"Heinousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Christian Scientist had been arrested in Iowa for this offence. In the words of the indictment, "She had practised a cure on one Mrs. George B. Freeman." After the physicians had pronounced the case hopeless, and had given her up, this criminal woman had actually dared to "cure" her. The heinousness of the offence was admitted. It was not, in the ordinary sense, malpractice; no medicine had been given, no pain was inflicted, no harm done. But she had been presumptuous enough to "cure," and not after the "regular," the orthodox way. Now the Rev. Francis Bellamy ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... and sighed heavily. "But after what befell last night, when... You know what is in my mind. I was distraught then, mad with fear for this poor father of mine, so that I could not even consider his sin in its full heinousness, nor see how righteous was your intent to inform against him. Yet I am thankful that it was not by your deletion that he was taken. The thought of that is to-day my ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... be that I am partly to blame for that in having passed too lightly over such exhibitions of them as have come under my notice: in short, that perhaps if I had been more justly severe with your faults you would have been more thoroughly convinced of their heinousness and striven harder and with greater success ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... one individual, was prevented being carried into effect; and many were consequently saved from horrors, equalling, if not transcending in enormity, the outrages of the savages themselves. Scenes of licentiousness and fury, followed upon the discovery of the plot.—Exasperated at its heinousness, and under the influence of resentful feelings, the whigs retaliated upon the tories, some of the evils which these had conspired to inflict upon them. In the then infuriated state of their minds, and the little restraint at that time imposed on the passions by the operation of the laws, it is really ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... instinct which belongs to women but only occasionally comes to some men, saw all this in a flash without any pondering and turning over and reflecting and comparing, and he said to himself under his breath, not eloquently, but well, as there came home to him the heinousness of that abhorrant social system dependent upon the religious system of the Prophet of Mecca, "Damn the emir and Mohammed and the whole damned ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... tender eyes, that Granville hardly knew what to make of his evident confidence. Surely a man couldn't be mad who could speak like that; and yet, whenever he alluded in any way to his return to England, it was always as though he ignored the gravity and heinousness of the charge brought against him. It was as though murder was an accident, for which one was hardly responsible. Granville couldn't make him out at all; the fellow was an enigma to him. There was so much that was good in him; and yet, there must be so much that was bad as well. He ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... any circumstances, but requested an interview with her father, in order to make him acquainted with the abominable principles, by the inculcation of which, as a rule of life and conduct, he had attempted to corrupt her. Her father having heard this portion of her complaint, diminished in its heinousness as it necessarily was by her natural modesty, appeared very angry, and swore roundly at the young scapegrace, as he ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... reasonings, the metaphysical labyrinth of defence and motive, which he wrought around his act, it was, in justice to him, necessary to give at length, in order to throw a clearer light on his character—and lighten, perhaps, in some measure the heinousness of his crime. No moral can be more impressive than that which teaches how man can entangle himself in his own sophisms—that moral is better, viewed aright, than volumes of homilies. But here I must pause for one moment, to bid the reader ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... French Ruler could not have fashioned it more for his own purpose if he had traced it with his own hand. We have then trampled upon a fundamental principle of justice, and countenanced a prime maxim of iniquity; thus adding, in an unexampled degree, the foolishness of impolicy to the heinousness of guilt. A conduct thus grossly unjust and impolitic, without having the hatred which it inspires neutralised by the contempt, is made contemptible by utterly wanting that colour of right which authority and power, put forth in defence of our Allies—in asserting their just claims and avenging ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... namely, that hypocrites think that external and civil works satisfy the Law of God and that sacrifices and observances justify before God ex opere operato. But then this veil is removed from us, i.e., we are freed from this error, when God shows to our hearts our uncleanness and the heinousness of sin. Then, for the first time, we see that we are far from fulfilling the Law. Then we learn to know how flesh, in security and indifference, does not fear God, and is not fully certain that we are regarded by God, but imagines that men are born and die by chance. Then we experience that ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... the great mission upon which she had entered, she commenced a lecturing tour, speaking to the people of her "experiences among the Freedmen." To show them as they were, to give a truthful portrayal of Slavery, its barbarity and heinousness, its demoralization of master and man, its incompatibility with all things beautiful or good, its defiance of God and his truth; and to show the intensely human character of the slave, who, through this fearful ordeal of two hundred years, had preserved so much goodness, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... of man. The second was the rending of the Temple veil, a type of the "new and living way" opened into the presence of God for all believers. Thus these two signs correspond to the human and the divine aspects of this atoning death, and indicate the heinousness of sin and the purpose ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... these dismal forebodings, she at length shook the ropes leading from her own perch to Samoa's; adopting this method of arousing his attention to the heinousness of what was in all probability going on in the cabin, a prelude most probably to the invasion of her own end of the vessel. Had she dared raise her voice, no doubt she would have suggested the expediency of shooting us so soon as ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... such a line of defense: taking all this into consideration, he, Mr. Smoothbore, would confidently ask the jury whether the prisoner at the bar was to be credited with merely a romantic stratagem, or with a crime the heinousness of which was only exceeded by the means by which he had striven to exculpate himself from it, and to evade the ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... and burst out crying; but Jock stepped forth and, with that impish look of fearlessness, said, "I did it, Uncle Robert! I wanted to make Aunt Ellen laugh. Did she laugh, mother?" he asked in so comical and innocent a manner that, in spite of her full consciousness of the heinousness of the offence, and its general unluckiness, Mother Carey was almost choked. This probably added to the gravity with which the other lady decreed with Juno-like severity, "Robin and John must be flogged. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... very time when we seem to be emerging from all danger? There must be some method in his madness. Can it be that he contemplates suicide? I remember that upon one occasion he spoke in a deeply reverent manner of the heinousness of the crime of self-destruction. I shall keep my eye upon him, however, and though I cannot obtrude upon the privacy of his cabin, I shall at least make a point of remaining on deck as long ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hallucination as the midnight visits of her reproachful spirit. Indeed, we are hardly condoning evil, in suggesting that the whole story from its beginning is marked with exaggeration, and that we who have our own lives to lead shall find little help in criticising at further length the exact heinousness of the ignoble falsehood of a boy who happened to grow up into ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Lordship, by the slightest of gestures, seemed to intimate that Mr. Rupert was only wasting time; and the end of it was that Mr. Jack Hanbury, after having heard a little more lecturing on the heinousness of his conduct, found himself under the charge of the tipstaff of the Court, with Holloway prison as his destination. It was not to be considered as a ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... seem that the heinousness of the misdemeanour was increased because of the presence of strangers. The probable punishment of the female would be the ducking-stool, which, to the terror of all beholders, occupied a prominent position about the centre of the ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... fallen into our hands; illustrating, to be sure, numberless dark points, or "damned spots" of human history; "much of atrocious guilt, of oppression, cruelty, fraud, treachery, baseness, and ingratitude;" yet the very heinousness of these characteristics carries on and keeps up the intense ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... classed with evils almost unavoidable. Now if the buying of adoptive children and of servant girls is to be uniformly abolished, it is to be feared that henceforth the practice of infanticide will extremely increase beyond what it ever was. The heinousness of the violation of the great Creator's benevolence, which constitutes infanticide, is beyond comparison with the indulgence granted to the system of buying and selling children ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... Scotland, conjuring, practising witchcraft, removing landmarks, desertion from the army, counterfeiting or mutilating coins, cattle-lifting, house-breaking, picking of pockets. All these were punished by hanging, but crimes of special heinousness, such as poisoning, were visited with burning or boiling to death. The numerous laws against treason and heresy have already been described. Lesser punishments included flogging, pillory, branding, the stocks, clipping ears, piercing tongues, and ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... plan. Chance favored me, and I found Eileen. It is useless for me to go into detail as to what happened after that, except to say this—that Eileen knew nothing of the proposed attack, that she was ignorant of the heinousness of the plot against you, and that she was almost as much a tool of ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... strength. But I assure you that in addition to this experience there will come, it may be early, it may be late, some moment in the life when there is discovered to the individual spirit making that ascent a sense of the awful heinousness of sin; and tho we may not have such a unique experience of evil as the Apostle Paul had, and become so conscious of it as to feel, as it were, that it is a dead body that we have to carry about with us as we go through life, interfering with the very motions of our spirit; yet we ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... the smoke ascending from the bottomless pit, but no denunciation could effectually bar it out, and tobacco and starch in the end asserted their right to existence and came into constant use. A miraculous amount of energy had been expended upon the heinousness of their use, and the very fury of protest brought a reaction equally strong. Radical even in her conservatism, New England sought to bind in one, two hopelessly incompatible conditions: intellectual freedom and spiritual slavery. Absolute ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... Friend. We may bid him farewell forever sooner than complain, for our complaint is too well grounded to be uttered. There is not so good an understanding between any two, but the exposure by the one of a serious fault in the other will produce a misunderstanding in proportion to its heinousness. The constitutional differences which always exist, and are obstacles to a perfect Friendship, are forever a forbidden theme to the lips of Friends. They advise by their whole behavior. Nothing can reconcile them but love. They are fatally late ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... with the heinousness of unbelief be assured that the Spirit is at work, for the worst sin in all this world is not impurity but rather that we should not believe on Jesus Christ. To reject him is to sneer at God, to trample the blood of his Son under foot, to count his sacrifice a common thing and ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... convenient Southern city. The vitality of the Rebellion existed not in cities, towns, or capitals, but in that which could die only by annihilation,—Human Slavery. That was and is the "original sin" of the Rebellion,—the total depravity and innate heinousness, to use theological terminology, without which there could not have been treason, secession, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... the sunlight that entered through the casement. Then he added: "And you will have the idea still less when you will have been able to prove 'de visu' what those anonymous letters were worth. Twelve letters in fifteen days, and cuttings from how many papers? And they claim that we invent heinousness in our books! If you like, we will search together for the person who can have elaborated that little piece of villany. It must be a Judas, a Rodin, an Iago—or Iaga. But this is not the moment to waste ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... secret-service work; and I soon found that he was generally right. Great crimes are the work of great criminals, and great criminals are very few. And by "great crimes" I mean, not crimes that loom large in the public view because of their moral heinousness, but crimes that are the work of skilled and resourceful criminals. The problem in such cases is not to find the offender in a population of many millions, but to pick him out from among a few definitely known "specialists" in the particular sort of ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... Others that the penalty should be accurately proportioned to the immorality of the offence, by whatever standard that immorality be measured. Others, again, that punishment should be limited to the minimum necessary to deter from crime, quite irrespectively of the heinousness of the particular crime punished. Of the first three of these opinions, Mr. Mill observes that 'they are all extremely plausible, and that so long as the question is argued as one of justice simply, without going down to the principles that lie under justice, and ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... misplaced as unjust, although the Squire humanely pressed his intercession; the incorrigible pilferer was therefore handed over to the custody of one of the turnkeys, until the Governor might award a punishment suitable to the heinousness of the offence. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... we have heard that, before his entry into the fatal hall, Taki Zenzaburo called round him all those of his own clan who were present, many of whom had carried out his order to fire, and, addressing them in a short speech, acknowledged the heinousness of his crime and the justice of his sentence, and warned them solemnly to avoid any repetition of attacks upon foreigners. They were also addressed by the officers of the Mikado, who urged them to bear no ill-will against us on account of the fate ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... parents in such cases know what to wish for! How happy for them, and for me, had I then been denied to their prayers! But now I am eased of that care. All those dear relations are living still—but not one of them (such as they think, has been the heinousness of my error!) but, far from being grieved, would rejoice to hear of ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... gravity. Contrast the human views of its enormity, as shown by men's playing with it, calling it by half-jocose names and the like, with God's thought of its heinousness. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... themselves in resisting the king, but addressed themselves to the people, pointed out the heinousness of their sins, and threatened them with the wrath of Jahveh if they persisted in their unfaithfulness: they came to be spiritual advisers rather than political partisans, and orators rather than men of action like their predecessors. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... The words to her sense had been so all-important, had meant so much, had seemed to be so final, that they hardly wanted further corroboration. Then, indeed, had come the great fault,—the fault which she had doubted whether she could ever pardon; and she, because of the heinousness of that offence, had been unable to answer the question that had been asked. But the offence, such as it was, had not lightened the solemnity of her assurance, as far as love went, that Ralph ought to be her own after the speaking ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... words the crowd were reminded more forcibly, than in their excitement and curiosity they had yet been, of the heinousness of the sacrilege. ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... even the decent moral world, in general. It realizes its own offences, venial as they appear to others, as sins against infinite love—a love unto death—and in the light of the sacrifice on Calvary, recognizes the heinousness of its guilt, and while it doubts not, marvels that it can be pardoned. The sinfulness of sin—more especially their own sin—is the intensest of all possible realities to them. No language is too strong to describe it. We may not unreasonably ask whether this estimate, however exaggerated it may ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... Mr. La Cloche's discourse may be in great measure anticipated. Setting forth the heinousness of rebellion and regicide, he dwelt upon the virtues of the Royal Martyr, his courage, his patience, his devotion to the Church. As was but natural in the circumstances, there followed an application to local politics. They were there, ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... an officer," obstructing the execution of the "process" whereby the American Provinces were to be made the slave colonies of a metropolitan despotism. The usual charge of doing all this by "force and arms," was of course thrown in. The publication of the advertisement was declared a "crime of such heinousness and of such a size as fairly called for the highest resentment which any court of justice has thought proper to use with respect to crimes of this denomination;" "a libel such that it is impossible by any artifice to aggravate it;" "It will be totally impossible for the ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... relief as he felt when the cool, fresh air struck his face. He had been saved from overt criminality. God had not permitted him to thus debase himself. Now that his excitement was gone, he saw the heinousness of the sin he had been about to commit in all ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... and so mangled, that he could not be known; upon which, it was to be spread abroad, that the puritans had blown up the parliament-house; and the better to make the world believe it, there was Mr. Pickering, with his choice horse ready to escape. But that stirred up some, who seeing the heinousness of the fact, and him ready to escape, in detestation of so horrible a deed, fell upon him, and hewed him to pieces; and to make it more clear, there was his horse, known to be of special speed and swiftness, ready to carry him away; and upon this rumour, a massacre ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott |
