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Tyrannous   Listen
adjective
Tyrannous  adj.  Tyrannical; arbitrary; unjustly severe; despotic.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Tyrannous" Quotes from Famous Books



... that tyrannous incontinence, needed however for man's race on earth, and of the ways of God which ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... she said. "The girl was faithless, and tyrannous, and proud, and coquettish, and unworthy, and false, and inconstant. She was black as hell and dark as night in both her person and her living. You ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... Enemy of the People" Ibsen thunders his powerful protest against the democracy of stupidity, the tyrannous vulgarity of majority rule. Doctor Stockmann—that is Ibsen himself. How willing and eager the pigmies and yahoos would have been ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... actually produce revolution in 1830, when Charles the Tenth was deposed for his persistent endeavours to maintain an unpopular ministry in power. No country in the world would long continue to tolerate a Parliamentary system which was free and representative in theory, but tyrannous and despotic in practice. Upper Canada was indeed long-suffering, but a time arrived when it became evident that there was a limit to her powers ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... as one of them, and I, Paullus Caecilius, are slaves one and all; abject and base and spirit-fallen slaves, lacking the courage even to spurn against our fetters, to the proud tyrannous rich aristocracy." ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... in thee. Thou hast the nobler virtues of thy race, Without the failings that attend those virtues. Thou canst be strong, and yet not tyrannous, Canst righteous be and not intolerant. Let there be ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... certain place; and even the trade guilds, as we know, had somewhat the course of a modern corporation. They became overgrown, aristocratic, swollen in fortune, and monopolistic in tendency. To some extent in the English cities and towns, and still more in France, they became tyrannous. And in the previous reign of Henry VIII all ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... sorrow, because of the shame of a favourite daughter, and for having committed the folly with one both loose in conduct and profane of speech. He had cause to be angry, but his anger, through his zeal, became tyrannous: in the exercise of what he called a father's power, he compelled his child to renounce the poet as her husband and burn the marriage-lines; for he regarded her marriage, without the kirk's permission, with a man so utterly ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... at her skirts is the creature Of tyrannous ages of creed and of caste; She bears, helpless prey of the priest, on each feature. The pitiful brand of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 18, 1890 • Various

... the original cruel exaction, but upon the remission afterwards, immense gains were derived. This will account for the manner in which those stupendous fortunes which astonish the world have been made. They have been made, first by a tyrannous exaction from the people who were suffered to remain in possession of their own land as farmers,—then by selling the rest to farmers at rents and under hopes which could never be realized, and then getting money for the relaxation of their debts. But ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... American colonies, had enjoyed an immense success, preached the sermon which provoked Burke to write his Reflections; and Priestley, no less enthusiastic in welcoming the Revolution, replied to Burke. The Government resorted to tyrannous measures; young men who sympathised with the French movement and agitated for reforms at home were sent to Botany Bay. Paine was prosecuted for his Rights of Man, which directly preached revolution. But the most important speculative work ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... all times, and never can be unsaid. Nor does it at all follow, because there is a gift of infallibility in the Catholic Church, that therefore the parties who are in possession of it are in all their proceedings infallible. "O, it is excellent," says the poet, "to have a giant's strength, but tyrannous, to use it like a giant." I think history supplies us with instances in the Church, where legitimate power has been harshly used. To make such admission is no more than saying that the divine treasure, in the words of the Apostle, is "in earthen vessels;" nor does ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... convict, hopelessly sick or degraded, is to find another with a like fate to share it with him. He will exert the utmost that is in him, every power, all his vital energy, to satisfy that craving; it is his very life. But for that tyrannous longing, would Satan have found companions? There is a whole poem yet to be written, a first part of Paradise Lost; Milton's poem is only the apology ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... believed in heartiness and cheerfulness. All their proverbs spring out of a keen sense of virtue. All their games are of a manly character. To materialize this glorious people, to commercialize and mammonize it, to make it think of economics instead of life, to make it bitter, discontented, and tyrannous, this is to strike at the very heart ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie

... on his brown horse, and the crowd melted away in all directions, for there was no knowing what the Governor might not do if he found them plotting. They were determined to rebel and to throw off his tyrannous yoke, but they preferred to do it quietly and comfortably, when he was ...
— William Tell Told Again • P. G. Wodehouse

... surprise. Neither in this nor in other matters was he shaped in the average mold of his contemporaries. In many respects he was doomed to a certain loneliness of excellence. There are few men that have had his stern and tyrannous sense of duty, his womanly tenderness of heart, his wakeful and inflexible conscience, which was so easy towards others and so merciless towards himself. Therefore when the time came for all of these qualities at once to be put to the most strenuous proof, the whole course of his ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... reasonable demands of the German nation for measures that were admitted to be crying needs of the times? No German diet met but a long list of grievances was submitted by the suffering people. It was of no avail. The haughty clergy rode over the people's rights and prayers rough-shod. The tyrannous devices which their cunning had invented were executed with brazen impudence. How had they treated simple laymen in whose possession a Bible was found? What was their inquisitorial court but the anteroom to holy butchers' shambles, the legal vestibule to murder that had been sanctioned by the Popes? ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... attack for the damage they had done, and guaranteed that no such act should ever be committed in the future. They also declared that the Poles, Danes, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Alsatians, and Serbs should be freed from the tyrannous governments which now enslaved them. In plain language this meant that the central powers must give back part of Schleswig to Denmark, allow the kingdom of Poland to be restored as it once had been; permit the ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet

... master-passion evermore, Like to a low hung and a fiery sky Above some great metropolis, earth shock'd Hung round with ragged-rimmed burning folds, Embathing all with wild and woful hues— Great hills of ruins, and collapsed masses Of thunder-shaken columns, indistinct And fused together in the tyrannous light. ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... with tyrannous power,—early associations, the taking up of his knightly vows with all its grand religious and heroic accompaniments, the delegated and accepted trust which he ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown

... gathered a fierce expression of passionate pain. The bloom of youth was on her cheeks, upon her lips, in all her still unformed features, but in her eyes suddenly was the knowledge of years, concentrated, tyrannous, and between this knowledge and her will there was set up a remorseless conflict, from which she found relief only in a new gaiety and love ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan

... elder Baroness was more feeble in her limbs, and still more irritable and excitable in temper. There were no events, save a few hunting adventures of the boys, or the yearly correspondence with Ulm; and the same life continued, of shrinking in dread from the old lady's tyrannous dislike, and of the constant endeavour to infuse better principles into the boys, without the open opposition for which there was neither ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge

... might be convinced of the absence of ferocious instincts in Ivan, to me, as a phrenologist, the statement was eminently incredible. All the appearances of his manner were such as to confirm his master's opinion. He was quiet, even tender in his attentions. But the tyrannous influence of ideas and physical impressions cannot be set aside; and no evidence would permanently have kept down my distrust of this man. When women shriek at the sight of a gun, it is in vain that you solemnly ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... bless them in the good they feel; And yet I bless them with a sigh: On me this grandeur stamps the seal Of tyrannous mortality. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... would have been good men, if they had said to themselves, 'We are prophets; we are inspired; we know God's law: and therefore we are righteous; we are safe: but these people—these idolaters, these drunkards, these covetous, tyrannous, profligate people round, to whom we preach, and who know not the law—they are accursed.' If they had, they would have said just what the Pharisees said afterwards. And what came of their saying so? Instead of knowing the Lord Christ, when he ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... so I tried to excuse him—that beside his plaguey trick of falling in and out of love he had an overhanging quarrel with his father, a worthy man, tyrannous when crossed, who meant him for the law. Nat abhorred the law, and, foreseeing that the tussel must come, vexed his honest conscience with the thought that while delaying to declare war he was eating his father's bread. This thought, working upon the ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine

... went out. He felt almost sick with humiliation, the humiliation of having to ask and the humiliation of the curt refusal. He hated the headmaster now. Philip writhed under that despotism which never vouchsafed a reason for the most tyrannous act. He was too angry to care what he did, and after dinner walked down to the station, by the back ways he knew so well, just in time to catch the train to Blackstable. He walked into the vicarage and found his uncle and ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... TYRREL. The tyrannous and bloody act is done,— The most arch deed of piteous massacre That ever yet this land was guilty of. Dighton and Forrest, who I did suborn To do this piece of ruthless butchery, Albeit they were flesh'd villains, ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... nearness of age often means friction and not comradeship. Where in such families the older children act as "little fathers" or "little mothers" they may be defrauded of a child's right to care-free leisure or develop a tyrannous control of the younger ones far from helpful to the development of either. The coming of new members to the family, however, in right spacing and right conditions, means that each child gets the benefit of all the teaching each other child receives and makes ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... the STORM-BLAST came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o'ertaking wings, And chased us ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... explain Fitzwalter's pre-eminence in the forces of the rebellious Barons. This seems to have been due to his influence with the wealthy citizens of London, who were among the staunchest opponents of the astute and tyrannous sovereign. On May 24, 1215—the Sunday next before Ascension Day, when many of the inhabitants would have been in attendance on Divine service—the army of the Barons, marching from Ware, were permitted ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... out of them into the houses, or any available shelter; and in the dark and chilly emptiness of the side roads one might listen in fancy for the stealthy returning steps of spirits crueller than Cold, more tyrannous than Poverty, coming to seize ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... two—the Rev. Canon Walker, and the Rev. J. Hawkesworth; and if you had to travel from the lowest point in Cornwall to the farthest house in Caithness you wouldn't find two more kindly men. We Protestants talk volubly about the grim, grinding character of priests, about their tyrannous influence, and their sinister sacerdotalism; but there is a good deal of extra colouring matter in the picture. Whatever their religion may be, and however much we may differ from it, this at least we have always found amongst priests—excellent ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... regenerate men, redeem them from sin, and fit them for the blessed kingdom of immortality. We understand the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews really to say in subtraction from what the Calvinist, in addition to what the Unitarian, says that Christ, by his resurrection from the tyrannous realm of death, and ascent into the unbarred heaven, demonstrated the fact that God, in his sovereign grace, in his free and wondrous love, would forgive mankind their sins, remove the ancient penalty of transgression, no more dooming their disembodied ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... must be the first that gives this sentence. And he, that suffers. O, it is excellent To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous To use it ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare

... nature, is destroyed by the theft of the Rhine-gold. What till then had been a serenely shining "star of the deep," has been transformed into a means by which to win authority. The programme of the greedy and tyrannous never varies; Alberich proclaims it; "The whole world will I win," and it is his daemonic will to depreciate love and set up power as the only value, so that nobody shall doubt his greatness and unique genius. "As I renounce ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... he replied, "but I think it was not to mind about the world, and not to care whether you were hungry or not, and not to live in the world at all but only in your own head, for the world is a tyrannous place. You have to raise yourself above things instead of letting things raise themselves above you. We must not be slaves to each other, and we must not be slaves to our necessities either. That is the problem of existence. There is no dignity in life at all if hunger can shout 'stop' ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens

... the failure of immediate expectation to revise his poem and omit from the third and the sixth books about one hundred and fifty lines, while adding fifty to heal over the wounds made by excision. As the poem stands, it is a rebuke of tyrannous ambition in the tale of Gebir, prince of Boetic Spain, from whom Gibraltar took its name. Gebir, bound by a vow to his dying father in the name of ancestral feud to invade Egypt, prepares invasion, but yields ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor

... you mine innumerable substance, That were too much for any tongue to tell; For all the whole Orient is under mine obedience, And prince am I of Purgatory and chief captain of hell; And those tyrannous traitors by force may I compel, Mine enemies to vanquish and even to dust them drive, And with a twinkle of mine eye not one to be ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various

... unusually fine and fiery quality, had owed a good deal to their aunt. There were family alliances between the Sedberghs and the Wendovers, and Lady Charlotte made a point of keeping up with the squire. She adored cynics and people who said piquant things, and it amused her to make her large tyrannous hand felt by the squire's timid, crack-brained, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Writings have occasioned so much mischief, abject slavishness, bloated pride, tyrannous usurpation, bloody persecution, with kings even against their will the drudges, false soul-destroying quiet of conscience, as this text, 'John' xx. 23. misinterpreted. It is really a tremendous proof of what the misunderstanding of a few words can do. That even Luther partook of the delusion, ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... it is power which I advocate, and not force; "'Tis well to have the giant's strength, but tyrannous to use ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood

... substitution for it of force regulated by justice. Coercion, in the form of law, was identical with the protection of the weak against the strong and the erection of an impregnable barrier against the tyrannous misuse of power. This doctrine exactly expressed his own character, for, as he was strong, he was also one of the most magnanimous of men. He was incapable of being overbearing in social intercourse. He had the fighting instinct to the full. An encounter ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... domestic affections, which are the purest and highest of all—all the other bonds of society, such as creeds, schools, nations, associations, leagues, families, denominations, all go sooner or later. The base is eaten out of them, because every man that belongs to them has in him that tyrannous, dominant self, which is ever seeking to assert its own supremacy. Here is Babel, with its half-finished tower, built on slime; and there is Pentecost, with its great Spirit; here is the confusion, there is the unifying; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... vnto the Lord, and they to serue their owne turnes. But neither did Saul scape the wrath of God therefore, neither had these that thing which they desired so, and did thirst after. Such is Gods iustice. He that they put their trust in, to deliuer them from the tyrannous hands of their enemies, he (I say) could supply ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt

... do I see'tis true. Look here, Iago, All my fond love thus do I blow to Heav'n. Tis gone. Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell; Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throne To tyrannous hate! Swell, bosom, with thy ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... a new channel widens and deepens—it; it lets the old water-course fill up, and never returns to its forsaken bed. The tyrannous habit was broken. The prophecy of the gitana had verified itself, and the ill a fair woman had wrought a fairer woman bad conquered ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the quest and the journeyings of the heroes, and of their toils in the swift contests, and how she had sinned through the counsels of her much-sorrowing sister, and how with the sons of Phrixus she had fled afar from the tyrannous horrors of her father; but she shrank from telling of the murder of Apsyrtus. Yet she escaped not Circe's ken; nevertheless, in spite of all, she pitied the weeping maiden, ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... commuting my frigid civility into kindness wherever an opportunity occurred; and not only was I beginning to think so, but I had already begun to act upon the thought—and what was the result? No answering spark of kindness, no awakening penitence, but an unappeasable ill-humour, and a spirit of tyrannous exaction that increased with indulgence, and a lurking gleam of self-complacent triumph at every detection of relenting softness in my manner, that congealed me to marble again as often as it recurred; ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... with mixed feelings. His heart bled for Colina. Yet the grim thought would not down that the tyrannous old trader had received no more than his deserts. He ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... revealed in the depths of this gentle being she had married—the will to subdue the grosser to the subtler emotion, the substance to the conception, the flesh to the spirit. Propensities, tendencies, habits, were as dead leaves upon the tyrannous wind ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... that these two boys have both perished, not in some noble common cause but one against the other in a struggle of dynasties and boundaries and trade routes and tyrannous ascendancies, then it seems to me that you must feel as I feel that this war is the most tragic and dreadful thing that ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... illumined, not by inspiration, but by shrewdness. With his sensitiveness to beauty of whatever kind, Banneker felt the extraordinary quality of the face, beneath its grim outline, interpreting it from the still depth of the quiet eyes rather than from the stern mouth and rather tyrannous nose. He was prepared for an abrupt and cold manner, and was surprised when the lawyer rose to shake hands, giving him a greeting of courtly congratulation upon his courage and readiness. If the purpose of this was to get Banneker to expand, as he suspected, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... interest, frequently he expels the young males as soon as they are old enough to give him trouble, the daughters, in some cases, he adds to his harem; only when old age has rendered him powerless are the tables turned, and the young, for so long oppressed, rebel and sometimes assassinate their tyrannous father. There is very little evidence of paternal affection among mammals. Even among monogamous species, where the male keeps with the female, he does so more as chief than as father. At times he is much inclined to commit infanticides ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... Shakespeare depicted as the "dark lady" of the sonnets. Nearly every sonnet of the twenty-six devoted to his mistress contains some accusation against her; and all these charges are manifestly directed against one and the same woman. First of all she is described in sonnet 131 as "tyrannous"; then in sonnet 133 as "faithless"; in sonnet 137 as "the bay where all men ride ... the wide world's commonplace"; in sonnet 138 as "false"; in 139, she is "coquettish"; 140, "proud"; "false to the bonds of love"; "black as hell... dark as night"—in both ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... the demand of the time, and had entered upon that course of triumph which was not to end till, three centuries later, chisel and brush dropped from hands enfeebled in the general decline of national vigor, and incapable of resistance to the tyrannous and exclusive ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... that point where the high road bifurcates, and the diverging branches of success and failure lead old comrades so very far apart. Ah, what a camaraderie and fellowship, knit close by the urgency of making both ends meet, strengthened by the necessity of withstanding rapacious, or negligent, or tyrannous landladies, sweetened by kindnesses and courtesies which cost the giver little, but mean much to the receiver! Did sickness of a transitory sort (for grievous illness is little known in lodgings) fall on the ground-floor tenant, ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner

... being pure formulary. It was genuinely expressive of a certain order of ideas intelligently held, a certain set of principles sincerely believed in, a view of art as positive and genuine as the revolt against the tyrannous system into which it developed. We are simply out of sympathy with its aim, its ideal; perhaps, too, for that most frivolous of all reasons because we have grown ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... now the Storm-blast came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o'ertaking wings, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... children, is the trouble of the ancients. For whilst we are tied to this tyrannous body we are subject to its death, and ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... same thing, the State very properly makes such a proceeding a crime, and punishes it as such. He does meddle with his neighbour's freedom, and that seriously. So it might, perhaps, be a tenable doctrine, that it would be needless, and even tyrannous, to make education compulsory in a sparse agricultural population, living in abundance on the produce of its own soil; but, in a densely populated manufacturing country, struggling for existence with competitors, every ignorant person tends to [229] become a burden upon, and, so far, an infringer ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... patience. For example: that of the "Polish Towns and Villages, ordered" by this Tyrant "to deliver, each of them, so many marriageable girls; each girl to bring with her as dowry, furnished by her parents, 1 feather-bed, 4 pillows, 1 cow, 3 swine and 3 ducats,"—in which desirable condition this tyrannous King "sent her into the Brandenburg States to be wedded and promote population." [Lindsey, LETTERS ON POLAND (Letter 2d). p. 61: Peyssonnel (in some. French Book of his, "solemnly presented to Louis XVI. and the Constituent Assembly;" cited in PREUSS, iv. 85); &c. &c.] ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... prove its grant, the liberty of the individual citizen is sacred and inviolable. Elsewhere there are governments called republics; universal suffrage constitutes the state; but, once constituted, the state is tyrannous and arbitrary, invades at will private rights, and curtails at will individual liberty. One ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various

... too barbarous! Colonel Gundry, you are the most tyrannous man; in your own dominions an autocrat. Every body says so, but I never would believe it. Oh, don't let me go away with that impression. And ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... thine arms are so—so tyrannous that I do fear thee— almost! And how may a poor maid, so crushed and helpless thus, gainsay thee? So prithee, O prithee take my poor letter an thou wilt ravish it from one so defenceless—O beseech ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol

... in her pocket and fingered a silver coin, but poverty is a grim, tyrannous stepmother to tender ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... the hearts of the people, and cement the foundation of his newly-acquired power. But we don't think so; the means by which he obtained the giddy height, to a comprehensive mind like his, at once suggested the necessity of vigilance, promptness, and unflinching execution of whatever act, however tyrannous or heartless it might have been, his ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... point in life, further, the instinct for independence becomes often exceedingly strong. All the conventions of society and the received rules for conduct are apt to appear mere tyrannous annoyances, cramping the free expression of personality. Society itself seems rather like a monster threatening to absorb and confine us. To be compelled to consider others, and even to bow to authority, is to many very bitter. "I will at all costs be myself" is the natural cry of a human ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray

... my countrymen! We have offended very grievously, And been most tyrannous. From east to west A groan of accusation pierces Heaven! The wretched plead against us; multitudes, Countless and vehement, the sons of ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child

... to be gentle with his subjects and to treat the Christians with kindness, but far from conforming with these wise and kindly intentions, he overwhelmed them with vexations and tyrannous acts. He doubled the taxes by a general census, subjecting not only men but also their animals to an impost. The receipts for the new duty had to be stamped with the impression of a lion, and every Christian found without ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... and will do; for I have now pitched my tent under a Cypress-tree; the Tomb is now my inexpugnable Fortress, ever close by the gate of which I look upon the hostile armaments, and pains and penalties of tyrannous Life placidly enough, and listen to its loudest threatenings with a still smile. O ye loved ones, that already sleep in the noiseless Bed of Rest, whom in life I could only weep for and never help; and ye, who wide-scattered still toil lonely in the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... thousand miles away from the boudoir, discussing theories of absolute monarchy, which she defended to admiration. Few women venture to be democrats; the attitude of democratic champion is scarcely compatible with tyrannous feminine sway. But often, on the other hand, the General shook out his mane, dropped politics with a leonine growling and lashing of the flanks, and sprang upon his prey; he was no longer capable of carrying a heart and brain at such variance for very far; ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... And on mis-tempered solitude Of unploughed field and unclipped wood Gazed rudely; when; with brutes, he fed On acorns, and his stony bed In dark, unwholesome caverns found, No skill was then to tame the ground, No help came then from him above— This tyrannous, blustering Jove. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... first truth belongs to the Eighteenth Century: the second to the Twentieth. Neither of them can be neglected in our attitude towards the state. Without the Jeffersonian distrust of the police we might easily grow into an impertinent and tyrannous collectivism: without a vivid sense of the possibilities of the state we abandon the supreme instrument of civilization. The two theories need to be ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... now," he would say among the circle of his admirers, and he would give a little wave of the hand, which was vastly effective—as if he "could an if he would" puff away the whole system of Christianity with quite a little breath of objection, but refrained from such tyrannous use of a giant's strength. "It's all very well, you know, for parsons—though, by the way, not half of the cleverest believe what they preach—but really for men of the world, and thinkers, and acute reasoners"—(oh, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... lantern, and shouted loud in return; it was an instinct, for if the creature were not human, which she had doubted but a moment before, what good could her responding cry do? And her cry was seized on by the tyrannous wind, and borne farther away in the opposite direction to that from which the call of agony had proceeded. Again she listened; no sound: then again it rang through space; and this time she was sure it was human. She turned into the house, and heaped turf and wood on the fire, which, ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell

... country. I have opposed this measure throughout; and I now protest against it as harsh, oppressive, uncalled for, unjust;—as establishing an infamous precedent, by retaliating crime against crime;—as tyrannous,—cruelly and ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... enforced, but little advantage was taken of this mandate in the Colonies, since opposition to the Writs had, thanks to the patriot Otis's denunciation of them, became almost universal; while the people had been roused to a sharp sense of their situation, in view of the tyrannous attitude of England towards the Colonies, and the next step taken by the Crown, under Prime Minister Grenville, in threatening them with the no less hated Stamp Tax. This new fiscal infatuation on the part-of the English ministry strained the relations of the Colonies toward the Crown to almost ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath

... traditional belief that a decollete corsage is a tyrannous necessity of evening dress, a woman not graciously endowed with a beautifully modelled throat and shoulders may, with perfect propriety, conceal her infelicitous lines from the derisive ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley

... light not heavy; and "immunities" from this and that are granted them, for certain years, till they get well nestled. Excellent arrangements: and his Majesty has, in fact, got about 20,000 families in that way. And still there is room for thousands more. So that if the tyrannous Firmian took to tribulating Salzburg in that manner, Heaven had provided remedies and a Prussian Majesty. Heaven is very opulent; has alchemy to change the ugliest substances into beautifulest. Privately to his Majesty, for months back, this Salzburg ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... the cruellest sins of any state, in giving petty and tyrannous authority into petty and tyrannous hands, is that it thus brings into hatred and disgust the true and high authority of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... awoke, and rose to his feet. What soft nothings men had said of sleep! "Oh, sleep, it is a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole!" Gentle! More tyrannous than death. The melancholy perambulation ended, and he lay down once more. He slept and dreamed again. This time he had killed his own brother. A moment before they had stood face to face—vigorous, wrathful, with eyes that flashed, and hands uplifted. Now his brother lay quiet and awful ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... contentment. In a well-composed air, no note, however short or low, can be spared, but the least is as necessary as the greatest: no note, however prolonged, is tedious; but the others prepare for, and are benefited by, its duration: no note, however high, is tyrannous; the others prepare for, and are benefited by, its exaltation: no note, however low, is overpowered; the others prepare for, and sympathize with, its humility: and the result is, that each and every note has a value in the position assigned to it, which, ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin

... what, by God's decrees, it is meant to be. Yet what is Carlyle's judgment upon war? His work is the witness. After the brief period of Goethe-worship, from 1834 on through forty years of monastic seclusion and labour not monastic, but as of a literary Hercules, the shaping thought of his work, tyrannous and all-pervading, is that of the might, the majesty, and the mystery of war. One flame-picture after another sets this principle forth. What a contrast are his battle-paintings to those of Tolstoi! Consider the long array ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... that first of contests, the ordinances of Zeus[4] have stirred me to sing, even the games which by the ancient tomb of Pelops the mighty Herakles founded, after that he slew Kleatos, Poseidon's goodly son, and slew also Eurytos, that he might wrest from tyrannous Augeas against his ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar

... condemning in no uncertain terms the thought of peace at any price. "There are kinds of peace," he said, "which are highly undesirable, which are in the long run as destructive as any war. The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice—all these should be shunned as we shun ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... escape the suspicion of bending downwards), and nature had given him a face which by dint of Mongolian eyes, and a nose, mouth, and chin seeming to follow his hat-brim in a moderate inclination upwards, gave the effect of a subdued unchangeable sceptical smile, of all expressions the most tyrannous over a susceptible mind, and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely to create the reputation of an invincible understanding, an infinite fund of humor—too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable crust,—and a critical judgment which, if you could ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... a slave!" repeated Leroy quietly. "You have heard of black slaves,—have you not heard of white ones too? There are countries still, where men purchase other men of their own blood and colour;— tyrannous governments, which force such men to work for them, chained to one particular place till they die. I am one of those,—though escaped for the present. You can ask me more of my country if you will; but a slave has no country save that of his master. If you ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... out lives well flavored with misery, and then suffer death for trifling offences or yield up their lives on the sacrificial altars to purchase favors from the gods for their hard rulers. The missionaries have clothed them, educated them, broken up the tyrannous authority of their chiefs, and given them freedom and the right to enjoy whatever their hands and brains produce with equal laws for all, and punishment for all alike who transgress them. The contrast is so strong—the benefit conferred upon this ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... tragedian, that being asked when he was a very old man whether he still had any commerce with women, he said "No," with this further addition, that "he was glad to say that he had at all times avoided such indulgence as a tyrannous and ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... the society of my sweet Josephine." Again he writes, "A thousand kisses as fiery as my soul, as chaste as yourself! I have just summoned the courier; he tells me that he crossed over to your house, and that you told him you had no commands. Fie! Naughty, undutiful, cruel, tyrannous, jolly little monster. You laugh at my threats, at my infatuation; ah! you well know that if I could shut you up in my heart I would put you in prison there!" This playful, gloomy, humorous, and tender quotation does not emanate from the heart of a monster, ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... despiseth small things will perish by little and little. Goethe's Tasso is very likely to be a pretty fair historical portrait, and that is true tragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine grief when some tyrannous Richard the Third oppresses and slays a score of innocent persons, as when Antonio and Tasso, both apparently right, wrong each other. One living after the maxims of this world and consistent and true to them, the other fired ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... was removed the revenue rose steadily with every remission of taxation. Meanwhile Pitt was showing the political value of the new finance in a wider field. Ireland, then as now, was England's difficulty. The tyrannous misgovernment under which she had groaned ever since the battle of the Boyne was producing its natural fruit; the miserable land was torn with political faction, religious feuds, and peasant conspiracies; and ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green

... our table, yea our bed, assaults Our peace and safety? when our writings are, By any envious instruments, that dare Apply them to the guilty, made to speak What they will have to fit their tyrannous wreak? When ignorance is scarcely innocence; And knowledge made a capital offence! When not so much, but the bare empty shade Of liberty is raft us; and we made The prey to greedy vultures and vile spies, That first transfix us ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson

... his secret heart the knowledge that he, a rich and gay young planter before he became converted to Methodism, had played with the fire of vice, and been badly burned. So Sylvia did not find him at all the Voice of Authority, but just a poor, hen-pecked, unhappy husband of a tyrannous Castleman woman. ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair

... Christ did not repel him, as by the power of His Godhead He might have done, that he should not tempt Him, but permitted him to spend all his artillery, and received the strokes and assaults of Satan's temptations in His own body, to the end He might weaken and enfeeble the strength and tyrannous power of our adversary by His long suffering. For thus, methinks, our Master and Champion, Jesus Christ, provoked our enemy to battle: "Satan, thou gloriest of thy power and victories over mankind, that there is none able to withstand thy assaults, nor escape thy darts, but at ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various

... upon the waters were the wings That bore glad tidings o'er the leaping wave Of sweet Hesperian isles, more bland and fair Than lover's looks or bard's imaginings; And blest was he, the hero brave, Who first the tyrannous deeps defied, And o'er the wilderness of waters wide A sun-pursuing highway did prepare For those true-hearted exiles few The house of Liberty that reared anew. Nor fails he here of honor due. These goodly structures ye behold, These towering ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... chase the measly savage fleeing naked through the bush. But nature can't run us ragged when all we have to do is put up a hard fight and conquer her. The iron workers are civilization's shock troops grappling with tyrannous nature on her own ground and conquering new territory in which man can live in safety and peace. Steel houses with glass windows are born of his efforts. There is a glory in this fight; man feels a sense of grandeur. We are robbing ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis

... the queen, sighing, "it is the terrible misfortune of the king that, in times so calamitous as these, he is deprived of the assistance of the patriotic men who alone would be able to save him and the state. The tyrannous decrees of Napoleon have taken his noblest and best servants from him. Stein is in exile. Hardenberg has to keep aloof from us because the emperor so ordered it. We might have ministers competent to hold the helm of ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach

... of euerie tree that I haue signified to be in this round hedge, on delightfull leauie cloysters, lay a wylde tyrannous beast asleepe all prostrate: vnder some two together, as the Dogge nusling his nose vnder the necks of the Deare, the Wolfe glad to let the Lambe lye vpon hym to keepe him warme, the Lyon suffering the Asse to cast hys legge ouer him: preferring ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash

... I call to mind Thoughts of the flower-scented wind, The dew, the gentle rain at night, The wonder-working snow and white, The song of birds, the water's fall, The sun that maketh bliss of all; Yea, this our toil and victory, The tyrannous ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... seen so striking an instance of a parent's natural traits growing into—blemishes—in one inheritor and into graces in another. Yet to know Gideon Hayle was to read the riddle. As quick to anger as his sons, as full of mirth as his daughter; open-hearted, wrong-headed, generous, tyrannous, valorous, contemptuous of all book wisdom yet an incessant, keen inquirer with a fantastical explanation of his own for everything in nature, science, politics, or religion. Implacable in his ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable

... the tyrannous heretic defeated in his cruel pleasures." These mysterious hints, coming so quickly after the Monteagle letter, still further alarmed ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt

... on any restrictions,' said Constance. 'I am sure he never would. Men don't. It is always women, with their nasty, prying, tyrannous instincts.' ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge

... said Marcella; "she has been practically the queen of a whole countryside, doing whatever she pleased, the mother and friend and saint of everybody. It has been all very paternal and beautiful, and—abominably Tory and tyrannous! Many people, I suppose, think it perfect. Perhaps I don't. But then, I know very well I can't possibly disagree with her a tenth part as strongly ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... remembering that hard-and-fast principles which lead insensibly to dogmatism cannot be too sedulously avoided by a Government. Politics must assuredly have its ideals, but compromise is the method by which alone it can approach them. The Allies have already been constrained by tyrannous circumstance to entertain important exceptions to their principle of nationality which was invoked against Italy's claim to Dalmatia, and in their own best interests they might have compromised on the subject of Bulgaria's claims to Macedonia, ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... hundred and seventy-nine non-commissioned officers had been court-martialed and sentenced for cruelly maltreating their subordinates. When we reflect that scarcely in one case out of every hundred formal charges are preferred by the victims, who know themselves completely in the power of their tyrannous masters, the official record thus stated is indeed appalling. But here again the Kaiser himself, as chief commander of the army, must be held largely responsible; for his more than lenient treatment of the convicted offenders is nothing less ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg

... and constables assembled to punish the four men, appeared cruel. The familiar faces, that in her momentary glance, she recognized, seemed to her evilly transfigured. Even the countenance of her promised husband, bent eagerly forward towards the witness-box, showed tyrannous and bloodthirsty. Her eyes hastily followed the pointing finger of her father, and sought the men in the dock. Two of them lounged, sullen and inattentive; one nervously chewed a straw, or piece of twig, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... resisting royal governors. Such men as James Otis and Samuel Adams in Massachusetts, William Livingston in New York, Patrick Henry in Virginia, Christopher Gadsden in South Carolina denounced the Stamp Act as tyrannous, unconstitutional, and an infringement of the liberties of the colonists. Popular anger rose steadily until, in the autumn, when the stamps arrived, the people of the thirteen colonies had nerved themselves to the pitch of refusing to obey ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith

... and oats like beasts. You are fleeced by these landlords for their private benefit, and as well kept under by the public burdens of State, wherein while the richer sort favour themselves, ye are gnawn to the very bones. Your tyrannous masters often implead, arrest, and cast you into prison, so that they may the more terrify and torture you in your minds, and wind your necks more surely under their arms.... Harmless counsels are fit for tame fools; ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... which is, according to the measure of it, in the truest sense kingly;* conferring indeed the purest kingship that can exist among men. Too many other kingships (however distinguished by visible insignia or material power) being either spectral, or tyrannous; spectral—-that is to say, aspects and shadows only of royalty, hollow as death, and which only the "likeness of a kingly crown have on;" or else tyrannous—-that is to say, substituting their own will for ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... had leaned upon the sill of an open casement. "Indeed, it had been better," she said, still with her face averted, and gazing downward at the tree-tops beneath, "it had been far better had we never met. For this love of ours has proven a tyrannous and evil lord. I have had everything, and upon each feast of will and sense the world afforded me this love has swept down, like a harpy—was it not a harpy you called the bird in that old poem of yours?—to rob me of delight. And you have had nothing, ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell

... Of course when the industrious people were unsuccessful, these idlers were obliged to work for their living, which, being unaccustomed to do anything energetic, they found it hard and difficult to do, and generally regarded themselves as the harshly used victims of a tyrannous fate. ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne

... the way of this heroic course and that was that he could not run the car. Never again would he touch one of those frightful nickel things on the instrument board. So, wishing to handle this harrowing situation alone, with true scout prowess and resource, he kicked around among the ruins of that tyrannous and fallen empire, and tried ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... "Dost thou presume my course to block? Off, off! or, puny Thing! I'll hurl thee headlong with the rock To which thy fibres cling." The Flood was tyrannous and strong; [A] 15 The patient Briar suffered long, Nor did he utter groan or sigh, Hoping the danger would be past; But, seeing no relief, at last, He ventured ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth

... the nineteenth century is the scramble for wealth; politics, literature, science, religion, art, are, apart from money-getting, mere lifeless wraiths."[40] Government in general, and British Government in particular, is vicious, tyrannous, and neglectful, and deserves the utmost contempt. "National Government is devised for other objects than the adjustment of essential, economic, and hygienic arrangements for the redemption of human life; to use it for such a purpose is gross tyranny and a deadly blow at ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... under the dominion of his senses; which can be, if the sentimentalists will believe me, as tyrannous and misleading when super-refined as when ultra-bestial. He made a good stout effort to resist the pipe-smoke. Emilia's voice, her growing beauty, her simplicity, her peculiar charms of feature, were all conjured up to combat the dismal ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... at the beginning of his long reign, and not permitting any of his courtiers to mention the word "death" in his presence, he abandons himself to a life of forbidden pleasure, humiliates and scandalizes the people of France instead of enlightening and elevating them. He inherits and maintains the tyrannous and oppressive feudal system, that prevents the common people from acquiring ownership of land. His career has been described, "as an hideous abortion and mistake of nature, the use and meaning of which is not yet known." The persecution of Bible readers, or Protestants, is begun with a general ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... in Hand, brave Americans all, And rouse your bold Hearts at fair Liberty's Call; No tyrannous Acts shall suppress your just Claim Or stain with Dishonour America's Name— In Freedom we're born and in Freedom we'll live. Our Purses are ready— Steady, Friends, Steady— Not as Slaves, but as Freemen our ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... began to call The morning forth; up rose the sun and Saul: Both, as men thought, rose fresh from sweet repose; But both, alas! from restless labours rose: For in Saul's breast Envy, the toilsome sin, Had all that night active and tyrannous been: She expelled all forms of kindness, virtue, grace, Of the past day no footstep left, or trace; The new-blown sparks of his old rage appear, Nor could his love dwell longer with his fear. So near a storm wise David would not ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... not content With fair equalitie, fraternal state, Will arrogate Dominion undeserv'd Over his brethren, and quite dispossess Concord and law of Nature from the Earth; Hunting (and Men not Beasts shall be his game) 30 With Warr and hostile snare such as refuse Subjection to his Empire tyrannous: A mightie Hunter thence he shall be styl'd Before the Lord, as in despite of Heav'n, Or from Heav'n claming second Sovrantie; And from Rebellion shall derive his name, Though of Rebellion others he accuse. Hee with a crew, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... the head of some individual of tyrannous mind and brawny arm to enslave a neighbour less strong than he, the thing would be impossible; the oppressed would be on the Danube before the oppressor had taken his measures ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... the reservations of the wild Indian tribes as well. Everywhere, without warning and without explanation, the surveyors' flags and posts made appearance. Wild rumours ran through the land, till every fluttering flag became the symbol of dispossession and every gleaming post an emblem of tyrannous disregard of a people's rights. The ancient aboriginal inhabitants of the western plains and woods, too, had their grievances and their fears. With phenomenal rapidity the buffalo had vanished from the plains once black with their hundreds of thousands. With the buffalo vanished the Indians' chief ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor



Words linked to "Tyrannous" :   domineering, tyrannical, tyrant, oppressive



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