"Brutal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... steady her. But again the old dismay and dread and loathing would come back with a rush. All at once her body from head to foot would grow cold and rigid. And the power which a year ago with her sister she had excitedly sensed as the driving force of this whole town, now loomed brutal, savage! The thought rose suddenly in her mind, "Amy. She was his wife! Five years!" And then in a revealing flash, "Her love was ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... general voice of the people, to ascend the throne; and had, some time before, left for Rome to assume the imperial purple. He was joyfully acknowledged by the whole Roman empire; who had groaned under a succession of brutal tyrants, and now hailed the accession of one who was, at once, a great general and an upright and able man; and who would rule the empire with a firm, just, and moderate hand. When winter was over, Vespasian sent Titus—who had, in the meantime, gone to Egypt—back ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... get rid of her as speedily as possible, no matter to whom; and they would rather have had Bluebeard at a two-months' engagement than any other man at one of six. There is something so coarse and revolting, so brutal, in the notion of bringing two people together into such a relation as that of marriage on purely selfish grounds, and without the slightest regard to their future happiness, that any one who has seen the snare laid for himself or his friends may ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... rough boys in Liverpool had stoned a cat, and dragged it through a pool of water, no one of the many passers-by attempting to stop them; when a dog coming up was moved with pity and indignation at the brutal proceedings, which ought to have induced the human beings who witnessed it to interfere. Barking furiously, he rushed in among the boys, and then carried off the ill-used cat in his mouth, bleeding, and almost senseless, to his kennel at the Talbot Inn, to which he belonged. He there ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... upon the defenceless victims of their oppression. But, my friends, was it designed to be so? If our Heavenly Father would protect by law the eye and the tooth of a Hebrew servant, can we for a moment believe that he would abandon that same servant to the brutal rage of a master who would destroy even life itself. Do we not rather see in this, the only law which protected masters, and was it not right that in case of the death of a servant, one or two days ...
— An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South • Angelina Emily Grimke
... consisted of that brutal and most earthy figure who had stood forth so furiously in defence of the gallows,—the hangman, in short,—together with the last thief and the last murderer, all three of whom were clustered about the last toper. The latter was liberally ...
— Earth's Holocaust (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... intellectually; against the monotonous and insincere tirades of paid agitators and their restless disciples; against laziness; ignorance, greed, and exaggeration masquerading as popular scientific economy; and against the brutal and extortionate upthrust from below. And so we shall arrive at the reverse kind of folly, an admiration and bad imitation of foreign pride and pomp, an arrogant individualism and a hardening of our human feeling. ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... from all that was sordid and vile, from brutal solitary and jacket hell, from acquainted flies and sweats of darkness and the knuckle- talk of the living dead, I was away at a ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... loudly at the clinking chain. Then, as its wrath subsided by degrees, The mind sank slowly to infantine ease, To playful folly, and to causeless joy, Speech without aim, and without end, employ; He drew fantastic figures on the wall, And gave some wild relation of them all; With brutal shape he join'd the human face, And idiot smiles approved the motley race. Harmless at length th' unhappy man was found, The spirit settled, but the reason drown'd; And all the dreadful tempest died away To the dull stillness of the misty day. And now ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... The smashed fingers alone were painful to see, but there were other accidents much worse. Every man in the fleet had been compelled to fight desperately for life, and you cannot go through such a battle without risks. There were no malingerers; the bald, brutal facts of crushed bones, or flayed scalp, or broken leg, or poisoned hand were there in evidence, and the men used no extra words after they had modestly described the time and circumstances under which they met with their ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... animal, which had advanced a little, retired slowly in his front, until it arrived again at the pass, when, rearing on his hinder legs, it beat the air with its paws, in the manner practised by its brutal prototype. ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... the silence of the cell: The dull, numb pain of waking, Stillness ... Fear clutching oblivion; And then to hear The brazen, blasphemous tolling of the bell, A crash of doors, Loud-clanging tins, The swell of brutal voices nearer and more near, Bursts at the last about you. Clangour. Queer delight of movement. Then ... the door shuts. Hell darkens about you with the turning key, The silence burns and sears you like a flame; It battens as the worm that never dies; Crawls ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... by what I conceived to be the commercial profligacy of the age. Whether the world does or does not become more wicked as years go on, is a question which probably has disturbed the minds of thinkers since the world began to think. That men have become less cruel, less violent, less selfish, less brutal, there can be no doubt;—but have they become less honest? If so, can a world, retrograding from day to day in honesty, be considered to be in a state of progress? We know the opinion on this subject of our philosopher Mr. Carlyle. If he be right, we are ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... he accepted their assistance without objection; but he took pains not to encourage a guerilla war; and when his East Frisian peasantry revolted independently against the French and were severely punished by them for it, he told them with brutal frankness that it was their own fault, for war was a matter for soldiers; the business of the peasants and citizens should be uninterrupted industry, the payment of taxes, and the furnishing of recruits. He well knew ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... ambitions to carry out the orders of his employers. He explained the legal status of the affair, and passed quickly on to the exciting events of the night on which he had been bound and sent upon his ride into the forest, to meet some fate, he knew not what. He described the brutal slaughter of the moose, and the immediate dismemberment of the animal. He noticed with interest that many men who had displayed no emotion as he described poor old Joshua's sufferings now grunted angrily at hearing the revelation ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... Satronius, in more brutal language, all but duplicated what Vedius had said to me, only reversing the clan names. He was convinced that I had assaulted his men by prearrangement with the Vedians, after a mock ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Room could see the four-man crew of the thing. Grim faced men, men of the Orient they plainly were, coldly concentrating on the work in hand. Their faces were those of men who are merciless, even brutal, with neither heart nor compassion of any kind for weaker ones. One man maneuvered the aero-sub, while the other three concentrated on the apparatus in the nose ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... by all men. He and Hamilton had much in common, and to some degree he took Laurens's place; not entirely, for Laurens's idealism gave him a pedestal in Hamilton's memory which no other man but Washington ever approached; and Morris was brutal in his cynicism, placing mankind but a degree higher than the beasts of the forest. But heart and brain endeared him to Hamilton, and no man had a loftier or more burning patriotism. As for himself, he loved and admired Hamilton above all men. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... that prompted Schwalbe to act with consideration. Had he been untrammelled he would have sent his prey to the bottom without compunction, for he had all the brutal instincts of the kultured Hun. It was a superstitious fear that held his frightfulness in check—a presentiment based upon the Mosaic Law, an eye for an eye and ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... identified the bodies of those for whose death they are personally responsible. My ideas of fighting were all of hand-to-hand encounters—the kind of bloody fighting that rejoiced the hearts of pirates. I considered that it took a brutal kind of man to do such work. For myself I felt certain that, though I got the upper-hand of a fellow who had tried to murder me, I should never have the callousness to return the compliment. The thought of shedding blood ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... and belt, and spurred boots, a helmet under his arm, a cuirass on his breast, he will now enter like a chicken-hearted charity-school boy, and that assembly which he formerly whipped with a strong hand, like school-boys, laughed at and caricatured in often brutal sarcasm, ridiculed at every instant, ignored in the calculation of the budget and the army estimates during long years, and sometimes divided and dispersed by his strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... incestuous passion for Hortense, of which his fondness for the little Charles Napoleon was maliciously urged as proof; and the proposal, when made with trembling eagerness by Josephine, was hurled back by Louis with brutal violence. To the clamour of Louis and Joseph the Emperor and Josephine seemed reluctantly ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... brutal burglar burgle; Whilst sentiment will calmly gurgle Bland platitudes, but not attack That sacred thing, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... offended and filled with horror, a beautiful young woman, whom it was my duty to have protected from those brutal manners, to which ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... Francis had ordered. "'Tis barbaric! What lover would sigh beneath walls thirty feet thick! And the portcullis! Away with it! Summon my Italian painters to adorn the walls. We may yet make habitable these legacies from the savage, brutal past." ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... in widespread shortages of basic commodities. Ignoring international condemnation, MUGABE rigged the 2002 presidential election to ensure his reelection. Opposition and labor groups launched general strikes in 2003 to pressure MUGABE to retire early; security forces continued their brutal repression of ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the Marchesino's face, a fighting look that was ugly and brutal, but that showed a ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... twist of the eyebrow, "God help the unduly prosperous—and the merely plain! From the former—always, Envy, like a wolf, shall tear down every fresh talent, every fresh treasure, they lift to their aching backs. And from the latter—Brutal Neglect shall ravage away even the charm that they thought ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... not, I was unconscious of your presence. I would have preferred to have spoken behind your back. It is brutal to speak before any face. It might lead to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... cannonading was still going on, prolonging the conflict way into the night. Below the castle the soldiers were intoning a slow and melodious chant that sounded like a psalm. From the interior of the edifice rose the whoopings of brutal laughter, the crash of breaking furniture, and the mad chase of dissolute pursuit. When would this diabolical orgy ever wear itself down? . . . For a long time he was not at all sleepy, but was gradually losing consciousness of what was going on around him when he was roused ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... something unfinished and stolid and brutal about a Carnegie Library now. The spirit of the garden and the sea, of the spring and the light, and of the child, is not in it. They have come to seem to some of us mere huge Pittsburgs of brains—all these impervious, unwieldy, rolling-mills of knowledge. I should ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... gorgeous" figures in the fashionable world of London under three kings, he would certainly have considered his prophetic informant an escaped lunatic, and would probably have told him so, with the brutal frankness which was one of his most ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... silent tears, throw up its honest eyes and kneel or its tender kneeds to an inexorable blockhead to be forgiven the false quantity of a word in making a Latin verse.' Likely enough Johnson's roughness was in part due to this brutal treatment; for Steele goes on to say:—'It is wholly to this dreadful practise that we may attribute a certain hardiness and ferocity which some men, though liberally educated, carry about them in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of youth—content to eat and sleep and toil, so that I might enjoy life, and get plenty of excitement! I went to Peru first, and of course I joined in the fights that were so frequently stirred up between that country and its neighbour, Chili. A very little of that, however, sufficed. The brutal ferocity of the soldiery with whom I was mixed up, and their fearful disregard of age, sex, infirmity, or helpless childhood during war disgusted me so much that I finally cut the army, and took ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... children; his heart had only room for one thought—Bessie, pretty dainty Bessie, the belle of the country side. How would she fare at the hands of ruffians like these? He would die for her gladly, gladly, but his death could be of no avail. The men had come in now, and he scanned them one by one, brutal, cruel, convict faces, sullen and lowering; the only one that showed signs of good humour was that of the leader of the band, and his good humour was the more terrible as it seemed to prove how certain he was of them and how utterly ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... standing and who was talking very excitedly. He had his back turned to Lupin; but Lupin, leaning forward, caught sight of a glass in which the deputy's image was reflected. And he was startled to see the strange look in his eyes, the air of fierce and brutal desire with which Daubrecq ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... technical paternity than the accursed one she had to own to. Was there some terrible law in Nature that slow forgiveness of the greatest wrong that can be wrought must perforce be granted to its inflictor, through the gracious survivor of a brutal indifference that would almost add to his crime, if that were possible? If, so, surely the Universe must be the work of an Almighty Fiend, a Demiurgus with a cruel heart, and this the masterstroke of all his cunning. But what, in Heaven's name, was the use of bruising ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... friend's arguments and admonitions, I think I may venture to say, with a suitable spirit. The arrogant or disputatious passions could not possibly find place in a scene like this. Even if I thought him in the wrong, what but brutal depravity could lead me to endeavour to shake his belief at a time when sickness had made his judgment infirm, and when his opinion supplied his sinking heart with confidence ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... perverted to justify the most cruel punishments inflicted on helpless children. The word translated 'a rod,' is derived from the Hebrew verb 'to govern,' and, as a noun, signifies a sceptre, a pen, or a staff, the emblems of government. Brutal punishments, as practised in our army, navy, and schools, are not only inhuman and indecent, but have one direct tendency, that of hardening the mind and instilling a vindictive ferocious disposition. After bringing up a very large family, who are a blessing to their ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... of this wretched den was a poor woman, who fled into the darkest corner of the place as our Officer entered. This poor wretch was the victim of a brutal man, who never allowed her to venture outside the door, keeping her alive by the scantiest allowance of food. Her only clothing consisted of a sack tied round her body. Her feet were bare, her hair matted and foul, presenting on the whole such an object as ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... ye’ve slain the brutal pard Who in drink and slumber finds delight, By ye will stand of Norway land The King so bold with ...
— Marsk Stig - a ballad - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... excessive, they were wont as a rule to accept the change from the hardships of their former rough existence to the comparative comfort of the mission, if not exactly in a spirit of gratitude, at any rate with a certain brutal contentment. ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... the credit side of the proposition that the Jew is a good and orderly citizen. Summed up, they certify that he is quiet, peaceable, industrious, unaddicted to high crimes and brutal dispositions; that his family life is commendable; that he is not a burden upon public charities; that he is not a beggar; that in benevolence he is above the reach of competition. These are the very quintessentials ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... coming off, but kept my hold and pinched or pulled the cunt lip till she yelled and called me a brute. I told her I would hurt her as much as I could, if she hurt me; so that game she gave up; the pain of pulling my hair made me savage, and more determined and brutal, ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... me! Oh, no, you were brutal merely by accident! I thank you! I must thank you for pointing your unfeeling hints at the most invincib—I mean inveterate—bachelor in the ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... explorers kept coming back to the fearsome face of the conqueror. From the brows down, he was simply a huge, brutal giant; above his eyes, he was an intellectual. The combination was absolutely frightful; the beast looked capable of anything, of overcoming any obstacle, mental or physical, internal or external, in order to assert his apparently enormous ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... the majority reached? Friends, there were bribes, there were threats, there were all kinds of intimidation, there were blows, there was wrangling of every kind, there was banishment, there was murder. There has not been a political platform in the modern world evolved out of such brutal, conflicting, anti-religious conditions as those which prevailed before and in connection with the ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... then laid siege to Rhegium, to which he granted peace on severe terms. Caulonia and Hipponeum, two cities whose territory occupied the breadth of the Calabrian peninsula, fell into his hands. Rhegium surrendered after a desperate defense, and Phyton, who commanded the town, was treated with brutal inhumanity. The town was dismantled, and all the territory of Southern Calabria was united to Locri. It was at this time that the peace of Antalcidas took place, which put an end to the Spartan wars in Asia Minor. The ascendant powers of Greece were ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... truer rumours that the day was Rome's; but the people were sick at heart, and heeded them not. The shrines were thronged with trembling women, who seemed to weary heaven with prayers to shield them from the brutal Gaul and the savage African. Presently the reports of good fortune assumed a more definite form. It was said that two Narnian horseman had ridden from the east into the Roman camp of observation in Umbria, and ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... her last quarrel, that supreme petty trouble which often explodes about nothing, but more often still on some occasion of a brutal fact or of a decisive proof. This cruel farewell to faith, to the childishness of love, to virtue even, is in a degree as capricious as life itself. Like life it varies ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... it, seemed to have no terrors for it. I could not allow the men to fire at it, partly, I believe, from a sense of shame that we should thereby appear to take unfair advantage, and prove ourselves more brutal than the quadrupeds, whom nature had indulgently destined to carry us on their backs. The open down we traversed, consisted of rich black mould, in which there was fossil wood in great abundance, presenting silicified fragments so curiously wooden as to be only distinguishable ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... with which the man worked. The gradual application of pressure; the careful moving forward from bog to bog with the path of retreat always open. From sharpness to brusqueness. From the brusque to the harsh. From the harsh to the brutal. ...
— The Terrible Answer • Arthur G. Hill
... not so easy as it might seem. It was not a congenial atmosphere. Her whole society consisted of the stern, unemotional merchant and his vulgar, occasionally brutal, son. At first, while the memory of her father was still fresh, she felt her new surroundings acutely, contrasting, as they did, with her happy Fulham home. Gradually, however, as time deadened the sting, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a miracle! His disguise was very complete, I will confess to deceive one so well skilled in the human countenance. I saw nothing, sir, of his shaggy whiskers heard nothing of his brutal voice, nor perceived any of those monstrous deformities which are universally acknowledged to ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... in 1975, Mozambique was one of the world's poorest countries. Socialist mismanagement and a brutal civil war from 1977-92 exacerbated the situation. In 1987, the government embarked on a series of macroeconomic reforms designed to stabilize the economy. These steps, combined with donor assistance and with political ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... snapped upward, so that his teeth were bared. There was a knife at Richard's girdle, which he now unsheathed and flung away. He stepped eagerly toward the snarling Welshman, and with both hands seized the thick and hairy throat. What followed was brutal. ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... matter? The Well itself was so cool and chaste and dark and cavern-like, that it was worth long summer days spent dreaming over it—dreaming over it in the cloistered garden, out of the dust and the folly and the grossness of the brutal World, that knows ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... said Mrs. Brinkley. She knew that Alice was obviously referring to the breach between herself and Miss Anderson following the night of the Trevor theatricals, and the dislike for her that she had shown with a frankness some of the ladies had thought brutal. Mrs. Brinkley also believed that her words had a tacit meaning, and she would have liked to have the hardness to say she had seen an unnamed victim of Alice doing his best to console the other she had specified. But she ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... giving, and gratified its sarcastic humor by laughing, London took thought, perhaps, when it read the strange device on the banner carried by this Vauxhall contingent. "Curse your charity —we want work," said the white letters, staring threateningly out of a wide strip of red cotton. There was a brutal force in the phrase. It was Socialism in a tabloid. Many a looker-on, whose lot was nigh as desperate as that of the demonstrators, felt that it struck ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... population with the express purpose of ejecting the lawful government, but have conquered where conquest was not only hailed by the enslaved people but was a positive benefit, by the introduction of mild and equitable laws instead of brutal and bloody despotisms. We have not snatched from a weak republic, whose principles had been expressly formed on our own model, that which poverty alone obliged it to relinquish. If the writer, who appears to be an excellent man and ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... Emilius Paulus had been chosen consuls. Emilius belonged to the aristocratic party, and had given proof of military ability three years before when he had commanded as consul in the Illyrian war. Varro belonged to the popular party, and is described by the historians of the period as a coarse and brutal demagogue, the son of a butcher, and having himself been a butcher. But he was unquestionably an able man, and possessed some great qualities. The praetor Marcellus, who had slain a Gaulish king with his own hand in the last Gaulish ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... the assertion that his mentality was wandering. It assured him first of the competence which Lord Greystoke had promised to pay him for the deportation of the ape, and then of revenge upon his benefactor through the son he idolized. That part of his scheme was crude and brutal—it lacked the refinement of torture that had marked the master strokes of the Paulvitch of old, when he had worked with that virtuoso of villainy, Nikolas Rokoff—but it at least assured Paulvitch of immunity from responsibility, placing that upon the ape, ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... experienced at the South, with here and there delirious abuse of slave-holders and frenzied words about freedom. She could have matched every one of them, she said, with wife-murders at the North, during her visit. In dealing with people like the slaves, of course men of brutal passions, provoked by their stupidity and negligence, or exasperated by their crimes, and, in cases of ungovernable anger, venting their displeasure upon their negroes under slight or merely imaginary affronts, give occasion to tales of distress which are nowhere mourned over ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... death this cut-throat wild Groaned "Mother! Mother!" like a child, While that poor innocent in man's clothes Died cursing God with brutal oaths. ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... fact." On order a bamboo pole was fetched, and run between the bound hands and feet. Thus like some beast was Iemon conveyed to the nearest ward office. The formalities were few and soon over. To avoid chance of repetition of the scene they conveyed him as he was. Thus began the brutal progress across Edo in full daylight. People turned and stared after this escort of the man-beast. At a distance they took the burden as some savage bear, or perhaps one of those reputed "tanuki" so noxious in their pranks on humankind. Come closer it was seen to be a man. ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... think in your heart," said Janetta. Then, thinking that she had been a little brutal, she added, more gently—"But there is perhaps no need to decide to-day or to-morrow what we are to do. We can think over it and see if there is a better way. All that I am determined upon is that your doings must be ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Joe Montgomery, with his great slouching shoulders arched, and his grimy hands buried deep in his trousers pockets, stared at the dead man in stolid wonder. Colonel Harbison's glance sought the same object but with a sensitive shrinking as from an ugly brutal thing. A clock ticked loudly in the office; there was the occasional fall of cinders from the grate of the rusted stove that heated the place; these were sounds that neither Gilmore nor the colonel had heard before. Presently a lean black cat stole from the office ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... voice speak softly behind her, almost expecting to hear a mocking echo of the words unspoken. "Has the Queen no further use for her jester?" No further use! No further use! Oh, why was she tortured thus? Why, when her whole soul yearned to forget, was she thus compelled to remember the man whose brutal passion and insatiable thirst for vengeance had caught ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... augmented by others at the national capital, and it was proposed to lay the bare facts in the chief executive's hands and at least ask for a modification of the order. The latter was ignorant in its conception, brutal and inhuman in its intent, ending in the threat to use the military arm of the government, unless the terms and conditions were complied with within a given space of time. The Cheyenne and Arapahoe ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... and cold. They scarcely recognize the fact that the happiness of their spouses is in their keeping; if they ever do remember this, it is at table, when they see seated before them a woman in rich array, or when a coquette, fearing their brutal repulse, comes, gracious as Venus, to ask them for cash— Oh! it is then, that they recall, sometimes very vividly, the rights specified in the two hundred and thirteenth article of the civil code, and their wives are grateful to them; but like the heavy ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... her face in the sofa cushions and sobbingly sought relief in tears. That gave a vent to her feelings of hatred and rage against her heartless husband. Her whole soul rebelled against this brutal man whom she had married because he had sworn on his knees to her that he could not live without her. And now he roughly stamped into the ground the affection which she once had borne him. He desecrated all those recollections which are so dear ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... were too quiet to sound brutal, but they were wholly without mercy. Bertrand's hands gripped the arms of his ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... lower-middle—class. Conversation is perhaps coarser here; but whatever may be the reality, the moral standard generally accepted is superior to that of London. Such immorality as exists is necessarily of a coarser and more brutal type. In Melbourne, especially, the social sin is very obtrusive. Sydney has of late been acquiring an unenviable notoriety for capital offences, and it is not advisable for ladies to walk alone in the streets there at any time of the day. On the other hand, in Adelaide no woman ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... individuals, possibly in the small minority, who regard anything like fighting as brutal or ungentlemanly. In a sense—a very limited sense—they may be right, for, though our environment is such that we can never rest in perfect security, it does seem hard that we should have to be constantly on the alert ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... effort weighed upon the spirits of the household. At eleven o'clock, after tea, after dinner—three times a day—was the inexorable programme repeated, in spite of prayers and protestations. Mrs Chester's theory was that it was brutal to torture the child, and that if she were to be lame, for pity's sake let her be lame in peace. Rhoda suffered agonies of remorse and passionate revolts against the mystery of pain, but the nurse and her assistant never showed a sign of wavering. As a ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... his pudgy pillows like a fragile piece of china instead of a human being Carl Stanton lay and cursed the brutal Northern winter. ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... them but that of broken-hearted slaves. My own case was many degrees better than that of the other whites, as I have before noted; but I was perfectly well aware that the slightest attempt on my part to show that I resented our common treatment would meet with the most brutal repression, and, in addition, I might look for a dreadful time of it for the rest ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... one vessel for several months, and he moreover gave him a very bad character. It appears that he was a most desperate fellow, having been in prison on several occasions for violent conduct, and was noted for his brutal language and bad behaviour. He had been turned out of the French navy for insubordination, and while on the frigate was a perfect terror to his messmates. He was noted as the strongest man of the three hundred who formed her crew, and as Ducas said, "There won't be enough tears ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... out of the bag. It made a slight sound. When he saw the roll of banknotes in his hand, I observed the extraordinary gleam on his face. All the sentiments of love were there, adoration, mysticism, and also brutal love, a sort of supernatural ecstasy and the gross satisfaction that was already tasting immediate joys. Yes, all the loves impressed themselves for a moment on the profound humanity ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... the Roman morality is not lovely for its own sake, nor excellent in itself. It is obedience to law, practised and valued, loved for what resulted from it, for the strength and rigid endurance which it gave, but not loved for itself. The Roman nature was fierce, rugged, almost brutal; and it submitted to restraint as stern as itself, as long as the energy of the old spirit endured. But as soon as the energy grew slack, when the religion was no longer believed, and taste, as it was called, came in, and ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... surpassed expectations; and the troubles of "bleeding Kansas," which seemed to culminate in the assault upon Sumner and the destruction of Lawrence, had kept the free States in a condition of profound excitement. Such brutal outrages, it was thought, would certainly discredit any party that approved the policy leading to them. Sustained by this hope the convention, in its platform, arraigned the Administration for the conduct of affairs; demanded the immediate admission of Kansas into the Union under the Topeka ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... of ferocious and brutal aspect, here made a gesture of fearful meaning, as an appropriate finish to ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... felt that this perpetual confinement in the fetters of brutal ignorance would have been the greatest calamity which could have befallen us; if we viewed with gratitude the contrast between our present and our former situation; if we shuddered to think of the misery, which would still have overwhelmed us, had our country continued to the present times, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... the remainder, like Antonia. It was her latest vaudeville turn, imitating Antonia. He was careful not to look again in her direction until she had stopped doing what annoyed him furiously. He could not hope to make her understand to what point the debasing of beauty to brutal comic ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... knaves, and frustrate equally. And now," she added, snatching the dagger which Raoul had given her from the scabbard, "now die, infamous, accursed pandar!" and with the word she buried the keen weapon at one quick and steady stroke to the very hilt in his base and brutal heart. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... stared about him at the vulgar plushy place, he burst out laughing at what it was about to figure in the eyes of the law: a Home, and a Home desecrated by his own act! The Home in which he and Susy had reared their precarious bliss, and seen it crumble at the brutal touch of his unfaithfulness and his cruelty—for he had been told that he must be cruel to her as well as unfaithful! He looked at the walls hung with sentimental photogravures, at the shiny bronze "nudes," the moth-eaten ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... such as Russia. And this business formed the governor-general of Canada. As a boy in his teens he was sent into the counting-house, an apprentice to commerce, and so he escaped the 'education of a gentleman' in the brutal public schools and the degenerate universities of the time. Business in those days had a sort of sanctity and was governed by punctilious—almost religious—routine. In the interests of the business he travelled, while young and impressionable, to Russia, and mixed to his advantage with the ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... worthy of thy sighs. Life is a bitter, weary load, The world a slough. And now, repose! Despair no more, but find in Death The only boon Fate on our race bestows! Still, Nature, art thou doomed to fall, The victim scorned of that blind, brutal power That rules and ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... for long periods of time, and pretending that it doesn't exist. They are shocked because human nature is not at all like the pretty pictures we like to draw of ourselves. It is not so sweet, amiable and gentlemanly or ladylike as we wish to believe it. It is much more selfish, brutal and lascivious than we care to admit, and as such, both too terrible and too ridiculous to please us. The Elizabethans understood human nature, and made glorious comedies and tragedies out of its inordinate crimes and cruelties, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... skipping off with his friend Punch to enjoy his ocean bath. "The other," says Mr. Shirley Brooks, "is a very remarkable drawing. It represents a bull-fight as seen by a decent Christian gentleman, and for the first time since the 'brutal fray' was invented the cold-blooded barbarity and stupidity of the show is depicted without any of the flash and flattery with which it has pleased artists to treat the atrocious scene. That grim indictment of a nation professing ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... and these attributes engage him in his dispatches. These same dispatches are a stumbling-block to all who prefer to tread the beaten, sensational track, and to see in Cesare Borgia a villain of melodrama, a monster of crime, brutal, and, consequently, of no intellectual force. But Villari contrives to step more or less neatly, if fatuously, over that formidable obstacle, by telling you that Macchiavelli presents to you not really Cesare ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... fair bastard, at the arrival of our adventurer, who, being allured by her charms, apprised of her situation at the same time, took the generous resolution to undermine her innocence, that he might banquet his vicious appetite with the spoils of her beauty. Perhaps such a brutal design might not have entered his imagination, if he had not observed, in the disposition of this hapless maiden, certain peculiarities from which he derived the most confident presages of success. Besides a total want of experience, that left her open and unguarded against the attacks ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... the marks of rough handling by brutal prison guards. There were many disfigured faces. One man carried in a crude sling, an arm broken by a savage ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... the barn, and demanded in a loud voice what was the matter? when, to his horror, he beheld William upon the barn floor, and Mary struggling but in vain to rise. William, instead of desisting from his brutal purpose, with a dreadful oath ordered Dan to clear out; but the sight of the outrage on her whom, I now firmly believe he loved better than his own soul, made poor Dan completely forget himself—and made him forget ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... hundreds of Balaclava charges and sea-fights; outshining the flawless perfection of "Maud":—a poem written in heart's blood and immortal tears, with a wondrously potent and subtle imagination, and a fire of humanity to burn up whole mountains of brutal superstitions. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... A great deal of brutal tragedy has been endured in the world because the rudeness of the representation, or of the public, or of both, did not allow a really sympathetic reaction to arise. We all smile when Punch beats Judy in the puppet show. The treatment ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... seemed to recoil, his delicate hands fluttering in the air almost femininely. "No, no, my dear young man. You misunderstood me entirely. We do nothing so crude, so vulgar, so ... so brutal. Oh, sometimes we ... uh ... sometimes an accident happens to someone. But nothing, you understand, that we have anything to do with. Your technique with the poor Mr. Abrams, who was so suddenly taken ... ill ... had led me to hope you ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... with the vengeance of the Order if they betrayed its secrets, and on the other faced with torture if they refused to confess. Thus they found themselves between the devil and the deep sea. It was therefore not a case of a mild and unoffending Order meeting with brutal treatment at the hands of authority, but of the victims of a terrible autocracy being delivered into the hands of ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... back of the hotel, and met the girl. On delivering my message she smiled, made some joke about her friend, and looked at me as much as to say: 'You will do as well.' I had been drinking, and in the most brutal manner I took her into a closet. By some strange chance or state of nerves she gave me exquisite pleasure, but the orgasm came with me before it did with her, and in spite of her disappointment and protests I stood up and pulled her out of the place for fear some one should find us there. Still ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... righteousness are the qualities which the German people value in the highest degree, and which have brought it a good and honourable reputation in the whole world. When we make experiments in lies and deception, intrigue and low cunning, we suffer hopeless and brutal failure. Our lies are coarse and improbable, our ambiguity is pitiful simplicity. The history of the War proves this by a hundred examples. When our enemies poured all these things upon us like a hailstorm, and we convinced ourselves of the effectiveness ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... expressed in English seem a little behind the times, here and there more than a little brutal. He speaks with sympathy of suttee, and he quotes the Volga-Kalmucks with approval. This tribe, it seems, "treat their wives with the most exquisite patriarchal courtesy; but directly the wife neglects a household duty courtesy ceases (for the genius of the house is more ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... am a witch, and I know, I know! Come, I am spent. You men weary me, as men have always done, being but fools whom it is so easy to make drunk, and who when drunk are so unpleasing. Piff! I am tired of you sober and cunning, and I am tired of you drunken and brutal, you who, after all, are but beasts of the field to whom Mvelingangi, the Creator, has given heads which can think, but which always ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... daisy; of the stars that glow, and the men who expire, of the heart that beats and the wave that rises. And this is so clearly indicated here, is so overwhelming, that one shudders inwardly, as if this dual life centred in one's own body; so brutal and immediate is the perception of these harmonies and developments. For the eye also has its orgies ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... the water—they believed that he assented. Thereupon, taking the best slave, they bound him hand and foot; and, taking him ashore, they passed the boat over him with great force and weight until they killed him with brutal cruelty. The sacrifice was concluded in the house with the death of another captive, who was killed by the wife of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... the cause. The finest understanding for feminine characters, all of which are children of her heart, cannot indeed compensate for imperfect comprehension of the masculine way of thinking. Strictly speaking, Helene Boehlau knows of only two sorts of feeling for men: hatred of the brutal beast and admiration for an ideal, which is born of longing to embrace a lofty, victorious personality. In real life she has found the fulfilment of her longing in her husband, the strange prophet who as half a Turk gathered about himself in Munich a queer circle of auditors for his mystical ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... never in my life was more struck by the amount of knowledge possessed by one man. I attached myself to the professor, and he was pleased to admit me to his friendship. I have lately been surprised to hear his manners pronounced rough and even brutal, and his temper morose. For my own part—and I watched him closely—I saw nothing but gentleness, and an active disposition to do good at all times. The poor women and children in the hospital loved him as a father, and I have seen their pale cheeks flush, and dull eyes glisten ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... girl," she said, "he's not in the least brutal, as he seems from his books. You couldn't meet with a more harmless man if you hunted for a year. Don't you be alarmed—why, you silly girl, you are actually trembling! He is nearly as stout as I am, and much more good-natured, and you're ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... blind and friendless. Glaucus is kind to, and protects her, finally purchases her of her brutal master. She loves him passionately and hopelessly, saves his life and that of his betrothed at the destruction of Pompeii; embarks with them in a skiff bound for a safer harbor, and while all are asleep, springs ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... It seemed brutal to Frank, but she allowed herself time for neither thought nor scruples. All she remembered was that it was necessary—though once again she asked herself if all her life, from that day on, was to be made up of brawling ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... a revelation of what a good cook can do with vegetables in season; it was the quintessence of delicacy, the refinement of finesse, the veritable apotheosis of the kitchen garden; meat would have been brutal, the intrusion of a chop inexcusable, the assertion of a steak barbarous, even a terrapin would have felt quite out of place amidst things so fragrant and impalpable as the marvellous preparations of vegetables from that wonderful ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... understand. Listen! It may sound brutal, but you've got to understand my love for you. Supposing you disappeared, as Englishwomen do sometimes in the East. Supposing I searched, and found you, and you—you were—you were like the little tweeny girl. What should I do? Why, Damaris, unless you came to me and ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... made for a new expedition against the savages. Now that Bacon had a commission signed by the Governor and confirmed with the public seal, men were quite eager to follow him. On all sides volunteers flocked in to offer their services against the brutal enemy. Even Councillors and Burgesses encouraged their neighbors to enlist, declaring that no exception could be taken to the legality of the commission.[614] Thus hundreds swallowed "down so fair a Bait, not seeing Rebellion at ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... run at about one-third speed and the step-water shut off for 15 or 20 seconds. This causes grooves and ridges on the faces of the step-bearing blocks, due to their grinding on each other, which obstruct the flow of water between the faces and thus raises the pressure. It seems a brutal way of getting a scientific result, if the result desired can be called scientific. The grooving and cutting of the step-blocks will not do any harm, and in fact they will aid in keeping the revolving parts of the machine turning about ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... Berne, who, in a three-weeks' campaign of murder, violence and pillage, utterly devastated and conquered the above provinces, burning the chateaux, decapitating their defenders and soiling the reputation of the Swiss soldier by inexcusable acts of cupidity and ferocity. Never was so venal and brutal a war waged at the will of a foreign and detestably traitorous king, and the coming of the great Duke Charles was awaited by all the inhabitants of the Romand country as a welcome deliverance from the hated Bernois. Postponing his Italian campaign, Duke Charles, ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... twinkle in his eye that both Paul and Arthur saw. They had been treated very well so far. They had seen nothing, as a matter of fact, to make them think that the Germans were brutal. They made war, and that is brutal in itself. The gentlest men, when they are engaged in a campaign, must do things that they would never attempt of their own ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... principle is pushed to the length of not requiring them to learn anything but what has been made easy and interesting, one of the chief objects of education is sacrificed. I rejoice in the decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which, however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new, as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable of doing anything which is disagreeable to them. I do not, ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill |
