"Usurious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sheet, arraigns its wealthy fellow-countrymen for lack of initiative and fondness of routine. It accuses them of a willingness to invest in city property, to deposit money in banks, "to make loans at usurious rates, in which they take advantage of the urgent and pressing necessities of their countrymen," but of unwillingness "to engage in agriculture, marine or industrial enterprise"; and says they are "generally lacking in the spirit of progression." According to another native newspaper, ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... nous, I am cursedly dipped; my debts, everything inclusive, will be nine or ten thousand before I am twenty-one." On his coming of age, the festivities at Newstead were celebrated by means supplied by money-lenders at enormously usurious rates of interest. His difficulties did not diminish, but only increased with time. It is said that his mother's death was occasioned by a fit of rage, brought on by reading the upholsterer's bills.[1] When the first canto of "Childe Harold" was published, Byron presented ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... it in odd corners, wrapped in a rag or an old curl-paper; but some of these hoards having been discovered by the housemaid, Eliza, fearful of one day losing her valued treasure, consented to intrust it to her mother, at a usurious rate of interest—fifty or sixty per cent.; which interest she exacted every quarter, keeping her accounts in a little ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... That ne'er, with anxious heart, explores The rugged heights Ambition climbs; Exempt from all the din, the toil, the care, That Cities for their busy Sons prepare; Fatigue, beneath the name of pleasure, Contentious law, usurious treasure, A tedious mean attendance on the Great, And emulation vain of ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... are one or two of these Mestizo traders whose fortunes amount to more than this; but such occurances are rare, and are seldom heard of. Many of these amounts have been collected together by their possessors by their engaging in a sort of usurious money-lending or banking business with the poverty-struck cultivators of the soil, by advancing seed to many of them for their paddy fields, and making the hard condition of exacting in return about one half of the produce of the ensuing ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... article was often misleading until the manufacturer's side of the question was explained and understood, and so, too, a low price often produced various criticism from those who could not differentiate between just and usurious profit. ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... wise have held that joys of sense, The more their pleasure is intense, More certainly demand again Usurious interest of pain; ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... the Lea and had received a bare four hundred pounds again. As for Little John, he went back to the forest and told his master the whole story, to Robin Hood's great satisfaction, for he enjoyed the chance of thwarting the schemes of a wealthy and usurious prelate. ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... At the same time the Stock Market exhibited tokens of excessive febrility, New York Central dropping twenty-three per cent. and Harlem thirteen. Loans had become extremely difficult to negotiate. The most usurious prices for a twenty-four hours' turn were freely paid. The storm was palpably reaching the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... unir (s'), to unite. univers, m., universe, the whole universe. usage, m., use, custom, precedent. usure, f., usury, usurious interest; payer avec ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... The same close and accurate calculation of pounds, shillings, and pence, marked his communications with his agent Meiklewham, who might otherwise have had better pickings out of the estate of St. Ronan's, which is now at nurse, and thriving full fast; especially since some debts, of rather an usurious character, have been paid up by Mr. Touchwood, who contented ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... garnered his harvest and stored it away. But poor Catenac has no expensive tastes, nor does he care for women or the pleasures of the table. While we indulged in every pleasure, he lent out his money at usurious interest. But, stop,—how much do ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... Secretary Cobb to stab the national credit. He would have been dealing constantly with a surplus instead of a deficit, and could not have put the nation to shame by forcing it to hawk its paper in the money markets at the usurious rate of one per cent. a month. One of the wisest financiers in the United States has expressed the belief that two hundred millions of coin, which might easily have been saved to the country by a protective tariff between 1850 and 1860, would have kept the National debt a thousand millions below ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... seemed to resent his marriage, and during the months that followed, gave him little peace. He was obliged, in the intervals of painting, to rush hither and thither to pacify this creditor, quiet the fears of that, remove the ill-will of a third, and borrow money at usurious interest from a fourth in order to keep his engagements with a fifth. In spite of all his compromises and arrangements, he was arrested more than once during this year, but so far he had been able to keep out of prison. His favourite pupil Bewick, who sat to him for the head of Lazarus ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... worldly care was to raise ready money; sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. And how he raised it: From usurious insatiable Jews; every fresh Jew sticking on him like a fresh horseleech, sucking his and our life out; crying continually, Give, give! Take one example instead of scores. Our Camera having fallen into ruin, William the Sacristan ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... misgovern well, one must open his purse as often as he forces the purses of others. He was passing by in his carriage this great khawaja, when we were coming out of the pottery. And of a truth, his paunch and double chin and ruddy cheeks seemed to illustrate what the priest told me about his usurious propensities. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... must bow to him. And woe betide The Wine-bibber,—the Roisterer by night; Him the feast-master, many bouts defied, Him 'twixt the pledging and the cup shall smite; Woe to the Lender at usurious rate, The hard Rich Man, the hireling Advocate; Woe to the Judge that selleth right for pay; Woe to the Thief that like a beast of prey With creeping tread the traveller harryeth:— These, in their sin, the sudden sword shall slay ... There is no ...
— The Dance of Death • Hans Holbein
... of a year's cruise; but it has heard less of the shrewd schemes which are devised for fleecing poor Jack, and applied by every one with whom he comes in contact, from the prosperous owner who pays him off in orders that can only be conveniently cashed at some outfitter's, who charges usurious rates for the accommodation, down to the tawdry drab who collects advance money on account of half a dozen sailor husbands. The seaman landing with money in his pocket in any large town is like the hapless fish in some of our much-angled streams. It is not enough ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... wilful. I have known people untrammelled in the ways of business, but with so intense an apprehension of their own interest, that they would grasp at the slightest possibility of gain as a certainty, and were led into as many mistakes by an overgriping, usurious disposition as they could have been by the most thoughtless extravagance.—We hear a great outcry about the want of judgment in men of genius. It is not a want of judgment, but an excess of other things. They err knowingly, and ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious terms." ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... demand, she could not rest in peace; (Beside th' affront to call th' adviser in, Who would prevent, to justify the sin): She therefore told him that "he vainly tried To soothe her anger, conscious that he lied; If thus he grasp'd at such usurious gains, He must deserve, and should expect her pains." The charge was strong; he would in part confess Offence there was—But, who offended less? "What! is a mere assertion call'd a lie? And if it be, are men compell'd ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... bankruptcy followed; and he fled from city to city, falling daily into lower practice. It is to be considered that he had been taught, and had learned as a delightful duty, a kind of business whose highest merit is to escape the commentaries of the bench: that of the usurious lawyer in a county town. With this training, he was now shot, a penniless stranger, into the deeper gulfs of cities; and the result is scarce a thing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reformer who amongst a thousand plans for reinfusing vitality into Roman polity was well understood to be digesting a large measure of relief to the hopeless debtor? What lunacy to believe that the ordinary citizen, crouching under the insupportable load of his usurious obligations, could be at leisure to support a few scores of lordly senators panic-stricken for the interests of their own camarilla, when he beheld—taking the field on the opposite quarter—one, the greatest of men, who spoke ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... guise of an usurious money-lender. It would be hard in the history of usury to come across the well-ascertained details of a more grasping, griping usurer. His practice had been of the kind which we may have been accustomed to hear rebuked with ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... hard-pressed brethren in feathers, lending at a fearful rate of interest; for every borrowing Lazarus will have to pay me back in due time by monthly instalments of singing. I shall have mine own again with usury. But were a man never so usurious, would he not lend a winter seed for a summer song? Would he refuse to invest his stale crumbs in an orchestra of divine instruments and a choir of heavenly voices? And to-day, also, I ordered from a nursery-man ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... what produced their disease. The law, in the first place, rigidly enforced the marketing of clean and perfect fruit, and a wholesome quality of all other provisions. This was at first difficult to do, as in those ancient days, (I refer to a very remote period of our history) in order to make usurious profit, dealers adulterated all kinds of food; often with poisonous substances. When every state took charge of its markets and provided free schools for cooking, progress took a rapid advance. Do you wonder at it? Reflect ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... here—though by no means what they might be with more thrift and knowledge—much better off than the same class in many other parts of Ireland. There are no "Gombeen men" here, he says, and no usurious shopkeepers. "The people back each other in a friendly way when they need help." Many of the labourers, he says, are in debt to him, but he never presses them, and they are very patient with each other. ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... against me. You know that you will not find any money with me, but you help yourself. Once before you came with a boat and carried off what we had saved for our own use, and turned it into money. Now you are no longer satisfied with the fruit of which you took tithes more jealously than any usurious pasha. You want to sell the trees, too, over my head—those trees, my treasures, my only friends in the world, which I have planted and nurtured, which keep me, and under which I can rest. Fy! for shame! to tell me such stories of getting money for these trees, to build ships of ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... in business in the goose-liver line. But, inspection of Straudenheim, who became visible at a window on the second floor, convinced me that there was something more precious than liver in the case. He wore a black velvet skull-cap, and looked usurious and rich. A large-lipped, pear-nosed old man, with white hair, and keen eyes, though near-sighted. He was writing at a desk, was Straudenheim, and ever and again left off writing, put his pen in his mouth, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... swallowed by an oyster; it became the most beautiful pearl in the Orient, and was the chief ornament in the throne of the Great Mogul. Those who are only compilers, imitators, commentators, splitters of phrases, usurious critics, in short, those on whom a genius has no pity, will always remain drops ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... carefully, having first shaken the balustrade to make sure that it was genuine, stout, and well-founded. Mrs Hamps followed, the fripperies of her elegant bonnet trembling, and her black gown rustling. Edwin smiled at her, and she returned his smile with usurious interest. There was now a mist of grey ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... stripped. Sometimes, however, when the chance of the drive brought down a hundred logs together, they failed to shoot over the barrier of the ledge. Then followed a jam, a bad jam, difficult and dangerous to break. The falls had taken her usurious share of the lives the river annually demands as ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... millions of you, a sober and industrious race. Cortez found you so, and you astounded him with your civilization. But the conditions that followed have enslaved you. Enslaved, I repeat, for you are bound by debt. Your hacendado master contrives that you cannot pay even his usurious interest. The food you eat, you must buy from him, at his prices, of the quality he prescribes. And if your debt be not sufficient, that is, if there seems a chance of your paying it off, then you must increase it to obtain your ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... through Mr. Wilkins's confused brain that he should find it impossible to produce the thousands required without having recourse to the money lenders, who were already making difficulties, and charging him usurious interest for the advances they had lately made; and he unwisely tried to obtain a diminution in the sum he had originally proposed to give Ellinor. "Unwisely," because he might have read Ralph's character better ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... disappointed with the ordinary avocations of the Forum,—its low standard of virtue, and its diversion of what is ennobling in the pure fountains of natural justice into the turbid and polluted channels of deceit, chicanery, and fraud; its abandonment to usurious calculations and tricks of learned and legalized jugglery, by which the end of law itself was baffled and its advocates alone enriched. But what else could be expected of lawyers in those days and in that wicked city, or even in any city of the whole Empire, when ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... been prevented from making any gain, through not having his money, he might charge something for its use. In time people began to distinguish between interest moderate in amount and an excessive charge for the use of money. The latter alone was henceforth prohibited as usurious. Most modern states still have usury laws which fix ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... amass an enormous fortune for himself out of the proscriptions. His eye for business reached over the whole Roman Empire. He was banker, speculator, contractor, merchant. He lent money to the spendthrift young lords, but with sound securities and at usurious interest. He had an army of slaves, but these slaves were not ignorant field-hands; they were skilled workmen in all arts and trades, whose labors he turned to profit in building streets and palaces. Thus all that he ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... therefore his masters must take care and make Wyllykyn and Peter Bale pay at Calais, 'but as for your dealings knoweth no man, without they search Peter Bale's books.'[41] The upright Betson no doubt eschewed such tricks and resented particularly the clever usurious Lombards, so full of financial dodges to trick the English merchant, for did they not buy the wool in England on credit, riding about as ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... thousand dollars of dowry. Half of this you are to employ in making partisans in the Senate, and in what you are pleased to call your army. This sum you will not lose: it will be repaid to you, and with usurious interest; or if it never should, you still make a good thing of it. The end you will keep in view, is to detach the Senate of Sonora from the Federal alliance. You will find no lack of reasons for this policy. For instance, your State has now scarcely ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... that the bishops and the clergy, who are now too timid, may be induced to follow. But even the civil magistrates must also suffer reforms to be enacted in their particular spheres; especially are they called on to do away with the rude "gluttony and drunkenness," luxury in clothing, the usurious sale of rents and the common brothels. This, by divine and human right, is a part of their enjoined works ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... be invited back. Rather wait awhile yet, and see what our bridges and real rapid transit, and the "philanthropy and five per cent" plan, will do for us. When that latter has been grasped so by the tenant that a little extra brass and plate-glass does not tempt him over into the enemy's camp, the usurious rents may yet follow the double-decker, as they have clung to it in ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... poor lieutenants felt and looked decidedly blue. For some of them it meant another loan in Berlin or Cologne at usurious interest, with no prospect of ever discharging the principal, which meant nothing less than ultimate ruin and disgrace. For others, less reckless or with less credit because of more modest family connections, it meant the paying off in monthly instalments of their debts, ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... did not keep pace with usurious calculations, and trades were concentrated in the capital. Mechanical skill was neglected in all the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... the story of the old Governor of Goa, who wanted money and summoned the usurers, and they wanted security; whereupon he laid his Hidalgo hand on a cataract of Kronos-beard across his breast, and pulled forth three white hairs, and presented them: 'And as honourably to the usurious Jews as to the noble gentleman himself, that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Eastern nations who have been guilty of them, Englishmen should hesitate before they fix the blame upon the government of any country in which they occur. The Jews are the chief traders in Roumania, and if they are exorbitant and usurious the way to meet them is by competition and enterprise on the part of the native traders, not ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... law was made for fixing the interest of money at ten per cent.; the first legal interest known in England. Formerly all loans of that nature were regarded as usurious. The preamble of this very law treats the interest of money as illegal and criminal; and the prejudices still remained so strong, that the law permitting interest was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... banker by name, but in reality dealt in usurious loans, Shylock-like wringing the pound of flesh from the victims of his avarice. He was known and dreaded by all the honest tradesmen of the city; the curse of the orphan and the widow, whom he unfeelingly drove into the streets, followed in his path; the children stopped ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... evil. The extortions of usurers have led to revolutions before now, and it seems high time for an enlightened Government to do something on a large scale for the abatement of the evil, if only by an absolute refusal to enforce any such usurious contracts. ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... outskirts of the city where its members duly qualified themselves as bona fide travellers. But his fellow-travellers had never consented to overlook his origin. He had begun life as an obscure financier by lending small sums of money to workmen at usurious interest. Later on he had become the partner of a very fat, short gentleman, Mr. Goldberg, in the Liffey Loan Bank. Though he had never embraced more than the Jewish ethical code, his fellow-Catholics, whenever they had smarted in person or by proxy under his exactions, spoke ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... task to purvey luxuries to the imperious Briton, to hold the extravagant underlings in his usurious clutches, to be at peace with Hindu, Moslem, Sikh, Pathan, Ghoorka, Persian, and Armenian, and to blur his easy-going Mohammedanism in a generous participation in all sins of omission and ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... not tire you with the various practices of usurious oppression; but cannot omit my transaction with Squeeze on Tower-hill, who, finding me a young man of considerable expectations, employed an agent to persuade me to borrow five hundred pounds, to be refunded by an annual payment of twenty per cent. during the joint lives of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... none. Credit was refused. Capital emigrated with its possessors. Commerce and agriculture languished. Misery spread over the land. The treasury was empty, for no contributions could be collected from an impoverished population, and the island's future was compromised by loans at usurious rates. ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... representative government. Kings borrowed money when they could, bankrupting themselves at intervals and sometimes wrecking their nations. Kings have always been uncertain pay. Not many loaned money to them willingly and only in small amounts and at usurious rates of interest. To float a "patriotic loan," it was often necessary to make use of the prison or the rack. With the advent of parliaments and chambers of deputies, the credit of nations improved and it became easy to borrow money. There was developed a special class of financiers, the Rothschilds ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Gordon Makimmon, would have no necessity for circuitous dealing; his course would be simple, unmistakable.—He would lend money at, say, three per cent, grant extensions of time wherever necessary, and knock the bottom out of the storekeepers' usurious monopoly, drag the farms out ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... you lose the bet, That you might pay your duns and debt. Consider, as the dice-box rattles, Your honour and unpaid for chattels. Think of to-morrow and its duns; Usurious interest, how it runs; And scoundrel sharpers, how they cheat you. Think of your honour, I ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... ululation, umbrage, unanimous, undulate, urbanity, usurious, uxorious, vacillate, vacuous, vandalism, variegate velocity, venal, venereal, venial, venous, veracious, verdant, verisimilitude, vernacular, versatile, vestal, vibratory, vicarious, vicissitude, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... old French, and Saxon terms were giving way on all sides to the English. It has been now for some time an allowed and understood thing that in these domestic backgrounds the growth of our country and the minuter traits of private life are to be studied with most clear and usurious profit. ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... apprehension of some momentous and far-reaching intrigue which he could not even foreshadow. And it was framing itself into being at a time when he had most prayed for their untrammelled freedom, when he had most looked for their ultimate emancipation from the claws of that too usurious past. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer |
