"Merciless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that torn thus from home and relatives, immured in filthy and crowded holds, ill fed, denied the two great gifts of God to man—air and water—subjected to the brutality of merciless men, and wholly ignorant of the fate in store for them, many of the slaves should kill themselves. As they had a salable value the captains employed every possible device to defeat this end—every device, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... of a married woman's infidelity, there would be fewer of the like scandals—the divorce might follow the scourging. A daintily brought-up feminine creature would think twice, nay, fifty times, before she would run the risk of allowing her delicate body to be lashed by whips wielded by the merciless hands of a couple of her own sex—such a prospect of degradation, pain, shame, and outraged vanity would be more effectual to kill the brute in her than all the imposing ceremonials of courts of ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... for his refusal Manuel sat upon the main-hatch fondling Tommy, and telling him what good things they would have in the morning for breakfast, and how happy they ought to be that they were not lost during the gales, little thinking that he was to be the victim of a merciless law, which would confine him within the iron grates of a prison before the breakfast hour in the morning. "I like Charleston, Tommy," said Manuel; "it looks like one of our old English towns, and the houses ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... to the domestic happiness of all circles as the golden system of living within one's income. Luxuries cease to be so if after-reflection produces vexatious results; comfort flies before an exorbitant and unprepared-for demand; and the debtor dunned by the merciless creditor sinks into something worse than a cipher, as nothingness is denied him, and the one standing before him but aggravates, and multiplies his painful annoyances. The great secret of satisfactory existence derives its origin from well-calculated and moderate expenditure. Ten ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... severe rebukes. For an hour she "soaked" her head; that is, she stood over a panful of warm water and kept dipping her head in with tightly shut eyes. Finally her hair softened sufficiently to be disentangled from the curl papers; and then Aunt Janet subjected it to a merciless shampoo. Eventually they got all the mucilage washed out of it and Cecily spent the remainder of the forenoon sitting before the open oven door in the hot kitchen drying her ill-used tresses. She felt very down-hearted; her hair was of that order which, ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the hero of this narrative, who fled to Canada with his slave wife, Elsie, to seek for her the protection of the British lion from the merciless talons of the freedom-shrieking American eagle, was emancipated three years previous to the date of this chapter, together with nineteen others (the reputed goods and chattels of John Bayliss, a Baptist deacon, near Jonesborough, Tennessee). Slaveholder ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... merciless to Marcia's shrinking ears. "I don't mind the implication. But Wilfred, Bobby, to fancy I would do anything so clumsy! Who says that women ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... was ignorant of it, she would come in an hour to the quay, and there some merciless agent would refuse her a passage! At any cost, he must see her beforehand, and enable her ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... midst of these thoughts—for himself resigned, for Ethel anxious—and turning over in his mind all the various modes by which the emotion of pity or mercy might be roused in a merciless and pitiless nature; he was thinking of an appeal to the brigands themselves, and had already decided that in this there lay his best hope of success—when all of a sudden these thoughts were rudely interrupted and dissipated and ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... debauchery and a weak pietism. He probably merited the cuts of the relentless scourge of Heine than which no instrument of chastisement was ever more unsparing, and which in his case was put to its most merciless use; but he loved art and lavished his revenues upon pictures, statues, and churches, which the world admires, imparting a benefit, though his subjects groaned. His successor, whom I saw, was a man morbid ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... Gallatin Street side. From this gallery he jumped to the street and fell flat on his back on the sidewalk. Springing to his feet as soon as possible, with a leaden, hail fired by the angry mob whistling about him, he turned to his merciless pursuers in an appealing way, and, throwing up one hand, told them not to shoot any more, that they could take him as ...
— Mob Rule in New Orleans • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... Twenty-one years ago to-day Ermyntrude was born, and her mother, after lingering two years, died. Leaving the girl in the care of an honest fishwife (when I say honest, I mean, as honest as her profession allowed), I roamed the seas as a Pirate: sorrow made me merciless. Then, when I wished to return to my daughter, I found that I ...
— The Pirate's Pocket Book • Dion Clayton Calthrop
... Private warfare was checked and lawless robbery to a considerable extent restrained. It is tolerably clear that the rise of heretical sects were both the cause and the result of moral dissatisfaction, tending to the adoption of higher moral standards. Some of these sects were cruelly crushed by merciless persecution, as in the case of the Albigenses. The doctrines of Wickliffe, however, were never stamped out in England; and the form which they took in Bohemia among the followers of the martyred John Huss had little about them ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... sent forth Thy prisoners out of the pit wherein is no water," the gloss observes: "Thou hast delivered them who were held bound in prisons, where no mercy refreshed them, which that rich man prayed for." But only the lost are shut up in merciless prisons. Therefore Christ did deliver some from the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... political friends. Mr. Balfour's face was a study; but it was a study in the impassibility which politicians cultivate when they desire to conceal their hatred of a political friend. It is on the same side of the House that the really violent and merciless animosities of the Parliamentary life prevail. I should think that Sir John Gorst is the object of about as bitter a hatred among his own gang as ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... Hood or his wild-woods setting, and the resourcefulness of Bre'r Rabbit; but the honest man will admit it is because of an innate and deeply rooted human sympathy with roguery as well as our natural human sympathy with the under dog and the man hunted by a merciless or an alien law. Very often, if the roguery is very great, or we are brought face to face with its effects and realize it is a real thing in real life, we will be shocked out of our sympathy with it, and realize, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... sects, which carried their own principles further than it was convenient to the original reformers; and always of the body from whom they parted: and this persecuting spirit arose, not only from the bitterness of retaliation, but from the merciless policy of fear. ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... make raid upon Pisan territory, and allowed Giovanni di Sano, who had lately been in her service, to seize a fortress in the territory of Lucca. The peace was broken. On the brink of ruin, ravaged by plague, Pisa turned to confront her hard, merciless foe. For months Florence ravaged her territory, while she, too weak to strike a blow in her own honour, could but hold her gates. Then the plague left ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... even by the most stunning blow; had he not even now three powerful protectors—Barras, Tallien, and Freron? He turned his back, therefore, with ready adaptability on the unsympathetic officials of the army, the mere soldiers with cool heads and merciless judgment. The evident short cut to restoration was to carry through the project of employment at Constantinople; it had been formally recommended, and to secure its adoption he renewed his importunate solicitations. His rank he still held; he might hope to regain position by some brilliant stroke ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... almost sounds as if Germans and Normans had got confounded. But the damage wrought by the last conquerors is being speedily made good on another site. It is the damage which is doing to the city by the merciless hands of its own people that never can be made good. One would have thought that the Cenomannian city on its height, the proud line of its Roman bulwarks, the noble works of later days which those bulwarks shelter, might have moved the heart of the most ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... for his hostility to man, I could never find out. Far down the river a hunter had been killed, ten years before, by a bull moose that he had wounded; and this may have been, as Noel declared, the same animal, cherishing his resentment with a memory as merciless as an Indian's. ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... Scott Brenton's brain. At the very end, there were two dates, both only possible, both so remote as to turn Brenton sick at heart. Was it for this that such men as Reed Opdyke were created? Was nature merciless, was law, that it ordained such pitiful, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... have thy reward. And now I rede thee go not to the Burg of the Four Friths; for this tale of thee shall get about and they shall take thee, if it were out of the very Frith-stool, and there for thee should be the scourge and the gibbet; for they of that Burg be robbers and murderers merciless. Yet well it were that thou ride hence presently; for those be behind my tormentors whom thou hast slain, who will be as an host to thee, and thou mayst not deal with them. If thou follow my rede, thou wilt ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... who went to Alaska and laid the foundations of his fortune before the gold hunters arrived. Bringing his fortunes to the States he is cheated out of it by a crowd of money kings, and recovers it only at the muzzle of his gun. He then starts out as a merciless exploiter on his own account. Finally he takes to drinking and becomes a picture of degeneration. About this time he falls in love with his stenographer and wins her heart but not her hand and ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... claim. It is not the divided and disinherited Churches of Scotland alone—it is, even more, the 'poor labourers of the ground'—who have reason, in these later days, to join in the death-bed denunciation by Knox of the 'merciless devourers of ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... suffered from want of water, air and space. The arrival of the captives at Columbia took place in the midst of a drenching rain-storm, and during the entire night, with scarcely any clothing, no rations, and no shelter, they were exposed to the merciless elements, while not twenty yards off, in front of their camping ground, glared the muzzles of a park of loaded artillery. The prisoners, being in a starving condition, looked the picture of despair. A discovery however was made of some bacon ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... young and the poor and the helpless go down before my eyes into the morass, trampled underfoot by beasts of prey in human shape that haunt these regions, it seemed as if God were no longer in His world, but that in His stead reigned a fiend, merciless as Hell, ruthless as the grave. Hard it is, no doubt, to read in Stanley's pages of the slave-traders coldly arranging for the surprise of a village, the capture of the inhabitants, the massacre of those who resist, and the violation of all the women; but the stony streets of London, if they could ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... this show of levity, for which she discerned no cause, Miss Carpenter's sentence upon the supposed culprit was instant and merciless. ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... Hooker and Cotton compare favorably with the best productions of their contemporaries in England, and contrast with the later writers of Cotton Mather's "glacial period," when, under the influence of the theocracy, "a lawless and merciless fury for the odd, the disorderly, the grotesque, the violent, strained analogies, unexpected images, pedantics, indelicacies, freaks of allusion, and monstrosities of phrase" were the traits ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... wind's rough and savage play. Between these capes of snow there was an occasional bare patch of clean swept ground. Altogether there was an impression of barren, wild, bitter-cold windiness about the aspect that did not fail to awe my mind; it looked inhospitable, merciless, and cruelly playful. ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... a passion, the power of which already appalled him. To say that he did not feel like keeping his promise now, or that his feelings had changed, he knew would be regarded as an excuse beneath contempt, and a week since he himself would have pronounced the most merciless judgment against a man in ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... merciless warrior, allowed no considerations of humanity to interfere with his military operations. The Palatinate, a country on both sides the Rhine, embracing a territory of about sixteen hundred square miles, and a population ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... while he was getting them together that the retreat might be made in good order, the old planter who, by the report of the fire-arms and the bustle and confusion without, guessed what had taken place, pressed me to remain with them, urging the certainty of our men being overpowered, and the merciless consequences which would ensue. He pledged himself with his fingers crossed in the form of the crucifix, that he would procure me safe quarter, and that I should ever enjoy his protection and friendship. I refused him kindly ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... musingly, "very strange that I should be pleading your gipsy's suit and find you so coldly, mercilessly determined to make that pleading vain! You are as stubborn as a Vereker and I think a trifle more merciless. Doubtless the reasons for your so sudden change are sufficient unto yourself, but to your friends they are profoundly incomprehensible, nor would I seek to probe the mystery; you are your own master and judge, and Diana is rich, has London at her feet, and ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... could be met by an intellectual superiority on the part of a demagogue clamouring for confiscation. The ultimate basis of the life of the State was for the first time to be laid bare and subjected to a merciless scrutiny; it remained to be seen which of the two great forces of society would prevail; the force of habit which had so often blinded the Roman to his real needs; or the force of want which, because it so seldom won a victory over his innate conservatism, was wont, when ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... of course, would ever mean to her quite what the oldest son meant. The first-born is the miracle, brought from Heaven itself through the very gates of death, a pioneer, merciless and helpless, a little monarch whose kingdom never existed before the day he set up his feeble little cry. All the delightful innovations are for him,—the chair, the mug, the little airings, ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... no reason to believe that the grandiose Woman handled, or designed to handle, a doomed Poland in the merciless feline-diabolic way set forth with wearisome loud reiteration in those distracted Books; playing with the poor Country as cat does with mouse; now lifting her fell paw, letting the poor mouse go loose in floods of celestial joy and hope without limit; and always ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that it meant mischief. Every purple flush of its hideous body told me so. The vague, goggling eyes which were turned always upon me were cold and merciless in their viscid hatred. I dipped the nose of my monoplane downwards to escape it. As I did so, as quick as a flash there shot out a long tentacle from this mass of floating blubber, and it fell as light and sinuous as a whip-lash across the front of my machine. ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... employment with a lordly hand. Of course, speaking so of the fate that, as a master, might be his own in the fluctuations of commerce, he was not likely to have more sympathy with that of the workmen, who were passed by in the swift merciless improvement or alteration who would fain lie down and quietly die out of the world that needed them not, but felt as if they could never rest in their graves for the clinging cries of the beloved and helpless ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... public, and the stupefaction of England, five American cruisers in succession captured or sank five British in the autumn of 1812, utilizing superior weight of broadside and more accurate gunnery with merciless severity. These blows did no actual damage to a navy which comprised several hundred frigates and sloops, but the moral effect was great. It had been proved that Americans, after ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... rank? Was it the earthquake's shock that left those long lines of dead heaped like grass before the mower's scythe? The rear ranks, paralyzed by the terrible disaster, held their ground, but no human courage could withstand the fire that blazed fierce and merciless from the redoubt. A moment's pause, and then a wild, headlong flight to the sheltering boats ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... fellow-creature thus!" exclaimed the priest, with indignation. "Oh! you are more savage than a heathen, or the very brute beasts there without, who trembled at the groans of the poor martyr; yea, hell itself could not be more merciless!" ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... a rage and gave the beggar a merciless scolding. The ragged fellow's insolent lying aroused his disgust and aversion, was an offence against what he, Skvortsov, loved and prized in himself: kindliness, a feeling heart, sympathy for the unhappy. By his lying, by his treacherous assault upon compassion, the individual had, as ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... had entrusted her soul? They that accompanied her e'er, Faithful in forest and field? Silent they circle my child, In tearful anguish embraced— Yet little actress she lies, Smiling, closed lashes beneath; See, she is laughing in truth— thou most merciless Death! ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... these persons have wives at home as well as I, from whom they have been much longer separated, under more affecting circumstances, having been held in a merciless and desponding slavery: if their wives love them as mine does me (a thing I cannot believe, but have no right to deny), ask these lately disconsolate and now joyous families whether I have done ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... bring the incident into the Lochlea period. In the new edition of Chambers's Burns, William Wallace accepts Robert's statement as correct; yet we hardly think the poet would have spent a summer at school at a time when the family was under the heel of that merciless factor. Besides, although he speaks of his seventeenth year, he has just made mention of the fact that he was in the secret of half the amours of the parish; and it was in the parish of Tarbolton that we hear of him acting 'as the second of night-hunting ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... the Atlantic, every passion is roused; our souls are fired with indignation. We see that their object is universal domination; we see that nothing less than the whole world, nothing less than the universal degradation of man, will satisfy these merciless destroyers. But be assured, Sir, we will oppose them with all our youthful energy and risk our lives in ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... a week later, Lord Baringstoke's public recantation was the talk of London. In a speech of considerable eloquence he showed how the merciless logic of facts had convinced his intellect, and his conscience had compelled him to abandon the position he had previously taken up. Fortunately, you can prove absolutely anything about Ireland. It is merely ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... a shout of "Amen! Amen!" They were all ready and would rather die on the field of battle than be hanged like rogues or perish in the woods at the hands of the merciless savages. So with muttered oaths they ...
— Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 • Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker
... applauded again as Sandel himself sprang through the ropes and sat down in his corner. Tom King looked across the ring at him curiously, for in a few minutes they would be locked together in merciless combat, each trying with all the force of him to knock the other into unconsciousness. But little could he see, for Sandel, like himself, had trousers and sweater on over his ring costume. His face was strongly handsome, crowned with a curly mop of yellow hair, while his thick, muscular ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... well-being of man here. It regards this life as an opportunity for joining that Church, for accepting that creed, and for the saving of your soul. If the history of the world proves anything, if proves that the Catholic Church was for many centuries the most merciless institution that ever existed among men. We, too, know that the Catholic Church was, during all the years of its power, the enemy of every science. It preferred magic to medicine, relics to remedies, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... continuance of the French war, and of that with the Indians which immediately succeeded it, the entire frontier from New York to Georgia was exposed to the merciless fury of the savages. In no instance were the measures of defence adopted by the different colonies, adequate to their object.—From some unaccountable fatuity in those who had the direction of this matter, a defensive war, which alone could have ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... out that heart-stirring sound so musical to an angler's ear, and than which none accords so well with the hoarser murmur of the brawling stream; till at last, after many an alternate hope and fear, the glittering prize turns up his silvery unresisting broadside, in meek submission to the merciless gaff. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... prohibition to liberal license. There are no pretensions about the Norwegians; there is no affectation about their morals and no leniency in the administration of their laws. The police and the magistrates are merciless and inexorable, and crime is punished more severely perhaps than in any other country. At the same time the people distinguish an important difference between temperance and total abstinence. They give their children beer in unlimited quantities, but absolutely ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... ask the reason. He was really enjoying the sight of her. Few women are comely in the morning hours, which have a merciless way of exaggerating minute imperfections. Beth hadn't any minute imperfections except her freckles, which were merely Nature's colorings upon a woodland flower. She seemed to fill the cabin with morning fragrance, like a bud just ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... without difficulty that the young officer preserved a calm demeanor under the severe blows dealt him by Fortune. Paul Landry, always master of himself, lowered his eyes that their expression of greedy and merciless joy should not be seen. The nearer the game drew to its conclusion, the closer pressed the circle of spectators, and in the midst of a profound silence the last hand began. Favored from the beginning ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... and sharp, merciless and logical veracity with which he discriminates between the solemn judgment of a tribunal and a stump speech from the bench,—the startling narration of decisions and statutes, practice and precedent, condensed into a few of the closing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... was white, and Hodson was trembling, but the girl stood, a merciless cold triumph in her face: "I do realise that, father. For the girl I care nothing, nor for Captain Barlow's intrigue with such, but I am the daughter of the man who ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... "merciless scalpel hacked and hewed away at the still almost palpitating flesh of the murdered man, in whose breast the dagger remained buried—a ferocious joy—a savage ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... hardly can be expected within measurable time on the part of either one or the other of the combatants in the existing European conflict, and this means the probable continuation for a long period of the merciless slaughter which has marked the last few months. We hold up our hands in horror at the stories of human sacrifices in the early ages when, after all, these were, perhaps, less brutal and less appalling than the wholesale slaughter of the flower of these warring ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... satire of Pope's in four books, the "fiercest" as well as the best of his satires, in which, with merciless severity, he applies the lash to his critics, and in which Colley Cibber figures as ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... ached especially. His head ached, the top of it ached, the back of it ached, the brains inside of it ached and seemed to be swelling, while the ache over his brows was intolerable. And beneath the brows, planted under his lids, was the merciless "$3.85." He opened his eyes to escape it, but the white light of the room seemed to sear the balls and forced him to close his eyes, when ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... have seen my way to put in a good word for you two. (To Sveinungi.) You won't be hard on your daughter! If we had been lying under the ruins now, she would have had no need to ask us. To-night we must not be merciless. ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... style, the merciless portraiture of the Second Empire, the unparalleled diorama of the Alma fight, combined to gain for these first four-and-twenty chapters an immediate vogue as emphatic and as widely spread as that which saluted the opening of Macaulay's "History." None of the later volumes, ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... joined their wives. By October they were on Lake Athabasca, which had already frozen. Here one of the wives, in the last stages of consumption, could go no farther. For a band short of food to halt on the march meant death to all. The Northern wilderness has its grim unwritten law, inexorable and merciless as death. For those who fall by the way there is no pity. A whole tribe may not be exposed to death for the sake of one person. Civilized nations follow the same principle in their quarantine. Giving the ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... that he would die before he would hurrah for Garfield, but when the merciless woman pushed him towards the edge of the rock, and said, "Last call! Yell, or down you go!" he opened his mouth and yelled so they heard it in ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... a facile and dramatic pen, a penetration as searching as a probe, and a power of psychological vision that in its minute detail, now pathetic, now ironical, in its merciless revelation of the hidden springs of the human heart, whether of aristocrat, bourgeois, peasant, or priest, allow one to call him ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... before he could bring in sufficient stores, he was invested by John, with Savary de Mauleon, called the Bloody, and a band of free-companions, whose noms de guerre were equally truculent—namely, the Merciless, the Murderer, the Iron-hearted. One of the archers within the walls bent his bow at the King's breast, and said to the castellane, "Shall I deliver you from yonder mortal foe?" "No; hold thy hand," said Albini; "strike not the evil beast; shouldst thou fail, ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... powerful urges of his desires and passions! She had fought with every resource at her command. She had wept and pleaded, she had stormed and raged, she had feigned submission and had played for time—and her torment had not touched in the slightest degree the merciless and gloating brain of the being who called himself Roger. Now his tantalizing, ruthless cat-play was done, the horrible gray-brown face was close to hers—she wailed her final despairing message to Costigan and attacked that hideous face with the ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... had the sorrow to live; had you seen the storms, and braved the perils, and endured the distresses which have befallen me; had you sat gazing out on the dreary ocean at midnight on a haunted coast; had you seen comrade after comrade, brother after brother, and son after son, swept away by the merciless ocean from your very side; had you seen the shapes of friends, doomed to the wave and the quicksand, appearing to you in the dreams and visions of the night, then would your mind have been prepared ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... before that time we shall be ready with the money; and even though we were not, it would be bad fortune indeed to find so merciless a creditor in his successor. We may sleep to-night with ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... groaned the man, staggering back against the side of the tent, and shrinking under the merciless words of the Goth like a ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Fate was not otherwise to be contended with, and its grim irony went deeper than human reach. Nemesis was merciless; an error was punished like a crime, and the more confident you had been that you were right, the most severe was the probable penalty. But it was part of Fate's malignity that, though the offender was punished, though Justice took care that her ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... which the company were to pass—no one passed uncensured by this confederacy. The first coup-d'oeil decided the fate of all who appeared, and each of the fair judges vied with the others in the severity of the sentence pronounced on the unfortunate persons who thus came before their merciless tribunal. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... This doctrine, like many others of its kind, seemed at first sight to be the balm it pretended, instead of an irritant, as it really was. It was calculated to deceive all except thinking men, and to silence all save a merciless logician. And this merciless logician, who was heaven-sent in time of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... indeed small. He felt that he could make a dash for liberty and outrun any one in the crowd, or outfight any one who might overtake him; but he would sooner have died than leave History, who could neither run well nor fight well, to the mercies of the merciless ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... fare better at the hands of the popular epigrammatist. Where three Kayasths are gathered together a thunderbolt is sure to fall; when honest men fall out the Kayasth gets his chance. When a Kayasth takes to money-lending he is a merciless creditor. He is a man of figures; he lives by the point of his pen; in his house even the cat learns two letters and a half. He is a versatile creature, and where there are no tigers he will become a shikari; but he is no more to be trusted than a crow or a snake without a tail. One of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... with the circumstances of their utterance. There was one in particular which especially tormented him. "Go for a cruise on your own account; go for a cruise on your own account," his brain reiterated with merciless pertinacity. What did it mean? Where had he heard those words before, and who had uttered them? He felt absolutely certain that at some time or other he had heard that phrase spoken, and that it had some intimate connection with himself, that it somehow concerned him vitally. "There ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... the ready made tool of the demagogue. A true democracy can only exist on the basis of sobriety. A drunken people cannot be trusted with the dearest rights and most vital possessions of freemen. Better the merciless tyranny of the Czar, or the military despotism of the Kaiser, far better the class rule of England, than the staggering, hiccoughing, bedevilled government ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... but not just like this one. My husband wants to take me to California. I wish—oh, how I wish I could go! But Harry would follow —I know he'll be merciless." ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... struggled on, because Napoleon needed all his soldiers. Then weakness crushed me, like a weight of iron. A mist before my eyes shut out the opposite precipice with its sparse pines, and flashing waterfalls, the mountain heights beyond, and the merciless blue sky. This was death. Who cared? The echo of thirty thousand feet was in my ears as they passed on, leaving me to die by the roadside, as ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... transfers to be made, and moreover Judge Trent had insisted that she become thoroughly acquainted with her business affairs and able to maintain an intelligent correspondence with her trustees when he himself had retired. She had shown a remarkable aptitude for finance and he was merciless in his insistence, demanding an hour ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Normandy, on the contrary, was absolutely merciless in warfare. He was not cruel for the sake of cruelty, but where he deemed that the policy demanded it, he was ruthless, and spared neither age nor sex. He was lavish to the church, but it was rather because he needed ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... to master the weakness of his reluctant nature—weakness which would extort pity from the severest minds, were it not from the odious connection which in him it had with cruelty the most merciless—did this unhappy prince, jam non salutis spem sed exitii solatium quaerens, consume the flying moments, until at length his ears caught the fatal sounds or echoes from a body of horsemen riding up to the villa. These were the officers charged with his arrest; ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... her varying cheek the air of fear, "Thinkest thou thus that with impunity Thou hast forsooth deceived me? dar'st thou deem Those eyes not hateful that have seen me fall? O heaven! soon may they close on my disgrace. Merciless man, what! for one sheep estranged Hast thou thrown into dungeons and of day Amerced thy shepherd? hast thou, while the iron Pierced through his tender limbs into his soul, By threats, by tortures, torn out that offence, And heard him ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... by the press of the State which had been captivated by its ringing logic, continued its merciless fire, and, as it proved, not insanely. For when the legislature came together, it turned out to be one of those "economy" sessions, periodically thrust down the throats of even the wiliest politicians. Not "progress" was ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... sister he kept at home to do the housework. He forbade her to marry. She and I never had enough money to do anything, to go anywhere, or to buy anything. Now, to be quite frank, I longed for him to die so that I could get free. To me he was an ogre, a great merciless tyrant, a giant with a club. Well, he died. When he was dead I felt what a man dying of thirst in the desert must feel when he suddenly comes to a spring of water. I recovered, and became what I am. My sister never recovered. She had been suppressed beyond all the limits of ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... which opened next week, and the prospects for the opera, and Mrs. de Graffenried's opening entertainment. When they came back it was eleven o'clock, and they found most of the guests assembled, nearly all of them looking a little pale and uncomfortable in the merciless morning light. As the two came in they observed Bertie Stuyvesant standing by the buffet, in the act of gulping down a tumbler of brandy. "Bertie has taken up the 'no breakfast fad,'" said Billy ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... of equality between whites and blacks by the French revolutionists, and the refusal of the planters to recognize that decree as binding, led to a terrible servile revolt, which desolated the whole of the colony. Those merciless strifes had, however, somewhat abated under the organizing power of a man, in whom the black race seemed to have vindicated its claims to political capacity. Toussaint l'Ouverture had come to the front by sheer sagacity and force of character. By a deft mixture of force ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... open face saw things sweet and wonderful. Her pale, mute mouth smiled faintly and she tried to stretch out her arms to him. There she lay, a smitten child, fallen after a bewildering struggle with a merciless foe. John with a breaking heart lifted her in his arms and carried her gently to-and-fro. The change and motion relieved her a little and what words of comfort and love he said in that last communion only God knows. ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... which her name is associated,—to 1835, '36, '37, '38, when our cities roared with riot, when William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through the streets, when Dresser was mobbed in Nashville, and Macintosh burned in St. Louis. At that time, the hatred toward abolitionists was so bitter and merciless that the friends of Lovejoy left his grave long time unmarked; and at last ventured to put, with his name, on his tombstone, only this piteous entreaty: Jam Parce Sepulto, 'Spare him now in ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... Merciless was Achilles; pitilessly did he exult as one brave man after another was sent by him to dye red the swift flood of ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... disease, and felt in a position to express an expert opinion on it. There was no cure for it; Bill had not recovered, neither would Libby Anne—this she told Mrs. Perkins and Martha. She knew it—it would let your hopes rise sometimes, but in the end it always showed its hand, unmistakable and merciless—oh, she ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... of speculation, except as to the soundness of the bills' makers, it is possible for bankers to make widely varying profits out of the same kind of business. Everything depends upon the amount of risk the banker is willing to take. The exchange market is a merciless critic of credit, and if a commercial firm's bills always sell at low rates, the presumption is strongly against its financial strength. Cases very frequently occur, however, where the exchange market ...
— Elements of Foreign Exchange - A Foreign Exchange Primer • Franklin Escher
... smiled beside the camp-fire. He had not caught even a hint of Snap Naab's suggested warning. Yet somewhere out on the oasis trail rode a man who, once turned from the saving of life to the lust to kill, would be as immutable as death itself. Behind him waited a troop of Navajos, swift as eagles, merciless as wolves, desert warriors with the sunheated blood of generations in their veins. As Hare waited and watched with all his inner being cold, he could almost feel pity for Holderness. His doom was close. Twice, ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... the most obdurate heart feel with keen sensibility. For to hear with patience of voracious animals being turned loose among human beings, to give sport to the rich and great, when upon reflection, he may be assured, that the merciless jaw knew no restraint but precipitately charged upon its prey whom it left, without remorse, either massacred ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... had a nobler object in his expedition into Germany—to arrest the fierce and merciless persecution of the Jews, which was preparing, under the monk Radulph, to renew the frightful scenes which had preceded the first crusade, in the flourishing cities on the banks of the Rhine. The Jews acknowledge the Christian intervention ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... probably contains more or less of basis in facts—each of them zealous on behalf of his plan, fertile in expedients to test its correctness, and untiring in its efforts to make known its success—each of them merciless in its criticism on the rest—there cannot fail, by composition of forces, to be a gradual approximation of all towards the right course. Whatever portion of the normal method any one of them has discovered, must, by the constant exhibition of its results, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... divided into two eras,—the River-drift and the Cave,—in Eastern America the aboriginal Eskimos held sway without interruption, and slowly bettered themselves through unnumbered centuries, until at last they were driven into icy exile by merciless conquerors, where, no doubt, they lost much of the advancement they had gained under ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... life were quite admirable, but when it came to any question of the protection of privilege, the preservation of property, or the rights in general of their superior class, these landowners were as merciless in the North Wales district as in many other parts of the country. Scorn and rage grew in the heart of young Lloyd George as he realized that these individuals had no claim over their fellows in personal worth or understanding, that they were practically unassailable by reason of their ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... faculties seem to have been entirely benumbed ever since the flagellations he got from Brougham in the beginning of last session. His terror of Brougham is so intense that he would submit to any humiliation rather than again expose his back to such a merciless scourge.[6] ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... take things as we find them; and this is why cold, rain, and frost, the whistling of merciless winds, together with false and pitiless ice, constitute the principal features of our introductory chapter. The merry chimes of sleigh bells, as if to add gloom to the scene, were silent, no snow having ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... to tell of all those hundreds and thousands of women, who perished in the Low countries of Holland, when Alva's sword of vengeance was unsheathed against the Protestants, when the Catholic Inquisitions of Europe became the merciless executioners of vindictive wrath, upon those who dared to worship God, instead of bowing down in unholy adoration before "my Lord God the Pope," and when England, too, burnt her Ann Ascoes at the stake of martyrdom. Suffice it to say, that ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... end of the pass the dog struggled to get down. They looked out upon a stretch of desolation. Sandy had called it six or seven miles. It might have been two or twenty. The deceit of rarefied air was intensified by the dazzle of the merciless sun beating down on powdered alkali, on snaky flows of weathered lava, on mock lakes that sparkled and dissolved in mirage. The broken mesa, across which ran the road to the deserted mining camp, mysteriously changed form ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn |
