"Viciousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fine. It's worth a lot to have you close enough to pull hair. Where have you been all this long while?" Being a bold young man and very much in love, he kissed her in spite of her professed viciousness. ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... fame of British scholarship; and Macaulay, brilliant and picturesque beyond any of his contemporaries, has an unprecedented popularity, which will last until the worthlessness of his opinions and the viciousness of his style are more justly appreciated than they are likely to be by the mobs of novel readers who in this generation have preferred him to James and Ainsworth. Lord Mahon is the most legitimate successor of the greatest historian ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... them against the eleven of us. But there are men, strong in viciousness, among them. They, too, have their serfs and bravos. Guido Bombini and Isaac Chantz are certainly bravos. And weaklings like Sorensen, and Jacobsen, and Bob, cannot be anything else than slaves to the men who compose the ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... interesting though all autobiography is, still less can we expect it from the men themselves. In writing his own memoirs, a man will not tell all that he knows about himself. Augustine was a rare exception, but few there are who will, as he did in his 'Confessions,' lay bare their innate viciousness, deceitfulness, and selfishness. There is a Highland proverb which says, that if the best man's faults were written on his forehead he would pull his bonnet over his brow. "There is no man," said Voltaire, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... with no possible personal grievances against the priests whom they martyrized. Their action was the result, not of an "ebullition of revenge for three centuries of tyranny" as stated by Blount, but of insensate greed of gold and damnable viciousness. I believe the American people will hold that such cruelities brand those who practise them as unfit to govern their ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... Josephine insisted on a romantic attachment, and pursued a visionary spouse with all the ardor and obstinacy of first-rate stupidity. Adelaide had the weakness to hate Josephine, the shrewdness to fear Madeline, and the viciousness to despise her mother; she skilfully and diligently devoted herself to the thwarting of the family. Madeline waited, only waited,—with a fierceness so dangerously still that it looked like patience,—hated her insulting bondage, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... of night this, to come breaking a man's rest!" growled the voice of Archelaus, audibly, and not without viciousness, as though he meant ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... may well encourage the idea that the quality of air of the wilderness has entered the soil. When, in Manila, I have seen the men bearing burdens on the streets spring out of the way of those riding in carriages, and lashed by drivers with a viciousness that no dumb animal should suffer, I have felt my blood warm to think that the men of common hard labor in my country would resent a blow as quickly as the man on horseback—that even the poor black—emancipated the other ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... gentle gallop, "he can't kick at my batch of bills. When he gets on a high horse, I know how to fix him." He laughed. Jarvis Thornton turned a curious eye on his companion. Just this kind of intimacy in families he had never experienced—an armed neutrality of viciousness. He was anxious to get on, to reach his Camberton rooms, where the Sunday forlornness was peace after this swinish atmosphere. Once back in his arm-chair, in the familiar confusion of books and papers and letters lying about, he wondered again what curious freak had led him to accept Roper ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... he, regardless of his profession, mingled freely, at county musters and political barbecues, with the lowest and vilest of the community, using every art his genius suggested to inflame the mad passions of men already excited to frenzy. In after life the viciousness and unscrupulousness of his nature overmastered his hypocrisy and burst out in acts of dishonesty and profanity, which disgraced and drove him from the State. He sought security from public scorn in the wilds of Florida; but all restraint had ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... backwards leaving you, with your legs wide apart and standing like a fool, to meditate on equine wickedness in the Realm of the Morning Calm. They are indeed the trickiest little devils for their size I have ever seen; and for viciousness and love of fighting, I can recommend you to no steed more capable of showing these qualities. The average price of an animal as above described varies from the large sum of five shillings to as much as thirty shillings (at the ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... all too frequently cling to the theory of punishment that justifies us in "paying back" for the trouble we have been caused—if, indeed, we do any more than vent our temper at the annoyance. It is not viciousness on our part; it is merely ignorance. But the time is rapidly approaching when there will be no excuse for ignorance, even if it is not yet time to say that preventable ignorance ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... living and true and busy teaching of priests; these things, Sir, were sufficient books and kalendars to know GOD by, and His Saints: without any images made with man's hand: but, certes, the vicious living of priests and their covetousness are [the] chief cause of this error and all other viciousness that reigneth ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... otherwise, at least when the horse was to a certain degree yet untrained, and could not be pursuaded to ride him; indeed, for more than a year after he was given to me, Campbell still retained suspicions of his viciousness, though, along with this mistrust, an undiminished affection. Although he was several times wounded, this horse escaped death in action; and living to a ripe old age, died in 1878, attended to the last ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... the Tripolitans placed great reliance upon their ability to fight at close quarters. Undeniably, they did better in such position than in handling their ships. They had all the viciousness of wild cats, and it has been shown how fiercely they fought in hand-to-hand encounters; but their experience with the Americans taught them that they were to be dreaded in any situation where their anger was aroused, and, as a consequence, ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... that assists effect as delightfully as it veils intention. At times she is sensitive and tender, but her graver mood has no more of violence or mawkishness than has her gallant roguery (or enchanting archness) of viciousness or spite. Best of all, she is her poet's very own. You may woo her and pursue her as you will; but the end is invariable. 'I follow, follow still, but I shall never see her face.' Even as in ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... equally great dislike to any sort of alliance with France, he at length addressed a letter to the queen, setting forth without reserve his objections to her marriage. He warned her Majesty, in the most unmistakable terms, of the worthlessness and viciousness of her suitor, and ended with a passionate appeal to her not to enter into an alliance which would so surely cripple the advancement of the English Church. But Sidney's letter was not one of reproof and entreaty only. All through its pages could be seen ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... measurable quantities, etc., so that philosophic morality is clearly not for children or teachers. Secondly, evolution encourages too often the doubt whether virtue can be taught, when it should have the opposite effect. Perversity and viciousness of will are too often treated as constitutional disease; and insubordination or obstinacy, especially in school, are secretly admired as strength, instead of being vigorously treated as crampy disorders of will, and the child is coddled into flaccidity. Becomes the lowest develops first, there is ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... he asked hastily, "the drift (of your argument)." To which Yue-ts'un responded: "Of the human beings created by the operation of heaven and earth, if we exclude those who are gifted with extreme benevolence and extreme viciousness, the rest, for the most part, present no striking diversity. If they be extremely benevolent, they fall in, at the time of their birth, with an era of propitious fortune; while those extremely vicious correspond, at the time of their existence, with an era of calamity. When those ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... first? An immense curse, the gnashing of teeth, hatred, desperate viciousness, a cry of rage against human society, a ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... of dried plum, has been recommended as a remedy against viciousness and irritability. An American doctor declares that there is a certain medicinal property in the prune which acts directly upon the nervous system, and that is where the evil passions have their seat. He reports ...
— Food Remedies - Facts About Foods And Their Medicinal Uses • Florence Daniel
... and that no ground in reason can be alleged against marriage with a husband's brother which does not tell against marriage with a wife's sister. Yet again he regarded the proposed changes as betraying the smug viciousness of the ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... a less triumphant degree to what it did in Nelson's time. If that be the case, it ought to be wrestled with until every vestige of the ugly thing is strangled. The letters of Nelson to personal friends, to the Admiralty, and in his reported conversations, are all full of resentment at the viciousness of it, though he obviously struggles to curb the vehemence of his feelings. No one felt the dagger of the reticent stabber more quickly and sensitively than he. Invisible though the libeller might ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... deeply attached to each other. Each knew and appreciated the other's good qualities and varying moods. For many months the petted animal had shown none of that savageness with which his owner had before been compelled occasionally to struggle. He had grown sleek and round, but had lost his viciousness, so far as she was concerned, and obeyed her lightest word and gesture with a readiness that had made him a subject of comment in the country around, where the "Yankee school-marm" and her black ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... wind-bleached hair blew out in time-torn banners from the edge of his wide hat. His piercing, black eyes were those of a man who drinks deep, fights hard, and lives always in the open air. Wild animals have such eyes, only there is this difference: the viciousness of an animal is natural; at least one-half of the viciousness of ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... was speaking Royston was tearing up the paper he held into the smallest shreds, and dropping them one by one. The act might have been involuntary, but seemed to have a savage viciousness about it, as if a living thing were being tortured by those cruel fingers. (The poor letter! whatever its faults might have been, it surely deserved a better fate: it was doubtless not a model of composition, but some of the epistles which have moved ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... may manifest itself depends largely on the temperament of the individual and the circumstances of the case. In some men it results in paralysis of the energies, changing the character into shiftlessness. In other cases it results in destroying the moral sense, but does not amount to positive viciousness, while on the other hand it may result as it unquestionably did in this case, in absolutely perverting the affections so as to render the man incapable of the natural feelings of a husband and father, and supplying motives which seem to be of ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... for no censorship ever cured a population of bad taste. But naturally the libraries could not stop at memoirs. They had, in order to be consistent and to talk big about morality, to include novels in their scheme of scavenging. At this point the libraries pass from futile foolishness to active viciousness, and so encounter the opposition of persons like myself, whose business it is to keep ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... in our viciousness grow hard, O, misery on't! the wise gods seal our eyes: In our own filth drop our clear judgments, make us Adore our errors, laugh at us while we strut ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... beginning of the boat trip he had been learning the stubbornness and inconceivable viciousness of the elements, and this glimpse of what was below him acted as a challenge. "We've got to ride that ridge," he said. "If we get off it we'll hit ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... origin, the Mafia to-day is a criminal organization, having, like the Camorra, for its ultimate object blackmail and extortion. Its lower ranks are recruited from the scum of Palermo, who, combining extraordinary physical courage with the lowest type of viciousness, generally live by the same means that supports the East Side "cadet" in New York City, and who end either in prison or on the dissecting-table, or gradually develop into real Mafiusi and perhaps gain ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... considering it is established to treat enemies ill and friends well; but if I did not meet fair treatment at your hands, I should be much more troubled. For then I should not seem to have been ill-treated through private enmity, but through the viciousness of the state. 21. Nominally I am contending about the writ, but actually about my citizenship. For with fair treatment I would remain in the city (for I trust to your decision); but if, being brought up by these men, I should be ...
— The Orations of Lysias • Lysias
... he, are the poor creatures who are eminently entitled to our pity, though they seldom meet with it. Good nature, and credulity, the child of good nature; are generally, as I have the charity to believe, rather than viciousness, the foundation of their crime. Those men who pretend they would not be the first destroyers of a woman's innocence, look upon these as fair prize. But, what a wretch is he, who seeing a poor creature exposed on the summit of a dangerous ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... were the spark to the magazine. The knife griped by Lone Bear was snatched from his girdle, and he sprang forward, striking with lightning-like viciousness at the chest of the Shawanoe, who avoided him with ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... myself: 'This is the stuff of which was formed the masterful race that overran the world under the names of a dozen different peoples. Ice and snow made the tough fiber, mental and physical, which the hot sun of southern climes afterward melted into the viciousness of more luxurious nations. Man is scourged into greatness by adversity, and leveled into mediocrity by prosperity. This little fellow, whose groans die between his set teeth, has in him the ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... local representative. In other words, it is a connecting link between the High Commissionerships of Frere and Milner. The events which followed the recall of Frere were accepted by the British inhabitants of South Africa as a practical demonstration of the inherent viciousness of the system under which the decision of cardinal questions of South African administration was left in the hands of the House of Commons, a body in which they were not represented; which met 6,000 miles away; ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... Dmitry had let himself go, as he spoke, and a passionate hate appeared in his quiet eyes. The "Trouble" was of so impossible a viciousness that only the nobility and goodness of Madame had prevented his assassination numbers of times. He was hated, he said, hated and loathed; his life—spent in continual drunkenness, and worse, unspeakable wickedness—was not worth a day's purchase, ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... one of the worst men in the whole Empire. Each day there were complaints against him; the Emperor himself frequently admonished him on account of the high esteem he had for his brave father. But there resulted no improvement, and his natural viciousness only manifested itself the more. He was killed in some battle, I forget which; and as little worthy of regret as he was, his death was a deep affliction to his excellent mother, although he even forgot himself so far as to speak disrespectfully of her in his coarse speeches. She usually ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... as he worked he talked it—religion, its folly, its silliness, its cruelty, its ignorance, its viciousness. Hiram listened without hearing; he was absorbed in observing the diagnosis. He knew nothing of medicine, but he did know good workmanship. As the physician worked, his admiration and confidence grew. He began to feel ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... people Mrs Hamps was apparently convinced that the explanation of Parnell's scandalous fall and of his early death was to be found in the inherent viciousness of the Home Rule cause, and also that the circumstances of his end were a proof that Home Rule was cursed of God. She reasoned with equal power forwards and backwards. And she was so earnest and so dignified that Edwin was sneaped into silence. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... know that at the thought his muscles made involuntary response. He swung the pick down, imagining the blow, with a ferocity and viciousness that would have been terrible ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... they compare favorably with the whites; they are easily handled, true and obedient; there is less viciousness among them; they are more patient; they have great constancy. The character of the white, as you know, runs to extremes; one has bull-dog courage, another is a pitiful cur; one is excessively vicious, another pure and ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... on his companion with a sudden viciousness. "By James!" he snapped, "you better take care of your-words, or there'll be a man in this smoke-room with a broken jaw. I allow no one to sling slights at either me or my ship. No, nor at the firm either that owns both of us. You needn't look round at the young ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... that there was nothing, nothing she would not do to make amends to Lawrence for what she had said. She wanted to tell him what it had been that prompted her, but she dared not lest in revulsion at her viciousness he turn on her ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... strained and overdone imitation of the old West the romance of their expectations. If they hadn't found it there thousands of them would have been disappointed, perhaps disillusioned with a healthful jolt. All the reality about it was its viciousness, and ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... assured her. "It was an accident, you see. The storm was beyond anything you can imagine. The wind was not only icy and cutting, but of a sharp viciousness that made it impossible to hear or to see. Almost impossible to walk. We merely struggled blindly against it,—against it, you understand, so that if Peter, who was behind, had called out, we ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... parasites. When Bucks, after his return, took his first walk after supper up Front Street, he was not surprised at this. Medicine Bend was more than ten times as noisy, and if it were possible to add any vice to its viciousness this, too, it would seem, had ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... heads. His moustache, which was harsh and black and cut evenly like the bristles of a brush, shadowed a coarse and sardonic mouth. He appeared to be about forty, or rather more. In his whole appearance there was something disagreeably hybrid and morose, that indefinable air of viciousness which belongs to the later generations of bastard races brought up in the midst of ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... on Valentina, who was convent-bred, and in a measure devout. She read in this singular alteration of his ways the undoubtable indication of an altered character. That he had approached the Sacrament on the morning after his wild words to her, she took to mean that he repented him the viciousness of the animosity he had entertained that he continued so extremely devout thereafter she construed into meaning that his repentance ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... have been endured, so far as mere superciliousness and hauteur to the professional musician were involved, if these people had possessed any real feeling or love for music; but it was their total want of all taste, their utter viciousness, that rendered them hateful to Mozart. He was ready to make any sacrifice for his family, but longed to escape from the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... and perturbation of the health of the whole body; but a defect discovers itself even when the body is in perfect health. But a disease of the mind is distinguishable only in thought from a sickness. But a viciousness is a habit or affection discordant and inconsistent with itself through life. Thus it happens that, in the one case, a disease and sickness may arise from a corruption of opinions; in the other case, the consequence may be inconstancy and inconsistency. ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... beautiful creature, nocturnal in his habits, with large ears, and large, fine eyes full of a wild, harmless look. He is daintily marked, with white feet and a white belly. When disturbed by day he is very easily captured, having none of the cunning or viciousness of the common ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... encourage, but yet to give warning strong and clear that these frightful catastrophes were in great measure the effect of our sins, our fostering of heathenism, our recognition of caste, and were especially a judgment on the viciousness and irreligion that had been the curse of English life in India. It was in open Christianity alone that ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Ascyltos, who, as he wished to rid himself of the importunities of Psyche, was delighted; had not Giton been shut up in the bridal-chamber, the plan would have presented no difficulties, but we wished to take him with us, and out of the way of the viciousness of these prostitutes. We were anxiously engaged in debating this very point, when Pannychis fell out of bed, and dragged Giton after her, by her own weight. He was not hurt, but the girl gave her head a slight bump, and raised such a clamor that Quartilla, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter |
