"Brutal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Boche was being hunted out and offered to take all civilians back to safety in motor lorries, 300 men, women and children, headed by the Deputy Mayor, heroically refused to leave their town, preferring, as they said, to risk the bombardment and the "brutal English" than to remain one ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... notwithstanding the bishopric was a neutral State. On this account they paid no respect to the grand master of the Bishop's household, who accompanied us, but, knowing Don John had taken the castle of Namur in order, as they supposed, to intercept me on my return, these brutal people, as soon as I had got into my quarters, rang the alarm-bell, drew up their artillery, placed chains across the streets, and kept us thus confined and separated the whole night, giving us no opportunity to expostulate with them on such conduct. In the morning ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... reason to suppose that Clarkson had been within half a mile of the spot that day. On the contrary, no reasonable doubt could exist that the real murderer was the Indian who had been found among the bushes. The men who knew him spoke of him as passionate, brutal, more than half-savage—there was perfect fitness between his appearance and character, and the barbarous manner of his crime. And yet while everybody spoke of him as undoubtedly guilty, almost everybody had a thought of Clarkson haunting his mind, and an uneasy desire to ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... the full description given in the book just mentioned, it will be well to state that black means hatred and malice. Red, of all shades from lurid brick-red to brilliant scarlet, indicates anger; brutal anger will show as flashes of lurid red from dark brown clouds, while the anger of "noble indignation" is a vivid scarlet, by no means unbeautiful, though it gives an unpleasant thrill; a particularly ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... he will tread upon their toes—an art in which I never knew his equal. However, I always loved Bastin, perhaps because no one else did, a fact of which he remained totally unconscious, or perhaps because of his brutal way of telling one what he conceived to be the truth, which, as he had less imagination than a dormouse, generally it was not. For if the truth is a jewel, it is one coloured and veiled by many ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... pouring over the hull of the boat, their very immensity making them form great slopes on both sides of it. When the crest of one broke upon the vessel Ferragut was able to realize the monstrous weight of salt water. Neither stone nor iron had the brutal blow of this liquid force that, upon breaking, fled in torrents or dashed up in spray. They had to make openings in the bulwarks in order to provide a vent for the ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... In addition to the violent headache from which he was suffering, his blood felt like fire in his veins, his skin was dry and rough; he was so giddy that he could scarcely stand. The truth was that he had been drugged with such brutal severity on the preceding night, by Xaxaguana's emissaries, to make sure of his being out of the way at the moment of his master's seizure, that it had been due more to chance than anything else that he had ever again awakened. After a few minutes' rest ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... this could turn against him. He could not endure the idea of being dismissed with contempt less than two years after his re-election to the presidency by the unanimous vote of all Republicans. He was willing to go, but he did not choose to be forced to go by the brutal summons of an infuriated public. Yet France, pending his decision, was without a government. Something had to be done. He employed every device to gain time. He had interviews with men of various parties. He grew more and more care-worn and aged. His troubles showed themselves ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... escaped his twisted lips. He clutched her roughly to him and dragged her through the door and into the moonlight, whiskey and anger lending him brutal strength. ...
— A Bottle of Old Wine • Richard O. Lewis
... Mandat Imperatif, the brutal and decisive weapon of the democrats, the binding by an oath of all delegates, the mechanical responsibility against which Burke had pleaded at Bristol, which the American constitution vainly attempted to exclude ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... precept, "Keep wine and water apart," is conveyed at the close of a lyric distinguished in other respects for the brutal passion of its drunken fervour. I have not succeeded in catching the rollicking swing of the original verse; and I may observe that the last two stanzas seem to form a separate song, although their metre is the same as that of the ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... closed with a vicious snap. Then I heard the crunch of sabots on the gravelled court, and the next instant caught a glimpse of the stout, brutal figure of the peasant Le Gros, the big dealer in cattle, as he passed the narrow window of ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... rode furiously over the country roads, as if mad to reach a certain end. A little later, he cantered up the gravelled drive of the Four Corners, his horse wet and trembling, and he with a craving unexplained, a desire that had found a swift, brutal expression. ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... The other two were bouncing, merry girls, rather coarse in manner, as might be expected from their environment; but Molly, perhaps fully conscious of her prettiness, assumed certain airs and graces and a regal deportment that brought even her big, brutal brothers to her ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... of shouldering their Sharp's rifles against the Border ruffians as they would against wild beasts. For himself, he could not class any of his fellow-creatures, however vicious and wicked, on the same level with wild beasts. Those wretches were, he granted, as bad and brutal as they were represented by the free State men of Kansas, but to him they were less blameworthy than were their employers and indorsers, the pro-slavery President and his Cabinet, pro-slavery Congressmen, and judges, and doctors ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... rang in his head. Although he could not quite understand the full meaning of the brutal judgment, it brought him disquiet and discontent. For one thing, like the high-road, his profession led nowhither. The thrill of adventure had gone from it. It was static, and Paul's temperament ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... summer resort in the White Mountains. His first great and cynical shock was to find that his "accomplishment" certificate was one of an enormous edition; that it meant comparatively nothing in the great brutal world of trade; that modesty was a drawback, and that gentleness was as weak as timidity. And repeated failures drove him from New England to a community where, it had been said, the people were less sharp, less cold, and far less exacting. He was getting along ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... The interior is very ornate. Just here, where Back Hill and Ray Street meet, was Hockley Hole, a famous place of entertainment for bull and bear baiting, and other cruel sports that delighted the brutal taste of the eighteenth century. One of the proprietors, named Christopher Preston, fell into his own bear-pit, and was devoured, a form of sport that doubtless did not appeal to him. Hockley Hole was noted for a particular breed of ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... time Chivington made this raid there was camped at Sand Creek about one hundred and fifty lodges of women, children and a few decrepit Indians. This was one of the most brutal massacres a white man was ever known to have commanded. With some sixty soldiers he said he would go and "clean 'em up." He got there at daybreak and began to fire on the Indians and killed a great many women and children. ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... of reckless daring. They were idle, swaggering, brutal. All the summer they sailed the seas, a terror to peaceful merchantmen, and when winter came, or when they were tired of plundering, they would retire to the West India Islands or Madagascar. Here, hidden in the depths of forests, they built for themselves strong castles ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... beautiful,—would have inspired primeval humanity to mould and chisel the lineaments of clay. Even New Zealanders elaborately carve their war-clubs; and from the "graven images" prohibited by the Decalogue as objects of worship, through the mysterious granite effigies of ancient Egypt, the brutal anomalies in Chinese porcelain, the gay and gilded figures on a ship's prow,—whether emblems of rude ingenuity, tasteless caprice, retrospective sentiment, or embodiments of the highest physical and mental ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... themselves rarely count for much, as they do in Crashaw, for instance, where words turn giddy at the height of their ascension. The words mean things, and it is the things that matter. They can be brutal: 'For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let me love!' as if a long, pre-supposed self-repression gave way suddenly, in an outburst. 'Love, any devil else but you,' he begins, in his abrupt leap to the heart of the matter. Or else his exaltation will ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... pass under, and came down on the unwary P.T. with the crushing force of his double bulk. The splay feet flattened the game-cock to the ground, and, while he lay there helpless, this victor-by-a-fluke began to peck and tear at his head and comb in a most brutal ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... was his advice which led Margaret to send away the hated Spanish regiments from Netherland soil; and, far from being naturally a relentless persecutor, there is proof that neither he nor the president of the Privy Council, the jurist Viglius, believed in the policy of harsh and brutal methods for stamping out heretical opinions. They had in this as in other matters to obey their master, and allow the odium to ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... you'll need a good, strong fellow who can be patient and kind and inflexible and even brutal, by turns. I wonder if we couldn't get Sven Oleson? The Raymers had him when Edward was down with typhoid, and he was a treasure when we could make him understand ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... Alexandrovna's heart when she saw this. It was as if darkness had swooped down upon her life; she felt that these children of hers, that she was so proud of, were not merely most ordinary, but positively bad, ill-bred children, with coarse, brutal propensities—wicked children. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... be tempted to declare that the picture is too dark a one to be true, did one not know from other sources of the brutal ways of filling the treasury which Egypt has retained even to the present day. In the same way as in the town, the stick facilitated the operations of the tax-collector in the country: it quickly opened ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... seemed a giant, drawn to his full height, and resting for support on the hand that was rested upon the table. Intensity of emotion arrested her breath, as she gazed at the silvered head, piercing black eyes, and spare wasted framp of the handsome man, who had always reigned as a brutal ogre in her imagination. The fire in his somewhat sunken eyes, seemed to bid defiance to the whiteness of the abundant hair, and of the heavy mustache which drooped over his lips; and every feature in his patrician face revealed ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... specimen of mankind. Beneath the peaked cap, crammed well down on to his head, gleamed a pair of surly, watchful eyes, and, beneath these again, the unshaven, brutal, out-thrust jaw offered little ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... torture-house wherein he would be starved, sweated, thrashed by brutal kourbash-wielding overseers, he found the most palatial and comfortable of clubs, a place of perfect peace, safety, and ease, where one was kindly treated by those in authority, sumptuously fed, luxuriously lodged, and provided with pleasant ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... fortunately placed individual perish, and this must be the case in still higher degree when we see an entire family die out. But perhaps a time will arrive when we have become so developed, so enlightened, that we can remain indifferent before the spectacle of life, which now seems so brutal, so cynical, so heartless; when we have closed up those lower, unreliable instruments of thought which we call feelings, and which have been rendered not only superfluous but harmful by the final ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... it is—the old game over again: it is enough to make one sweat in the depth of winter—on my honor!" said the bailiff, in a brutal tone. Then advancing toward Morel, he continued: "If you don't come along at once, I will take you by the collar, and bundle you down. ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... shaken with the fever their negligence had bred, crippled by the loss of his pet clerk, and savagely angry at the desolation in his charge, he had once damned the collective eyes of his 'intelligent local board' for a set of haramzadas. Which act of 'brutal and tyrannous oppression' won him a Reprimand Royal from the Bengal Government; but in the anecdote as amended for Northern consumption we find no record of this. Hence we are forced to conclude that Mrs. Hauksbee edited his reminiscences before ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... has the dog come to be regarded as a "noble" animal? The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward you can never get her ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... lash of a whip back into striking readiness ... a brutal nose broken askew, a blaster burn puckering across cheek to misshapen ear ... that, evil, gloating grin of anticipation. Flick, flick, the slight dance of the lash in a master's hand as those thick fingers tightened about the stock of the whip. In a moment it would whirl ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... men, whose only thought was of the brutal sport to come, was Hade, with Dwyer standing at ease at his shoulder,— Hade, white, and visibly in deep anxiety, hiding his pale face beneath a cloth travelling-cap, and with his chin muffled in a woollen scarf. He had dared to ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... to remove pig iron from the storehouse without giving a receipt for it. Ambassador McCormick secured our immediate release, and we returned to the States. M'sieu' has no idea of the power of these Russian officers. The murder of my assistant was of the most brutal character. Kozoubsky came to my office and demanded the iron, but having secured it, refused to sign the receipt which McDonald presented to him. McDonald said: 'You shall not remove the iron if you do not sign the receipt.' As he spoke the words the General drew ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... Kindar placing his arm around her, whispered: "By remaining here, adored Camilla, for my sake—in declaring to your hated husband that you will leave Berlin on no account—that your honor demands that you should prove to him in the face of his brutal commands, that these are no commands for you—and that you will follow your own will and inclination. Therefore you ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... of our sea life. Things, we agreed, might have been worse, though we got many a kick and rope's ending, not only from the boatswain, but from others among the more brutal ...
— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston
... the regicides were executed at this spot in Charles II.'s reign, within sight of the place where they had murdered their King. These men, according to the brutal temper of the times, were cut down when half hanged and disembowelled before a great concourse of people. Pepys mentions going to the executions as to a show. Later the pillory stood here in which, among others, Titus Oates suffered. But, besides these dismal reminiscences, ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... after his meaning. 'Hardly that. Let it stand. He 's only one with the world: but he shares the criminal infamy for crushing hope out of its frailest victims. They're that—no sentiment. What a world, too, look behind it!—brutal because brutish. The world may go hang: we expect more of your gentleman. To hear of Nesta down there, and doubt that she was about good work; and come complaining! He had the privilege of speaking to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... twenty years ago has, I am glad to say, entirely disappeared. She was not a success. She screwed her hair into sausages and rolled them around her ears. She wore a straw hat tilted at an absurd angle over her nose. She snarled. Her skin was coarse, her hands brutal, and she took no care with herself. But the younger generation came along, the flapper—and behold, a change! The factory girl or work-girl of fourteen or fifteen would surprise the ladies of the old school. She is neat. She knows enough about things to take care of herself, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... that night's events became more and more accelerated, Wilbur could not but notice the change in Moran. It was very evident that the old Norse fighting blood of her was all astir; brutal, merciless, savage beyond all control. A sort of obsession seized upon her at the near approach of battle, a frenzy of action that was checked by nothing—that was insensible to all restraint. At times it was impossible for him to make her hear him, or when ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... sufficient to produce noble works of art, has been already proved. Nor can it be doubted, that there is latent feeling, and taste enough, among the people, to appreciate them, if it were called forth by cultivation. It is only a brutal and sluggish nation, who cannot be made to feel, as well as think. The cultivation necessary, however, is not that which consists in forcing the whole body of the people to become conceited smatterers; ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... gallantry which formed a strong ally to religion in bringing out the better sentiments of humanity. At a time when force was greater than law, when the weak and defenceless were at the mercy of the powerful, when women were never safe from the attacks of the brutal, a body of men who were sworn to redress wrongs, to succor the oppressed, and to protect women and children, could not fail to be highly beneficial and to win the reverence of mankind. To be a good knight was to be the salt of the earth. The church gave easy absolution to the champion of the ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... that man be! (thought I to myself) What a total want of delicate refinement must he have, who can thus shock our senses by such a brutal noise! He must I am certain be capable of every bad action! There is no crime too black for such a Character!" Thus reasoned I within myself, and doubtless such were the reflections ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... hostile to the Protestant population. In face of their undoubted provocations, an equally narrow and irrational Protestant feeling was aroused. Late in 1856 this latent bitterness was roused to fury by a brutal attack by some Irish Catholics upon their fellow-labourers at Gourley's Shanty, along the line of railway construction. So savage was the fighting that the military were called out to restore order, which was not done without {133} bloodshed. Howe ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... the air with clouds of stupefying incense smoke. Surgeons and dentists allow us fleeting glimpses of bright steel instruments, very strangely shaped. It is contrived that we see them in a cold, clear light, the light of scientific relentlessness. There is a suggestion of torture, not brutal but exquisitely refined, of perfected pain, achieved by the stimulation of recondite nerves of very delicate sensibility. Lawyers wear archaic robes and use a strange language in their mysteries, conveying to us a belief that ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... not to say brutal on the part of Knox and his friends; but the Earl of Murray (as Lord James Stewart soon after became) and Maitland, confident now in the security of Protestantism, were not disposed to subordinate polities to zealotry. They were ready for a degree of toleration. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... protest against, and, as far as might be, to root out? Would our courts feel themselves debarred from interfering to rescue a daughter from a parent who wished to make merchandise of her purity, or a wife from a husband who was brutal to her, by the plea that parental authority and marriage were of Divine ordinance? Would a police-justice discharge a drunkard who pleaded the patriarchal precedent of Noah? or would he not rather give him another month in the House of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... acute, and not a word of that Bad Boy's brutal intentions was lost on me. I shrunk among my feathers and shivered with despair; but when I heard the voice of Little Miss I ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... either singly or in groups, but their faces were so insolent, and their looks so derisive, that the knight could easily guess that they would not show him the way, and even if they were to make a reply to his question, it would be a brutal or ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Sheridan. The treatment of women by the police is traditional. The 'unfortunate'—unhappy creatures!—are their pet aversion; and once in their clutches, receive no mercy. The 'Charley' of old was quite as brutal as the modern Hercules of the glazed hat, and the three adventurers showed an amount of zeal worthy of a nobler cause, in rescuing the drunken Lais from his grasp. On one occasion they seem to have hit on a 'deserving case;' a slight skirmish with the watch ended ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... was not brutal hazing, but merely the light form of the sport known as "running" the ...
— Dave Darrin's First Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... moment, confused and half-blinded. The first thing he saw was a drop of blood stealing down Gibbie's forehead. He was shocked at what he had done. In truth he had been frightfully provoked, but it was not for a clergyman so to avenge an insult, and as mere chastisement it was brutal. What would Mrs. Sclater say to it? The rascal was sure to make his complaint to her! And there too was his friend, the herd-lad, in ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... brutal directness about this verdict upon a rival historian which we shall probably persist in calling "Saxon"; but it is no worse than the criticisms of Matthew Arnold's essay on "The Celtic Spirit" made to-day by university ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... the church when Benedict began his labors, was no less than that of reducing a demoralized and brutal society to law and order. Chaos reigned, selfishness and lust ruled the hearts of Rome's conquerors. The West was desolated by barbarians; the East dismembered and worn out by theological controversy. ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... spring, stood on his feet, and was instantly wide awake. Looking angrily at the brutal intruder with his one eye, he said in a voice quivering with suppressed anger: "I'm not working for you by the day, but by the job, and if I sleep, I do it at my own loss, not yours. Besides, I don't remember that I ever drank the pledge ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... as we shall presently show. On the moral side the heroes of the epic profess great belief in the power and awfulness of this god Duty. And so far as go rules of chivalry, they are theoretically moral. Practically they are savage, and their religion does not interfere with their brutal barbarity. The tendency to cite divine instances of sin as excuse for committing it is, however, rebuked: "One should neither practice nor blame the (wrong) acts of gods and seers," ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... his faults, his habits. He thought of his deep reserve, and of the intense emotion he sometimes felt when he was quite alone and composing. Sometimes he felt like a great fire then. Sometimes he felt brutal, almost savage, decisive in a sense that was surely cruel. Did she suspect all that? Did she love all that without consciously suspecting it? Sometimes, when he had been working very hard, overworking perhaps, he felt inclined to do ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... pleasure; formed indeed for, and highly susceptible of enjoyment and rapture; but that enjoyment, alas! almost wholly at the mercy of the caprice, malevolence, stupidity, or wickedness of an animal at all times comparatively unfeeling, and often brutal. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Whillaloo! Fancy HEALY the hot Politely approving of "BALFOUR the Brutal"! How pleasant to picture the Pig at full trot, Without that "hard riding" some fancy must suit all! Too good to be true? That time only can show. 'Tis something that Piggy should promise ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... it is true. Besides, servants do sometimes steal. And little foreign blood of the oppressed nationalities has truth in it, or honesty. Why should it? Why should the subjugated Irish, any more than the Southern slaves, beaten down for centuries by brutal strength, seeking to exterminate their religion and their speech, to terrify them out of intelligence and independence, to crush them into permanent poverty and ignorance,—why should they tell the truth or respect property? Falsehood and theft are that cunning which is the natural ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... in the Voreux pit. He was brutal and overbearing with the workmen, but humble in the presence of his superiors. Though it was well known that he was the lover of La Pierronne, he was friendly with her husband, and got information from him regarding the progress of the strike. On the day of the accident in ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... a soldier, but a small landowner and cultivator, very much what we should call a squireen. He was normally much more concerned about his crops, his cattle and pigs, than about his lord's affairs and his lord's quarrels. He was ignorant, often rather brutal, and turbulent, very ready for a quarrel with his neighbour, but with no taste for national wars, and the prolonged absence from his home which they might involve, unless indeed there was a reasonable prospect of plunder. Indeed, he was a very matter-of-fact person, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... York and the Pentagon, rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan's terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... his unhappy victims must have been the ironical name of "Friend Haskall." The mother and child were now separated. The boy was levied to a Virginian named Freeland, who bore the military title of Major, and carried on the plebeian business of a publican. This man was of an extremely brutal disposition, and treated his slaves with most refined cruelty. His favourite punishment, which he facetiously called "Virginian play," was to flog his slaves severely, and then expose their lacerated flesh to the smoke of tobacco stems, causing the most exquisite agony. William ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... beat, as has been hinted, more quickly. At the evening meal he was early in the room, on the chance that she might appear before the others. But she did not descend, and the meal proved unpleasant beyond the ordinary, James drinking more than was good for him, and taking a tone, brutal and churlish, if not positively hostile. For some reason, the Colonel reflected, the young man was beginning to lose his fears. Why? What was he planning? How was he, even if he had no respect for his oath, thinking to evade that dilemma ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... addressing her son, "is the way your mother has been treated all along; yes, by a brutal and coarse-minded husband, who pays no attention to anything but his own gross and selfish enjoyments; but, thank God, I have now some person to ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... pious child had heard enough of the words of these men, as she walked behind them, to fill her with horror. She had never before heard an oath, but there came back from these men coarse, brutal tones and words of blasphemy that froze her blood with horror. And Moses was going with them! She felt somehow as if they must be a company of fiends bearing ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... spirits of the household. At eleven o'clock, after tea, after dinner—three times a day—was the inexorable programme repeated, in spite of prayers and protestations. Mrs Chester's theory was that it was brutal to torture the child, and that if she were to be lame, for pity's sake let her be lame in peace. Rhoda suffered agonies of remorse and passionate revolts against the mystery of pain, but the nurse and her assistant never showed a sign of wavering. As a rule, Evie made a gallant attempt ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... your approach. Alas! The only flower known to have wings is the butterfly; all others stand helpless before the destroyer. If they shriek in their death agony their cry never reaches our hardened ears. We are ever brutal to those who love and serve us in silence, but the time may come when, for our cruelty, we shall be deserted by these best friends of ours. Have you not noticed that the wild flowers are becoming scarcer every year? It may be that their wise men have told them to depart till man becomes ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... vehement—instructed him in much that he had desired to learn. It was made clear to him that a long combat of wills and desires had been in progress between the crafty courtesan and the half wily and the half brutal soldier, with a baffling of Heliodora's devices which would never have come to his knowledge but for this outbreak of rage. How far the woman had gone in her lures, whether she had played her last stake, he could not ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... like one in a dream. When his struggles against his enemy were fiercest, he kept saying over her name to himself, as though she could help him. Yet always it was Sally's hand he held in the darkest hours, in his brutal moments; for in this fight between appetite and will there are moments when only the animal seems to exist, and the soul disappears in the glare and gloom of the primal emotions. Nancy he called his "lucky sixpence," but he ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... (whom I had seen so lately in the part of butler) stood crying upon Tom; on the top step, tossed in the hurly-burly, Tom was shouting to the prince. Yet a while the pack swayed about the bar, vociferous. Then came a brutal impulse; the mob reeled, and returned and was rejected; the stair showed a stream of heads; and there shot into view, through the disbanding ranks, three men violently dragging in their midst a fourth. By his hair and his hands, his head forced as low as his knees, his face concealed, he was wrenched ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... terrible, overpowering sensation of murderous anger grip at my heart, as it had already done once before in an altercation with this brutal ruffian, the blood again mounted to my head like fire, and, reckless of all consequences, I was in the very act of pulling myself together for a spring at his throat, when I felt a small hand—the touch of which thrilled me, even at that moment—laid upon my arm, and Miss Onslow's ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... burgher bonds of the Middle Age, for good or for evil, have perished by natural and necessary decay; and nothing has taken their place. Each man is growing up more and more isolated; tempted to selfishness, to brutal independence; tempted to regard his fellow-men as rivals in the struggle for existence; tempted, in short, to incivism, to a loss of the very soul and marrow of civilization, while the outward results of it remain; and therefore tempted to a loss of patriotism, of the belief ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... are free men," Ord whispered. "Vulgar, opinionated, brutal—but free! You are still better than any breed who ...
— Remember the Alamo • R. R. Fehrenbach
... them on deck has always been a wonder to me, but he did it. He was a brutal sort o' a man at the best o' times, an' he carried on so much that I s'pose they thought even the sarpint couldn't be worse. Anyway, up they came, an' we all stood in a crowd watching the sarpint as it ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... on the 22d of February had surpassed expectations; and the troubles of "bleeding Kansas," which seemed to culminate in the assault upon Sumner and the destruction of Lawrence, had kept the free States in a condition of profound excitement. Such brutal outrages, it was thought, would certainly discredit any party that approved the policy leading to them. Sustained by this hope the convention, in its platform, arraigned the Administration for the conduct of affairs; demanded the immediate admission of ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... "Great, ugly, brutal boxers! Prize-fighters! Awful pictures, Ruth! I suppose next he will make a collection of the photographs of ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... is generally the most credulous."—"Very true," said my countess; "for such an one as would do no harm to others, seldom suspects any from others; and her lot is very unequally cast; admired for that very innocence which tempts some brutal ravager to ruin it."—"Yet, what is that virtue," said the dean, "which ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... heard him croak with maudlin accent. "Pink Angel, begorrah! What doin' 'ere, eh? Whoop! Go back to sky, Angel!" and lifting a brutal foot he kicked the image into the street. Then with a shriek of laughter he staggered away ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown
... too sure of that, Helen," returned Wingfold. "There are very decent husbands as husbands go, who are yet unjust, exacting, selfish. The most devoted of wives are sometimes afraid of the men they yet consider the very models of husbands. It is a brutal shame that a woman should feel afraid, or even uneasy, instead of safe, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... greed; a bitter irony would be distilled from the contrast of his own modest station in life and the huge value of the lucid crystals and carbons under his hands. His hands—ah, the realist would angrily see some brutal pathos or unconscious naughtiness in the crook of the old mottled fingers. How that widening parting in the gray head would be gloated upon. It would be very easy to do, and it would be (if we ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... "blindness of preconceived opinion" the simple belief of creation. And so on in other cases. But I beg pardon for troubling you. I am heartily sorry that in your unselfish endeavours to spread what you believe to be truth, you should have incurred so brutal an attack. (98/6. The "Edinburgh" Reviewer, referring to Huxley's Royal Institution Lecture given February 10th, 1860, "On Species and Races and their Origin," says (page 521), "We gazed with amazement at the audacity of the dispenser of the hour's intellectual amusement, who, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... time, in the hope that their irate masters would relent. But this, instead of helping, hindered and injured the cause of the slaves. Angered at the conduct of their slaves, the master element, having their representatives on the floor of the Assembly, secured the passage of the following brutal law:— ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... and split the other's shoulder, And drove them with their brutal yells to seek If there might be chirurgeons who could solder The wounds they richly merited, and shriek Their baffled rage and pain; while waxing colder As he turn'd o'er each pale and gory cheek, Don Juan raised his little captive from The heap a moment ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... think you would be full of good thoughts after you had been bitten by the watch-dog and fired at by the man of the house, and earned nothing by your labour except a bad cold and the prospect of hydrophobia? There is nothing more brutal than the way in which society treats the burglar, and so long as society refuses to put him in the way of earning an easier and less dangerous living, he cannot be blamed if he continues ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... no reply. The man's cynicism was sufficiently brutal to make it impossible to reply without heat. And Steve had no desire to quarrel with his chief lieutenant. Besides, he was deeply attached to the rascal. So they swung up the last sharp incline in the voiceless manner in which so much of their ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... purple mantles, which were meant both to adorn the combatant, and to conceal the blood of the wounded; to fall well and decorously being an incentive the more to the most heroic valour. The conduct of the Spartans in battle denotes a high and noble disposition, which rejected all the extremes of brutal rage. The pursuit of the enemy ceased when the victory was completed; and after the signal for retreat had been given, all hostilities ceased. The spoiling of arms, at least during the battle, was also interdicted; and the consecration of the spoils of slain enemies to the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Landport cobbler had inculcated by strap and tongue from his earliest years. Of one fact about professed atheists I am convinced; they may be—they usually are—fools, void of subtlety, revilers of holy institutions, brutal speakers, and mischievous knaves, but they lie with difficulty. If it were not so, if they had the faintest grasp of the idea of compromise, they would simply be liberal churchmen. And, moreover, this memory poisoned his regard for Miss Haysman. For she now so evidently ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... in 1975, Mozambique was one of the world's poorest countries. Socialist mismanagement and a brutal civil war from 1977-92 exacerbated the situation. In 1987, the government embarked on a series of macroeconomic reforms designed to stabilize the economy. These steps, combined with donor assistance and with political stability since the multi-party elections in 1994, have led ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... were unprincipled men, who undertook the enterprise solely as a speculation. They had as little regard for the rights of the negro as the most brutal slaveholder had ever shown. Very few of them paid the negroes for their labor, except in furnishing them small quantities of goods, for which they charged five times the value. One man, who realized a profit of eighty thousand dollars, never paid his negroes a penny. Some of the lessees made ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... discovered," exclaimed the steersman of the foremost boat, with a brutal oath. "Spring to your oars, lads! We must gain a footing before the guard turns out or it's all up with us. ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... struck him on the shoulder, with a crash that vibrated through the hall; but Odysseus heeded it not, but passed on without a pause or a stumble to his place on the threshold. When he was seated he complained loudly of the brutal conduct of Antinous. "Accursed be he," he said, "who lifts up his hand against a helpless beggar; may Heaven requite ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... Further, the Philosopher says (Ethic. vii, 6) temperance and intemperance are about human desires and pleasures. Now certain desires and pleasures are more shameful than human desires and pleasures; such are brutal pleasures and those caused by disease as the Philosopher states (Ethic. vii, 5). Therefore intemperance is not the most ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... water and milk at home, at the taverns and at social gatherings he often succumbed to potations which left him in happy drunken forgetfulness of daily hardships. House-raisings and weddings often became orgies marked by quarreling and fighting and terminating in brutal and bloody brawls. Foreign visitors to the back country were led to comment frequently on the number of men who had lost an eye or an ear, or had been otherwise maimed ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... not have seen among our English-speaking people; both the jauntiness of the first phase and the petulance of the second. To hold the balance straight, however, I may remark that if the men were all fearful "cads," they were, with their cigarettes and their inconsistency, less heavy, less brutal, than our dear English-speaking cad; just as the bright little cafe where a robust mater- familias, doling out sugar and darning a stocking, sat in her place under the mirror behind the comptoir, was a much more civilized spot than a British ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... upon his brutal design, had as yet not noticed us. He was within a pace of Ajor when Ace and I dashed between them, and I, leaning down to the left, swept my little barbarian into the hollow of an arm and up on the withers of my glorious Ace. We had snatched ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in this matter of interpretation of the scriptural injunction. In the matter of State rights, Southern election laws, and mob violence, our Government has turned the other cheek also. What has been the result? Why the tyrants continue to become more and more brutal, until they are not only running black men out, but they have recently, at the muzzle of the shot gun, forced their own kith and kin, men to the manor born, to leave the States. I have no hesitancy in proclaiming that this brutality ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... at Charlottesville, unlovely and lovely, ghastly and vital, brutal, spiritual, a hell of pain and weakness, another region of endeavour and helpfulness, a place of horror, and also of strange smiling, even of faint laughter, a country as chill as death and as warm as love—the hospital at Charlottesville saw the weary morning grow to ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Coliseum in ancient Rome centuries ago, a group of Christians waited in the arena to be devoured by the lions, and eighty thousand spectators watched their vigil. Those Christians were plain folk—"not many mighty, not many noble"—and every one of them could have escaped that brutal fate if he had been willing to burn a little incense to the Emperor. Turn now to ourselves, eighteen hundred years afterwards. We have had a long time to outgrow the character and fidelity of those first Christians; do we think that we have done so? As we imagine ourselves ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... a profane and brutal fellow. And how my heart bled for some poor Islanders whom he had on board! They knew not a word of English, and no one in the vessel knew a sound of their language. They were made to work, and to understand what was expected of them, only by hard knocks and blows, being pushed ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... have no salutations from such as you." Young Egmont, who had been captured, fighting bravely at the head of coward troops, by Julian Romero, who nine years before had stood on his father's scaffold, regarded this brutal scene with haughty indignation. This behaviour had more effect upon Roda than the suppleness of Capres. "I am sorry for your misfortune, Count," said the councillor, without however rising from his chair; "such is the lot of those who take ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... quite believe it. He was living at the rate of ten thousand a year. Well, we dined as we were, Carville insisting that as I was up from the country they should bar evening dress for one night. This was rather pretty in its way, and I found he was a curious mixture of prettiness and downright brutal ruthlessness. I found a man I knew slightly among the guests, a chap named Effon, son of the soap man, and he told me that Carville was one of the most extraordinary men he had ever met, that women would almost come to him at the crooking of his ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... concourse of students who ultimately flocked to Paris, exceeded the number of the inhabitants, and there was much difficulty in finding the means of lodging them; how great must have been the anxiety for learning, as the masters were exceedingly brutal and imparted their knowledge to the pupil by the force of blows, which at length deterred many students from placing themselves under the charge of such preceptors. This extraordinary desire for obtaining education appears to have been almost a sudden impulse, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... recklessly through the waters of that glancing and startled river, which, until within the last few weeks, no stranger keel had ever furrowed! Whose work are we engaged in, when we burst thus with hideous violence and brutal energy into these darkest and most mysterious recesses of the traditions of the past? I wish I could answer that question in a manner satisfactory to myself. At the same time, there is certainly not much to regret ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... the tired ones, the brutal-faced, bitter-eyed ones, the beaten ones—we walk up and down the cold street, peering at the cheerless buildings. Life takes a long time to pass. But without changing our bitter, brutal faces we bow this afternoon, madam, to ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... thirty-six of them women. Even as late as the period of the War of 1812—a war which did not affect Charleston save in the way of destroying her shipping and causing poverty and distress—a case of brutal piracy is recorded. The daughter of Aaron Burr, Theodosia by name, was married to Governor Joseph Alston. After her father's trial for high treason, when he was disgraced and broken, she tried to comfort him, for the two were peculiarly devoted. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... smiled winningly. "Ah, Mrs Marriott, do not make me vain. Yes, we are going to leave you. In fact we should have all gone ashore this evening, but my unfortunate friend, Mr Capel, is not yet fully recovered from the brutal attack to ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... the age. Whether the world does or does not become more wicked as years go on, is a question which probably has disturbed the minds of thinkers since the world began to think. That men have become less cruel, less violent, less selfish, less brutal, there can be no doubt;—but have they become less honest? If so, can a world, retrograding from day to day in honesty, be considered to be in a state of progress? We know the opinion on this subject of our philosopher Mr. Carlyle. If he be right, we are all going straight ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of police surveillance (such as I have had), or one brutal rejection from an inn-door, change your views upon the subject like a course of lectures. As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air; but once get under the wheels, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 22, Revised Version) that he will win no reward. That is the true spirit of the mercenary, who cannot conceive of a man taking trouble unless he gets paid for it somehow, and will fight and kill, all in the way of business, without the least spark of enthusiasm for a cause. Hard stolidity and brutal carelessness shielded him from any 'womanish' tenderness. Absalom was dead, and he had killed him. It was a good thing, for it had put out the fire of revolt. No doubt David would be sorry, but that mattered little. Only it was better for the message ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the rude manual toil of the tribe. Among the Iroquois, however, women were not wholly despised; sometimes, if of forceful character, they had great influence in the councils of the tribe. Among the Hurons, on the other hand, women were treated with contempt or brutal indifference. The Huron woman, worn out with arduous toil, rapidly lost the brightness of her youth. At an age when the women of a higher culture are still at the height of their charm and attractiveness the woman of the Hurons had degenerated ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... to examine the parties. The examination was made, and the report declared that both parties were duly and fully qualified for performing the conjugal act. In order to invalidate this report the lady affirmed that if she was not a virgin it was in consequence of the brutal efforts of one whose impotency rendered him callous as to the means he employed to satisfy himself. The Chevalier de Langey, much incensed at this imputation, demanded the Congress; the judge granted the petition, the wife appealed ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... the Rencontres des Muses de France et d'ltalie. As a sonneteer he showed much grace and sweetness, and English poets borrowed freely from him. In his old age Desportes acknowledged his ecclesiastical preferment by a translation of the Psalms remembered chiefly for the brutal mot of Malherbe: "Votre potage vaut mieux que vos psaumes." Desportes died on the 5th of October 1606. He had published in 1573 an edition of his works including Diane, Les Amours d'Hippolyte, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... time; if you wish to tell anything that is weighing on your mind, you would not be understood, or you would be laughed at: they talk with you, not for the sake of sharing a thought, but to get something funny out of you. Yes, and so it has gone—in a brutal, beastly way, and you are always conscious that you belong to the rank and file; they always make you feel that. Hence you can't realize what an enjoyment it is to talk a coeur ouvert to such a man ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... a little brutal but it is common sense," he declared. "In times of great stress, too, one becomes primitive, and the primitive instinct is for the strong to save himself. I am not ashamed to confess," he concluded, "that I have secured an ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... beaker full of the warm South." "I have tropical blood in my veins," wrote Hunt, deprecating "the criticism of a Northern climate" as applied to his "Story of Rimini." Keats' death may be said to have come to him from Scotland, not only by reason of the brutal attacks in Blackwood's—to which there is some reason for believing that Scott was privy—but because the hardships and exposure of his Scotch tour laid the foundation of his fatal malady. He brought back no literary spoils of consequence from the North, and the description of the journey in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... lengthen. Ki Ki, after sitting a little longer, soared up into the sky to reflect upon further measures. By destroying the thrush he knew that the war must continue, for Choo Hoo would never believe but that it had been done by Kapchack's order, and could not forgive so brutal an affront to an ambassador charged with a solemn treaty. Choo Hoo must then accept his (Ki Ki's) offer; the weasel, it was true, had been before him, but he should be able to destroy the weasel's influence by revealing his treachery to Kapchack, and how he ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... before I visited the slave states in the West, appalling stories of the cruelty and barbarity of masters to slaves. In effect I saw there instances of cruel and brutal masters. But I was astonished to find that the slaves in general had the most cheerful countenances, and were apparently the happiest people that I saw. They appeared to me to be as well fed and clothed, as the labouring poor at the North. Here I was ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Chris, and escort him home. Freddie, whose idea had been a tete-a-tete involving a brotherly lecture on impetuosity, had demurred but had given way in the end; and they had set out to walk to Victoria together. Their way had lain through Daubeny Street, and they turned the corner just as the brutal onslaught on the innocent Henry had occurred. Bill's shrieks, which were of an appalling timbre, brought them to ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... are two extremes in debates and in public discussions which should be equally avoided: The first is that brutal frankness which forgets to be courteous; and the second is that extreme of hypocritical courtesy which forgets to be candid. What is needed everywhere is the candor which is also courteous and the ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... the forests, and men may sleep in the woods of a night without being frozen to death, thousands of the convicts try to escape from the gold and salt mines. These poor folk prefer to run the risk of capture and the brutal punishment it involves, rather than remain longer in endless misery. Feeding on mushrooms and berries they plod their weary way back, amid perils of every kind, to their native homes, hundreds—it may ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... Adela Miranda; and though his love be of a coarse, brutal nature, it is strong and intense as that the noblest man ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... though the gift may have been. I wanted something that my friends might keep after my death, to reconcile them to my loss. It seems that I was mistaken. What I wanted is no longer done. Go on, then, with your brutal work. Take your negative, or whatever it is you call it,—dip it in sulphide, bromide, oxide, cowhide,—anything you like,—remove the eyes, correct the mouth, adjust the face, restore the lips, reanimate the necktie and reconstruct the waistcoat. Coat it with an ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... Breton land. Mighty ruler, make war upon the Frank, defend our country, and give us vengeance—vengeance for Karo my son, Karo, slain, decapitated by the Frankish barbarians, his beauteous head made into a balance-weight for their brutal sport." ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... support despotism are Germans; German, too, are the generals who have distinguished themselves by massacring the people; German are the officials who undertake to punish the laborers' strikes and the rebellion of their allies. The reactionary Slav is brutal, but he has the fine sensibility of a race in which many princes have become Nihilists. He raises the lash with facility, but then he repents and oftentimes weeps. I have seen Russian officials kill themselves rather than march against the people, or through remorse for slaughter ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... that ever-present terror of insolvency, and all the pains and perils attendant thereupon, tormented her by day and kept her awake at night. Every ring at the cottage gate set her heart beating, and conjured up the vision of some brutal sheriff's officer, such as she had read of in modern romance. She nursed her father with extreme tenderness. He was not confined to his room for any length of time, but was weak and ill throughout the bleak wintry months, with a racking cough and a touch of low fever, lying prostrate ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... practised with much pleasure, that graceful old English fashion of saluting every lady on the cheek at meeting, which (like the old Dutch fashion of asking young ladies out to feasts without their mothers) used to give such cause of brutal calumny and scandal to the coarse minds of Romish visitors from the Continent; and he had seen, too, fuming with jealous rage, more than one Bideford burgher, redolent of onions, profane in that way the velvet cheek of ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... please. This is the way I look at it: Dave was careless, and his father can give him a lecture on his carelessness. Nat was brutal, and it is up to you to take him in hand. If he were my son, I'd give him a good talking to—and maybe I'd thrash him," added ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer
... was a Cilician, of a senatorian family in Anazarbus, and a minister of the gospel. In the persecution of Dioclesian he fell into the hands of a judge, who, by his brutal behavior, resembled more a wild beast than a man. The president, seeing his constancy proof against the sharpest torments, hoped to overcome him by the long continuance of his martyrdom. He caused him to be brought before his tribunal everyday; sometimes he caressed him, at other ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... as 17 deg., to STATEN RIVER. From this place, what more of the land could be discerned, seemed to stretch westward:" the Pera then returned to Amboina. "In this discovery were found, every where, shallow water and barren coasts; islands altogether thinly peopled by divers cruel, poor, and brutal nations; and of very little use to the ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... a moment its elements: a jumble of foiled ambitions, brutal greed, plagiarists of '93, despots disguising themselves as ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... Greene and Jonson composed many fine physical and licentious dramas, pandering to the London groundlings, bloated wealth and accidental power; but Shakspere threw a spiritual radiance over their brutal, sordid phrases and elevated stage characters into the realm of romantic thought, pinioned with hope, love and truth. His sublime imagination soared away into the flowery uplands of Divinity, and plucked from the azure wings of angels brilliant feathers ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... of temperance the Greeks estimated so highly, that the supreme difficulties of modern civilization lie. We see these difficulties again in relation to the extension of law. It is desirable and inevitable that the sphere of law should be extended, and that the disputes which are still decided by brutal and unreasoning force should be decided by humane and reasoning force, that is to say, by law. But, side by side with this extension of law, it is necessary to wage a constant war with the law-making tendency, to cherish an undying ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... activity. Even when they pursue truth, they desire as much as possible of what we may call human scenery along the road they follow. They dwell in the heart of life; the blood sounding in their ears, their eyes laying hold of what delights them with a brutal avidity that makes them blind to all besides, their interest riveted on people, living, loving, talking, tangible people. To a man of this description, the sphere of argument seems very pale and ghostly. By a strong ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dined off two russet apples, and drew up his belt to stop the ache—for the Telephone Boy was growing very fast indeed, in spite of his poverty, and couldn't seem to stop growing somehow, although he said to himself every day that it was perfectly brutal of him to keep on that way when his mother had so many mouths ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... he knew now it would be a brutal, utterly merciless fight—slaughter, extermination without any ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... "It's positively brutal of Mademoiselle!" said Raymonde reflectively. "If it had been Gibbie, now, it would have been no surprise to me. Don't cry, you little silly! You look like a weeping cherub on a monument! Shovel your clothes back again into your drawers, and put a tidy ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... and Plants," 1st Edit., ii. 431. "Did He cause the frame and mental qualities of the dog to vary in order that a breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity, with jaws fitted to pin down the bull for man's brutal sport?" ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... with me I want Mr. Denham to come too. I have various reasons for wanting him to come. One is that he has nowhere else to go where he will have half as good a time as he will here and another is that if he goes anywhere else I won't have half as good a time as if he comes here. Pray excuse my brutal candor, but I am only a woman; brutal candor and womanly weakness always have gone about encouraging one another, you know. I cannot see any good reason for Mr. Denham's not coming except that he declines my invitation. It is very silly in him, and I regard it as no reason at all. ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... search and labour would be baffled; then, hour after hour he designed guilty designs against me, but by the mercy of Almighty Allah I have ever escaped all carnal soil of that foul monster. This evening, in despair of my safety, I was rejecting his brutal advances when he attempted to take my life and in the attempt he was slain by thy valorous hand. This is then my story which I have told thee." My father reassured the Princess, saying, "O my lady, let thy heart be at ease; at day-break I will take thee ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... know whether that's flattering or not.' He began to walk up and down the room again cogitating. 'I don't mind trying,' he said at last, 'in a very gingerly way. I can't, of course, undertake to be brutal. It would be impossible for any one to treat her roughly. But there might be ways of doing it. There's time to think over the best way of doing it. Supposing, however, she took offence? Supposing, after Sunday next, she never speaks ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cold, like the ancient monks; an austere, stern, bitter, reproachful man, who affected to despise all pleasures, like his own disciple Diogenes, who lived in a tub, and carried on a war between the mind and body—brutal, scornful, proud. To men who maintained that science was impossible, philosophy is not much indebted, although they were disciples of Socrates. Euclid merely gave a new edition of the Eleatic doctrines, and Phaedo speculated on the oneness of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... as it was at first. But one day Edwin Bentham was brutal. All boys are thus; besides, being a French Hill king now, he began to think a great deal of himself and to forget all he owed to his wife. On this day, Wharton heard of it, and waylaid Grace Bentham, and talked wildly. This made her very happy, though she would not ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... of middle age with a brutal, heavy-jawed face and a low, receding forehead. His lips, a little apart, showed yellow, irregular teeth, of which two at the front of the lower jaw had been broken, and the scar of an old wound, running from the corner of his left eye down to the centre of his ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... instant that he had been brutal and ill-bred. Claudia judged him so, and whatever Claudia said must needs be just But when she had swept by him to the waiting brougham and the fashionable escort had followed her, he stood in a choking rage, and felt like Cain. A thick drizzle ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... two figures in the center of the room, from whom had proceded the noises he had heard. One was that of a girl cowering on her knees and moaning in a voice from which reason had clearly departed. A big, unconscionably brutal-looking man stood over her, holding her down by her hair, which, braided in a single plait, was wound about his hand. He had just thrown the stick upon the floor with which he had been beating her, and was drawing from the ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... fluid would immediately be coughed up from his lungs. Food would pass through the wound of the stomach. The man was greatly prostrated, but after eleven months of convalescence he recovered. In the brutal capture of Fort Griswold, Connecticut, in 1781, in which the brave occupants were massacred by the British, Lieutenant Avery had an eye shot out, his skull fractured, the brain-substance scattering on the ground, was stabbed in the side, and left for dead; yet he ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... that I have seen the world over—in Germany, in the Crown Prince's coterie (don't I know them?), in South Africa, in West Africa, in China. He has every mark, the same military style, the same arrogant self-assertion, the same brutal ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... made any of the natives meet them with a show of peace, and this they repaid by brutal deeds. One of their visitors was an Indian queen—as they called her—the woman chief of a tribe of the South. When the Spaniards came near her domain she hastened to welcome them, hoping by this means to make friends of her dreaded visitors. Borne in a litter by four of her subjects, the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... tied up like that could be thrown down, thrown anywhere, left to stand up, if you like, and he'd be literally helpless, even if, as the doctor said, he had the use of his hands. He'd be unconscious almost at once—dead very soon afterwards. Murder?—I should think so!—and a particularly brutal and determined one. Bent!—whoever killed that poor old fellow was a man of great strength and of—knowledge! Knowledge, mind you!—he knew the trick. You haven't any doubtful character in Highmarket who has ever lived in ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... heard the commendation of Philip of Spain—he knew that the most eloquent orator of the Church, Muretus, had congratulated the pope upon this signal victory of the truth. He knew that medals were stamped in commemoration of the brutal massacre, and he remembered that the same spirit that had struck at the gray head of Coligny had also murdered Egmont and Home in the Netherlands; had calmly gazed in the person of Philip upon De Sezo perishing in the fire, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis |
