"Savagery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he was trying to believe, when he came to analyze it. Yellow Bird possessed her powers, but they were definitely limited. And to believe beyond those limitations, to ride upon the wings of superstition and imagination, was sheer savagery. ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... of food upon every tree and shrub. But in the temperate regions of America and Europe these vast populations can only live by great toil, and if none will toil all must starve; but before they starve they will slay each other, and that means universal conflict, savagery, barbarism, chaos. ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... coat and woollen mittens, he went out to fodder the cattle. With that joyous roar of fresh flame in the stove the cabin was already warming up, but outside the door, which Dave closed quickly behind him, the cold had a kind of still savagery, edged and instant like a knife. To a strong man, however, it was a tonic, an honest challenging to resistance. In spite of his sad preoccupation, Dave responded to the cold air instinctively, pausing outside the door ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... purple dye and a table of royal elegance. He surpassed Roman luxury in the lavishness of his expense, Roman pride in his sense of complete independence of circumstance, and Roman niggardliness and cruelty in his treatment of his slaves. Satiety had begotten a chronic callousness and even savagery that showed itself, not merely in the now familiar use of the ergastulum and the brand, but in arbitrary and cruel punishments which were part of the programme of almost every day. His wife Megallis, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... own position, he saw himself the member of a race dragged from complacent savagery into the very heat and turmoil of a civilization for which it was in nowise prepared; bowed beneath a yoke to which its shoulders were not fitted, and then, without warning, thrust forth into a freedom as absurd as it was startling and ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the perilous side of a tremendous tottering tree, and another grimly driving the bolts that could not save it into the stringers of a collapsing wooden bridge. It was, as he recognized, not exactly courage that they had displayed, but the elemental savagery that in the newer countries, at least, now and then seizes on hard-driven men ground down by mortgage-holders, or ruined by flood and frost. With man and Nature against them they would make their last grim protest before they were crushed. Gordon once or twice had been ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... final troubles that precipitated the country again into a conflict with Austria. Previous to the actual declaration of war, constant collisions in the neighborhood of Lucerne had for some time past taken place, with all the horrors and savagery of war. In 1385 a body of men from Lucerne attacked and demolished the castle town of Rothenburg, the residence of an Austrian bailie. Next, both Entlibuch and Sempach, at the instigation of Lucerne, revolted ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Mere Honour. The sunshine streaming through the windows showed in high light bandaged heads or arms and faces haggard with victory. Wine had been spilled, and in the air there was yet the savor of blood. About each man just breathed some taint of savagery that was not yet beaten back after yesterday's wild outburst and breaking of the bars. In some it took the form of the sleek stillness of the tiger; others were loud-voiced, restless, biting at their nails. Only to a few was it given to bear triumph soberly, with room for other thoughts; to the ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... of this again! You are an Indian but one removed from savagery. I am a white! I couldn't think of marrying you!" Then her tender heart failed her and her voice trembled. "But still I am your friend, Kut-le. Truly I am ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... German armies make war it has been necessary that they see towns systematically burned down, mines flooded, factories reduced to ashes, orchards devastated, cathedrals shelled and fired—all that deliberate savagery, aimed to destroy national wealth, nature, and beauty, which the imagination could not conceive at a distance from the men and things that have endured it and today bear ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... frail little life it was—feeble beyond expression, and ugly with the ugliness of savagery. She wriggled and screwed up her skinny features with inane ferocity. A motherless wallaby would have submitted to human solace and ministrations with daintier mien; but the whole household thrilled with excitement. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Now get you gone Before I call the savagery that sleeps Here in the jungle to annihilate ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... and even the realities. China rigid against the West was not a semi-barbarism resisting civilization, but an excessively perfected culture resisting the raw energies of one still young and, in its eyes, still with the taint of savagery: ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... hundred tribes of aborigines all more or less akin to those of Kweichau and Burma, but each under its own separate chief. Some of them are fine-looking, vigorous people; but the Chinese describe them as living in a state of utter savagery. Missionaries, however, have recently begun work for them; and we may hope that, as for the Karens of [Page 53] Burma, a better day will soon dawn ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... long, upward march from savagery and slavery—throughout the nearly 2,000 years of the Christian calendar, the nearly 6,000 years of Jewish reckoning—there have been many deep, terrifying valleys, but also many bright and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Loch Sloy!" now rose the voices overhead, surely the maddest place in the world for a Gaelic slogan: it gave him a sense of unspeakable savagery and antique, for it was two hundred years since his own family had cried ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... alarm. They foresaw that it heralded the return of the hated domination of the priests, associated in their minds with practical slavery, and they decided on the tragedy, which was carried out with all the savagery of which their natures ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... sixteenth century: the ferocities, cruelties, and savagery of those wars: depopulated and ruined this rich and flourishing country: the Inquisition drove thousands of Flemings, an industrious and orderly folk, to England, where they established silk manufactures: and the carrying trade which had been wholly in the hands of the Antwerp shipowners ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... clung to the logs. She was a moving figure, piteous, lovely, rather like some graceful mountain beast, its spirit half-broken by wounds and imprisonment and human tending, but ready to leap into a savagery of flight or of attack. They were wild, those great eyes, as well as wistful. Prosper, looking suddenly up at them, caught his breath. He put down his book as quietly as though she had indeed been a wild, easily ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... grim laugh and a leer of savagery that made his gaunt face look positively hideous—"you would have given out after three days, friend de Batz, would you not? And I warned you, didn't I? I told you if you tampered with the brat I would make you cry in mercy ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... that we were bound for a long voyage, and that the captain had got together a very motley crew. This did not trouble me; in fact, I was glad on both scores. The journey would take me away—I cared not where, the savagery of the crew accorded with my own wild feelings. They were a poor, degraded set, weak physically, and with the stamp of villainy upon them. Their conversation was degrading, their every thought was steeped with filth. I ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... and drew her little grey cloak more closely around her shoulders; not from cold, though a bleak wind was blowing across the marshes. She was warmed by walking; but the aspect of the scene before her almost frightened the Venetian girl by the savagery of its desolation. ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... satisfied the king ordered the fight to cease. Kamiole gave no heed to his words. He had a tiger's thirst for blood. Like a flash he leaped upon the fallen man and pounded the weapon into his heart. This rebellion against the king and the savagery of the killing caused an outcry of rage and horror. The murderer's chance was desperate. "Face down!" commanded the king. This was the command to put the offender to death. A dozen sprang to execute the order. Kamiole tugged the javelin out of his foeman's body and hurled ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... what the Hindus were no longer 3000 years ago. But that is a mere guess, and is contradicted by the facts of their language. They may have passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive may be, for all we know, a relapse into savagery, or a corruption of something that was more rational and intelligible in former stages. Think only of the rules that determine marriage among the lowest of savage tribes. Their complication passes all understanding, all seems a chaos of prejudice, ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... make matters worse Preston was defeated by the Parliamentarians at Summerhill (Aug. 1647), and Lord Inchiquin was carrying all before him in the South. Everywhere he went he had acted with great savagery, and was especially violent in his opposition to the Catholic religion. But early in 1648 he changed his politics, and declared for the king against the Parliament. Immediately the former friends of Ormond on the ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... part in framing machinery for securing peace and justice, and in moving forward the landmarks of civilization as against savagery, and of human mercy as ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... helpless against the strong—if you forget the whole of that, and act as a brute even would not act, in cruelty and wickedness to men and animals alike, you will degrade the body you are trying to preserve, you will paralyse the body you are trying to save from disease, and you will go back into the savagery which is the nemesis of cruelty, and ruin these nobler bodies, the inheritance of the ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... 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, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Tiger Elliston overthrew barbarism and established in its place an island empire of civilization, so would she supersede savagery with culture. But, her empire of the North should be an empire founded not upon blood, but upon humanity ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... and that it was only requisite to gather up the separate traits to form a whole. Under a fine sky, in a primitive society, when all the relations are still simple, when science is limited to so little, nature is easily satisfied, and man only turns to savagery when he is tortured by want. All nations that have a history have a paradise, an age of innocence, a golden age. Nay, more than this, every man has his paradise, his golden age, which he remembers ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of the hair had somewhat broadened, giving still more majesty to that noble ruin. The countenance—a little material, perhaps, but how could it be otherwise?—presented, like all the Breton faces grouped about the baron, a certain savagery, a stolid calm which resembled the impassibility of the Huguenots; something, one might say, stupid, due perhaps to the utter repose which follows extreme fatigue, in which the animal nature alone is visible. Thought was rare. It seemed to be an effort; its seat was in the heart more than in the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... to their science, but both he and Strabo speak of their human sacrifices. Suetonius describes their religion as cruel and savage, and Mela, who speaks of their learning, regards their human sacrifices as savagery.[1027] Pliny says nothing of the Druids as philosophers, but hints at their priestly functions, and connects them with magico-medical rites.[1028] These divergent opinions are difficult to account for. But as the Romans gained closer acquaintance with the Druids, they found less philosophy ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... had described the coming into this northern world of thousands and tens of thousands of the bravest and best-blooded men of England and France, and how these thousands had continued to come, bringing with them the names of kings, of princes, and of great lords, until out of the savagery of the north rose an aristocracy of race built up of the strongest men of the earth. And these men of later days he had called Lords of the North—men who had held power of life and death in the hollow of their hands until the great company yielded up its suzerainty to the Government of the Dominion ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... hoping (what proves quite futile) they may even burn a Prussian magazine here or there. Contemptible to the Prussian soldier, though very troublesome to him. Friedrich regards the Pandour sort, with their jingling savagery, as a kind of military vermin; not conceivable a Prussian formed corps should yield to any odds of Pandour Tolpatch tagraggery. Nor does the Prussian soldier yield; though sometimes, like the mastiff galled by inroad of distracted weasels in too great quantity, he may have ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... traffic in its decayed streets. Whether the presence of a large garrison has already modified the population, or whether we may ascribe something to the absence of Roman municipal institutions in the far past, and to the savagery of the mediaeval period, it is difficult to say. Yet the impression left by Foligno upon the mind is different from that of Assisi, Spello, and Montefalco, which are distinguished for a certain grace and gentleness in ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... tear-bombs, of bombs containing deadly germs; she herself had beheld the poison gas rolling back into the trenches at Nivelle under the town tower. Dimly she began to understand that the Hun, in his cunning savagery, had tricked, betrayed and polluted civilization itself into lending him her own secrets with which she was ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... Greek world, in which man had been allowed to think his own thoughts and dream his own dreams according to his desires. The somewhat vague rules of conduct of the philosophers had proved a poor compass by which to steer the ship of life after a deluge of savagery and ignorance had swept away the established order of things. There was need of something more positive and more definite. This the ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... ruins of the hut, was a strange scene of rejoicing. Asensio, recovered now from his burst of savagery, was tearful, compassionate; his comrades laughed and chattered and bragged about their prodigious deeds of valor. Over and over they recounted their versions of the encounter, each more fanciful than the ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... proved at once the fallacy of taking too many things for granted. So the shattered casques and broken bones of many a luckless armadillo were strewn along the way, mute evidences of Suma's insatiable savagery. ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... as history has shown over and over again. If a strong man fails in a conflict of forces in a time of great public excitement, he is rarely allowed to sink quietly into oblivion; the mob turns upon him with the savagery of a wild beast. Napoleon was one day driving through the streets of Paris amid cheering crowds. One of his suite remarked to him that it must be gratifying to see how his subjects loved him. "Bah!" said the Emperor, ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... morning. When an adversary suddenly and brutally assaults us, his ferocity springing from the instinct of a lower civilisation—as when a farm-dog leaps upon us in the road—our first instinct is to fall back and meet him on the ground of his own savagery, to give him an exact tit for his tat. But can you not see that, as we do this, and in proportion as we do it, we allow him to impose himself on us and relinquish our main advantage? It is idle to practise a higher moral ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... beating him, but with no success, while he ran the risk of exciting him to a dangerous degree of savagery if he should persist in it. The boy had no weapon about him, unless his jack-knife should be counted as such, and nothing could be accomplished with that. He asked himself whether it were possible to dive under the raft and give him two or three vigorous thrusts with the implement; but, fortunately, ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... mouth to show your ignorance, Oliver, you had better keep it shut. The men who carried stone axes had advanced far beyond the state of savagery. But I suggest that you had better give Doctor Adams a chance of telling his story, after ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... 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, behind her, rode ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... fathers, who had heard about the battle before they came home and had not failed to discover who had won, being all Seminary lads themselves, would also be much lifted, but would feign to be extremely angry at the savagery of their boys, would wonder where the police were, would threaten their sons with all manner of punishments if this ever happened again, and would declare their intention of laying a complaint before the chief constable. As, however, it was absolutely ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... little chance of misapprehending the haughty anguish with which he threatened, pleaded, cajoled. Clear and unfaltering his voice rose and fell. He dealt out fearlessly, foolishly, to that long-snouted, little-brained, wild-eyed multitude, reason beyond their instinct, persuasion beyond their savagery, love beyond their heed. ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... shot to the bar across the shutters, and betook himself in silence to the other window, where presently he burst into a fit of laughter. The sound was harsh even to savagery. "Go your ways, Saunderson," he said. "I've tried the bars of the cage; they're too strong. Stop on your morning round, and I'll give ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... laws, and I have done it! The writs have been executed. Boys, you are dismissed." It will be doing Senator David R. Atchison, Ex-Vice-President of the United States, a kindness to conclude simply that he was drunk, otherwise he displayed utter savagery and barbarism. He inculcated gallantry to ladies, but said: "If you find any woman with arms in her hands, tread her under foot as you would a snake." The Caucassian white woman of Lawrence had no more rights of self-protection than the slaves of a South Carolina rice plantation—they were wholly ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... Dillon, smiling. "Yes, I should think he was a great favourite of yours. But, come now, my boy; you have done your part well. Here, come in and have a good meal. Your man has done what many more of these fellows do—broken out in a bit of savagery. He is shut up safely in yonder, too much done up for me to say anything to him to-night; but tomorrow morning he will be tamed down a bit, and kept for three or four days to return to his senses, and then he will come back and go on with his work ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... and peaks of the old roofs are depicted, as if in black festoons, on the clear golden sky. At this moment, there suddenly passes over merry, laughing Japan a somber 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 population of young children, of little mouskos and little mousmes, who spread themselves ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... to school, because it pleased me to read "Queen Mab" and "Cain," amid the priests and ignorance of a hateful Roman Catholic college. And there my poets saved me from intellectual savagery; for I was incapable at that time of learning anything. What determined and incorrigible idleness! I used to gaze fondly on a book, holding my head between my hands, and allow my thoughts to wander far into dreams and thin imaginings. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... minstrelsy in the days of his captivity, ever since he had watched her walking on the slopes of Windsor Park, and wooed her in verses that are still preserved. They had now been eleven years married, and their court was one bright spot of civilization, refinement, and grace, amid the savagery of Scotland. And now, after the pleasant social evening, the queen, with her long fair hair unbound, was sitting under the hands of her tirewomen, who were preparing her for the night's rest; and ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Neanderthal methods and use the limited amount of brains the intervening centuries had given them, to scheme for victory. A thousand years hence the Frankenstein might be buried and man's brain gigantic. Then and then only would civilization be perfected, and the savagery and asininity of war a blot on the history of his race to which no man cared to refer. But that was a long way off. When a man's country was in danger there was nothing to do but fight. Noblesse oblige. And fight without growling ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... advance already made before the nations, as will surprise even the most sanguine and far-sighted. Nevertheless, while so much is promised, there are all the attendant evils. It is a serious thing to bring unwashed, uncombed, untutored men, scarcely redeemed from savagery, to the ballot-box. It is a dangerous thing to bring the foreigner, whose whole secular education was under the throne of the tyrant, and put his hand upon the helm of affairs in this free nation. It is a dangerous thing to bring men ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of being discovered by the latter. Once inside their circle, they would take no notice of me—for doubtless there would be other Indians within sight; and I trusted to my well-counterfeited semblance of savagery to deceive the eyes of these ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... Lord Spencer—'Here's a Lord.' They are very pleasant people. I heard from Janet to-day of ice at Cairo and at Shoubra, and famine prices. I cannot attempt Cairo with meat at 1s. 3d. a pound, and will e'en stay here and grill at Thebes. Marry-come-up with your Thebes and savagery! What if we do wear ragged brown shirts? ''Tis manners makyth man,' and we defy you to ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... to have been an essay from an igloo, describing the awful privations of the writer and the primitive savagery of his surroundings on the Murman coast. It was to have wrung the sympathetic heart of the public and at the same time to have enthralled the student of barbaric life with its wealth of exotic detail. While embodying all the best-known ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... the beginning, the pioneer encountered the savagery of border life, grappled with it, and reacted to it without guidance from other mentor than his own instincts. His need was still the primal threefold need family, sustenance, and safe sleep when the day's work was done. We who look back with thoughtful eyes upon the frontiersman—all ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... hundred years are many and great, but it is not necessary therefore to believe that in three generations a great nation has emerged from savagery. Let us see what part of La Bruyere's description may be set down to rhetoric, and to the astonishment of the scholar who looks hard at a countryman for the first time. Undoubtedly the peasant is sunburnt; unquestionably he is dirty. ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... so slowly. His left hand was at his side, the one broken finger standing oddly apart from its fellows, as he ran the three steps to meet Kootanie George. George threw up his arm, but the savagery of the blow beating upon him struck the guard aside and Kootanie George, caught fairly upon the chin flung out his arms and went down. He brushed against the wall behind him in falling and so came only to his knees on the floor, ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... dresses sat here and there on the grass, and apart from them in gravity waited old men in moccasins and blankets and with feathers in their hair. Spry young men smoked cigarettes and talked volubly, garbed in the worst of civilization and the most useless of savagery. ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... and did not halt until we reached San Marcos, with its gloomy memorial of human savagery. After an hour's halt we set out and arrived at San Felipe in time to catch the train to Havana. On arriving there at dusk I sent my servant to inform his mistress of my safe arrival while I called on Don Fernando at the hotel. His frank and hearty reception ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... it," said my double. "Every woman who could command money used it, we found, to make underbred aggressions on other women. As men emerged to civilisation, women seemed going back to savagery—to paint and feathers. But the samurai, both men and women, and the women under the Lesser Rule also, all have a particular dress. No difference is made between women under either the Great or the Lesser Rule. You have seen the men's dress—always ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... I can only do it in a sentence or two, of more important changes in these fifty years. English manners and morals have been bettered, much of savagery and coarseness has been got rid of; low, cruel amusements have been abandoned. Thanks to the great Total Abstinence movement very largely, the national conscience has been stirred in regard to the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... chief men of the city at a banquet to which he had invited them. This atrocity, according to Machiavelli's creed, would have been justified, if Oliverotto had combined cruelty and subtlety in proper proportions. But his savagery was not sufficiently veiled; a prince should never incur odium by crimes of violence, but only use them as the means of inspiring terror. Besides, Oliverotto was so simple as to fall at last into the snare of Cesare ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... 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 of themselves ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... 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' ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... heard of this cruel phase of Southwestern cunning before. With the feeble sophistry of the cynic he mistrusted the good his scepticism could not understand. Howbeit, glancing sideways at the slumbering savagery of the man beside him, and his wounded hand, he did not care to show his lack of confidence. He contented himself with that equally feeble resource of weak humanity in such cases—good-natured indifference. ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... another boy, or thought I was. Suddenly put down among boys of my own age, I found I had a great deal to learn. Before the spring term of school was over I could fight, play "keeps," tease the little girls, and use forbidden words as well as any boy in my class. I was restrained from utter savagery only by the fact that Mrs. Harling, our nearest neighbor, kept an eye on me, and if my behavior went beyond certain bounds I was not permitted to come into her yard or to play with her ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... of his savagery, his face softened in the next moment. "If it could only be in the right way! Look at me, look at you. You're so very beautiful, I'm so strong. There is only one right ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... to be perceptibly modified; and if to the knack of speech he adds a tolerable acquaintance with the sacred characters which form the written language, he becomes transfigured, as one in whom the influence of the holy men of old is beginning to prevail over savagery and ignorance. ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... probable that for centuries before the whites came, the Indians of North America were stationary in their population, for the reason that under their stationary condition of culture a given area could support only so many people. In conditions of savagery, and even of barbarism, therefore, we can lay down the principle that population will increase up to the limit of food supply, will stop there and remain stationary until food supply increases. This is the condition ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... descriptions could have been imported into the colorless literature of the empire. "Atala" is already old-fashioned and theatrical in all the parts which are not descriptive or European—that is to say, throughout all the sentimental savagery. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... go!" cried Roger, rising into a threatening savagery over the brazen hypocrisy of such a pretence. "If he is here another hour, I will drag him out with my own hands." The young man seemed to tear out all his powers from his own person, as one draws a sword from its sheath, and to wield his vehemence ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... of readers, especially of those whose means are slender, the author does for private economy what Smith and Ricardo and Bastiat have done for national economy. * * * The one step which separates civilization from savagery—which renders civilization possible—is labor done in excess of immediate necessity. * * * To inculcate this most necessary and most homely of all virtues, we have met with no better teacher than this ...
— Harper's Young People, February 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that he had reached his "Utopia," and that his past forty years of loneliness and savagery was the price he had paid for ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... lead, fired first, but succeeded only in wounding the bear. Pain was now added to the savagery of hunger, and the infuriated monster rushed upon Phillips. Dave leaped back, but his foot slipped on a bit of ice, and he went down with a thud, his rifle flying from ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... and they joined Yonge at lunch. An hour later a dozen trim King's African Rifles cantered up—Zulus all, under command of Yonge, who maintained order through two hundred miles of savagery. ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... old Virginia, who had reached that state of human advance, midway between savagery and civilization, that is known as barbarism, were but a small portion of that red-skinned, vigorous, and most interesting race familiar to us under their general but wrongly-used name of "Indians." They ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... "Bust his head!" "Tar and feathers!" were several of the cries in the wild medley that went up, the spirit of philanthropy and good fellowship changed to brute savagery on the instant. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... people from the ignorance and poverty of slavery and savagery, it could not be expected to form them at once into large givers or efficient workers for foreign fields; but who can say, after the marvels of the past twenty-four years, what the future shall show, ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 9, September, 1889 • Various
... human sacrifice among the Aztecs, with its accompanying traces of cannibalism, was due to the savagery of a long previous condition of their Indian race; just as in the Greek drama, when that ancient people had attained a high level of culture and refinement, the sacrifice of a human life, sometimes a princess ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... frying-pan. Miss Melluka was graciously pleased to express her entire approbation of the Circus, and so was Polly; for the ponies were speckled, and brought down nobody when they fired, and the savagery of the wild beasts appeared to be mere smoke—which article, in fact, they did produce in large quantities from their insides. The Barbox absorption in the general subject throughout the realisation of these delights was again a sight to see, nor was it less ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... as she turned the corner on Norris Street and ran full-tilt, into a yowling, taunting, torturing little pack of boys. They were gathered in close formation about some object which they were teasing, and knocking about in the mud, and otherwise abusing with the savagery of their years. Fanny, the fiery, stopped short. She pushed into the ring. The object of their efforts was a weak-kneed and hollow-chested little boy who could not fight because he was cowardly as well as weak, and his name (oh, pity!) was Clarence—Clarence ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... hideous lips in anticipation of the feast to come, and vied with one another in the savagery and loathsomeness of the cruel indignities with which they ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... purple sky and the great silver stars," said Sadie. "Look at the silent desert and the black shadows of the hills. It's grand, but it's terrible, too; and then when you think that we really are, as that dragoman said just now, on the very end of civilisation, and with nothing but savagery and bloodshed down there where the Southern Cross is twinkling so prettily, why, it's like standing on the beautiful edge ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... God. But these hopes proved illusory; only Verlaine knows where he is, and he will not tell. The last certain news we had of him was that he had joined a caravan of Arabs, and had wandered somewhere into the desert with these wanderers, preferring savagery to civilization. Verlaine preferred civilized savagery, and so he remained in Paris; and so he drags on, living in thieves' quarters, getting drunk, writing beautiful poems in the hospitals, coming out of hospitals and ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... of civilisation which have existed in the centuries which divide primitive savagery from high civilisation, the demand for continuous, unbroken child-bearing on the part of the woman as her loftiest social duty has generally been hardly less imperious. Throughout the Middle Ages of Europe, and down almost to our own day, ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... of the fashion, which would not draw admiration. At another stage distinction comes from starting a new fashion. This may be done by an ornament, if it is well selected so that it will "take."[381] Beads have been a fashionable ornament from the days of savagery until to-day. An Indian woman in Florida "had six quarts (probably a peck) of the beads gathered about her neck, hanging down her back, down upon her breasts, filling the space under her chin, and covering her neck up to her ears. It was an effort for ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... collective possessions—flocks and pastures and hunting grounds—they came into collision with each other, and all the old pugnacity of the beast awoke. Skill, and even ferocity, in war became a valuable social quality, and we get the stage of the savage. The barbarian, or the man between savagery and civilisation, was still compelled to fight for his possessions. He was usually surrounded by fierce savage tribes. The civilised man in turn was surrounded by savages and barbarians, and needed to fight. ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... Prussian is depicted as saying to his bound and gagged victim, "Ain't I a lovable fellow?" is one of the most pointed and vital of all pictorial, or indeed other, criticisms on the war. It is very important to note that German savagery has not interfered at all with German sentimentalism. The blood of the victim and the tears of the victor flow together in an unpleasing stream. The effect on a normal mind of reading some of the ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... real savagery was enacted. On the 5th of September a non-commissioned officer flung himself almost naked on the widow Naude, on whom he was billeted, and carried her into his room. This woman's father, Francois Fontaine, rushed up on hearing ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... I don't say that I endorse this program, I'm only telling you, in half-a-dozen words, what it really is. It is sure, though, that when the black man rules, he relapses into savagery; when he obeys a white master, ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... ordinary prisoner, under guise of disciplining and reforming him. Nothing was to be gained by disciplining or reforming a "lifer." Others, however, in whom despair had taken the expression of obstinacy or savagery, were savagely handled; one of them bears terrible scars from a shooting by one of the guards, and he told me that, out of the twenty-two years he had already served, eight had been spent in the punishment cells. Others are maltreated ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... by the destruction of the Janizaries,—which the Sultan had long meditated, and concealed in his own bosom with the craft which formed one of the peculiarities of this cruel yet able sovereign, but which he finally executed with characteristic savagery. Concerning this Russian war we ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... mattered nothing that he broke his head, and was forced to realize that he was not the stronger. He never ceased to revolt against suffering. From that time on his life was an unceasing struggle against the savagery of a Fate which ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... result of these discoveries and others like them, showing that man was not only contemporary with long-extinct animals of past geological epochs, but that he had already developed into a stage of culture above pure savagery, the tide of thought began to turn. Especially was this seen in 1863, when Lyell published the first edition of his Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man; and the fact that he had so long opposed the new ideas gave force to the clear and conclusive argument ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... side of the boundary. The whip worked with the authorization of the law; men languished and died turning the wheel of the pump. A cold, methodical cruelty, a thousand times worse than the fanatic savagery of the Inquisition, devoured human creatures, giving them nothing more than the exact amount of sustenance necessary to prolong their torture.... No. This was another world, where his jealousy and his fury could find ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Martin's self-portrait, that did not greatly distress her. She had never supposed that he or any one else was "good." She had never known a "good" person. Nor did it occur to her, in her pristine state of savagery, that you loved any one the less for their drawbacks. She would rather be with Martin at his worst than with any one else at their best—that ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... in the industrial scale, the harder the conditions. The finer, the more delicate, the more skilled the trade, the higher is it lifted above the struggle. There is less pressure, less sordidness, less savagery. There are fewer glass-blowers proportionate to the needs of the glass-blowing industry than there are ditch-diggers proportionate to the needs of the ditch-digging industry. And not only this, for it requires a glass-blower ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... Jennie, "Wonota it only a single generation removed from arrant savagery. She calls a spade a spade. You shouldn't blame her. It is civilization—which is after all a sort of make-believe—that causes us white folk to refer to a spade as ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... of trained and organized savagery, where ferocity was cultivated as a virtue, and every emotion of pity stifled as unworthy of a man; where ancient rites, customs, and traditions were held with the tenacity of a people who joined the extreme of wildness with the extreme ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... those still living in Africa and America, having an analogous organization, and similar weapons and tools. A few lived in the desert, in the oasis of Libya, or in the deep valleys of the Red Land—Doshirit, To Doshiru—between the Nile and the sea; the poverty of the country fostering their native savagery. Others, settled on the Black Land, gradually became civilized, and we have found of late considerable remains of those of their generations who, if not anterior to the times of written records, were at least contemporary with the earliest kings ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and vagabonds—persons who declined to dig but were not ashamed to beg; with perhaps an excessive inclination to assume that wherever there was a doubt the delinquent should not have the benefit of it. The savagery however of the earlier Tudor laws against vagabonds was mitigated, and honest efforts were made to find a substitute for the old relief of genuine poverty by the Monasteries. This took in the first place the form of enactments for the local collection of voluntary contributions ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... has no thought. Only its rage. No calculation but its immense strength. Savagery, courage, alone inspire its warfare. So it is that fierce satisfaction rings in its greeting ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... were immortal, but that fire and water would sometime prevail. Sacrifices were never made, Strabo says, without the intervention of the Druids. Pomponius Mela says that in his time (c. 44 A.D.), though the ancient savagery was no more, and the Gauls abstained from human sacrifices, some traces of their former practices still remained, notably in their habit of cutting a portion of the flesh of those condemned to death after ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... But after learning the futility of it, sentient creatures discovered another, the succeeding evolutionary emotion. It is pure savagery in its destructive power, a thousand times more effective in annihilating ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... philosophy or opinion 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 ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... incompassionateness &c. 914a[obs3]; gall, venom, rancor, rankling, virulence, mordacity[obs3], acerbity churlishness &c. (discourtesy) 895. hardness of heart, heart of stone, obduracy; cruelty; cruelness &c. adj.; brutality, savagery; ferity[obs3], ferocity; barbarity, inhumanity, immanity|, truculence, ruffianism; evil eye, cloven foot; torture, vivisection. ill turn, bad turn; affront &c. (disrespect) 929; outrage, atrocity; ill usage; intolerance, persecution; tender mercies [ironical]; "unkindest cut ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... red since the Canadians were crucified, and I fancy no prisoners were taken for a long time after. We "censor" this or that in the newspapers, but nothing will censor men's tongues, and there is a terrible and awful tale of suffering and death and savagery going on now. Like a ghastly dream we hear of trenches taken, and the cries of men go up, "Mercy, comrade, mercy!" Sometimes they plead, poor caught and trapped and pitiful human beings, that they have wives and children who love them. The slaughter ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... were thoroughly trained in the military art. They had proved their right to be considered among the most formidable soldiers the world has known. Against the brown rock of that host in khaki, the flower of German savagery and courage had broken at Chateau-Thierry. There the high tide of Prussian militarism, after what had seemed to be an irresistible dash for the destruction of France, spent itself in the bloody froth and spume of bitter defeat. There ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... profaned the cathedral by using it as a stable and a tippling place, while saw-pits were made in the sacred building and carpenters plied their trade. At Chichester the pikes of the Puritans and their wild savagery reduced the interior to a ruinous desolation. The usual scenes of mad iconoclasm were enacted—stained glass windows broken, altars thrown down, lead stripped from the roof, brasses and effigies defaced and broken. A creature named "Blue Dick" was the wild leader of this ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... rope. He worked at it for a long time, and finally stopped his efforts, baffled, despairing, his heart filled with angry hopelessness. Again the breeze fluttered the lapel, and with a sudden impulse of revengeful savagery he thrust down his head and snapped at the coat. Unexpectedly, he caught it in his teeth. Filled with a new inspiration, he kept fast hold of the cloth and by working it along between his lips, he finally got the head of the pin between his teeth. Then he easily drew it out, and, leaning ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... involvement is this?" demanded Chang Tao. "This one's thoughts and intention were not turned towards savagery and arms, but in the direction of a pacific ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... dignity, bears no malice, and very soon remits punishment he has given in the heat of the moment. I think that he regards us Scots as being a people for whom allowances must be made, on the ground of our inborn savagery and ignorance of civilized customs. He does not mind plain speaking on our part and, if in the humour, will talk with us much more familiarly than he would do to ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... I never witness in my Grasshopper-cages the savagery which is so common in the Praying Mantis, who harpoons her rivals and devours her lovers; but, if some weakling succumb, the survivors hardly ever fail to profit by his carcass as they would in the case of any ordinary prey. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... creeds." He declaims ferociously against freedom of opinion, and "the fathers of the inquisition might have reveled over the first twenty-five pages of this Protestant book, that actually blaze with the eloquent savagery and rapture of religious intolerance." He laughed in the midst of this declamation, but it was rather a sardonic laugh, and soon checked by fresh consideration ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... devastating Huns—poured out upon the budding kingdoms which had succeeded the mighty empire of Rome, and threatened to trample under foot all that was left of the work of long preceding ages. Civilization had swung downward into barbarism; was barbarism to swing downward into savagery, and man return ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... men of his regiment of Creeks."[67] The delinquent wayfarers were both fortunate and unfortunate in thus tardily arriving upon the scene. They had missed the fight but they had also missed the temptation to revert to the savagery that was soon to bring fearful ignominy upon their neighbors. To the very last of the Pea Ridge engagement, Stand Watie's men were active. They covered the retreat of the main army, to a certain extent. They were mostly half-breeds and, so far as can be definitely ascertained, were entirely ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... Mrs. Tetchy and ask her to sell me some plants. I had great misgivings as to my success; and in addition, the fear of her sharp temper and language made me nervous. I could stand up and face and argue with a man without flinching; but somehow the rasping savagery of a termagant woman ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... roots. What landmarks remain are the blackened walls of houses, cracked and crashed in by falling roofs. The entire place must have been given over to explosion and incendiarism before the Huns departed. One stands in awe of such completeness of savagery; one begins to understand what is meant by the term "frightfulness." As far as eye can reach there is nothing to be seen but decayed fangs, protruding from a swamp of filth, covered with a green slime where water has accumulated. This is not the unavoidable ruin of shell-fire. ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... Pond, it was thick and red for days, and tradition said that in after years it resumed its hue of crimson at sunset and held it until dawn. The captured, who were delivered to the Indians, had little to hope, for their white allies could not stay their savagery. Blind Rock was so called because the Indians brought a white man there, and tearing his eyes out, flung them into embers at the foot of the stone. Captives were habitually tortured, blazing splinters of pine being thrust into ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... and laid in churchyard, and the doctor remained a bachelor. Christmas found him busy upon two papers written almost concurrently: the one 'A Description of a Kind of Trigla vulgarly confounded with Trigla Blochii,' intended for Loudon's 'Magazine of Natural History,' the other, 'On Savagery in Dogs and Methods of Meeting their Attacks,' for the Journal of ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... hardship had not diminished his big paunch so characteristic of the rich, peace-loving merchant. He had gone through the terrible events of the past year with sorrowful resignation and bitter complaints at the savagery of men. Now that he was journeying to the frontier at the close of the war, he saw the Prussians for the first time, although he had done his duty at the ramparts, and staunchly mounted guard on ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... A keen satire on our recent wars, in which the parallel between savagery and soldiery is unerringly drawn. Profusely illustrated by Dan Beard. 12mo, cloth, 400 pages, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various |
