"Atrocity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of blood after which so many bitter tears must flow. The sight indeed cut her to the heart, and yet she was thankful for it; for the first time the reckless cruelty of that laughing monster was evident in all its naked atrocity. Horror, aversion, loathing for that man to whom everything but power, cruelty, and cunning, was as nothing, left no room for fear or pity, or even the least shade of self-reproach for having aroused in him a desire ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a great deal to destroy a Britisher's spirits, but this terrible night almost supplied the crucial test. We were not only combating Prussian atrocity but Nature's ferocity as well, and the two forces now appeared to be in alliance. The men sang, as they confessed, because it constituted a kind of employment at least to the mind, enabled them to forget their misery somewhat, and proved an excellent antidote to the ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... of the whole of the opposition orators coincided. The Duke of Richmond said, that our employment of them would call down the vengeance of Heaven; and he argued, that our soldiers, acting with them, would become as ferocious as the Indians, and ready to commit any atrocity, or to make any attack on the liberties of the country that ministers might command! The unpleasant task of defending the employment of wild Indians fell upon Lord Suffolk, one of the secretaries of state, and he contended that the measure was allowable on principle; inasmuch as ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... love to Beatrice, or committed himself by the utterance of any opinion as to the propriety of clerical marriages; but he daily became looser about his peculiar tenets, raved less immoderately than heretofore as to the atrocity of the Greshamsbury church pews, and was observed to take some opportunities of conversing alone with Beatrice. Beatrice had always denied the imputation—this had usually been made by Mary in their ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... Enquirer" for September 6, 1831. It is an indignant denunciation of precisely these outrages; and though he refuses to give details, he supplies their place by epithets: "revolting,"—"inhuman and not to be justified,"—"acts of barbarity and cruelty,"—"acts of atrocity,"—"this course of proceeding dignifies the rebel and the assassin with the sanctity of martyrdom." And he ends by threatening martial law upon all future transgressors. Such general orders are not issued except in rather extreme cases. And ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... them as martyrs. They attempted to prostitute the law to their own base standard of political morality. They assiduously laboured to render life valueless in Ireland and property worthless, whilst no deed was too cowardly, no atrocity too barbarous, for them to praise. They alone in modern times warred against women and children. Animals were the dumb victims of the inhuman ferocity they in no way tried to check, and they effectively taught the receptive Irish millions that a British Government could ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... Patras, was foiled by the vigilance and determination of the English admiral. Disappointed in these attempts, he proceeded, in the teeth of the warnings which had been given him, to execute his orders to put down the insurrection on land, and carried them out with merciless atrocity,—ravaging the Morea with fire and sword. Resolved now to bring matters to an issue, the combined fleets in October, 1827, entered the harbour. As was expected would happen, the Turks fired upon them, and then ensued the famous battle of Navarino, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... guilty of the same crime; that Rousseau, better than they, did not erect his own criminality into a social theory, but was tolerably soon overtaken by a remorse which drove him both to confess his misdeed, and to admit that it was inexpiable; and that the atrocity of the offence owes half the blackness with which it has always been invested by wholesome opinion, to the fact that the offender was by and by the author of the most powerful book by which parental ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... himself insulted, as he would assuredly be, were he to look down upon the courts from the galleries of the Bicetre. And yet in this prison of Madrid were some of the most desperate characters in Spain: ruffians who had committed acts of cruelly and atrocity sufficient to make the flesh shudder. But gravity and sedateness are the leading characteristics of the Spaniards, and the very robber, except in those moments when he is engaged in his occupation, and then no one is more sanguinary, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... with them." The humour of this will be apparent to any who have visited internment camps. Lawn tennis was, however, possible at some camps, both here and in Germany—there were seven courts at Ruhleben. Some of the atrocity stories many of us will recognise as not so reliable as Miss Macnaughten supposed. It is her personal experiences which are important, and, like the Scotchman[59] (whom she quotes) she has, not hatred, but respect, for the Germans whom ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... here we are making ourselves out as white as angels, and yet we are, taking it all in all, capable of any kind of polite atrocity the moment glory, gold, or women are concerned—So you ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... as usual, had been the real authors of this new atrocity, but Figgins felt convinced that the guilt lay at the door of Mole, on whom he turned ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... composers most work,—namely, spiritual auricular analogy. At first it would seem to defy analysis, so rapt is it, and so indirect. No reference whatever is made to the mere fact of Lincoln's death; the poet does not even dwell upon its unprovoked atrocity, and only occasionally is the tone that of lamentation; but, with the intuitions of the grand art, which is the most complex when it seems most simple, he seizes upon three beautiful facts of nature, which he weaves into a wreath for the dead ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... fact of the matter. And no one knew who was responsible for the atrocity. And no one knew what had become of the severed hand! I wasted not a moment in linking up the story. The ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... his first and last public atrocity. He had killed men since, but always when they were alone with him. No one had seen him at his murders. He would have been destroyed when his racing days were over, but he possessed the ability to transmit a large measure of his stamina ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... Providence. I will not dwell long on this journey of three hundred miles. We were in the midst of the fire, yet, strange to say, escaped without a hair being singed; robberies, murders, and all kinds of atrocity were perpetrated before, behind, and on both sides of us, but not so much as a dog barked at us, though in one instance a plan had been laid to intercept us. About four leagues from Santander, whilst ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... Bell's Weekly Messenger believed that it was now "the imperative duty of England and France to do what they can in order to prevent the possible occurrence of a crime which, if carried out, would surpass in atrocity any similar horror the world has ever seen[933]." "Historicus," on the other hand, asked: "What is that solution of the negro question to which an English Government is prepared to affix the seal of English approbation[934]?" Mason, the Confederate ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... had been accustomed to kneel at the foot of that cross in prayer, now, with life itself at stake, they would instinctively press towards it to escape from the swords of the enemy. But, as far an regards the atrocity of the thing, it makes little difference on what particular spot they were murdered. You cannot relieve the memory of Cromwell from the odium of such murder, but by proving, what it is impossible to prove, that at Wexford the women and children were specially ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... of humanity. To knock a man on the head is neither virtuous nor guilty, but it depends upon the language applied to the action to make it murder or glory. Why not say, then, that you have testified the courage of a hero, rather than the atrocity of a ruffian? This is perfectly ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it when the boy was beaten. It made her sick. She felt that she must go out of this school, this torture-place. And she hated the schoolmaster, thoroughly and finally. The brute, had he no shame? He should never be allowed to continue the atrocity of this bullying cruelty. Then Hill came crawling back, blubbering piteously. There was something desolate about this blubbering that nearly broke her heart. For after all, if she had kept her class in proper discipline, this would never have happened, Hill ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... before. We planned a little what was to be our future course; but even for that we did not look forward long; how could we, when every day we scarcely knew if we should see the sun go down? For Amante knew or conjectured far more than I did of the atrocity of the gang to which M. de la Tourelle belonged; and every now and then, just as we seemed to be sinking into the calm of security, we fell upon traces of a pursuit after us in all directions. Once I remember—we must have been nearly ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... such a foul misdemeanor, as to condemn and sentence a peer of the realm for a capital offence, without giving him a solemn and public trial. Now, my dear master, has your clear understanding been so misled as to make you suppose their misdoings ever reached such atrocity, or that they would unwisely ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... the ruling people. Instead of absorbing their strength, Abdul Hamid hit upon the new method of killing them, so that the Turks should still maintain their domination. And the policy set on foot by him was developed but a few years ago into a scheme of slaughter, which in atrocity has far surpassed the killings of Attila, of whom the Nationalist poet sings, or even the designs of the deposed Sultan. The Armenian nation, with the exception of such part of it as has escaped into Russian territory, has been exterminated, and ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... oozings of the glacier heights That thro' the crevices come foaming down, And turned to rest me in the herdsmen's cots,[51] Where I was host and guest, until I gain'd The cheerful homes and social haunts of men. Already through these distant vales had spread The rumor of this last atrocity; And wheresoe'er I went, at every door, Kind words saluted me and gentle looks. I found these simple spirits all in arms Against our rulers' tyrannous encroachments. For as their Alps through each succeeding year Yield the same roots—their ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... that a fresh rebellion had been in agitation so late as 1752. LOCKHART. He was executed on June 7, 1753. Gent. Mag. xxiii. 292. Lord Campbell (Lives of the Chancellors, v. 109) says:—'I regard his execution as a wanton atrocity.' Horace Walpole, however, inclined to the belief that Cameron was engaged in a new scheme of rebellion. Walpole's Memoirs of George ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... the door, with shouts of laughter, the bills which announced the sale of his property. Even delicate women, who had tears for highwaymen and housebreakers, breathed nothing but vengeance against him. The lampoons on him which were hawked about the town were distinguished by an atrocity rare even in those days. Hanging would be too mild a death for him: a grave under the gibbet too respectable a resting place: he ought to be whipped to death at the cart's tail: he ought to be tortured like ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... appearance of being the joint composition of a discarded valet and a bookseller's hack." The last hypothesis appears very probable. Internal evidence is greatly in its favour. Can any of your readers tell me who was "Charles Caraccioli, Gent.,"—when the atrocity which bears his name was published,—or any thing about the man or his book? Probably some notice of it may be found in the Monthly Review, the Gentleman's Magazine, or some other periodical of the last century. ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... minister and a Christian editor, he dared not ignore. His troubles with the people of St. Louis took in the spring of 1836 a sanguinary turn, when he denounced the lynching of a negro by a St. Louis mob, perpetrated under circumstances of peculiar atrocity. In consequence of his outspoken condemnation of the horror, his office was broken into and destroyed by a mob. Lovejoy thereupon removed his paper to Alton, but the wild-cat-like spirit pursued him ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... Revelation, is the direction of the wise man: "Keep thy heart with all diligence." This is the fountain whence issue the streams which are to fertilize and gladden, or to pollute and destroy. No one was ever wicked in speech or action who was not first wicked in heart. The deeds of atrocity which shock us in execution were first performed in heart—in thought. Had this been "kept," had the early idea been restrained, the result so fearful in development might have been averted. Young ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... an account of the dangers of that awful road up the hill that I feel no Fort would repay me for its terrors. Do say what you feel, Miss Loring. Mr. Clifden can lunch with the officers at Nowshera and come any time. I know I am an atrocity." ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... that this relates to the atrocity committed by the Infant Don Juan of Castille, who, while in revolt against his brother, Sancho IV., appeared before the city of Tarifa with an army, chiefly composed of Mahometans; finding the infant son of the governor, Don Alonzo Perez de Guzman, at nurse in a neighbouring village, he ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... back by the hollow square and planted cannon of Lord Percy's troops. In a short time the march was resumed. The troops had burned several houses at Lexington, a vandalism which added to the fury of the provincials. As they proceeded, the infuriated soldiers committed other acts of atrocity, particularly in West Cambridge, where houses were plundered ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... of that ignominious death were suffered by Jesus in all their atrocity. For a moment, according to certain narratives, his heart failed him; a cloud hid from him the face of his Father; he endured an agony of despair more acute a thousand times than all his torments. But his divine instinct ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... as I confess now with shame, my prejudices of self-interest had blinded me into regarding it and its members as great and useful and honorable "captains of industry." Honorable in the main; for, not even my prejudice could blind me to the almost hair-raising atrocity of some of their doings. Still, morality is largely a question of environment. I had been bred in that environment. Even the atrocities I excused on the ground that he who goes forth to war must be prepared to do and to tolerate many acts the church would ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... and sore, and the strangeness of her surroundings bewildered her—the sofa upholstered in slippery American cloth and hard as a board to her aching limbs, the waxen atrocity beneath its glass shade standing on a rickety table at the foot of the couch, the smallness of the room ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... felt himself colouring. This was what he had been waiting for—the day the Colonel should wantonly sacrifice some innocent person. And could his wife be a party to that final atrocity? Lyon had reminded himself repeatedly during the previous weeks that when the Colonel perpetrated his misdeed she had already quitted the room; but he had argued none the less—it was a virtual certainty—that he had on rejoining her immediately made his achievement plain to her. He was ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... his service those who would not hesitate to sell their souls for gold. Moved by this diabolical impulse, he followed her to Buffalo, and there made the acquaintance of two unmitigated villains who kept a low gambling house in one of the vilest streets in the city, and who were capable of any atrocity known to the annals of crime. These two vagabonds were already refugees from Canadian justice, having been concerned in one of the bank robberies so frequent in the Provinces, and had an accomplice of their own stamp on the Canadian ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... Keith's brain with fire, and he sprang to his feet, hands clinched and eyes blazing. He could have believed this of Indians, it was according to their nature, their method of warfare; but the cowardliness of it, the atrocity of the act, as perpetrated by men of his own race, instantly aroused within him a desire for vengeance. He wanted to run the fellows down, to discover their identity. Without thinking of personal danger, he ran forward on their trail, which ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... was absorbed in listening to the villainous plot that Lord Vincent was unfolding to his companion. It was the very same plot that he had communicated to his valet, the atrocity of which had shocked even that cut-throat. It did not shock Faustina, however. She listened with avidity. She co-operated with zeal. She suggested such modifications and improvements for securing the success of the conspiracy, and the ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... the past—to that night of horror when the Protestants were gathered at the fete of St. Bartholomew. When twelve had struck, in the dead of night, the bell in St. Germain l'Auxerrois gave out the solemn signal, and there ensued a scene of horrible atrocity, such as the world has rarely witnessed, and which will make the names of its perpetrators infamous so long ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... proceeding as greatly to her liking. She expresses discontent only that she had not been left free to kill or spare the officers at her discretion. Personally Ralegh cannot be accounted amenable for the atrocity. He is not named in Grey's despatch to the Council. But it would be folly to pretend that he disapproved it. Hooker, his eulogist, claims it for him as an eminent distinction. He cordially sympathized with Grey's ideal of a Mahometan conquest ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... that all the damage done by the earthquake. On the west side of Jerusalem, half of the mountain was split off and hurled to the east, into a road, at a distance of four stadia. (30) And not heaven and earth alone were outraged by Uzziah's atrocity and sought to annihilate him; even the angels of fire, the seraphim, were on the point of descending and consuming him, when a voice from on high proclaimed, that the punishment appointed for Uzziah was unlike that ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... county, Ohio, wrote a letter to the Rev. John Rankin, of Ripley, Ohio thirteen years since, containing a description of the cutting up of a slave with a broad axe; beginning at the feet and gradually cutting the legs, arms, and body into pieces! This diabolical atrocity was committed in the state of Kentucky, in the year 1807. The perpetrators of the deed were two brothers, Lilburn and Isham Lewis, NEPHEWS OF PRESIDENT JEFFERSON. The writer of this having been informed by Mr. Dickey, that some of the facts connected with this ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... houses. Most of the houses had been looted systematically. According to the stories of those inhabitants who remain, there was a reign of terror for about a week, during which the Germans rendered themselves guilty of every sort of atrocity and barbarity. They are all most positive that there was no firing upon the German troops by the civil population. It seems to be generally believed that the massacre was due to resistance of retiring Belgian troops and the destruction ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... troops and about the same number of Indians, led by Colonel Procter, whom Brock had placed in command of the fort at Amherstburg. Procter's name is infamous in the annals of the war. The worst traditions of Indian atrocity, uncontrolled and even encouraged, cluster about his memory. He was later promoted in rank instead of being degraded, a costly blunder which England came to regret and at last redeemed. A notoriously incompetent officer, on this one occasion of the battle of the Raisin he acted with decision ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... crime is committed in some place, attracting public attention either through the atrocity of the case or the strangeness of the criminal deed—for instance, one that is not connected with bloodshed, but with intellectual fraud—there are at once two tendencies that make themselves felt in the public ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... distracted for the moment by the arrival of Edith Symmes, and the little group paid her the momentary attention of an awed silence, for she had perpetrated what was, perhaps, the greatest atrocity of her life—a vivid scarlet gown which made her face ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... to the torment of sleeplessness, under the bayonets of the Egyptian soldiers. But it is indeed too unreasonable and unjust to lay on the Pasha of Damascus the whole blame of these proceedings, unequalled in atrocity since the days of the fourth Antiochus. The guilt must be equally shared by those who delivered up an innocent people into his hands; indeed, their share is greater. He may plead that he was obliged to do these things by the nature ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... martial exercises, which distinguished the chivalry of the region beyond the Loire, and were ill fitted to face enemies who, in every country from Ireland to Palestine, had been victorious against tenfold odds. A war, distinguished even among wars of religion by merciless atrocity, destroyed the Albigensian heresy, and with that heresy the prosperity, the civilization, the literature, the national existence, of what was once the most opulent and enlightened part of the great European family. Rome, in the meantime, warned by that ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and the intrepidity of its author. Gladstone has characterized it as the greatest forensic effort in the English language, not excluding the masterpieces of Erskine. It is a plea for the life of a brutalized negro who butchered a whole family under circumstances of peculiar atrocity. The deed was without excuse or palliation, save in the insanity of the perpetrator, of which Seward became convinced, and volunteered as counsel amid the surprise, imprecations, and threats of the Auburn community, where the case was at issue. The moment was a supreme one for him, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... lessons in crime to their delighted listeners. There the deepest tragedy and the broadest farce are represented in the career of the murderer and the thief, and are applauded in proportion to their depth and their breadth. There, whenever a crime of unusual atrocity is committed, it is brought out afresh, with all its disgusting incidents copied from the life, for the amusement of those who will one ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... refuse to remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it. The cases in which we could interfere by force of arms as we interfered to put a stop to intolerable conditions in Cuba are necessarily very few. Yet it is not to ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... far away south," he answered. "Had I been in the neighbourhood, I should probably have heard of the occurrence from the Indians, who had treated me with courtesy and confidence. It is only since they have been guilty of many acts of atrocity that I have separated myself from them. I told them that I would remain their friend, and do my utmost to defend and advance their cause, if they would act justly, and if resolved on war, would carry it on according to the customs of the civilised ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... day of the month, which was that of the Epiphany; and was able to clear herself of all the calumnies which her husband had brought against her. The surprise of the people in seeing these corpses was great, from the atrocity of the deed, which made one really shudder, seeing two septuagenarians and a girl of seventeen so ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... gazing to blindness upon the sun. Everything was confused and imperfect. I could see that the courthouse was filled to overflowing, and this increased my feebleness. The case was one that had occasioned considerable excitement in the community, It was one of no ordinary atrocity. This was a sufficient reason why the audience should be large. There was yet another. There were two new debutants. In a community where popular eloquence is, of all others, perhaps the most desirable talent, this circumstance was well calculated to bring many ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... to thee. Be proud of having lived a moment when thy atrocity was so great that it almost made the deeds of the devils themselves forgotten. I speak of that moment when thou didst command me to withdraw the veil which concealed the Eternal from thy sight. The angel whose charge it was to register thy sins ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... above his fate. It was all very vivid, and the more incredible therefore that such a devilish thing as the death-punishment should still be, and that governments should keep on surpassing in the anguish they inflict the atrocity of the cruelest murderers. If the Salem-born Hawthorne ever visited that church in remembrance of the fact that his people came from the same parish; if he saw the mortal relic which held me in such fascination that I could scarcely ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... Every other offence merely subjects the delinquent to imprisonment and labour in the castle, or rather arsenal at Christiania, and the fortress at Fredericshall. The first and second conviction produces a sentence for a limited number of years—two, three, five, or seven, proportioned to the atrocity of the crime. After the third he is whipped, branded in the forehead, and condemned to perpetual slavery. This is the ordinary course of justice. For some flagrant breaches of trust, or acts of wanton cruelty, criminals have been condemned ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... Government, or whether the denunciation of her Majesty's Opposition, were not to her liking; or whether the perusal of the Court news had disturbed her serenity; whether it was that the latest discovery in tenors was reported stricken with sore throat that grieved her; or whether it was the last atrocity in crime that made her flesh creep and so disquieted her, it was impossible to say; but that Lady Mary fidgeted considerably over her journal was a fact past dispute. A looker-on, had there been one, would have noticed that her eye frequently wandered from ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... The noise you heard was that window which possibly hasn't been opened for a century or two, groaning in pain at being forced into action again! Can't sleep in this beastly room—haven't closed my eyes yet—and when I did get out of that Victorian atrocity over there and take to the sofa by the window, why, the first thing I saw were those flames flickering out across the horizon like signal-fires, or something! I've been watching them for the past twenty minutes and they've got on my nerves. ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... believe all the atrocity stories; but one of our servants in this house came back from the East front recently and said the orders were to kill all Cossacks. Our washerwoman reports that her son was ordered to shoot a woman in Belgium and I myself ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... gently, though she averted her eyes, for all the long hours he had filled with the stories of his crimes upon earth were poured into the ear of the spirit of his Beatrice, as he thought. One last and crowning atrocity ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... malignant and envious minister—a snake in the grass—a fly in the ointment of Prince Ahmad's beatitude! And to think of the old witch gaining access to the fairy palace— it was nothing less than an atrocity! And the tasks which she induces the king to set Prince Ahmad to perform—but they are all accomplished for him by his fairy bride. The only thing to regret—the fatal blemish in the tale—is the slaughter of the old king. Shabbar ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... inscription suspended over them, 'Not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.' At Paris all was sweetness and silence. The settlement was tranquilly surrendered to the same men who had made it the scene of their atrocity; and two years later, 500 of the very Spaniards who had been most active in the murder were living there in peaceable possession, in two forts which their relation with the natives had obliged them to build. It ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... delight in their case in adding insult to cruelty; and not without reason did the Church at that time consider as martyrs the priests and monks who were slain by the pagan Scandinavians. Their sanguinary and hideous idolatry showed its hatred of truth and holiness in always manifesting a peculiar atrocity when coming in contact with the Church of Christ and her ministers. And, our chief object in speaking of the stand made by the Irish against the pagan Danes is, to show how the clan-system became in truth the avenger of God's altars and ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... now, from sich atrocity and impudence!" laying down the cloaks and bundles, and facing the Indian, with an appearance of great indignation—"Did a body ever hear sich a liar! Why, Misther Ould Nick, Madam Willoughby wouldn't let the likes of ye touch the ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... referred to Jehovah; that David was plainly informed of the intention of the Gibeonites of 'hanging up' the seven persons 'before Jehovah' as an 'atonement;' that he willingly surrendered them for that atrocity; that he evidently expected from that act a cessation of the famine; and that this calamity is reported to have really disappeared in consequence of the offering" (Ibid, p. 392). Kalisch, in his anxiety to diminish as far as possible the evidence that human sacrifices were enjoined ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... this day, Norman of Torn," replied De Montfort. "Verily do I believe we owe our victory to you alone; so do not mar the record of a noble deed by wanton acts of atrocity." ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... more, all resentment, all revenge, against him ceased with his existence, and a tender pity supplied their place:—what, while living, he never would have forgave, when dead lost great part of its atrocity, and he bewailed the fate of the transgressor, with unfeigned tears ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... words to write you about this savage atrocity; only enough to express our sorrow and sympathy for yourself. We have been in great distress. Owen came to tell us of this great feat of arms of the 'Southern chivalry.' He was absolutely sobbing. I was much relieved on seeing your despatch to your mother, and to hear that George was going to ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... no words can begin to do justice—was in this case solitary. Once a day, of an afternoon and always at the time when all the men were upstairs after the second promenade (which gave the writer of this history an exquisite chance to see an atrocity at first-hand), Lena was taken out of the cabinot by three plantons and permitted a half-hour promenade just outside the door of the building, or in the same locality—delimited by barbed wire on one side and the washing-shed ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... magnanimity was not met by those who led the South after Lee's retirement, and before reconstruction set in, and that the Fifteenth Amendment was brought on by their own doings: when have two wrongs made a right? And to place the negro above these people was an atrocity. You cannot expect them to inquire very industriously how magnanimous this North meant to be, when they have suffered at her hands worse, far worse, than France suffered ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... as "A good work for a good Magistrate." This learned person, it will be recollected, exhorted the commonwealth men to destroy all the muniments in the Tower—a proposal which Prynne considers as an act inferior only in atrocity to his participation in the murder of Charles I., and we should not be surprised if some zealous reformer were to maintain, that a general conflagration of these documents would be the most essential benefit that could be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... eighteen thousand unoffending persons should be stripped of all that they possessed, and cast out to the mercy of the wilderness. The atrocity of the plan is matched by its folly. The king gave explicit orders, but he gave neither ships nor men enough to accomplish them; and the Dutch farmers, goaded to desperation, would have cut his sixteen hundred soldiers to ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... ground somehow, and I take it that but for the invention of other more rapid means of transit the present generation would be as little concerned at the pains of the post-horse as they are at the horrors enacted behind the closed doors of the physiological laboratories, the atrocity of the steel trap, the continual murdering by our big game hunters of all the noblest animals left on the globe, and finally the annual massacre of millions of beautiful birds in their breeding time to provide ornaments for ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... for the Union. Her devotion to it is the latest and the most terrible form of idolatry. She has given to the Slave Power a carte blanche, to be filled as it may dictate—and if, at any time, she grows restive under the yoke, and shrinks back aghast at the new atrocity contemplated, it is only necessary for that Power to crack the whip of Disunion over her head, as it has done again and again, and she will cower and obey like a plantation slave—for has she not sworn that she will sacrifice ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... these proceedings, carried this letter to the abbe, the poor priest read it and re-read it; so amazed and horror-stricken was he to see the perfection with which his own handwriting and signature were imitated. The dangerous condition into which this last atrocity threw poor Ursula sent Savinien once more to the procureur du roi with the ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... necessarily great centers of crime, we daily hear of murders; their frequency and remoteness leave us undisturbed. Our sympathies can only be deeply moved either by some scenic peculiarities investing the crime with unusual romance or unusual atrocity, or else by the more immediate appeal of direct neighborly interest. The murder which is read of in the Times as having occurred in Westminster, has seldom any special horror to the inhabitants of Islington or Oxford Street; but ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... dwell on the ordeal of a long engagement. It is often made to sound romantic in fiction, but in realistic life such an unnatural relationship is a refined atrocity—often an injurious one—except to pseudo-human beings so unreal and unromantic that they should never be married or engaged at all. I nearly died; and as for Carl—well, unrequited affection may be good for some men, but requited affection in such circumstances cannot be good ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... all law and order, and pandering to the worst passions of an ignorant and ferocious populace, goads them, by the most unfounded and mischievous statements, to the commission of crime, and then adduces the atrocity of their acts as a proof of the injustice of their treatment. Every murder is palliated, because it arises from "the occupation of land." Every brutal assassination is paraded as "a fact" for Lord Devon, and is recommended to that nobleman's attention; not that the helpless and unoffending ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... self? If the tables could once be turned, and it could be that it was the black race which violently and lastingly triumphed in the bloody revolution at Wilmington, North Carolina, a few years ago, what would not we excuse to the white man who made the atrocity the argument of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... beside other plunder, amounting to one or two hundred reals more. Inferior Pangerans would of course partake likewise. Muda Hassim must have given his consent, must have been a participator in this atrocity, nobody being desperate enough to do such a thing without his orders. In fact, they dare not move up the river themselves without leave, much less send up the Dyaks. It is a hateful feature in this government, newly developed since the close of ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... of all the persons mentioned by the narrator have been printed in full, except those of Capt. I—— and his wife, and that of Mr. D——, to whom conduct of peculiar atrocity is ascribed. These three individuals are now gone to answer at a far more awful tribunal than that of public opinion, for the deeds of which their former bondwoman accuses them; and to hold them up more openly to human reprobation could no longer affect ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... exactly the sort of man who would like to have the profit of an evil deed without the loss of reputation arising from the commission of it, and who would consider himself best served by agents who could commit a profitable atrocity without being guilty of the annoying want of tact of waiting for his direct orders to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... the morning, when we had gone to press and were having a relaxing concert as usual (for some of the printers were good singers and others good performers on the guitar and on that atrocity the accordion), the proprietor of the Union strode in and asked if anybody had heard anything of Boggs or the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... died out of the race. Stoning a woman to death in the east because she has ventured to marry again after being deserted by her husband may be more merciful than allowing her to be mobbed to death; but the official stoning or burning of an adulteress in the west would be an atrocity because few of us hate an adulteress to the extent of desiring such a penalty, or of being prepared to take the law into our own hands if it were withheld. Now what applies to this extreme case applies also in due degree to the other cases. Offences in which sex is concerned ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... atrocities has been the mistake of aggressors throughout Earth's history. The battle cries of countless wars have called upon the people to remember an atrocity. Nothing else hits an Earthman as hard as a ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... the attorney (whom we will now report in the first person), "the man who stands here charged, and, in the minds of nine out of ten of all present, I fearlessly affirm, justly charged, with a murder, to the deliberate atrocity of which scarce a parallel can be found in the world's black catalogue of crime,—this man, I say, is a felon-refugee from ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... that Druidic discipline which combined a priestly constitution with civil privileges, and with a very peculiar doctrine of a political and even moral purport. We might be tempted to suppose that the atrocity of human sacrifice was first introduced among them by the Punic race. For they were from primeval times connected with the Carthaginians and Phoenicians, who were the first to traverse the outer sea, and sought in the island a metal which was very valuable for the wants of the ancient ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... claim a place among the authentic specimens of his oratory. Adverting to some of those admirers of Mr. Hastings, who were not so implicit in their partiality as to give unqualified applause to his crimes, but found an excuse for their atrocity in the greatness of his mind, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... humiliate us in the most abominable way. The whole family have sworn to make us blush publicly. Publicly blush! They have written to Mama to come and speak out. Now will you attend to me, Caroline? You do not credit such atrocity? I know it to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... old woman started for the shore than Condon hailed a canoe upon the other side of the ship, and after bargaining with its owner finally lowered his baggage and himself aboard. Once ashore he kept out of sight of the two-story atrocity that bore the legend "Hotel" to lure unsuspecting wayfarers to its multitudinous discomforts. It was quite dark before he ventured to enter and arrange ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... murder, rapine, thefts, piracies, conflagrations, with every outrage violating the happiness and safety of society, but are the first to set the example and to consecrate the atrocity—where the people are taught no one principle of morality or religion—where the arts and sciences are wholly unknown or despised—where the amusements and sociabilities of human life are totally disregarded—where the bounties ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... scarcely left this unnoticed when they attack much slighter abuses. If such a thing ever occurred, even in the worst of times, it must have been an isolated case. I have not met elsewhere with any allusion to this passage, or the atrocity recorded in it, and would be glad of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various
... of Henry VIII., was accompanied by circumstances of peculiar horror; and it has been asserted that he died of a loathsome disease, which is hardly mentioned in history, except in the case of men who have been rendered infamous by an atrocity of persecuting zeal. On his bed of intolerable anguish, in that splendid and luxurious palace which he had built for himself, under the palms of Jericho, swollen with disease and scorched by thirst, ulcerated externally and glowing ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... daring-looking fellow, with a bold, piratical swagger, which gave an impression that he would not hesitate at the most audacious acts of atrocity which he might suppose would forward the object he happened to have in view. He put out his hand in the most cool and impudent manner to shake Adair's, and then stood calmly eyeing his uninvited visitors, as much as to say, "Now make the most of ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fiber of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity. ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... Now the precept, "Thou shalt not kill," would be sufficient to make the executive powers of conscience watchful, in deterring the individual from the crime, or in reproving and punishing him if he committed it. But the mere precept would have but little effect in exhibiting to him the full atrocity of the sin, in comparison with an anecdote or a story which detailed its commission. But even this would not be so powerful as the effect produced by a murder committed in a neighbouring street, and still more were it perpetrated in his own presence. The necessary ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... Hungary,[613] there is no hint in the correspondence, either in Paris, Simancas, or Brussels, that there was a suspicion of foul play. If Charles or Francis had believed Henry really capable of so deep atrocity, no political temptation would have induced either of them to commit their cousins or nieces to the embrace of a monster, yet no sooner was Jane Seymour dead, than we shall find them competing eagerly with each other to ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... miner, with his fierce blackened face and rolling eyes, looked vindictive enough then to be guilty of any atrocity as he seemed to be ...
— Son Philip • George Manville Fenn
... hats, the broken feather of which was hanging down, then her furs, and then three pairs of boots; and the disposal by sale of these relics, wherein he could trace in a confused sort of way the very outlines of her form, appeared to him an atrocity, as if he had seen carrion crows mangling her corpse. The atmosphere of the room, heavy with so many breaths, made him feel sick. Madame Dambreuse offered him her smelling-bottle. She said that she found ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... now he was bound to confess that, for the moment, he had been so bewitched by the charms of the siren, that he had bound himself by the fatal oath, scarce knowing what he swore, which linked him to the fortunes of the villain father. Slightly he touched on that atrocity of Catiline, by telling which aloud he dared not sully her pure ears. He then related clearly and succinctly the murder of the cutler Volero, his recognition of the murderer, the forced deception which he had used reluctantly toward Cicero, and the suspicions and distrust ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... the Island as free booty for his friends, sycophants, and favourites; then, an old woman, garbed in male attire, having an infirmity of purpose only too prone to be blown about by every wind of doctrine, alternating helplessly between tenderness and truculence, the charity of a Fry and the tragic atrocity of Medea. After this dismal ruler, Trinidad, by the grace of the Colonial Office, was subjected to the manipulation of an unctuous dandy. This successor of Gordon, of Elliot, and of Cairns, durst not oppose high-placed official malfeasants, but [72] ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... name of insanity!—could have inspired such a meaningless atrocity? What could its perpetrator have hoped to ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... several hundred people on board near the Indian coast. He reached Calicut on October 29th, and immediately bombarded the city, seizing the inoffensive native fishermen in the port, eight hundred of whom he massacred in cold blood under circumstances of brutal atrocity. In 1503 he again left for Europe, after establishing a factory at Cochin. In consequence of his violence a war ensued between Cochin and Calicut. In 1504 Lopo Soares came out with a fleet of fourteen caravels, and proclaimed a blockade of the port of Cochin, in spite of the fact that the Rajah ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... conviction in a court of justice. It is quite contrary to the well-established humanity of De Soto. There can be no possible excuse for such an act of barbarity on the part of any civilized man. If De Soto were guilty of the atrocity, it would, indeed, indicate that his reason ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... of the betrayer of our Lord as a kind of monster, whose crime is so mysterious in its atrocity as to put him beyond the pale of human sympathy. The awful picture which the great Italian poet draws of him as alone in hell, shunned even there, as guilty beyond all others, expresses the general feeling about him. And even the attempts which have been made to diminish the greatness of his ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... afraid we cannot afford to be pioneers, and I'm sure the neighbors are not ready to co-operate. We must still 'go by water,' and the important question is where to send the lower end of the main drain. There is no sewer in the street, and a cesspool is an atrocity worthy of the darkest ages. The only safe thing appears to be the sub-surface irrigation plan, for which, fortunately, there is plenty of room on our lot. This comes very near to Uncle Harry's notion of 'earth to earth' ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner |
