"Thumbscrew" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not. Yet—I have a notion that I do. It would be a trifle easier to face the rack and thumbscrew, eh? Well, let's get it over. Possibly telling will ease you a bit, after all. It ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... The rack? The thumbscrew? Sink me, ye shall see how an Englishman can die! Even from these ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... and a desperate effort, then repairing to her own little inner room, disturbed the honourable retirement of the last and best-beloved of her dolls in a pink-lined cradle in a disused doll's house, and laying the key beneath the mattress, felt heroically ready for the thumbscrew rather than yield it up. She knew Armine would say she was right, and be indignant that Janet should meddle with mother's private stores. So she turned over on the pillow, cooled by the morning breeze, and fell into a sound sleep, whence she was only ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... distress to any member in good standing, pound three times on the outer gate, give two hard kicks and one soft one on the inner door, give the password, "Rutherford B. Hayes," turn to the left, through a dark passage, turn the thumbscrew of a mysterious gas fixture 90 deg. to the right, holding the goblet of the encampment under the gas fixture, then reverse the thumbscrew, shut your eyes, insult your digester, leave twenty-five cents near the gas fixture, and hunt up the nearest cemetery, so that you will ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... saying quoted by Sir Edwin Pears in writing of certain Mahommedan sects: "The paths leading to God are as numerous as the breaths of His creatures; hence they consider religious toleration as a duty." Toleration does not mean simply abstinence from the thumbscrew and the rack or even the repeal of the Conventicle or the Five Mile Act, but appreciation of the religious opinions and practices of others, and due respect for them. Without formal union there may not only be peace and goodwill between bodies which ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... be at the merciless mercy of man, most of us would rather be racked for a creed that existed intensely in somebody's head, rather than vivisected for a discovery that had not yet come into anyone's head, and possibly never would. A man would rather be tortured with a thumbscrew until he chose to see reason than tortured with a vivisecting knife until the vivisector chose to see reason. Yet that is the real difference between the two types of legal enforcement. If I gave in to the Inquisitors, I should at ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... Henry's admonishing finger goes up, and we are hushed to see what is the really cruel thing he intends to show us next, that will hurt just like a thumbscrew. He smiles and flips down a long scroll of—direct and drastic taxes quite ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... down on Aldebaran's wan face. It was as white and drawn as if he had been tortured by the rack and thumbscrew, so he made no answer for the moment. But when the fire was kindled, and they had supped the broth set out in steaming bowls upon the table, he ventured on a ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... you, dear old sir, for that generous tribute to my grasp of military science," said Bones. "An' now proceed to the next torture—which will you have, sir, rack or thumbscrew?—oh, thank you, Horace, I'll have a glass of ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... silent summer heaven, But Sir Richard bore in hand All his sick men from the land, Very carefully and slow, Men of Bideford in Devon— And he laid them on the ballast down below; And they blessed him in their pain That they were not left to Spain, To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... in the happiness of those whom she loved, it was torture,—the thumbscrew and the rack. ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray |
