionable pismires. We might as wisely bring to the same judgment bar Bengal's royal beast, crazed with lust for blood, and Jaques' wounded deer, weeping in the purling brook. Each sex and genus must be considered by itself, for each possesses its ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... single out none of them who is, without positively evil qualities, so absolutely intolerable as Marius.[103] Others have more such qualities; but he has no good ones. His very bravery is a sort of moral and intellectual running amuck because he thinks he shall not get Cosette. Having, apparently, for many years thought and cared nothing about his father, he becomes frantically filial on discovering that he has inherited from him, as above, a very doubtful and certainly most un-"citizen"-like title of Baron. Thereupon (taking ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... willing to let a public censor like P.V. run amuck whenever he likes,—so it be not down our street. I confess to a good deal of tolerance in this respect, and, when I live in Number 21, have plenty of stoicism to spare for the griefs of the dwellers in No. 23. Indeed, I agreed with our young ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... retired for the night. There was so much to talk over, and when they did finally lay themselves down to rest, it was with the conviction that Captain Forest was not quite so mad as they had supposed. He was at least a harmless lunatic and in no danger of running amuck. ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown

... America with spies, plotting constantly against her peace and her honour. She had run amuck upon the seas, and by her submarine warfare endangered the lives and welfare of all mankind. She had become a menace to the world's freedom. The President loves peace even as the soul of America loves peace. But both President and people became at length convinced that the only way to restore ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... shore, and brought back anything but an edifying account of the state of things. Every single man and woman appeared to be drunk, reeling about the place. One young Samoyede in particular had made an ineffaceable impression on them. He mounted a sledge, lashed at the reindeer, and drove "amuck" in among the tents, over the tied-up dogs, foxes, and whatever came in his way; he himself fell off the sledge, was caught in the reins, and dragged behind, shrieking, through sand and clay. Good St. Elias must be much flattered by such homage. Towards morning the howling ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... said Watson, putting down the ukulele. 'All I know is that Germany runs amuck and gives a mighty good imitation of hell let loose. I am not discounting the wonderful bravery of France and Belgium, but you know that the hope of everything lies right in this country here. Well, that's good enough for me. I'm a hundred per cent. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... called Schenectady; but I didn't hesitate. I said to myself, better one hundred a year in good old England, than five in a country where the population is so inflated with its importance that I should always be in danger of running amuck. And besides that, I should lose my accent, and forget how to say 'leg'; while the workings of the stomach would be discussed before me with an ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... we must never overlook, for it is a fact. We cannot run amuck as giants over this world and hope to conquer it. We could conquer it, yes; but only when the last of its inhabitants had been killed; stamped out like ants defending their hill from the attacks of an elephant. Don't you see I ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings

... it very easily, Mr. Hacket always thought his wife and child in danger. I remember, one day a Malay was being tried in the court-house, when he, by a sudden spring, escaped from the police, and snatching a sword from a bystander, ran amuck through the bazaar, wounding two or three people he met. The hue and cry in the town fired the imaginations of the timid. People came running to the house for shelter, bringing their goods and chattels, and all sorts of tales—"The Chinese were coming from Sambas," and all sorts of ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall

... was seen that the Malay was no longer dangerous, the people poured out again from the houses and shops. It was no very unusual thing, in Cape Town, for the Malays to run amuck; and many of those in the streets hurried off, in the direction from which the man had come, to inquire how many victims had fallen to his deadly crease, and to see whether any friends were among them. On the ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty

... other-self to scoff and rail and sneer at her. It had become bitterness to him to enter the gates of the Villa d'Orsay. His nerves were so wrought up that to look about the magnificent but too palace-like, too hotel-like rooms was to struggle with a longing to run amuck and pause not until he had reduced the splendor to smithereens. And in that injustice of chronic self-excuse which characterizes all human beings who do not live by intelligently formed and intelligently executed plan, she was now trying to soothe herself with ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips

... foundry town. The local authorities have jailed some I. W. W.[69-2] plotters. They state that a jail delivery is threatened, that the Sheriff can't control it, and that they believe the mob will run amuck generally and shoot up the town. Take a few men; go over and ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various

... unfortunately, even this classic resemblance to the legitimate farce of our civilization was deceptive. Another brocaded actor, who represented the hero of the play, turned three somersaults, and not only upset my theory and his fellow actors at the same time, but apparently ran amuck behind the scenes for some time afterward. I looked around at the glinting white teeth to observe the effect of these two palpable hits. They were received with equal acclamation, and apparently equal facial spasms. One or two beheadings which enlivened the play produced the same sardonic ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... not at coyotes alone but at every living thing. There were many coyotes such as Cripp, with the hair slipped from their hides,—the ones that had survived a dose of poison but were unable to shake off its devastating after effects. Hydrophobia broke out among these and they ran amuck, striking alike at friends and foes. Sound coyotes were turned into frothing fiends that helped to spread the wave of madness that swept across three States. Horses and cows died by hundreds and it was no unusual thing for one mad coyote to bite fifty head of sheep ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts

... snorted the civil administrator. "Keeping his men in hand is what he has to do! They're running amuck all over Panama, getting into fights with the Spiggoty police, bringing the uniform into contempt. As for the climate, it's the same climate for all of us. Look at Butler's marines and Barber's Zone police. The climate hasn't hurt them. They're ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis

... wrapped in the chain and his wrists encased in steel, and this time it was as if Don Pablo's head had been caught between a hammer and an anvil. The negro's strength, exceptional at all times, was multiplied tenfold; he had run amuck. When he arose the machete was in his grasp and Don Pablo's brains were ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... not seen, Schiller's first play is very apt to produce the impression of a boyish extravaganza. The sentimental bandit who nourishes his mighty soul on the blood of his fellow-men, and undertakes to right a private wrong by running amuck against society in another part of the world, is a figure upon which we decline to waste our sympathy. We have no place for him in our scheme of art unless it be in comic opera or in the penny dreadful. Emotionally ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... to consider the impossible idea that the convention would bolt—would run amuck, no matter who addressed it—no matter what contingency arose. But to have the convention even tolerate this brazen interloper troubled his sense of mastery; the convention had been too ready to permit the ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day

... surprised at the treatment visited upon Paine by the country he had so much benefited. Superstition and hallucination are really one thing, and fanaticism, which is mental obsession, easily becomes acute, and the whirling dervish runs amuck at sight of a man whose religious opinions are different from ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... fits. In her own park too! It's a bit thick, you know, that. I don't wonder that she came straight along to you to demand his blood. You'll have the old man down next; also the beautiful Miss Moore. It's getting beyond a joke, you know, Dick. You'll have to shut the beast up. You can't let him run amuck like this." ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell

... and the wanton killing of American men, women, and children, without warning, brings sharply before the American people the question of how long the present sexless policy of the conduct of our affairs is to be continued. Germany has apparently decided to run amuck with civilization. It is now for the American people to decide whether this nation has any virility left, or if it is content to sink to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... your practical, personal, and material success now. I am not speaking to you as a reformer or as a teacher of the elemental truths. You are a searcher, past fifty years of age, after the flesh-pots. Very well, then. Do not run amuck of the world. Join in its progress, even if that progress seems to you to ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... doubt that the cause of the fishers' frenzy was the quiet, inoffensive bottle-nosed whale, leisurely prowling about the Sound in search of a living, and, in fact, none other than the one that my friend had supposed to be a reef. These creatures rarely run amuck until the harpoon is thrust into them. They usually roll about the sea in the most harmless way. No doubt the sight of a huge creature in localities unaccustomed to it creates an impression of dull alarm, and, strange though it be, some minds are so constituted ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman

... lazily, "of course they do; but we have got our revolvers handy, and our guns are within reach of our hands. We should make precious short work of any Ghazis who were to run amuck ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty

... the kings of England and of Italy, had all voluntarily abdicated in favour of a republican form of government. Europe and Asia had run amuck, hysterical with fear and blood. As well try to pacify a pack of mad and fighting dogs as these frenzied myriads with their half-crazed generals. They lay, these armies, across the fair bosom of the earth like dying monsters, crimson in their own blood, yet still able to writhe upward ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train

... it runs amuck up and down the whole play and makes everybody sit up all round. It asks eminently respectable old maids if they wouldn't like to have a baby; and it wants to know why bald-headed old men have left off wearing ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome

... league against him: every day, when school broke up, he was assaulted with a brutality equal to that of an English public school, but which certainly would not have been roused against him there by the same cause. He had to run amuck through the courtyard to the gate, where a servant was waiting for him, often reaching it with torn clothes and a bloody face. This persecution was stopped by his old playfellow, Orlando Furioso, who was two years his senior: he threw himself into the crowd ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various

... have become insensible even to the suggestions of physical fear. But this can hardly be accorded the name of courage; rather is it to be attributed to the suffusion of blood to the brain which drives the Malay to run amuck. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... it was true that matters—always according to Mr. Greyne's letters home—slightly improved. While walking near the quay, in active search for nautical outrage, he saw an Arab dock labourer, who had been over-smoking kief, run amuck, and knock down a couple of respectable snake-charmers who were on the point of embarkation for Tunis with their reptiles. This incident had filed up a half-score of pages in exercise-book number one, and had flooded Mr. Greyne with hope and aspiration. But it was followed by a stagnant ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens

... there are a thousand and one things in the nature of aids to the underwriter—things whose proper action he doesn't directly control, although he has to keep a father's eye on them to see that they don't run amuck." ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... Freedom is not congenial to Germans. Had Germany won she hoped to impose her type of civilization everywhere, and she saw little harm in the fact of imposition. Inferior nations ought to be raised to Germany's cultural level by force, and they ought to be prevented from running amuck internationally, also by force. The German mind viewed complacently the bondage of the small nations in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It did not think that Czechs or Poles lost anything by being governed from Vienna. Its only reservation was that it might be ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... and think it over. Said he would preach about it next Sunday.... Well, a swishing isn't a likely thing anyhow. But I would.... There isn't a master here I'd stand a thrashing from—not one.... And because I choose to say what I think!... I'd run amuck." ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... determination was, never to do my duty with frantic impetuosity, helped on by the fiery liquor of excitement. I know Bimala finds it difficult to respect me for this, taking my scruples for feebleness—and she is quite angry with me because I am not running amuck crying Bande Mataram. ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore

... daggers, and murder every living creature in their way. In this, however, they differ from the gamesters of our country, who never find their senses, until they have lost their fortunes, and beggared their families; whereas the Malays never run amuck, but in ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... and the output of ice. They were, indeed, "malefactors of great wealth"; at least we may guess the latter, and the animus of a more intelligent precedent may some day hopefully be directed to such definite evils, of which our ancestors were well aware, rather than blindly running amuck at all. The coal-dealers in Boston, by the way, made the same argument that is always made, and was made at Athens in the grain combination of the third century B.C.—to wit, that they put up the prices in order to prevent other people buying all the coal and speculating ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... guy-rope snap with a sound like a pistol-shot, and a great stone swung to a boom and weighing tons should begin running amuck through piles of cement, machinery, and men, and some one of the working gang, seeing the danger, should, with the quickness and sureness of a mountain-goat, spring straight for the stone, clutching the end of the guy and bounding off again, twisting the bight round some improvised snubbing-post ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... worked as well as any man in the bunch. I only caught sight of her now and then . . . you see what we had to do, don't you? . . . We had to secure all these infernal things that were running amuck and ease up the rest of the cargo that had got jammed on the port side. There were accidents. Three or four were knocked out. Petersen, the Swede, had his leg crushed. I don't know what was wrong at the time. He was working next me, and a roll of the ship brought an ugly ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... A proposition difficult to beat, E'en though you get there Zaza with both feet, In forty flickers, it's the same hard luck, And you are up against it nip and tuck, Shanghaied without a steady place to eat, Guyed by the very copper on your beat Who lays to jug you when you run amuck. O Life! you give Yours Truly quite a pain. On the T square I do not like your style; For you are playing favorites again And you have got me handicapped a mile. Avaunt, false Life, with all your pride and pelf: Go take a running jump ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various

... future," continued the Doctor, as he handed Dave two strange-looking spheres, the size of a man's head, "the work of sheriffs, policemen and other officers of the law is not going to be quite so hazardous. When a criminal runs amuck, he will not kill a half-score of brave men before he is captured. The officers of the law will do what we will soon be doing, and a child can do the rest. Only," he continued, "watch your step going up ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell

... with his fellow grain growers, the five years that followed were years of continuous struggle for E. A. Partridge. The railway came and the country commenced to settle quickly. The days of prairie fires that ran amuck gave way to thriving crops; but at thirty and forty cents per bushel the thriving of those who ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse

... fantastic opulence and extravagance, Ransome had never seen anything to beat the Poly. There was no end to it, no end to the privileges you enjoyed. He positively ran amuck among his privileges—those, that is to say, offered him by the Poly. Swimming Bath and the Poly. Gym. As he said, he "fair abused 'em." But he considered that the Poly. "got home again" on his exceptionally moderate use of the Circulating Library, ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... I never meant a word I said!" he began, with exaggerated trepidation. "Why the dickens didn't you murder the whole yapping bunch of us, Grant?" He clapped his hand affectionately upon the other's shoulder. "We kinda run amuck yesterday afternoon," he confessed cheerfully, "but it sure was ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... swore deliriously that he would do worse to Le Borgne's master than he had done to the supercargo; but he never by any chance let slip who Le Borgne's master might be, though M. Radisson, Chouart Groseillers, young Jean, and I kept watch by turns lest the drunken knave should run amuck of our Frenchmen. I mind once, when M. Radisson and I were sitting quiet by the bunk where Ben was berthed, the young rake sat up with a fog-horn of a yell and swore he would slice that pirate of a Radisson and all his cursed Frenchies ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... run amuck!" some one cried, and in an instant there was an uproar of terror as the people left their seats and surged back to higher tiers where they hoped the elephant ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell

... receipts, a mighty sum and was gratified with a round of applause by way of offset to the hisses. This event would have looked most horrible in anticipation,—a thing to make a man shoot himself, or run amuck, or hide himself in caverns where he might not see his own burning blush; but the reality was not so very hard to bear. It is a fact that I was more deeply grieved by an almost parallel misfortune which happened to my companion on the same evening. ...
— Passages From a Relinquised Work (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... forms is the most dynamogenic of all the emotions. In paroxysms of rage with abandon we stop at nothing short of death and even mutilation. The Malay running amuck, Orlando Furioso, the epic of the wrath of Achilles, hell-fire, which is an expression of divine wrath, are some illustrations of its power. Savages work themselves into frenzied rage in order to fight their enemies. In ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... neighbourhood what is called "a rogue elephant"—an elephant which, for some reason known only in elephant councils has been driven out of the herd, and is so enraged by his expulsion that he is ready to run amuck at every person and animal he sees. This was not pleasant intelligence. We found native carts at the place, ready to proceed in the morning to a market to be held at the foot of the hills; and after a very uncomfortable night, much disturbed by the cries of the beasts of ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... bitter lips, his bare brawny arms, tattooed with strange devices. How clean he kept his teeth and nails! There was the stamp of the thoroughbred all over him. In what strange parts of the world had he run amuck? What fair, gracious women mourned for him in ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... the fellow who's taking these women about and our Schomberg. Signor Zangiacomo ran amuck in the morning, and went for our worthy friend. I tell you, they were rolling on the floor together on this very veranda, after chasing each other all over the house, doors slamming, women screaming, seventeen of them, ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad

... hope," Lovell answered, "but I shall never be the man I was. I have seen—God grant that I may some day forget what I have seen! No wonder that my nerves have gone! I saw a Russian correspondent, a strong brutal-looking man, go off into hysterics; I saw another run amuck through the camp, shooting right and left, and, finally, blow his own brains out. Many a night I sobbed myself to sleep. The men who live through tragedies, Aynesworth, age fast. I expect that I shall ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... conservation of wild life has changed the mental attitude of very many people. The old Chinese-Malay spirit which cries "Kill! Kill!" and at once runs amuck among suddenly discovered wild animals, is slowly being replaced by a more humane and intelligent sentiment. This is one of the hopeful and encouraging ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... the proprietor of the show recognized us, for we saw him regarding us suspiciously; and we moved on to the cage in which the Wild Man sat, with a big brass chain attached to his leg—ostensibly to prevent him from running amuck among the spectators. Two of his keepers were guarding him, with axes in their hands. He was loosely arrayed in a tiger's skin, and his limbs appeared to be very hairy. His skin was dark brown and rough with warts. His hair, which was really a wig, hung in tangled snarls ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens

... there rang out on the night the sudden tumult of a bell; a bell that told as plainly as though it clamored with a human tongue, that the hand that rang it was driven with fear; fear of fire, fear of thieves, fear of a mad-man with a knife in his hand running amuck; perhaps at that moment creeping up ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis

... carriage and pair, white-haired butler—everything correct, except myself. It was of no use. I can hold myself in for a month or two; then I break out, the old original savage that I am under my frock coat. I feel I must run amuck, stabbing, hacking at the prim, smiling Lies mincing round about me. I can fool a silly woman for half-a-dozen visits; bow and rub my hands, purr round her sympathetically. All the while I am longing to ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... he. "No, you're not, boy. If I catch you down there I'll play the game as you've mapped it out for me. I'll grab Jerry's axe or pitchfork and run amuck, blest if I don't. You'll wake up and find yourself sending for ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... a runabout or a sporting buggy, and the sharp, decisive hoof-beats of a trotter. Then, like a cowboy shooting up a peaceful camp, a frantic devil would hurtle out of the distance, bellowing, exhaust racketing like a machine gun gone amuck—and at these horrid sounds the surreys and buggies would hug the curbstone, and the bicycles scatter to cover, cursing; while children rushed from the sidewalks to drag pet dogs from the street. The thing would roar by, leaving a long ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... so well ordered, no emotion so thoroughly controlled, but that under sudden pressure—click!—the mechanism slips a cog and runs amuck. Just that thing happened inside the Unspeakable Perk's smooth-running, scientific brain upon incitement of his flag's desecration and his lady's grief. To her it seemed that he shot past her horizontally ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... the lithographers had a fit in the dining room of the contract hotel this morning (I don't blame him, do you?) and they hauled him out by the feet. We run amuck with another advance car, the other day, but nobody got into a fight. I thought rival cars always—excuse the typewriter, it doesn't know any better— got into a ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington

... poke of my fist I could kill any one of these master brains. The ten-foot workers seemed mere shells, light and fragile; even the buildings were light and flimsy. The little globe-houses on their sticks seemed to waver, almost like nodding flowers. If we ran amuck we could smash everything we saw here ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings

... was at once brutish, terrible, Homeric; the fellow's reserves of strength seemed immense; sheer animal rage drove him; he ran amuck with lust to kill. He beat, rushed, strove to close. His opponent's lithe body evaded a clutch that might have ended the contest. John Steele fought without sign of anger, like a machine, wonderfully ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham

... himself together and walked on. Certainly he would soon run amuck if he did not get over feeling like that, if he did not master these impulses which bordered on insanity. He wondered if that inner ferment would drive ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... incarnation of passionate revolt against the restraints of class and form and custom which he not only conformed to but religiously believed in. And she set stirring in him all kinds of vague, wild longings to run amuck socially and politically—longings that, if indulged, would ruin him for any ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips

... ropes, and run amuck amongst the murtherin' blackguards," he exclaimed, seizing the rope that bound him with his teeth and endeavouring to tear it—an effort which it is needless to say was futile, and nearly cost ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne

... could ask him about the horses, and whether the dates were always sticky, and what he did in a sandstorm, and lots of interesting things. And then a Malay,—why, you could ask him how he felt when he ran amuck,—only, perhaps, that would not ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards

... them, toward the forest. The charge of the carriers, wreaking havoc on every side, had broken up the battle formation the aliens had had; the flaming death from the horrible weapons of the invaders, the fearless courage of the foot soldiers, and the steel-clad monsters that were running amuck among them shattered the little discipline they had. Panicky, they lost their anger, which had taken them several hours to build up. They scattered, ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett

... any, fer he 's out o' his head. Consequent, it's up ter us. Thet warrant business, an' deputy sheriff racket, was a blame smart trick, all right. It would 'a' corralled us good an' proper if thet fool Swede had n't run amuck. Not that he left us in no bed o' roses, but, at least, we got a fightin' chance now, an' afore we did n't have even that. I was inclined ter let yer surrender to the sheriff, fer Sam Hayes is a squar' man, but not ter Farnham an' his gang—not much, Mary Ann! Thet ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish

... committed any overt act, had retired to a camp near by with his high explosives. But Constable Wight got an information sworn out against him for having an explosive in his possession with intent to endanger life, which was putting it mildly enough when he was in fact dealing with a man running amuck with dynamite playthings. However, this served the purpose of Constable Wight, who rode out to the camp and arrested the man, explosives and all. It was not a very pleasant undertaking, but that did not count for anything with a wearer of the scarlet ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth

... the German people and their Prussian or Prussianized rulers and leaders for the monstrous crime of this war and the atrocious barbarism of its conduct is the difference between the man who, acting under the influence of a poisonous drug, runs amuck in mad frenzy and the unspeakable malefactor who administered that drug, well knowing and fully intending the ghastly consequences which were bound ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn

... evidently thinks that JONAH swallowed the whale." Bill seemed to shatter friendships and dissever old alliances. SQUIRE of MALWOOD naturally at home in the fray, but rather startling to find HOME SECRETARY running amuck at CHAMBERLAIN. MATTHEWS in his most hoity-toity mood; quivered with indignation; thumped the table; shook a forensic forefinger at the undesignedly offending JOSEPH, and, generally, went on the rampage. As for HENEAGE, he filled up any little pause in uproar by diving in and moving the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 20, 1891 • Various

... Goblets were drained in competition to the sound of cannon, and the judges who awarded the prize to the Prince, were presented by him with estates comprising hundreds of peasants. Maimon began to shout in imitation of the cannon, in imagination he ran amuck in a synagogue, as he had seen the prince do, smashing and wrecking everything, tearing the Holy Scrolls from the Ark and trampling upon them. Yes, they deserved it, the cowardly bigots. Down with the law, to hell with ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... have, and I'd as lief her throat were cut! She almost ripped my bowels up, I vow, Running amuck with horns well set to butt: Nathless I've locked her in the stall below: She's blown with grass, I tell ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... answered as politely as possible; 'it was I that first found the casks were loose, and by the accident that the rim of the full one struck me pretty sharply, in the night, between the shoulder-blades. I got it trigged up, as you see, before it ran amuck to do further damage. In securing it I found that it had lost its bung and was almost empty: but that hardly seemed worth mentioning, with such a flood of rainwater washing around. There was nothing to be done at the moment; the breaker in ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... he steers wild; in this ill-balanced course his lone horn strikes every tree on this side as he dodges from that side. The unhappy creature is staggered, body and mind. In what Jericho of the forest can he hide his diminished head? He flies frantic. He runs amuck through the woods. Days pass by in gloom, and then comes despair; another horn falls, and he becomes defenceless; and not till autumn does his brow bear again ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various

... to put him where his queer streak can't get loose and run amuck in my garden." He caught an expression of hesitancy in the policeman's ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... Printing House Square. To a man they agreed in calling him Utopian, altruistic, visionary. What milder epithets should be applied to one who, with sufficient literary talent—not to say genius—to make himself a working name in the ordinary way, must needs run amuck among the theories and write a novel with a purpose? a novel, moreover, in which the purpose so overshadowed the story as to make the ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... of undertone of frivolity that is all the nearer to the absolutely comic for the earnestness, so to speak, of its unconsciousness. The reason is, partly no doubt, to be ascribed to its debonnaire self-satisfaction, its disposition to "lightly run amuck at an august thing," the traditions of centuries namely, to its bumptiousness, in a word. But chiefly, I think, the reason is to be found in its lack of anything properly to be called a philosophy. This is surely a fatal flaw in any system, because it involves a contradiction ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... Christendom, and even down to our own war of 1812. Others, again, scorned superstition, and entertained merely practical misgivings concerning the weight, density, and temperature of the comet, lest the eccentric aerial wanderer should run amuck of the earth in some confusion touching the right of way ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... amuck in 1914 Smuts was Minister of Defense of the Union of South Africa. The Nationalists immediately began to make life uncomfortable for him. Balked in their attempt to keep the Union out of the struggle they took another tack. After the Botha campaign in German South-West ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... herds of buffalo grazed along the foothills of the western mountains, two hardy prospectors fell in with a bull bison that seemed to have been separated from his kind and run amuck. One of the prospectors took to the branches of a tree and the other dived into a cave. The buffalo bellowed at the entrance to the cavern and then turned toward the tree. Out came the man from the cave, and the buffalo took after him again. The man made another dive for the hole. After ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... his eyes from those of the captive youth. Henry's blood chilled, and for a moment stopped its circulation. Then it flowed in its wonted tide, but he understood. Yahnundasis was seeing red. Like the Malay he was amuck. At any moment he might throw the glittering hatchet at the prisoner. Henry recognized the imminence of his danger, but he steeled his nerves. He saw, too, that much depended upon himself, upon the power of the spirit that radiated from his eyes. Hence, he, too, looked steadily into ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler

... from a viewless and apparently noiseless space, it was NOT considered the lightnings of an avenging Deity, but was traced directly to the ambushed rifle of Kansas Joe, swayed by a viciousness quite as human as their own; the spectacle of Blizzard Dick, verging on delirium tremens, and riding "amuck" into an Indian village with a revolver in each hand, did NOT impress them as a supernatural act, nor excite their respectful awe as much as the less harmful frenzy of one of their own medicine-men; they were NOT influenced by implacable white gods, who relaxed only to drive hard bargains ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte

... were startled by someone blaspheming in a way that made their flesh creep. Even Tim blanched; for in the voice he recognized the timbre of insanity. He had seen this happen in the trenches, when men driven mad by concussion or gas or horrors ran amuck among their fellows. The one who now swam toward them was evidently a stoker—a powerful creature. His face was grimed with coal dirt, his eyes were red, and his blasphemies were interspersed with hilarity at the prospect of cutting their throats. When thirty yards off he ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris

... Malays drunk with bhang and running amuck, a company of howling dervishes, may possibly, in our own day, go through similar frantic vagaries; but I doubt if any civilized European people but the French would permit and enjoy such scenes. Yet our neighbors ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... without comfort. The Bell River Indians had certainly taken to the war-path. But it was only in defence of their fishing on the river which meant their whole existence. They were defending it successfully, but, in their success, their savage instincts had run amuck. Not content with slaying the invaders they had annexed their enemy's property and squaws. Then, with characteristic ruthlessness, they had set about carrying war far and near, but only amongst the Indians. Their efforts undoubtedly had a dual purpose, The primary ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... I said, making a sign to Jan, and we all three threw ourselves upon him, and prevented him drawing his knife, when he would, I suspect, have run amuck among us, as the Malays frequently do ...
— Adventures in Africa - By an African Trader • W.H.G. Kingston

... no easy task. The lead they had gained put their opponents on their mettle, and they fairly ran amuck in the second quarter. By successive rushes, they worked the ball down the field. At the ten-yard line, the Rally Hall boys braced, and the enemy lost the ball on downs. A fake forward pass, splendidly engineered by Billy and Fred, would have saved the day, ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport

... of cattle and flocks of sheep from western Virginia were driven through the streets and gathered at Drovers' Rest, two miles west of town. Some days many thousands filled West (P) Street from morn to eve, and, occasionally, a wild steer ran amuck and then there was great excitement. Also, large flocks of turkeys, hundreds of them, were driven up from lower Maryland and passed through the streets to pens on the outskirts of town, where one could go and ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker

... the streets— And it was starving time in houses Where fat generosity once ran amuck, No fires in inns, no cheerful bark of hounds, Or stroke of social hoofs upon the stones. And the long docks bit the black water Like old loosened fangs that held the sea In one ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen

... were, though they might settle down to work for a while on one ranch, and then pass on to another; the sort of creatures who loafed in the saloons of the little villages and amused them selves by running amuck and shooting up the town. These men, and indeed nearly all of the pioneers, held the man from the civilized East, the "tenderfoot," in scorn. They took it for granted that he was a weakling, that he had soft ideas of life and was stuck-up or affected. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... promise, although never fully tested with the gun,—his leisure hours, which included every one in the twenty-four, were passed in the invention and perpetration of curiously regulated mischiefs, with all of which he took pains to combine an element of the ludicrous. His great spree was to run amuck into a flock of small children coming out of school. If there was a dirty crossing hard by, over which they had to pass, he would wait until they had got half-way, and then, going through them ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... Mercy, the prize-fight, given in detail, by rounds, is followed by an orgy of drunkenness rising to a scale almost Homeric. The man, crazy with alcohol, runs amuck, and things begin to happen. The village is turned upside down. Two powerful contrasts are dramatically introduced, one as an interlude between violent phases of the debauch, the other as a conclusion. The first is the contrast between the insane buffoon ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... safe, I put my old Spad through every antic we two had ever done together. The observers in the balloons must have thought me crazy, a pilot running amuck from aerial shell shock. I had discovered a new meaning for that "grand and glorious feeling" which is so often ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall

... show that they are the amusements of a peculiar and limited class. The greater part of them are at a miserable discount (horse-racing excepted, which has been already sufficiently done in H. W.), and there is no reason for running amuck at them at all. I have endeavoured to remove much of my objection (and I think have done so), but, both in purpose and in any general address, it is as wide of a first article as anything can well be. It would do best in the opening of ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens

... proofs of power treated as factitious, and witnessed a frankness concerning authorship, far and near, that I had not dreamed of authors using. When Doctor Holmes understood that I wrote for the 'Saturday Press', which was running amuck among some Bostonian immortalities of the day, he seemed willing that I should know they were not thought so very undying in Boston, and that I should not take the notion of a Mutual Admiration Society too seriously, or accept ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... on "Moneyphobia" at the thirty-ninth annual commencement exercises of the Peirce Business College. He paid his respects to Thomas W. Lawson in such terms as "frenzied fakir" and "crazed Malay running amuck." ... "There are abundant indications that this epidemic is now rife in the community. The extraordinary vote polled by a Socialistic candidate for President, in a time of general prosperity, seems to evidence this, as does the avidity with ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... same devoted head has been smoothed and patted. It is a proof to me of his self-control that he never strikes out pugilistically, right and left, when addressed as one of 'My friends,' or 'My assembled friends;' that he does not become inappeasable, and run amuck like a Malay, whenever he sees a biped in broadcloth getting on a platform to talk to him; that any pretence of improving his mind, does not instantly drive him out of his mind, and cause him to toss his obliging patron ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... balanced. In those particular subjects it did not take a deep student of human nature to set down the entire crowd of them as visionaries, most fantastically inclined—in which direction, having no restraint whatever, they ran absolutely amuck. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... Philadelphia paper very wittily said the other day, they can't commit economic murder without committing economic suicide. Do you suppose, therefore, that half of the population of the United States is going about to destroy the very foundations of our economic life by simply running amuck amidst the schedules of the tariff? Some of the schedules are so tough that they wouldn't be hurt, if it did. But that isn't the program, and anybody who says that it is simply doesn't understand the situation at all. All that the tariff-reformers claim is this: ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson

... course, that doctrines—which are only formal and orderly statements of principles involved in the facts—must flow from the proclamation of the person, Christ. I am not such a fool as to run amuck against theology, as some people in this day do. But what I wish to insist upon is that the first form of Christianity is not a theory, but a history, and that the revelation of God is the biography of a man. We must begin with the person, Christ, and preach Him. Would ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... The fellow came down to Nettleton and ran amuck, the way they sometimes do. After they've done a wood-cutting job they come down and blow the money in; and this man ended up with manslaughter. I got him convicted, though they were scared of the Mountain even at Nettleton; and then a queer thing happened. ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton

... when it needed all his intelligence to keep him from springing on the keeper, and running amuck in the ward-room, simply for the sake of uttering a violent, brutal protest. Then there were hours when he was too exhausted to leave his cot. At such a time he wrote a letter, his first letter to his mother, and he made the keeper promise ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various

... trouble is chronic ophthalmia; nearly all the children are afflicted with this disease, and at the eyes of each poor helpless babe are a mass of hungry flies. The wonder is, not that ophthalmia runs amuck among these people, but rather, that any of the children escape ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... great, I think." In Religion—obscurantism, resistance to the light, the smug endeavour to make the best of both worlds, offended Arnold as much on the one hand, as insolence, violence, ignorant negation, "lightly running amuck at august things," offended him on the other. He loved a "free handling, in a becoming spirit, of religious matters," and did not always find it in the writings of his Liberal friends. It is true that he once made a signal lapse from his own canon of ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell

... Naapu liked him. Even good Madame Mauer, who squinted, squinted more painfully at Follet than at any one else. But his idleness was beginning to tell on him; occasionally he had moody fits, and there were times when he broke out and ran amuck among beach-combers and tipsy natives along the water-front. More than once, Ching Po sought him out and fetched ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... She would visibly shrink at those remarks, though they were sometimes so excruciatingly funny that she had to laugh, and feel dreadful immediately after. She saw that he resented her shrinking; it seemed to excite him to run amuck the more. But she could not help it. Once she got up and walked away. He followed her, sat on the floor beside her knees, and thrust his head, like a great cat, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... impulses often clash. And since, as we have just said, the relative worth to us of the acts is not always accurately represented by the impulses, we need to stand off and compare them impartially. No single passion must be allowed to run amuck; the opposing voices, however feeble, must be heard. When desires are at loggerheads, when a deadlock of interests arises-an almost daily occurrence when life' is kept at a white heat-there must be some moderator, some governing power. Morality is the ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... makes the monotony and the weariness bearable. And then, suddenly, they break. They hate the machines and the city and everything they ever knew or did. It's a sort of delayed-action psychosis which goes off with a bang. Some of them go amuck in the city, using their belt-weapons until they're killed. More of them bolt for the jungle. The city loses better than one per cent of its population a year to the jungle. And then they're Ragged Men, half mad at all times and wholly mad as far as the city ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... philosopher's stone, and the shadowy sages of modern Thibet are said, by those who speak for them, to have compassed the instantaneous transference of bodies from place to place. In either case, the holders of these secrets have laudably refused to publish them, lest avarice and malice should run amuck in human society. A similar fear might well visit the conscience of one who should dream that he had divulged to the world at large what can be done with language. Of this there is no danger; rhetoric, it is true, does put fluency, emphasis, and other warlike equipments at the disposal ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh

... point of accusing, first, his wife and then his step-son of having taken it with a view to a private sale. So began an exceedingly acrimonious and emotional discussion, which ended for Mrs. Cave in a peculiar nervous condition midway between hysterics and amuck, and caused the step-son to be half-an-hour late at the furniture establishment in the afternoon. Mr. Cave took refuge from his wife's emotions in ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... as due to sudden insanity. It is now, however, certain that the typical amok is the result of circumstances, such as domestic jealousy or gambling losses, which render a Malay desperate and weary of his life. It is, in fact, the Malay equivalent of suicide. "The act of running amuck is probably due to causes over which the culprit has some amount of control, as the custom has now died out in the British possessions in the peninsula, the offenders probably objecting to being caught and tried in cold blood'' ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... envious in dells as in drawing-rooms, and as vain and egotistical on a Norfolk Broad as in Grosvenor Square. In this Appendix Borrow defends 'Lavengro,' both the book and the man, at some length, and with enormous spirit. At gentility in all its manifestations he runs amuck. The Stuarts have a chapter to themselves. Jacobites, old and new; Papists, old and new; and, alas! Sir Walter Scott as the father of 'Charley o'er the Waterism,' all fall by turn under the lash ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... berserker; fury, dragon, demon, tiger, beldame, Tisiphone[obs3], Megaera, Alecto[obs3], madcap, wild beast; fire eater &c. (blusterer) 887. V. be -violent &c. adj.; run high; ferment, effervesce; romp, rampage, go on a rampage; run wild, run amuck, run riot; break the peace; rush, tear; rush headlong, rush foremost; raise a storm, make a riot; rough house*; riot, storm; wreak, bear down, ride roughshod, out Herod, Herod; spread like wildfire. [(person) shout or act in anger at something] explode, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... most consistent enemy, but it was through Tublat that, when he was about thirteen, the persecution of his enemies suddenly ceased and he was left severely alone, except on the occasions when one of them ran amuck in the throes of one of those strange, wild fits of insane rage which attacks the males of many of the fiercer animals of the jungle. Then none ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... used, it being thought that in the hands of violent patients, chairs might become a menace to others. In the dining room, however, there were chairs of a substantial type, for patients seldom run amuck at meal time. Nevertheless, one of these dining-room chairs soon ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... civilized and Christian people, and yet we tolerate on every corner places where men are transformed into incarnate devils, and sent forth to run amuck in our streets, and outrage the helpless women and children in their own homes. The naked inhabitants of Dahomey could do no worse in ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... preach about it next Sunday.... Well, a swishing isn't a likely thing anyhow. But I would.... There isn't a master here I'd stand a thrashing from—not one.... And because I choose to say what I think!... I'd run amuck." ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... a struggling crowd of wheelmen came, and from a cloud of dust the winner of the mile bicycle-race shot past the tape. The difficulty in the carabao event was to stick on to the broad, clumsy animal, during the gallop around the course. One of the beasts, excited by the shouts, began to run amuck, and cut a swathe in the distracted crowd as clean as an ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... know their father, a brute, a sort of brute beast with an intolerant loud voice, a creature who has ran amuck in our all too merciful world for the last thirty years and more. An engineer! To him all that we hold dear and sacred is nothing. Nothing! The splendid traditions of our race and land, the noble institutions, the venerable order, the broad slow march from precedent ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... has my heart bruck, so she has, if ever any body's heart was bruck wit the likes of her; an' sure so there was, no doubt, or I wouldn't be as I am wid her. I'll give her a dead bargain, sir; for it's only to get her aff av my hands I'm wanting plase yer haner—husth amuck—husth, a veehone!** Be asy, an' me in conwersation ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton

... myself," the voice went on. "I'm not above lifting a few calves for the brand I'm riding for or any little thing like that, but this deal sort of gorges up in me. They'll never cinch it on to any man—they never do. Old Rile is brooding over it. He'll likely run amuck. One way or another he'll try ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts

... feet touch the deck than he began to clean up the ship. He had the strength of several men, and he ran amuck with it. I remember especially one man whom he got into the chain-boxes but failed to damage through inability to hit him. The man dodged and ducked, and Victor broke all the knuckles of both his fists against the huge links of the anchor chain. By the time we dragged him out of that, his madness ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... when laws are overriden and doom defeated. Yes, the price he was meant to pay was gratitude to one of shrivelled soul and innate antipathy; and he had not been man enough to see the trial through to the end! With a little increased strain put upon his vanity and pride, he had run amuck. Like some heathen gladiator, he had ravaged in the ring. He had gone down into the basements of human life and there made a cockpit for his animal rage, till, in the contest, brain and intellect had been saturated by the fumes and sweat ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker

... to making a widower of me. Made a rush for Zarinska, but she whisked her skirts in his face and escaped with the loss of the same and a good roll in the snow. Then he took to the woods again. Hope he don't come back. Lost any yourself?' 'One—the best one of the pack—Shookum. Started amuck this morning, but didn't get very far. Ran foul of Sitka Charley's team, and they scattered him all over the street. And now two of them are loose, and raging mad; so you see he got his work in. The dog census will be small in the spring if we don't ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London



Words linked to "Amuck" :   murderously, insane, demoniac



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