"Savagery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... included English, French and Dutch sailors, and were complemented occasionally by bands of native Indians, there are few instances during the time of their prosperity and growth of their falling upon one another, and treating their fellows with the savagery which they exulted in displaying against the subjects of Spain. The exigencies, moreover, of their perilous career readily wasted their suddenly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... cry from the savagery of the illicit mountain still to that consummate luxury of civilization, an ocean-going steam yacht. Yet, in actual space, the distance between these two extremes was not great. The Josephine, all in snowy white, save for the gleam of polished brass-work, and ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... harmoniously confronted with the chaos of the rocks and mountain- streams. Those grounds of Sir William H—-'s are a double paradise, the wild Eden of the Past side by side with the cultivated Eden of the Future. How its alternations of Art and Savagery at once startle and relieve the sense, as you pass suddenly out of wildernesses of piled boulders, and torrent-shattered trees, and the roar of fern- fringed waterfalls, into "trim walks, and fragrant alleys green; and the door of ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... dreary and bitter speculations as to the probable causes which had led Pauline to desert him openly for the Englishman. Why had he not the power, the audacity, the social courage which the guide undoubtedly possessed, to seize her and bear her off bodily on these occasions? This—a relic of savagery—would alone overcome the ease with which Crabbe confronted him, and despite vices and faults usually carried off the palm. As one progressed the other retrograded; the Englishman, dreaming of a good name and character restored, lay peacefully beneath Poussette's roof, not ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... returned to the crevasses. Free of the magic of the sky, with the curtains of night drawing in, the mighty savagery of the bare mountains in their disdain of man and imagination reasserted itself. It dropped Mary Ewold from the azure to the reality of Pete Leddy. She was seeing, the smoking end of a revolver and a body lying in a pool of blood; and there, ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... women," he went on. "So fanciful and delicate, so sensitive you're afraid to lay a finger on them. So unselfish, too, some of them, they seem too good for this old rough and tumble of a world. And yet touch 'em home, and they'll show an unscrupulous savagery of which we coarse brutes of men should be more than half ashamed. God Almighty made a little more than He bargained for when He made woman. She must have surprised Him pretty shrewdly, one would think, now and then since the days of the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... There was no trace of any instigation from the North in any form. It seemed not a stroke for freedom by men worthy to be free; not even a desperate revolt against intolerable wrong; but more like an outbreak of savagery, the uprising of the brute in man, thirsty for blood. The fear at first prevailed that there existed a widespread conspiracy, and various legislation for protection and repression was enacted ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... the things which surround him, but the most cursory acquaintance with primitive art shows that he is much more apt to crudely geometrize. Now it is not necessary to assume that we are to revert to the conditions of savagery in order to believe that in this matter of a sound aesthetic we must begin where art has always begun—with number and geometry. Nevertheless there is a subtly ironic view which one is justified in holding in regard to ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... more ordinary type, and this sordid note continues through the three final volumes. I have said that Faustus is an allegory of 'man's inhumanity to man.' That is emphatically, in more realistic form, the distinguishing feature of Celebrated Trials. Amid these records of savagery, it is a positive relief to come across such a trial as that of poor Joseph Baretti. Baretti, it will be remembered, was brought to trial because, when some roughs set upon him in the street, he drew a dagger, which he usually carried 'to carve fruit and sweetmeats,' and killed his assailant. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... But there Jack Danby was in his own element. There had never been an animal yet, wild or tame, that he had ever seen, with which he could not make friends. He dropped to one knee now, while the others watched him, and spoke to the dog. In a moment the savagery went out of the bulldog, who, as it seemed, was really little more than a puppy, and he came playfully up to Jack, anxious ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters - or Jack Danby's Bravest Deed • Robert Maitland
... the savagery which suddenly edged the voice of the man who had first greeted him. There was contempt in it—and an assumption of personal superiority ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... more and more impressed, as the summer goes on, with the inequality of man's fight with Nature; especially in a civilized state. In savagery, it does not much matter; for one does not take a square hold, and put out his strength, but rather accommodates himself to the situation, and takes what he can get, without raising any dust, or putting himself into everlasting opposition. But the minute he begins to clear a spot larger ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in the many play versions of the story—the element that urges Giovanni's suspicion to quick action—the dramatic force of Pepe in Boker; the disappointed motherhood and embittered love of Lucrezia in Stephen Phillips; the inborn savagery of Malatestino in D'Annunzio; the innocent unconsciousness of Concordia in Crawford, which finds similarity in a scene in Maeterlinck's "Pelleas and Melisande" between father and little son. Further, in Uhland, a distorted glimpse of a colourless reportorial figure ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... stream of Marvell's music ran, So let the household melodies be sung, The pleasant pictures on the wall be hung— So let us hold against the hosts of night And slavery all our vantage-ground of light. Let Treason boast its savagery, and shake From its flag-folds its symbol rattlesnake, Nurse its fine arts, lay human skins in tan, And carve its pipe-bowls from the bones of man, And make the tale of Fijian banquets dull By drinking ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... such matters, those who desire to know how much human beings can endure, and of what savagery they can be capable when hunger drives them, may find these details set out in the pages of Josephus, the renegade Jewish historian. It serves no good purpose and will not help our story to repeat them; indeed for the most part they are too terrible to be repeated. History ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... in this, divides the history of mankind into three main epochs:—savagery, barbarism and civilization. Each of the two first ones he again divides into an under, a middle and an upper period, each distinguishing itself from the other by certain innovations and improvements, predicated in each instance upon the control over subsistence. Morgan, accordingly, exactly in the ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... much lighter colour than any of her schoolmates, but her physiognomy was of the usual Kafir type. Her father was an Englishman, and her mother a Gaika Kafir; she had passed her childhood in a native hut, and when, five years previously, she was sent to the mission, she was in a condition of absolute savagery. In the mission school her Aryan blood told; she kept easily ahead of the other girls, and took all the ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... lower classes in the great city, and not merely that portion of the lower classes who are qualified by the appellation of the dangerous classes, but in strata where at least a moderate degree of civilization might be hoped for, an amount of savagery, of lawlessness, and of cruelty prevailed that would have not ill become the pirates of the Spanish Seas or the most brutal of Calabrian brigands. The hideous institution of the pillory stimulated and fostered all the worst instincts of a mob to whose ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... is evident that man's original state was not one of savagery. Indeed there is abundant evidence to show that man has been degraded from a very much higher stage. Both the Bible and science agree in making man the crowning work of God, and that there will be no higher order of beings here on the earth than man. We must not forget that while man, from ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... while assuming such excessive superiority over, his former equals. No one also is more hopeless about the civilisation of Africa than the semi-civilised African returning to the 'home of his fathers.' He feels how hard has been his struggle to emerge from savagery; he acknowledges, in his own case, a selection of species; and he foresees no end to the centuries before there can be a nation equal even to himself. Yet in England and in books he will cry up the majesty of African kings,—see, for a specimen, Bishop Crowther's 'Niger Diary.' He will give ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... unique epistle to her husband, and he crushed it. There was an ill-repressed, terrifying savagery in the act, and her heart was torn between fear and pity for this lone message of good-will. Whatever its wording, such it was. A dark red flush had mounted his forehead to the roots of his ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... obtain, and pore over them at intervals, even in those sadly fallen times he spent at Chislehurst. And he had material for reflection enough, for in no way, I take it, can a public man learn what a world of savagery, hatred, cruelty, and uncharitableness lies, not so much in man's mind, but in that corner of it which we euphemistically term his "humour," as in following the handiwork of the political caricaturist ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Aguinaldo was preparing to deliver upon and in Manila was not to be a mere raid such as the bandits of Cavite were in the habit of making upon the defenceless towns. The plan was a piece of calculated savagery in which murder and outrage were considered means to accomplish a purpose. The servants were to kill their employers; organized bands, dressed in the dress of civilians, living in the city of Manila under the government of the Americans, in many cases employed by the Americans, were to suddenly ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... and with so cynical a completeness. He should return; he should not triumph in his self-righteousness, be a living reproach to her always by his careless indifference to everything that had ever been between them. If he treated her so because of what she had done to him, with what savagery might not she be treated, if all that had happened in the last three years were open as ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a man like Connolly, and they were merely taking their turn at being drilled and disciplined. They were raised against the police who, in the big strike of two years ago, had acted towards them with unparallelled savagery, and the men had determined that the police would never again find ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... advance from savagery to barbarism there comes a time in the history of all kinds of textile products at which the natural technical progress of decorative elaboration is interfered with by forces from without the art. This occurs when ideas, symbolic or otherwise, come ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... worm," he cried, with sudden savagery. "Take it, you miserable fool," he added, as Scipio remained unheeding. "It wouldn't blow even your fool brains out. Take it!" he reiterated, with a command the other could no longer resist. "And now get out of here," he went ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... the magic realm opened, forthwith became its exploiter to its vast renown and his own large profit, coining its wealth of minerals, lumber, cattle, and grain, and adventurously building the railroads that must always be had to drain a new land of savagery. ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... now to say anything of the horrors of uncivilised savagery and hopeless abject misery which we witnessed. They are painted in my mother's book, and should any reader ever refer to those pages for a picture of the state of things among the factory hands at that time, he may take with him my testimony to ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... lighter ones a quaint felicity of unexpected humor, in his expositions a vividness of presentment, in his arguments a sledge-hammer force, all of which are not to be found together anywhere else, and none of which is to be found anywhere in quite the same form. And despite the savagery, both of his indignation and his laughter, there is no greater master of tenderness. Wherever he is at home, and he seldom wanders far from it, the weapon of Carlyle is like none other,—it is the very ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... busy!" he ordered sharply, jerking his hand toward a, trunk that stood at the foot of the cheap iron bedstead. "Get that opened. Hurry up! And see that you don't leave any scratches on it, or—you understand!" He leaned forward, leering with sudden savagery at ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... the part of Garman's guards, and his heart sank. Was it possible that their flight had some connection with Annette's disappearance? They were all desperate men, the most vicious Of criminals, who had fled to safety in the cypress swamps because their savagery unfitted them for existence in a civilized environment. Inflamed by moonshine whiskey they would be capable of anything, even of forgetting for the moment of ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... is the wide expanse of open country—smooth, level, stretching away to the dim horizon. The tonga turns the corner and enters a new world. A cooler breeze is blowing. A single step has led from peace to war; from civilisation to savagery; from India to the mountains. On all sides the landscape is wild and rugged. Ridge succeeds ridge. Valley opens into valley. As far as the eye can reach in every direction are ragged peaks and spurs. The country of the plains is left, ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... The terms were that he should march out with his soldiers and the civilians of the place, and should be escorted in safety to Fort Edward, about eighteen miles to the south. This time the savages surpassed themselves in treachery and savagery. They had formally approved of the terms of surrender, but they attacked the long line of defeated English as they set out on the march, butchered some of their wounded, and seized hundreds of others as prisoners. Montcalm ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... she was herself, reaching for the thing of the moment, and the roar outside the palisade, constantly rising in volume, in menace and savagery, brushed out of her brain every cloud of shock. Laroux caught her ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... while, outside, darkness creeps over all, and the thousand and one indentations and peaks of the old roofs are depicted, as if in black festoons, on the clear golden sky. At this moment, over merry, laughing Japan, suddenly passes a sombre shadow, strange, weird, a breath of antiquity, of savagery, of something indefinable, which casts a gloom of sadness. And then the only gayety that remains is the gayety of the young children, of little mouskos and little mousmes, who spread themselves like a wave through the streets filled with shadow, as they swarm from schools ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... form. An old man on a Semitic throne baffles the modern Attilas, and the recent invasion of the barbarians, under the form of red republicans, socialists, communists, all different phases which describe the relapse of the once converted races into their primitive condition of savagery. Austria would long ago have dissolved but for the Semitic principle, and if the north of Germany has never succeeded in attaining that imperial position which seemed its natural destiny, it is that the north of Germany has never at any ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... sort there was no other reading of a light kind in 1724. It was Eliza Haywood or nothing. The men of the same class read Defoe; but he, with his cynical severity, his absence of all pity for a melting mood, his savagery towards women, was not likely to be preferred by "straggling nymphs." The footman might read Roxana, and the hackney-writer sit up after his toil over Moll Flanders; there was much in these romances to interest men. But what had Ann Lang to do with ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... two or three admissions. We have no right to hinder, nor do we seek to prevent, the legitimate development of the colonial power of France. So far as France can replace savagery by true civilization, we shall rejoice in her advances in any part of the world. And further, we have no right to, nor do we pretend to the exercise of, the duty of police of the world. But at the same time, while we ought not and cannot undertake such extensive responsibilities, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... suits the weakness of Richard II. or Henry VI. or Shakespeare himself better than it suits the hardy Bastard. Even as a young man Shakespeare hated the cruelty of ambition and the savagery of war as much as he loved all the ceremonies of chivalry and observances of ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... one source. For among the most refined habits and methods the most barbarous and disgusting acts are found. A refined and humane spirit of culture seems, by some method, or at some time, to have been grafted on to a spirit of primitive savagery, and each to have retained its character and practices. But their social system was not an unhappy one for their people. It was an epoch of handiwork, where all were employed and all were fed; and if there were few comforts ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... game, the white man's game," Dick laughed. "She's not afraid of him, and he knows it. She outgames him, out-savages him, teaches him what savagery is in ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Jamaica insurrection is another hopeful piece of business. That platform-sympathy with the black—or the native, or the devil—afar off, and that platform indifference to our own countrymen at enormous odds in the midst of bloodshed and savagery, makes me stark wild. Only the other day, here was a meeting of jawbones of asses at Manchester, to censure the Jamaica Governor for his manner of putting down the insurrection! So we are badgered about New Zealanders ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... his hand and came forward, upon his face some indescribable emotion which removed it from mere savagery, some half-chivalrous impulse born perhaps of a barbaric egotism and self-confidence, perhaps of that foolhardy and vain love of risk which had made White Calf chief of his people and kept him so. He stood silent for a moment, his arms folded ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... Japanese isle the exiles had retained all of their medieval military savagery, to which had been added the aboriginal ferocity of the head-hunting natives they had found there and with whom they had intermarried. The little colony, far from making any advances in arts or letters had, on the contrary, relapsed into primeval ignorance as deep as that ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of the flight over the man-trapped, wild-pig runs of the mountain bush-men; and of the final rescue by Tasman, he who was hatcheted only last year and whose head reposed in some Melanesian stronghold—and all breathing of the warmth and abandon and savagery of the burning ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... hung very low, and in the twilight and smoke the savagery of the Wilderness became fiercer than ever. The dusk gathered around Lee, but his erect figure and white horse still showed distinctly through it. Harry, his spirit touched by the tremendous scenes in the very ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... WOULD think more of him if he gave up the old fighting ways for her sake. Certainly armed resistance to her uncle's first edict would not please her. She had said he was too violent, so he would show her he could lay his savagery aside. She might smile on him approvingly, and that was worth taking a chance for—anyway it would mean but a few days' delay in the mine's run. As he reasoned he heard a low voice speaking within the open door. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... But the savagery of the whole affair stuck in Lloyd's imagination. There was a primitiveness, a certain hideous simplicity in the way Bennett had met the situation that filled her with wonder and with even a little terror and mistrust of him. The vast, brutal directness of the deed was out of place ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... Ayres at that time, were perforce ardent Federalists and detesters of the "savage Unitarios." Farragut mentions an incident occurring at an official festivity in honor of Rosas, which shows the savagery that lay close under the surface of the Argentine character at that time, and easily found revolting expression in the constant civil strife and in the uncontrolled rule of the dictator. "In the ball-room was a picture ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... of their promoters. The conditions of success in business for the white race are so exacting, uncertain, changeable and inscrutable that only ten per cent retire from the contest victorious. When we recall the fact that the colored people have come so recently from savagery, through the barbarism and debasing effects of American slavery, into the light of the present-day civilization, we should expect them to be slow in getting a footing in the shifting and ever-changing sands of the business world, while in slavery they were ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... fallen back into heathen savagery. One of these, who was found in a war party, painted and armed like the rest for a foray against the whites, said to a Christian brother: "I cannot but have bad thoughts of our teachers. I think it was their fault that so many of our countrymen were murdered ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... epochs are determined by economic arrangements. But a system of property always contains within itself "the seeds of its own destruction." Mechanical inventions suggest a change: a dispossessed class compels it. So mankind has progressed through savagery, chattel slavery, serfdom, to "wage slavery" or the capitalism of to-day. This age is pregnant with ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... system shrewdly devised to meet the known weaknesses of the Indian character. By it extensive tracts have been set apart for the warlike tribes, within which they may pursue all their customs and habits of life, and indulge themselves in savagery, being also subsisted thereon to the extent of their actual necessities, but outside of which bands or parties are liable to be struck by the military at any time, without warning, and without any implied hostility to those members of the tribe who remain ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... independent, and have so far advanced in civilization that they make their own laws, administered through officers of their own choice, and educate their children in schools of their own establishment and maintenance, others still retain, in squalor and dependence, almost the savagery of their natural state. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward. I have never since been able to see a number of hands held upward, even when they are moving rhythmically in a calisthenic exercise, or when they belong to a class of ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Of savagery in which the Fates Had given him birth and dwelling-place— And so, descending through estates Of gentle vassalage, his race Had come to those ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... is torn and gashed with ancient earthquake upheavals, and there are perpendicular cliffs, deep clefts and gorges, black holes filled with water, and swift torrents dashing over precipices and falling into caverns—in a word, all the fantastic savagery of volcanic scenery, but the whole covered with the ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... finds its expression not only in the mythic tales, but in the organization of the people into society, in their daily life and in their habits and customs. There is a realm of anthropology in this lower state of mankind which we call savagery, that is hard to understand from the standpoint of modern civilization, where science, theology, religion, medicine and the esthetic arts are developed as more or less discrete subjects. In savagery these great subjects are blended in one, as they ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... by neglect and infidelity, while he treats his numerous mistresses just as the Turk treats the creatures of his harem— merely as so many pretty soft animals, requiring to be fed with sweets and ornamented with jewels, and then to be cast aside when done with. All pure savagery! But we are slowly evolving from it into something better. A few of us there are, who honour womanhood,- -a few of us believe in women as guiding stars in our troubled sky,- -a few of us would work and climb to greatness for love of the one woman we ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... again and again gone home; and mingled with them, hoarse raging cries of triumph. Many minutes they lasted, those noises of the night, sound-emblems of all the cruelty in the heart of Nature; till at last death appeased that savagery. And any soul abroad, that pitied fugitives, might once more listen, and not weep. . ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to outward practices; the warrior bent the knee, but his heart remained the same. The spirit of the new religion could not as yet penetrate his soul; he remained doubtful between old manners and new beliefs, and after fits of repentance and relapses into savagery, the converted chieftain finally left this world better prepared for Walhalla than for Paradise. Those who witnessed his death realised it themselves. When Theodoric the Great died in his palace at Ravenna, piously and surrounded ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... savage, to the cave-dwellers and stone-implement man of Pleistocene times, and so on to our rude ancestors whom we see dimly at the dawn of history, and thus rapidly upward to the European man of our own era. What a record! What savagery, what thwartings and delays, what carnage and suffering, what an absence of all that we mean by intelligent planning and oversight, of love, of fatherhood! Just a clash of forces, the battle to the strong and ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... his wife, and the aged pair passed into a brush hut beneath some stately pines. I, too, turned toward the wagon which was to carry me back to camp, meditating long and deeply on the remarks of this strolling compound of savagery and education. Environment is largely responsible for man's condition. Here was a man who had acquired considerable knowledge of the world and books, he was still a savage in his manner of life and ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... affair of outposts. Those who realize the destructiveness of the late war, the devastation and impoverishment, the lowering of the level of civilization throughout vast areas, the general increase of hatred and savagery, the letting loose of bestial instincts which had been curbed during peace—those who realize all this will hesitate to incur inconceivably greater horrors, even if they believe firmly that Communism in itself is much to be desired. An economic system cannot be considered apart from the population ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... deathbed torment, the snarl of petty spite, the low fierce cry of triumphant malice, the long-drawn shriek of futile rage. There was commonly an element of unreason, extravagance, even grotesqueness, in the hatreds that caught his eye; he had a relish for the gratuitous savagery of the lady in Time's Revenges, who would calmly decree that her lover should be burnt in a slow fire "if that would compass her desire." He seized the grotesque side of persecution; and it is not fanciful to see in the delightful chronicle of the Nemesis ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... her gray eyes by the light of the flambeau; limpid, and deep, and earnest, they looked at Stern. Her wonderful hair, shaken out in bewildering masses over the striped, tawny savagery of the robe, made ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... valley of the Mississippi, and joined with loose and uncertain links her two colonies of Canada and Louisiana. But the strength of her hold on these regions of unkempt savagery bore no proportion to the vastness of her claims or the growing power of the rivals who were soon to contest them. [Footnote: On the claim of France that all North America, except the Spanish colonies of Mexico and Florida, belonged to her, ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... proceedings of the modern highwayman might have passed as gentle. Now they turned in an instant to savagery. The chauffeur, a burly, capable fellow, incited by that raucous voice behind him, sprang from the car and seized the advancing robber by the throat. The latter hit out with the butt-end of his pistol, and the man dropped groaning on the road. Stepping ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... knew little of as almost an impertinence compared to the rugged, gloomy, pathetic, and equally youthful hero of an adventurous wilderness of which they knew still less? What availed the courtesy and gentle melancholy of Clarence Brant beside the mysterious gloom and dark savagery of Red Jim? Yet they received him patronizingly, as one who was, like themselves, an admirer of manly grace and power, and the recipient of Jim's friendship. The farmer alone seemed to prefer Clarence, and yet the latter's tacit ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... of all the marsupials is the Tasmanian devil. It is only a little devil, a couple of feet or so long, but its savagery is beyond measuring by anything like a two-foot rule. No reasonable devils could wish to be treated with more indulgence than the Zoological Society extends to these. A rolling blind is provided to keep ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... and one or two other equally insignificant products, the forests furnish no food except animals. These lowly people seem to have been so occupied with the severe struggle with the elements that they could not even advance out of savagery into barbarism. They were homeless nomads whose movements were determined largely by ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... the violent passions and wild crimes of southern temperaments, excited, and yet left lawless, by a superstition believed in enough to darken and brutalise, but not enough to control, its victims. Those were the countries which just then furnished that strange mixture of inward savagery with outward civilisation, which is the immoral playwright's fittest material; because, while the inward savagery moves the passions of the audience, the outward civilisation brings the character near enough to them to give them a likeness ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... convention, gloried in outraging decency. The rage, which, as he said himself, tore his heart out, carried him to strange excesses. There is something ironical (he would himself have appreciated it) in the popularity of Gulliver's Travels as a children's book—that ascending wave of savagery and satire which overwhelms policy and learning to break against the ultimate citadel of humanity itself. In none of his contemporaries (except perhaps in the sentimentalities of Steele) can one detect the traces of emotion; to read Swift is ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... was taught by Gideon Pond to members of the Lake Calhoun band. Both lessons were in the useful and civilizing art of plowing and were the first in that grand series of lessons, covering more than seventy years, and by which the Sioux nation have been lifted from savagery to civilization. ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... treated in the preceding chapter. The present chapter is an effort to point out the necessity for an understanding of the first trend of motives if we would minimize the temptations of the struggle and free the boy from the constant sense of the stupidity and savagery of life. To set his feet in the worn path of civilization is not an easy task, but it may give us a clue for the undertaking to trace his misdeeds to the unrecognized and primitive spirit of adventure corresponding ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... the secret of all stories of adventure and chivalry of the simpler and more primitive order; and in one aspect it is true that R. L. Stevenson loved and clung to the primitive and elemental, if it may not be said, as one distinguished writer has said, that he even loved savagery in itself. But hardly could it be seriously held, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... but beautiful home in the hills, and, almost as he loved Nell, his bonny daughter, did the old trader love his stalwart son. Born a wild Westerner, reared among the Sioux with only Indians or army boys for playmates, and precious little choice in point of savagery between them, Hal had grown up a natural horseman with a love for and knowledge of the animal that is accorded to few. His ambition in life was to own a stock farm. All the education he had in the world he owed to the kindness of loving-hearted army women at Laramie, women who befriended him when ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... life of deliberate profligacy. Of two of his amours we learn enough or too much from his letters to Murray and to Moore—the first with his landlord's wife, Marianna Segati, the second with Margarita Cogni (the "Fornarina"), a Venetian of the lower class, who amused him with her savagery and her wit. But, if Shelley may be trusted, there was a limit to his candour. There is abundant humour, but there is an economy of detail in his pornographic chronicle. He could not touch pitch without being defiled. But to do him justice he was never idle. He kept his ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... woman who was gazing in speechless absorption at the panorama of flame. In the light of the fire he could see that it was Mrs. Preston. She seemed entranced, fascinated like an animal by the savagery of the fierce fire. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... mad," he said in low voice, resembling the tones of repressed savagery. "You tell me so much, but withhold so much that I am more bewildered than ever. I can understand your helplessness in an Eastern household, but why should you obey the behests of this veiled monster in London, in ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... yet, the chief feeling was almost that of a paganism, of an earth-smell and an earth-worship, of a giant awakening from torpor, ravenous with hunger. It was all the grand savagery, the terrible strength of Mother Earth, the Great Protector, from whose loins I had sprung, but who is unspeakably awesome until you see her face in the rising sun. Then the nightmare of the darkness which empalls her with a cold sense of death, ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... hidden under a manner of bluff frankness. One did not need a second glance to see from whom the younger Rutherfords had inherited their dark, good looks. The family likeness was strong in all of them, but nature had taken her revenge for the anti-social life of the father. The boys had reverted toward savagery. They were elemental and undisciplined. This was, perhaps, true of Beulah also. There were moments when she suggested in the startled poise of her light body and the flash of her quick eyes a wild young creature of the forest set for night. But in her case atavism manifested itself ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... find—fleeting flash of support or encouragement—was hidden behind a common mask of astonishment as blank as had been his own. They were waiting for his answer; he knew they were waiting for that as he crossed to the door. And when he paused there, to turn in sudden savagery, he realized that his tardiness had robbed him of his chance. It was too late to talk ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... home, safe in bed, and thought with grotesque grief of some unfinished work. Next minute, I knew that I would not have missed the night out there for any consideration. The grey, slightly sheeny boil of the sea around us; the sweeping savagery of the sky; the ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... so I was glad to tread once more the surface of Pellucidar. Mysterious and terrible, grotesque and savage though she is in many of her aspects, I can not but love her. Her very savagery appealed to me, for it is the ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... California for curiosity or interest, also they are unpopular. They have done dreadful things—lonely women in outlying farms have guns and dogs, the one loaded, the other cultivated in savagery against the visits of ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... a future war. But over and above the direct sacrifices and material losses by slaughter, fire, hunger, and disease, a war will cause to humanity a great moral evil in consequence of the forms which a struggle on sea will assume, and of the examples of savagery which it will present at a moment when the civil order will be threatened by new ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... material improvements, actually more imperative if less spectacular, would certainly have been carried out with the vast sums of money saved from war expenditures. Whatever good ends, then, war may have served in the past, it is now superfluous, a mere survival of savagery, a relic of our barbaric past, a clear injury to man, in ways which we ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... to give bond. At any time, on certain conditions, a member of a tribal ward can apply for full citizenship in a municipality. In short, the governmental system adopted is intended to raise the native progressively from savagery to municipal life. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... glared at him. Doble was a strong, reckless devil of a fellow who feared neither God nor man. A primeval savagery burned in his blood, but like most "bad" men he had that vein of caution in his make-up which seeks to find its victim at disadvantage. He knew Hart too well to doubt his word. One cannot ride the range with a ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... began to hoot in great numbers, and with extraordinary ferocity. The cry made upon Paul's sensitive mind an impression that never could be effaced. He associated it with cruelty, savagery and deadly menace. His ear even multiplied and exaggerated the sinister calls. The woods were filled with them, they came from every bush, and the menacing circle was steadily and ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... loss of limbs or even eyesight, have not been able to bar the progress of men with grit; that poverty has rocked the cradle of the giants who have wrung civilization from barbarism, and have led the world up from savagery to the Gladstones, the ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... these things, he talked like a romantic man-of-war's man, who had seen the civilized world, and loved it; found it good, and a comfortable place to live in. So he and Larry never could agree in their respective views of civilization, and of savagery, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... something of his work and greatly respected it, he was entirely too reminiscent of the Stone Age to be altogether an agreeable dinner companion. He seemed, indeed, to have absorbed something of the savagery of those early types of life which he ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... lost its savagery, and became soft and tender—"then, Dulnop, lad, ye shall have thy Cunora; and as ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... had celebrated the maddest orgies on our path, and Death, with passionate vehemence, had swung his sharpest scythe. Wild savagery and merciless destruction had blended with the shrewdest deliberation and skillful knowledge in constructing the bars which the German, avoiding his own good familiar word, called barricades. An elderly gentleman who was explaining their ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... before she hurries back to her nest! It seems that among the chaffinches the male is the more spiritual of the sexes. But then he has so little to do compared with the female. He is still in that state of savagery in which the male ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... describe in detail the different systems of social organization which evolved from and superseded each other at different periods, but it is necessary to remind you that the changes that have taken place in the past have been even greater than the change proposed by Socialists today. The change from savagery and cannibalism when men used to devour the captives they took in war—to the beginning of chattel slavery, when the tribes or clans into which mankind were divided—whose social organization was a kind of Communism, all the individuals belonging ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... long feathers of the Argus pheasant waving from their war-caps, the brilliant colors of their war-coats trimmed with the black and white feathers of the hornbill, and the strange devices upon their gaudy shields but added to the savagery of their appearance as they danced and howled, menacing and intimidating, in the path of ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... "Treason," "betrayal," "savagery," were on everybody's lips. For Antwerp, you might say, had been "half German"; many of its rich and influential men were of German origin, although they had lived in Belgium for years. And now the Belgians felt they ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... fought, seemingly with the utmost savagery, to keep them from binding him with ropes. Even as he fought, however, he fancied he could hear the grim chuckling of Caleb Barter. What ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... besides moved with the spirit of emulation, for I had just finished my third or fourth perusal of The Phantom Ship. 'Come,' said I to my engine, 'let us make a tale, a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilisation; a story that shall have the same large features, and may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book you have been reading and admiring.' I was here brought up with a reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, as the sequel ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... savagery is it in a man that will not suffer him to let a woman, loved or unloved, stand in the last resort against his will? At any other time I would have pleaded with her; would have ended, mayhap, by weakly deferring to her wish. But now—well, you must remember, my dears, that I was ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... his talk.] — Well, it's a story I'm not understanding at all why you'd be worse than another, Christy Mahon, and you a fine lad with the great savagery ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... movement that had in it a hint of savagery, and picked up the end of rope that lay jerking ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... sigh plaintively, but give utterance to piercing shrieks and despairing yells; tearful Amandas are unceremoniously thrust into the background by vindictive Matildas, whose passions rage in all their primitive savagery; the fearful ghost "fresh courage takes," and stands forth audaciously in the light of day; the very devil stalks shamelessly abroad in manifold disguises. We are caught up from first to last in the very tempest, torrent and whirlwind of passion. When the novel of terror ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... under this state of facts —nothing could excuse or palliate that shocking and disgraceful and barbarous crime against humanity; and the human mind is incapable of understanding how such savagery can be accounted for, except upon the theory that "He that nameth Rebellion nameth not a singular, or one only sin, as is theft, robbery, murder, and such like; but he nameth the whole puddle and sink ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... agriculture, or had military arts and devices which so nearly approached the white man's. These, taken together with their high abilities in boat-building, and their tastes and capacities in the ornamental arts modify their savagery to a semi-civilization—or at ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... serve Galatia: you heard him on the letter. Not say as much? I all but said as much. I am sure I told him that his plot was folly. I say it to you—you are wiser—Rome knows all, But you know not the savagery of Rome. ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... the oars and grinned at me, and of these one had a black eye, being the man I had knocked off the deck. It was plain that he bore no malice, so I smiled back at him, and lifted the jug of ale toward him as I drank. He was a pleasant-looking man enough, now that the savagery of battle had passed ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... Bullen. "And poor Madam Rothsay, too, plunged from the height of civilization into the depths of savagery without even a maid or a mirror. I can fully sympathize with her. But what do you propose to do? Have you thought out ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... invitation. The familiar bark of the six-shooter was a matter of almost nightly occurrence; a dispute at the gaming table, a discourteous word spoken, or the rivalry for the smile of a wanton was provocation for the sacrifice of human life. Here the man of the plains reverted to and gave utterance to the savagery of his nature, or, on the other hand, was as chivalrous as in the ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... gentry, and they who ought to have known better, set such an example, and gave their sanction to outrage and savagery, it was only natural that the lower orders should be quick to take their pattern by their superiors, and should be only too ready to break and defy the law. And so it is clear enough that they were. In a single ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... one whom he had it in his power to punish, let him go free, saying, Forgiveness is better than revenge. The one shows native gentleness, the other savagery. ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... their country, they had continued to live among the Shawnees and Wyandots, and in their savagery were worse than the Indians. Their names are red on the pages ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... and races who flocked to the Pacific coast, found there a motley state of society between civilization and savagery. There were the relics of the old Mexican occupation, the Spanish missions, with their Christianized Indians; the wild tribes of the plains—Apaches, Utes, and Navajoes; the Chinese coolies and washermen, all elements strange to the Atlantic sea-board ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... the way to pleasant relations with ones brother-in-law. The civilized second self, always a dismayed and cynical spectator of Hyde's lapses into savagery, raised ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... better, in every sense of the word, than those tribes on their eastern frontier, whom they conquered in after centuries, unless we discredit (which we have no reason to do) the accounts which the Roman and Greek writers give of the horrible savagery of ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... genius will arise, able to free himself from the paralysing incubus, to fire the dull masses with hope, and to turn the very vastness of the governmental machine into a means of destruction. But, for that achievement, he will need the magnetism of a Mirabeau, the savagery of a Marat, and the organising powers of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... under conditions of strange environment where new customs and institutions were necessary, and in this condition civilization had a greater influence, and the progress of occupation by white men within the territory of the United States, at least, has reached such a stage that savagery and barbarism have no room for their existence, and even customs and institutions must in a brief time be completely changed, and what we are yet to learn of these ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... source was the French trouvre, Thomas of Brittany, who composed his Tristan in England about 1180. Of this French poem only a few fragments are extant. The original Tristan-saga contained elements of revolting savagery, but in Gottfried's poem, as in the fragments of Thomas, it is transformed into a courtly romance of love—an illicit love that defies conscience and the world and remains faithful unto death. The selections are from the translation ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... perilous, journey across Alaska, but in the open season you may now travel there almost any week in large liners from San Francisco. It seemed like a dream to land suddenly in this modern town, within a day's journey of Whalen with all its savagery and squalor, and it was somewhat trying to have to walk up the crowded main street in our filthy, ragged state. Eventually, however, we were rigged up at a well-stocked clothing establishment in suits of dittos which would hardly have passed muster in Bond Street, but which did very well for ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... who hold such language exaggerated glance at my piece justicative, the Saturday's article (June 28, '88) upon Mr. Hitchman's "Biography of Sir Richard Burton." No denizen of Grub Street in the coarse old day of British mob-savagery could have produced a more damning specimen of wilful falsehood, undignified scurrility and brutal malevolence, in order to gratify a well-known pique, private and personal. The "Saturday Reviler"—there is, I repeat, much virtue in a soubriquet—has grown only somewhat feebler, not kindlier, not ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... more than a gush of sympathy or a song of thankfulness, but for downright help by practical work. Still greater was the change from bounding along in florid health on merry waves of the wholesome sea, to a walk through the east end of London,—that morass of vice, and sighs, and savagery,—what is forced on the senses in an hour being not a hundredth ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... breaks out in so repulsive a form as in the piece called "Jesuitism" (1850), in the Latter-Day Pamphlets (No. VIII.). Discarding the creed, the practice, and the language of Puritanism, Carlyle still retained its narrowness, its self-righteousness, its intolerance, and its savagery. The moralist, to whom John Knox was a hero, but St. Bernard was not, but only a follower of the "three-hatted Papa," and an apostle of "Pig's-wash," was hardly the man to exhaust the heroic in history. In the "Hero as Man-of-Letters," Carlyle was at home. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... And all my limbs were stiffened as I fled, Just as the white moon ghost-like climbed the sky, Nearer they came and nearer, baying loud, With bloodshot eyes and red jaws dripping foam; And when I strove to check their savagery, Speaking with words; no voice articulate came, Only a dumb, low bleat. Then all the throng Leapt swift upon me and tore me as I lay, ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... thoroughly unscientific habit of mind manifested by the writer. If it had any influence on me at all, it set me against Evolution; and the only review I ever have qualms of conscience about, on the ground of needless savagery, is one I wrote on the "Vestiges" while under ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... the crowd, to whom the whole scene was sport—and though we have become more civilised in some ways as time has passed, sport has retained much of its original savagery even now—gleefully tied together Haldane's hands and feet, and carried her, thus secured, to a large deep pond about a hundred ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... Instantly he "shut his young wife up in a darkened and padded cell, and finally had her cut into pieces by two surgeons," so the story goes. Terrified at what he had done and of the consequences which were sure to follow when the King heard of his savagery, the Count fled the country ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... we see at the beginning of all known and half-known history, is not savagery, but high civilisation, at least of an outward and material kind. Do you demur? Then recollect, I pray you, that the three oldest peoples known to history on this planet are Egypt, China, Hindostan. The first glimpses of the ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... finality in her voice; he felt it and his face darkened with passion. A sneer replaced the mirthless grin on his lips, and when he got up and moved slowly toward Betty she sat motionless, for there was a repressed savagery in his movements that chilled her blood. He came and stood in front of her, towering over her; she saw that his hands were clenched, the fingers working. Twice she tried to look up at him, but each time her gaze stopped at his hands—they ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer |
