"Cruelty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... walk up and down, and occasionally advance toward the door, as if to disperse the crowds. At such times, however, before executing his purpose, he would glance round on the splendors they were admiring, and, as if smitten with a sense of the enormous cruelty he had meditated in thinking to deprive them of the sight, would falter and turn away, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... Abdallah, who was murdered by his brother, Giaffir (pacha of Aby'dos). After the death of his brother, Giaffir (2 syl.) took Selim under his charge and brought him up, but treated him with considerable cruelty. Giaffir had a daughter named Zuleika (3 syl.), with whom Selim fell in love; but Zuleika thought he was her brother. As soon as Giaffir discovered the attachment of the two cousins for each other, he informed his daughter that he intended her to marry ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... cruelty, or horror, not of great size, for which enormousness should be used. We speak of the enormity of an offence but of the ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... to expect it? I have curbed and repressed myself not to scare you by precipitancy. In that I have done violence to my feelings, and more than all in using the same cold aloofness with which you chose to treat me. I have waited—oh! so patiently—until you should tire of that mood of cruelty." ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... which he could have counted if he had cared to. "There is fighting in the forest already," he thought. Then putting his head low in the tunnel of vegetation he dashed forward out of the horrible cloud of flies, which he actually managed for an instant to leave behind him. But it was not from the cruelty of insects that he was flying, for no man could hope to drop that escort, and Jaffir in his life of a faithful messenger had been accustomed, if such an extravagant phrase may be used, to be eaten alive. Bent nearly double he glided ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... will not tell. Only thus much: I love thy child. Trust me,—I love them, all. They are the brightest miracle I know. Wherever I go, I search the eyes of men To find such clearness;—and it is not there. Lies, greed and cruelty, and dreadful dark! And all that makes Him sad these thousand years, And keeps His forehead bleeding.—Ah, ...
— The Piper • Josephine Preston Peabody
... demanding, rigidly, an explanation regarding the recent attacks upon the Americans, as well as the immediate surrender of the murderers in their tribes who were guilty of committing various acts of injustice and cruelty since the ...
— The Battle of Bayan and Other Battles • James Edgar Allen
... as a child, he ever remained. He was known as a little demon, of insensate cruelty and viciousness. The family medicos privately adjudged him a mental monstrosity and degenerate. Such few boy companions as he had, hailed him as a wonder, though they were all afraid of him. He could outclimb, outswim, outrun, outdevil any of them; while none dared fight with him. He was too terribly ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... house on the square was touched, the scene was one of unmitigated desolation. It was the first time we had seen the raw wounds of a bombardment, and the freshness of the havoc seemed to accentuate its cruelty. We wandered down the street behind the hotel to the graceful Gothic church of St. Eloi, of which one aisle had been shattered; then, turning another corner, we came on a poor bourgeois house that had had its whole front torn away. ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... cartridges and a 38 Smith & Wesson is the sum total of my armament. Emptying my revolver among the mob, and then being caught while reloading, would mean a lingering death by the most diabolical tortures, processes that the heathen Chinee has reduced to a refinement of cruelty unsurpassed in ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... committed, on this continent, at least. Up stairs, in Castle Thunder, there are two or three large rooms, barred and dimly lit, and two or three series of condemned cells, pent-up and pitchy, where, by a refinement of cruelty, the ceiling has been built low so that no man can stand upright. Here fifteen or twenty were crowded together, and, in the burning atmosphere, they stripped themselves stark naked, so that when in the morning the cell-doors were opened, they came forth as from the ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... their faith as an Infidel, and therefore common property. These bandits could offer no such excuse, for they plundered people of their own faith and blood. They were Mexicans, a hybrid mixture of Spanish atrocity and Indian cruelty. They numbered from ten to twenty, and for several months terrorized the Mexican inhabitants on both sides of the river. On the American side they were particular never to molest any one except those ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... man," said Peter, smiling, "that you are not without curiosity; but I can easily pardon anyone for being curious about the wonders contained in the book of Master Ellis Wyn. The angel showed him the course of this world, its pomps and vanities, its cruelty and its pride, its crimes and deceits. On another occasion, the angel showed him Death in his nether palace, surrounded by his grisly ministers, and by those who are continually falling victims to his power. And, on a third occasion, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Danish viking, noted for his daring, cruelty, and success, had taken it into his head to visit the neighbourhood of Horlingdal, and repay in kind a visit which he had received in Denmark the previous summer from a party of Norsemen, on which occasion his crops had been burned, his cattle slaughtered, and his lands "herried", ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... deeply in love with his friend's wife once said: "If only I could paint her and get what I want from her, I could bear it." His wish strikes a chill at first; it sounds egotistic; it has the peculiar, instinctive, inevitable cruelty of the artist, seeing in human nature material for his art. But it shows us the moral side of art. The artist was a good and sensitive man; he saw the misery he had brought and would bring to people he loved, and he saw, or ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... however, gave him no uneasiness, compared to the present injury. The boy seized on was not a slave, and accused of no offence. His fidelity to his master had brought him into his present situation, and he, as his protector, could not see him enslaved without deprecating the cruelty and injustice of the act. Ali, with a haughty and malignant smile, told his interpreter, that if Mr. Park did not depart that instant, he would send him back likewise. Finding it was vain to expect redress, Mr. Park shook hands with his affectionate boy, who was not less affected than ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... severe in the whole scene. It seemed impossible that any one of the innumerable keys could fit a churlish strong-box or a prison-door. Cellars of beer and wine, rooms where there were fires, books, gossip, and cheering laughter—these were their proper sphere of action. Places of distrust and cruelty, and restraint, they would have left quadruple-locked ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... and 8 syllables), which hiss and stab like poisoned bullets, and which were transmitted to his family by a venal gaoler. There he wrote the best known of all his verses, the pathetic Jeune captive, a poem at once of enchantment and of despair. Suffocating in an atmosphere of cruelty and baseness, Chenier's agony found expression almost to the last in these murderous Iambes which he launched against the Convention. Ten days before the end, the painter J.B. Suvee executed the well-known portrait. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... at the time of his death. His last years were harassed by ill-health and the turbulence of his grandson Archagathus, at whose instigation he is said to have been poisoned; according to others, he died a natural death. He was a born leader of mercenaries, and, although he did not shrink from cruelty to gain his ends, he afterwards showed himself a mild and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... that of the Highlanders to a thousand. No quarter was given to the stragglers and fugitives who fell into the hands of the English. Their wounded were left on the ground till the following day without care or food, and the greater portion of them were then put to death in cold blood, with a cruelty such as never before or since disgraced an ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... hated their master was almost a matter of course. At the same time they were far from regarding him as an exceptional monster of cruelty, for they knew from their friends that flogging prevailed almost everywhere, and accepted it as a necessary portion of the woes of boyhood. Indeed, in some respects, when not smarting under the infliction, they were inclined to believe that their lot was, ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... district with an energy of hatred to which even the terror inspired by Claverhouse gave place, and which has survived to a time within the memory of men still living. In the early years of this century the most monstrous traditions of his cruelty were still current, and are not yet wholly extinct. In a vaulted chamber of the house in which he lived, on the English road some three miles south of Dumfries, is still shown an iron hook from which he is said to have hung his ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... in the bosom of great injustice; but there can be, I imagine, neither cruelty nor callousness in our speaking, at times, as though this injustice had ended, else should we ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... days, small chance of fair play in a quarrel with velvet and embroidery; so that the fellow, who was menial in the inn, slunk back to finish his task of dressing the bonny gray, laughed at by all, but most by the wench in the stammel waistcoat, his fellow-servant, who, to crown his disgrace, had the cruelty to cast an applauding smile upon the author of the injury, while, with a freedom more like the milk-maid of the town than she of the plains, she accosted him with—"Is there any one you want here, my pretty gentleman, that you ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... bridge, and saw the London night, blue and gold, vast water rolling, and the spectacle of the stars like a dream from which she could not disentangle her individuality. Was she to die in the star-lit city, she and her child; and why should such cruelty happen to her more than to the next one? Steadying her thoughts with an effort, she said, "Why not go to the workhouse, only for the night?... She did not mind for herself, only she did not wish her boy to go there. But if God ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... buy basket Sunday," said the Princess, and she looked loftily away from the sweet-grass basket shaking in Nancy's shaking hand. She was not in the least moved by Nancy's horrified, distressed face. Perhaps something of the ancient cruelty of her race possessed her; perhaps it was only the contagion of Yankee shrewdness. Nancy dared not go home with the basket; she went home without it ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... very parties injured, expresses indeed that opinion of our ignorance, baseness, and insensibility which your uninformed and proud nation has long been pleased to entertain of us. It is impossible that we should think of submission to a government that has, with the most wanton barbarity and cruelty, burnt our defenseless towns, in the midst of winter, excited the savages to massacre our farmers, and our slaves to murder their masters, and is, even now, bringing foreign mercenaries to deluge ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... invention into the teeth of the inventor, especially when that inventor knows that it is successful really, although just at present it does not happen to work, is a very deadly insult. Few indeed could be deadlier, except, perhaps, that of the cruelty which can suggest to a woman that no man will ever look at her because of her plainness and lack of attraction; or the coarse taunt which, by shameless implication, unjustly accuses the soldier of cowardice, the diplomat of having betrayed the secrets of his country, or ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... are very gentle, very humane; the democratic system deprives people of weapons that every one doesn't equally possess. No one is formidable; no one is on stilts; no one has great pretensions or any recognised right to be arrogant. I think there is not much wickedness, and there is certainly less cruelty than with you. Every one can sit; no one is kept standing. One is much less liable to be snubbed, which you will say is a pity. I think it is to a certain extent; but, on the other hand, folly is less fatuous, in form, than in your countries; and as people ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... He knew there was no danger now of their loosing his bonds—they were pleased to see him suffer; Carew, because of jealousy, and Ichi, because of native cruelty. He determined to bear his lot with stoicism. If they were about to command this yellow fiend with the deadly fingers to torture him, why, he would stand it. He would not give them the satisfaction, nor ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... stand far apart are trimmed of their branches, and brought nearer to each other by bending their bodies; the victim is then attached to both trunks, sometimes by his extended arms, at others by his legs, or by whatever part of the frame cruelty can suggest, when the saplings are released, and permitted to resume their upright positions. Of course, the sufferer is lifted from the earth, and hangs suspended by his limbs, with a strain on them that soon produces the most intense ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... Here we are (thought I) in New Orleans—the metropolis of a great slave country,—a town in which exist many depots for the disposal of human beings,—the very city where, a few months ago, poor Pauline was sacrificed as the victim of lust and cruelty! Unhappy girl! What a tragedy! On the 1st of August last, I told the horrid tale to my emancipated people in Berbice. Here it is, as extracted from the Essex (United States) Transcript. Read it, if you please; and then you will have a notion of ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... We believe in, and fear a God, and whatever you may conclude from the Slaughter of your Companions, yet we are far from thirsting after the Blood of the Whites; and it's Necessity alone which obliges us to what bears the face of Cruelty. Nothing is so dear to Man as Liberty, and we have no way of avoiding Slavery, of which our Bodies wear the inhuman Marks, but by a War, in which, if we give no Quarter, the English must blame ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... but she thrilled at the telling of some actual adventure, something big with life. Her heart and good will went out to the man who won against odds. Strangely enough, soldier's daughter though she was, the pomp and glamour and cruelty of war were detestable to her. It was the obscure and unknown hero who appealed to her: such a one as this ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... 375. The cruelty which is inflicted on the workman by the payment of his wages in goods, is often very severe. The little purchases necessary for the comfort of his wife and children, perhaps the medicines he occasionally requires for them in illness, must ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... her arm, her cloak, the nun strove desperately to detain her. "Randalin! Listen! Alas! how you grieve me by talking after this manner! Wait, you do not understand. It is not their cruelty I fear for you. Child, listen! It is ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... rebellious child obey: to extort answers from plants is indeed a problem! By many years of close contiguity, however, I have come to have some understanding of their ways. I take this opportunity to make public confession of various acts of cruelty which I have from time to time perpetrated on unoffending plants, in order to compel them to give me answers. For this purpose, I have devised various forms of torment,—pinches simple and revolving, pricks with needles, and burns with acids. But let this pass. I now understand that replies ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... daughter were with me. Bonaparte came to see me in the evening; and oh! Bourrienne, how can I describe to you what I felt at the sight of him; even the interest he evinced for me seemed an additional cruelty. Alas! I had good reason to fear ever ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... that he should be tortured so—her Frank! Oh, she knew—whatever he said, and however bravely and jauntily he talked. To think that her love for him should have been the principal cause of his being sent to jail, as she now believed. And the cruelty of her father! And the smallness of his enemies—that fool Stener, for instance, whose pictures she had seen in the papers. Actually, whenever in the presence of her Frank, she fairly seethed in a chemic agony for him—her strong, handsome lover—the strongest, bravest, wisest, kindest, handsomest ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... occasion and get on quite as well without them. He clearly disapproved of Desiree's marriage, and drew her attention to the fact that she was no more than a schoolgirl with an inconsequent brain, and little limbs too slight to fight a successful battle in a world full of cruelty ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... matters he returned to the abuses that had been discovered by the commission. A terrible story of neglect and cruelty was told. These charges did not rest on the testimony of prisoners. They were sustained by the evidence of officers and by the records of the institution. "If," said the speaker, "every word of the witnesses called by the commissioners were struck out, and the case left to rest on the testimony ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... It seemed cruelty to prolong the conversation, and soon after the order was given to lower the sail and unstep the mast, for the wind had pretty well dropped as they swept in towards where the vessels were anchored, and the distance ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... time approached for Gerrard's return to active service, it struck him that she had perceived her unconscious cruelty, and was endeavouring to atone for it. He loved her the better for the thought, though it made him all the more miserable, since the tenderness in her voice, the tears he sometimes surprised in her eyes, must spring from a pity that was not at all akin to ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... few women, not well sunned and ripened, and perhaps toughened, who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true thing with a kind of genial cruelty. Still there are some - and I doubt if there be any man who can return the compliment. The class of man represented by Vernon Whitford in THE EGOIST says, indeed, the true thing, but he says it stockishly. Vernon is ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were appointed by the Welsh princes, and after the conquest of Wales, by commission from the kings of England. Yet the tradition is that Edward I., in revenge for the influence of the Bards in animating the resistance of the people to his sway, persecuted them with great cruelty. This tradition has furnished the poet Gray with the subject of his celebrated ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... antagonistic political systems in that which nature and history have irrevocably decided must be one country. To agree to a compromise which would leave any ambiguity on that point would not be magnanimity: it would be weakness, ingratitude, and cruelty—ingratitude to the heroic dead, and cruelty to the ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... August 29th. The shocking condition of the city, which the victors found piled with heaps of dead bodies, the quarrels over the sharing of booty, the sale of the wretched creatures who had not succumbed to the pestilence,[26] all these scenes of terror, cruelty, greed, caused him profound horror. The "human beast" was let loose, the apostle's voice could no more make itself heard in the midst of the savage clamor than that of a life-saver over a ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... established the latter. And, whereas some by a smooth deportment made the first beginnings of tyranny less discernible and unacceptable, he by the fury of his behaviour heightned the severity of his ministry, which was liker the cruelty of an inquisition than the legality of justice. With all this he was a Presbyterian, and retained his aversion to King Charles I. and his party to ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... at once her horse forward, leaving me crushed by this blow, the more terrible that I had wholly ceased to fear it, and that it struck me with a keen cruelty I had not even foreseen. There had indeed been in the unhappy woman's voice no trace whatever of insolent swaggering; it was the very voice of despair, a cry of heart-rending grief and timid reproach; everything ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... the river and fruit upon the palm, none shall starve and none shall hoard. Superstition and dogma, fear and cruelty, shall have no place with us. We understand—you and I; and what we know we shall teach. And nothing shall survive of the world that was, save such things as were good. For the old order has passed away—and the new day shall be a ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... proclaimed by common consent, and without any interval, after the death of Vardanes, and ascended the Parthian throne before the end of the year A.D. 46. It is not likely that his rule would have been resisted had he conducted himself well; but the cruelty of his temper, which had already once cost him his crown, again displayed itself after his restoration, and to this defect was added a slothful indulgence yet more distasteful to his subjects. Some military expeditions which he undertook, moreover, failed of success, and the crime of defeat caused ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... must conquer our own spirits, and in this new birth of freedom not imitate the cruelty and harshness of royalty against which we protest. "We will kill the king, but not the man," were his words. But with all of his tact and logic he could not make his colleagues see that to abolish the kingly office, not to kill the individual, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... hate its cruelty and its wrongs. I'll do my best in these early days to make it impossible. But if it comes, I'll play the game with my life in my hands, and if I had a hundred lives I'd give them all to my country—my only regret is that ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... state, when Madame sent Mr. Duroy to tell me Mr. Fitzgerald was in debt, and had sold me to that odious Mr. Bruteman, whom he had always represented to me as the filthiest soul alive. I think that incredible cruelty and that horrible danger made me insane. My soul was in a terrible tempest of hatred and revenge. If Mr. Fitzgerald had appeared before me, I should have stabbed him. I never had such feelings before nor ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... millions of indemnity, the endowment of the Catholic religion, and an extraordinary annual embassy charged to present his majesty with a gold medal, which should set forth how the Dutch owed to him the conservation of their liberties. Such vindictive cruelty makes the mind run forward and dwell with a glow of satisfied justice on the bitter days of retaliation and revenge which in a future, still thirty years off, will humble the proud and pitiless oppressor in the dust; when he shall ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... his eagerness to outdo all former exhibitions and shows, went beyond the limits within which the seeing of men butchered in bloody combats and dying in agony and despair would serve for a pleasure and a pastime. The people were shocked; and condemnations of Caesar's cruelty were added to the other suppressed reproaches and criminations which ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... consecrated their lives. Had it not been for their patient and unselfish labor the story of the hard conditions under which the pioneers struggled to lift woman out of her subjection, the bitterness of the prejudice, the cruelty of the persecution, never would have been told. In all the years that have passed no one else has attempted to tell it, and should any one desire to do so it is doubtful if, even at this early date, enough of the records could be found for the most superficial account. In not a library ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... that I'm not the only one. Wordsworth evidently got worried about things like I do. But it's the cruelty—that's what I can't understand." ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... man with whom other men will not care to argue; an irrational, cut and thrust, unscrupulous, but yet distinctly honest man; one who can be tyrannical, but will tyrannise only over the evil spirits; a man capable of intense cruelty to those alongside of him, but who will know whether his victim does in truth deserve scalping before he draws his knife. He should be savage and yet good-humoured; severe and yet forbearing; truculent and pleasant in the same moment. He ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... any "mite society" nor the "little busy bees," where city children are trained to think of and help the poor, and she didn't wear the badge of the "Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," as many children do nowadays. Indeed I don't expect she ever heard there was such a society. But she was instrumental nevertheless in doing a great deal of real practical good. O, how her ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... regret," comes his voice from yon rude scaffold, "that I have but one life to give for my country." It is a shame that America so long had no monument to this heroic man. One almost rejoices that the British captain, Cunningham, author of the cruelty to Hale, himself met death on the gallows, in London, 1791. How different from Hale's the treatment bestowed upon Andre, the British spy who fell into our hands. He was fed from Washington's table, and supported to his ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... end. Nor had they "where to lay their heads," some of them having left behind only the smoking ruins of a home, which, though "ever so lowly," was "the sweetest spot on earth" to them. McCook, by his unparalleled cruelty, had made his name ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... the cause of truth in defending Hanno and the Carthaginians from the charge of cruelty, brought against them by Mr. Attorney-General Bannister. A very slender investigation of the bearings of the narration would have prevented it. I know not how Dr. Falconer deals with it, not having his little volume at hand; but in so common a book as the History ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 26. Saturday, April 27, 1850 • Various
... in the face, John Avery," answered he, "and tell me what you mean. Think you this great palace of cruelty and injustice built up by him shall not crumble to dust along ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... oppression and wrong, injustice and tyranny. And in Bonaparte, whether as Consul or Emperor, the peoples of Europe for a time beheld the hero who led against the tyrants the hosts of the free. What were his own despotisms, his own rigour, his cruelty, the spy-system of Fouche, the stifled Press, the guet-apens of Bayonne, the oppression of Prussia, and one sanguinary war followed by another—what were these things but the discipline, the necessary sacrifice, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Cavalier, it is still more curious to note that nineteenth-century New England, with its atmosphere of quiet scholars and cultured tea parties, suddenly flung forth in John Brown a figure whose combination of soldierly skill with maniac fanaticism, of a martyr's fortitude with a murderer's cruelty, seems to have walked straight out of the seventeenth century and finds its nearest parallel in some of the warriors ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... the force of that reply. At the same time her sense of injury set its own construction on Sydney's motive. "Has his cruelty driven you away ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... contrary to all our civilization. Our own men are apathetic and weary, and have no heart in the business. The Bulgarian soldiers are not very popular with us. In the first place they are more like Russians than Germans, and there is something about the Slav that makes one's hair bristle. Their cruelty is terrible." ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... poetical school that preceded the dramatists naturally expressed their ideas. It seems to us odd that peaceful sheepcotes and love-sick swains should stand for the world of the Tudors and Guises, or that its cunning statecraft and relentless cruelty should be represented by the generous follies of an imaginary chivalry. But it was the fashion which Spenser found, and he accepted it. His genius was not of that sort which breaks out from trammels, but of that which makes the best of what it finds. And whatever we may ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... danger and restrained by no scruple. He had to choose whether he would be their victim or their accomplice. His choice was soon made. He tasted blood, and felt no loathing; he tasted it again, and liked it well. Cruelty became with him, first a habit, then a passion, at last a madness. So complete and rapid was the degeneracy of his nature that, within a very few months after the time when he had passed for a good-natured man, he had brought himself to look on the despair and misery of his fellow ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... strong swimmer thrust into the sea to save a drowning man. There were others then besides himself, he thought, as he grasped it, who were making this fight for bread and glory; there was something else in the great city besides cruelty and misery, money-getting and money- spending—something of unselfishness, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the English and Americans were brutal in allowing women and children to go on this boat when they had been warned that the boat was going to be sunk! They spoke of this much in the manner in which one would speak of the cruelty of a man who would drive innocent children and women to march in front of armies in order to protect the troops from ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... bed. How such talents make one laugh at Tully's rules for an orator, and his indefatigable application. His laboured orations are puerile in comparison with this boy's manly reason. We beat Rome in eloquence and extravagance; and Spain in avarice and cruelty; and, like both, we shall only serve to terrify schoolboys, and for lessons of morality! "Here stood St. Stephen's Chapel; here young Catiline spoke; here was Lord Clive's diamond-house; this is Leadenhall Street, and this broken column was part of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... shut the eyes that they could not see, to close the ears that they could not hear, and to destroy the sense of smell. But Ralph, not being a politician, smelled the hog-pen without and the stench within, and saw everywhere the transparent fraud, and heard the echo of Jones's cruelty. ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... touch of cruelty in the tingles of pride that were hers at thought of these two royal men suffering for her and because of her; for she did not hide from herself the conviction that if Dick knew, or, rather, since he did know, he, too, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... in the midst of love, luxury, and fox-hunting, let us for a time leave our enterprising friend, Mr. Sponge, while we take a look at a species of cruelty that some people call 'sport.' For this purpose we ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... this deed of cruelty; poor Sinclair is raised from the floor by Liverpool Jack, who thrusts him forth into the street with a curse, telling him to come there ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... cruelty, the advent of hot water, Edward Pierson lay in his chintz-curtained room, fancying himself back in London. A wild bee hunting honey from the bowl of flowers on the window-sill, and the scent of sweetbrier, shattered that illusion. He drew the curtain, and, kneeling on the window-seat thrust his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... before, but it had been my distinct understanding that he was to accompany me; for if anything disconcerts me it is to go alone to such a place. However sweet girls may be as individuals, or in small groups, they are in the mass diabolically cruel, and their cruelty is directed especially against men. I know. I have walked up to a college building to pay a call, while thirty girls, seated on the steps, played, sang, and whistled an inane marching tune, with the ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... fatal, and each that should have served to bear him out of the trap only goes to bind him faster. A man in love suggests the spider's web, and when he is seeking to escape from a woman that will degrade his life, the cruelty which is added completes and perfects the comparison. A man's love for a common woman is as a fire in his vitals; sometimes it seems quenched, sometimes it is torn out by angry hands, but always some spark remains; it contrives to unite about its victim, and in the end has its way. It is a cancerous ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... at this awful relation of the cruelty of the sterner sex called for a spoken sympathy, and I said at once, and heartily: "That was horrid of him! If I were you I'd never give him ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... reef is not a long one, but the Samoan crew were frightened to have such a man free; so they tied him hand and foot and then lashed him down tightly under the midship thwart with strips of green fau bark. Not that they did so with unnecessary cruelty, but ex-Lieutenant Schwartzkoff, the foreman, was looking on, and then, besides that, this big-boned, light-skinned man was a foreigner, and a Samoan hates a foreigner of his own colour if he is poor and friendless. And then he was an aitu a devil, and could speak neither Samoan, nor ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... quiet, but I deem it best to maintain a military supremacy in the city for a few days, until the affair is fully investigated. I believe the sentiment of the general community is great regret at this unnecessary cruelty, and that the police could have made any arrest they ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... learnt the chess-play of cruelty, In the very beginning of the game her sweet cheek (rukh) took ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... in need, and steered for Cape San Antonio, in Cuba. There he gathered his followers about him, and addressed them with his fiery Gascon eloquence. For the first time, he told them his true purpose. He inveighed against Spanish cruelty. He painted, with angry rhetoric, the butcheries of Fort ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Messiah"—Addison's Evidences, p. 81. "But my chief affliction consisted in my being singled out from all the other boys, by a lad about fifteen years of age, as a proper object upon whom he might let loose the cruelty of his temper."—Cowper's Memoir, p. 13. "[Greek: Tou patros [ontos] onou euthus hypemnaesthae]. He had some sort of recollection of his father's being an ass"—Collectanea Graeca Minora, Notae, p. 7. This construction, though not uncommon, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... decency is almost universal among the poorer sort of people, whose manners I cannot but regard as the worst in the whole world. The open street for ever presents the spectator with the most loathsome scenes of beastliness, cruelty, and all manner of vice. In a word, if you would take a view of man in his debased state, go neither to the savages nor the Hottentots; they are decent, cleanly, and elegant, compared with the poor ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... the harpies in the story of PHINEUS, a son of AGENOR, King of Thrace. At the bidding of his jealous wife, IDAEA, daughter of DARDANUS, PHINEUS put out the sight of his children by his former wife, CLEOPATRA, daughter of BOREAS. To punish this cruelty, the gods caused him to become blind, and the harpies were sent continually to harass and affright him, and to snatch away his food or defile it by their presence. They were afterwards driven away by his brothers-in-law, ZETES and CALAIS. It has been suggested that ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... away sorrowing and sauntered up the little street that leads to the Etablissement des Bains. I was disappointed in Joanna and did not want to see her again. She should be punished for her cruelty. I sat down on one of the benches on the Place, and looking at the Mairie clock stolidly thought of supper. They made famous onion soup at the little auberge where we lodged, and Paragot, himself a connoisseur, had pronounced their ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... place will he receive, in the memory and gratitude of the world, than the perjured and audacious despot who, born the same year, in the neighboring city of the Hague, has won his way to the throne of France by deeds of selfishness and cruelty! Even to-day, who would not rather be John Henry Wichern, the director of the Rauhe Haus at Horn, than Louis ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... instant in which his glance searched the room, I saw that his face was flushed and his eyes swimming and bloodshot. There was in his look, as I remember it now, something of the inflamed yet bridled cruelty of a ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... no indication whatever of a tendency to overpass the confines of a wild hunter and warrior life. They were inveterately attached to it, impracticable conservatists of barbarism, and in ferocity and cruelty they matched the worst of their race. Nor did the power of expansion apparently belonging to their system ever produce much result. Between the years 1712 and 1715, the Tuscaroras, a kindred people, were admitted into the league as a sixth nation; but they were never ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... to give you a good licking, but the law won't allow me," said Mr. Bankes, K.C., the new magistrate for West London, in fining a lad for cruelty to a horse. The discovery that even magistrates have to forgo their simple pleasures in these times made a profound ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various
... for the escape of the Princess. This presence of mind, joined to the frankness of the youth, staggered Manfred. He even felt a disposition towards pardoning one who had been guilty of no crime. Manfred was not one of those savage tyrants who wanton in cruelty unprovoked. The circumstances of his fortune had given an asperity to his temper, which was naturally humane; and his virtues were always ready to operate, when his passions did not ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole
... world, the serene harmony of the universe, man's love of the true, the beautiful, and the good. Intellectual masters like Emerson and Renan. ignore conscience; they refuse to acknowledge the selfishness, the baseness, the cruelty of society; they are deaf to the groans of creation; they smile, and expect us to smile, whilst they clap a purple patch of rhetoric on the running sores of humanity. No sackcloth must pass their gate, and no craftsman of Ind ever wove gossamer half so delicate and delightful ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... as she went. But Mag, alas! was never more to respond to her call. He was hanging by the leg from his perch, head downward, wings outstretched, and glossy feathers ruffled; and below him, on the ground, some stones were scattered which told the tale of cruelty and petty spite. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... moved with pity at the sight of their torments, not one of them gave so much as a single groan: so little regard had they for their own flesh in the cause of God. No kinds of torture, no inventions of cruelty were forborne to force them to a conformity to the pagan worship of the times. Germanicus, who had been brought to Smyrna with eleven or twelve other Christians, signalized himself above the rest, and animated the most timorous ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... dog had been driven back. The hubbub died down. And White Fang licked his hurts and meditated upon this, his first taste of pack-cruelty and his introduction to the pack. He had never dreamed that his own kind consisted of more than One Eye, his mother, and himself. They had constituted a kind apart, and here, abruptly, he had discovered many more creatures ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... only serve to make its men and women more resolute; that even if others were to cease fighting against you, and if her sword were broken, Belgium would dash its hilt in your face till breath and life were driven out of her mangled body; that, in short, we hate you for your cruelty and despise you for your baseness; and that for the future, wherever there is a Belgian, there is one who is the enemy of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... was still bowed and his face had not relaxed from the pain of moving. Standing a moment at his side and looking down at him, she noticed how thin and gray his hair had become. She turned away her face, looking out of the window and battling with the cruelty of it all. The minister felt the tenderness of her silent ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... notice against another woman who was living in the same house. When he heard the name of the woman who wished to obtain the notice he refused to have anything to do with the matter. She had been a bad character. He said, 'I tell you candidly, she ought to be drowned for her cruelty to her children.' I said, 'You knew her once, but you do not know her now. How long is it since you saw her?' 'About nine weeks' he replied. 'Well,' I said, 'nine weeks ago she and her husband both came to Christ in our mission hall. For the first time ...
— The Personal Touch • J. Wilbur Chapman
... shawl tighter around me, clutching as I did so, a circlet of diamonds, that would have purchased all the comforts in the land for me, and yet I was alone and freezing. He was comfortable and warm, whose cruelty had driven me into the street, and yet I was his own flesh and blood. He could listen to the wailing of the winter wind, and know that it was the pitiful cry of his child—his daughter, and yet remain unmoved. It was then I missed the tender solicitude ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... Idea, it seemed. Yes, but these good caged beasts here set them an example, in not troubling relatives and friends when they come to the gasp! Mrs. Burman's invitation loomed as monstrous—a final act of her cruelty. His skin pricked with dews. He thought of Nataly beside him, jumping the ditch with him, as a relief—if she insisted on doing it. He hoped she would not, for the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the door, and Marishka was alone. With an effort she rose and mechanically made her dispositions for sleep, thinking meanwhile of the words of Captain Goritz and feeling a dull and unhappy sense of disappointment and defeat. There was a latent cruelty under his air of civility which astonished and terrified her. And the revelations with regard to Hugh Renwick, astounding though they were, had in them just enough of a leaven of fact to make them almost if not quite credible. Hugh Renwick, the man ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... Amasis. "Forget not my words, and above all shed no blood! I will know nothing of what happens to Phanes, for I hate cruelty and would not be forced to stand in horror of my own son. But thou, thou rejoicest! My poor Athenian, better were it for thee, hadst thou ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... SECOND PERIOD embraces the state of the Peninsula when the conquests of the Spaniards and Portuguese in the East and West Indies had raised to the highest pitch the renown of their arms; sullied, however, by superstition and cruelty. An allusion to the inhumanities of the Inquisition terminates this picture. The LAST PART of the Poem opens with the state of Spain previous to the unparalleled treachery of BUONAPARTE, gives a sketch of the usurpation attempted upon that unsuspicious and friendly kingdom, ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... expenditure of strength, and in the next place our hands were by this time in such a frightful condition of rawness that the idea of proposing what would make them very much worse seemed to smack of downright cruelty, unless I could urge some more valid reason than the mere desire to get ahead a little faster. And our situation just then was scarcely ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... heart over it," he said more gently; "and as to cruelty, Evelyn, haven't you abused my faith in your loyalty and dragged my pride in the dust by letting your name be coupled with that man's, though I told you plainly I had good reasons for distrusting and disliking ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... of children among the lower orders. Your propositions are far in advance of my radicalism. The State must sometimes interfere between parent and child; for instance, in education or protection from cruelty. But, if I understand you, you actually contemplate a general refining and elevation of the ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau's cruelty. I had not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau's hands. I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to me the lesser part. Before, ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... determination that the breeding system of such mischiefs and monsters shall be forever and utterly destroyed. We needed not that he should put on paper that he believed in slavery, who, with treason, with murder, with cruelty infernal, hovered round that majestic man to destroy his life. He was himself the lifelong sting with which Slavery struck at Liberty, and he carried the poison that belonged to Slavery; and as long as this Nation lasts ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... years, and in some respects seemed to have reformed. He died without confession; nevertheless, I did not think he would be damned. When the body had been wrapped in the winding-sheet, I saw it laid hold of by a multitude of devils, who seemed to toss it to and fro, and also to treat it with great cruelty. I was terrified at the sight, for they dragged it about with great hooks. But when I saw it carried to the grave with all the respect and ceremoniousness common to all, I began to think of the goodness of God, who would not allow that person to be dishonoured, but would have ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... so well and have used it so long in their daily life that they seem to discharge whole volleys of it into their English writings unconsciously, and so they omit to translate, as much as half the time. That is a great cruelty to nine out of ten of the man's readers. What is the excuse for this? The writer would say he only uses the foreign language where the delicacy of his point cannot be conveyed in English. Very well, then he writes his best things for the tenth man, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... be able to rest until I've seen them cruel, haughty, overbearin' wretches brought low. They're the enemies of God and man, because they drive poor, weak souls to curse their Maker for permittin' such cruelty. I've done it myself, over and over again! the good Lord forgive me! No, sir, it ain't in man's power to forgive a Spaniard who's got you into his power, and I can't believe that such an impossibility is expected of us. I don't believe that the passage ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... life, inasmuch as it differs from flesh and blood life in too many and important respects; that we have made up our minds about not letting life outside the body too decisively to allow the question to be reopened; that if this be tolerated we shall have societies for the prevention of cruelty to chairs and tables, or cutting clothes amiss, or wearing them to tatters, or whatever other absurdity may occur to idle and unkind people; the whole discussion, therefore, should be ordered out of court ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... much labor from the insurgents' cause, and supplying the places which otherwise might be filled with so many white men. So far as tested it is difficult to say that they are not as good soldiers as any. No servile insurrection or tendency to cruelty has marked the measures of emancipation and the arming of the blacks. . . . Thus we have a new reckoning. The crisis which threatened to divide the friends of the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... himself. Though our allies were rather tardy in the assault, they made up for it after the place was carried, saving the Spaniards the trouble of putting the enemy to death; and indeed we often blamed the ferocious cruelty of our allies, from whom we saved many of our Indian enemies. At this time indeed, our countrymen thought themselves better employed in searching for gold and taking good female prisoners, than in butchering a parcel of poor wretches who ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... looked into a show of wild beasts, and saw Nero the great lion, whom they had the cruelty to bait with bull-dogs, against whom the noble creature disdained to exert his strength. He was lying like a prince in a large cage, where you might be admitted if you wish. I had a month's mind—- but was afraid of the newspapers; ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... Guns; Ear Trumpets for Pilots; Hot Water in Dressing Ores; Ocean Echoes; The Delicacy of Chemists' Balances; Government Control of the Dead; Microscopic Life; The Sources of Potable Water; Theory of the Radiometer; Tempered Glass in The Household; The New York Aquarium; The Cruelty of Hunting; The Gorilla in Confinement; Instruction Shops In Boston; Moon Madness; The Argument against Vaccination; The Telephone; Damages by an Insect; The Summer Scientific Schools; An Intelligent Quarantine; The "Grasshopper Commission"; Surveying Plans for the Season; The Causes of Violent ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... and splendour; the deadly wrestling of men who meant to outlive one another by sheer strength and grim power of killing; the dark ignorance, darkest just before the waking of new thought, and art, and learning; the universal cruelty of all living things to each other, that had grown out of the black past; and, with all this, the undying belief in Rome's greatness, in Rome's future, in Rome's latent power to rule the ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... your horses must be well groomed, their hoofs blackened, and their tails properly banged. I do not intend here to enter a discussion concerning the cruelty of docking horses' tails. The social law is without exception. Horses with long tails are impossible. I believe banging is not accompanied ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... impossible to get on with the people who are capable of them; the mistakes which no one, we say, has any right to make; the shallowness, or conventionality, or narrowness, or positiveness in talk which makes us wince and tempts us towards the cruelty and wickedness of scorn;—surely in all these things, and in many others like them, of which conscience may be ready enough to speak to most of us, there are really opportunities for thus following the example of our Saviour's great humility and patience. How many friendships we ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... himself, he would probably have starved to death, had not the neighbors brought him food in fear of something that they sensed but vaguely. The food was brought to him by children; they were not afraid of Lazarus, nor did they mock him with naive cruelty, as children are wont to do with the wretched and miserable. They were indifferent to him, and Lazarus answered them with the same coldness; he had no desire to caress the black little curls, and to look into their innocent shining eyes. ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... turns on the murder of the heroine, the book is yet a considerably livelier one than Mr. Bates's, and imposes no such burden of hopeless misery on the reader. A startling and mysterious crime is dear to the human imagination, and here we are confronted with one hideous in its cruelty and inexplicable in its circumstances. The story is told by the passionate lover of the murdered Veronika, and there is much youthful eloquence and pathos in the description of his meeting with the lovely young Jewess, their sympathy in art,—for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... is closed," Olive said as she came back to her cooling tea. "I hope there is a heaven for horses and a hell for men. Oh, how I hate cruelty! Carmela, if that is Orazio I must say I sympathise with Gemma. How could any woman love a mean, narrow-shouldered, whitey-brown paper thing ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... strange threat. Should she mention it to Paul? She had almost done so, when she lifted her eyes to his face. The weary, worn expression checked her. Not now; it would be a cruelty. ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... that we were paddling up-stream. But whither were we bound; of what tribe or nation were the negroes who manned the canoe; and how had I come to be among them? Had Tourville, with a greater refinement of cruelty than even I gave him credit for, handed me over to the tender mercies of these savages, to work their bloodthirsty will upon me, instead of himself murdering me out of hand? If so, what was to be my ultimate fate? I shuddered as I ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... can only be likened to that of the lover in Heinrich von Kleist's poetically sublime, but morally atrocious, tragedy, Penthesilcia, except that, in poor Marie's case, the woman suffered from the awful frenzy of the male, in whom the "gentlest passion" degenerated in Saturnalia of revolting cruelty. The Duke killed Marie because doing so gave him the most damnable pleasure,—her the most ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... suddenly breaking into tears, 'is the cruelty on my side! O Mr Wrayburn, Mr Wrayburn, is there no cruelty in ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens |
