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Savagery   Listen
noun
Savagery  n.  
1.
The state of being savage; savageness; savagism. "A like work of primeval savagery."
2.
An act of cruelty; barbarity. "The wildest savagery, the vilest stroke, That ever wall-eyed wrath or staring rage Presented to the tears of soft remorse."
3.
Wild growth, as of plants.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Savagery" Quotes from Famous Books



... the origin and ultimate relations of the idea of holiness. On the other hand, the fact that the Semites—or at least the northern Semites—distinguish between the holy and the unclean, marks a real advance above savagery. All taboos are inspired by awe of the supernatural, but there is a great moral difference between precautions against the invasion of mysterious hostile powers and precautions founded on respect for the prerogative of a friendly god. The former belong ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... quaint felicity of unexpected humor, in his expositions a vividness of presentment, in his arguments a sledge-hammer force, all of which are not to be found together anywhere else, and none of which is to be found anywhere in quite the same form. And despite the savagery, both of his indignation and his laughter, there is no greater master of tenderness. Wherever he is at home, and he seldom wanders far from it, the weapon of Carlyle is like none other,—it is the very sword of ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... brief and luckless trial of a notary's office I was apprenticed to an engraver, a petty tyrant, whose injustice taught me to lie and to steal. Restless, dissatisfied, and in perpetual terror of my master's savagery, I here reached my sixteenth year. But one day, finding the city gates closed on my return from a country excursion, I determined, rather than face the inevitable thrashing, to seek my fortune in the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... of human sacrifice among the Aztecs, with its accompanying traces of cannibalism, was due to the savagery of a long previous condition of their Indian race; just as in the Greek drama, when that ancient people had attained a high level of culture and refinement, the sacrifice of a human life, sometimes a princess or other distinguished ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson

... back till I get him—not if I stay here a week," he declared, with jocular savagery. "Took half my leader and my pet fly—I got him with a peacock-bodied gray hackle that I revised to suit my own notions—and, by the great immortal Jehosaphat, he looked like a whale when he jumped up clear of the riffle, ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... hoarse, gasping shout to the police to hurry—and then Mittel reeled back, measuring his length upon the wharf from a blow with a boat hook full across the face, driven with a sudden, untamed savagery that seemed for the moment to ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... roots. What landmarks remain are the blackened walls of houses, cracked and crashed in by falling roofs. The entire place must have been given over to explosion and incendiarism before the Huns departed. One stands in awe of such completeness of savagery; one begins to understand what is meant by the term "frightfulness." As far as eye can reach there is nothing to be seen but decayed fangs, protruding from a swamp of filth, covered with a green slime where ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson

... and his exploit in dispatching lions is briefly told. At this point—the end of column 3 (on the obverse), i.e., line 117, and the beginning of column 4 (on the reverse), i.e., line 131—a gap of 13 lines—the tablet is obscure, but apparently the story of Enkidu's gradual transformation from savagery to civilized life is continued, with stress upon his introduction to domestic ways with the wife chosen or decreed for him, and with work as part of his fate. All this has no connection with Gilgamesh, and it is evident that the tale of Enkidu was originally an independent tale ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous

... Territory of New Mexico comes to be written, the name of Colonel Albert J. Fountain deserves and should have first place in it. Throughout the formative epoch of her evolution from semi-savagery to civilization, an epoch spanning the years from 1866 to 1896, Colonel Fountain was far and away her most distinguished and most useful citizen. As soldier, scholar, dramatist, lawyer, prosecutor, Indian fighter, and desperado-hunter, his was ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson

... him any romance, any poetry in the life around her; she looked to Italy for that. His "Song of the West," which only once, incoherent and fierce, he had tried to explain to her, its swift, tumultous life, its truth, its nobility and savagery, its heroism and ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... writs have been executed. Boys, you are dismissed." It will be doing Senator David R. Atchison, Ex-Vice-President of the United States, a kindness to conclude simply that he was drunk, otherwise he displayed utter savagery and barbarism. He inculcated gallantry to ladies, but said: "If you find any woman with arms in her hands, tread her under foot as you would a snake." The Caucassian white woman of Lawrence had no more rights of self-protection than the slaves of a South Carolina rice plantation—they ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler

... such savagery, so evidently the result of defective education, two opposite and extreme parties in the State, the anti-church Mialls and the pro-church Anthony Denisons, combine to oppose the multiplication of education that teaches decency ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney

... presentation rests. These are, first, that life tends to move along certain lines that constitute the law of human nature. Just as the infant tends first to wriggle, then creep, then walk, then run and dance, so human nature tends to move upward from savagery through primitive settled life to the complex forms of larger settled units. In this progress, material or economic forces play a large part; but ideas, originally born out of circumstances, but sometimes borrowed from other people, sometimes degenerate remnants of past utilities, also play a ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... Bill Conway unburdened himself of a slightly ribald little chanson entitled: "What Makes the Wild Cat Wild?" In the constant repetition of this query it appeared that the old Californian sought the answer to a riddle not even remotely connected with the mystifying savagery of non-domestic felines. ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... settlement was at Fort Apache, some thirty miles from my camp. These people, having such an evil reputation, are worthy of a few more notes. Such tales of cruelty and savagery were told of them as to be almost incredible. They were the terror of Arizona and New Mexico, yet they were not entirely to blame. Government ill-treatment of Cochise, the great chief of the Chiricaua Apaches, had set the whole tribe on the war-path for ten years. A military company, ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson

... see me occasionally. His dress was a curious mixture of civilization and savagery. He wore the chapeau and dress-coat of a General of the American Army, with a large epaulette on one shoulder. He was very proud of the coat, because General Crook had given it to him. His shirt, leggings and moccasins were of buckskin, and the long braids of his coal-black hair, tied ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes

... hospitable roof Of thine, thou good old loyalist, Baby! Thy mansion is a shrine, whereto shall come On pilgrimages, in the distant days, The strong and generous youths of Canada, And, musing there in rich imaginings, Restore the balance and the beaver-pack To the wide hall; see forms of savagery, Vanished for ages, and the stately shades Of great Tecumseh and high-hearted Brock. So shall they profit, drinking of the past, And, drinking loyally, enlarge the faith Which love of country breeds in noble minds. But now to sleep—good night unto ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair

... to pass over without the notice that it undoubtedly deserves Dr. Pennell's very impressive accounts of his intercourse, as medical missionary, with the strange folk whom he was trying to reclaim from savagery, of the risks which he faced with cool courage and self-command in his travels among them, and of his quaint theological disputations with arrogant Mullahs, whose invincible ignorance easily convinced a congenial audience of their argumentative superiority. His skill in surgery naturally invested ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... May the 24th, Rev. Thomas Dixon, one of the Baptist clergymen of New York City, said: The heresy trial is a record of barbarism, a relic of savagery. It belongs to the crudeness, and ignorance, and superstition of barbaric times. It ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... glimmering on great plains. Does not such darkness breathe through it, such melancholy, such haunting of elusive airs? There are flashes too of light, of song, the playing of shepherd's pipes, the swoop of horsemen and sudden outcries of savagery. But the note to which it all comes back is the monotone of a primitive life, like the day-long beat of camel bells. And more than all, it is the mood of Asia, so rarely penetrated, which is neither lightness ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... passion easily swings from adoration to hate, as history has shown over and over again. If a strong man fails in a conflict of forces in a time of great public excitement, he is rarely allowed to sink quietly into oblivion; the mob turns upon him with the savagery of a wild beast. Napoleon was one day driving through the streets of Paris amid cheering crowds. One of his suite remarked to him that it must be gratifying to see how his subjects loved him. "Bah!" said the Emperor, "The same rabble would ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell

... defamed! Demos was roused, was tired of listening to mere articulate speech; it was time for a good wild-beast roar, for a taste of bloodshed. Scarcely a face in all the mob but distorted itself to express as much savagery as can be got out of the human countenance. Mutimer, seeing what had come, sprang down from the cart. He was at once carried yards away in an irresistible rush. Impossible for him and his friends to endeavour to hold their ground: they were too vastly outnumbered; ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... there was so great a crush of spectators that a poor woman fell and had her leg broken. The Prince gave her ten guineas. That was a cricketer. And yet, within eight years, Kennington was back among the vilest barbarities of the Middle Ages. The 'Forty-five was to set a mark of ferocious savagery in Kennington annals hardly surpassed by Tyburn. The Earl of Kennington (that, with the nickname of 'Butcher,' was one of the titles of the Duke of Cumberland) had sent to gaol in Southwark nine officers whom he had taken prisoner at Carlisle, fighting for Charles Edward Stuart. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... disregard the rules of society are not exhibiting a superior intelligence, are not promoting freedom and independence, are not following the path of civilization, but are displaying the traits of ignorance, of servitude, of savagery, and treading the way that leads back ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... say that I endorse this program, I'm only telling you, in half-a-dozen words, what it really is. It is sure, though, that when the black man rules, he relapses into savagery; when he obeys a white ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... the industrial scale, the harder the conditions. The finer, the more delicate, the more skilled the trade, the higher is it lifted above the struggle. There is less pressure, less sordidness, less savagery. There are fewer glass-blowers proportionate to the needs of the glass-blowing industry than there are ditch-diggers proportionate to the needs of the ditch-digging industry. And not only this, for it requires a glass-blower to ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London

... character as a barbarian begins to be perceptibly modified; and if to the knack of speech he adds a tolerable acquaintance with the sacred characters which form the written language, he becomes transfigured, as one in whom the influence of the holy men of old is beginning to prevail over savagery and ignorance. ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles

... than a hundred tribes of aborigines all more or less akin to those of Kweichau and Burma, but each under its own separate chief. Some of them are fine-looking, vigorous people; but the Chinese describe them as living in a state of utter savagery. Missionaries, however, have recently begun work for them; and we may hope that, as for the Karens of [Page 53] Burma, a better day will soon dawn on the ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... of his friends, More and Fisher; the bitter tyranny of evangelistic clericalism in Geneva and in Scotland; the long agony of religious wars, persecutions, and massacres, which devastated France and reduced Germany almost to savagery; finishing with the spectacle of Lutheranism in its native country sunk into mere dead Erastian formalism, before it was a century old; while Jesuitry triumphed over Protestantism in three-fourths of Europe, bringing in its train a recrudescence of all the corruptions Erasmus and ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... advocates of the system contrast the barbarism of Richard Coeur de Lion with the culture and humanity of Saladin, they seem to forget that the race of Richard had but just emerged from the savagery of the Northmen, while Saladin and his race had not only inherited the high moral culture of Judaism and Christianity, but had virtually monopolized it. It was chiefly by the wars of the Crusaders that Western Europe became acquainted with ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... this fervid protestation, a message illuminated as it were by the vibrato, he began to hate the terrible frankness of the Italian nature which, till now, he had thought he loved. The beauty of reticence appealed to him in a new way. There was savagery in a bellowed passion. The voice was travelling. They heard it moving onward towards Nisida. Artois wondered if Vere knew who was the singer. She did not leave him ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... final troubles that precipitated the country again into a conflict with Austria. Previous to the actual declaration of war, constant collisions in the neighborhood of Lucerne had for some time past taken place, with all the horrors and savagery of war. In 1385 a body of men from Lucerne attacked and demolished the castle town of Rothenburg, the residence of an Austrian bailie. Next, both Entlibuch and Sempach, at the instigation of Lucerne, revolted against her Austrian rulers, expelled the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... published an article in defence of Peter Finnerty, convicted for a libel on Castlereagh, and exhorting public writers to be bold in the cause of individual liberty. The same number contained an article on the savagery of military floggings, for which he was prosecuted, defended by Brougham, and acquitted. His acquittal drew from Shelley a letter of congratulation, addressed to Hunt as "one of the most fearless ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... stared, with aching eyes, at the rich twilight which crept like purple mist among the trees. The very quiet of the scene grated as a discord upon his mood, and he would have welcomed with a feeling of relief any violent manifestation of the savagery of nature. A storm, an earthquake, even the thunder of battle he felt would be less tragic than just this pleasant evening with the serene ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow

... the crowd, to whom the whole scene was sport—and though we have become more civilised in some ways as time has passed, sport has retained much of its original savagery even now—gleefully tied together Haldane's hands and feet, and carried her, thus secured, to a large deep pond about a ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt

... granddaughter of one of these gentlemen afterwards became Queen of the Sandwich Islands. The country, as far as I could see, appeared to be highly cultivated. The people in their habits and customs presented a curious mixture of savagery and civilisation. ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston

... demanded Chang Tao. "This one's thoughts and intention were not turned towards savagery and arms, but in the direction of a pacific union of ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah

... neither covering nor home. Less protected than the beasts of the forest, he found himself compelled to Think!—to think out his own means of shelter,—to contrive his own weapons of defence. Slowly, and by painful degrees, from Savagery he has emerged to Civilization;—wherefore it is evident that his Maker meant Thought to be his first principle, and Action his second. He who does not work, shall not eat;—he who does not use all his faculties for improvement, shall by and by have none to use. Injustice and corruption ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... and the Fall of the Second Empire was one of the most dramatic. The world is not, after all, so securely merged from the darkness of the Dark Ages. Within that short century, in Paris itself, the very capital of cultured Europe, there has twice uprisen a human savagery immeasurably exceeding all the tales we are to tell of the fierce past ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... themselves—for I was equally apprehensive of being discovered by the latter. Once inside their circle, they would take no notice of me—for doubtless there would be other Indians within sight; and I trusted to my well-counterfeited semblance of savagery to deceive the eyes of these ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... wild creatures have but small measure of gentleness in them, and that only by instinct and at short stated seasons. Hence I have given both sides and both kinds, the shadows and lights, the savagery as well as the ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long

... fleeing from the settled villages and from the punishment due their atrocities. Consequently, the latter were extraordinarily fierce. Many heathen were numbered among them, accustomed long since to that rudeness of life and savagery, and they were all the worst kind of people. They committed notable depredations on the civilized villages, robbed the boats that anchored in the ports and bays, and treacherously committed many murders. Their boldness rose to such a pitch that one could not cross through ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various

... too apt to look upon the condition of savage and of barbarous tribes as standing on the same plane with respect to advancement. They should be carefully distinguished as dissimilar conditions of progress. Moreover, savagery shows stages of culture and of progress, and the same is true of barbarism. It will greatly facilitate the study of the facts relating to these two conditions, through which mankind have passed in their progress to civilization, to discriminate between ethnical periods, or stages of culture both ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan

... fresh token of savagery in his younger sister, Henry's face grew quite apoplectic with shame. But, still keeping his mouth closed, he pushed by Gladys and the twins, and dragged Margery up the steps ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore

... war on the people of New England, and was waging it with a persistence and fury that spread terror through the country. It was a struggle against manifest destiny, such as must needs be repeated whenever civilization comes to dispute a place in new lands with savagery, and which has been continued, more and more feebly, to our own day. The war was bloody, and for a long time the issue hung in the balance. At last the Indian king was driven westward. The Nipmucks joined him in the Connecticut Valley, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... habits and dexterities. His features were bold and aquiline; his expression arrogant and predatory; his whole appearance that of a swift, violent, unscrupulous man of action; and his copious white hair and the deep sabre-cut that traversed his nose and temple added a note of savagery to a head already remarkable ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson

... stand a famine? For the first time in the history of warfare the rear of the victor, the rear of the fighting line becomes insecure, assailable by flying machines and subject to unprecedented and unimaginable panics. No man can tell what savagery of desperation these new conditions may not release in the soul of man. A conspiracy of adverse chances, I say, might contrive so great a cataclysm. There is no effectual guarantee that it could ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... sanguinary rushes, she would not talk about fun. When you reach the drawing-room, there is a pug seated on an ottoman. He looks like a peculiarly truculent bull-dog that has been brought up on a lowering diet of gin-and-water, and you gain an exaggerated idea of his savagery as he uplifts his sooty muzzle. He barks with indignation, as if he thought you had come for his mistress's will, and intended to cut him off with a Spratt's biscuit. Of course he comes to smell round your ankles, and equally of course you put on a sickly smile, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward. I have never since been able to see a number of hands held upward, even when they are moving rhythmically in a calisthenic exercise, or when they belong to a class of chubby children who wave them ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... The Evolution of Property from Savagery to Civilization, 18, 19. "If the savage is incapable of conceiving the idea of individual possession of objects not incorporated with his person, it is because he has no conception of his individuality as distinct ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... to divest the agent of one or more of the limitations of humanity, and to clothe him with preter-human attributes. Nearly all the supernormal phenomena believed in by primitive man—so far as we can judge of him from contemporary savagery—would suggest the agency of an invisible man; clairvoyance, and other manifestations of preternatural knowledge, would suggest independence of the senses in the acquisition of knowledge; every kind of "miracle" would bespeak an extension of power over physical nature beyond human wont; ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... and she held Her white forefinger quivering aloft At greatest arm's-length of her dainty arm, In menace sweeter than a kiss could be And terribler than sudden whispers are That come from lips unseen, in sunlit room. So with the spell of all the Powers of Sense That e'er have swayed the savagery of hot blood Raying from her whole body beautiful, She held the eyes and wills of all the crowd. Then from the numbed hand of him that cut, The knife dropped down, and the quick fool stole in And snatched ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... sound that mingled threat and protest, something between a prolonged "Ah!" and "Ugh!" Then with a hoarse intensity of anger came a low heavy booing, "Boo! boo—oo!" a note stupidly expressive of animal savagery. "Toot, toot!" said Lord Redcar's automobile in ridiculous repartee. "Toot, toot!" One heard it whizzing and throbbing as the crowd ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... seed. He advances, but advances wrongly, and therefore has to go back upon his steps. He progresses in what he calls civilisation, which so long as it is purely self-aggrandisement, is but a common circle, bringing him back in due course to primitive savagery. Now I, for example, started in life to make money—I made it, and it brought me power, which I thought progress; but now, at the end of my tether, I see plainly that I have done no good in my career save such good as will come from my having placed all my foolish gainings under the control of a ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... true to the life that feature of old Mr. Prejudice still is. In every conversation, discussion, debate, correspondence, the angry man is invariably the prejudiced man; and, according to the age and the depth, the rootedness and the intensity of his prejudices, so is the ferocity and the savagery of his anger. He has already settled this case that you are irritating and wronging him so much by your still insisting on bringing up. It is a reproach to his understanding for you to think that there is anything to be said in that matter that ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte

... no power to choose a new one. Do not forget that the power to choose a new master carries with it power to discharge the wage slave and hire a new one. This power to discharge is the most merciless and cruel tyranny ever developed in the struggle of man from savagery to civilization. This awful right places in the hand of the master the power of life and death. He can deprive his wage slave of fuel, food, clothes, shelter. Life is the only right worth having if its exercise is put into question. A starving man has no liberty. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon

... glorying that she might give so much for country and humanity. Then, in the nights, things that she had read far back, unrealizing, rose and confronted her with awful reality. Brutalities, atrocities, wounds, barbarous captivity—nightmares which the Germans had dug out of the grave of savagery and sent stalking over the earth—such rose and stood before the woman lying awake night after night. At first her soul hid its face in terror at the gruesome thoughts; at first her mind turned and fled and refused to believe. Her boys, Brock and Hugh! ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... is, and what he feels he should be, must be; they are the indignant protests of the race against acquiescence in the world's evil as the world's law; they are the incoherent utterances of those yearnings for nobler conditions of existence, which no savagery, no ignorance, nothing but a false and ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... "when one like me stands on the threshold midway between savagery and civilization and compares the crudities and at times barbarities of the one with the luxuries and vices of the other, he often asks himself which is preferable, civilization and its few virtues, or the simple ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown

... and gashed with ancient earthquake upheavals, and there are perpendicular cliffs, deep clefts and gorges, black holes filled with water, and swift torrents dashing over precipices and falling into caverns—in a word, all the fantastic savagery of volcanic scenery, but the whole covered with the rich verdure ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... her gray eyes by the light of the flambeau; limpid, and deep, and earnest, they looked at Stern. Her wonderful hair, shaken out in bewildering masses over the striped, tawny savagery of the robe, made colorful ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... pore over them at intervals, even in those sadly fallen times he spent at Chislehurst. And he had material for reflection enough, for in no way, I take it, can a public man learn what a world of savagery, hatred, cruelty, and uncharitableness lies, not so much in man's mind, but in that corner of it which we euphemistically term his "humour," as in following the handiwork of the political caricaturist ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... merely from the feminine instinct for making excuses, that she said to herself that John was worn out with the strain of burdens long and uncomplainingly borne; and she was, it might be added, near enough to the primitive savagery of the rustic New Englanders of the last generation, to find it perfectly a matter of course that a man should make of his womenfolk a sort of scapegoat upon whom to visit his wrath against the sins alike of fate ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates

... would talk to them in low sweet tones, until the fireflies were twinkling in the thicket and the stars stole out one after another in their silent myriads, of One Who came from the highest Heaven to redeem them from savagery and degradation, and to make them holy as He was holy, and pure as He was pure. He was eminently successful; but when he had planted in some islands the first seeds of a fruitful Christianity, he sailed to other reefs, still carrying ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... proceed far. We can see daylight all round her bow under deck." But he was not in any unusual plight. And not only the perils of the deep had to be encountered, but other perils, some bred of man's savagery, then more freely exhibited than now, others necessary to the execrable traffic in peaceful blacks. It as a time of constant wars and the seas swarmed with French privateers alert for fat prizes. When a slaver met a privateer the battle was sure to be a bloody ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... of their abominable vulgarity. Flora used to tell her something of her life in that household, over there, down Limehouse way. It was incredible. It passed Mrs Fyne's comprehension. It was a sort of moral savagery which she could ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad

... perforated by metallic hoops of brass or silver, and sometimes of gold; to which is often added a necklace of bright sea-shells mixed with shark's teeth, completing the oddest outfit that can well be conceived of for a human being. Savagery tinctured with civilization. The native children of six, eight, and ten, were subjects of particular interest, the boys especially, who were remarkably handsome, clean-limbed, with skins shining like satin, and brown as hazel nuts. ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... persuaded them to be good by cutting off the heads of their leaders, who both happened to be priests: one was even a bishop. He had been taught in a school that always found an axe ready to hand. Let those who lament the savagery of modern warfare consider what happened then to a Danish fleet that tried to bring relief to hard-pressed Stockholm. It was beaten in a fight in which six hundred men were taken prisoners. They were all, say the accounts, "tied hand and foot and flung overboard amid the beating ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis

... canoes, swimming children, and dogs, and more than thirty riders, with their feet tucked up round their horses' necks, all escorting a "pale face," was grotesque and enchanting, and I revelled in this lapse into savagery, and enjoyed heartily the kindliness and goodwill of this ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... own bodies also claimed one last civilized feast of purification before entering on a life of savagery. The bath-house of the town is a small timber building. The bath-room itself is low, and provided with shelves where you lie down and are parboiled with hot steam, which is constantly kept up by water being thrown on the glowing hot ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... men for petty thefts, of life-long imprisonment for debt, of the stocks and the pillory, of a Temple Bar garnished with the heads of traitors, of the unreformed prison system, of the press-gang, of unrestrained tyranny and savagery at public schools. That the slave trade was iniquitous hardly any one suspected; even men who deemed themselves religious took part in it without scruple. But a change was at hand, and a still mightier change was in prospect. At the time of Cowper's birth, John Wesley was twenty-eight, and ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... conservatism lies, first, in its love of the existing order. Every established form of social life has had a certain wholeness and strength and perfection of its own. This is as true of savagery as it is of any type of civilization. Interests are in equilibrium, and are guaranteed security within certain limits that are generally understood. In other words, at least a measure of fulfilment may ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... whole army corps. This movement threatened to become a serious obstacle to the Serbian plan of separating the Austrians in Shabatz from those farther south. But the situation was saved by one of those incidents which sometimes stand out above the savagery of warfare and give to it a touch ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... spite of his savagery, his face softened in the next moment. "If it could only be in the right way! Look at me, look at you. You're so very beautiful, I'm so strong. There is only one right way about it. ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough

... prodigious ignorance and thoroughly unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer. If it had any influence on me at all, it set me against Evolution; and the only review I ever have qualms of conscience about, on the ground of needless savagery, is one I wrote on the "Vestiges" while under ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... course, and we went to pieces on the rocks at the foot of this island. Until to-night I did not know that it was this island. I alone was washed on shore. In the days that came I grew to wish that I, too, had perished. You know nothing of what solitude and savagery mean to the man of civilization—and to the man of ambition. Oh, my God! I dared not leave the shore lest I miss the chance to signal a passing vessel. There was scarcely anything to maintain life on that rocky ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... an encounter by flight, made it improbable that any future quarrel would be proceeded with to violent extremes, but it was much safer to run no risks, and not let verbal disagreements rise to hippopotamus-pitch again. Consequently when there was any real danger of such savagery as was implied in sending challenges, they hastened, by mutual concessions, to climb down from these perilous places, where loss of balance might possibly occur. For which of them could be absolutely certain that next time the other of them ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... suits the weakness of Richard II. or Henry VI. or Shakespeare himself better than it suits the hardy Bastard. Even as a young man Shakespeare hated the cruelty of ambition and the savagery of war as much as he loved all the ceremonies of chivalry and ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... discoveries and others like them, showing that man was not only contemporary with long-extinct animals of past geological epochs, but that he had already developed into a stage of culture above pure savagery, the tide of thought began to turn. Especially was this seen in 1863, when Lyell published the first edition of his Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man; and the fact that he had so long opposed the new ideas gave force to the clear and conclusive ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... watch exceeded those of her frying-pan. Miss Melluka was graciously pleased to express her entire approbation of the Circus, and so was Polly; for the ponies were speckled, and brought down nobody when they fired, and the savagery of the wild beasts appeared to be mere smoke—which article, in fact, they did produce in large quantities from their insides. The Barbox absorption in the general subject throughout the realisation of these delights was again a sight to see, nor ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens

... roads). A few of the parents of the young people so killed buried the bodies, and thus brought Cetywayo's wrath on themselves, resulting not only on their own death, but destruction of the whole family. . . . It is really terrible that such horrible savagery could take place on our own borders. . . . Uhamu reproved Cetywayo the other day, reminded him of his promises to Mr. Shepstone, and begged him to spare the people. This advice, as could be ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard

... for the growth of natural truth; but it may be that the plant is all the hardier for the bendings and buffetings it has undergone. The torturing of a shrub, within certain limits, strengthens it Through the struggles and passions of the brute, man reaches his estate; through savagery and barbarism his civilisation; and through illusion and persecution his knowledge of nature, including that of his own frame. The bias towards natural truth must have been strong to have withstood and overcome the opposing ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... painful stillness she walked up to Daniel, and plucked him by the coat-sleeve: "Eh, you don't know who I am?" she asked, and her squinty eyes shone on him with enigmatic savagery: "I am ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... so I was glad to tread once more the surface of Pellucidar. Mysterious and terrible, grotesque and savage though she is in many of her aspects, I can not but love her. Her very savagery appealed to me, for it is the ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... ten, and took the highest possible degrees on every subject. Then he was ordained. About this time he chanced to hear a series of sermons by a Colonial bishop that directed his mind towards the mission-field. This was after he had served as a deacon in an East End parish and become acquainted with savagery in its western form. ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard

... their putting on mourning! Just think of it!" Mrs. Munger appealed to Mrs. Wilmington, who was listening to her nephew's savagery of tone and phrase with the lazy pleasure she seemed always ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... Savagery and civilization meet on this plane of religious credulity. The Indians of Canada believed not more implicitly in the demons who howled all over the Isles of Demons, than did the early French sailors and the ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... can't think the cast was up to its extremely difficult task, if you estimate that task, as it seems to me you must, to be the reproducing of the original Victory characters. Perhaps Mr. SAM LIVESEY'S Ricardo was the nearest, though the primitive savagery of his wooing had to be toned down in the interests of propriety. Mr. GAYER MACKAY made his Jones interesting and plausible in the quieter opening movements. In the intended tragic spasms one felt that he became rather comic than sinister. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various

... that cruelty differs not from savagery or brutality. For seemingly one vice is opposed in one way to one virtue. Now both savagery and cruelty are opposed to clemency by way of excess. Therefore it would seem that savagery and ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... with rage and horror whenever she permitted herself to contemplate the excesses of the late Jerry. She had always mistrusted the man. She had never liked his face—not merely on aesthetic grounds but because she had seemed to detect in it a lurking savagery. How right events had proved this instinctive feeling. Mrs. Pett was not vulgar enough to describe the feeling, even to herself, as a hunch, but a hunch it had been; and, like every one whose hunches have proved correct, she was conscious in the midst of her grief of a certain complacency. It seemed ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... time in his eighty-fourth year, thus wan, wearied, pathetic, would appeal to the imaginations or the hearts of even political opponents. Simple man, you know nothing of the ruthless cruelty which dwells in political breasts, of the savagery which lies in the depths of the horse-jockey squire or the overdressed youth—anxious to distinguish himself, if it be only by throwing mud at a stately column—you have no idea ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... threatening fact was the movement down Broadway of unknown thousands, maddened by liquor, and confident from their unchecked excesses during the day. They knew that they had only to destroy the handful of men at police headquarters and the city was theirs to plunder and destroy with hyena-like savagery. ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe

... wouldn't take campers long to revert to savagery," ejaculated Billie. "We are already as brown as Indians. We keep our sleeves rolled up and our collars turned in and wear creepers instead of shoes, and always khaki skirts, and never dress for supper. Even Cousin Helen ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes

... Heracles came into the palace of the king. The harsh king feasted Heracles and abated his savagery before him. But he could not forbear boasting of how he had trapped the heroes who had come to carry off Persephone. And he told how they could not get out of the stone chairs and how they were held captive in his dark dungeon. Heracles listened, his heart full ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... that truth out into the light, in all its naked hideousness. Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes; they are at grips with the essentials of a problem before men have finished debating its mere externals. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... that was thrown in with the programme informs me that the martial spirit of the Zulus (at that time under their own regime) was "identical in many respects with 'Prussian Militarism.'" Certainly there was a savagery about the way in which they progged the air with their assegais that made one picture them as capables de tout. But any comparison, whether in point of costume or royal bearing, between King Mpande and the GERMAN KAISER must have been in favour of the latter. On the other hand, his son Umbuyazi ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various

... a mere affair of outposts. Those who realize the destructiveness of the late war, the devastation and impoverishment, the lowering of the level of civilization throughout vast areas, the general increase of hatred and savagery, the letting loose of bestial instincts which had been curbed during peace—those who realize all this will hesitate to incur inconceivably greater horrors, even if they believe firmly that Communism in itself is much to be desired. An economic system cannot be considered apart from ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell

... not wait upon I would." The Jamaica insurrection is another hopeful piece of business. That platform-sympathy with the black—or the native, or the devil—afar off, and that platform indifference to our own countrymen at enormous odds in the midst of bloodshed and savagery, makes me stark wild. Only the other day, here was a meeting of jawbones of asses at Manchester, to censure the Jamaica Governor for his manner of putting down the insurrection! So we are badgered about New Zealanders and Hottentots, as if they were identical ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens

... white man's game," Dick laughed. "She's not afraid of him, and he knows it. She outgames him, out-savages him, teaches him what savagery is in its intimate mood ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... that of the heroes of Valhalla, who recruited at night the energies dissipated in the battles of the day by quaffing bumpers of inexhaustible mead. In these essays we have the Berserker in his milder moods, his savagery all laid aside, with but here and there a glint, as of sun-ray on harness, to remind us of the sinking in the glory and pride of ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman

... classes of readers, especially of those whose means are slender, the author does for private economy what Smith and Ricardo and Bastiat have done for national economy. * * * The one step which separates civilization from savagery—which renders civilization possible—is labor done in excess of immediate necessity. * * * To inculcate this most necessary and most homely of all virtues, we have met with no better teacher ...
— Harper's Young People, March 2, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... of all the marsupials is the Tasmanian devil. It is only a little devil, a couple of feet or so long, but its savagery is beyond measuring by anything like a two-foot rule. No reasonable devils could wish to be treated with more indulgence than the Zoological Society extends to these. A rolling blind is provided to keep the sun out of their eyes, and they are politely ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... super-civilization they knew little of as almost an impertinence compared to the rugged, gloomy, pathetic, and equally youthful hero of an adventurous wilderness of which they knew still less? What availed the courtesy and gentle melancholy of Clarence Brant beside the mysterious gloom and dark savagery of Red Jim? Yet they received him patronizingly, as one who was, like themselves, an admirer of manly grace and power, and the recipient of Jim's friendship. The farmer alone seemed to prefer Clarence, ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... Won't you, Molly? It won't be no fun without you and you'd cry all by yourself with me gone." His little face was all drawn up with anxiety and sympathy at my lonely estate with him out of it and a cry rose up from my heart with a kind of primitive savagery at what I felt was coming down ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess

... we took life for life, the Bedouins would lose less than ten percent, and we'd be wiped out. And we couldn't expect to take life for life, charging a position like theirs in the night. It can't be a stand-up battle. It's got to be science against savagery, or nothing." ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... submit to similar painful experiences. India cannot truly be described as an uncivilized or barbarous country, but, side by side with elements of the highest civilization, it contains many elements of primitive and savage barbarism. The savagery of India cannot be dealt with ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... these premature arrangements undesirable, for it was absurd to plan the marriage of two children before I could tell whether this union was in accordance with nature and whether they were really suited to each other. We must not confuse what is suitable in a state of savagery with what is suitable in civilised life. In the former, any woman will suit any man, for both are still in their primitive and undifferentiated condition; in the latter, all their characteristics have been developed by social institutions, and each mind, having taken ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... days. At the summit of the temple, in full view of the assembled multitude below, he was barbarously put to death by a priest, in order to propitiate the cruel god to whom the temple was dedicated. And Master M. was taught that the moral of all this savagery was, that human joys are transitory, and the partition between sorrow and happiness is a very thin one, or ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... story of slavery and hear an exponent of free thought say, "The doctrine that woman is a slave or serf of man—whether it comes from hell or heaven, from God or demon, from the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, or the very Sodom of perdition—is savagery pure and simple," I say, "That is so, but just that was the ruling idea when infidelity was on the throne of Rome." And only where the Bible has gone and triumphed has woman the privileges which ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various

... dictated the savage massacre and mutilation which followed. The death of Zedekiah's sons, and of the nobles who had scoffed at Jeremiah's warnings, and the blinding of Zedekiah, were all measures of precaution as well as of savagery. They diminished the danger of revolt; and a blind, childless prisoner, without counsellors or friends, was harmless. But to make the sight of his slaughtered sons the poor wretch's last sight, was a refinement of gratuitous delight in torturing. Thus singularly was Ezekiel's enigma solved ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... comprehend the significance of this war, which is a war of civilization against barbarism, a sacred war in which the forces of humanity raise a rampart of human breasts against the violent reappearance of primitive savagery. ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne

... cursed clever physicians, alienists, psychologists, hypnotists—whatever they were—have cut the strange savagery and ferocity out of the splendid John ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren

... of a man that he sets to goin', when they have come to full fruition skare him most to death, horrify him by the sight. I'll bet Burgoyne felt bad enough, a lookin' on her dead body, if it wuz his doin's in the first place, in lettin' loose such ignerance and savagery onto ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley

... escaped for the moment beyond his control—the primitive man which he had well-nigh succeeded in stifling with the bonds of his servitude. Had he not told her that he would have given all he had to forget that single wild lapse into savagery? She was sure that he despised himself for it. He would never for an instant suffer such an impulse again. He did not really love her. It was not in him to love any woman. He would make her a formal offer of marriage, and when she had ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell

... the confinement of the hold, wandered about the deck, not a little to the discomfiture of the crew in whose minds there remained a still vivid picture of the savagery of the beasts in conflict with those who had gone to their deaths beneath the fangs and talons which even now seemed itching for the soft flesh of ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Ponderevo. I would not call him a lovable, but he is an admirable, man. He is too ruthless, rude, and bitter to be anything but solitary. His harshness is his fault, his one real fault; and his harshness also marks the point where his attitude towards his environment becomes unscientific. The savagery of his description of the family of Frapp, the little Nonconformist baker, and of the tea-drinkers in the housekeeper's room at Bladesover, somewhat impairs even the astounding force of this, George's first and only novel—not because he exaggerates the offensiveness of the phenomena, ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett

... changes was prompted by instincts derived from the arts of ornament and pomp. Splendor of arms, of banners, of equipages, of ceremonies, and the elaborate forms of intercourse with enemies through conferences, armistices, treaties of peace, &c., having tamed the savagery of war into connection with modes of intellectual grandeur, and with the endless restraints of superstition or scrupulous religion,—a permanent light of civilization began to steal over the bloody shambles of buccaneering warfare. Other modes of harmonizing ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... had been removed from the executive mansion; while every evening the chief and his standing army failed not to face the splendid Stars and Stripes as they were reverently lowered from a bamboo flagstaff, where during the day they floated over a village redeemed by them from seemingly hopeless savagery. ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel

... forts and settlements, ambushes, massacres, torturings, and acts of duplicity and ferocity innumerable. Yet every instance of Indian hostility has ended in the triumph of the whites, the advance of the army of colonization a step further, and the gradual subjugation of American savagery, animate and inanimate, to the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... value in my life was tremendous. It made it none the less, that in those days I was obsessed by the idea that she was transitory, and bound to go out of my life again. It is no good trying to set too fine a face upon this complex business, there is gold and clay and sunlight and savagery in every love story, and a multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath the fine rich curtain of affection that masked our future. I've never properly weighed how immensely my vanity was gratified ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... tolerably successful in a general sort of way was at once evident, for the expression of mingled fear and savagery on Mokalua's features at once vanished, giving place to a smile; he nodded his head, pointed to Murdock, himself, and Vati, waved his hand toward the woods, said a few quick words to his companion, and ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood

... no longer 3000 years ago. But that is a mere guess, and is contradicted by the facts of their language. They may have passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive may be, for all we know, a relapse into savagery, or a corruption of something that was more rational and intelligible in former stages. Think only of the rules that determine marriage among the lowest of savage tribes. Their complication passes all understanding, all seems a chaos of prejudice, superstition, pride, vanity, and stupidity. And ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller

... disastrous idiot; and that he would not long be at pains to conceal his opinion of him." The classical part of the audience resented the touches of Spanish local colour in the play, the mixture of pleasantries and familiar speeches with the tragic dialogue, and of heroism and savagery in the character of Hernani, and they made all manner of fun of the species of pun—de ta suite, j'en suis—which terminated the first act. "Certain lines were captured and recaptured, like disputed redoubts, by each army ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... at what underlay Mrs. Silver's declaration that she had never lost a grandchild and had no intention of adopting a stranger in the place of one, it should be first understood that in many respects she was a civilized person. The quality of savagery, barbarism, or civilization in a tribe may be tested by the relations it characteristically maintains with domestic animals; and tribes that eat dogs are often inferior to those inclined to ceremonial cannibalism. Likewise, the civilization, barbarism, ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington

... no justification in any of the great world religions, and not even the British, or the Germans, who idolize soldiers, would immortalize a man simply because he was a hunter. From whatever point the subject be viewed it seems undeniable that hunting is only a survival of savagery. ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang

... the arid sarcasm in the voice. The shoulders were shrunken, the temples fallen in, the neck behind was pinched, and the eyes looked out like brown beads alive with fire, and touched with the excitement of monomania. His last word had a delicate savagery of irony, though, too, there could be heard in the tone a defiance, arguing apprehension, not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... subdued, And Rome grew polished, who till then was rude; The rough Saturnian measure had its day, And gentler arts made savagery give way: Yet traces of the uncouth past lived on For many a year, nor are they wholly gone, For 'twas not till the Punic wars were o'er That Rome found time Greek authors to explore, And try, by digging in that virgin ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... systems of social organization which evolved from and superseded each other at different periods, but it is necessary to remind you that the changes that have taken place in the past have been even greater than the change proposed by Socialists today. The change from savagery and cannibalism when men used to devour the captives they took in war—to the beginning of chattel slavery, when the tribes or clans into which mankind were divided—whose social organization was a kind of Communism, all the individuals belonging ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... haint it? How the acts and deeds of a man that he sets to goin', when they have come to full fruition skare him most to death, horrify him by the sight. I'll bet Burgoyne felt bad enough, a lookin' on her dead body, if it wuz his doin's in the first place, in lettin' loose such ignerance and savagery onto a ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley

... in her voice had a note of savagery in it now. Celia's vague terror grew. She had a feeling that a beast was waking in the woman, and with it came a growing premonition of failure. Vainly she cried to herself, "I must not fail to-night." But she ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason

... proved illusory; only Verlaine knows where he is, and he will not tell. The last certain news we had of him was that he had joined a caravan of Arabs, and had wandered somewhere into the desert with these wanderers, preferring savagery to civilization. Verlaine preferred civilized savagery, and so he remained in Paris; and so he drags on, living in thieves' quarters, getting drunk, writing beautiful poems in the hospitals, coming out of hospitals and falling ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... great battlegrounds of the human spirit the problem raised by Prometheus has been fought out. On the ground of science, who does not know the defiant and Titanic mood in which knowledge has at times been sought? The passion for knowing flames through the gloom and depression and savagery of the darker moods of the student. Difficulties are continually thrust into the way of knowledge. The upper powers seem to be jealous and outrageously thwarting, and the path of learning becomes a path of ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... drew near, a straggling group gathered around the strangers. They stared dully and without intelligence, and yet like animals in whom savagery is ever ready to burst restraints. The stronger men among them glowered at the intruders, turning against a strange face with the snarl they dared not show to one grown familiar. Beyond the mines, ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post

... description of the life of the Romans, and we marvel at the inhumanity of those soulless Luculli, who satiated themselves on viands and wines while the populace were dying with hunger. We shake our heads, and we marvel at the savagery of our grandfathers, who were serf-owners, supporters of household orchestras and theatres, and of whole villages devoted to the care of their gardens; and we wonder, from the heights of our grandeur, at their inhumanity. We read the words of Isa. v. 8: ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi

... Indians showed a savagery which, unfortunately, was not peculiar then to him. In the heat of battle they were not to scalp those they slew, because time then was so valuable. While they were taking a scalp they could kill ten men. But when the ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler

... The little man did most of the talking; Dupont seeming content with a listening role, and gratified by what he heard. He nodded frequently, and once or twice a grim smile enhanced the ugliness of his mouth, a smile terrible in its contained savagery, fit to make one's blood run cold, that cruelly relished in anticipation the success of some ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance

... for the first time in well-certified history, but controlled by a very pure Aryan stock, much nearer kin to the peoples of the West than any Oriental folk with which they have had intimate relations hitherto. The Persians appeared from the Back of Beyond, uncontaminated by Alarodian savagery and unhampered by the theocratic prepossessions and nomadic traditions of Semites. They were highlanders of unimpaired vigour, frugal habit, settled agricultural life, long-established social cohesion and spiritual religious conceptions. Possibly, too, before they ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth

... began to learn what real savagery meant. Only women and children appeared to inhabit the island, and these fled inland at the strangers' approach. This afforded an excellent opportunity for the visitors to look into the native huts ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley

... removals placed tribes under conditions of strange environment where new customs and institutions were necessary, and in this condition civilization had a greater influence, and the progress of occupation by white men within the territory of the United States, at least, has reached such a stage that savagery and barbarism have no room for their existence, and even customs and institutions must in a brief time be completely changed, and what we are yet to learn of these people must ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell

... the village of Stanz, near the eastern shore of the Lake of Lucerne (Sept. 8). There for three days they fought with unyielding courage. Their resistance inflamed the French to a cruel vengeance; slaughtered families and burning villages renewed, in this so-called crusade of liberty, the savagery of ancient war. ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... First Solar War, when Teyr (the race of Aum had originated there) ruled. That awful struggle had bludgeoned the home planet back to savagery, and left Coar and Sennech little ...
— Tulan • Carroll Mather Capps

... and did not halt until we reached San Marcos, with its gloomy memorial of human savagery. After an hour's halt we set out and arrived at San Felipe in time to catch the train to Havana. On arriving there at dusk I sent my servant to inform his mistress of my safe arrival while I called on Don ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell

... little way back from civilization to savagery. We live in a wonderful time: the last twenty-five years have seen changes that mark epochs in the onward and upward march. To mention but two, we might name the almost complete evolution of our definition as to what constitutes "Christianity"; and in material things, the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... and savage, to the cave-dwellers and stone-implement man of Pleistocene times, and so on to our rude ancestors whom we see dimly at the dawn of history, and thus rapidly upward to the European man of our own era. What a record! What savagery, what thwartings and delays, what carnage and suffering, what an absence of all that we mean by intelligent planning and oversight, of love, of fatherhood! Just a clash of forces, the battle to the strong and ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... rule, are very ignorant, are very lazy, are very brutal, are very criminal. But a little way removed from savagery, they are incapable of adopting the white man's moral code, of assimilating the white man's moral sentiments, of striving toward the white man's moral ideals. They are creatures of brutal, untamed instincts, and uncontrolled feral passions, which give frequent expression ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... event of such an issue, as it would be impossible to make a friend of their captive, the Sauk favored sending a bullet through him before parting; but Deerfoot was so emphatic in protesting against such savagery, that Hay-uta promised ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... the ruins of the hut, was a strange scene of rejoicing. Asensio, recovered now from his burst of savagery, was tearful, compassionate; his comrades laughed and chattered and bragged about their prodigious deeds of valor. Over and over they recounted their versions of the encounter, each more fanciful than the other, ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... brighter blaze, naturally seems to us absurd; but to the savage mind it wears a different aspect, and the institution of the great fire-festivals which we are considering probably dates from a time when Europe was still sunk in savagery or at most in barbarism. Now it can be shewn that in order to increase the celestial source of heat at midwinter savages resort to a practice analogous to that of our Yule log, if the kindling of the Yule log was originally ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... reached by dog-sled, after a fatiguing, if not perilous, journey across Alaska, but in the open season you may now travel there almost any week in large liners from San Francisco. It seemed like a dream to land suddenly in this modern town, within a day's journey of Whalen with all its savagery and squalor, and it was somewhat trying to have to walk up the crowded main street in our filthy, ragged state. Eventually, however, we were rigged up at a well-stocked clothing establishment in suits of dittos ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt



Words linked to "Savagery" :   violence, fierceness, barbarism, brutality, vehemence, savageness, ferocity, furiousness, cruelty, inhumanity, fury, viciousness, ferociousness, wildness, atrocity, cruelness, savage, harshness



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