"Savagery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the hut, was a strange scene of rejoicing. Asensio, recovered now from his burst of savagery, was tearful, compassionate; his comrades laughed and chattered and bragged about their prodigious deeds of valor. Over and over they recounted their versions of the encounter, each more fanciful than the other, until it seemed that they ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... stream of Marvell's music ran, So let the household melodies be sung, The pleasant pictures on the wall be hung,— So let us hold against the hosts of Night And Slavery all our vantage-ground of Light. Let Treason boast its savagery, and shake From its flag-folds its symbol rattlesnake, Nurse its fine arts, lay human skins in tan, And carve its pipe-bowls from the bones of man, And make the tale of Fijian banquets dull By drinking whiskey from a loyal skull,— But let us guard, till this sad war shall cease, (God grant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... glorying that she might give so much for country and humanity. Then, in the nights, things that she had read far back, unrealizing, rose and confronted her with awful reality. Brutalities, atrocities, wounds, barbarous captivity—nightmares which the Germans had dug out of the grave of savagery and sent stalking over the earth—such rose and stood before the woman lying awake night after night. At first her soul hid its face in terror at the gruesome thoughts; at first her mind turned and fled and refused to believe. Her boys, Brock and Hugh! It was not credible, it ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... the Acts of Uniformity. So far as they are restrained at all, they are restrained by the general disciplinary powers of the Church. Theoretically those who indulge in them are liable to the statutory penalties imposed by the Act of Elizabeth. Practically these cannot be enforced; their savagery makes it impossible. They stand as they were enacted in 1549, and again ten years later; they are now intolerable. I am told that no attempt has been made to enforce them since the year 1796, nor is there any chance of their being revived. The Acts ...
— The Acts of Uniformity - Their Scope and Effect • T.A. Lacey
... that same moment he saw the face. It was a terrible, questing face—the face of a creature that was hunting, and yet hunted; of a creature half animal and half man. So long as he lived he knew that he would never forget it; the wild savagery of it, the questing fire that was in the eyes, the loneliness of it there in the night, set apart from all mankind; and with the face he would never forget that other thing that came to him audibly—the throbbing, gasping heartbeat ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... along, freighted with the most terrific engine of destruction. What strange warfare! Who could have fancied that when savages began to use clubs to maul each other it would end in this diabolical refinement! Weapons, weapons, weapons—the history of man's undying savagery working under new forms of civilization! The war submarine—what ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... the Lake Calhoun band. Both lessons were in the useful and civilizing art of plowing and were the first in that grand series of lessons, covering more than seventy years, and by which the Sioux nation have been lifted from savagery to civilization. ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... suppose that man would first imitate the things which surround him, but the most cursory acquaintance with primitive art shows that he is much more apt to crudely geometrize. Now it is not necessary to assume that we are to revert to the conditions of savagery in order to believe that in this matter of a sound aesthetic we must begin where art has always begun—with number and geometry. Nevertheless there is a subtly ironic view which one is justified in holding in regard to quite obvious aspects of American life, in ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Any one who is at all versed in the procedure of criminal justice knows that it goes ahead slowly and surely and finally lays hold upon the guilty.—But as Commissioner von Stoeckel quite rightly observed: The whole moral downfall of our time, its actual return to savagery is a consequence of the lack of religion! Educated people do not hesitate to undermine the divine foundations upon which the structure of salvation rests.—But, thank God, we're always to be found at our place! We are, so to speak, always on our ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... man that he sets to goin', when they have come to full fruition skare him most to death, horrify him by the sight. I'll bet Burgoyne felt bad enough, a lookin' on her dead body, if it wuz his doin's in the first place, in lettin' loose such ignerance and savagery onto ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... rate her language, if not her feelings. Two expressions of face were natural to him; one eloquent of good humour, in which the reader of countenances would find some promise of coming frolic;—and the other, replete with anger, sometimes to the extent almost of savagery. All those who were dependent on him were wont to watch his face with care and sometimes with fear. When he was angry it would almost seem that he was about to use personal violence on the object of his wrath. At the present moment ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... and cheering change has come over our attitude to this wing of the battle of life. So far from regarding it as in any sense necessary to revert to barbarism, still less to savagery, for either the prevention or the cure of disease, we have discovered by the most convincing, practical experience, that we can, in the first place, with the assistance of the locomotive and trolley, combined ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... the awful tragedy was completed. Every old man and woman was killed, slain with a sword, or hacked to death, or speared. Babies, and little children were brained against the walls of the houses; strong men—fathers, lovers, sons—had been murdered with every wantonness of savagery conceivable. The only persons spared had been the budding girls, and one or two of the best looking of ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... hands, smooth and only faintly brown, were thin, too, and curiously expressive as they clung to the logs. She was a moving figure, piteous, lovely, rather like some graceful mountain beast, its spirit half-broken by wounds and imprisonment and human tending, but ready to leap into a savagery of flight or of attack. They were wild, those great eyes, as well as wistful. Prosper, looking suddenly up at them, caught his breath. He put down his book as quietly as though she had indeed been a wild, easily startled thing, and, suppressing the impulse to rise, ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... the Imperial family. It was then that I had the first experience of a genuine Hungarian town, with its streets knee-deep in mud, and swarming with huge dogs of ferocious temper. On quitting the steamboat for the inn, I seemed at one step to have passed from civilisation into savagery. Anything more atrociously filthy and repulsive than this establishment I never saw, and yet it was the best inn of a town of ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... to a girl. Of all these bitter, self-righteous, censorious little sects which raise each its own ladder to the Throne of Grace at Newlyn, the Luke Gospelers was the most bitter, most self-righteous, most censorious. And of all those burning lights which reflected the primitive savagery of the Pentateuch from that fold, Gray Michael's beacon flamed the fiercest and most bloody red. There was not a Gospeler, including the pastor of the flock, but feared the ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... the German cause have complained that Asiatics and Africans upon the very verge of savagery have been brought against them from India and Algiers. And in ordinary circumstances, I should sympathise with such a complaint made by a European people. But the circumstances are not ordinary. Here, again, the quiet unique barbarism of Prussia goes deeper than what we call barbarities. ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... undertake to give me an idea of their abominable vulgarity. Flora used to tell her something of her life in that household, over there, down Limehouse way. It was incredible. It passed Mrs Fyne's comprehension. It was a sort of moral savagery which she could ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... the child mind, the savage mind, and the traditional civilized mind. We are all animals and never can cease to be; we were all children at our most impressionable age and can never get over the effects of that; our human ancestors have lived in savagery during practically the whole existence of the race, say five hundred thousand or a million years, and the primitive human mind is ever with us; finally, we are all born into an elaborate civilization, the constant pressure of which we can by ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... a glory; nowadays it is a calamity. Later on it will be condemned as the sad ancestral remains of barbarism and savagery. ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... and luckless trial of a notary's office I was apprenticed to an engraver, a petty tyrant, whose injustice taught me to lie and to steal. Restless, dissatisfied, and in perpetual terror of my master's savagery, I here reached my sixteenth year. But one day, finding the city gates closed on my return from a country excursion, I determined, rather than face the inevitable thrashing, to seek my fortune ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... once there, she would quietly lock the door. She canvassed in her mind all the rooms in her little box of a home. There was one, convenient, appropriate, and secure—the store-room. No sooner said than done. To see this fierce-looking Kickapoo clad in robes of savagery, and gleaming in all the paint of the war-path, seated on Miss Slopham's refrigerator, and looking about on either side with barbaric curiosity at her array of shelves of jars and bottles, while he ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... threat and of kindliness—of power and weakness. He had heard of this cruel phase of Southwestern cunning before. With the feeble sophistry of the cynic he mistrusted the good his scepticism could not understand. Howbeit, glancing sideways at the slumbering savagery of the man beside him, and his wounded hand, he did not care to show his lack of confidence. He contented himself with that equally feeble resource of weak humanity in such cases—good-natured indifference. "All right," he said carelessly; "I'll see what can be done. ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... savagery, and the sooner we get rid of it the better. How queer he seems. It is the old Tedham, but ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... nothing, but, as he sat listening to this fervid protestation, a message illuminated as it were by the vibrato, he began to hate the terrible frankness of the Italian nature which, till now, he had thought he loved. The beauty of reticence appealed to him in a new way. There was savagery in a bellowed passion. The voice was travelling. They heard it moving onward towards Nisida. Artois wondered if Vere knew who was the singer. She did not leave him long ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Red Sea for the grace of God. But these hopes proved illusory; only Verlaine knows where he is, and he will not tell. The last certain news we had of him was that he had joined a caravan of Arabs, and had wandered somewhere into the desert with these wanderers, preferring savagery to civilization. Verlaine preferred civilized savagery, and so he remained in Paris; and so he drags on, living in thieves' quarters, getting drunk, writing beautiful poems in the hospitals, coming out of hospitals and falling in ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... its hands is one utterly unexampled in the history of the world. While in the midst of a great civil war, and struggling as it were in very death-throes, to emancipate and organize four millions of men, most of whom, up to this very day, have by deliberate legislation been kept in ignorance and savagery. Thoroughly to comprehend the immensity of such a task, we must also reflect that the men to whom that task is intrusted are anything rather than intellectual giants. Yet the true solution of the problem will be given by the principle of self-government and by the self-governing ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... crikey, yes!" He looked across at Herrick with a toothless smile that was shocking in its savagery; and, his ear caught apparently by the trivial expression he had used, broke into a piece of the chorus of a comic song which he must have heard twenty years before in London: meaningless gibberish that, in that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sound of steel falling upon stone. And then both figures were on the ground almost at her feet, locked together in mortal combat, fighting, fighting like demons in a silence that throbbed with the tumult of unrestrained savagery. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... When I read the story of slavery and hear an exponent of free thought say, "The doctrine that woman is a slave or serf of man—whether it comes from hell or heaven, from God or demon, from the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, or the very Sodom of perdition—is savagery pure and simple," I say, "That is so, but just that was the ruling idea when infidelity was on the throne of Rome." And only where the Bible has gone and triumphed has woman the privileges ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... and more. Many of us fear this change. Our religious feelings are dear to us, and we look with suspicion and dislike on any philosophy, the apparent tendency of which is to dry them up. Probably every change from ancient savagery to our present enlightenment has excited, in a greater or less degree, fears of this kind. But the fact is, that we have not yet determined whether its present form is necessary to the life and warmth of religious feeling. We may err in linking the imperishable with the transitory, and confound ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... to the music of sword and spear as blithely as does Scott's or Dumas's—as blithely as did the hearts of the Reislaeufer themselves. Look at the mad rush, the hand-to-hand grapple, in a drawing of the Basel Collection, for instance (Plate 7). The blood-lust, the heroism, the savagery, the thrust, the oath, the dust-choked prayer, the forgotten breathing clay under the bloodstained foot; the very clash and din of the fray;—all is told with the brush. And yet not one unnecessary detail squandered. ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... village of Stanz, near the eastern shore of the Lake of Lucerne (Sept. 8). There for three days they fought with unyielding courage. Their resistance inflamed the French to a cruel vengeance; slaughtered families and burning villages renewed, in this so-called crusade of liberty, the savagery of ancient war. ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... him out of the corner of her eye; she did not notice this defect in him, for her he was a splendid male, with a delightful quality of savagery in love which she had found in no other man except Verisschenzko—Verisschenzko! Her thoughts hesitated when they came to him—Verisschenzko was adorable, but he was a man to be feared—much more than Hans. Him she could always cajole if she used passion enough, ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... There's nothing to laugh at in that exhibition!" the doctor reproved him, with an acrimonious savagery. "I don't know which makes me sicker; to stay in there and listen to them, or come out here and find you ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... forever." All the Burmese, says Sangermano, without exception, have the custom of boring their ears. The days when the operations were performed were kept as festivals. The ludicrous custom of piercing the ears for the wearing of ornaments, typical of savagery and found in all indigenous African tribes, is universally prevalent among our ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... and then I will not kill him. It would make me sick." But more than once, stealing into the room, when it was her watch off, she would catch the two men glaring ferociously at each other, wild animals the pair of them, in Hans's face the lust to kill, in Dennin's the fierceness and savagery of the cornered rat. "Hans!" she would cry, "wake up!" and he would come to a recollection of himself, startled and shamefaced ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... comprehend the significance of this war, which is a war of civilization against barbarism, a sacred war in which the forces of humanity raise a rampart of human breasts against the violent reappearance of primitive savagery. ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... the heroine, who inherits not merely the tendency to play fast and loose with successive husbands, which is observable in both chanson and roman heroines, but something of the very unlovely savagery which is also sometimes characteristic of them; while the hero also is put in "unpleasant" circumstances. He is a gentleman and a good knight, and though only a vassal of the Count of Ponthieu, he, as has been said, marries the Count's ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... bound for a long voyage, and that the captain had got together a very motley crew. This did not trouble me; in fact, I was glad on both scores. The journey would take me away—I cared not where, the savagery of the crew accorded with my own wild feelings. They were a poor, degraded set, weak physically, and with the stamp of villainy upon them. Their conversation was degrading, their every thought was steeped with filth. I soon made myself a sort of unofficial captain among them, and by a ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... opposition to both was simply the general opposition to expansion—that is, to national growth and national greatness. In our long-settled communities there have always been people who opposed every war which marked the advance of American civilization at the cost of savagery. The opposition was fundamentally the same, whether these wars were campaigns in the old West against the Shawnees and the Miamis, in the new West against the Sioux and the Apaches, or in Luzon against the Tagals. In each case, in the end, the believers in the historic ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the weakness of Richard II. or Henry VI. or Shakespeare himself better than it suits the hardy Bastard. Even as a young man Shakespeare hated the cruelty of ambition and the savagery of war as much as he loved all the ceremonies of chivalry and observances ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... of Marvell's public actions for the rest of his days, and if at times he may need forgiveness for the savagery of his satire, it ought to be found easy to ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... Man and Materials, by WM. G. PARKER, M.E. Shows how man has raised himself from savagery to civilization by utilizing the raw material of the earth. Brings for the first time the wonderful natural resources of the United States to the notice of American children. The progress of the Metal-Working arts simply described and very attractively illustrated. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 20, March 25, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... turn things would take. The master mathematician's grim warnings were treated by many as so much mere elaborate self-advertisement. Common sense at last, a little heated by argument, signified its unalterable convictions by going to bed. So, too, barbarism and savagery, already tired of the novelty, went about their nightly business, and save for a howling dog here and there, the beast world left the ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... completed in six weeks. But it took the labour of 250,000 men, who worked, if the story be true, night and day. Along the canal were seen several large encampments of troops, rather rough instruments, it is true, for polishing African savagery into usefulness, but perhaps the only means by which great things could have been done in so short a period as the reign of Mohammed Ali. An Italian fellow-passenger, who had resided in Egypt twenty-five years, gave it as the result of his experience, that without the strong ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... lastly, a very sufficient reason may, I think, be assigned for the choice of the ox or cow, as representing the very life of nature, by the first legislators of Egypt, and for the similar sacred character in the Brachmanic tribes of Hindostan. The progress from savagery to civilization is evidently first from the hunting to the pastoral state, a process which even now is going on, within our own times, among the South American Indians in the vast tracts between Buenos Ayres and the Andes: but the second and the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... the Sensoba. The latter are the innermost known to my negro informants, and their sheep and goats have found their way to the Gaboon: they are doughty elephant-hunters, and they attack the Njina, although they have no fire-arms. The Mpangwe deride the savagery of these races, who have never heard of a man riding a horse or an ass, which the Mpongwes call Cavala and Buro burro). The names of these three races, which are described as brave, warlike, and hospitable to strangers, will not be found on any map; indeed the regions east of the Gaboon ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... hear protests from the South that it should be left alone to deal with the Negro question, my thoughts go back to that scene of brutality and savagery. I do not see how a people that can find in its conscience any excuse whatever for slowly burning to death a human being, or for tolerating such an act, can be entrusted with the salvation of a race. Of course, there are in the South men of liberal thought who do not approve lynching, ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... prompted by instincts derived from the arts of ornament and pomp. Splendor of arms, of banners, of equipages, of ceremonies, and the elaborate forms of intercourse with enemies through conferences, armistices, treaties of peace, &c., having tamed the savagery of war into connection with modes of intellectual grandeur, and with the endless restraints of superstition or scrupulous religion,—a permanent light of civilization began to steal over the bloody shambles of buccaneering warfare. Other modes of harmonizing influences arose more directly ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... wrong: the grim, sinister faces of the men, constantly on guard, as though the old hacienda were in a state of siege; the altered disposition of his father, always given to gloomy moods, but lately doubly silent and saturnine, full of strange savagery and smouldering fire. Yes, somewhere in the back of his mind he had known the whole, shameful truth; had known the purpose of those silent, stealthy excursions, and equally silent returns,—and more than once the broken heads and bandaged arms that coincided so oddly with some new tale of a daring ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... Paul—"the German Kultur—has thrown us back to the earliest savagery of which we hold record. All that education has done for us is to hold the savage in check for a time. He is still there. Spiritually humanity's record ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... culture had done and wuz doing for 'em, what swift strides they wuz makin' along the road that leads upwards. And to see 'em workin' away right before us at all the industrial trades, to see inteligence in the eyes that had held savagery, to hear the inteligent conversation in place of gutteral axents, I ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... a living progress that altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little deadened him to that incessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal circling. He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities and recurrencies of the human routine. The remoter past of wandering savagery, the inevitable changes of to-morrow were veiled, and he saw only day and night, seed-time and harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks in the summer sunlight and tales by the winter ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... don't say that I endorse this program, I'm only telling you, in half-a-dozen words, what it really is. It is sure, though, that when the black man rules, he relapses into savagery; when he obeys a white master, he rises ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... its guide, was not a whit better. As anarchy increased, immorality was likely to increase likewise; and Scotland was in serious danger of falling into such a state as that into which Poland fell, to its ruin, within a hundred and fifty years after; in which the savagery of feudalism, without its order or its chivalry, would be varnished over by a thin coating of French "civilisation," and, as in the case of Bothwell, the vices of the court of Paris should be added to those of the Northern freebooter. To deliver Scotland from that ruin, it was needed that ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... suggestion appealed to him. He had a way with women of a certain kind, and if his confidence had been rather shaken by Jean's savagery and Lydia's indifference, he had not altogether abandoned the hope that both girls in their turn might be conquered by the ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... fears or calls sickness. Once, when Ben went to the school where a dozen or so other happy-faced little girls were being taught and prepared for the Eastern school, Miss F—— was obliged to tell him Mary was sick. For a while his savagery was apparently renewed. He became wild again. His visits increased in frequency, and all the time the teacher was in mental torture, for he seemed to feel that the white woman was in some manner connected with his child's going ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... conversation, discussion, debate, correspondence, the angry man is invariably the prejudiced man; and, according to the age and the depth, the rootedness and the intensity of his prejudices, so is the ferocity and the savagery of his anger. He has already settled this case that you are irritating and wronging him so much by your still insisting on bringing up. It is a reproach to his understanding for you to think that there is anything to be said in that ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... Ages the nobles of Rhineland were mostly notorious for their wild savagery and predatory habits, and thus the modern traveller on the famous river, admiring the many picturesque castles built on summits overlooking its banks, is prone to think of these places as having been the homes of men who were little better than freebooters. And in general ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... now; cast back into savagery and blindly groping for its primitive weapons. Honoria crossed the floor not knowing what she meant to do, or might do. Lizzie sprang to defence against she knew not what. But when her enemy advanced, towering, with a healthy boy dragging at her skirts, she did the one thing she could—turned with ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Of Fermor's red-hot savagery on Custrin, it is lamentably necessary we should say something: to say much would he a waste of record; as the thing itself was a waste of powder. A thing hideous to think of; without the least profit to Fermor, but with total ruin to all the inhabitants, and to the many strangers ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... if blind, so much the quieter." The base of the new society was the freeman who fought, tilled, judged and grew from more to more. He wrought a state out of tribal kinship and fostered an independence and self-reliance which no oppression could destroy. The story of man's slow ascent from savagery through barbarism and self-mastery to civilization is the embodiment of the spirit of optimism. From the first hour of the new nations each century has seen a better Europe, until the development of ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... patois understood only by his own family; but what is more reasonable to suppose than that the Drift-men of the marshes and coastlines had only a restricted use for vocal sounds, sign-language being expressive enough to meet their few wants? Meagre social conditions, peculiar isolation, savagery, strife for life, call for no complex language, but sign-language has the authority of people living on the globe to-day, not only amongst uncivilised races, but traces are seen in our ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... six-branched candlestick. It hit the floor, rebounded with a dull ring on the carpet, and by the time it came to a rest every single candle was out. He on the other side of the door naturally heard the noise and greeted it with a triumphant screech: "Aha! I've managed to wake you up," the very savagery of which had a laughable effect. I felt the weight of Dona Rita grow on my arm and thought it best to let her sink on the floor, wishing to be free in my movements and really afraid that now he had actually heard a noise he would infallibly burst the door. But he ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... treating both him and Dugald with a complete absence of the savagery he expected. They were being perfectly matter-of-fact. If his hands had not been tied, Geoffrey might not have been a prisoner at all. This puzzled him as well. A prisoner, after all, could not expect to be treated very well. True, he and Dugald were nobles, but ...
— The Barbarians • John Sentry
... are plain. It is now too late to restore elsewhere the great natural possession which the thoughtless savagery of a former generation destroyed in careless ruth, but, thanks to this early impulse of conservation, a fine example still remains in the Yellowstone. But it is not too late to obliterate wholly certain misconceptions ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... of honesty, the avengers of virtue defamed! Demos was roused, was tired of listening to mere articulate speech; it was time for a good wild-beast roar, for a taste of bloodshed. Scarcely a face in all the mob but distorted itself to express as much savagery as can be got out of the human countenance. Mutimer, seeing what had come, sprang down from the cart. He was at once carried yards away in an irresistible rush. Impossible for him and his friends to endeavour to hold their ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... hospitable; but, like all the women of Buenos Ayres at that time, were perforce ardent Federalists and detesters of the "savage Unitarios." Farragut mentions an incident occurring at an official festivity in honor of Rosas, which shows the savagery that lay close under the surface of the Argentine character at that time, and easily found revolting expression in the constant civil strife and in the uncontrolled rule of the dictator. "In the ball-room was a picture which would have disgraced even barbarian society. ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... strifes and dissensions followed another breach of the Admiral's wise regulations; they no longer cared to remain together in the fort, but split up into groups and went off with their women into the woods, reverting to a savagery beside which the gentle existence of the natives was high civilisation. There were squabbles and fights in which one or two of the Spaniards were killed; and Pedro Gutierrez and Rodrigo de Escovedo, whom Columbus had appointed ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... Sioux, trouble in which the Cheyennes, and probably others also, were becoming involved. Every soldier patrolling that long northern border recognized the approach of some dire development, some early coup of savagery. Restlessness pervaded the Indian country; recalcitrant bands roamed the "badlands"; dissatisfied young warriors disappeared from the reservation limits and failed to return; while friendly scouts told strange tales of weird ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... here and now to say anything of the horrors of uncivilised savagery and hopeless abject misery which we witnessed. They are painted in my mother's book, and should any reader ever refer to those pages for a picture of the state of things among the factory hands at that time, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... observer a most vivid picture of a characteristic scene in that bygone age, millions of years ago, when reptiles were the lords of creation, and 'Nature, red in tooth and claw' had lost none of her primitive savagery, and the era of brute force and ferocity showed little sign of the gradual amelioration which was to come to pass in future ages through the predominance ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... cruelty and wickedness to men and animals alike, you will degrade the body you are trying to preserve, you will paralyse the body you are trying to save from disease, and you will go back into the savagery which is the nemesis of cruelty, and ruin these nobler bodies, the inheritance of ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... Storms we encountered, and the mariners fought them with stubborn endurance; twice a blazing stone from Heaven hissed into the sea beside us, though without injuring any of our ships; and, as was unavoidable, the great beasts of the sea hunted us with their accustomed savagery. But only once did we suffer material loss from these last, and that was when three of the greater sea lizards attacked the "Bear," the ship whereon I travelled, at one and ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... Commons his conversion to the theory of free trade, and his purpose to repeal the Corn Laws, he was answered by Benjamin Disraeli in a speech which for bitterness of sarcasm, brilliancy of wit, and savagery of denunciation, has seldom been equaled in parliamentary history. (See Appendix.) He denounced Peel as "a man who never originates an idea; a watcher of the atmosphere; a man who takes his observations, and when he finds the wind in a particular quarter turns his sails ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... beauty draw thy vows. Carried away by excess of frenzy, thou art little prone to love. Steeped in blood and slaughter, thou judgest wars better than the bed, nor refreshest thy soul with incitements. Thy fierceness finds no leisure; dalliance is far from thee, and savagery fostered. Nor is thy hand free from blasphemy while thou loathest the rites of love. Let this hateful strictness pass away, let that loving warmth approach, and plight the troth of love to me, who gave thee the first breasts of milk in childhood, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... and yet they hated as much to have him there when there was no paint to him. But presently Harte took a pencil and drew these two simple lines under his feet and behold he was a magnificent success!—the ancient symbol of California savagery snarling at the approaching type of high and progressive Civilization, the first Overland locomotive!: [Sketch of a small section ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... To adopt an American idiom, he "felt like brandy and water"; he also "felt like" wearing no clothes, and generally rejecting his new conceptions of duty and decency. In fact, he had a good bout of savagery, and then he returned to his tall hat, his varnished boots, his hymn-book, and his edifying principles. The life of small boys at school (before they get into long-tailed coats and the upper-fifth) is often a mere course of ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... grandmother! A nice set of nincompoops the race will develop into if such fools as that get their way! We're soft enough as it is, Heaven knows. Why couldn't they hang the scoundrel as he deserved? That's the surest way of putting an end to savagery. But to stop the sport ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... the hope does not depend upon a book—it depends upon the heart—upon human affection. The fear, so far as this generation is concerned, is born of the book, and that part of the book was born of savagery. Whatever of hope is in the book is born, as I said before, of human affection, and the higher our civilization the greater the affection. I had rather rest my hope of something beyond the grave upon the human heart, than upon what they call the Scriptures, ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... member of the Junior Street-cleaning Band to the point of reproving his mother for throwing a banana peel in the street, the thing to be done is to take him out and spank him, if it is reverting to "the savagery" of the street. Better a savage than a cad. The boys have the making of both in them. Their vanity furnishes abundant material for the cad, but only when unduly pampered. Left to itself, the gang can be trusted ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... of speculation in the past and of every result of science born in our own time Think of the sunny spaces in the world's history, in each of which one could linger for ever I Athens at her fairest, Borne at her grandest, the glorious savagery of Merovingian courts, the kingdom of Frederick II., the Moors in Spain, the magic of Renaissance Italy—to become a citizen of any one age means a lifetime of endeavour. It is easy to fill one's head with names ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... of man. And There is an element of the freest and frankest savagery in the most refined and spiritual of women. ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... in its march from savagery to civilization, may be considered as one man, showing, first, animation; next, manifesting his objects of attraction; third, displaying his purposes; and finally putting forth his wisdom in obedience to the true, the beautiful, ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... table at the Athenaeum where he and Mr. Cartwright were dining, Kinglake rose, and removed to another part of the room. "The Times" had inserted a statement that Madame Novikoff was ordered to leave England, and he thus publicly resented it. "So unlike me," he said, relating the story, "but somehow a savagery as of youth came over me in my ancient days; it was like being twenty years old again." It came out, however, that "our indiscreet friend Froude" had written something which justified the paragraph, and Kinglake ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... by the path, was a group of women loaded with the soldiers' gear; and beside them were some carriers bearing his green tent and apparently all his equipment. The sight cheered him a little. He attempted to find immediate consolation in the idea that the savagery of the corporal might possibly abate when they were away from the neighbourhood of the inciting agent, whom he was sure ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... at his door, myriad-headed, insane, bloodthirsty, all-powerful—the mob, that terror of civilization, that sudden reversion in mass to a state of savagery. It boded ill for Joe Blaine. He had a bitter, ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... volumes. I have said that Faustus is an allegory of 'man's inhumanity to man.' That is emphatically, in more realistic form, the distinguishing feature of Celebrated Trials. Amid these records of savagery, it is a positive relief to come across such a trial as that of poor Joseph Baretti. Baretti, it will be remembered, was brought to trial because, when some roughs set upon him in the street, he drew a dagger, which ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... it an anomalous fact that the children of savages should exhibit a stronger tendency to protrude their lips, when sulky, than the children of civilized Europeans; for the essence of savagery seems to consist in the retention of a primordial condition, and this occasionally holds good even with bodily peculiarities.[12] It may be objected to this view of the origin of pouting, that the anthropoid apes likewise protrude ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... to laugh at in that exhibition!' the doctor reproved him, with an acrimonious savagery. 'I don't know which makes me sicker; to stay in there and listen to them, or come out here and find you thinking ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... a long sigh. He could not blind himself to Tatsu's savagery. This was not the sort of husband that Ume had a right to expect from her father's choice,—a youth not only penniless, and without family name, but in himself unusual, strange, with look, voice, gesture, coloring each a clear contrast to the men that Ume-ko ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... threatening fact was the movement down Broadway of unknown thousands, maddened by liquor, and confident from their unchecked excesses during the day. They knew that they had only to destroy the handful of men at police headquarters and the city was theirs to plunder and destroy with hyena-like savagery. ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... vision, his pulses beating with a mad longing so fierce as to be utterly beyond his own control. It was as though he had drunk strong wine and had somehow slipped the leash of ordinary convention. The savagery of the night, the tropical intensity of it, had got into him. Half-naked, wholly primitive, ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... promontory where a score or more of sheet-iron shacks making an unsightly blot upon the fair face of nature proclaimed the fact that civilization had set its heel. Straggling upon the outskirts were the thatched huts of natives, picturesque in their primeval savagery, harmonizing with the background of tropical jungle and accentuating the squalid hideousness of the white ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... (Vol. i., p. 186.) will field the origin of this word in Stillingfleet's Origines Sacrae, Part II. Book i. c. i., where there are traced the gradations observed by travellers in the savagery of the several natives of America. Has it been recorded of any people in Europe, Asia, or Africa, that they were addicted to ...
— Notes & Queries,No. 31., Saturday, June 1, 1850 • Various
... has pressed against the ear of some unfortunate, and whose uniform has been splashed with human brains, feels as guilty as his colonel. Above, cruel men gave orders which savage men executed below. Savagery keeps the secret of cruelty. ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... much practice to give up, my dear! Old Jones is good enough for us—he's not a d——d Frenchman, at least," he said with sudden savagery. "In fact," he added, smoothly again, "it was I who advised Jacques to try the mountains. He has ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... crowd, to whom the whole scene was sport—and though we have become more civilised in some ways as time has passed, sport has retained much of its original savagery even now—gleefully tied together Haldane's hands and feet, and carried her, thus secured, to a large deep pond about a ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... glad to tread once more the surface of Pellucidar. Mysterious and terrible, grotesque and savage though she is in many of her aspects, I can not but love her. Her very savagery appealed to me, for it is the savagery of ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... from the conclusion of the last chapter, that we are about to describe a scene of bloodshed and savagery, we may as well explain in passing that the custom of duelling, as practised among some tribes of the Eskimos, is entirely intellectual, and well worthy of recommendation to those civilised nations which still cling fondly and foolishly to the ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... wounded. Even if we took life for life, the Bedouins would lose less than ten percent, and we'd be wiped out. And we couldn't expect to take life for life, charging a position like theirs in the night. It can't be a stand-up battle. It's got to be science against savagery, or nothing." ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... ginos], or clan. The earliest form of political union in the world is one which rests, not upon territorial contiguity, but upon I blood-relationship, either real or assumed through the legal fiction of adoption. In the lowest savagery blood-relationship is the only admissible or conceivable ground for sustained common action among groups of men. Among peoples which wander about, supporting themselves either by hunting, or at a somewhat more advanced stage of development by the rearing of flocks and herds, a group ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... quill between his fingers and the paper flattened on a pad against his knee, Louis was in no haste to write. Gnawing with unconscious savagery at his under-lip he stared into vacancy, searching, searching, searching for the precise words to express his thought. But they eluded him. It was not so simple to be precise, so clear that even a fool like Beaufoy could not make a mistake, and yet be so cautious that the true purpose, ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... second!" cried the master-carpenter, sharply now, for in spite of the sudden savagery on Jean Jacques' part, he felt he had an advantage, and now he would play his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and monuments of a high culture, offer. Travel in West Africa is very hard work, and very unhealthy. There are many men who would not hesitate for a moment to go there, were the dangers of the native savagery the chief drawback; but they hesitate before a trip which means, in all probability, month after month of tramping through wet gloomy forests with a swamp here and there for a change, {465} and which will, the chances are 100 to 1, end in ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... noiselessly quitted were aroused to terror—sudden, bewildering night-terror—by a gasping cry from his lips, followed by the leaping and rushing of some brute in flight, and by a screech which was one defiant note of unutterable savagery. ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook |
