"Brutal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enquiry already placed on the question paper as to the Ministry's intentions in the matter. This question was due for the sitting of June 13, and on that day Russell wrote to Palmerston that he should call Butler's order "brutal" and that Palmerston might use the term "infamous" if preferred, adding, "I do not see why we should not represent in a friendly way that the usages of war do not sanction such conduct[640]." This was very different from the tone used ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... philosopher Plato was doubtful in what rank of living creatures to place and collocate them, whether amongst the rational animals, by elevating them to an upper seat in the specifical classis of humanity, or with the irrational, by degrading them to a lower bench on the opposite side, of a brutal kind, and mere bestiality. For nature hath posited in a privy, secret, and intestine place of their bodies, a sort of member, by some not impertinently termed an animal, which is not to be found in men. Therein sometimes are engendered certain humours so saltish, brackish, clammy, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... a troop of very formidable baboons of the dog-faced species. These creatures are brutal, ferocious, and horrible to look upon, with their dog-like muzzles and savage expression. However, a few shots scattered them, and the chattering horde scampered off, leaving several of their number on ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... hardships of war. Young Andrew was taken prisoner, and roughly treated by his captors. He was nearly starved in prison at Camden. While thus confined, an English officer insolently ordered him one day to black his boots. Jackson indignantly refused, for which offense the brutal officer beat him over his head with his sword, inflicting injuries which caused suffering in after life. This incident is related to have greatly intensified Jackson's hatred of the English throughout his life. An orphan, and alone in the world, when the War of the Revolution ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... me." Armstrong's face worked in spite of himself. "Forget that I did suggest, Harry. It was brutal of me." ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... it with his indifference to these ragged shrill-voiced women about her. She paused at length before one of the low hovels and timidly knocked. At the same moment the door suddenly opened and a young man came lounging heavily out. By the light from the doorway Elizabeth caught a glimpse of a heavy brutal face, as he slouched past her. She started back, about to run, but stopped. Just beyond him in the doorway stood the girl she sought. The pale light of a flickering gas jet above her head revealed her face. There was no mistaking her now. Elizabeth forgot her ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... him now, as much as the brutal offer of the gold had outraged his honourable feeling. It was far better, he reflected, that the Queen should act thus and help him to look upon her as a being altogether beyond his sphere, as she really was. After this, he thought, it would be impossible and out of the question ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... little Turks with brilliant fezzes; wiry mountaineers in dirty, full, white kilts, shouldering long guns and one hand on their pistols, stalk untamed past a dozen Turkish soldiers, who look sheepish and brutal in worn cloth jacket and cotton trousers. A headless, wingless lion of St. Mark still stands upon a gate, and has left the mark of his strong clutch. Of ancient times when Crete was Crete not a trace ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... claim of pity, she writes two volumes of the most exquisite prose. What a tender, suffering creature is Indiana; how little her husband appreciates that gentleness which he is crushing by his tyranny and brutal scorn; how natural it is that, in the absence of his sympathy, she, poor clinging confiding creature, should seek elsewhere for shelter; how cautious should we be, to call criminal—to visit with too heavy a censure—an act which is one of the natural impulses of a tender heart, that seeks ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the bottom of his bed unlacing his boots, so that his back was towards Arthur, and he didn't see what had happened, and looked up in wonder at the sudden silence. Then two or three boys laughed and sneered, and a big, brutal fellow who was standing in the middle of the room picked up a slipper, and shied it at the kneeling boy, calling him a snivelling young shaver. Then Tom saw the whole, and the next moment the boot he had just pulled off flew straight ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... acute, and not a word of that Bad Boy's brutal intentions was lost on me. I shrunk among my feathers and shivered with despair; but when I heard the voice of Little Miss I rounded my ear ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... who you are, now," von Schellen continued, with brutal bluntness, "and we know as much more about you as we need. We know of the Admiralty office that you visited, and we know the information that you two were expected to gather along the Kiel Canal when you should have entered ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... we call pure or spiritual love. Then the child will be all gentle, all tender and tender-radiant, always enfolded with gentleness and forbearance, always shielded from grossness or pain or roughness. Now the father's instinct is to be rough and crude, good-naturedly brutal with the child, calling the deeper centers, the sensual centers, into play. "What do you want? My watch? Well, you can't have it, do you see, because it's mine." Not a lot of explanations of the "You see, darling." No such nonsense.—Or if a child ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... Dickens has been more successful than any other novelist, ancient or modern. With him every leading character stands for his class. Squeers is the representative of the schoolmaster, then too common, ignorant, brutal, and grasping; Winkle is the Cockney sportsman; it is impossible to think of red tape without naming Mr. Tite Barnacle; and so on through all the books. If he sometimes too plainly labels his characters with their qualities and defects, it is a fault caused by his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... of speech, an almost brutal frankness, is a noticeable northern characteristic. It strikes a stranger painfully, but is accepted and even appreciated by those ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... spirit he kissed his little saint. ... Of course—of course—one must admit these brutal things—of course the scheme might fail. Anything might happen to crash it about his ears. That was a deadly, dismal thought, but he flattened it from sight with that lusty hammer that gay youth uses—"I shan't be any worse off if it ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... quietly passed into sleep. Such are the hardening results of war, that some soldiers, who were unhurt, actually refused to give a trifle of river water from their canteens to their expiring comrades. At one time a brutal wrangle occurred at the well, and the guard was compelled to seek reinforcement, or the thirsty ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... troop of self-lacerating penitents with the meaner robber and cut-purse and the murderer that doth his butchery in small with his own hand. No doubt wickedness hath its rewards to distribute; but who so wins in this devil's game must needs be baser, more cruel, more brutal than the order of this planet will allow for the multitude born of woman, the most of these carrying a form of conscience—a fear which is the shadow of justice, a pity which is the shadow of love—that hindereth from the prize of serene wickedness, itself ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... flying machine to you and your friends if I cared to do so. However, I don't care to. Knowing that I wished my experiment to be kept a secret, you came here with the one idea of being disagreeable, and you have succeeded. I am sorry to be so rude to my own sister, but occasionally the brutal truth is a good thing for ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... to Secretary Seward some time after the President's death, he was still suffering from his fracture and from the brutal attacks of the assassin, who made such a desperate attempt to kill him ...
— Lincoln's Last Hours • Charles A. Leale
... rushed down the stairway screaming. There was a jam in the hall and a terrible crush at the outer doors. A curtain had been blown across a console and taken fire; that was all, but the alarm and confusion were dreadful. Women fainted. One or two men made brutal efforts to escape. I have a temperament which leaves me pretty cool in real danger. There was none but what the terror of these people created. I was hustled about and, with others, driven against the Chinese screen which covered the doorway of the count's office. I said he had entered it—yes, ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... passion in the mere demonstration of hostility, and gently gathering up his oar gave the countryman the right of way. The courage of the latter rose as the strange danger passed, and as far as he could be heard, he continued to exult in the wildest excesses of insult: 'Ah-heigh! brutal executioner! Ah, hideous headsman!' Da capo. I now know that these people never intended to do more than quarrel, and no doubt they parted as well pleased as if they had actually carried broken heads from the encounter. But at the time I felt affronted and trifled with by the result, ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... old friend," answered the Scarecrow; "but you must pardon me for appearing just now in this brutal form." ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... combined to make the Baltimore club—that local people have been led to believe was made of a crowd of earnest, honest players—thoroughly despised and detested. In ten years' experience in scoring games in Cleveland I have never heard such a torrent of vulgarity, profanity and brutal, senseless abuse heaped upon an umpire as Lynch stood from the Baltimore players upon ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... major components of GDP. Subsistence farming predominates. Although pre-independence Equatorial Guinea counted on cocoa production for hard currency earnings, the deterioration of the rural economy under successive brutal regimes has diminished potential for agriculture-led growth. A number of aid programs sponsored by the World Bank and the IMF have been cut off since 1993 because of the government's gross corruption and mismanagement. Businesses, for the most part, are ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... woman, she escaped most of the cuts and abrasions to which we hard-working men were subject in the course of working the Snark around the world. I did not tell her so. You see, I did not wish to bruise her ego with brutal facts. Being an M.D., if only an amateur one, I knew more about the disease than she, and I knew that time was my ally. But alas, I abused my ally when it dealt a charming little yaw on the shin. So quickly did I apply antiseptic treatment, that ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... hand on her arm. "Forgive my brutal bluntness. I'm not clever at such things, but I would have said as much to my ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... on her way to Rosenthal's, even when she climbed the long stairs and was ushered into Mangan's small office, died out of her heart when she saw the manager's face. She had anticipated an outburst of anger, followed by a brutal tirade over her carelessness in wrapping up the mantilla with the other pieces and leaving it behind her the night before. Instead, he came forward to meet her—his lean, nervous body twitching ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... their food by the Russians. The men were to eat first, and when they perished the women and children would be left as slaves to the Russians. A Cossack, Pushkareff, brought a ship out for the merchant Betshevin in 1762, and, in punishment for the murder of several brutal members of the crew by the Aleuts, he kidnapped twenty-five of their women. Then, as storm drove him towards Kamchatka, he feared to enter the home port with such a damning human cargo. So he promptly marooned fourteen victims on a rocky coast, {39} ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... of the victors was, of course, to secure themselves, and fires and crowbars were the readiest way to that end. But the wail in the last chapter of Lamentations hints at the usual atrocities of the sack of a city, when brutal lust and as brutal ferocity are let loose. Chapter lii. shows that the final step in our narrative was separated from the capture of the city by a month, which was, no doubt, a month of nameless agonies, horrors, and shame. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... made by himself. He was a short, thickset man, powerfully made, with brawny arms disproportionately short even for his height, and with a countenance, as far as one could judge of a face so disfigured by his grimy toil, rather brutal than savage. His choice apprentices, full of admiration and terror, worked about him; lank and haggard youths, who never for an instant dared to raise their dingy faces and lack-lustre eyes from their ceaseless labour. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... his full height, and resting for support on the hand that was rested upon the table. Intensity of emotion arrested her breath, as she gazed at the silvered head, piercing black eyes, and spare wasted framp of the handsome man, who had always reigned as a brutal ogre in her imagination. The fire in his somewhat sunken eyes, seemed to bid defiance to the whiteness of the abundant hair, and of the heavy mustache which drooped over his lips; and every feature in his patrician face revealed not only a long line of blue-blooded ancestors, but ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... sir,' said Madam P——, with animation; 'it brutalizes and degrades the master and the slave; it separates husband and wife, parent and child; it sacrifices virtuous women to the lust of brutal men; and it shuts millions out from the knowledge of their duty and their destiny. A good and just God could not have designed it; and it ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... last fronted by another opening, a ragged one which might have been hacked with an ax. They emerged from it into the wildest scene Ross had ever seen. Of course, he was familiar with ice and snow, but here was a world surrendered completely to the brutal force of winter in a strange, abnormal way. It was a still, dead white-gray world in which nothing moved save the wind which ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... pipe like a large and very happy cat—'Don't blame you in the least. It's uncommonly good of you, and all the rest of it, but every man—even you, Torp—must consider his work. I know it sounds brutal, but Dick's out of the race,—down,—gastados expended, finished, done for. He has a little money of his own. He won't starve, and you can't pull out of your slide for his sake. ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... the mass of the poor, and it is in the tenement-houses that we find the causes which, combined, are making of the generation now coming up a terror in the present and a promise of future evil beyond man's power to reckon. They are a class apart, retaining all the most brutal characteristics of the Irish peasant at home, but without the redeeming light-heartedness, the tender impulses and strong affections of that most perplexing people. Sullen, malicious, conscienceless, with no capacity for enjoyment save in drink and the lowest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... "Have I got anything to say!" he sneered. "Would you have anything to say if a bunch of half-drunken fools decided to take the law into their own hands and hang you for defending a woman against the brutal attack of a fiend?" He paused and wrenched to free his hands but the rope held firm. "It was a wise precaution you took when you ordered my hands tied—a precaution that fits in well with this whole damned cowardly proceeding. And now you ask me if I have anything to ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... heat from the lamps?—but Mauville's brow became flushed; his buoyancy seemed gross and brutal; desire lurked in his lively glances; Pan gleamed from ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... PRAY. Yet to whom? To what? To the Universal Law of Necessity? In that there could be no hearing or answering of human petitions. I meditated on this with a kind of sombre ferocity. Who portioned out this Law of Necessity? What brutal Code compels us to be born, to live, to suffer, and to die without recompense or reason? Why should this Universe be an ever-circling Wheel of Torture? Then a fresh impetus came to me. I rose from my recumbent posture and ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... the most debasing of the emotions. It can lead to panic even among soldiers with arms in their hands; sailors will trample on women and children in their blind rush for the boats; men will even deny their convictions, their faith, and cringe to brutal power; crimes the most vile are committed from fear, and fear had virtually obliterated womanhood in Miss Ainsley's soul. She was in a mood to accept any conditions for the assurance of safety, and she gave not a thought to any one ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... good authority—a deceiver of women, a skulk, a dog. I have met with many villains; and I am not hot. But my tendency is to take that fellow by the throat with both hands, and throttle him. Having thoroughly accomplished that, I should prepare to sift the evidence. Unscientific, illogical, brutal, are such desires, as you need not tell me. And yet, madam, they are manly. I hate slow justice; I like it quick—quick, or none at all, I say, so long as it is justice. Creeping justice is, to my mind, little better than ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... you hound of a abolitionist!" shouted a brutal voice; "we're about ready fur ye!" Penn's hand drew back. I dare say it trembled, I dare say his face turned white again, as he felt the danger so near. How could he confront, with his sensitive spirit, those ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... fastened round the knee, and the other round the ankle; by this means they make the calves of their legs large, and the above-mentioned parts very small, which I imagine that they regard as a mark of elegance: by this peculiarity we distinguished them.[289-3] The habits of these Caribbees are brutal. There are three islands: this is called Turuqueira; the other, which was the first that we saw, is called Ceyre; the third is called Ayay:[290-1] all these are alike as if they were of one race, who do no injury to each other; ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... young baronet was carried out and laid, as comfortably as might be, on the back seat. Edith followed, unutterably against her will, but how was she to help it? He was her worst enemy, but even to one's worst enemy common humanity at times must be shown. It would be brutal to let him ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... for those words, Stephen! I'm sore for them to the very core of my heart. If they'd been my own father's children or mine, I couldn't feel sadder than I do. And to have to listen to those hard, cold, brutal words ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... this respect. Moral causes come into consideration, in proportion as the progress of knowledge is advanced; and the public opinion of the civilized world is rapidly gaining an ascendeney over mere brutal force. It is already able to oppose the most formidable obstruction to the progress of injustice and oppression; and as it grows more intelligent and more intense it will be more and more formidable. It may be silenced by military power, but it cannot be conquered. It is elastic, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... said Wolston, "I am very sorry to be under the necessity of contradicting you. I have visited the slave states of North America, and have witnessed atrocities perhaps less brutal, but not less heart-rending, than those ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... he fully realised that his gaolers had escaped from him. "How brutal to leave a fellow shut up in a hole like this. 'Tis horrible; and enough to drive one mad. Ugh!" he now cried, "if ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... of my house, you black slut!' I said—but I didn't say 'slut.' And she went. It was the only time I was ever brutal to a woman." ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... was to drag her on, but that would have been too brutal, and stopping short he asked what was ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... a manifestation of the sexual instinct. It is the same emotion which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the of Titian. It is possible that Strickland hated the normal release of sex because it seemed to him brutal by comparison with the satisfaction of artistic creation. It seems strange even to myself, when I have described a man who was cruel, selfish, brutal and sensual, to say that he was a ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... listened she might have heard the words repeated; but she had dropped off into a quiet slumber and lay unconscious of the semi-brutal state of ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... such representations to Mr. Cameron as, I flatter myself, will dispose of the case of this young rascal and make him repent his brutal and unprovoked assault. I'll go over to-morrow forenoon to the hotel and speak to him on the ...
— Herbert Carter's Legacy • Horatio Alger
... to express and record his protest against the injustice of slavery. Twice as a youth he had made a trip to New Orleans,—in 1828 and 1831,—and on his second visit had for the first time observed slavery in its most brutal and revolting form. He had gone into the very centre of a slave mart, had seen families sold, the separation forever of husband and wife, of parent and child. When we recall how deeply he always sympathized with suffering, brute as well as human, and his strong love of justice, we can realize ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various
... herself, engaged in hanging clothes on a line. Perceiving the young man, she stopped and turned to him inquiringly. He averted his eyes and went away without remark. But the affair was done for. There was no hatchet, he was frustrated entirely. He felt crushed, nay, humiliated, but a feeling of brutal vindictiveness at his disappointment soon ensued, and he continued down the stairs, smiling maliciously to himself. He stood hesitating at the gate. To walk about the streets or to go back were equally repugnant. "To think that I have missed such a splendid ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... ships and seventeen gun-boats were all the vessels that they were able to produce, but it was some time before they would agree to place these entirely under Sir Sidney Smith's command. Ahmed Pasha, or, as he was generally called, Djezzar Pasha—Djezzar meaning the butcher, from the cruel and brutal nature of the man—the Governor of Syria, was in Constantinople at the time, and was present at these meetings. He was aware that Napoleon was marching against him; and although usually he paid ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... of misery indiscriminately over the dearest earthly hopes of companions, children and friends, and paralyzes every pulse of joy that beats in the human bosom. Many a child has been spurned from the presence of its brutal father, and been beaten for asking bread to satisfy its hunger. Intemperance stupefies man to the moral impressions of the gospel, and hardens the heart with the touch of its benumbing powers. It is the giant of ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... Miramon's Government, during the present year. Some of these were only worthy of a barbarous age, and if they had not been dearly proven would have seemed impossible in a country which claims to be civilized. Of this description was the brutal massacre in April last, by order of General Marquez, of three American physicians who were seized in the hospital at Tacubaya while attending upon the sick and the dying of both parties, and without trial, as without ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... no conscious design in running; his muscles merely reacted in obedience to the grinding tumult in his brain. His eardrums rang with the fancied sound of Natalie's cries; and his eyeballs were seared with the picture of her shrinking in the brutal hands of Grylls. As he crashed through the wood, the little branches whipped his face unmercifully; and the spiny shoots of the jackpines tore his clothes. He ran full tilt into unyielding obstacles; and was flung aside, unconscious ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... devoid of humanity as he was short-sighted in statesmanship, forbad the exiled clergy of Switzerland to set foot in the annexed Province of Alsace. The brutal conduct of the chancellor could, however, only injure himself. It stigmatizes him as a persecutor throughout the ages, as long as history shall be read, whilst the sufferers to whom he refused shelter and bread, found abundant compensation in the generous ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... rather say. He was not crying over it, but he looked pretty forlorn and white, and his blindness made it pitiable. I call it brutal; the man at least might have travelled up for company. A journey of ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the "Iliads" that this anger was pernicious, that it brought a thousand ills on the Grecian camp. The courage of Achilles is proposed to imitation, not his pride and disobedience to his general; nor his brutal cruelty to his dead enemy, nor the selling his body to his father. We abhor these actions while we read them, and what we abhor we never imitate; the poet only shows them, like rocks or quicksands to ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... Arabian steed submit to be a vile drudge?" cries the fatalist. Nonsense! A man is not an irrational creature, but a reasoning being, and has something within him beyond mere brutal instinct. The greatest victory which a man can achieve is over himself, by which is meant those unruly passions which are not convenient to the time and place. David did not do this; he gave the reins to his wild heart, instead of curbing it, and became a robber, and, alas! ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... recklessly they have abandoned their confidence in themselves, and in that gracious Being who never forsakes those who put their trust in him. They sink into despondency, and, seeking to forget themselves, they bring upon their faculties the brutal stupor of intoxication, or they exhilarate them by its delirious gayety. Suicide is often the fearful issue. Dupin ascribes a hundred cases of suicide annually to the lottery system in the single city of ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... Heaven knows they are bad enough, but they are by no means so bad as you thought. And I'm your wife, Stephen. That thing you did was brutal; those men will talk. I was guilty, no doubt, in my thoughts, but I'm young, and you have no right to blight my life and my reputation—yes, and yours—by a thing like that. We will have to meet those men. What are you going ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... brutal sport at one time in vogue in this country as a kind of "attraction" in public-houses of the lowest class. The animal was kept in a tub or barrel and was attacked by dogs. Yielding at last to superior numbers, it was dragged or drawn out. ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... have to confess that this conceit of Peter was one of his most fascinating qualities. To put it with brutal frankness, there never was a ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... downward, Stratton squirmed his body sidewise so that the blade merely grazed one shoulder. Grasping the slim wrist, he twisted it with brutal force, and the weapon clattered to the floor. An instant later he had gripped the fellow about the body and, exerting all his strength, hurled him across the table and ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... Brutal indeed my proposition was, and Mrs. Church was not prepared to assent to it in this rough shape. She dropped her eyes on her book, with an air of acute meditation. Then, raising them, "We are very ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... Divine Service," and as "a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventions, to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of the kingdom." The chairman of the bench was the brutal and blustering Sir John Keeling, the prototype of Bunyan's Lord Hategood in Faithful's trial at Vanity Fair, who afterwards, by his base subserviency to an infamous government, climbed to the Lord Chief Justice's seat, over the head of Sir Matthew Hale. Keeling had suffered ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... how I could ever had imagined that love affairs were delightful, interesting things. They are horrible. I couldn't even give poor heartbroken Fred one little kiss, because of my promise to Ken. It seemed so brutal. I had to tell Fred that of course he would have my friendship, but that I couldn't kiss him because I had promised somebody ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... shot down Bourbon, Rome, after his death, was plundered, devastated and ravaged by a brutal, greedy, licentious, and fanatical soldiery. Europe was moved at the story of the sack of Rome and the position of the pope, who had taken refuge in the castle of St. Angelo. Francis I. and Henry VIII. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... humblest Roman carried everywhere with him. All the acts of Pilate which are known to us, show him to have been a good administrator.[2] In the earlier period of the exercise of his office, he had difficulties with those subject to him which he had solved in a very brutal manner; but it seems that essentially he was right. The Jews must have appeared to him a people behind the age; he doubtless judged them as a liberal prefect formerly judged the Bas-Bretons, who rebelled for such trifling matters as a new road, or the ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... the story of Arnold's expedition to Virginia, with the brutal incidents which history relates concerning it. It will suffice to say that Champe formed part of it, all his efforts to desert proving fruitless. It may safely be said that no bullet from his musket reached the American ranks, but he was forced to brave death ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... marriage to be real enough, and he would not mar her delight by undeceiving her. Later, since she was wretched at home with her scolding mother and a brutal step-father, and there were dangers in allowing her to go on waylaying him in streets when too long a period elapsed between his visits to her, he quietly took her away and established her in a small house on the outskirts of the city, with the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... as 17 deg., to STATEN RIVER. From this place, what more of the land could be discerned, seemed to stretch westward:" the Pera then returned to Amboina. "In this discovery were found, every where, shallow water and barren coasts; islands altogether thinly peopled by divers cruel, poor, and brutal nations; and of very little use to the (Dutch ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... and Thinstock Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The treatment of women by the police is traditional. The 'unfortunate'—unhappy creatures!—are their pet aversion; and once in their clutches, receive no mercy. The 'Charley' of old was quite as brutal as the modern Hercules of the glazed hat, and the three adventurers showed an amount of zeal worthy of a nobler cause, in rescuing the drunken Lais from his grasp. On one occasion they seem to have hit on a 'deserving case;' a slight skirmish with the watch ended in a rescue, and ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... living was very dear, comfort very uncommon, and good manners still more rare. Throughout his journey he found in the taverns "a system of impertinence, rudeness, rascality, and filth, rendered more intolerable by an antipathy to the English, in the brutal manifestation of which most of the Colonel, Doctor, and Squire, keepers of the taverns, were pleased to indulge." When he asked an hostler to call him early in the morning, he was answered that—he might call himself and be d——d. In the Western country he found no symptoms of hospitality—witnessed ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... calling forth, intentionally or not, this brutal act of violence in the ecclesiastical strife, drew on himself the catastrophe of ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... would be asked of me. There is no fanaticism, no intolerance. It would be brutal if I declined to go to church on a Sunday morning. You see, my strictly scientific attitude helps in avoiding offence. Fanny can't understand it, but my lack of dogmatism vastly relieves her. I have been trying to explain to ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... the case, I can't afford to let matters like this killing pass without getting revenge, swift and sure. You understand? Someone's going to suffer for the killing of that girl, not only because it was a brutal murder, but because the department has got to make an example or no one whom we employ ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... from him—brutal and unbridled as was his wont when money affairs were being discussed. He was not accustomed to curb his violence in her presence. She had been his helpmeet in many unavowable extravagances, in the days when he was still striving ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... men! If you dare to move another step, I'll shoot. What do you mean by your outrageous conduct, pushing and hustling your way violently through a crowd of helpless women and children in that brutal fashion? You wouldn't do it if any of them belonged to you, and I am surprised that the husbands and fathers put up with it. Call yourselves Englishmen? Pah! I'm ashamed of you. You ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... all probability. The war will be over soon, I trust, but so much may happen before it is. You inspire in me such deep solicitude. I had to tell those poor negroes that they were free. So they would be if within our lines. But when we are gone that overseer may be brutal, and the slaves may come again to you for protection. That cousin of yours may also come again—oh, it puts me in a sort of rage to think of leaving you so unfriended. You will have to be a woman in very truth, and a brave, circumspect ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... shame and rage. His attack now was that of a frenzied animal, quite careless of defense and desirous only of murder. Twice the Duke wounded him, but it was Alessandro who drew backward, composedly hindering the brutal onslaught he was powerless to check. Then Eglamore ran him through the chest and gave vent to a strangled, growling cry as Alessandro fell. Eglamore wrenched his sword free and grasped it by the blade so that he might stab the Duke again and again. He meant to hack the abominable flesh, to slash ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... these few Saints would be left to get ready to move in peace; but not so. If there is any doubt of the brutal character of the mob, what they now did will ...
— A Young Folks' History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints • Nephi Anderson
... arraigned, found guilty; and the official authorities, it is whispered, hint that perhaps the case is not solitary, that perhaps you had better not probe farther into that department of things. This is in the autumn of 1841; the crime itself is of the previous year or season. "Brutal savages, degraded Irish," mutters the idle reader of Newspapers; hardly lingering on this incident. Yet it is an incident worth lingering on; the depravity, savagery and degraded Irishism being never so well admitted. In the British land, a human Mother ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... showed themselves willing enough to assist in these labors, but when the brutal treatment to which the people of la Espanola had been subjected was meted out to them also, and the greed of gold caused their self-constituted masters to exact from them labors beyond their strength, the Indians murmured, ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... Tiflin might make guesses about what they meant to do, Nelsen and Ramos would have taken no chances. They had to be brutal. Homing darts pierced armor. The four went ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... and slightly bald at the top, bent over her laces. But she remembered herself in time and stood still. She dared not glance at Knight, to send him a message of encouragement, but she knew that for once even his resourcefulness had failed, and that he must be steeling himself to the brutal discovery of ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... present time, and urging them to keep in view that crown of glory which He had prepared for all who hold fast to the truth. So much had his faithful and gentle character won the love of all except the most brutal, that many even among those who had been perverted regarded him with affection, while the priests, hearing him so highly spoken of, were afraid for the present to persecute him further. They were, however, very active among his congregation, whom ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... the characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime are not transmitted by physical heredity to its offspring, must certainly stand as the basic principle of education; for everything that we identify as human as contrasted with that which is brutal must look to education for its preservation and support. It has been stated by competent authorities that, during the past ten thousand years, there has been no significant change in man's physical constitution. This simply means that Nature finished ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... very stupid and brutal people. They rub their bodies all over with rancid grease, which gives them a very bad smell, so that you may nose them at a considerable distance. Their children are all born perfectly white; but being constantly ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... wounds, one a deep gash on the head, the other on his hand. The officer then turned to Robert Jackson, and ordered him to clean his boots. Robert also refused. Then the man struck this boy on the head, and knocked him to the floor. It was a bad business, and the whole performance, especially the brutal treatment of a defenseless woman and two boy prisoners, made a deep impression on Andrew's mind. He was only fourteen years old, but his fighting spirit was ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... Rome sought to suppress with brutal rigor. The bloody persecutions of the Waldensians in France, which almost resulted in the extirpation of these peaceful mountain people, of the followers of Wyclif in England, whose remains Rome had exhumed after his death and burned, of the Hussites in Bohemia, were all aimed at translations ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... leave her. She had not intended to use such words, nor such a tone. She certainly did not suppose that he knew about Miss Gailey's condition. She had affirmed to Janet Orgreave her absolute assurance that he did not know. As for the tone, it was accusing, it was brutal, it was full of the unconscious and terrible ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... weird enthusiasm, almost an obsession. It was taken up over the land, and repeated in a thousand books and on as many platforms. One of these propagandists was General von Bernhardi, who entered in more detail into the technical and strategical aspects of the programme. The rude and almost brutal frankness of both writers may be admired; but the want of real depth and breadth of view cannot be concealed and must be deplored. The arguments in favour of force, of unscrupulousness, of terrorism are—especially in Bernhardi[14]—casuistical ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... gathering the wheat, and binding it into sheaves. They, too, were in terror of the Turks; but, when they saw the imperial cortege slowly plodding its way through the sandy road, they stopped their work, and, coming up to the portieres, intruded their coarse, brutal faces into the very carriages themselves. They stared at the empress and jeered at the emperor; inquired how he liked his crown, and why he did not wear it on his head. They added that it was a fine thing to be ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... that made a deep impression on me. Young as I was, I comprehended that I was the cause of the ill-treatment of my nurse, whom I fondly loved. I interfered—I placed my little body between her and her brutal oppressor. I scratched, I kicked, I screamed—I grew mad with passion. At that hour, the spirit of evil and of hate blew the dark coal in my heart into a flame; and the demon of violent anger has ever since found it too easy to erect there his altar, of which the fire, though, at ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... state, which can in a moment's time descend from that place and become statically a crowd. And it is from the sociological standpoint the most terrible kind of crowd; it is that which today has taken a bellicose attitude, and which by its attitude and precepts prepares the brutal blows of mobs. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... body of a white woman—a Mrs. Blynn—and also that of her child. These captives had been taken by the Kiowas near Fort Lyon the previous summer, and kept close prisoners until the stampede began, the poor woman being reserved to gratify the brutal lust of the chief, Satanta; then, however, Indian vengeance demanded the murder of the poor creatures, and after braining the little child against a tree, the mother was shot through the forehead, the weapon, which no ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... stood by his elbow on a bracket on the wall. His countenance had a strong masculine cast; not properly human, but such as we see in the bull, the goat, or the domestic boar; something equivocal and wheedling, something greedy, brutal and dangerous. The upper lip was inordinately full, as though swollen by a blow or a toothache; and the smile, the peaked eyebrows, and the small, strong eyes were quaintly and almost comically evil in expression. Beautiful white hair hung straight all round ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... will be engaged in preparing the ground on which Associations are ultimately to arise, are yet able to contribute something of their time and means to the cause of humanity's emancipation from brutal drudgery. ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... spokesman Blair might show himself, as he often did show himself, quite incapable of understanding, much less of sympathising with, the real spirit of the North. Stanton might be truculent and even brutal, but he was willing to work, he knew how to organise, he was devotedly loyal. Seward, scholar and statesman as he was, had been ready to give needless provocation to Europe and was often equally ill-judged in his treatment of ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... steal. And little foreign blood of the oppressed nationalities has truth in it, or honesty. Why should it? Why should the subjugated Irish, any more than the Southern slaves, beaten down for centuries by brutal strength, seeking to exterminate their religion and their speech, to terrify them out of intelligence and independence, to crush them into permanent poverty and ignorance,—why should they tell the truth or respect property? Falsehood and theft are that cunning which is the natural and necessary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... whose only thought was of the brutal sport to come, was Hade, with Dwyer standing at ease at his shoulder,— Hade, white, and visibly in deep anxiety, hiding his pale face beneath a cloth travelling-cap, and with his chin muffled in a woollen scarf. He had dared ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... you in your frightful martyrdom? Why do you endure these horrors which might be abolished? You hurl me back upon the loathsome thought that love, love for a depraved, brutal wretch is the secret that baffles me. I might be able to see you die, to lay you, stainless snowdrop that you are, in the coffin that would keep you sacred forever; but please God! I will never endure the pain of seeing you leave these sheltering walls to ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of the boy, I believe," coolly interrupted Carraway. To a man of his old-fashioned chivalric ideal the brutal allusion to the girl was like a deliberate blow in ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... that terrible, overpowering sensation of murderous anger grip at my heart, as it had already done once before in an altercation with this brutal ruffian, the blood again mounted to my head like fire, and, reckless of all consequences, I was in the very act of pulling myself together for a spring at his throat, when I felt a small hand—the ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... it was the universal custom to send women and young girls to whipping-houses, to the hands of the lowest of men,—men vile enough to make this their profession,—there to be subjected to brutal exposure and shameful correction. She had known it before; but hitherto she had never realized it, till she saw the slender form of Rosa almost convulsed with distress. All the honest blood of womanhood, the strong New England ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in which James had grown to manhood; a world of brutal swordsmen, in whose hands the boy who shrank from the very sight of a sword seemed helpless. But if the young king had little physical courage, morally he proved fearless enough. He drew confidence in himself from a sense of his intellectual ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... ours. Among officials and literary men we have lots, lots, and they don't know it themselves. On the other hand, the docility of schoolboys and fools has reached an extreme pitch; the schoolmasters are bitter and bilious. On all sides we see vanity puffed up out of all proportion; brutal, monstrous appetites.... Do you know how many we shall catch by little, ready-made ideas? When I left Russia, Littre's dictum that crime is insanity was all the rage; I come back and I find that crime is no longer insanity, but simply common sense, almost a duty; anyway, a gallant protest. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... may be imagined; my hand has not the cunning to reproduce it on paper; and if it had, it would shrink from the task. Mild men became brutes, brutal men, devils, women—God help them!—shrieking beldams for the most part. Never shall I forget them with their streaming hair, their screaming open mouths, and the cruel ascending fire glinting on their ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... The brutal soldiers to the brutish court Dragged the weak women, and they stood o'er-awed, Each to the other clinging for support, And praying in her ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... successfully through the troubles of the universe. Strength may be combined with stupidity, but even then it is not to be trifled with. Macaulay's sympathy with these qualities led to some annoying peculiarities, to a certain brutal insularity, and to a commonness, sometimes a vulgarity, of style which is easily criticised. But, at least, we must confess that, to use an epithet which always comes up in speaking of him, he is a thoroughly manly writer. There is nothing silly or finical about him. He sticks to his colours resolutely ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the reserve, the cunning watchfulness, the suggestive silences of the folk who lived in them, of whom he had just left three excellent specimens in Crood, Mallett and Coppinger. How was he, a stranger, going to unearth the truth about his cousin's brutal murder, amongst people like these, endowed, it seemed to him, with an Eastern-like quality of secretiveness? ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... mass, and kill them all by shooting at them with arrows, just as if they had been beasts surrounded in a chase, excepting that the excitement and pleasure of shooting into such a mass of human victims, and of hearing the shrieks and cries of their terror, was probably infinitely greater to their brutal murderers than if it had been a herd of lions, tigers, and wolves that they ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... requite thy miseries; Nor is earth worthy of thy sighs. Life is a bitter, weary load, The world a slough. And now, repose! Despair no more, but find in Death The only boon Fate on our race bestows! Still, Nature, art thou doomed to fall, The victim scorned of that blind, brutal power That rules and ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... still "Caucasian" race,—and where are English and American sympathies? We can't stop to settle all the doubtful questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure to come out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does the same nature in the inferior animals,—tame it or crush it. The India mail brings stories of women and children outraged and murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers. England takes down the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... reefs and islands for the five missing men. I hope it will not be long before they are brought in, for, independent of any other crimes they have committed, they must almost certainly have been guilty of a most brutal murder, and have killed their own comrade. It is wonderful how so many of these men escape. It is difficult to understand how they can procure boats, provisions, and sufficient water for the voyage of over 2,500 miles, that being about the distance from New Caledonia to Rockhampton ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... maniac with her fingers splayed. The swaying figure bent, grabbed her about the waist, and lifted her high into the air. I thought for a moment he was about to crush her as he had crushed the man. But I was wrong. She was hurled to the sand, but with a violence so brutal that she went ...
— The Man the Martians Made • Frank Belknap Long
... secondly, because government, whether Divine or human, implies that the subject has a previous knowledge of the rules under which he is living. There is a fallacy, too, in comparing unchangeable laws with a personal governor. For the law need not necessarily be an 'ignorant and brutal tyrant,' but gentle and humane, capable of being altered in the spirit of the legislator, and of being administered so as to meet the cases of individuals. Not only in fact, but in idea, both elements must remain—the fixed law and the living will; the written word and the ...
— Statesman • Plato
... of no commercial importance, the same cannot be said of the Arabic people. They are keen, thrifty traders, and as brutal in their instincts as they are keen. The commerce which connects the western part of Asia with Europe is largely of their making. They collect and transport the goods from the interior, delivering them to Jewish ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... of fighting a foe from every way the winds blow, cold and hunger, storms and floods and desert heat, poisonous reptiles, poisoned arrows of Indians, and the deadly Asiatic cholera; sometimes with brave comrades, sometimes with brutal cowards, sometimes on scout duty, utterly and awfully alone; over miles on endless miles of grassy level prairies, among cruel canyons, in dreary sand lands where men die of thirst, monotonous and maddening in their barren, eternal sameness; and sometimes, ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... "You mean larton brutal [black bread]!" retorted Gavroche, calmly and coldly disdainful. "White bread, boy! white bread ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... such descriptions as that of the progress of Isabella to the camp of Ferdinand after the capture of Loxa, and of the picturesque pageantry which imparted something of gayety to the brutal ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... much have preferred to keep out of it. But when once he had studied the Nicene doctrine and found its agreement with his own conclusions from Scripture, a clear sense of duty forbade him to shrink from manfully defending it. Such was the man whom the brutal policy of Constantius forced to take his place at the head of the Nicene opposition. As he was not present at Milan, the courtiers had to silence him some other way. In the spring of 356 they exiled him to Asia, on some charge ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... workshop to workshop, confidently and cheerfully at first, whistling softly between whiles; but at every turn the question confronted him. In some places, where he was recognized with thinly veiled surprise as that boy of Shackford's, he was kindly put off; in others he received only a stare or a brutal No. ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... upon this and similar points. In 1821, he wrote his Adonais, a monody on the death of Keats. Part of this poem had its origin in the mistaken notion, that the illness and death of Keats were caused by a brutal criticism of his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review. The last verse of the Adonais seems almost prophetic of his own end. Passionately fond of boating, he and a friend of his, Mr. Williams, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... 1975, Mozambique was one of the world's poorest countries. Socialist mismanagement and a brutal civil war from 1977-92 exacerbated the situation. In 1987, the government embarked on a series of macroeconomic reforms designed to stabilize the economy. These steps, combined with donor assistance and with political stability since the multi-party ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... to the instincts of humanity in every right-minded person is made by a consideration of the brutal system employed by these traffickers to in every way exploit their victims, the hardened prostitute as well as the innocent maiden. It is probable that a somewhat larger proportion of the American girls are free from the control of ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... America had nothing more serious to complain of than the arbitrary act of the dishonest governor referred to; but it is a melancholy fact that, ever since the conquest of Peru by Pizarro, the Spaniards have treated the Indians with brutal severity, and it is no wonder that revenge of the fiercest nature still lingers in the breasts of the descendants of those ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... educated. Here she assumed the garb of a novice. Her relatives, thinking that he must have done this in order to rid himself of her, furiously vowed vengeance, which they took in the meanest and most brutal form of personal violence. It was not a time of fine sensibilities, justice, or mercy; but even the public of those days was horrified, and gave expression to its horror. Abelard, overwhelmed with ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... a faint idea of the anguish and confusion that have been produced in this part of the country by this infamous statute. It has turned Southeastern Pennsylvania into another Guinea Coast, and caused a large portion of the inhabitants to feel as insecure from the brutal violence and diabolical acts of the kidnapper, as are the unhappy creatures who people the shores of Africa. Ruffians from the other side of the Slave-line, aided by professional kidnappers on our own soil, a class of men whose 'occupation' until lately, had been 'gone,' are continually prowling ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... were directed towards reclaiming the allied Indians from some of their most brutal practices, and to induce them to form settlements near those of the Jesuits. The selfish planters, interested in keeping up the feuds of the Indians, in order to procure slaves, exclaimed against these proceedings as violations ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... observed Paul, "I have every where found, not only the same nature, but a common innate sentiment of justice that seems universal; for even amidst the wildest scenes of violence, or of the most ungovernable outrages, this sentiment glimmers through the more brutal features of the being. The rights of property, for instance, are every where acknowledged; the very wretch who steals whenever he can, appearing conscious of his crime, by doing it clandestinely, and as a deed that shuns observation. All ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... as it was at first. But one day Edwin Bentham was brutal. All boys are thus; besides, being a French Hill king now, he began to think a great deal of himself and to forget all he owed to his wife. On this day, Wharton heard of it, and waylaid Grace Bentham, and talked wildly. This made her very happy, though she would not listen, ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... no power is secure against the affronts of this lawless tribe; they are a sort of licensed brawlers, their brutal and inhuman trade rendering them insensible to all fear from any quarter. Death is to them but as a scratch on the finger—they care not for it, when nor how it comes. The slightest cause—a passing word—a look—a motion—is enough to inflame ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... woman, he plunged into debt and forced her to contend with and pacify his duns out of her private fortune, and even worried her into an attempt to raise money for him by pledging her annuity, though, luckily, no Jew in London was plucky enough to take a long risk on the life of the wife of so brutal a husband. This daily inferno of disgust and terror the woman endured for three years, for the barbarous English law requires the woman, not the man, to prove extreme cruelty besides adultery; and cruelty is often ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... take shelter at the Abbey of Feal, in the house of one of his dependents, called Mac Cormac. Catherine, a beautiful daughter of his host, instantly inspired the Earl with a violent passion, which he could not subdue. He married her, and by this inferior alliance alienated his followers, whose brutal pride regarded this indulgence of his love as an unpardonable degradation ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... willing to stand and fight when the odds are not too overwhelmingly against me, but in this instance I perceived neither glory nor profit in pitting my relatively puny strength against the iron muscles and brutal ferocity of this enraged denizen of an unknown world; in fact, the only outcome of such an encounter, so far as I might be concerned, ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... unfortunate." It may be worth the while to add (what is remarked by Mr. Matthews in his Diary of an Invalid), that the number six has been considered at Rome as ominous of misfortune. Tarquinius Sextus was the very worst of the Tarquins, and his brutal conduct led to a revolution in the government; under Urban the Sixth, the great schism of the West broke out; Alexander the Sixth outdid all that his predecessors amongst the Tarquins or the Popes had ventured to do before him; and the presentiment seemed to receive ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... These brutal attacks work on the active sensitive feelings, lacerating and confusing them. They have no educative power on all the innumerable fine processes in the life of the child's soul, on their ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... the part of anybody, they were rather out, in this particular instance. The simple fact was, that Oliver, instead of possessing too little feeling, possessed rather too much; and was in a fair way of being reduced, for life, to a state of brutal stupidity and sullenness by the ill usage he had received. He heard the news of his destination, in perfect silence; and, having had his luggage put into his hand—which was not very difficult to carry, ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... deceived over the conditions of the undertaking. Open kidnapping and the revival of anything like a slave trade could hardly be practised under the British flag at this time; nor indeed did the Fiji settlers, in most cases, wish to do anything unfair or brutal. It was to be a matter of contracts, voluntarily signed by the workmen; but the Melanesian was not educated up to the point where he could appreciate what a contract meant. When they did begin to understand, many were unwilling to sign for a period long enough to ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... conceived it possible that so many children could have been collected together, without a single trace of beauty or scarcely of intelligence in so much as one individual; such mean, coarse, vulgar features and figures betraying unmistakably a low origin, and ignorant and brutal parents. They did not appear wicked, but only stupid, animal, and soulless. It must require many generations of better life to wake the soul in them. All America could not show ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... weary me, as men have always done, being but fools whom it is so easy to make drunk, and who when drunk are so unpleasing. Piff! I am tired of you sober and cunning, and I am tired of you drunken and brutal, you who, after all, are but beasts of the field to whom Mvelingangi, the Creator, has given heads which can think, ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... He too had revelled with the rest, had been overcome by the drink and joined in everything, from the horseplay in the open air to the bestial amusements in those dark holes where the populace seeks its pleasure, that stimulant for the work of the morrow. Then that brutal drunkenness had come, with the loss of all his senses, till he found himself, dog-tired, sick and feverish, up in his ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... Edward Coke's arrogance to the whole Bar, and to all who approached him, now became almost insufferable, and that "his demeanour was particularly offensive to his rival"—Bacon. As to prisoners, "his brutal conduct ... brought permanent disgrace upon himself and upon the English Bar." When Sir Walter Raleigh was being tried for his life, but had not yet been found guilty, Coke said to him: "Thou art the most vile and execrable traitor that ever lived. I want words sufficient to express thy viprous ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... state of an Intercessor in Heaven, is besought with prayer and tears, and placatory penances, to mediate with God for the pardon of human sin. This is a mean and vile trait of human nature, the proof of ignorance, selfishness, brutal cowardice, and a superstitious materialism. It shows the base instinct to put down and destroy whatever or whoever makes men feel their own imperfections; with the alternative of ignoring and denying these very imperfections by turning into gods men who have merely ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... they only stared. Accustomed as they were to death in that wild land, the suddenness of this deed surprised them. The contrast between the splendid, brutal savage who had stood before them a moment ago, and the limp, black thing going to sleep upon the ground, was strange enough to move their imaginations. There he lay, and there, over him, the smoking pistol in his hand, Meyer stood ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... what is known as historical fiction, there are none which appeal to a larger number of Americans than Horseshoe Robinson, and this because it is the only story which depicts with fidelity to the facts the heroic efforts of the colonists in South Carolina to defend their homes against the brutal oppression of the British under such leaders as ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth |
