"Heinousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the persons of God's creatures, doom to slavery the free African the moment his eyes are opened on the light of heaven, for no other offence than being the child of parents thus doomed before him, can, in the judgment of truth and the estimation of a just posterity, be held inferior in heinousness only to the first act of piracy which made them slaves. It is in vain that we cover up and avoid such reflections. They cling to us, and earth cries shame upon us that their voice has been so long unheeded. ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... nor a principle of thought. He is the living God, a real personal spirit with whom the soul is permitted to hold direct communion. Providence becomes the act of a personal agent. Religion is the worship in spirit. Sin is seen in its heinousness. Prayer is justified as a reality, as the breathing of the human soul for communion with its infinite Parent (8). And by the light of this intuition, God, nature, and man, look changed. Nature is no longer a physical engine; man no longer a moral machine. Material nature becomes the ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... have committed. You were sent to one of the best public schools in England. It is not likely that in the healthy atmosphere of such a school as Roughborough you can have come across contaminating influences; you were probably, I may say certainly, impressed at school with the heinousness of any attempt to depart from the strictest chastity until such time as you had entered into a state of matrimony. At Cambridge you were shielded from impurity by every obstacle which virtuous and vigilant authorities could devise, and even had the obstacles been fewer, your parents probably took ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... dead to life; but if you are really more influenced in this matter by the heinousness of the crime itself, by the moral infection, so to speak—that may spring from any kinship with Juliet Sparling or inheritance from her—than by any dread of social disgrace or disadvantage—if that be true!—then for ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... know I love you." The words to her sense had been so all-important, had meant so much, had seemed to be so final, that they hardly wanted further corroboration. Then, indeed, had come the great fault,—the fault which she had doubted whether she could ever pardon; and she, because of the heinousness of that offence, had been unable to answer the question that had been asked. But the offence, such as it was, had not lightened the solemnity of her assurance, as far as love went, that Ralph ought to be her own after the speaking of such words as he had spoken. There were those ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... these very writers who claim for him a high inborn morality, discovering in him such indwelling monsters as revenge, mercilessness, implacability, the affirmation falters not the less upon my tongue. That very many of the graver crimes laid at the Indian's door, and the revolting heinousness of which the records of our courts reveal; may be traced to his prescribing for himself, and practising, a lax standard of morals, is a statement which it would be idle to dispute. That the marriage tie exacts from him not the most onerous of interpretations, ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... into effect; and many were consequently saved from horrors, equalling, if not transcending in enormity, the outrages of the savages themselves. Scenes of licentiousness and fury, followed upon the discovery of the plot.—Exasperated at its heinousness, and under the influence of resentful feelings, the whigs retaliated upon the tories, some of the evils which these had conspired to inflict upon them. In the then infuriated state of their minds, and the little restraint at that time imposed on the passions ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... themes as the Attributes of God, the Divinity of Jesus Christ, the Nature and Desert of Sin, the Atonement, Regeneration, Faith, Resurrection, and Judgment to come, with Heaven and Hell as tremendous realities. They emphasized the heinousness and the desert of sin as a great argument for repentance and acceptance of Jesus Christ. A lapse from that style of preaching is to be deplored; for as Gladstone truly remarked, the decline or decay of a sense of sin against God is one of the most ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... commissioned by the king, and therefore the smallest satisfaction that I can demand of thee, is to solicit from Cambyses the punishment of him who has interfered in the execution of the royal decrees. In Persia, where men bow to the king's will as to the will of a god, this crime will be seen in all its heinousness. The punishment of Gyges is a debt ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to own a home has so strong a hold on the moral sense of the people that it is made use of by the promoter who may in some cases think himself the philanthropist he intends others to call him. I mean that the duty of owning and the heinousness of paying rent are so ingrained that buying on the instalment plan has seemed a righteous thing, even with the examples of broken lives in plain sight. As an incentive to save, if there were anything to save, it might have been justified in the days of feudalism. But for an independent ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... other; the professional jeers: 'My friend has told you this' and 'My friend will tell you that.' The professional steering of the impartial judge, seated there above them all; the cold, calculated rhapsodies about the heinousness of arson; the cold and calculated attack on the characters of the stone-breaker witness and the tramp witness; the cold and calculated patter of the appeal not to condemn a father on the evidence of his little child; the cold and calculated outburst on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... case would have been equally misplaced as unjust, although the Squire humanely pressed his intercession; the incorrigible pilferer was therefore handed over to the custody of one of the turnkeys, until the Governor might award a punishment suitable to the heinousness of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... world, hath by nature a power, not only to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men; but to judge of, and punish the breaches of that law in others, as he is persuaded the offence deserves, even with death itself, in crimes where the heinousness of the fact, in his opinion, requires it. But because no political society can be, nor subsist, without having in itself the power to preserve the property, and in order thereunto, punish the offences of all those of that society; there, ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... they found this nakedness associated with a relation of the sexes utterly opposed to their own, and when, especially, the first white wives on the South Sea beaches, found the joyous, handsome, frolicsome women of the islands, making ardent love to their husbands, the innate heinousness of bodily bareness became fixed as a guiding star towards bringing the ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... uppermost," or in any other manner deemed inconsistent with the dignity of the service which permitted you to fly them, laid you open to reprisals of the most summary nature. Before you realised the heinousness of your offence, a gang boarded you and your best man or men were gone beyond recall. The joy of waterside weddings—occasions prolific in the display of wrong colours—was often turned into ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... surprised, a prisoner taken forth of the hands of the warden, and carried away, so far within England, she esteemed a great affront. The lieger, Mr. Bowes, in a frequent convention kept at Edinburgh, the 22d of May, did, as he was charged, in a long oration, aggravate the heinousness of the fact, concluding that peace could not longer continue betwixt the two realms, unless Bacleuch were delivered in England, to be punished at the queen's pleasure. Bacleuch compearing, and charged with the fact, made answer—'That he went not into England with intention to assault any of the ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... he had kissed her; in fact it was almost unbelievable that he had ever kissed so radiant a being. She received him as an old friend, without a trace of embarrassment. Her ease put him at serious disadvantage. He was at a loss to know how to impress upon her the heinousness of the deceit she ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... spoke. But it was not necessary that anything upon the dark human "background" of this picture should have its origin with God; it was only necessary that, having originated with man, men or demons, it should be put to record just as it was in all its heinousness and wickedness in order that we might see the true character of God in his relations to it. If a wise physician should undertake to make himself known to the world he would not give us a history of all he did with every patient, and at the same time fail to give us just so much ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... but for sure custody, and only of such as be suspected of heresy, in which crime, thanked be God, there hath fallen no such notable person in our time, or of such qualities as hath given occasion of any sinister suspicion to be conceived of malice or hatred to his person other than the heinousness of their crime deserveth. Truth it is that certain apostates, friars, monks, lewd priests, bankrupt merchants, vagabonds, and lewd idle fellows of corrupt intent, have embraced the abominable and erroneous opinions ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... son may have leave to speak even to his own mother with some harshness, so as that harshness is meant for her good, and to turn her from her wicked ways, and not done for the purpose of upbraiding. And now this virtuous prince did in moving terms represent to the queen the heinousness of her offence, in being so forgetful of the dead king, his father, as in so short a space of time to marry with his brother and reputed murderer: such an act as, after the vows which she had sworn to her first husband, was enough ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... ever reclaim his property, he would not fail to detect the violence of which I had been guilty. Inglefield would disapprove in another what he had not permitted to himself, and the unauthorized and clandestine manner in which I had behaved would aggravate, in his eyes, the heinousness of my offence. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... slave of sin, and sold under its power. There is no appreciation of the Deliverer till there is a longing for deliverance, and no longing for deliverance till there is a hatred of bondage. Hence one must have a just sense of the heinousness of sin before he can ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... confused by her error, and being also rather tremulous with three flights of stairs at top speed, Harmony dropped her bow. In point of heinousness this classes with dropping one's infant child from an upper window, or sitting on the wrong side of a carriage when ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... "sale" of indulgences loses a deal of the heinousness with which it has been invested. The funds so realized go into the coffers of the Church, which is fit and proper. What afterwards becomes of them at the hands of Alexander opens up another matter altogether, one in which we cannot close our eyes to the fact that ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... result of sin, than any which we have as yet considered: that Death is the outward sign and sacrament of an inward and spiritual fact. When we sin we are, in a measure proportioned to the deliberateness and heinousness of our sin, doing to death the Divine life, the Christ within us. That which happened once on Calvary is renewed time after time in the inward experience of men. The outward fact is an historical drama representing an ever-repeated spiritual tragedy. Daily, by the hands of ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... these dismal forebodings, she at length shook the ropes leading from her own perch to Samoa's; adopting this method of arousing his attention to the heinousness of what was in all probability going on in the cabin, a prelude most probably to the invasion of her own end of the vessel. Had she dared raise her voice, no doubt she would have suggested the expediency of ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... At the foot of the slope is a great circular plain, ringed with a river of boiling blood in which spoilers, robbers, and murderers, some famous, some obscure, are plunged more or less deeply in proportion to the heinousness of their crimes; for, like earthly streams, this has its deep and shallow. At the latter point they cross, on the back of Nessus the Centaur, and at once enter (Canto xiii.) a wood of gnarled and sere trees, ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... arrived there, the armed multitude cause panic and confusion wherever they go. Again, when they see the principal men of the state placing themselves at their head, they think that, whatever it may be, it was not without good reason. Nor does the heinousness of the circumstance excite less violent emotions at Rome than it had done at Collatia; accordingly they run from all parts of the city into the forum, whither, when they came, the public crier summoned them to attend the tribune of the celeres, with which office Brutus ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... force is employed. There is rape without seduction if a man abduct a widow or one who is not a virgin. Hence Pope Symmachus says [*Ep. v ad Caesarium; Cf. can. Raptores xxxvi, qu. 2], "We abhor abductors whether of widows or of virgins on account of the heinousness of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... Now, my beloved, do we not get many remembrances of our sins? Is not every day presenting our primitive departure from God, our first separation from the Fountain of life by sin, to our view, and in such sad and woful effects pointing out the heinousness of sin? Do you not see men's bodies every day dissolved, the tabernacle of earth taken down, and the soul constrained to remove out of it? But what influence hath it upon us, what do the multiplied funerals work upon us? It may be, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... relief as he felt when the cool, fresh air struck his face. He had been saved from overt criminality. God had not permitted him to thus debase himself. Now that his excitement was gone, he saw the heinousness of the sin he had been about to commit in all ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... purse. It was this gigantic iniquity which created that arrogant class who have exhausted the catalogue of violence to obtain power and the lexicon of sophistry for arguments to extenuate the exceeding heinousness of crime. How could it be otherwise? To tell a man he is free when he has neither money nor the opportunity to make it, is simply to mock him. To tell him he has no master when he cannot live except by permission of the man who, under ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... What other heinousness they would be guilty of would never be shaped into thought, for at this moment down came a dainty little slipper, with a dainty little rosette, from the tree above, plump on to his sketch, and a violent start and a glance upward revealed a bewildering little ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... The heinousness of sins is not to be measured singly by their nature, but also by the state of the person who commits them. The least unfaithfulness in a spouse is more injurious to her husband, than far greater ones in his domestics. I told them all the trouble ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... soon found that he was generally right. Great crimes are the work of great criminals, and great criminals are very few. And by "great crimes" I mean, not crimes that loom large in the public view because of their moral heinousness, but crimes that are the work of skilled and resourceful criminals. The problem in such cases is not to find the offender in a population of many millions, but to pick him out from among a few definitely known "specialists" in the particular ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... not be amerced for a small offence, but only according to the degree of the offence; and for a great crime according to the heinousness of it, saving to him his contenement;[31] and after the same manner a merchant, saving to him his merchandise. And a villein shall be amerced after the same manner, saving to him his wainage, if he falls under our mercy; and none of the aforesaid amerciaments ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... heart filled to overflowing with the claims of the great mission upon which she had entered, she commenced a lecturing tour, speaking to the people of her "experiences among the Freedmen." To show them as they were, to give a truthful portrayal of Slavery, its barbarity and heinousness, its demoralization of master and man, its incompatibility with all things beautiful or good, its defiance of God and his truth; and to show the intensely human character of the slave, who, through this fearful ordeal of two hundred years, had ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... desires to get rid of his father and mother-in-law. By means of threats, reproaches and inducements he persuades another man to commit the crime. Taking a gun, the latter sets out to do the deed; but he realises the heinousness of it and turns back. "The next day," he says, "at four o'clock in the morning I started again. I passed the village church. At the sight of the place where I had celebrated my first communion I was filled with remorse. ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... world loves a lover," and it is, perhaps, equally true that most people like to read the details of clever detective exploits. The deeds of criminals naturally awaken the emotions of horror, fear, curiosity and awe in proportion to their heinousness and the mystery by which they are enveloped. Consequently the detective officer who pierces the mystery—unravels it thread by thread, and by unerring sagacity penetrates its innermost depths and lays his hand ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... in a variety of ways, which have been very cleverly distinguished and classified by legislators according to their heinousness or merit, to the end that some robbers may be honored, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Montgomery or some other convenient Southern city. The vitality of the Rebellion existed not in cities, towns, or capitals, but in that which could die only by annihilation,—Human Slavery. That was and is the "original sin" of the Rebellion,—the total depravity and innate heinousness, to use theological terminology, without which there could not have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... daughter. The cauzee, however, had not long left home, when the brother, instigated by passion, made love to his sister-in-law, which she rejected with scorn; being, however, unwilling to expose so near a relative to her husband, she endeavoured to divert him from his purpose by argument on the heinousness of his intended crime, but in vain. The abominable wretch, instead of repenting, a gain and again offered his love, and at last threatened, if she would not accept his love, to accuse her of adultery, and bring upon her the punishment ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... defense: taking all this into consideration, he, Mr. Smoothbore, would confidently ask the jury whether the prisoner at the bar was to be credited with merely a romantic stratagem, or with a crime the heinousness of which was only exceeded by the means by which he had striven to exculpate himself from it, and to evade ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... the level of other girls. The very pain that Lady Barbara took to hush it up, her fears lest it should come to the ears of the De la Poers, her hopes that it MIGHT not be necessary to reveal it to her brother, assisted to weigh down Kate with a sense of the heinousness of what she had done, and sunk her so that she had no inclination to complain of the watchfulness around her. And Aunt Jane's sorrowful kindness went ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge |
