"Ruthless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of people; however, after the tribe had been governed for upwards of thirty years by such a person as old Fraser, it were no wonder if the greater part had become either rogues or fools: he was a ruthless tyrant, Belle, over his own people, and by his cruelty and rapaciousness must either have stunned them into an apathy approaching to idiocy, or made them artful knaves in their own defence. The qualities of parents ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... with him, but supposing any situation to arise in which our presence, nay, our very existence, became a danger to him and his plans—what then? He had a laughing lip and a twinkle of sardonic humour in his eye, but I fancied that the lip could settle into ruthless resolve if need be and the eye become more stony than would be pleasant. And—we were at his mercy; the mercy of a man whose accomplice might be of a worse kidney than himself, and whose satellites were yellow-skinned slant-eyed Easterns, pirates to a man, and willing ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... She would that they had finished her life! Why should she survive, except for vengeance? For not only were her hopes for Ireland fallen; not only were those who had trusted themselves to The McMurrough perishing even now in the hands of ruthless foes; but her brother, her dear, her only brother, whom her prayers, her influence had brought into this path, he too was snared, of his fate also there ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... breaking limbs and a shower of leaves and smaller twigs, the mighty bird of prey, extricating himself from every obstacle, tore his way into the leafy recess where his little victim waited, trembling. Every branch seemed agitated by his ruthless, irresistible advance, and the hanging nest swayed upon its slender branch, as the cruel talons of the intruder fixed themselves in the yielding bark. The weight of the monster bird upon the very branch which his little victim had chosen for a home caused it ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... throw the harpoon into each other ruthless, though? Why, you could see that old girl fairly squirm when she got one of them assault-and-battery glances. Her under lip would quiver a bit, she'd wink hard three or four times, and then she'd sort of collapse, smotherin' a sigh and not finishin' what ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... progress, throughout the savage state, man has been largely indebted to those qualities which he shares with the ape and the tiger; his exceptional physical organization; his cunning, his sociability, his curiosity, and his imitativeness; his ruthless and [52] ferocious destructiveness when his anger is roused ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... indictment against a body of noblemen and gentlemen; against an order that for two hundred years had been the right arm of the Church and the defender of Christianity against its most dangerous and ruthless enemies. No writer of fiction would have ventured on inventing such a trial, and no one unacquainted with mediaeval history would credit the record that grave prelates and learned judges drew up such a document, and then set themselves ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... with milk and honey; this very generation proved worse than their fathers. The original inhabitants of Canaan, whom they dispossessed, could hardly have surpassed them in sin against Jehovah; and therefore the ruthless slaughter of their conquest was as unreasonable as it was inhuman. So much for "God's ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... differing in many respects, they may be said to afford equal attraction to the traveller. Ellora can boast of the wonderful "Kylas;" Ajunta of those most interesting frescoes which carry the art of painting back to an unknown period, but which at Ellora have been almost totally obliterated by the ruthless and ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... gentlemen of Tudor times, with starched ruffs and buckled shoes; and one lovely marble figure, by a forgotten sculptor, of a young daughter of the house who had perished during the Great Plague. The ruthless hands that had chipped and spoiled many of the other monuments had spared this one, and the beautiful, calm face seemed to be resting in tranquil sleep, patiently waiting for the summons ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... Scarce I could from tears refrain; For her griefs, so lively shown, Made me think upon mine own. Ah! (thought I) thou mourn'st in vain; None takes pity on thy pain: Senseless trees, they cannot hear thee, Ruthless bears they will not cheer thee: King Pandion he is dead; All thy friends are lapp'd in lead; All thy fellow-birds do sing, Careless of thy sorrowing! Whilst as fickle Fortune smiled, Thou and I were both beguiled. Every one that flatters thee Is no ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... village, on a rise overlooking the river, stood the parish church, a grey, old Early-English building whose priceless architecture had mercifully not been tampered with by the ruthless hand of the so-called restorer. With a little difficulty Lenox found the cottage of the caretaker, whose wife presently came up clanking the big keys and unlocked the west door for them. The interior was most beautiful: ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... railroad schedule and formulating the arguments he meant to use against Dick's determination to give himself up. He foresaw a struggle there, but he himself held one or two strong cards—the ruthless undoing of David's work, the involving of David for conspiring against the law. And Dick's own obligation to the ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... 'Twas plain he liked his burden well. But in a wild-wood glen A band of robber men Rush'd forth upon the twain. Well with the silver pleased, They by the bridle seized The treasure Mule so vain. Poor Mule! in struggling to repel His ruthless foes, he fell Stabb'd through; and with a bitter sighing, He cried: "Is this the lot they promised me? My humble friend from danger free, While, weltering in my gore, I'm dying?" "My friend," his fellow-mule replied, "It is not well to have one's work too high. If thou hadst been a miller's ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... soothing one, scolding another, listening attentively, cutting complaints short, comforting, commanding, soliciting, I marvelled at the good fortune of that Petrograd committee. In spite of his kind heart—and he was one of the kindest-hearted men I have ever met—he could be quite ruthless in dismissal or rebuke when occasion arrived. He had a great gift of the Russian irony and he could be also, like all Russians, a child at an instant's call, if something pleased him or if he simply felt that the times were good and the sun was shining. I only once, in a ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... what you would say," interrupted the widow, "you would tell me that she is in the hands of pirates, ruthless villains who fear neither God nor man, and that, unless a miracle is wrought in her behalf, nothing ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... had been hopelessly cruel and ruthless, here started back with a gasp and a little cry, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that when gazing at tragedies, bull fights and crucifixions, man has felt his happiest; and when man invented hell, he made hell his heaven on earth. Couldn't this be a characteristic of all life? Couldn't the spheres be cruel and ruthless, too? ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... to her cost what even they could effect); they are to be "tribunes of the people," who are to act as their gratuitous legal advisers; and, when law is not sufficiently effective, the whole force of the army is to obtain what the said tribunes may conceive to be justice, by the practice of ruthless intimidation. Society, says Mr. Booth, needs "mothering"; and he sets forth, with much complacency, a variety of "cases," by which we may estimate the sort of "mothering" to be expected at his parental hands. Those who study the materials thus set before them ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... disenchantment he experienced gave even his iron frame a terrible shock. Yet his haughty temper forbade him to entertain offers of, still more to sue for, peace. Those surrounding him, including his nearest by kinship, were afraid of angering the ruthless man by unwelcome counsel. ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... knew to be awaiting him, Joe was utterly happy. It was as though a weight, which had been oppressing him for years, had suddenly been lifted from his shoulders. He would cheerfully have ridden on to any terror ever conceived by the ruthless Jake. Diane's welfare—Diane's happiness; it was the key-note of his life. He had watched. He knew. Tresler was willing enough to marry her, and she—he chuckled joyfully ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... driven to fearful deeds of violence; and, with a series of murders on his conscience, he eventually goes mad. Leubald, whose character is a mixture of Hamlet and Harry Hotspur, had promised his father's ghost to wipe from the face of the earth the whole race of Roderick, as the ruthless murderer of the best of fathers was named. After having slain Roderick himself in mortal combat, and subsequently all his sons and other relations who supported him, there was only one obstacle that prevented Leubald from fulfilling the dearest wish of his heart, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... to wring your neck for that!" he said. At the swift ruthless savagery in his tone the girl shrank back. Nicanor saw and laughed. "Since I may not, I'll take payment otherhow. As for the old man, let him squeal as best likes him. If they break him on the wheel, I shall go and tell ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... earlier utterances Bjoernson has been held up as Antichrist by the ministers of a narrow Lutheran orthodoxy, very much as the spokesmen of an antiquated caste-system of society have esteemed his ideas to be those of the most ruthless and radical of iconoclasts. But he is a stout fighter, and attacks of this sort only serve to arouse him to new energy. And so he toils manfully on for the enlightenment of his people, knowing that his cause is the cause of civilization itself—of a rational social organization, an ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... desires to travel anywhere abroad at whatever time, is of no consequence. On the other hand, the refusal of states to receive others, and for their own citizens never to go to other places, is an utter impossibility, and to the rest of the world is likely to appear ruthless and uncivilised; it is a practice adopted by people who use harsh words, such as xenelasia or banishment of strangers, and who have harsh and morose ways, as men think. And to be thought or not to be thought well of by the rest ...
— Laws • Plato
... finally retired with ample means and in the enjoyment of an honorable reputation. There he exercised a generous hospitality, and led a quiet rural life. He planted a mulberry-tree, which became a pilgrim's shrine to numerous travellers; but a ruthless successor in the ownership of New Place, the Reverend Francis Gastrell, annoyed by the concourse of visitors, was Vandal enough to cut it down. Such was the anger of the people that he was obliged ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... suggests a painful view of the universe, as Hobbes' natural state of war suggested painful theories as to human nature. War is evidently immoral, we think; and a doctrine which makes the whole process of evolution a process of war must be radically immoral too. The struggle, it is said, demands "ruthless self-assertion" and the hunting down of all competitors; and such phrases certainly have an unpleasant sound. But in the first place, the use of the epithets implies an anthropomorphism to which we have no right so long as we are dealing with the ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the mother of invention, and what the farmer class wanted in military knowledge, they made up for in practical sagacity directed to the intensely personal ends of protecting their own homes and families, their herds and stacks from the ruthless hands of the coming hosts! It was naturally expected that Napoleon would land and enter England from the South or East, and that in the latter case the inhabitants of Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire would, in the event of a flank movement ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... something very maidenly about the appearance of Augustus Clarence Percy Marmaduke Grobble. One could not imagine him doing anything unfashionable, perspiry, rough or rude; nor could one possibly imagine him doing anything ruthless, ...
— 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
... are open to the inclemency of the weather, or roughly boarded up. The stove, once of polished steel, is now brown and encrusted with rust as if the iron were 500 years old. It is impossible for an architect or artist to survey the ruthless and wanton destruction of this noble wing, unscathed and uninjured but by the hands of barbarous man, without feelings of the deepest regret and sorrow. How forcibly do the lines of the noble bard recur to the mind ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... flutter of unseen eagle pinions. A land without the tall and sombre figure worshipping the Great Mystery; without suns and snows and storms—without the scars of battle, swinging war club, and flashing arrow—a strange, weird world, holding an unconquered race, vanquished before the ruthless tread of superior forces—we call them the agents of civilization. Forces that have in cruel fashion borne down upon the Indian until he had to give up all that was his and all that was dear to him—to make himself over or die. He would not yield. He died. He would ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... Cecco, who flung him to Smee, who flung him to Starkey, who flung him to Bill Jukes, who flung him to Noodler, and so he was tossed from one to another till he fell at the feet of the black pirate. All the boys were plucked from their trees in this ruthless manner; and several of them were in the air at a time, like bales of goods flung from ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... Lanpher's comrade of the attractive smile and the ruthless profile walked into the room. He closed the door without noise, spread his legs, and looked ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... will sit when I shall stand, I know. [Sits them all down. And, Marian, you may sit among the rest, I pray ye do, or else rise, stand apart: These helps shall be beholders of my smart— You that with ruthless eyes my sorrows see, And came prepar'd to feast at my sad fall, Whose envy, greediness, and jealousy Afford me sorrow endless, comfort small, Know what you knew before, what you ordain'd To cross the spousal banquet of my love, That I am outlaw'd by the Prior of York, My traitorous ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... gen'rous maid, Whose only care is her poor lover's mind, Tho' ruthless age may bid her beauty fade, In every friend to love, a friend ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... re-christening was not asked. The name would have been cut in the same ruthless fashion whether he willed it or not. Fortunately, however, he welcomed his release, and this cheerful conformity to public sentiment earned for him at the outset of ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... was her conscience dyed with guilt, 105 Remorse she full oft revealed, Her blood by the ruthless Black Canon was spilt, And in death her ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Their waters amain In ruthless disdain, - Her who but lately Had shivered with pain As at touch of dishonour If there had lit on her So coldly, so ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... the cab. Aboard the receding boat the ruthless engine bells jingled on; the broad waterside and the city behind it seemed, from her decks, to draw away into the western clouds, and the yellow river spread wide its shores in welcome to her swinging form. Now its mighty current seemed ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... of mind to be impressed by my argument. I followed up my advantage. I undertook to send a ruthless flaming angel of a Cliffe to pronounce the inexorable decree of exile. After a few faint-hearted objections he acquiesced in the scheme. I fancy he revolted against even this apparent surrender to Gedge, although he was too proud to ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... he saw the familiar face looking at him with pensive, half-reproachful glances; and then a dark figure that was strange to him came between him and that gentle shadow, and thrust the vision away with a ruthless hand. At last, by dint of going over the ground again and again, always pleading Margaret's cause against the stern witness of cruel facts, Clement came to look upon the girl's innocence as a ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... depend upon it. Maginnis called him back, you know, and no doubt hauled him off bodily, positively refusing to let him pause for good-byes. A man of ruthless determination, is Maginnis." ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... how I am to make an impression," meditated Kate, as they drove on; "I suppose it would make an impression if I stood up and repeated, 'Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!' or something of that sort, as soon as I got in. But one couldn't do that; and I am afraid nothing will happen. If the horses would only upset us at the door, and Aunt Barbara be nicely insensible, and the young countess show the utmost presence of ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... won his cause. His scathing attacks, his magnetism, his ruthless insistence left an indelible mark upon the minds of the jury—such a mark as no subsequent comments from the judge could efface or even moderate. The verdict returned was unanimous in spite of a by no means favourable summing-up. The prisoner was ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... of Norba.] So ruthless an example provoked a desperate resistance at Norba. It was betrayed to Lepidus by night; but the citizens stabbed and hung themselves or each other, and some locking themselves inside their houses, set them in flames. A wind was blowing and the town was ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... brutality of the German soldier of to-day be the result not only of the ruthless command from the official higher up but also of the de-souling, materialistic influence of Socialism on the common people of Germany during the past twenty-five years? Is not the viciousness of Prussian militarism plus ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... oblivion,—by the latter, that it must be eternally reiterated. The procession of the torches defines the sorrow; and by this wild, despairing search in the darkness do we know that her daughter Proserpine, plucking flowers in the fields of light, has been snatched by ruthless Pluto to the realm of the Invisible. Then by the procession of Iacchus we learn that divine aid has come to the despairing Demeter; by the coming of, Aesculapius shall all her wounds be healed; and the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... babe is gone! Oh, spare my child, And strike my heart in twain!" To those ruthless men the lady knelt, But her piteous ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... and indifferent at her departure, with his thoughts on another woman, hoping for her death with criminal craving. Wretch! And he was still alive! And she, so kind, so sweet, buried forever, lost in the depths of eternal, ruthless death! ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... see her in white muslin, and she resolved that if it cost Docia her life she would have the flounces of her dress smoothed before evening. She, who was by nature almost morbidly sensitive to suffering, became, in the hands of this new and implacable power, as ruthless ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... of Arcot, Wade and Morey, challenged by the most ruthless aliens in all the universes, blasted off on an intergalactic search for defenses against the invaders of Earth and all ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... with the same logic, only think him the sole sensible person on the stage. Thus it comes about that the more completely the dramatist is emancipated from the illusion that men and women are primarily reasonable beings, and the more powerfully he insists on the ruthless indifference of their great dramatic antagonist, the external world, to their whims and emotions, the surer he is to be denounced as blind to the very distinction on which his whole work is built. Far from ignoring idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors in ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... in uttering its being according to its own laws. If I have afforded nothing else I have afforded glimpses into that world; and the question now is, What do we precisely gather, what can we be said to know of the laws of that world in which these swift, beautiful and apparently ruthless creatures live and move and utter themselves? I shall have to draw upon more than I have recorded here: cases which I have heard of, which I have read of in other men's books, as well as those which are related here as personal revelation. If I speak pragmatically, ex cathedra, it is not ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... land but also human life in sacrifice. We shudder as we picture the priest standing over his victim, his hands wet with the blood of his fellow man. We cry out in horror as we think of the lives these peoples sacrificed. We call it an inhuman glorification of a pagan deity. We call it a ruthless waste of wealth and human life. These practices we pronounce to be the result of a popular delusion—a false sense of obligation to the spirit of war. Yet from the time the Scythian drew the blood of his victim in homage to the great war god, even down ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... to fame, Or study keeping in the type you frame: If great Achilles figure in the scene, Make him impatient, fiery, ruthless, keen; All laws, all covenants let him still disown, And test his quarrel by the sword alone. Still be Medea all revenge and scorn, Ino still sad, Ixion still forsworn, Io a wanderer ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... since the time of those tiresome Picts and Scots—and for generations they had raided their neighbors' castles and lands, and carried off their cattle and wives and daughters and what not! They had seized anything they fancied, and were a strong, ruthless, brutal race, not much vitiated by civilization. These instincts of seizing what they wanted had gone on in them throughout eleven hundred years and more, and were there until this day, when Michael, the sole representative of this branch of the family, ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... the whole mystery, who had seemed to the boy to be spinning his very brain into dreams, rose, and, drawing near the bed, as if to finish the ruthless destruction, and with her long witch-broom sweep down the very cobwebs of ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... trains rushing through the dark, filled with raving maniacs, of men who have become like little children again. And yet when you hear, "The Germans are advancing! They are coming!" the German army seems to take on a supernatural aspect, to become a ruthless machine that drives everything before it in its advance, and in its wake leaves a country stripped of life—all the people and cottages rubbed off the ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... be the literary editors of several Boston papers, two celebrated painters, and several well-known professors of oratory," she said, and like Lieutenant Napoleon called upon to demonstrate his powers, I graved with large and ruthless fist, and approached my opening date with palpitating but ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... flute would have been broken in his ruthless hands and its fragments flung into the lake; but Wallulah, startled, caught it from him with a ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... of Parliament. But I warn them that, unless the just claims of youth to economic and intellectual independence are speedily acknowledged, the children of England will enforce them by direct action of the most ruthless kind. The brain that rules ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... the very hounds occasionally turn away, were unworthy entertainment even for the most ruffian enemy, when helpless and a captive; and such, alas! was the fare in those casernes. And then, those visits, or rather ruthless inroads, called in the slang of the place 'strawplait-hunts,' when in pursuit of a contraband article, which the prisoners, in order to procure themselves a few of the necessaries and comforts of existence, were ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... she prays, with the certainty of inspiration she works, and with the patience of genius she waits. At last she is becoming "as fair as the morn, as bright as the sun, and as terrible as an army with banners" to those who march under the black flag of oppression and wield the ruthless sword ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... doubtless know the horrors of an examination-room as well as I do. You know what it is to sit biting the end of your pen, and glaring at the ruthless question in front of you. You know what it is to dash nervously from question to question, answering a bit of this and a bit of that, but lacking the patience to work steadily down the list. And you have experienced doubtless the aggravation ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... the feet upon that path of nature along which a man may go strongly, consoled in solitude by a god-like sense of self-reliance. This immutable confidence is the essential power of stoicism, which does not, like the great oriental religions, tame personality by ruthless maiming, but teaches it to bear the brunt of adversities erect, like an athlete finely trained. Its very arrogance, its sufficiency, perforce commend it to those whose instinct urges to self-abasement: its lofty disregard of adverse circumstance ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... Dr. Bird with a chuckle, "it was merely a shrewd guess. We have twisted his tail so often that I figured he could not resist the temptation to come here and gloat a few gloats over us if he were here. I know his ruthless methods in dealing with his subordinates and I knew that they would never dare to resort to torture in his absence. No, old dear, we are safe until he returns. I hope he stays ...
— The Solar Magnet • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... was winning victories in the East, and the news of them somewhat disturbed the ruthless conquerors. But for the present they were absolute, and the saturnalia of blood went on. It ended at length ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... out with ruthless vigour—naturally raised up adversaries on every side. In the court itself Maachah and her party were implacable. Outside it the idolatrous priests, and all their hangers-on, whose vested interests were abolished, were plotting and scheming ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... experience; and foresight, let us add, since from his simple yet wonderfully powerful sketches there is gained an insight into all the mysterious workings of humanity, from the lulling of the babe in the cradle, the ruthless disruption of the apron-string that he is led with, because some naughty little boys laughed at him, to the tolling of the bell by the old sexton over ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... last law, Finds "Nature red in tooth and claw With ravin"; fierce and ruthless. But Woman? Bard who so should sing Of her, the sweet soft-bosomed thing, Would he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... countenance than long descriptions can convey: the width and flatness of frontal; the tapering elegance of contour disguising the strength of the deadly jaw; the long, large, terrible eye, glittering and green as the emerald,—and withal a certain ruthless calm, as if from the consciousness of an ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... advance parties, composed of their wives, to secure houses or lodgings in the bleak and inhospitable environs of their new station; while a rapidly ageing Mess President concludes yet another demoralising bargain with a ruthless and omnipotent caterer. Then—this is the cream of the joke—the day before we expect to move, the Practical Joke Department puts out a playful hand and sweeps us all into some half-completed huts at D, somewhere at the other end of the Ordnance map, and leaves us there, with a happy chuckle, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... had numbed and brutalized them; fatigue had rendered them irritable, and the strangeness of their environment had made them both fearful and suspicious. There was no good- fellowship, no consideration on the Chilkoot. This was a race against time, and the stakes went to him who was most ruthless. Phillips had not exaggerated. Until this morning, he had received no faintest word of encouragement, no slightest offer of help. Not once had a hand been outstretched to him, and every inch he had gained had been won at the cost of his own efforts ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... herds five thousand strong that screamed and stormed and crashed, flattening out villages in rage that man should interfere with them—in fear of the ruthless few armed men with rifles in their rear. Whole herds crashed pell-mell through artfully staged undergrowth into thirty-foot-deep pits, where they lingered and died of thirst, that Arabs (who sat smoking within hail until they ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... me! Miss Bannerworth, save me!—only you can save me from the ruthless multitude which follows, crying aloud for ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... which Las Casas and his co-workers laboured were discouragingly adverse. The mailed conquerors and eager treasure-seekers who followed in the wake of Columbus were consumed by two ruthless passions—avarice ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... was evidently wretched in it. Also he had the look in his eyes of a man whose boots are so tight that he wishes to die. His fancy waistcoat and maroon necktie must have been forced upon him by a ruthless salesman who would stop at no crime in the way of trade, and the consciousness of these atrocities and the largeness of his scarf-pin had reduced the poor fellow to the depths of gloom. In one hand he held a pair of yellowish kid gloves which hung limp and feeble, like the ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... too late? It was only by the greatest cunning, by the greatest determination, by the most ruthless disregard of everything that I succeeded in getting away from home. My younger sister tried to bar the door. Even the servant girl! But I told mama that if they wouldn't let me out through the door, they might just as well bar the window, else I'd reach the street through ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... inclement, unsparing, stern, unrelenting, ruthless, brutal, incompassionate, unkind; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... must be the delights of knowledge so gained! grand in themselves, and ennobling in their tendencies! Will it justify the same as a noble, a laudable, a worshipful endeavor to cover it with the reason or pretext—God knows which—of such love for my own human kind as strengthens me to the most ruthless torture of their poorer relations, whose little treasure I would tear from them that it may teach me how to add to their wealth? May my God give me grace to prefer a hundred deaths to a life gained by the suffering of one simplest creature. He ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... and abilities, could without assistance hope to achieve." My father, upwards of half a century since, commenced collecting mortuary memorials; many of the monuments from which he copied the inscriptions have since been destroyed by time, and many, very many, more by the ruthless innovations of beautifying churchwardens. These "very vast" collections—the labour of a life—however, only form a portion of the materials I now posses; for since I issued my prospectus in 1844, I have received ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... his government, their nation had attained its highest pitch of grandeur and glory. In revenge there existed in England (as is proved by a thousand authentic documents) a monster so hideous, a tyrant so ruthless and bloody, that the world's history cannot show his parallel. This ruffian's name was, during the early part of the French revolution, Pittetcobourg. Pittetcobourg's emissaries were in every corner of France; Pittetcobourg's gold ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... legend of the brave days of old, of sprites and pixies, of trolls and gnomes, of ruthless barons and noble knights. "The Silent Maid" herself, with her strange bewitchment and wondrous song, is equalled only by Undine in charm and mystery. The tale is told in that quaint diction which chronicles ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... gently stirred by the breeze, seemed to swell the concert of sweet sounds; but no human voice awoke the echoes there. It was as if the earth was speaking in thankfulness to its Maker, while man,—ungrateful and unworthy man,—pursuing his ruthless path of devastation and destruction, had left no being to say, "I thank Thee ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... homesick for mother. Babies were a mystery to me, although I had helped mother with all of hers. We had buried three of them in homemade coffins—pioneering is a ruthless scythe, and only the fit survive. I began to understand my mother and the glory in the character which never faltered, although she was alone and life had been hard. How could I whine when I had Tom and a good friend—and ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... Risk Quick, Sure Death in a Desperate Bluff on the Ruthless Martian Brigands. (Part Three of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... drums resound, Valiant brothers, welcome all, Crowd the royal standard round, 'Tis your injured country's call. See, see, the robbers come, Ruin seize the ruthless foe; For your altars, for your homes, Heroes ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... was a nice plot to face, and countermine! A plot that was only to be defeated by subtlety and strategy; for, at the most, there were but three of us, all told, against thirteen ruthless, treacherous men; and it was not to be forgotten that no dependence whatever was to be placed upon the man Harry; his scruples apparently drew the line at cold-blooded murder, but on the hither side of that, consideration for his own safety might tempt him to any ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... am Bess, brave in battle, ruthless to foes, a terror to nations, and oft drenching my right hand in the ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... justice, Jeremiah brings home to the hearts of his people the truths and judgments, with which he was charged, in the hard, hot realism of their austere world. Through his verse we see the barer landscapes of Benjamin and Judah without shadow or other relief, every ugly detail exposed by the ruthless noon, and beyond them the desert hills shimmering through the heat. Drought, famine, pestilence and especially war sweep over the land and the ghastly prostrate things, human as well as animal, which their skirts leave ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... had applied the restrictive proviso of 1820. Besides, only so recently as 1849, he had said, with all the emphasis of sincerity, that the compromise had "become canonized in the hearts of the American people, as a sacred thing, which no ruthless hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb." And while he then opposed the extension of the principle to new Territories, he believed that it had been "deliberately incorporated into our legislation as a ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... property that ought to have been restored was kept, it was kept not by Wolfe but by "Hangman Hawley." Still one could wish to see Wolfe fighting on a brighter field than Culloden, and engaged in a work more befitting a soldier than the ruthless extirpation ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... "Master, you have dipped pen in your heart, your phrases sear. Ruthless, unflinching, you have stripped naked your soul and set it here. Have I not loved you well and true? See! between us the shadows drift; This bit of blood and tears means You — oh, let me have it, a parting gift. Sacred I'll hold it, a trust divine; sacred your honour, her dark ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... fought in the battles of his country under the celebrated Morgan; survived the blast of British oppression; and now, in the decline of life, sits under his own well earned vine and fig-tree, near the grave of his unfortunate countrymen, who fell gloriously, while fighting the ruthless savages, under the command ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... described as a hard despot, ruthless as a tiger who strikes his fellow-workers numb and dumb with fear. "But he is under no illusions as to the real sentiments of the members of the Soviet who back him, nor does he deign to conceal those which he entertains toward them.... ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... that will not be erased, Or, save in incommunicable gleams Too permanent for dreams, Be found or known. No tonic and ambitious irritant Of increase or of want Has made an otherwise insensate waste Of ages overthrown A ruthless, veiled, implacable foretaste Of other ages that are still to be Depleted and rewarded variously Because a few, by fate's economy, Shall seem to move the world the way it goes; No soft evangel of equality, Safe cradled in a communal repose ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... for a long while I'd forgotten him entirely. He hung to the rail a little farther forward, gazing across the maelstrom with a fixed, exhausted expression. His face was haggard; the strain of the night had marked him with a ruthless hand. As I watched him, his eye turned slowly in my direction; he gave me an anxious look, then crawled along the rail to a place ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... may be a terrible thing, as in the sheeted cataract, with all its boiling eddies, or in the falling of the lightning from the womb of the cloud. There is desolation behind that, gigantic movement, ruthless force; but charm comes like a signal of security and good-will, and even its inevitable end is lit with something of mercy and quietness. The danger of charm is that it is the mother of sentiment; and ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... carried that look in my bosom like a caress. The girl in pink was an arch, ogling person, with a good deal of eyes and teeth, and a great play of shoulders and rattle of conversation. There could be no doubt, from Mr. Ronald's attitude, that he worshipped the very chair she sat on. But I was quite ruthless. I laid my hand on his shoulder, as he was stooping over her like ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is in not treating war as a game. To do so would be weakness and frivolity. War must be ruthless, must be frightful. It is not to be bound down by laws human or Divine. And even then she is not logical. Two German officers interned in Holland are released on parole. Taking their country at her word, they hasten back to rejoin their regiments. The German Staff is shocked, sends them ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of music seems to dwell in the face of the St. Cecilia; and the cup of maternal anguish to be filled to the brim, as in Guide's Murder of the Innocents, the mother clasps to her arms the terrified babe, and strives to flee from the ruthless destroyer. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... each in turn Beheld its schemes disjointed, As right or left his fatal glance And spectral finger pointed. Sworn foe of Cant, he smote it down With trenchant wit unsparing, And, mocking, rent with ruthless hand ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... or of the body politic, were evils to be overcome, at any cost of pain and sweat and blood, by a direct effort of the will. As he never yielded to fever and weakness in himself, so he dealt with the vice and frivolity he detested, crushing it out by a ruthless application of power, hunting it with spies, stretching it on the rack and breaking it on the wheel. But a gentler, more understanding method would have accomplished more, even for ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Riseholme was apt to be a little unkind; if you mentioned the absurdities of your friends, there was just a speck of malice in your wit. But with her there was none of that, she gave an imitation of Mrs Weston with the most ruthless fidelity, and yet it was kindly to the bottom. She liked her for talking in that emphatic voice and being so particular as to what time it was. "Now first of all you are coming to dine with me ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... they had days when they worked intensely, and Ludlow was as severe with Cornelia's work as he was with his own. He made her rub out and paint out, and he drew ruthless modifications of her work all over it, like the crudest of the Synthesis masters. He made her paint out every day the work of the day before, as they did in the Synthesis; though sometimes he paused over it in a sort of puzzle. Once ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... I have told you, the adventurers who met at my father's rooms talked of the ruthless savage—the lurking Indian of the forest and prairie, and also of our neighbours the Spaniards; but as soon as we reached the place, it seemed to all that the Indians did not exist; and as to the Spaniards, they were far ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... in that artificial age, and began to speak with his noble natural voice. He came the gentle satirist, who hit no unfair blow; the kind judge, who castigated only in smiling. While Swift went about hanging and ruthless, a literary Jeffreys, in Addison's kind court only minor cases were tried;—only peccadilloes and small sins against society, only a dangerous libertinism in tuckers and hoops, or a nuisance in the abuse of beaux canes and snuffboxes." Steele set The Tatler a going. "But with ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... Osorio, with her mysterious sweetness and duplicity, these are among the salient points of characterisation which stand out in this powerful book. La Espuma was a cry from the desert to those who wear soft raiment in king's palaces. It was the ruthless tearing aside of the conventions by a Knox or a Savonarola. It was stringent satire, yet tempered with an artist's moderation, ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... ride away to visit my estates (he spoke of them always in the plural, as though he owned a county or two). You have under you the best eyes and the keenest blades along the border for I attended to it! Be ruthless! Use them, work them—sweat them to death! Keep away from messes and parades; seek no praise, for you will get none in any case! Work! Work for ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... her. Even the cabin door and windows were gone, and every rope and spar and sail; the cook's galley, hold and forecastle plundered of every article worth carrying off, and an air of general desolation and ruthless ransacking pervaded ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... enslaving others, and mimics Divinity on the stilts of diabolism. Like the barbarian who thought himself enriched by the powers and gifts of the enemy he slew, he aggrandizes his own personality, and heightens his own sense of freedom, through the subjection of feebler natures. Ruthless, rapacious, greedy of power, greedy of gain, it is in Slavery that he wantons in all the luxury of injustice, for it is here that he tastes the exquisite pleasure of depriving others of that which he most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... are responsible for the creation, in such hot haste, of this Court, and for its instant entrance upon its ruthless work, may not be fully and specifically answered, with absolute demonstration, but we may approach a satisfactory solution of it. We know that a word from either of the Mathers would have stopped it. Their relations ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... for a short space, to be relieved from his burdens. For them both, so young, so helpless against powers that were ruthless in the accomplishment of wider destinies, they were allowed to find in these ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... known of all American literary productions; from their mountain home she had seen British troops march into Charlottesville, four miles away, and then, with household treasure, had fled, knowing that beautiful Monticello would be devastated by the enemy's ruthless tread. She had known Washington, and had visited his lonely wife there at Mount Vernon when victory hung in the balance; when defeat meant that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington would be the first victims of a vengeful ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Spartan, Draconian, stringent, strait-laced, searching, unsparing, iron-handed, peremptory, absolute, positive, arbitrary, imperative; coercive &c 744; tyrannical, extortionate, grinding, withering, oppressive, inquisitorial; inclement &c (ruthless) 914.1; cruel &c (malevolent) 907; haughty, arrogant &c 885; precisian^. Adv. severely &c adj.; with a high hand, with a strong hand, with a tight hand, with a heavy hand. at the point of the sword, at the point of the bayonet. Phr. Delirant ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the capitulation, and the "word of a general," violated the articles he had pledged his honor to maintain, disarmed and imprisoned the soldiers, sacked the churches, and gave the place up to all the ruthless cruelties and violences of a general pillage. Not only this, the too credulous Governor, Manivel, was himself imprisoned, plundered of money and clothes, and carried off on board the conqueror's frigate, with many of his unfortunate companions, to view the further spoliations of ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... Magnus's arm, her pretty light-brown hair in disarray, her large young girl's eyes wide with terror and distrust. What was about to happen she did not understand, but these men were clamouring for Magnus to pledge himself to something, to some terrible course of action, some ruthless, unscrupulous battle to the death with the iron-hearted monster of steel and steam. Nerved with a coward's intrepidity, she, who so easily obliterated herself, had found her way into the midst of this frantic crowd, into this hot, close room, reeking of alcohol ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... sympathy, and he had a rapid and correct perception of character. He was a thoroughly honest man, and, in the course of a life of great trial and vicissitude, even envenomed foes had never impeached his pure integrity. For the rest, he was unselfish, but severe in discipline, inflexible, and even ruthless in the fulfilment of his purpose. A certain simplicity of speech and conduct, and a disinterestedness which, even in little things, was constantly exhibiting itself, gave to his character even charm, and rendered personal intercourse ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... seemed to follow the brilliant officer, detected in that glance a sentiment of which the transient expression is known to every woman. She perceived with the deepest anguish that her visit would be useless; this lady, full of artifice, was too greedy of homage not to have a ruthless heart. ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... House, and ran furious races until they had ruined several fine horses. They beheaded sheep in the palace till the floors ran with blood, and then pelted the passers-by with sheep's heads. They spent the money in the royal treasury like water, and played so many heedless and ruthless boy-tricks that the period of these months of folly was known, long after, as the "Gottorp Fury," because the harum-scarum young brother-in-law, who was the ringleader in all these ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks |
