"Destructive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... There was too much velvet and satin, and the dresses were too much loaded. The diamonds, though superb, were frequently ill-set. The dresses, compared with the actual fashion, were absurdly short, and the feet, naturally small, were squeezed into shoes still smaller, which is destructive to grace, whether ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... fell in with a deep, dark, deadly, and destructive war, waged by the princes and potentates of those parts, both spiritual and temporal, against what do you think? One thing I am sure of. That unless I told you, you would never know; nor how they waged that war either; for all their strategy ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... the early penal enactments of the Pale—so forcibly supplemented in after years by the perjured "Dutch boor" and the inhuman Georges. The foul fiend himself could not have devised laws more diabolical in their character or destructive in their application. So close were their meshes and sweeping their folds, that the possibility of escape was obviously out of the question; as their victim was met and entangled at every turn, until at last ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... siege of eight days. He then overrun the Electorate of Treves, demolished all its fine fortifications, and by the energies of pillage, fire, and ruin, rendered it impossible for the territory hereafter to render any opposition to his arms. The destructive genius of Louvois had suggested that these unnecessary spoliations would tend to increase the authority of his royal master by inspiring a greater terror of ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... and do too much. All here exists in a state of exaggeration. The nation itself professes to be in a situation in which it is impossible for any nation ever to be naturally placed. To maintain themselves in this false position, they necessarily have recourse to much destructive conduct and to many fictitious principles. And as the character of a people is modelled on that of their Government, in private life this system of exaggeration equally prevails, and equally produces a due ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... over to thistles, rushes, and rough grasses. Drains have been put in so that the stagnant water in the soil might not cause the growth of those grasses which cattle will not touch. Fresh seed has been sown, and 'rattles' and similar plants destructive to the hay crop have been carefully eradicated. New gales, new carts, and traps, all exhibit ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... within the limits granted to that company, and is, at the same time, of force to preclude all the subjects of this nation from the right they before had to carry on a trade within those limits, such a law is plainly destructive to the nation's interest and to commerce in general. I therefore suppose, that, if the South Sea Company should think proper to revive their trade in the manner I propose, this proviso would be explained by Parliament to mean no more than excluding the South ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... is conducive to health or otherwise, it is impossible to overlook this destructive passion, which like envy is 'the rottenness of the bones.' Anger and fear are more violent, but this is more fixed: it sinks deep into the mind, and often proves fatal. It may generally be conquered ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... religion is the end or object of this life. When it is so considered it becomes destructive of happiness. The real end of life is, happiness. It becomes a hydra-headed monster, reaching in terrible coils from the heavens, and thrusting its thousand fangs into the bleeding, quivering hearts of men. It devours their substance, builds palaces for God (who dwells not in temples ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Captain Hilyar. But the damages were soon repaired, and his two ships stood back for the crippled foe. Both stationed themselves on her port-quarter, the Phoebe at anchor, with a spring, firing her broadside, while the Cherub kept under way, using her long bow-chasers. Their fire was very destructive, for they were out of reach of the Essex's carronades, and not one of her long guns could be brought to bear on them. Porter now cut his cable, at 5.20, and tried to close with his antagonists. After many ineffectual efforts sail ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... sea-wave produced even more destructive effects than had been caused by the earthquake. About twenty minutes after the first earth-shock the sea was seen to retire, as if about to leave the shores wholly dry; but presently its waters returned with tremendous ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... sealed the Empire's doom. Robbed of its Anatolian governing class and its Anatolian territorial army, it ceased to be self-sufficient, and the defenders it attracted from the west were at least as destructive as its eastern foes. The brutal regime of the Turks in the pilgrimage places of Syria had roused a storm of indignation in Latin Europe, and a cloud gathered in the west once more. It was heralded by adventurers from Normandy, who had first served the Romaic Government as mercenaries in ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... Windsor Castle had been equally destructive. The vessels had gradually neared each other in the calm; and the height of the Windsor Castle out of the water, in comparison with the corvette, had given her the advantage in sweeping the decks of the ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... all the first-born of the Egyptians, and filled the land with mourning. When David offended against God by numbering the people, one angel caused that terrible destruction by which his sin was punished. The same destructive power exercised by holy angels when God commands, will be exercised by evil angels when He permits. There are forces now ready, and only waiting the divine permission, ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... the generous offer of Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont at the Seattle convention in 1909. During our first year in these beautiful Fifth Avenue rooms Mrs. Pankhurst made her first visit to America, and we gave her a reception there. This, however, was before the adoption of the destructive methods which have since marked the activities of the band of militant suffragists of which Mrs. Pankhurst is president. There has never been any sympathy among American suffragists for the militant suffrage movement ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... "the most striking superabundance of pigeons, as well as of parrots, is confined to the Australo-Malayan sub-regions in which ... the forest-haunting and fruit-eating mammals, such as monkeys and squirrels, are totally absent." He points out also that monkeys are "exceedingly destructive to eggs and young birds."—Note, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... table, exclaiming that she knew she should have the measles; in fact, she immediately fell sick of that disorder, (and died, I think I understood.) All her family took it, and it raged through the island, proving dreadfully destructive. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... fought off Portland, at half pistol-shot distance, on the 3d of September, 1813. The commander of the Boxer (Lieutenant Blyth) had boastfully nailed his flag to her mast, and after a sharp, short, and destructive engagement, she was compelled to surrender. Her second officer had to announce the fact through his trumpet, for he could not haul down her flag. Burrows and Blyth were both slain, and were buried side by side in ...
— Harper's Young People, August 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... ancient mansion of Stoke, appearing to Mr. Penn, after some years absence in America, to demand very extensive repairs, (chiefly from the destructive consequences of damp in the principal rooms,) it was judged advisable ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... my passion was to foster a disease destructive either of my integrity or my existence. It was indispensable to fix my thoughts upon a different object, and to debar myself even from her intercourse. To ponder on themes foreign to my darling image, and to seclude myself from her society, at hours which had usually been spent with her, were difficult ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... example of this preponderance of the destructive forces. We should never have believed that man's nerves could resist so great a trial. The nerves of the bravest man are tempered to face death for the space of a second, but not to live in the hourly expectation of death and nothing else. Heroism ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the weak and defenceless, the burgher was touched to the centre of his heart. Call a Boer by what name you please, but of this be assured—he is a man who, above all, loves his family, and has pride and pleasure in his home, be it never so humble. When, therefore, a destructive policy was adopted, who shall realise fully what passed through the minds of these as they stood watching the lurid flames of their burning homes, and heard how in the camps their families were dying in scores? Cronje's ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... embroideries of Fez and Marrakech have already found a ready market in France, besides awakening in the educated class of colonists an appreciation of the old buildings and the old arts of the country that will be its surest safeguard against the destructive effects of colonial expansion. It is only necessary to see the havoc wrought in Tunisia and Algeria by the heavy hand of the colonial government to know what General Lyautey has achieved in saving Morocco from this form of ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... disposed to ascribe the absence of trees in the vast grassy plains of South America, to "the destructive custom of setting fire to the woods, when the natives want to convert the soil into pasture: when during the lapse of centuries grasses and plants have covered the surface with a carpet, the seeds of trees can no longer germinate and ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... theocratic government can claim political validity. The magistrate is concerned only with the preservation of social peace and does not deal with the problem of men's souls. Where, indeed, opinions destructive of the State are entertained or a party subversive of peace makes its appearance, the magistrate has the right of suppression; though in the latter case force is the worst and last of remedies. In the English situation, it follows that all men are to be tolerated save Catholics, Mahomedans ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... however, between them, that, while Dee was more of an enthusiast than an impostor, Kelly was more of an impostor than an enthusiast. In early life he was a notary, and had the misfortune to lose both his ears for forgery. This mutilation, degrading enough in any man, was destructive to a philosopher; Kelly, therefore, lest his wisdom should suffer in the world's opinion, wore a black skull-cap, which, fitting close to his head, and descending over both his cheeks, not only concealed his loss, but gave him a very solemn and oracular appearance. So ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... exercise of my own powers. As soon as I understood the principles, I relinquished for ever the pursuit of the mathematics; nor can I lament that I desisted, before my mind was hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration, so destructive of the finer feelings of moral evidence, which must, however, determine the actions and opinions of our lives. I listened with more pleasure to the proposal of studying the law of nature and nations, which was taught in the academy of Lausanne by Mr. ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... inevitable culmination of a discordant state of being, rather than the verdict of a vindictive judge or the sentence of a forensic monarch. Every retribution is an impinge of the creature in the creation, and, so far from expressing destructive wrath, is an act of the self rectifying mechanism of the universe to readjust the part with the whole. With what pernicious folly, what cruel superstition, men have attributed their own miserable passions to their imperturbable Maker, breaking his infinite perfection into all sorts of frightful ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... that dust has another part to play in nature; a part so important that it is doubtful whether we could even live without it. To the presence of dust in the higher atmosphere we owe the formation of mists, clouds, and gentle beneficial rains, instead of water spouts and destructive torrents. ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... at it as a question in social life, in morals, or in physiology, the American plan of granting absolute divorces is dangerous, and destructive to what is best in life. It leads to hasty, ill-assorted matches, to an unwillingness to yield to each other's peculiarities, to a weakening of the family ties, to a lax morality. Carry it a trifle farther than it now is in some of the Western States, and marriage ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... upon the conception of mechanism are not purely destructive in their aim. The man who makes them wishes to destroy one view of the system of things in order that he may set up another. If the changes in the system of material things cannot be accounted for mechanically, it is argued, we are compelled to turn for our ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... with well-made, substantial articles. The houses in these streets are all of two stories, with very narrow frontage, ground being valuable. A large quantity of timber is used in their construction, which renders any chance fire in this city so very destructive. The streets in Canton are all very narrow, most of those I have seen not exceeding six or seven feet in width: the two China Streets are probably twelve feet wide. The city does not cover half the space which a European ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... coral reefs, and the harbours are generally within these reefs; and one of them was discovered by Commodore Byron in 1765, who reported it as destitute of inhabitants. Their character is variable, and during the winter months they have long and heavy rains, and destructive hurricanes sometimes occur. The air is generally moist, and light winds and calms during the summer, render ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... scholar fancies it happiness enough to live with people who can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that they are prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot apply themselves to yours. The conditions of literary success are almost destructive of the best social power, as they do not have that frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion on the best terms. It is probable you left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or in the farms, with ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... espece atrabilaire Qui pense qu'un air refrogne La met au dessus du vulgaire, La privation de tes bienfaits Seule fait naitre sa satyre; Charmante idole du Francois Chez lui reside ton empire: Tes detracteurs font les pedans, Les avares et les amans De cette gloire destructive Qui peuple l'infernale rive, Et remplit l'univers d'exces. L'ambitieux dans son delire N'eprouve que de noirs acces, Le genre-humain seroit en paix, Si les conquerans savoient rire. Contre ce principe evident C'est en vain qu'un censeur declame, Le mal ne se fait en riant. Si de toi provient l'epigrame, ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... these worms are ought to be painted with White Lead, and the Ships supply'd with a good stock in order to give them a New Coat whenever it's necessary. By this means they would be preserved free from these destructive Vermin. The Long boat's Bottom being so much destroy'd appear'd a little extraordinary, as the Dolphin's Launch was in the Water at this very place full as long, and no such thing happened to her, as the Officers that were in the ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... and change in his attitude to his wife, been presented to him with such distinctness as that day. He saw clearly that all the world and his wife expected of him something, but what exactly, he could not make out. He felt that this was rousing in his soul a feeling of anger destructive of his peace of mind and of all the good of his achievement. He believed that for Anna herself it would be better to break off all relations with Vronsky; but if they all thought this out of the question, he was even ready to allow these relations ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... said to be saved which has never been lost or in danger of being lost. And in every case where anything is saved, the greatness of the salvation depends upon the value of the thing saved, together with the measure of effort and sacrifice required to effect it. Some years ago a very destructive fire was raging in the city of Pittsburg. A gentleman, who claimed to have been an eyewitness of the fire, related the following incident to me. He said the firemen had just rescued a family from a burning building, and thought ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... and the Hebrew languages were not to be taught! for the republican freedom of the ancient Jews and Grecians had often proved destructive of monarchy. Hobbes, in the bold scheme of his Leviathan, seems to have been aware of this fatality. Campanella would substitute for these ancient languages the study of the Arabic tongue! The troublesome Transalpine ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... him hate a system of government which was capable of shedding blood without repugnance. His commercial interests showed him the death of trade in the Maximum, and in political convulsions, which are always destructive of business. Moreover, like a true perfumer, he hated the revolution which made a Titus of every man and abolished powder. The tranquillity resulting from absolutism could alone, he thought, give life to money, and he grew bigoted on behalf of royalty. When Monsieur ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... ordination and those appointed to confer it: one young clergyman at Weimar shot himself on this account; heresy, and jarring, and unprofitable logic, were universal. Hence Herder's vehement attacks on this 'pernicious quackery;' this delusive and destructive 'system of words.'[26] Wieland strove against it for another reason. He had, all his life, been labouring to give currency among his countrymen to a species of diluted epicurism; to erect a certain smooth, and elegant, and very slender scheme of taste and morals, borrowed from our Shaftesbury ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... until we were in the latitude of the river La Plata. Here there are violent gales from the south-west, called Pomperos, which are very destructive to the shipping in the river, and are felt for many leagues at sea. They are usually preceded by lightning. The captain told the mates to keep a bright look-out, and if they saw lightning at the south-west, to ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Danube, forming a cordon reaching from the German Ocean to the Black Sea, kept back the tide of barbarians, but the volume of force accumulated behind the barrier, and at length it poured in an overwhelming and destructive tide over the fair and fertile provinces whose weak and effeminate people offered but a feeble resistance to the robust armies of the north. The Romans, under the instruction of Caesar and Tacitus, had a faint idea of the usages of the people inhabiting ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... bombardments began, prior to an intended attack on the sea-coast by the 4th Army, in conjunction with the 5th and 2nd Armies from Ypres. The enemy, before our artillery came in, greatly increased his artillery force, and daily destroyed any work done by night. These destructive shoots were afterwards found to be part of his barrage programme for the attack on the ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... screw the wrong way, so as to reverse the action of the engine, and to direct the train back to Kibworth. There, a mineral train was making its way towards Leicester, and as the line was on a sharp incline the result might have been a most destructive collision. It was, however, reduced to one of a comparatively mild description by the promptness and efficiency with which the brakes were applied to both the trains. Had not the mineral train been pulled up, and the passenger train lowered ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... purpose is it that that great Architect of the World, God, gave man an injunction against his eating of the Tree of Knowledge, as if knowledge were the bane of happiness; according to which also, St. Paul disallows it as puffing up and destructive; whence also St. Bernard seems in my opinion to follow when he interprets that mountain whereon Lucifer had fixed his habitation to be the mountain ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... gesture which summoned ruin athwart the walls, she finished expressing her abominable hopes. Among her vague plans, reared upon hate, was that of employing the wretched Alexandre as a destructive weapon, whose ravages would bring her some relief. Should she lose all other battles, that would assuredly be the final one. And she had attained to this pitch of madness through the boundless despair in which the loss of her only son had plunged ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... vain-glorious, and therefore wished to put the latter to shame or to kill him by engaging him in an attempt to perform something impossible. So he sent for him and said: "The sea is a useful thing, in so far as it is the original home of the fish which come up the river. But it is very destructive in stormy weather, when it beats wildly upon the beach. Do you now drink it dry, so that there may be rivers and dry land only. If you cannot do so, then forfeit all your possessions." The other said, greatly to the vain-glorious man's surprise: ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... that of the moon. Like all country people, whether in France or in England, he had the strongest faith in the influence of the moon upon the weather. He, moreover, maintained that moonbeams had a very corrosive and destructive action upon zinc. This fact, he said, had come under his observation scores of times in his business, which was that of roofing as ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... a motion for a writ of habeas corpus his case came on for trial in May 1655. Maynard and two other eminent lawyers who were his counsel pleaded so effectively that they were committed to the Tower for what was called language destructive to the Government. Cony himself then went on with the pleading, and so sturdily that Chief Justice Rolle was non-plussed, and had to confess as much to Cromwell. It was only by delay, and then by some private management of Cony, that a decision ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... might have been foreseen, necessarily created and stimulated a demoralizing system of fraud, unjust and destructive to the interests of the coffee planter, and prejudicial to the ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... low banks. Now a huge overflow was pouring out of the lake, filling the wide river bed with muddy water. The disciples looked with dismay at the uprooted bushes and broken limbs swirling past them. They could hardly believe that this destructive flood had been the narrow Jordan they had forded so ...
— Men Called Him Master • Elwyn Allen Smith
... thoughts; in short, that it has been but the dreams of such a brain put into action and invested with a semi-substance. That this brain is of immense power, that it can set matter into movement, that it is malignant and destructive, I believe; some material force must have killed my dog; the same force might, for aught I know, have sufficed to kill myself, had I been as subjugated by terror as the dog—had my intellect or my spirit given me no ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... the East—and, after making them air-tight, laid a bridge upon them out toward the single wall defending the harbor front. At the further end of this unique approach he placed a large gun; and so destructive was the bombardment thus opened that fire-ships were sent against the bridge and battery. But the Genoese of Galata betrayed the scheme, and it was baffled. The prisoners captured were hanged in view of the Greeks, and in retaliation Constantine exposed ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... constituted powers laid heavy contributions on merchandise, increasing many-fold the price at which it must ultimately be sold. The routes by sea had many of the same dangers, along with others peculiar to themselves. The storms of the Indian Ocean and its adjacent waters were destructive to vast numbers of the frail vessels of the East; piracy vied with storms in its destructiveness; and port dues were still higher than ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... the general unrest, and these new democratic ideas that were playing old Harry with the country! For in his opinion the country was in a bad way, partly owing to Industrialism, with its rotting effect upon physique; partly to this modern analytic Intellectualism, with its destructive and anarchic influence on morals. It was difficult to overestimate the mischief of those two factors; and in the approaching conference with his brothers, one of whom was the head of an industrial undertaking, and the other a writer, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... long controlled, must eventually break its bonds. Forbidden expression, and not spent by expression, it accumulates force. When the dam breaks, the flood is more destructive than the steady, normal current ever could have been. Having denied himself remorse, and having refused to meet the fact of his own cowardice, Anthony Dexter was now face to face with the ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... necessary in the development of this work as we proceed, to slightly modify our conception of the aetherial atom, but that modification will rather be of a constructive character, than a destructive one. There may also be certain objections to meet and explain away when we deal with the phenomena of light, heat, and electricity, and Gravitation, and the part which the aetherial atom plays in those phenomena, but these objections I hope to meet and ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... any environment at all, and consequently could have no recognition of our own existence. The confusion of thought involved even in the attempt to state such a condition shows it to be perfectly inconceivable, for the simple reason that it is self-contradictory and self-destructive. On this account it is clear that our own existence and that of the world around us necessarily implies the presence of a Universal Mind acting on certain fixed lines of its own which establish the basis for the working of all individual minds. ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... day, being less hungry and more keenly alive to the hated smell of his enemy, Baree ate less but was more destructive. McTaggart was not as skillful as Pierre Eustach in keeping the scent of his hands from the traps and "houses," and every now and then the smell of him was strong in Baree's nose. This wrought in Baree a swift and definite antagonism, a steadily increasing hatred ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... estimate of the book, save the implication that he himself had understood the original, though many Englishmen even were staggered by its obtuseness and failed to comprehend the subtlety of its allusion. It is criticism in the narrowest, most arrogant sense of the word, destructive instead of informing, blinding instead of illuminating. It is noteworthy that Sterne's name is nowhere mentioned in the review, nor is there a hint of Tristram's English popularity. The author of this unsigned ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... Products.—As the result of destructive metamorphosis or the wearing out of the body, there remain certain waste products which have to be expelled as soon as is possible. Their retention and accumulation would soon produce death. A part is expelled by the lungs as carbon-dioxide, or as it is ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... Ample funds, resolute men, and an unprotected enemy would have been positive factors of success. Money, they had in abundance. Madness and folly seem to have ruled the half-hearted conspirators of California. An ALABAMA or two on the Pacific would have been most destructive scourges of the sea. The last days of opportunity glide by. The prosaic records of the Federal Court in California tell of the evanescent fame of Harpending, Greathouse, Rubery, Mason, Kent, and the other would-be buccaneers. The "Golden ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... of the Gothic image. Farther: it has been said that if I had substituted the word "gable," it would have spoiled the line just as much as the word "pediment," though "gable" is a Gothic word. Of course it would; but why? Because "gable" is a term of vulgar domestic architecture, and therefore destructive of the tone of the heroic description; whereas "pediment" and "spire" are precisely correlative terms, being each the crowning feature in ecclesiastical edifices, and the comparison of their effects in the verse is therefore absolutely accurate, ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... was preceded by a group of chosen disciples, called by the Nahuatl name tlatoques, speakers or attorneys.[14-*] His successor, known as "the Greater Thunder," did not maintain this state, but nevertheless claimed to be able to control the seasons and to send or to mitigate destructive storms—claims which, sad to say, brought him to the stocks, but did not interfere with the regular payment of tribute to him by the villagers. He was also a medicine man and master of ceremonies in certain "scandalous orgies, where ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... are all but savages, as low in the scale of intellect as the New Zealander or the Tahitian, and beneath those races in ingenuity and skill as craftsmen. Wars have been waged amongst them, but they were neither sanguinary nor destructive, and the fact remains no less remarkable, that at the period of our occupying Dorjiling, friendship and unanimity existed amongst all these tribes; from the Tibetan at 14,000 feet, to the Mechi of the plains; under a sovereign whose temporal ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... indeed. What could it do for you but ruin you? You know it as well as I do; but you are selfish enough to wish to continue a romance which would be absolutely destructive to me, though for a while it might afford a pleasant relaxation to your graver studies. Harry, you can choose in the world. You have divinity, and law, and literature, and art. And if debarred from love now by the exigencies of labor, you will be as fit for love in ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... great importance occurred in this quarter, until August 3d, of the next year when a definitive treaty was concluded by General Wayne, with the hostile Indians north-west of the Ohio. By this treaty, the destructive war which had so long desolated that frontier, was ended in a manner acceptable to the United States. An accommodation was also brought about with the southern Indians, notwithstanding the intrigues of their Spanish neighbors. The regions of the Mississippi valley were ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... undulating motion, so that most of the inhabitants were enabled to escape into the streets, and a small number only perished of those who had assembled in the churches. It is a generally received opinion at Cumana, that the most destructive earthquakes are announced by very feeble oscillations, and by a hollow sound, which does not escape the observation of persons habituated to this kind of phenomenon. In those fatal moments the cries ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... capable of the crimes Corbario had committed in cold blood, for a settled purpose, should show so little power of following the purpose to its accomplishment after clearing the way to it by a murder; but every one who has had to do with criminals is aware that after any great exertion of destructive energy they are peculiarly subject to a long reaction of weakness which very often leads to their own destruction. If this were not a natural law, if criminals could exert continually the same energy and command the same superhuman cunning which ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... been the practice for some time past to shoot such hogs (pursuant to an order which their destructive qualities had rendered necessary in the lieutenant-governor's time) as were found trespassing in gardens or cultivated grounds, and the loss of the animals being greatly felt by the owners, as well as detrimental to the increase of that kind of stock, the governor directed, that instead of ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... possible it will seem to you. It is not, I believe, infidelity, but fanaticism, which England has to fear just now. The infidelity of England is one of mere doubt and denial, a scepticism; which is in itself weak and self-destructive. The infidelity of France in 1793 was strong enough, but just because it was no scepticism, but a faith; a positive creed concerning human reason, and the rights of man, which men could formulize, and believe in, and fight for, ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the hill, and the column wheeled into line, to meet it. Even on the crest of the hill, the grass was breast high, but it did not impede the view of the advancing lines of the Dervishes. Into these a heavy and destructive fire was at once poured. The enemy, however, pushed on, firing in return; but being somewhat out of breath, from the rapidity with which they had marched; and seeing nothing of the defenders of the hill, save their heads, they ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... wolf, the son of Loki the Evil Principle of Scandinavia, supposed to have personated the element of fire, destructive except when chained ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... consideration, provided we assign a time proportionately vast for their operation. On the other hand, the advocates of catastrophism, to make good their views, are compelled to invoke forces and actions, both destructive and restorative, of which we have, and can have, no direct knowledge. They endow the whirlwind and the earthquake, the central fire and the rain from heaven, with powers as mighty as ever imagined in fable, and they build ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... In a very destructive fire which occurred in Liverpool, Eng., in October, 1874, involving the loss of several "fire-proof" stores, repeated explosions of the vapor of turpentine rent ponderous brick arched vaults, and exposed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... seemed to shed he saw himself leading a column of armed boats to the attack of the Settlement. He could burn the whole place to the ground and drive every soul of them into the bush. He could! And there was a surprise, a shock, a vague horror at the thought of the destructive power of his will. He could give her ever so many lives. He had seen her yesterday, and it seemed to him he had been all his life waiting for her to make a sign. She was very still. He pondered a plan of attack. He saw smoke and flame—and next moment he saw himself alone ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... Isis! three times do I pronounce thy name. O Isis, who givest birth to serpents, crocodiles, and ostriches, may thy name be thrice praised. O Isis, who preservest grains of wheat from robber whirlwinds, and the bodies of our fathers from the destructive toil of time, Isis, take pity on my son and preserve him! Thrice be thy name repeated and here and there and beyond, today and forever, and for the ages of ages, as long as the temples of our gods shall gaze on themselves in ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... Parrish. "The concentrated essence of the destructive principle. It's a lever I fitted into a concealed groove in the Atom Smasher unknown to Tode. This lever has a universal joint and connects with a hidden chamber, and when pulled will catapult the annihilated components of a small quantity ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... trigger the recoil of the gun "kicked" the muzzle two feet in the air and the native ten feet into the bush. I bought a Tower rifle at the trade price, a pound, and brought it home. But although my friends have offered to back either end of the gun as being the more destructive, we have found no one with a sufficient sporting spirit to determine ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... that Li Keen would endeavour to gain an advantage by treachery if the chance presented itself, Ling determined to go forth to meet him, and without delay settle the entire disturbance in one well-chosen and fatally-destructive encounter. To this end, rather than disturb the placid mind of Mian, to whom the thought of the engagement would be weighted with many disquieting fears, he gave out that he was going upon an expedition ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... had done so he locked his door behind him, then loosed his hold on things material. He raged about the room like a wild animal, and vented his spite on every inanimate thing that lay within reach. His voice was strange in his own ears, as was the destructive frenzy that possessed him. In time he grew quieter, as the physical energy of this brutal impulse spent itself; but there came no surcease of his mental disquiet. As yet his mind grasped but dully the fact that she was to marry another, but gradually this thought in turn took possession of him. She ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... and penny papers did not exist. Murders were committed then, as now, but little was said, and less was known about them. Wrecks occurred then, as now, but few, except the persons immediately concerned, heard of them. "Destructive fires", "terrible accidents", and the familiar round of "appalling catastrophes" occurred then, as now, but their influence was limited, and their occurrence ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... change). The changes taking place in cells, whereby they become more complex and contain more force, or less complex and contain less force. The former is constructive metabolism, or anabolism; the latter, destructive metabolism, or katabolism. ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... example of the best Reformed Churches: for without this wee know no other proper and effectuall remedy against the present dangers of Religion there, or for purging the Church from scandals, which are destructive either to sound Doctrine, or to Godlinesse: And herein we are confident, the experience of all the Reformed Churches will bear witnesse with us. Nor do we doubt but in England also, time and experience will more and more commend, not ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... Attorney-General. During the trial of one of the Chartist leaders he swore that he had himself formed one of a band of conspirators in Manchester, who pledged themselves to burn the city, and who had prepared the most destructive combustibles to secure the success of their horrible plot. When asked to name the parties composing the meeting at which he said he had been present, he named me as one. I was horrified. I had never seen the man before in all my life, and the idea that I should be a party ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... few can taste it without injury to their souls. Hence, in order to guard against its fatal influence, not less preparation, nor less time, nor less efforts, are required than to suffer the privations imposed by adversity, for experience proves that the former is more destructive than the latter to ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... lie about the present wealth, as they generally lie about their past poverty. But when they say that they are going in for a "constructive social policy," they do not lie. They really are going in for a constructive social policy. And we must go in for an equally destructive social policy; and destroy, while it is still half-constructed, the ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... adjacent to those places. To Perestrelo he gave the island of Porto Santo, to colonize it. Perestrelo, however, did not make much of his captaincy; and spent his life in endeavouring to make head against the rabbits, which were as destructive as a plague of locusts, and which by their fecundity resisted all his efforts to exterminate them. This captain has a place in history, as being the father-in-law of Columbus, who, indeed, lived at Porto Santo for some time, and here, on ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... capitalism is founded have already been abandoned in part by their sponsors as unworkable. But at best they represent a standard of social morality that is essentially destructive of social well-being. ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... been given to Mr. Franklin, and that Marquis de Castries and Count de Vergennes, were trying to obtain a sum more adequate to our wants. This, however, the Minister of France has requested me not to mention, as it was as yet an uncertainty, and would perhaps give ill-grounded hopes, destructive of the internal efforts we ought to make. I am told that just before the departure of Mr. Dela Peyrouse, some dispatches were sent to Brest; but do not think they contain any thing relating to our operations, as Marquis de Castries writes me that the determination of the Council ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... excellent way.' (He always talks like that, in a sort of slow drawl.) 'We will leave your name exactly as you have carved it. But remember, young man, not another letter do you add to that name so long as you are a member of this school. A Grub you are,—a nasty little destructive Grub,—and a Grub you shall remain, so far as that desk is concerned, for all time. And if ever in future years you come down here as a distinguished Old Boy—say a K.C.B. or an Alderman,—remember to bring your numerous progeny'—oh, he's a sarcastic devil!—'to this room, and show them ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... this bird, later, to be as useful as he was beautiful. He it was who took upon himself the care of the potato-patch in the garden below, spending hours every day in clearing off the destructive potato-beetle, singing as he went to and from his labors, and, when the toils of the day were over, treating us to a delicious evening song from the top of a ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... With bright, but oft destructive, gleam, Alike o'er all his lightnings fly; Thy lambent glories only beam Around the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... underway the following morning, and brought to, with a spring on her cable, within less than a mile of the shore, when the larboard side was brought to bear nearly upon the site of the town. The object of the Commodore, in this movement, was not to open an indiscriminate or destructive fire upon the town and inhabitants of Quallah Battoo, but to show them the irresistible power of thirty-two pound shot, and to reduce the fort of Tuca de Lama, which could not be reached on account of the jungle ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... waiting? Let us, then, remind ourselves that excess and precipitation are more than wasteful,—they are directly destructive. The fire that blazes beyond bounds not warms the house, but burns it down, and only helps infinitesimally to warm the wide out-of-doors. Any live snail will out-travel a wrecked locomotive, and besides will leave no trail of slaughter on its track. Though despatch ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... front ranks, who had gradually crept up the side of the hill, an incessant fire was kept up; but the pieces could be worked with but little exposure, and it was harmless. Fortunately the shells buried themselves deeply before exploding, and were mainly destructive in their direct passage. Again the horseman cantered gaily to his former place of observation on the left; but our sharpshooters had the range, and his fine sorrel was turned to the work limping very discreditably. This trifling injury was all that we could ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... can tell what the precise effect will be," he qualified. "But in my opinion it is very likely to be destructive of dividends. Skipping the dry details, the new law, which is equitable enough on its face, can be made an engine of extortion in the hands of those who administer it. In fact, I happen to know that it was designed and carried through for ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... harmony in their life with one another, and on the other hand, that He would preserve us from all sorts of calamity to body and livelihood, as lightning, hail, fire, flood, poison, pestilence, cattle-plague, war and bloodshed, famine, destructive beasts, wicked men, etc. All this it is well to impress upon the simple, namely, that these things come from God, and must be prayed for ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... floods, as well as widespread and destructive flooding from monsoonal rains; severe ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... and a pack of hounds, he managed to make duck and drake of his wife's little fortune. This account has now been "simply riddled in its details" (as Mr. Saintsbury puts it) by successive biographers, the last destructive critic being the late Sir Leslie Stephen, who plausibly suggested that the "yellow liveries" (not the family liveries, be it noted!) were simply a confused recollection of the fantastic pranks of that other and earlier Beau Fielding (Steele's "Orlando ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... traders from St. Louis, with a train of thirty-eight wagons. One of their wagons was loaded with pitch-pine wood for cooking purposes. It was raining, and a regular plains storm was coming on. These storms are sometimes tremendously destructive. A train had been overtaken at this same place the year before, and nearly all of the animals perished. I counted one hundred and ninety skeletons of mules that had died in that storm. Many of the men also died. The storm took place ten days earlier in the season than did the one ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... as fires applied in several parts to a dry wood and crackling shrubs of laurel, or as with impetuous fall from the steep mountains, foaming torrents pour down to the ocean, each clearing a destructive course."—AEneid, xii. 521.] ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... have come from Fiji. He was also supposed to be present in a hollow stone. A temple was built for him there, and called "The house of the gods." It was carefully shut up all round; thinking that if it was not so, the gods would get out and in too easily, and be all the more destructive. Offerings were presented on war occasions; and he was also presented with gifts, and had prayers offered to him, before going to fish, before planting some fresh section of bush land, and also in times of sickness or special epidemic. It was firmly believed that if there was no prayer to ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... O'erwhelm me. First my husband, now my son— Both dead—both slaughter'd by the bloody hand Of Barbarossa! What infernal power Unchain'd thee from thy native depth of hell, To stalk the earth with thy destructive train, Murder and lust! To wake domestic peace, ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... which threatens our Company, and has despoiled us of a large fortune? What! we are not skillful enough to obtain this result without having recourse to awkward and dangerous violence? You do not know, then, the immense field that is thrown open by the mutually destructive power of human passions, skillfully combined, opposed, restrained, excited?—particularly," added Rodin, with a strange smile, "when, thanks to a powerful ally, these passions are sure to be redoubled in ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... this respect, and what floods of despair and of horror will overwhelm him! Instead of glowing approbation and serene hope, will he not hate and torture himself? Self-violence, or a phrenzy far more savage and destructive than this, may be expected to succeed. I beseech you, therefore, to relinquish this scheme. If you calmly reflect upon it, you will discover that your duty lies in carefully ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... night. The fish swimming about the lagoon, or sporting near the surface, strike against the net, and get their heads fast in the meshes. The net swinging loose, yields to their pressure, and entangles them the more as they struggle to extricate themselves from it. This is a most destructive mode of catching fish, and generally secures ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... reported of an enthusiastic archaeologian that he blessed the day of the Commonwealth because, he said, if Cromwell and all his destructive followers had never lived, there would have been no ruins in the country to repay the antiquary's researches. And the converse of this is true of a race of men who before long will be "improved" off the face of the earth, if ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... he must be given the proper things to throw—small, bright-colored worsted balls, bean-bags, and other harmless objects. If he is allowed to discover the pleasure there is in smashing glass and china, he will certainly be, for a time, a very destructive little person. When later he is able to creep throw his ball and creep after it—he will amuse himself for hours at a time, and so relieve those who have patiently attended him up to this time. In general we may lay down the rule, that ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... had taken place in the country under the name of the Pilgrimage of Grace was seized by the king as an excuse for suppressing many of the larger monasteries and confiscating their property. He had no such excuse for carrying out his destructive policy in the city. Nevertheless, under the immediate supervision of Cromwell, the work of suppression went on, and before the end of 1538 was well nigh complete. The surrender of the houses of the Black Friars, the Grey Friars ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... even when otherwise good, are apt to be noisier than European ones. The servants have little idea of silence over their work, and the early morning chambermaids crow to one another in a way that is very destructive of one's matutinal slumbers. Then somebody or other seems to crave ice-water at every hour of the day or night, and the tinkle, tinkle, tinkle of the ice-pitcher in the corridors becomes positively nauseous when one wants to go to sleep. The innumerable electric bells, always ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the houses are smaller, the palaces not so numerous, and inferior in splendour and magnitude. But here a larger space is covered with magnificent buildings, mosques, kiosks, columned halls, and arcades, with everything that was in the power of art to create; and no single object has escaped the destructive influence of time—all is falling into ruin. It is scarcely more than two hundred years since the town was in a flourishing state of wealth and magnificence, and it is hardly possible to divest the mind of the idea ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... the fifty-fourth, and applies it to Christ and His Kingdom. (Dial. ch. xiii.) Shortly after, he applies to the second Advent of Christ the prophecy of Daniel respecting the Son of Man, brought before the Ancient of Days. (Ch. xxxi.) Then he notices and refutes certain destructive interpretations of prophecies which have been derived from the unbelieving Jews by our modern rationalists, as that Psalm cx. is spoken of Hezekiah, and Psalm ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... though most effective as a military measure in broad results, is so distinctly commerce-destructive in essence, that those who censure the one form must logically proceed to denounce the other. This, as has been seen,[389] Napoleon did; alleging in his Berlin Decree, in 1806, that war cannot be extended to any private property whatever, and that the right of blockade is restricted ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... time in our history when unbelief and skepticism was more determined in its opposition to the Christian religion than at the present. There is an incessant attempt to instill into the minds of the young principles in opposition to, and destructive of Christianity. Many have split upon the rocks of infidelity, and stranded upon the quicksands of doubt and skepticism, in spite of the fact that Christianity presented them an example, which is the light and life of men—a character ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... one uncertain glance at the cows sauntering away from him, and then charged straight for the unknown foe. The works of man might, indeed, have some strange inherited attraction for him; but man, the individual, he hated with destructive hate. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... dismiss it as preposterous and impossible. And yet nothing is more certain in my opinion than that penal imprisonment for crime must cease, and if it be not abolished by statute, it will be by force. It must be abolished because, alarming or socially destructive though alternatives to it may appear, it is worse than any alternative, being not only dangerous, but wicked, and it breeds and multiplies the evils it pretends to heal or diminish. It is far more wicked and dangerous than it was a thousand or a hundred ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... was composed of all the Dutch boors and their servants, well armed and mounted; these would make an incursion into the Caffre territory, and because a few head of cattle had been stolen by parties unknown, they would pour down upon the Caffres, who had but their assaguays to oppose to destructive fire-arms, set the kraals or villages in flames, murder indiscriminately man, woman, and child, and carry off, by way of indemnification for some trifling loss, perhaps some twenty thousand head of ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... have vanished from the earth; while the sad remnant, few and feeble, faint and weary, "are fast traveling to the shades of their fathers, toward the setting sun."[200] Year by year they wither away; to them the close breath of civilized man is more destructive than the deadliest blight.[202] The arts and appliances which the accumulated ingenuity of ages has provided to aid the labor and enhance the enjoyments of others, have been but a curse to these children of the wilderness. That blessed light which shines to the miserable ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... the arbitrary character, which is considered as destructive of all their other claims to ordinary vegetable rank, there is no unison whatever, for Rafflesiaceae have ordinary ovula, while Sarcocoidalis ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... irrevocable, to voice and to prolong the deep human interest attaching to death encountered at the call of duty; that is the poet's task, and brilliantly it has been discharged. Its other side, the paean of sorrow for a self- destructive exploit, the dirge on lives wantonly thrown away, the deep blame attaching to the untractableness which sent them to their doom, was the task of the historian, and that too has ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... and the sea began to roughen. The men discharging the cargo hastened their work, and it was evident that the last of the lighter barges would soon be setting out for the shore. Ned was staring at them and recalling all the yarns he had heard concerning the destructive power of a gulf "norther," when Captain Kemp came walking slowly toward him, with a face which appeared to express no sort of unusual concern for anything in ...
— Ahead of the Army • W. O. Stoddard
... nothing but a crimson glare on the Campagna, seen for miles and miles around, and afterwards described to the world by the world's press as the "Burning Down of a Trappist Monastery" in which no lives had been lost save those of one Fra Ambrosio, long insane, who was supposed to have kindled the destructive blaze in a fit of mania,—and of a stranger, sick of malarial fever, whom the monks had ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... "young Ireland" it was aimed at—to demolish a whole litter of those little gentlemen with curly tails who assist, in conjunction with the "praties," in "paying the rint" of the trusting natives of the Emerald Isle; consequently, its destructive powers were beyond question, and it might really, she thought, be of the utmost utility to me on the western prairies, where, she believed, I was going ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... say you are conservative—eminently conservative—while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by "our fathers who framed the Government under which ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... ever will be while men have passions and women desires. To love and enjoy, to desire and to satisfy one's desires, such is the circle in which we move, and whence we can never be turned. When restrictions are placed upon the passions as in Turkey, they still attain their ends, but by methods destructive to morality. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... to the hills lay a little to the west of north; and at many places on their journey they not only heard of the sloth bear, but were witnesses of the ravages which this destructive creature had committed on ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... destructive than constructive in his philosophy as expressed in his plays; and he criticizes so many of the institutions held sacred by society that people have refused to accept him seriously, even when he has written expository prefaces to his dramas. In Arms and the Man, he satirizes the romantic ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... at all surprising that they upon whom the revolutionary deluge came should have looked with indiscriminating horror and affright on all the influences which in their view had united first to gather up, and then to release the destructive flood. The eighteenth century to men like De Maistre seemed an infamous parenthesis, mysteriously interposed between the glorious age of Bossuet and Fenelon, and that yet brighter era for faith and the Church which was still to come in the good time of Divine Providence. The philosophy ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... infrequent but seldom very destructive earthquakes; the occasional cloud-bursts and tornadoes, sudden and violent as a gunpowder-explosion; and, finally, the astounding contrast between the fertile regions and the desert. There are places where you can stand with one foot planted in everlasting ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... how so impotent and grovelling an insect as I (these were his expressions), could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation, which I had painted, as the common effects of those destructive machines, whereof, he said, some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver. As for himself, he protested, that although few things delighted him so much as new discoveries in art or ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... rage, took up his mace in that battle, and aimed it at Shalya for the latter's destruction. Resembling the very bludgeon of Yama, impending (upon the head of the foe) like kala-ratri (Death Night), exceedingly destructive of the lives of elephants and steeds and human beings, twined round with cloth of gold, looking like a blazing meteor, equipped with a sling, fierce as a she-snake, hard as thunder, and made wholly of iron, smeared with sandal-paste ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... well as the physical situation. The policy of silence and concealment concerning evils which are now known to be preventable is no longer justifiable. The thinking public can now learn what these evils are, how destructive they are, and by what measures they may be cured or prevented. With this knowledge goes the responsibility and duty of applying it in defense of ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... went. There were no friends to go, for she had insisted on inviting none—for fear of the lynx eyes and the destructive influence upon her plans of Mr Thornycroft and Jim. She gained the one end she had schemed for throughout—to get past the risks of the public marriage and back to her struggle in obscurity, unmolested, unpitied, unshamed. The Urquharts wrote, and ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... call the Western, civilised element in his character, showed itself in his lifelong striving to get into touch with contemporary thought, to acquire a full measure of modern culture, and to curb his riotous, lawless impulse towards mere sound and fury. It is this unique fusion of apparently mutually destructive elements and instincts that gives to Tschaikowsky's music much of its novelty and piquancy. But, apart from this uncommon fusion, it must be remembered that his was an original mind—original not only in colour but in its very structure. Had he been pure Slav, or pure Latin, his music might ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... had no definitive result the new invaders did not quite overthrow Hindu rule till the end of the tenth century. During this period the native un-Aryan tribes, with their Hinduizing effect, were more destructive as regards the maintenance of the old Brahmanic ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... troubled that our guns did not reply. Could it be possible that the enemy's fire was so destructive that our forces were paralyzed? I was learning to distinguish between the measured cadences of the enemy's firing. After a hurtling shower flew over, I sprung out, took a survey, and was so filled with exultation and confidence, that I crept back again with hope renewed. Our ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... to the judgments which, ever since the beginning of the world, have fallen upon hardened sinners; for example, floods, tempests, thunder and lightning in the heavens above, and destructive earthquakes from ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... kindness to all creatures, as thou hast reason. Belonging to the animal species, we are ignorant of virtue. But being endued with reason, men show kindness towards creatures. Why do then reasonable persons like thee commit themselves to acts contaminating alike body, speech, and heart, and destructive of virtue? Thou knowest not what virtue is, neither hast thou taken council of the wise. And therefore it is that from ignorance, and childishness thou destroyest the lower animals. Say, who art thou, and what for hast thou come ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... war. But this sacrifice of American youth did not make the world safe for anything. It helped make the world a breeding place for communism, fascism, naziism, and other varieties of socialism; and it planted the seeds for a second world war more destructive than ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... millions of tiny feeding rootlets from the trees of the forest. The closely interwoven fibre of these rootlets, everywhere forms a strong web for the carpet, which firmly holds in place the soft, porous, underlying soil, safely protecting it from the destructive erosion which, especially on the steeper slopes, swiftly follows the dashing violence of heavy rain storms. Gradually this leafy carpet grows in strength and thickness; like some great sponge it sucks up and retains the waters of the snows of winter, with those of ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... command was again given; and a broadside, as destructive, was poured into the second boat. The damage done was somewhat less, and her bow reached the side of the ship. A dozen Malays sprang on board, as their boat sank under their feet; but the sailors were ready and, with musket, pistol, and ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... gaming was but a new shock to Cecilia, who scrupled not to represent to him the uncertainty of so hazardous a reliance, and the inevitable evils of so destructive a practice. ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... methods which had belonged to earlier periods, but neither the methods nor the periods, we can safely say, will live again. Neither our own nor future generations will escape the influence of modern technology. It will play its part. It may be a part which will lead away from some of the destructive influences which developed in the era of craftsmanship and which dominate the present. But a society too enfeebled to use its own experience will not have the power to use the experience of another people or of another time. It is beside ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... this narrow cleft, but it had left proof of inundations that had leapt over the summit of the obstruction, when the rush of water had been too great for the area of the contracted passage. Altogether, the two rivers Sahaam and Angrab are interesting examples of the destructive effect of water, that has during the course of ages cut through, and hollowed out in the solid rock, a succession of the most horrible precipices and caverns, in which the maddened torrents, rushing from the lofty chain of mountains, boil along until they meet the Atbara, ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... public confession, the rules of evidence, the degrees of guilt, and the measure of punishment. It was impossible to execute this spiritual censure, if the Christian pontiff, who punished the obscure sins of the multitude, respected the conspicuous vices and destructive crimes of the magistrate: but it was impossible to arraign the conduct of the magistrate, without, controlling the administration of civil government. Some considerations of religion, or loyalty, or fear, protected the sacred ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Unemployment reached a height which has never since been touched. Messrs. Hyndman, Champion, Burns, and Williams were actually tried for sedition, but happily acquitted; and public opinion was justified in regarding Socialism rather as destructive and disorderly than as constructive, and, as is now often said, even too favourable to repressive legislation. In these commotions the Society as a whole took no part, and its public activities were limited to a meeting ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... it is the lesson of history, that real wrongs, unredressed, grow into preposterous demands. Men are much like nature in action; a little disturbance of atmospheric equilibrium becomes a cyclone, a slight break in the levee a crevasse with immense destructive power. ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... bud is a kind of seed planted in the branch instead of in the soil. It bursts and grows like a germ. In the absence of seeds and fruit, many birds and animals feed upon buds. The pine grosbeaks from the north are the most destructive budders that come among us. The snow beneath the maples they frequent is often covered with bud scales. The ruffed grouse sometimes buds in an orchard near the woods, and thus takes the farmer's apple ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... the conservative stuff, Until all the bright metal is cover'd enough, To repel a destructive so active; For in Etching, as well as in Morals, pray note That a little raw spot, or a hole in a coat, Your ascetics find ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... time necessary for desiccation as being very long, since the zoologist can occupy himself with other subjects while the specimens are drying. Let us add that the process renders the preservation indefinite, and that destructive insects are not to be feared. Some vertebrates, such as monkeys, that I preserved in the flesh ten years ago, by a nearly identical method, are still ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... angles of the room; he had been caught, was twisting, in a great storm; a storm with thunder and cruel flashes of lightning; a storm hammering and hammering at him.... Must not lose his hold on—on life! He must stay fast against everything! It wasn't his hand gripping the destructive force towering above him, but a strange quality within him, at once within him and aside, burning in his heart and ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... you've been so noble, that I repent the fatal Difference that makes us meet in Arms. Yet though I'm young, I'm sensible of Injuries; and oft have heard my Grandsire say, That we were Monarchs once of all this spacious World, till you, an unknown People, landing here, distress'd and ruin'd by destructive Storms, abusing all our charitable Hospitality, usurp'd our Right, and made ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn |
