Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Lawlessness   /lˈɔləsnəs/   Listen
Lawlessness

noun
1.
A state of lawlessness and disorder (usually resulting from a failure of government).  Synonym: anarchy.
2.
Illegality as a consequence of unlawful acts; defiance of the law.  Synonym: outlawry.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Lawlessness" Quotes from Famous Books



... the ground for hope that if we leave things alone the new generation will be better than their elders? To me it seems that the truth is rather the other way. The lawlessness of our lads the increased license of our girls, the general shiftlessness from the home-making point of view of the product of our factories and schools are far from reassuring. Our young people have never learned ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... little inclined to engage in conversation with the man, for the fellow's appearance was far from favorable. The sneaking glance of his eyes, his unshaved face and uncouth dress, half civilized, half barbarian, gave him an air of lawlessness, though except for these things he might ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden

... surge up in his breast, and he started on again. Then he stopped once more. Though long retired from faithful service on the bench, he had been all his life a serious exponent of the law, and what he went to tell meant lawlessness that no one could hope to check. He knew the temper of the people; their long suffering was at an end, and they would go over at last and wipe out the Cross-Roads. It depended on him. If the mob could be held off over to-day, if men's minds could cool over night, the ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington

... entirely under control that the influence of Satyagraha was profoundly for its good and that where violence did break out there were local causes that directly contributed to it. At the same time I admit that even the violence that did take place on the part of the people and the spirit of lawlessness that was undoubtedly shown in some parts should have remained under check. I have made ample acknowledgment of the miscalculation I then made. But all the painful experience that I then gained did not any way shake my belief in Satyagraha or in the possibility of that matchless force being ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi

... they recognized it at once as a protest against the sluggishness and ignorance of the south. In the west they spoke of it as a revolt against the spirit of the east and in the east they called it a reaction against the lawlessness of the west. But everywhere they hailed it as a new sign of the glorious ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... have done his. We were together in the old days at St. Andrew's, and he was a good Cavalier then; he is a man of family and of honor. Pardon me if I think he has chosen the wrong side, and is doing vast evil in stirring up ignorant people against the government and breeding lawlessness. But there, I desire not to debate, and none grieves more over the divisions of the day than an unhappy soldier who is sent to settle them by the rough medicine of the sword. Henry Pollock has chosen his side and taken his ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren

... discreet attendance upon her, as if she had been the daughter of a Spanish Hidalgo, never to be approached except in the presence of her duenna. Poor Mistress Margery, finding her old fears removed, was overpowered with new ones. She had no lawlessness or hoyden manners to contend with, but instead a haughtiness so high and demands so great that her powers could scarcely satisfy the one or her spirit ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... I should think that a colony of black sheep whose diet had been wild oats would account for all the lawlessness ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton

... and they were promptly taken to the guard house. This morning they were given the choice of imprisonment or going to work at two dollars a day, and they promptly chose the latter. We are getting along very well in our work, and very little tendency to lawlessness, I am happy to say, ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... acquired formidable power, established citadels and states, governed by daring and sagacious leaders, and levied blackmail upon Christian countries for the protection of commerce. It was not until the vigorous campaign of Decatur that the backbone of this sanctioned lawlessness of the Barbary States was broken and safety upon the high seas ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann

... it does: not directly," answered Mrs. Denton. "But it helps them to establish their position and get a tighter hold upon the public. War does pay the newspaper in the long run. The daily newspaper lives on commotion, crime, lawlessness in general. If people no longer enjoyed reading about violence and bloodshed half their occupation, and that the most profitable half would be gone. It is the interest of the newspaper to keep alive the savage in human nature; and war affords the readiest means of doing this. You can't do much ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome

... floors—cotton that resettled eternally as soon as it was brushed away. The superintendent regarded me curiously, I thought penetratingly, and for the first time in my experience I feared detection. My dread was enhanced by the loneliness, the lawlessness of the place, the risk and boldness ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... parties, a wide field of candidates contested the municipal, legislative, and presidential elections held in March and May of 2005 in which General BOZIZE was affirmed as president. The government still does not fully control the countryside, where pockets of lawlessness persist. Unrest in neighboring nations, Chad, Sudan, and the DRC, continues to affect stability in the Central African ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... the day gang got the wounded man into bed. He revived sufficiently to say he had not seen the man that shot him, but he guessed he knew him all the same. Then he turned on his side, swore feebly at the lawlessness of the South, and gave up ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... that he is an advocate of lawlessness and disorder because he happens to be opposed to some of your pet schemes, does it, ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... began, for from no other man, I was confident, could have issued so sepulchral a plaint. It was unmusical, unbeautiful, unlively, and indescribably doleful. Yet the words showed that it should have ripped and crackled with high spirits and lawlessness, for the words ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... developments. Gamblers, suave, easy, ingratiating, foregathered and started the ball of high stakes rolling. And in their wake came all that class of carrion which is ever seeking something for nothing. But the final brand of lawlessness was set on the camp by the arrival of a number of jaded, painted women, who took up their abode in a disused shack sufficiently adjacent to Beasley's store to suit their purposes. It was all very painful, all very deplorable. Yet it was the perfectly natural ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... roving bands of nightly marauders bid defiance to the civil authorities, and threaten to drive out every man, white or black, who does not submit to their arbitrary dictation. To add to the general lawlessness of these communities, bad men of every description take advantage of the circumstances surrounding them, and perpetrate acts of violence, from personal or pecuniary motives, under ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.

... grotesque assembly revealed itself before to mortal eyes. The king had seen all kind of gnomes, goblins, and kobolds at his coronation; but they were quite rectilinear figures, compared with the insane lawlessness of form in which the Shadows rejoiced; and the wildest gambols of the former, were orderly dances of ceremony, beside the apparently aimless and wilful contortions of figure, and metamorphoses of shape, in which the latter indulged. They retained, however, all the time, to ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald

... continues to say, that though Mr. Antony continued to live a life of licentious lawlessness, that occasioned talk even in Rome, he was singularly successful ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... filibusters of that period, the most lawless class of men in an age of universal lawlessness, the refuse from the seaports of northern Europe, as cruel miscreants as ever blackened the ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk

... feelings; but the decree is signed according to the law of the Medes and Persians, and cannot be altered. The honor of the king depends upon the faithful execution of all his laws; and if in this one point thou failest and let the guilty one escape, thy subjects will laugh at thy timidity, and lawlessness ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones

... wild beasts they were intended to hold down. Their outbreaks were the blind outbreaks of mere ruffians. The victory of Corso over Dante and the wiser citizens was followed by a carnival of bloodshed, firing of houses, pillage and lawlessness which wrings from Dino curses as bitter ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... away all restrictions upon the activity of the United States in Central America. It specifically permitted the United States to "maintain such military police along the canal as may be necessary to protect it against lawlessness and disorder." By interpreting this clause as allowing complete fortification, the United States has made itself the guardian of the canal. In return for the release from former obligations which Great Britain thus allowed, the United States agreed that any canal constructed ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish

... organize within the borders of the Republic for an attack upon its peaceful neighbour. Such laxity was against the law of nations. As a result of Durham's spirited action, the military forces on both sides of the boundary-line worked in concert to put down such lawlessness. President Van Buren's attitude, however, cost him his ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan

... Mankato and wreaking summary justice upon the Indians. The situation became so serious pending the decision of the president that the governor was compelled to issue a proclamation calling upon all good citizens not to tarnish the fair name of the state by an act of lawlessness that the outside world would never forget, however great was the provocation. When the final order came to execute only thirty-eight there was great disappointment. Petitions were circulated in St. Paul and generally signed favoring the removal of ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore

... together in the revelries of the novel. To state the degree of excellence possible to a style as perverse as it is entertaining, to measure the wisdom of essential folly, is difficult; and yet it may be said that the strength of the novel is in its lawlessness, which leaves the author of genius free to introduce his creations just as they occur to him, and the author of talent free to range through all books and all time and reproduce brilliant sayings and odd characters,—which, with no other connecting ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... class. One of the most valuable portions of the history is the extended view which Mr. PRESCOTT has presented, at the opening of the work, of the character and civilization of the ancient inhabitants of Mexico. The Spaniards conquered no tribe of untutored savages, roaming, in the wild lawlessness of the aborigines of our section of the western continent, over the sunny plains and smiling fields of Anahuac: they found a people there who, centuries before the discovery of the western world by Columbus, possessed the arts of civilization, and had reached a point ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various

... government. If the educated and influential classes in a community either practice or connive at the systematic violation of laws that seem to them to cross their convenience, what can they expect when the lesson that convenience or a supposed class interest is a sufficient cause for lawlessness has been well learned by the ignorant classes? A community where law is the rule of conduct and where courts, not mobs, execute its penalties is the only attractive field for ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison

... passed their couches, and not dropping her voice even as she passed the place where the dead lay, but singing, as loud as she could, the most impudent drinking-song out of the taverns of the Spahis that ever celebrated wine, women, and war in the lawlessness ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... by a Jew named Kirsanoff, a religious dispute arose. The matter was of small importance, but it led to a scuffle by which a large crowd of idlers was attracted. The mob grew in numbers and in lawlessness, and having ejected the proprietor of the shop, they proceeded to despoil the place of its liquors. Inflamed by their copious libations, the rioters were ripe for any excess. At this moment there ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith

... ferment were grave; even in England Chartism was rampant—a sinister movement, which might at any moment upset the Constitution and abolish the Monarchy. Surely, with such dangers at home, this was a very bad time to choose for encouraging lawlessness abroad. He naturally took a particular interest in Germany. His instincts, his affections, his prepossessions, were ineradicably German; Stockmar was deeply involved in German politics; and he had a multitude of relatives among the ruling German families, who, from the ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... nothing to fear, nothing to be ashamed of. Harrod had driven him to lawlessness; the Government took away what was left him to make a living. He had to live. What if he did break laws made by millionaire and fanatic! What of it? He had her love and her respect — and her deep, deep pity. And these were enough for ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers

... lawlessness I may not fully understand. Some of them lie upon the surface. Reckless men settled there originally, and, living beyond the control of calmly and justly administered law, they gradually resolved ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson

... lower man. If it is his body that he neglects, he will deteriorate into a wild and bestial savage. . . . If it is his mind, it will degenerate into imbecility and madness. . . . If he neglect his conscience, it will run off into lawlessness and vice. Or, lastly, if it is his soul, it must inevitably atrophy, drop off in ruin and decay. ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond

... of his death. He had given no information as to where he had last rested, but, so far as Mosk knew, had dropped down from the sky. Certainly his conversation when he was intoxicated showed that he had travelled a great deal, and that his past was concerned with robbery, and bloodshed, and lawlessness; but the man had talked generally as any traveller might, had refrained from mentioning names, and altogether had spoken so loosely that nothing likely to lead to a tangible result could be gathered from his rambling discourses. He had paid his board and ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume

... the interests of insurance, the lawlessness of war is wholly adverse and destructive. Insurance involves mutual trust and trust thrives under security of person and property. Insurance demands steadiness of purpose and continuity of law. In war, all laws are silent. War is the brutish, blind, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... offers special facilities for depredations on parties crossing the river; here the divided current, losing something of its force, is less of an obstacle, and the island serves as a resting place on the passage. Immunity from punishment breeds lawlessness. The Ba Toka who, fifty years ago, inhabited the islands in the great southern bend of the Zambesi, utilized their location to lure wandering tribes on to their islands, under the pretext of ferrying them across, and then to rob them, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... conduct. This makes him a heroic figure. And when the clearing-up comes and he discovers that he has been the victim not of society but of an individual villain; that his attempt to right wrongs by committing new wrongs, to enforce the laws by lawlessness, and to correct violence by violence, was nothing but presumptuous and criminal folly,—when all this becomes clear to him, we have a tragic situation of the most pathetic character. This element of high tragic ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... the greatest literary organ of the Revolution was unquestionably Byron, whose genius, daring, and melodramatic lawlessness, exercised what now seems such an amazing fascination over the least revolutionary of European nations. Unfitted for scientific work and full of ardour, Mr. Carlyle found his mission in rushing with all ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... has failed absolutely to conciliate Ireland. Every generation there have been rebellions and shootings and agitations of a vehement and exhausting character carried continually to the point of lawlessness before Irish grievances could be redressed. A form of government which requires a succession of rebellions to secure reforms afterwards admitted to be reasonable cannot be a good form of government. These agitations have inflicted grave material ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell

... To the lawlessness of the street the home opposes no obstacle, as we have seen. Within the memory of most of us the school did not. It might have more to offer even now. But we have gone such a long way since the day I am ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... world-spirit by a sudden destruction of our patriotism. We will never usher in tranquillity with a crash. The nihilism of Tolstoy would plunge us into lawlessness and anarchy, for the chief element of patriotism we must keep. "What is that element?" you ask. It is the willingness of the individual to sacrifice his welfare for the welfare of the group. There we have the stem ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... the lawlessness, though well attested, can scarcely be conceived. When in the streets 'nation' drew the knife upon 'nation,' 'town' upon 'gown'; when the city bell started to answer the clang of St. Mary's; horrible deeds were done. I pass over massacres, tumults such as the famous one ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... more from the official Liberals in 1886, when he refused to follow Gladstone into the Home Rule camp. He disliked the methods of Parnell, the obstruction in Parliament, and the campaign of lawlessness in Ireland. His own victories had not been won so, and he had a great respect for the traditions of the House. He also believed that the Home Rule Bill would vitally weaken the unity of the realm. But no personal bitterness entered into his relations with his old colleagues: he did not attack ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... regained? When Sati, the Spirit of Reality, through humiliation, suffering, and penance, won the Heart of Shiva, the Spirit of Goodness. And thus, from the union of the freedom of the real with the restraint of the Good, was born the heroism that released Paradise from the demon of Lawlessness. ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... all they know—these big old trees—of those who went in by the door and "came out by the cellar" of Tom Bell's stronghold. In the end the place fell, in the war between order and lawlessness and, as the pessimists love to assert, a woman, as usual, was the cause of ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill

... should we still to transient love be bound; But, finding these so false, we pass beyond Unto the Love of loves that never dies. Nay, things that die cannot assuage the thirst Of souls undying; nor Eternity Serves Time, where all must fade that flourisheth Sense is not love, but lawlessness accurst: This kills the soul; while our love lifts on high Our friends on ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... answered, "I can go to jail." The thing he could not do was to deny the man's appeal to him for help. Before the war he was known as an Abolitionist—after it, as a Conservative, his sympathy with and for the South being very strong. During the draft riots in 1863 the spirit of lawlessness was on the point of breaking out in the river towns. I happened to be home from Virginia, and learned that my father's house was among those marked for burning on a certain night. During this night the horde gathered; but one of ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe

... was swearing at his foot. So as all seemed against me, I turned sadly enough and followed my guard to the dungeon. I cared little enough what came to me. Ever since I set foot out of London things had gone against me. I was steeped breast-high in disloyalty and lawlessness; I had staked my peace of mind on a rebel, and now it seemed even he had done with me. Yet I could not believe that. Had I done so, I think I should have beaten out my brains upon the wall of that damp cellar. As it was, I sat there, too bewildered to think. ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed

... vassals of the King had a right to sit there, and were called Paris De France, in distinction from the other nobles who only had seats in the Parliament in whose province their lands might lie. To these St. Louis, in his anxiety to repress lawlessness, had added a certain number of trained lawyers and magistrates; and these were the working members of these Parliaments, which were in general merely courts of justice for civil and criminal causes. The nobles ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... hardly less remarkable than that of Socrates, and agrees with the picture given of him in the first of the two Dialogues which are called by his name, and also with the slight sketch of him in the Protagoras. He is the impersonation of lawlessness—'the lion's whelp, who ought not to be reared in the city,' yet not without a certain generosity which gained the hearts of men,—strangely fascinated by Socrates, and possessed of a genius which might have been either ...
— Symposium • Plato

... or Mrs. Foster, who feels the spirit of justice within her, and who has felt the injustice of the laws, stands up to show truth and justice, and build a spiritual column, she is out of her sphere! and the honorable men turn aside, and leave her to be the victim of rowdyism, disorder, and lawlessness! It is not out of character that Fanny Kemble should read Shakespeare on the stage, to large circles. The exercise of the voice on the stage is womanly, while she gives out the thoughts of another; but suppose (and it is ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... as to the wisdom, or even the justice of its decrees or statutes. If they are unwise, they yet are rules to which the community can conform itself, and by which its members can make their plans and govern their expectations, while lawlessness is the negation alike of guidance for the present and of confidence in the future. If they are unjust, they yet do less wrong and to fewer persons, than would be done by individual and sporadic attempts to evade or neutralize them. Nay, unwise and inequitable laws, to which the ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody

... Predestination. This statement has certainly an imposing air. But consider it. To assert the identity of chance and free-will is but another way of saying that pure freedom is one and the same with absolute lawlessness,—that where freedom exists, law, order, reason do not. If this be a misconception, as it surely is a total and fatal misconception, of the nature of freedom, then does the statement of our author, with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... of Alleghenia. As John Barclay had said, it was not that her people, as a class, were corrupt or criminal, but merely that they viewed with easy tolerance evidences of laxity and lawlessness which would have set the citizens of another state by the ears, and filled the newspaper columns and the public forums with indignation and protest. In this respect, the papers of Kenton City were the most flagrant offenders. Even ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl

... followed in the wake of his army, not a single opportunity was afforded them of joining any portion of his command in a stealthy raid upon the habitations or any of the people, or of taking an advantage of the confusion and lawlessness which almost invariably surround the camp of an invader. From first to last, his troops observed with singular fidelity, his order that the lives and property of the Canadians not found in arms against him, should be held as most sacred. And in no ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh

... mountaineer the world over, the Lewallens were for the Union. The Stetsons owned a few slaves, and they fought for them. Peace found both still neighbors and worse foes. The war armed them, and brought back an ancestral contempt for human life; it left them a heritage of lawlessness that for mutual protection made necessary the very means used by their feudal forefathers; personal hatred supplanted its dead issues, and with them the war went on. The Stetsons had a good strain of Anglo-Saxon blood, and owned valley-lands; the Lewallens kept store and made "moonshine"; ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr.

... Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas were set up without the authority of Congress and without the sanction of the people; and whereas said pretended governments afford no adequate protection for life or property, but countenance and encourage lawlessness and crime; and whereas it is necessary that peace and good order should be enforced in said so-called States until loyal and Republican State Governments can ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... be admitted, however, that very little lawlessness was apparent. In no instance have I received a rude word while travelling in the South, while, on the other hand, the courtesy and ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... they lived with Socrates they were able by his support to dominate their ignoble appetites; (12) but being separated from him, Critias had to fly to Thessaly, (13) where he consorted with fellows better versed in lawlessness than justice. And Alcibiades fared no better. His personal beauty on the one hand incited bevies of fine ladies (14) to hunt him down as fair spoil, while on the other hand his influence in the state and among the allies ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon

... not all the lawlessness of this quarter is the result of the slave-trade, for the Arabs buy whoever is brought to them and in a country covered with forest as this is, kidnapping can be prosecuted with the greatest ease; elsewhere the people are honest, and have a regard ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone

... the French people what they were to expect, if conquered, and had given to that inundation of energy, under which the Republic herself was sinking, a vent and direction outwards that transferred all the ruin to her enemies. In the wild career of aggression and lawlessness, of conquest without, and anarchy within, which naturally followed such an outbreak of a whole maddened people, it would have been difficult for England, by any management whatever, to keep herself uninvolved in the general combustion,—even had ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... intrepid pussy (a better poet than her master) to the cat of Miss Anna Seward, surely the last lady in all England to have encouraged such lawlessness on the ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... in this very spirit of concession that, as others would have it, lay the origin of the evil. The Archduke Ferdinand of Gratz congratulated the Emperor upon an event, which would justify in the eyes of all Europe the severest measures against the Bohemian Protestants. "Disobedience, lawlessness, and insurrection," he said, "went always hand-in-hand with Protestantism. Every privilege which had been conceded to the Estates by himself and his predecessor, had had no other effect than to raise their demands. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... must needs be convinced that what I say is true, and that would be a poor triumph for me. No, on the faith of my word alone, you must believe it, confess it, assert it, swear to it, and maintain it! If not, I defy you to battle, ye sons of lawlessness and arrogance! Here I stand ready to receive you, whether ye come singly, as the rule of knighthood demands, or all together, as is the custom with churls ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... many generations ago, the proprietors of this very property of Osterfield, which the uncle of the present Lord de Barre bought, and to which I, their descendant, am gate-keeper. What with gambling, drinking, and worse, they deserved to lose it. The results of their lawlessness are ours: we are what and where you see us. With the inherited poison, the Father gave the antidote. Rachel, my child, am I not right when I say that you thank God with me for having THUS visited the iniquities of the ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... a dish," Charlotte would say, her two braids down her back, her hands clasped about her knees. He had never, the undercurrent in his mind still reminded him, been so alone with her since the days when they had, with an unspoken sense of lawlessness, slipped away together for a day's fishing or a breathless orchid hunt in the woods. The adventures had been less and less frequent as time ran on and it had begun to dawn on Raven that they were entirely contrary to Aunt Anne's sense of New England decencies. After ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... and raised it to distinction in barbaric ages, but which will as surely, unless powerfully modified, necessitate its extinction in the present age. For the Kurts are incapable of assimilating civilization. An excess of physical vigor in the first Kurt who settled in Norway takes the form of lawlessness and an entire absence ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... military election to command the army, which was at variance with the citizens (479-480). By his prudent administration, the nobility of his character, and the moderation of his views, he rapidly gained the hearts of the citizens of Syracuse—who had been accustomed to the most scandalous lawlessness in their despots—and of the Sicilian Greeks in general. He rid himself—in a perfidious manner, it is true—of the insubordinate army of mercenaries, revived the citizen- militia, and endeavoured, at first with the title of general, afterwards ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... demonstrate its accuracy by documents or through the testimony of trustworthy witnesses, if it were possible to unveil the faces of those who are at the head of the world conspiracy and who hold its bloody strings in their hands, then the very 'mystery of lawlessness' would be infringed upon, and it must remain intact until its incarnation in the 'son of destruction.'" Then he goes on to say that the world is rushing towards its destruction, and that there is only one force ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein

... therefore, according to a certain range of ideas, the notion of subjection to the primeval order of nature. The alternative is to consider independent communities as not related to each other by any law, but this condition of lawlessness is exactly the vacuum which the Nature of the jurisconsults abhorred. There is certainly apparent reason for thinking that if the mind of a Roman lawyer rested on any sphere from which civil law was banished, it would instantly fill the void with the ordinances of Nature. It is never ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... Kearney Street she turned without hesitation to the left, and walked toward those regions which are associated in the minds of every San Franciscan with lawlessness and crime. She had given a swift glance to the right before turning; the region of respectable shops and fashionable promenade was as black as a tunnel; the eccentric economy of the city forbade the light of street lamps when the moon was out, whether clouds accompanied ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... same thought had come to Judge Garford. But if the aged jurist had made any comparisons, they were not reflected in his benign features. A lifetime among scenes of turbulence, and watching justice gain steady ascendancy over frontier lawlessness, had made the judge indifferent to the ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman

... matter, but await the common judgment of all the most holy bishops; therefore know thou, O Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, and thou, O Memnon, bishop of this city, that ye are dismissed and deposed from all sacerdotal functions as the originators and leaders of all this disorder and lawlessness, and those who have violated the canons of the Fathers and the imperial decrees. And all ye others who seditiously and wickedly, and contrary to all ecclesiastical sanctions and the royal decrees, gave your consent are ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... she was designed to be my life's playmate and my soul's purifier. I know not what might have become of me, if the thought of her had not walked beside me as my guardian angel. For, like many vagrants from the beaten high roads of the world, there is in my nature something of that lawlessness which belongs to high animal spirits, to the zest of adventure, and the warm blood that runs into song, chiefly because song is the voice of a joy. And no doubt, when I look back on the past years I must own that I have too often been led astray from the objects set before ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of Great Britain, in aid of which commissions were issued under the authority of France. To counteract the apparent tendency of these popular passions, Mr. Adams published, also in the Centinel, a series of essays, signed Marcellus, exposing the lawlessness, injustice, and criminality, of such interference in favor of one of the belligerents. "For if," he wrote, "as the poet, with more than poetical truth, has said, 'war is murder,' the plunder of private property, the pillage of all the regular rewards of honest industry ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy

... court-room and saluted Murrell with a great shout. But Murrell, bound, in rags, and silent, his lips frozen in a wolfish grin, was a depressing sight, and the boldest felt something of his unrestrained lawlessness go ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... right to a certain extent.—Olof, you broke the laws of the Church during a time of lawlessness and unrest. What could be forgiven then must be punished now. Don't force the King to appear worse than he is. Don't let your scorn for the law and your wilfulness force him to punish a man to whom he ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg

... since he had taken the field Clodius could make arbiter of the proposition only by assembling the throng outside the walls), condemned the lawlessness of the action taken in regard to Lentulus, but still did not approve the punishment proposed for it. Every one knew, he said, all that had been in his mind concerning the events of that time—he had cast his vote for letting the men live—but it was not fitting for any such law to be drawn up ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio

... if anything, to do with rank or power. "Eurystheus being what he was," says Epictetus, "was not really king of Argos nor of Mycenae, for he could not even rule himself; while Hercules purged lawlessness and introduced justice, though he was both ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock

... must have done in any case, if only because she was the only daughter of its richest citizen. But the bold, luxuriant quality of her beauty, the original and piquant freedom of her manners, the stories told in gossip about her lawlessness at home, her intellectual attainments, and artistic vagaries—these were even more exciting. The unlikelihood of her marrying any one—at least any Octavian—was felt to add a certain romantic zest to the image she made on the local perceptions. There was no visible young Irishman at ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... of the United States cannot believe that the commanders of the vessels which committed these acts of lawlessness did so except under a misapprehension of the orders issued by the Imperial German naval authorities.... It confidently expects, therefore, that the Imperial German Government will disavow the acts of which the Government of the United States complains, that they will make reparation ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff

... event, being the active beginning of a series of phenomena. Yet the action of the supposed free cause must be imagined as independent of all connection with any previous event. It is without law or reason, and would be the blind realisation of confusion and lawlessness. Therefore transcendental freedom is a violation of the law of causation, and is in conflict with all experience. We must of necessity acquiesce in the explanation of all phenomena by the operation ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... my heart throbbing in realization of new danger, yet served also to stiffen my nerves. What had we blindly drifted into? What was behind this lawlessness which could make murder commonplace? What mystery lurked about this haunted, hideous house where death skulked in the dark? My thought was not so much concerned with myself, and my own danger, as with that of the young woman whom I was bound ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish

... university student is subject to very few restrictions, and that much greater liberty is allowed him than is permitted to English students. Nietzsche did not approve of this extraordinary freedom, which, in his opinion, led to intellectual lawlessness.—TR. ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... glee; with something of the same spirit of mischief that a cat shows when she has a captured mouse at the end of her paws. While the gruel was heating, she spun round the room in quest of amusement; and her sudden jerks and flings from one place and thing to another had so much of lawlessness, that Ellen was in perpetual terror as to what she might take it into her head to ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell

... king by the Mad Parliament. His decision in favour of Henry was probably an honest one; but he was misled by the very different relations of the French and English kings to their nobles, who in France maintained lawlessness and violence, while in England they were struggling for law and order. Throughout the struggles between the Popes and the Emperor Frederick II., Louis would not be induced to assist in a persecution of the Emperor which he considered unjust, nor permit one of his sons to ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge

... in that heavy, soft-scented air perfumed from the aloe-wood burning in a brazier, through which he saw, half blinded at first coming from the darkness without, that face which subdued and dazzled even the antagonism and the lawlessness of Cigarette. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... gloves and such things, quite 'the glass of fashion and the mould of form.' But full of ambition, eager for success, eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success." Yet the correct and conventional Browning could also fire up for lawlessness—"frenetic to be free." He was hail-fellow well-met, we are told—but is this part of a Browning legend?—with tramps and gipsies, and he wandered gladly, whether through devout sympathy or curiosity of mood we know not, into Little Bethels and ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... at a point called Arispe, in Sonora, in a country now almost depopulated by the hostile inroads of the Indians from our side of the line, would, it is believed, have prevented much injury and many cruelties during the past season. A state of lawlessness and violence prevails on that distant frontier. Life and property are there wholly insecure. The population of Arizona, now numbering more than 10,000 souls, are practically destitute of government, of laws, or of any regular administration of justice. Murder, rapine, and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson

... the army of Edward the First during the invasion of Scotland by the usual method of throwing stones from catapultae, at a distance of seven hundred yards. A subsidiary fortress, Lovat, heretofore inhabited by one of the constables of the Crown, whom the lawlessness of the wild inhabitants and the turbulence of their chieftains had rendered it necessary to establish in the west of Scotland, also fell into the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson

... when Adharma—unrighteousness, lawlessness—is exalted, then I Myself come forth: for the protection of the good, for the destruction of the evil, for the establishing firmly of Dharma, I am born from age to age." That is what He tells us of the coming forth of the Avatara. That is, the ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant

... breach of settlement," says Njal, "that any man should take the law against another; for with law shall our land be built up and settled, and with lawlessness wasted and spoiled." ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders

... years the valley of the Rhine itself, and the various valleys adjacent, were the haunt of numerous bodies of rapacious and desperate banditti. The rugged, mountainous nature of the country naturally made lawlessness the more easy there, and till so late as the beginning of the nineteenth century these gangs of robbers were a constant menace to the traveller in Rhineland. At the time of the French Revolution, indeed, and for some decades thereafter, the district was literally ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... with material upon other deeds of violence! The subjects which he has chosen, however, are of both historic and dramatic importance, and they have the added value of giving the modern reader a clear picture of the state of semi-lawlessness which existed in Europe, during the middle ages. "The Borgias, the Cenci, Urbain Grandier, the Marchioness of Brinvilliers, the Marchioness of Ganges, and the rest—what subjects for the ...
— Widger's Quotations from Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas, Pere • David Widger

... all this business mean?" he broke out impatiently. "What's all this menace of lawlessness—this impudent ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... to stare at her. He was, in fact, entirely too well bred to do anything of the sort, and yet, quite disgracefully, he longed to do nothing on earth so much, and further he was inclined to justify himself in this social lawlessness. ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... subjects, and the way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary self-control; his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme, his want of reverence for the rules of his art; his general lawlessness, belong to one side, but to one side only, of the Celtic nature. But the ardour of the man, the pathos of his passion and the passion of his pathos, his impulse towards the infinite and the constant rush he made into its indefinite realms; the special set of his imagination towards the fulfillment ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... comparatively good condition. Even in the worst administration, and when the public mind is most demoralized, there may remain the purity of law; the sublime thought. If the mind finds itself sinking into lawlessness and disorganism, and borne away by the pressure of evil, it can look upward, and, catching new energy from the ...
— Government and Rebellion • E. E. Adams

... street, but many who had ridden miles, and who ate a frosty lunch between services may be pardoned for indulging in the "great and shameful miscarriages," which were, undoubtedly, a rush across the pews or a wrestle on the meeting- house steps. Even their lawlessness held more circumspectness than is known to the most decorous boy of to-day, and it gained with every generation, till neither tithing-men nor constables had further power to restrain it, the Puritans of the eighteenth ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... perhaps from disgust. And well it is that they stand aside, but maybe they will cease one day to do so and will form a firm wall confronting the hurrying apparition and will check the frenzied rush of our lawlessness, for the sake of their own safety, enlightenment and civilization. Already we have heard voices of alarm from Europe, they already begin to sound. Do not tempt them! Do not heap up their growing hatred by a sentence justifying the murder of a father ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... and outbursts of primitive lawlessness recall at once to our attention the condition of affairs at some of our universities, colleges, and larger schools. The secret societies and student-organizations, with their initiations, feasts, and extravagant demonstrations, their harassing of the uninitiated, their despisal of ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... not necessary to look across the ocean to foresee the necessity for military readiness. Our neighbor to the south was in the grip of armed lawlessness and terrorism. Northern Mexico was infested with banditti which were a constant menace to the safety of our border. Such government as the stricken country had was either unable or unwilling to hold them in check. It appeared ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene

... running the gamut from petty annoyance to senseless murder. None of the open-handed, bold and reasoned intelligence of the prairie criminal. It revolted him. Senseless, insensate, formless, erratic, it only disgusted him with its sheer and unprofitable lawlessness. On the prairie crime meant double duty for him—to discover, then to catch the criminal; here there was no escape—once the criminal ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan

... the Bristol mayor whom Jeffreys tried for a "kidnapping knave" fell upon a succession of regulating captains whose doings put their civic prototype to open shame, and more petitions and protests against the lawlessness of the gangs emanated from Bristol than from any other city ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson

... nonobservance &c 772; evasion, inobservance, failure, omission, neglect, laches [Law], laxity, informality. infringement, infraction; violation, transgression; piracy. retraction, retractation^, repudiation, nullification; protest; forfeiture. lawlessness; disobedience &c 742; bad faith &c 940. V. fail, neglect, omit, elude, evade, give the go-by to, set aside, ignore; shut one's eyes to, close one's eyes to. infringe, transgress, violate, pirate, break, trample under foot, do violence to, drive ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... little idyl were quietly turned. The book might have been closed or laid aside even then. But it so chanced that Cherry was an unconscious prophet; and presently it actually became a prudential necessity for her to have a masculine escort when she walked out. For a growing state of lawlessness and crime culminated one day the deep tocsin of the Vigilance Committee, and at its stroke fifty thousand peaceful men, reverting to the first principles of social safety, sprang to arms, assembled ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... others you dislike, is that I am going to keep that pledge. You are my men, and as my men you have supported me, and as my men I have rewarded you,—no chief was ever more open-handed with property toward his following,—but if you think that on that account I will endure from you trouble and lawlessness, you would better part from me and get into your boats and go back to my other kingdom. For I tell you now, openly and without deceit, that here henceforth there is to be but one rule for Angle and Dane alike; and I shall be as much their King as yours; and they shall share equally in ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... corner of life, and speedily set about breeding, and beget Boastfulness, and Vanity, and Wantonness, no base-born children, but their very own. And if these also, the offspring of Wealth, be allowed to come to their prime, quickly they engender in the soul those pitiless tyrants, Violence, and Lawlessness, and Shamelessness. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus

... this is not generally admitted. Mr. Crooke states that some are said to be emigrants from the banks of the Nerbudda; but the main body say they came from Ajmer in the sixteenth century. They were notorious in the eighteenth century for their lawlessness, and gave the imperial Mughal officers much trouble in the neighbourhood of Agra, rendering the communications between that city and Etawah insecure. In the Mutiny they broke out again, and are generally a turbulent, ill-conducted ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... engine-driver and warned him to pull out before trouble started. But he had to take in water first. And he seemed to be an expert in symptoms of lawlessness. Leaning his grimy head and shoulders out of the cab, he looked the crowd over, spat, and showed his yellow teeth in a grin that vaguely reminded me of Grim's ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy

... The lawlessness of all that followed strikingly exposes the frightful state of criminal justice at that time, wherever Spanish law prevailed. No evidence appeared to connect Catalina in any way with the death of Fernando Acosta. The Portuguese gamblers, besides that perhaps they thought ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... slowly without speaking to each other. We were too shamed, too sympathetic with Douglas to tolerate this exhibition of lawlessness. We were disgraced by an American audience which had tried to disgrace an American Senator, who asked for nothing except for the privilege of ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... reformer; I desire to see sweeping changes; I want a good, wise, and honest government; and I desire these things because I fear that, if they do not come peacefully they will come in a tempest of lawlessness and vengeance." ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty

... upon my mind an indescribable impression of dangerousness—of 'something fierce and terrible, eligible to burst forth.' Of men like this, then, were formed the Companies of Adventure who flooded Italy with villany, ambition, and lawlessness in the fifteenth century. Gattamelata, who began life as a baker's boy at Narni and ended it with a bronze statue by Donatello on the public square in Padua, was of this breed. Like this were the Trinci and their bands ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... American life and property in that country. The Government of the United States had occasion to accord permission for the passage of a body of Mexican rurales through Douglas, Arizona, to Tia Juana, Mexico, for the suppression of general lawlessness which had for some time existed in the region of northern Lower California. On May 25, 1911, President Diaz resigned, Senor de la Barra was chosen provisional President. Elections for President and Vice President were thereafter held throughout the Republic, and Senor Francisco ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft

... will be a volcano of lawlessness if it doesn't get a square deal from you, Lindman," said Trevison. "You have seen what a mob looks like. You're the representative of justice here, and if we don't get justice we'll come and hang you in spite of a thousand ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer

... above-mentioned conditions the authority of the Government is becoming more and more weakened, and that thus the danger arises of the people losing all respect and reverence for lawful authority, and falling into a condition of lawlessness. And that to prolong the war can only lead to hastening the ruin of the people, and making it clear to them that the only authority in the country is that ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet

... Hitler, and Stalin, and all their imitators. Why, it is as much the public fear of Big Government as the breakdown of civil power because of the administrative handicap of a shortage of Literate administrators that is responsible for the disgraceful lawlessness of the past hundred years. Thus, it speaks well for the public trust in Chester Pelton's known integrity and sincerity that so many of our people are willing to agree to his program for socialized Literacy. They feel that he can be trusted, ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire

... legal device, it did not stand the test of the courts. In 1892 the Ohio Supreme Court declared the Standard Oil Trust a violation of the law and demanded its dissolution. The persistent attempts of the Standard to disregard this order increased its reputation for lawlessness. Finally, in 1899, after Ohio had brought another action, the trust was dissolved. The Standard interests now reorganized all their holdings under the name of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Again, in 1911, the United States Supreme Court declared this combination a violation of the ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick

... tone of the conversation was so much more frank than anything to which Wynne was accustomed that he felt bewildered. This freedom of criticism of the powers, this want of reverence for conventionalities, gave him a strange feeling of lawlessness. He felt as if he had himself been wonderfully and almost culpably daring in listening. He wondered that he was not more shocked, being sure that it was his duty to be. There was about the young man's mental condition a sort of infantile unsophistication. ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates

... is the leader of the party. He has shown me very great kindness, and has proved a true friend. From what I have seen of him, I have no doubt whatever that, in spite of certain acts of lawlessness to which he and his friends have been driven of late, you will find him, in any position you may be good enough to give him, an honest and thoroughly ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty



Words linked to "Lawlessness" :   administration, illegality, lawless, government activity, disorder, governance, governing, government, nihilism



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com