"Scoundrelly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "And a scoundrelly larceny of that of a better man in every way. No, doctor. The honor of my regiment demands that he be run down and brought to justice; and you must not withhold the only proof with which we can reach ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... refuse to believe a word of it," he said, "if it were not such a low, scoundrelly piece of business that it becomes quite possible in connection with the name of my son Bevis. It is quite like Bevis. He was always a disgrace to us. Always a weak, untruthful, vicious young brute with low tastes—my son and heir, Bevis, Lord Fauntleroy. ...
— Little Lord Fauntleroy • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... bare floor was frankly dry mud and dust, the roof was bare cob-webbed thatch and rafter, and the furniture a rickety table, a dangerous-looking cane-bottomed settee and a leg-rest arm-chair from which some one had removed the leg-rests. Had some scoundrelly oont-wallah pinched them for fuel? (No, Damocles, an ex-Colonel of the Indian Medical Service "pinched" them for splints.) A most depressing human habitation even for the most cheerful and care-free of souls, a terrible ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... of upright character, young and clean, but badly worsted in the battle of life, consents as a desperate resort to impersonate for a period a man of his own age—scoundrelly in character but of an aristocratic and moneyed family. The better man finds himself barred from resuming his old name. How, coming into the other man's possessions, he wins the respect of all men, and the love of a fastidious, delicately nurtured girl, is the thread upon which the story ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... and with the whole scoundrelly crew. What brutes they must have been! According to Don Gregorio's account, they were of all nations, and the worst sort of each. The negro says the same. Among them four that spoke Spanish, and appeared to be Spaniards, ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... the thing so like a man, sir; but it is really no laughing matter. It's a scoundrelly job, only fit for a Maltee off the Nix Mangeery. If it had been a lot of those carter fellows that had carried you up, I could have understood it; wrecking's born in the bone of them: but for those four ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... with a sudden, merry look, "I believe you're in the right of it! A stubbly chin makes a man feel such a pernicious, scoundrelly, hangdog walking misery." ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... and by a mad insurrection in the country districts, he rapidly fell into the selfish and criminal condition of the man whose special concern is his own personal safety. This he sought to secure by an unworthy alliance with the most scoundrelly amongst his ambitious contemporaries, and he would have given up his own city as well as France to the King of Navarre and the English had not another burgher of Paris, John Maillart, stopped him, and put him to death at the very moment when the patriot of the states-general of 1355 was about to ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... all patience with this vile world, for one thing. Mankind are by nature benevolent creatures, except in a few scoundrelly instances. I do not think that avarice of the good things we chance to have, is born with us; but we are placed here amid so much nakedness, and hunger, and poverty, and want, that we are under a ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... hinder legs are drawn up with a slight trembling, as of greed and rapacity, in the thighs; the head turns to the right and the left, and follows the evolutions of the bees against the glass. The posture of the scoundrelly insect is strikingly expressive; one reads in it the brutal desires of a creature in ambush, the cunning patience that postpones attack. The choice is made, and Philanthus throws ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... forrard." Of the two heroes, Claude Abrial, Marquis de Pierrerue—a fervent Royalist and Catholic, who lavishes his own money, and everybody else's that he can get hold of, on a sort of private Literary Fund,[527] allows himself to be swindled by a scoundrelly man of business, immures his daughter, against her wish, as a Carmelite nun, and dies a pauper—is a quite possible but not quite "brought off" figure. Theven Falgouet, the Breton buveur d'eau,[528] who is introduced to us at actual ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... to have no redress, sir? Is a British subject to have his slush-tub cannonaded on the high seas, and no redress, sir? Sir, sir, I tell you, sir, if you don't do me justice, I'll go on board and open my fire upon that scoundrelly Lady Jane." ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... fact—that the great poets have usually been themselves extremely exact observers of detail. It has not made them great poets; but they would not be great poets without it. And when Eugenie Grandet starts from le petit banc de bois at the reference to it in her scoundrelly cousin's letter (to take only one instance out of a thousand), we see in Balzac the same observation, subject to the limitation just mentioned, that we see in Dante and Shakespeare, in Chaucer and Tennyson. But the great poets do not as a rule accumulate detail. ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... Where? Heavens! Where? Oh! why had he allowed that doctor to go! Imbecile that he was. But no! It was the only right course, he reflected distractedly, while the messenger waited downstairs chatting agreeably to the officers. It was in that scoundrelly doctor's true interest to return with positive information. But what if anything stopped him? A general prohibition to leave the town, for instance! There would ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... once a year. If Arthur had only got well—but, instead, he had a relapse and died. And there was the woman, made his widow by mischance as it were, with her child on her arm—whose child?—and a scoundrelly black-mailing lawyer to work up her case for her. Her claim was clear enough—the right of dower, a third of his estate. But if he had never meant to marry her? If he had been trapped as patently as a rustic fleeced in a gambling-hell? ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... had grown up a repugnance in our minds to the business, and when one day my friend Mac remarked it was a scoundrelly business to rob the heirs of an estate, and they women, George and I heartily acquiesced; and we vowed we would take no part in the matter, and then and there resolved we would throw both James and Brea over, but first to use Brea and ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... who were connections of Mr. Abednego, were insured in our office to the full amount of their loss. The calamity was attributed to the drunkenness of a scoundrelly Irish watchman, who was employed on the premises, and who upset a bottle of whisky in the warehouse of Messrs. Shadrach, and incautiously looked for the liquor with a lighted candle. The man was brought to our office by his employers; and ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... slowly, and with hesitation, Nigel obeyed his instructions. He felt displeasure and disgust at the scoundrelly disguise which he was under the necessity of assuming; but when he considered the bloody consequences which law attached to his rash act of violence, the easy and indifferent temper of James, the prejudices of his son, the overbearing influence ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... he knew for certain would overwhelm him, and like a torrent, flood all other feelings if he did not bid his memory be still. But try as he would to turn away from these memories, he could not stifle them entirely. He remembered the scoundrelly, tearful, lying, pitiful letter he had sent to Gemma, that never received an answer.... See her again, go back to her, after such falsehood, such treachery, no! no! he could not, so much conscience and ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... I saturated myself with German contemporary thought as expressed in the German press. I deliberately laid my mind open to conviction; I repeated to myself over and over again: "We Germans are fighting a defensive war: the scoundrelly Grey made the world-war: Gott strafe England!" Absurd as this proceeding seems to me when I look back upon it, I would not laugh at myself at the time. I must be German, I must feel German, I must think German: on that would my safety in the ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... The scoundrelly princes of Persia, urged on by political jealousy against Daniel, have succeeded in getting a law passed that whosoever prays to God shall be put under the paws and teeth of the lions, who are lashing themselves in rage and hunger up ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... done so when he received a long epistle from Acquet de Ferolles, in which the unworthy husband tried to dissuade him from undertaking the defence of his wife, and to ruin the little testimony for the defence that Ducolombier had collected. It seems that this scoundrelly proceeding immediately enlightened the eminent advocate as to the preliminaries of the drama, for from this day he proved for the Combray family not only a brilliant advocate, but a friend whose devotion ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... which says, for example, that because a man is a sheep-stealer he must needs be a bad husband. As well might one set out to prove that a parricide must inevitably prove an indifferent cook. In the person of Fra Palamone, of whose scoundrelly proclivities I had had more than an inkling already, it is undoubtedly true that many agreeable qualities were to be found. He was, to use my illustration again, an admirable cook; he was a good talker, a companionable man, ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... love her!" His face grew bright again, and the wooing blood ran tingling in his veins. "Am I a thief, a scoundrelly thief, because I have that right common to all men, to love one woman? Some day I shall suffer for this; some day my heart shall ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... chamber, leaving Gregory to curse himself for having been lured into a confession that it now seemed to him had been unnecessary, since in his newly found vitality he realized that death was none so near a thing as that scoundrelly fool of a leech had led him ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... scoundrelly rabble, sir," cried Scarlett, turning upon him fiercely. "You see, they are about to treat me as if ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... "That scoundrelly Chow made his boast that other midshipmen patronized his place. I don't believe it. Such a vice wouldn't appeal to you, and it doesn't to me. But there are more than two hundred new plebes coming in just now, and many of these boys have never been away from home before. Some of them might ...
— Dave Darrin's Second Year at Annapolis - Or, Two Midshipmen as Naval Academy "Youngsters" • H. Irving Hancock
... gusto, and seemingly no feeling of shame, the manoeuvres of a scoundrelly commission merchant whom he had known and studied in his youth, and we were all listening with an odd mixture of mirth and embarrassment, when our little party was brought abruptly to an end in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as her one true friend in their little world of scoundrels and murderers. She had cared for him very much—it was entirely possible that some day she might have come to return his evident affection for her. She knew nothing of the seamy side of his hard life. She had guessed nothing of the scoundrelly duplicity that had marked his first advances toward her. She thought of him only as a true, brave gentleman, and in that she was right, for whatever Henri Theriere might have been in the past the last few days ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Middlebrook!" He pushed the claret nearer. "Fill your glass again! Hand it over to the authorities? Why, that would merit a full-page cartoon in the next number of Punch. Good, good! but," he went on, suddenly becoming grave again, "we were talking of those scoundrelly Quicks. Of course we—that is, my French friend and I—have been, and are, ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... creek near Forty-Mile, where a year later it was discovered mutilated and defiled, do you think that her lover would be glad of that? Do you think that he would pity the black-guard who could do such a scoundrelly ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... intercept them; only that it would pain him to learn how much she yet thought of his rival. Indeed, it would have been cruel to show them to him, for he would have seen that they were blurred with tears. You perceive that she had come to be tender of the feelings of this earnest and scoundrelly lover, believing in his sincerity and ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... responsibility. And that very morning he had been ordered to pick the melon, which was to be shown next day at the county fair, and to bring it in for Mr. Lenman to gaze on its blonde virginity. But in picking it, what had the damned scoundrelly Jesuit done but drop it—drop it crash on the sharp spout of a watering-pot, so that it received a deep gash in its firm pale rotundity, and was henceforth but a bruised, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... with disgust. He was growing angry. Then, realizing this, he conceived himself ridiculous, almost as ridiculous as that sly, scoundrelly Pantaloon. He laughed and took the outstretched hand. "No rancour?" ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... and invariable. Money attracted money, accumulating always in the same places, going by preference to the scoundrelly and the mediocre. When, by an inscrutable exception, it heaped up in the coffers of a rich man who was not a miser nor a murderer, it stood idle, incapable of resolving itself into a force for good, however charitable the hands which fain would administer it. One would say it was angry at ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... due course of time the three Beltz children were restored to their parents. It was learned that they had been kidnapped by three men who had thought to make a large sum of money out of their scoundrelly game. But all three kidnappers had lost ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... since it completes the picture I have drawn from Varchi:—'Lorenzo made himself the accomplice and instrument of those amorous amusements for which the Duke had an insatiable appetite, with the object of deceiving him. He was singularly well furnished with all the scoundrelly arts and trained devices of the pander's trade; composed fine verses to incite to lust; wrote and represented comedies in Italian; and pretended to take pleasure only in such tricks and studies. Therefore he never carried arms ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the night-light. A germ hates light, preferring to do his scoundrelly work when it is so black that you can't see your hand in front of your face and the darkness presses down on you like a blanket. Occasionally a fear would cross his mind that the night-light might go out; but it never ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... After a moment of silent contemplation, I was beginning to comment on its beauties and peculiarities, when, playfully pressing the hand he still retained within his arm, he interrupted me with,—'Never mind the picture: it was not for that I brought you here; it was to get you away from that scoundrelly old profligate yonder, who is looking as if he would like to challenge ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... a scoundrelly piece of business. If the mayor signs that he should be impeached. There is not a vote in there to-night that has not been purchased—not one. This is a fine element of brigandage to introduce into Chicago; why, people who ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... red beard; a tall dark man, with a thin fierce face and bloodshot eyes, the Spaniard by his looks; and a slight man, with the face and bearing of an English gentleman. The men behind them differed no whit from the two gravediggers, being as scoundrelly of face, as great of strength, and as curiously attired. They came straight to the open grave, and the dead man beside it. The three who seemed of most importance disposed themselves, still side by side, at the head of the grave, and their ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... ripe peach he's a Jap, with a scoundrelly white skipper and white mates. They'll all stick together for a five-dollar bill and swear they never was on the beach at all. If they do, how're ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne |
